C16| The Man We Thought We Knew

"Oh dear Lord." Mary our housekeep grasped behind me.

I'd heard her coming, summoned by my tears as she always had been. Mary was hard woman, a widow who'd lost her only child to the fever that had swept through town decades ago. Mary and I had a strange relationship, she was who I should have turned to for motherly advise or comfort considering my own mama was so lacking in that department. But Mary wore her pain in a phyiscal way, as if she cloaked herself in her grief years ago and now simply did not know how to live without carrying her shroud of pain everywhere she went. I tried to get close her, to know her and love her but she would let me and I, I was tried of trying to love mothers who would not and in Mary's case could not love me back.

Turning my head towards her, I realised I was not mad at her, like I was at everyone else. She was not there, she did come to cheer for my death nor did she come to speak for my character either, though that would have done little good as it was the Mayors son who'd been killed.

So far, Mary is also the only one who cried for me. I decided then, instinctually I think that Mary would live, she'd survive this nigth of horror and revenge. She'd be spared the bloodly justice I was exacting upon this town and its people.

"Scarlet?" She gasped once move, staring at me in equal parts horror and shock. "You," She signed herself with the cross.

"You're alive."

"I knew he couldn't do it. Your papa loved you so much, I knew he would have found a way to save you." She spoke more to herself then me, her outspoken thoughts almost had me laughing, but emotion rose to the surface. It seems I too was in a state of shock.

"Scarlet." Mary sunk to knees, reaching out as if she were about to take me into her arms. But even flooded as she was with genuine relief at my being alive, prey recognized predator.

She froze half an arms distance from pulling me into her embrace, her shock and confusion visible to me even in the dark of the room.

Pity.

Survival instinct had robbed me of what would have been the first embrace Mary had given me in nearly a decade.

The older woman looked me dead in the eye, fear had her heart racing, flavoring her blood as it moved through her veins. A feeling akin to hunger gnawed at my gut at the scent of it.

Lucky for Mary, I seem to have ate my fill.

"You have changed, child."

“Don’t all children grow when their hung for murder by the fathers?” The words filled the air without the fire that usually accompanied them.

Still the statement shocked Mary, the stale scent of pity and sadness filled the air. “Oh, he didn’t.” Dropping her arms, Mary looked up at my father. “He wouldn’t. Would he? He loved you more than anything.”

“I don’t understand.” She muttered, shaking her head as tears formed in her eyes.

“Neither do I.” We both lapsed into a heavy silence at the feet of dead man we both thought we knew and loved but never really understood.