Nettle Blackthorn and the Three Wicked Sisters (3 page)

Jazz opened the bathroom door
startling her. She escorted Bram out,
a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been robbed.” She patted his back
in a manner she hoped convey her sympathies, but to Nettle,
resembled more like the pained grimace of someone unused to
bothering with other people’s problems. “But luckily the bathroom’s
OK. So… I’ll test it first.” With a little push, she had Bram out
of the bathroom, and shut the door on his surprised
expression.

Bram
turned to roll his bright blue eyes at Nettle, who shook her head
in shared disbelief. Their self absorbed cousin had no idea the
world didn’t revolve solely around her.

Fred
made his way down the staircase, his boots making a racket
on the wooden steps. He stumbled off the last step, hunched over
and out of breath, a fire-poker held limply in one hand. “It’s...
OK... I thought...” he huffed and puffed and wheezed, “No one
here.”

“Dad,
are you OK?” Nettle asked. He looked as if he’d run a marathon. He
nodded, sucking in air, gave her a thumbs-up, and slumped into his
old armchair. A cloud of dust billowed from the cushion as he sank
into it. He regained his breath.

“Who
could have done this?” asked Nettle, her dark brows drawn together
as she surveyed the destruction.

When he
r father didn’t answer she glanced up. He was deathly
still, the colour drained from him. His fingers gripped the
armrests like claws. He gazed around at the room at all the
upturned and smashed furniture and scorch-marks on the
walls.

“Dad?”
Nettle asked concerned. It must have only just sunk in for
him. He was too busy running around making sure no one was here.
“Dad?”

He star
ted, obviously forgetting she was there. She held his gaze,
then allowed it to slip away as he gave himself a sharp shake to
release the tension. He relaxed back into the chair expelling his
breath. When he shrugged, he smiled, his mood lightening. “I guess
it could have been anyone really, we’ve been away for
ages.”

“
Have they taken anything?”

It was a reasonable question to ask, she thought, except
her father glanced away, his teeth worrying at his bottom lip, the
tell-tale sign he was thinking how to avoid the truth.
What is going
on?

“I don’t think so, though it’s impossible to tell with
the
state
the rooms are in.” In a brighter tone, he turned to her with a
comforting smile. “Kids more like, just out to make a
mess.”

Nettle didn’t believe him, he was acting really weird. Only
a week ago he abruptly decided to take a family trip back to the
cottage, then, when arriving, he didn’t want to enter the property.
She was positive he had the same thought as her. Someone had been
searching for something in particular.
But for what?

“Where’s
Jazz?” Fred asked.

“Bathroom,” answered Bram. He was sifting through a pile of
dusty items near the fireplace. “Hope you don’t need it, she’ll be
in there forever.”

“What do
you have there?” inquired Fred, he thought he recognized the wooden
toy in his son’s hand but couldn’t be sure.

Nettle
decided to do some investigating herself. While her father joined
Bram, squatting down beside him, she ran up the
staircase.

Bram had
discovered a small cluster of wooden toys within the mess on the
floor. “Wow. Are these all mine? When I was a baby?” He’d found a
spinning top, a rattle and a donkey.

Fred
beamed, “I carved them myself.” When Bram handed his father the toy
donkey he’d been holding, coated with a strange splattering of red
and green paint, his father added, “Ah well, your mother painted
them... somewhat.”

Over the past few years, the
Blackthorn family had traversed the
country from market to fair, utilizing Fred’s natural talent with
wood to support their travels. They’d park up at a new camp ground
and he’d poke about the surrounding woodland finding the right kind
of twig or broken branch. “It sung out to me,” he’d say, and then
spend the evening hours whittling, wood shavings littering at his
feet, deep in thought as the wood took shape, almost of its own
volition.

A series of nicks and scratches caught Fred’s attention.
“
Over here
Bram,” he urged going over to crouch by the wall near the
stairwell. He pointed to a faint pencil line and a name scribbled
beside it. “This was how tall Nettle was the day you were born.”
Fred pointed to another measurement. “See here, this was how tall
you were, when you were only six months old.”

“
Cool.”

Fred
grinned. “There are so many things to show you. Your first
baby-shoes, the tree-house, old photographs of your mother we
couldn’t take with us....”

The
smile on Bram’s face quavered, becoming more forced, like an
uncomfortable mask he wore. Fred noticed. “Hey buddy, what’s the
matter?”

Bram
scuffed the floor with the tip of his worn sneakers. He frowned,
annoyed and frustrated that his father didn’t understand. He
finally sighed heavily knowing he was going to hurt his father, but
unable to avoid it. “I don’t remember this place, or those toys or
even getting measured. I don’t remember anything.”

“
Of course not, you were so little when we left.”

“That’s
it, Dad, I’m not going to remember this place am I? I don’t even
remember Mum. I was a baby when she left.”

Fred’s
throat pinched tight. How could he be so oblivious? To Bram, this
cottage they lived in for a brief time as a happy family, even his
own mother, were strangers.

Bram
placed an arm around his father’s shoulder, wishing he hadn’t been
so tactless. Fred cleared his throat noisily and clasped his son’s
hand. With his wide mouth, honey locked hair and heart-shaped face,
he looked so much like his mother. The only concession to himself
were the spectacles. “Yes, you’re right. But it’s not to say these
things, these memories of you growing up here, didn’t happen.” He
squeezed Bram’s hand until a smile crept over his son’s lips.
“Humour an old man, huh, let me tell you some tales.”

Dim light filtered through the dirty bay windows of the
staircase
and its tower as Nettle made her way up to the second
floor. She was a tall and lanky girl, with a long narrow face and
thick dark eyebrows that feathered upwards, above nondescript green
eyes and angular cheekbones. Her nose, like her fathers, was
slightly hawkish. Her lips were thin like his. Her complexion was
olive, however, unlike her father’s vibrant hue, hers was dull and
had a rather dusty depth to it. She, in her own description,
considered her looks, like her skin tone, dull and exceedingly
uninteresting. She wore
her usual uniform of woollen tights – today, her
favourite grey and black striped pair - teamed with khaki shorts
and a comfortable hoodie. Normally, she had a hat pulled over her
long messy black hair. Hats were her thing and she had stacks of
them. Baker Boys and Gatsby; fleece lined Trapper hats; pretty
berets and skull clinging beanies; Chullo or Ushankas, especially
good for blustery winter days or a Chilote with their pom-poms. But
today she’d left her cat hat with its bristly whiskers in Bessie
when chasing her father inside the cottage.

Along the curved wall were a series of pictures. She
lingered to rub a hand over the dusty glass
, revealing a miniature landscape
crafted from cleverly layered leaves and two children made of
twisted twigs playing beneath the boughs of a tree. A sudden image
crowded her mind, of her, as a child, sitting at her mother’s
long-toed bare feet, sorting through a wicker basket of green
grasses and crisp dead leaves. The memory so vivid, she even felt
the warm sunlight striking her forehead as she squinted up at her
mother’s face.

Nettle reeled slightly under the intense recollection. Her
fingers curled into fists and she dug her short nails into the soft
flesh of her palms.
I don’t want to remember. Briar doesn’t deserve it!
She’d hardened
herself over the years, suppressing such memories, resolving to
forget about Blackthorn Cottage and everything to do with her
mother. She ran up the rest of the steps to the second floor,
intently keeping her gaze downward.

She found the doors open to the rooms, no doubt by her
father
, and
in a state as her father described, barely disturbed. This floor
housed their playroom, a small study and library. Nettle wandered
into the library, the wooden floor creaking beneath her footsteps,
dust motes stirring with her intrusion. Her father’s favourite
armchair with an opened book cresting the worn leather armrest,
stood beside the stained glass window, a leadlight image of birds
taken flight in various hues of blue.

When she was young t
he room seemed enormous. Books lined every inch of
wall space, reaching for the vaulted ceiling, a dizzying height for
a six year old. Now, nearly thirteen, Nettle found it to be just a
small pokey room, with a low ceiling, full of dusty old
books.

Four bedrooms took up the entire top floor. Nettle
purposely didn’t look into her parent’s bedroom as she passed by.
She tentatively entered her own bedroom, which overlooked the back
garden now rife with weeds. It was exactly how she remembered it,
although a lot smaller.
It’s strange being back here,
she thought,
as if the room
belongs to some other little girl.
The pale lemon plastered walls were
adorned with pictures cut from her favourite story books, though
now, Aladdin’s brightly coloured clothes had faded with age. A
thrush and robin, carved by her father, hung from the ceiling on a
mobile.

She smiled, wandering over to her dresser.
Little Judy
Carbunkle and Tonks!
Two dolls, leaning against one another, stood on
top of the dresser: Judy Carbunkle, a delicate southern belle with
golden ringlet hair and bright red cheeks and lips, and her beau,
Private Tonks, a moustached soldier, proudly standing at attention
with his bayonet rifle, lovingly carved by her father for her for
her fifth birthday. There once was a time when she’d barely been
apart from these dolls, tucked under an arm, joining her on daily
adventures.

A small
four poster bed stood in the centre, unmade. Nettle paused at that,
her set of drawers were pulled open, as well as the wardrobe doors.
Her childhood clothes had been rifled through, and some spilled
over the open drawers, coated in dust. The disturbance here was
isolated pockets, and she surmised, had been made by them, not an
intruder.

She only
had vague memories about the day they left. It was too long ago,
nearly seven years. She had fragmented images of being woken in the
middle of the night and carried somewhere, by someone who wasn’t
her father, their unfamiliar scent too earthy, their height too
short.

Before
that memory, the last thing she remembered was being tucked into
bed by her mother. Briar had been crying. She’d been confused as to
why her mother always seemed to be so sad back then. The next
morning, when Nettle awoke, she realized that comfortable feeling
of being rocked, was from being jostled around in the back of an
old car. She and Bram had been placed on the back seat, tucked
under a crocheted rug while they’d slept. Her mother wasn’t there.
“She’s gone,” Fred had said, and he’d refused to say anything
further. With confusion and gradual unease, Nettle became aware
that they were travelling away from the only home she’d ever known,
and things wouldn’t ever be the same again.

And now, seven years later
, they’d returned to Blackthorn Cottage.
The strangeness of her father’s behaviour filtered through her mind
as she made her way back downstairs. Something didn’t feel quite
right. She couldn’t quite place why he was out of sorts. She
understood about Briar, but there was something else, and she
wondered if it had to do with whoever had ransacked the
place.

She found her father and Bram where she’d left them,
rifling through the mess on the floor. As she descended the last
few steps
,
she froze. A sudden chill made the soft hairs on the nape of her
neck stand on end. From this viewpoint, looking down, she saw the
room quite differently. This wasn’t the work of squatters going
through their stuff, intent on chaos. The side tables were pulled
over, their drawers thrown across the room, a side table
splintering against the wall, the plastered walls cracked and
indented where something or someone had fallen against it. This was
the scene of a struggle, a fight.
But between who? Mum and Dad?

Fred
paused to look up at her. “Nettle are you all right?”

She
nodded and swiftly arranged a nonchalant expression. Satisfied, her
father handed Bram a black and white photograph. “Is this me?”
Nettle’s brother asked, surprised at the fat little
baby.

“You
were quite chubby. You liked your milk. A lot.” Fred
replied.

Nettle watched her father.
Could it be that we left mum, not the
other way around?
“Dad,” she carefully began, “why haven’t we come back here
sooner? At least, to put things away, do a bit of tidying up.
Maybe, even rent the place?”