Anna In The Garden

19

19

After three days of punishment, Nursey allowed Anna out of her room. The morning routine reinstated as though nothing had happened, but the pain in Anna's bottom and her feelings of elation from seeing more than the four walls of her own room said otherwise.

From the dragging out of bed, to the cold bath, extra rough scrubbing to make up for the days without bathing, to hair tugged and yanked into order and on to breakfast and the morning constitutional, everything occurred as it always had.

She fell back into the routine with the comforting feeling of falling into a warm bed. Her imprisonment had served its purpose and Anna no longer wished to escape the confines of the house to meet with Ken. She no longer wished to think about the strange girl through fear that Nursey may punish her for the mere thought.

Once afternoon studies ended, Anna found herself at a loss for something to do. With no inclination to peruse the lines of books within the library, nor a wish to practice her needlework, or to paint, or to write, she wandered the hallways and corridors of the house in search of something, anything, that could occupy her mind and push away thoughts of the girl.

Nursey had said nothing about Ken. Not a single word. Anna wondered whether Nursey intended to act as though Ken had not appeared in Anna's room. That she had not ejected the girl with grotesque ferocity through the panes of the window. Indeed, Nursey had said little of anything since the incident and Anna considered this yet another ongoing punishment.

She found herself outside her room, yet had no intention of entering. She had spent far too much time within, that she would find it most pleasing if she never had to enter it ever again. She wondered how conducive Nursey would feel to moving to a different room within the house? After all, there were a great many rooms that never saw the light of day, anymore. Not since Mother and Father left.

Pausing in her circuit of the house, she came to the window and placed her hand upon one frosted panel. She had not even realised a glazier had visited to replace the shattered panes. No sound of hammering or scraping had reached beyond her thick door. No conversations between Nursey and anyone else to eavesdrop upon. Only the silence of an empty, lonely house.

About to turn away, she furrowed her brow in much the same way as Mother tended to do when encountering something she found out of place. Something, Anna attempted to put her finger upon, was not quite right. Her gaze returned to the window, roving from the very top to the bottom. She could not place it. An inkling of something wrong. Not how it should be.

Or something as it should be, were it not for the incident with the trickster, Ken.

Her eyes seemed to slide away from the window, after a while. Sloughing across the surface of the glass panels. Creeping away from the wooden frame and panel partitions. Passing from the window sill. She had the distinct feeling that everything was in its place. Its correct place. Yet her mind could not fail to know, deep down like a mouse hiding in a hole, that something was not right.

Blinking, she examined the window once more. From the panels at the top, to panels at the very bottom. She placed every ounce of attention she could muster upon this task. And then, at her third pass across the window, she saw it. A tiny thing. Something that she had almost forgotten. Something that should no longer have a place upon the repaired window.

A crack. A thin hair of a fracture in one of the panes. Of course, it could have happened when the glazier replaced the window, but Anna knew better. She knew that crack. She had made that crack so many years ago. The exact same shape. The exact same angle. The exact same placement. The probability of this being a new crack was of some doubt.