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    Nocturne
    Nocturne
    Nocturne
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    Nocturne

    By Debra Milligan

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    About this ebook

    The worlds of medicine and music collide in NOCTURNE, a novella which tells the recollections of a girl’s coming of age during the Victorian era of 1888-89 in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The remembrances of operatic singer Amelia Prescott are heightened by a sharp wit and telling details that chronicle this year in her life.

    Abandoned by her immediate family, Amelia is saved from despair by the loving hand of her aunt. When that hand literally dies before her eyes, Amelia struggles to prevail over her pain through the art of music. She is drawn out of her melancholia by a music professor, only to be thrust again into the darkness of her worst fears. Faith triumphs in the end as her mature memory recollects her long, harrowing battle against the demons of despair, along with her encounters with a couple of doctors, one of whom needs to heal himself; the other is beyond being healed.

    Nocturne plays like a haunted memory of night, and a shining vision of the compelling future. Aware of profuse inner wounds to bind, Amelia Prescott sets out in search of the means by which to survive the latest loss, that of her beloved mother figure. Ultimately, she discovers truths that are more horrific than those which prompted her initial journey. She leaves these settings, healed enough to move West and become a successful operatic singer. Decades later, she rudely discovers that the clutches of fear and pain are still binding her.

    Nocturne is a black diamond, filled with glimmers of illumination that appear unexpectedly from dark crevasses within the memory of the narrator, Amelia Prescott. Through an inescapable darkness, the light shines to reveal truth to this young female.

    During the grievous experiences of her youth, she bravely faces the truth but had lacked the maturity to comprehend it. Only as a grown adult woman does she summon the courage to delve the depths of the truths of her past and to piece together this memoir of her coming of age.

    The tone is direct and witty. The images are sharply defined but not so clear that they do not cast shadows throughout this compelling tale of the coming of age of this sensitive, talented, insightful female.

    Written in flashback in the first person, Nocturne provides a tightly woven narrative of the recollections of a girl who has suffered much at the hands of cruel, callous adults. She nonetheless still strives to overcome the damage wrought to her and to journey from girlhood into womanhood.

    Thirty years after this singular year 1888-1889, Amelia Prescott frees her operatic and literary voices to finally speak from her memory and thus become fully whole and fully healed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDebra Milligan
    Release dateSep 1, 2012
    ISBN9781476233345
    Nocturne
    Author

    Debra Milligan

    Debra Milligan is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is fluent in French and has varied interests in the fine arts, architecture, history of all kinds, music, horses, hounds, the Golden Age of Hollywood, quilting, fashion, and gardening.

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      Book preview

      Nocturne - Debra Milligan

      Nocturne

      By Debra Milligan

      Copyright 2012 Debra Milligan

      Smashwords Edition

      Cover design Copyright 2012

      DigitalDonna.Com

      ~~~~****~~~~

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your very own copy.

      ~~~~****~~~~

      Table of Contents

      Dedication

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Epilogue

      ~~~~****~~~~

      DEDICATION

      To Ron

      ~~~~****~~~~

      Chapter 1

      The past unfolded like a series of nightmarish dreams, all tethered by that year of my life from 1888-1889. For a long time, those events unraveled wildly in my mind until my consciousness scarcely knew past from present, past from future, illusion from reality, fear from faith. Images, recollections, and sensations sloshed about my mind in a surreal and unexpected series of waves. My vision of things about me was fuzzy and unconnected. Living in the moment eerily felt as if the hands of the past were pulling me into a shallow quicksand from which I could not emerge. Then the retaining wall of memory simply gave way and I had to start erecting barriers in an attempt to separate past from present and to stop the past from intruding into the present, like foul groundwater.

      Thirty years have passed since that singular year. I am now a happy woman, a wife and mother, after having enjoyed a career as an opera singer in Denver. My life has been joyous and fruitful, but it would never have come to any fruition without that year of upheaval, turmoil, and incomprehensible grief. Certain summers of one’s life are pivotal. Those summers knew the lessons that I had to learn. Those summers formed the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega of an entire year whose reverberating memories would become, much later, a form of cathartic crisis.

      Those experiences became imprinted on my mind with such severe accuracy, much like acid etching curvilinear designs into copper, that for many years, I possessed a terrifying fear of darkness, along with a painful sensitivity to any diminishment of light. Only now, through the rendering of those memories from the darkness of the past into the present illumination of understanding am I capable of accepting the chiaroscuro of that year, indeed of my life. That year, however, remains the lynchpin to all that preceded it and to all that followed.

      If charity begins at home, then I can safely say that I grew up in a home without charity. My mother was descended from Russian immigrants, my father from a wealthy English family that came to America early in the history of the country and only became more wealthy. He met my mother at a time when his youthful exuberance was gone and, at the age of thirty, he married her. Most likely, he’d been spurned by enough females of his society because of his fecklessness and had chanced upon a beautiful but uneducated girl of twenty who was working in a milliner’s shop. That he married down, he never let her forget. That he was unfaithful to her, she never let him forget.

      One spring day when I was fourteen, my father left my mother for an actress and never returned. A divorce was arrived at in due time, with monetary arrangements that proved insufficient. My much older brother married a girl and moved to San Francisco. That summer, I was parted out to the house of my beloved paternal Aunt Charlotte. A widow, she lived in a white Italianate mansion in Georgetown in the northwest corner of Washington, D.C. She was sixty at the time, and in generally poor health. It was my job to care for Aunt Charlotte in the midst of my schooling and with the abundant love that she gave to me.

      My father moved from the family home in a small town in Virginia to New York City. I was invited to see him and his glamorous mistress from time to time but I declined the offers. My mother sought refuge in other men: older men, younger men, men from her past, men who would never be part of her future. The family that I had tenuously known was shattered. I did not try to pick up the pieces. They were too splintered. Valiantly, I tried to live with hope and to dedicate my efforts to helping my beloved aunt. This tale thus begins with Aunt Charlotte, five years almost to the day that I came to live in the white Italianate mansion of this widowed woman.

      I ran down the long curved staircase and saw my aunt sprawled on the black and white tiles of the vestibule floor.

      Remember me! She rasped and looked into my eyes. She then closed her eyes and collapsed.

      I clasped my aunt in my arms but I felt that it was too late.

      I called for Miriam, the maid. She came upstairs from the kitchen and screamed. I then ordered her to ride in the calèche to the house of Dr. Blackthorn, the physician of my aunt. That Second Empire Victorian was located about twenty blocks away. Miriam left the house in a dither of tears.

      I held my aunt for what felt like an eternity. I smelled the violet scent of the potpourri sachet that she carried on her and I felt the brooch on her neck press against my neck. Within that brooch was the hair of her deceased husband. It was a splendid silver and onyx piece of jewelry, a widow’s testament to love, but I hated the thing. It was perfectly ghoulish, I thought at the time, to wear hair, something that was already dead, of a dead beloved.

      As I contemplated the morbid nature of the brooch, I prayed. I did not cry. I could not yield to the tears that were building, like water behind a vast dam, within me. It was the middle of June and the jungle heat of this region had overcome Georgetown in Washington, D.C. I felt very warm as I held the body of my aunt. I noticed that she felt very cool, almost cold. I waited for the doctor to arrive.

      I began to whimper and I heard the voice of God whisper to me that the soul of this sweet, lonely woman was no longer there, within her.

      Dr. Blackthorn barged through the double doors of the mansion. A young man followed him. Blackthorn gently took my aunt from my arms. He slowly and methodically raised her eyelids and then he checked her carotid pulse. With grim demeanour, he unbuttoned her blouse and rolled up the cuffs and sleeves.

      I considered these actions somewhere along the lines of a violation but I said nothing. I was too shocked by the scene surrounding me. I stared at the young man whom I took to be the apprentice of this elder doctor. He was gazing in wonder at the painted white Rococo woodwork in the rather large vestibule.

      Dumont! Blackthorn snapped. Here is the patient!

      Dumont looked at the needle-scarred arms of my aunt.

      Blackthorn sniffed the nostrils of my aunt. I felt that this action was yet another affront to her dignity, but I remained silent. The manner of this physician was detached and diffident and yet his gray eyes grew wild as he said, Suicide. Morphine.

      I passed out at this point. When I awoke, I was in the arms of Dumont.

      He tenderly set me onto the staircase. I grasped the maroon rug that covered the stairs and I looked at my aunt who was still on the floor.

      Can’t you move her? I asked no one in particular.

      Dr. Blackthorn walked to me. Do you wish to authorize an autopsy?

      No! I spoke with indignation. Cutting up the body of this dear, sweet woman sounded like another affront to her. There will be no more checking or cutting on her.

      Dr. Blackthorn eyed me. I did not care what he thought of me. I’d heard enough stories about bodies stolen from graves and sold to doctors for use as cadavers. The entire medical profession, if one could have called it that at the time, more than mildly repulsed me. I stood up and walked down the stairs.

      I will arrange for her funeral. If you would please submit your bill to me, Amelia Prescott, I will see that this house visit is paid in full.

      The cool gray eyes of Dr. Blackthorn widened only slightly. His broad mouth half-smiled, and he said, As you wish, Miss Prescott.

      Dumont stared at me. I stared back at him. I recall that his eyes were the color of brass coins, more bright than garish, but intense in their effect. His hair was black and shiny; his nose, hooked; his lips full and sensual.

      I looked

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