The Thing in The Forest

Chapter Twelve- 1689

I have been moved back in with my mother for almost a year now. Now that the children I looked after have a tutor, I am no longer needed all day at the manor. I still go there to do my daily jobs, but it is much easier to keep to myself when I am not having to stay there all day and night. The wife cannot seem to get pregnant again, no matter how hard the husband tries. Although I feel pity for her, I must keep myself safe.

Time has not been kind to my mother. She looks much older than she is. She still does several jobs in town to try to make enough money to keep the debtors away and to keep our deceased father's house, but I have a feeling that one day soon she will have to write the deed over to one of my brothers.

My older brother is married now and is living in town, working in the mines as father did. He has the same cough as Father did as well, which brings back memories of that sound reverberating off the wooden walls of our small home. He tries to visit at least once a week, but those visits are becoming fewer and fewer and less and less time. I fear that he will soon not walk through our doorway at all.

Despite our family's circumstances, my two younger siblings are doing well. They are grown and beautiful in their own rights. Both of them are looking for work in respectable places and are on the verge of searching for marriage proposals. I am so happy for them. I do not hold their joyous outcome against them, but instead embrace them and encourage them to go out in the world and make a name for themselves and find happiness.

Mother is meant to wed a man from town soon. His wife died in the childbirth of their first. Neither of them made it. He says the arrangement will provide for my family and he will have a wife to take care of him.

He is not as kind as Father was. No one could be and it may not be fair to this man to compare them. He sometimes reaches out to touch my mother and I can see the slightest recoil from her. I have seen her with marks on her arms although she tries to hide them with longer shirts, even in the summer. I can hear her crying at night. I do not know how to comfort her, and I am not sure that she would receive it. We have not been affectionate in years. She is a ghost of her former self.

I do visit my neighbor down the road still. I do most of her housework now. She lost her husband not too long ago and I can tell that she doesn't have much time left in this world. She is my only friend outside of my siblings, and I do not want to lose her. She has been slowly giving me some of her possessions as of late, telling me that she wants me to keep them as a reminder of her.

The latest gift that she has given me is her plant journal. Several of her garden plants are used for medicinal purposes and she and I have done many walks through them while she names them for me and tells me what they are used for. She has shown me how to dry them and steep them, and I have even created a few customers that purchase my tea that induces a cycle, which is the same preventative that I had been taking while staying in the manor for those few years.

We speak often, my friend and I. She is beyond wise and I wish I had spent more time with her, learning from her. I sometimes wished that she had been my mother, unable to have children of her own. I think she would have made a very loving mother. I sometimes imagine having my own children and them calling her Grandmother. But it wasn't meant to be. For now, I steep some teas to ease her arthritis and walk through her garden with her.