Western Medicine: 1 - Burial

A/N: Don't get excited. This is the one and only taste you're getting of Western Medicine until it's published.

I'm sharing this because while I used to be good at blurbing my stories, I've grown up and gotten a little more complex.

Thus, it seems much easier to give readers a taste rather than poorly explain what the book is about.

So...without further ado....

~ * ~

Were he not in the process of burying his mother, Hamaliel James Clarke would’ve laughed aloud.

He supposed that if he were to withhold the programs and drape a cloth over her tombstone, not one person in attendance aside for his sister could even name the deceased.  Yet what a turnout!  Classmates, professors, and school administrators whom he’d only known in passing were there.  Even the former—and most disdainful—colleagues of their father James were present.  They hadn’t even come to James’s funeral to make sure he was dead!

Even the priest, Father Reyes, hadn’t contacted the family since he quarreled with their father last year, but here he was, presiding over the final rites.  It seemed as though everyone who never liked or hadn’t cared much for the Clarkes had shown up wearing their Sunday best and their most compassionate faces.

Indeed, Hamaliel worked very hard not to laugh.

He felt his sister shift next to him and suddenly remembered the gravity of the situation.  Out of respect for their mother, they’d opted for a Catholic funeral, complete with smoking censers, long-winded passages in Latin, and a pair of horses to draw the coffin in an old-fashioned processional.  As their father would say, it was a proper public display.

But it was also late spring; the wind blew in in warm and thick from the western river, and after a long indoor service, Hamaliel was alarmed to see how high the sun was outside.  The long walk across St. Tatiana’s Cemetery would not go well for his sister.  Dressed in her long, heavy black gown, Orianne Idelle d’Auvigne already appeared deeply affected by the heat.  She pulled out her dark lace fan and wearily waved it back and forth.

Hamaliel mentally kicked himself.  He should’ve insisted she stay home and rest, just as the doctor’s prescribed.  But he knew Orianne wouldn’t have obliged him; she would want to attend her mother’s burial.  The two had always been close; Orianne took after their mother in many ways, from her dark West African looks to her fluency in French.  Above all, she wanted this last chance to say goodbye.  And she didn’t like missing out anything simply because she felt unwell, especially since the doctors told them she didn’t have much time.

Shifting his thoughts from the unpleasant yet inevitable, Hamaliel tuned out the droning priest and subtly began assessing those gathered, trying to name them.  There was his ethics professor from last semester, Dr. Mulberry, as well as the university chancellor, Dr. Rheine.  Both had paid strict attention to Hamaliel’s progress at the University, even going so far as to send unnecessary, not-so-secret reports home to his parents every month.  Then there was the widow Rothschild, head of the Canter-Rothschild Foundation, who often came calling on Idelle d’Auvigne, and did so particularly often in the last months of Idelle’s life.

Hamaliel peered closely former classmates, trying to recall their names.  He’d studied with them, gone to parties with them, even invited them some of his own accord, yet out of the dozens of faces he only recognized one, Suriel Zhou.  And the only reason he remembered Suriel was that during ethics class, the two briefly bonded over the fact their mothers named them after angels.

Suriel was not alone at the funeral; he was with a willowy blonde whom Hamaliel recognized from television.  Cyndi Rhodes, daughter of CEO Arthur Rhodes, had been on countless talk shows and new stations with her family, trying to clear their names of fraud and vainly protest their innocence.  The federal government had seized billions of dollars from Hawthorne-Rhodes International, and when Gideon Hawthorne fled the country with his mistress, the Rhodes had remained in the States to blame everything on him.

How convenient, Hamaliel smirked.  While he had no trouble seeing exactly how and why Arthur Rhodes was guilty of fraud, Hamaliel couldn’t for the life of him figure out why Cyndi was with Suriel.  By her own repetitive admission on television, she dated football and basketball players, many of whose surnames linked to old money.  Suriel was neither an athlete nor from old money.  What he was, however, was a promising pre-law student who interned at Hawthorne-Rhodes International…before the scandal, of course.

So what was the bimbo doing with the brain?

***

Suriel sometimes wondered if Cyndi thought he was an idiot, like he couldn’t put two and two together.

For months he’d asked her to coffee, to drinks, and once to dinner, but she always said no.  But the moment he mentioned having taken a class with Hamaliel Clarke, she suddenly suggested they attend funeral the together.  Suriel had never really been close friends with Hamaliel, and in a way, he felt it was disrespectful to attend the funeral of one he didn’t know, but he wasn’t about to let opportunity go to waste.  If Cyndi wanted their first date to be at a funeral, to then to the funeral they would go.

Maybe he was an idiot; if so, then Cyndi knew him well.

It was his own fault; he shouldn’t have thrown himself at her feet so cravenly nor so often.  Before the scandal, she was the blonde, blue-eyed daughter of a billionaire, no doubt used to people worshipping her left and right.  It was amazing that she could even remember his face, much less his name and who he was.

Suriel had hoped being her father’s favorite in the legal department would’ve counted for something, but it didn’t.  Cyndi never cared to learn about the business or how it was run, so long as it kept her neck-deep in shoes, credit cards, and limousines.

He knew he shouldn’t like her.  Already his parents had voiced their disapproval.  His mother called her “empty-headed trouble” and his father nicknamed her the Leech.  Both emphatically and repeatedly told him she’d make a bad wife if they were to marry, and that it would most assuredly end in divorce.  Mrs. Zhou strongly doubted a woman like Cyndi could even remain faithful to a single man.

But stubborn as an ox, Suriel dismissed his parents as merely being prejudiced and kept trying anyway.  He invited her to classiest places he could afford and even saved up for a romantic weekend getaway…just in case.

Instead, he’d wound up standing with her amongst strangers dressed in black, baking in the sun, staring numbly at two giant tombstones carved from pure marble.  The first belonged to James Clarke; the engraved letters were plain and the wording very simple:

James Wallingford Clarke

Loving son of Wallingford and Geneva

October 29, 1952 – December 12, 2009

May God be cleverer than His greatest work

Suriel resisted the urge to snicker; James Clarke’s cynicism and combative nature were infamous in business circles.  It was said he trusted no one and never gave charity.  Born of poor parents, legend suggested there was a bitterness which never left his reputedly cold heart.

His wife, on the other hand, was said to be kind and gentle woman, but little else was said about her.  Every so often she’d given to a charity, but she rarely left her husband’s estate, especially in the last few months of her life.  The elegant engraving on her tombstone reflected her reputed daintiness.

Idelle Ginette d’Auvigne

le 24 septembre, 1960 – le 6 mai, 2010

Qu’elle repose en paix

Suriel had just figured out the French when Cyndi leaned in and lightly began to whisper in his ear.  Suriel tried not to jump at her closeness, pretending to ignore the shivers her perfume sent through him.

“After this, the family will return to their father’s estate at Westerley,” she was saying.  “But because everyone will try to talk to them all at once, they won’t stay there.  My guess is that they’ll head North tonight, to their mother’s château in St. Verde.  When we leave, we can rent a room at an inn in the town, and call on them for breakfast the next morning.”

Had she been anyone else, he would’ve looked at her as though she were a crazed stalker.  But Cyndi Rhodes, the object of his every obsession and fantasy, had just asked him away for the weekend, suggested renting a single room, and Suriel sure as hell wasn’t about to pass that up.

***

Orianne noticed her brother studying the good-looking Asian man and his blonde companion.  She could tell something was perplexing him; she wondered if the blonde was some ex-fling of his.  She wondered why the two of them preoccupied him so; she wasn’t his type and Hamaliel had no shortage of women falling for him.  He was tall and broad-shouldered, with clear cocoa brown skin.  And he had their father’s charmingly broad, flat nose.

Orianne smiled at her brother fondly, tugging at his sleeve as she asked softly, “Do you know them?”

“The man is a former classmate,” he murmured.  “Pre-law.  Brilliant, if I dare say.  And the woman is Cyndi Rhodes.”

Orianne’s eyes widened.  “From TV?”  She looked back at the couple in disbelief.  “He doesn’t seem like her type.”

Hamaliel’s left eyebrow went up.  “He’s not.  Not even remotely.”

“Maybe recent circumstances have opened her mind a bit,” Orianne shrugged.

Her brother chortled, “Not likely.  People like her never open their minds.”

Orianne smiled more brightly this time.  “You sound like our father.”

Hamaliel nodded stiffly.  “Compliment taken,” he said, lowering his voice before adding.  “And in the spirit of our father—and mother—I think it’s prudent we leave Westerley tonight for a while.”

Orianne was alarmed.  “But why? “ she whispered.  “It’s our home!  Where else could we stay?”

“De la Veuve,” he replied.

“But it’s abandoned!  Mama left it that way for the last ten years, Hamaliel.”

“I put in a call to Mrs. Ripley last week.  She says the first floor is habitable enough,” he shrugged.  “Château de la Veuve is officially your property now, Ori.  Might as well break it in.”

Orianne was immediately overwhelmed, and though she couldn’t name the emotion, she couldn’t stop the tears it summoned.  And she was right on cue, because Father Reyes had just ended his seemingly eternal invocation, and all eyes were now on the brother and sister.

Also on cue, Hamaliel dutifully embraced his sister, comforting her for what seemed the millionth these past few months.