They offered me the only room they had for the night, it was Edsel's. It was simple, with only a bed, and two empty drawers. As I sat upon his bed, I thought of what he told me months ago. When he worried for me, something that became a bother to me. An irate feeling overcomes me as I realize that he was right and I too blind to realize it. This beautiful flower he warned me of, had poison behind it's petals. It was slow like a snake, enticing like a rose, and would have destroyed me if I had not ran away from it when I saw it's fangs before it bit me. I became attached to him, like a fly in the kitchen of a butcher. Eventually that blade would have sliced me into a meaningless mass. What would have m master done to me if I had stayed? What would I have become?
"He never liked staying in his room for far too long." Edsel's mother said as she opened the door. She stood in the open doorway scrutinizing the four walled room. "He said it made him feel like he was in a cell, and the world around him was free. I knew one day my son would go and find a better life. A life that did not make him feel as if he were in a cell, a cell filled with radishes." She chuckled at the end, shaking her head as she bit her bottom lip.
"Did he tell you?" I asked her and she took a deep breath as she walked up to me and sat beside me on his bed. She was a short woman, and her face was more youthful than many girls I had come to know. Girls who lacked the knowing of motherhood.
"That morning he simply left this room, over his shoulder he carried everything he needed, hugged his father and I and left. He said he was to go and begin a life he had always wanted. I so desperately wanted to be stunned, tell him he can not leave us, but I could not. A mother is never selfish. What we know for our children is always the greatest thing they can have, and I know that picking radishes from a field and selling them was no life my son wanted."
"You are good mother."
"And I pray he believes so too. Though I am sure he left you with no word of his venture."
"Nay." She smiled gently and placed her hand over mine. Her hand was warm, like any mother's is.
"What would you have done if he had told you? Told him not to go? Or would you have gone with him?"
"When I came to look for him, I came to offer my hand in marriage. I had felt as if I had fooled him in many ways, but nonetheless he felt like the man I was destined to marry. But I lack the knowing now if I would have gone with him, I was so heartbroken when he left. He was a constant thought within me, it hurt when I thought he had forgotten me easily. Like so many have."
"I believe you are solely a root of inspiration amidst many Bryony. When one gazes at you, they think of many things. My son thought of another life, and it was one beside you. Your papa must have thought of you on a ship, or your mama a better life. We can not control what others think of us, and you have had the ill fate of coming upon one whose thoughts were not of good."
"A blessing with a stem of a curse." I whispered, and she held my hand more tightly.
"We can not question what we have faced already Bryony, it has occurred for a reason and you are here now. Why question what has already occurred when we can answer what can occur in what lies ahead."
"Edsel," I said as I looked upon her. "mama and my sisters that shall be my answer. The ship, the port, my life lived again."
"Then it shall be, be weary of what has already occurred, and find your path Bryony." She stood up, and I stood before her. "Simply because we are women, does not mean we can not answer for ourselves. We may not have the big fist of men, or the power they have over their shoulders but we surely have something they do not. A will of a hurt woman."
