Finding the Fourth Hill

Three years later...

Yay! I learnt how to update!!! I'm smart (not really! this is a big thing for me! Don't laugh!)

Slowly and unwillingly I rise from the tub, rapping a towel around myself, "I'm done" I call to the maid, Ethel.

She scurrys in and wraps a robe around me. She is kind of old, 34, her thick round glasses frame her electric blue eyes that crinkle when she flashes her kind toothy smile. Thomas's smile. And she always wears her long blond hair in a bun.

"How would you like your hair today Miss Smith?" She bussles around my head transforming my hair from its natrual state, long wavy blonde, into a simple but effective fish tail braid that has exqusit detail.

Next she leads me into my room were shes laid out a simple peach dress.

"Thank you" I say and she leaves to attend to my sister.

Ethel has been our maid since I was one, since I can first rember.

She came here from town, were her husband had abused her so badly she'd lost her baby and had a misscarrige.

She was about dead when she stumbled up to our front door. My mother invited her in and nursed her to better health.

When Ethel was capable of speech again she begged to stay here. So my father built a small cottage down the back of our land for her to live in. It was only big enough for at most two people but it was a safe place for her to call home.

In return for our hospataility she offered to do the housework. But three weeks later she snuck off to the village to up with her ex, by accident becoming pregnent, again.

Her ex, who belived her dead when she had fled, killed himself out of fear that she'd came back to haunt him.

Twelve months later she gave birth to an baby, Thomas. My father was distrought and angry at this. My parents got into quite a big fight.  

But to this day Ethel has kept her word, even schooling my sister and I.

When I truge through the dinnng room my father scoulds, "thatss no wayy for a youngg lady to walkk!" But his words are slurred so I wave him off and pour myself some porriage.

Prefering to eat in the kitchen, because the dinning room reaks of alcohol and I cant bear to look at him!

My mother passed away when I was two, just a month after she gave birth to Frances, my sister, she fell terribly ill half way through her pregnancey it didn't effect the baby but no doctor knew what it was or how to treat it so she was left to die.

This was about the time of the big agument. My father went into a rage, drinking all his home brew insted of selling it in town. We quickly became poor. But he pulled up long enough to secure a job of fruit and veg' growing and selling at the local markets.

But he slipped up and went back to the bottle, so the growing was left to my sister and I.

I shovel the remains of my porridge down, despite the burning trail it leaves in my throat, chuck my bowel on the basin and dart out the door.

I spot him with the axe, chopping the winters wood, his body arching with the swift, swinging movements. His axe slices through the chunks of hard wood scattering splinters every witch way. Suddenly he glances up, a smile errupting across his face.

"Hello" he says before returning to his work.

Thats all I get now, the odd hello, no more hugs, no more Thomas and I time. I pick up the chicken and pig bins then moap around the back and down the rockey slope to the pens.