Influences of Stars

Chapter 4

After Constance was finally released from her confinement, one by one the others felt a further burden placed upon them until they all regretted going near the recorders office so bitterly that they vowed together to never think of stealing again. Yet these burdens didn't feel like punishments, instead rather more like responses to something beyond their control- their ageing.

Charis' pa looked at her one evening as she grimaced at the sight of another dead thing. "I'm sorry you have to see it all. I wish...I wish I could do better for you all," he said.

And Charis lied to him, saying that she truly didn't mind. She promised him that she found it easy to see the blood, to raise the children, to take on his work when he was too weak to, because she had a mind that flickered away. Then she smiled at him because the look he gave her from the dark corner he submerged himself in was so soft and kind that she cursed herself for even thinking of saying her true feelings. Sometimes she wanted to scream.

***

"You need to grow into yourself," Theo's brother in law, John, told him. Theo jumped as he spoke; he wasn't used to anyone saying anything at the dinner table. "How can you have any pride in yourself if you're letting a group of wee lasses tell you what to do?"

Theo mumbled yet another apology. Unlike Constance or Tibby, he truly was sorry. He hadn't liked being dragged into such a scheme and he certainly had no intention of ever being so amenable to their unruliness again.

***

How long did that last?

***

"Did you hear him?" his sister Alice said, clipping him around the ears to win back his attention. She used to be quite indifferent to Theo, never minding what he did either in or out of their home. However, she had remarried only a week ago and now seemed willing to follow her husband's lead in enforcing some element of domestic discipline. Theo decided he preferred invisibility to bruises.

"I could do with more help on the sawmill. It needs to be transported quicker and perhaps one day you'd like to be a carpenter? You could repair the church and the hall and the houses and sell furniture to the richer folk or to the others down the river."

"Really?" asked Theo, looking up from his bowl. Moved by this offer of a future when John usually showed him nothing but disdain, Theo was struck by the sudden comfort of a home that normally felt so empty and cold, the laughter of his parents a memory close to dying itself. Darkness broke through the window, a soft stream of dark blue that seemed to float, hover, above the quiet world that had been created through the fall of night

"Perhaps some goodly work will knock a bit of firmness into you," said John, his tone a little harsher that time. Theo didn't care; he ignored the reason why he was being offered work and instead focused on the fact that he would have an occupation, a use, to support himself when he grew up. There was a kind of weightlessness to that knowledge.

"You'll have to stop playing as much once you start. And don't look at me like that! Most boys your age have been working for two years already. It's no wonder you're so pathetic when your sister let you mess about for so long," said John, resigning Theo to silence once more. His sister said no word in his defence.

Normalcy returned, with the three sitting together in loneliness. Theo became lost in himself as he always had to, until the cold spring air washed over them with the swinging open of the door against their walls. "I'm sorry to intrude!" said a breathless voice. The three were ripped from their solitude, with only one of them being grateful for it, by Tibby who stood with her gloved hands pressed against the doorway as if ready to rush off once more, and her face flushed with a rosy flush. "Please may I have Theo? We won't be long, I promise," she said.