3.
Over those ensuing years, countless and regular missives, letters, parcels, and cards were issued forth from the Thrush residence at the typical and to be expected intervals addressed to one or another or all of the self-exiled members of the family. These were directed to all the corners of the earth where the lonely patriarch believed his family might have found refuge and established a new outpost of the Thrush lineage.
Never was there the least response or reply, nor any hint that his fevered communiqués, entreaties, pleas, inquiries, and well-wishing were ever received. Even during the early years of Thrush’s abandonment when he issued numerous and frequent cries for help out upon the ethers when curious and troubling developments threatened his well-being, his peace of mind, never was there the least flutter of interest or concern returned to the ancestral manse.
All had eventually, with time, as is inevitable in most human affairs, settled down within the walls of Thrushdom and came to resemble something of an ordered routine. The house was impeccably maintained according to seasonal demands. Temperatures inside the house remained crisp to bracing, but heat was not withheld when needed for the maintenance of good health and a modicum of basic comfort.
Fredreich and Mathilde-Eloise were never truly forgiven for their complicity in Felicity’s abandonment of Thrush and her absconding with his surviving children on the night of Augusta Clarice’s death. But they were peerless as household staff, and they knew the house and its numerous idiosyncrasies to precision and attended to them without complaint. As well they knew Elwood Addington Thrush to a degree that the lord of the house found them comfortable and would not have wished to suffer himself and the house the trouble and expense, and the uncertainty, of seeking out, hiring, and training new staff that in all likelihood would not be suitable at all to his tastes and various unique requirements of the house. So all remained as it remained for nearly forty years.
4.