Nightingale

May 24, 1888

May 24, 1888

Dear Soren Bennett,

Words cannot express the loathing I bore when my mother received the letter from your father. The thin cursive characters savored and sewed in our hurt; my ache from your past negligent and ignorant juvenile hands stole from his senseless offer. I failed to sway my mother's mind, but she fixated herself on tending to you and your estate for the summer months like she did when we were mere children running bare in your garden overflowing with trickling scent of dewy apricot, ivory roses, and tender lilies. Alas, the estate stands idle of your homeliness, only touched by a thick veil of dust and bone fabrics which shields the nude furniture. It may be to your amusement to know the property survives in the porcelain stone and brick it did when we were children, faded and foreign amidst the array of towering willow trees like a hidden gem. The outside is bare of its copious raw beauty. The rosebeds have long died, stripped of the healthy soil that bore them as the majority of the garden is, replaced with barren and dying land. Do you embellish in lost memories of when the garden blossomed in the late spring, and we'd pick berries till our palms were crimson and blue from their broken and delicious flesh? When your mother filled the kitchen with the lingering aromas of yeast and sugar as she baked us fresh strawberry cakes and brewed warm chamomile tea at noon? I couldn't comprehend the weight of our indifference when I was a child, but seeing as it bore your father's letter, the Bennett's have made it astonishingly clear. I must attest, I do not revel in the idea of your upcoming presence or your family's counterfeit hospitality. My labor and tending to the Bennett estate will be for the sake of my poor mother, whom you've toyed with far enough. For the sake of our pasted friendship, I will be cordial, but your family will receive nothing more from me.

Astrid James