They Went to Paradise
There was an overturned wagon in the middle of the road. He lay curled against the roof of it; stirring against the heavy beat of rain, he turned over.
Rain sheathed him in an oily hide; stumbling through puddles, he strode slowly forward through the steady fall of liquid from the sky. High grass called his name, though it didn't know it. Pantlegs were rolled up and water sloshed over polished business shoes.
Wheatgrass French kissed his ankles, whispering to him of unrestrained acts, committed most freely on these grounds centuries before. This was the best way to run from pressures of love and life, duty and possession.
He untucked his watchfob and plunked it into his socks, for safekeeping. More rediculous thoughts that led nowhere; happy to have them, he pressed through, to the place where wildflowers wove in incandescent reaction to the water and wind.
Walking without care, he headed toward a break in the storm; a place to soothe the bump rising up on his forehead. Careful not to kill even one blossom, he walked to the center and settled down in a barren circle settled right in the middle of the flowers.
Contemplation set in; it wouldn't be likely that anyone would look for him, now; perhaps there would be a search party or two within the day.
For miles, the Irish countryside stretched out around him. The best thing for him would be walking, so this was his exact aim; when, at last, he discovered an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of untended farmland.
Inspecting each square inch of the place, he found it livable; they would have to do something about the damaged door. He endeavored to take it apart himself; with tools abandoned in the basement, he managed to do just that.
Months passed; trying his hand at farming was a viable option. One day he settled onto his front porch; the wheat had been sewn and corn was just beginning its growth stages. He sat swinging his legs over the basement, waiting, waiting..
A head peeked up out of the wheatgrass. One he recognized instantly, waving, the being moved closer and closer to him, until they stood face to face.
"You made it," He smiled.
"Took awhile," He admitted, "Too long. You're doing well."
"Yeah."
He stood on.
Indefinitely; through the winters and the summers; illness and prosperity. Years rolled on, and as civilization moved closer to them and noted their gentlemanly deportment and decided them good men. Even when they never took wives of their own, and lived childlessly.
For fifty long years, they watched from the outside; though there was the occasional trade for food, people of the village knew nothing of their real, inner feelings. Rumors sprung up when the taller one set to weeping the day they cemented over the ring of flowers at the town square to make way for a statue dedicated to the lost Baron of Verovia. Things were whispered, never expressed.
One day, after years of innuendo and rumor, a reporter from the newly minted area press decided to walk to the house and discover for himself the story of these two men, who's identities remained intentionally blank, answering only to "Friend".
Their front door was ajar. It didn't take a fool to notice what he did, however.
Two elderly men, sitting side by side in twin chairs in the parlor. Wearing the most peaceful expressions. Apparently sleeping as they held hands.
But as the reporter approached both limp forms, he noted that neither seemed to be breathing. And fingers placed to the corotid confirmed quite clearly that they were both dead.
***
A medical examiner ruled that both men had died, simply, from old age. Quietly, they were buried by their homes, in a tiny walled-off graveyard housing only their moon-skull, wrinkled forms.
So anonymously they lay for over a hundred years; until the fall of '01. There were stories in the paper, trumpeting about bones that had been exhumed, DNA tests performed. Local legend melded with fact.
There had been a Baron, they said, who fell desperately in love with his advisor. Knowing that the strain of royalty would force him to procreate for the good of the title, they had decided mutually to fake their deaths; one by carriage accident, one by drowning, several years apart. They had decided, mutually, on one place to meet; a broken-down farm in the middle of a wheatgrass field, just north of a fairy ring.
The town remained both proud of and embarrassed by the beautiful love story applied to the village. So they paid to have the statue in their town square amended, and it stands, to this day:
Baron Steven Richards
And Lord Steven Regal
Of Verovia
Rest Here