Page 43 of The Thirteenth Child
From the shadows of their back bedroom came an answering moan.
I turned toward Merrick, silently begging him to intervene, but he only gestured for me to continue inside. A painfully long moment passed before I acquiesced.
I entered the cabin, stepping over bits of broken furniture, unidentifiable scraps and lumps of things. How had everything gone wrong so quickly? We’d never had the tidiest of homes, but it had never been likethis.The house my siblings and I had grown up in was now nothing more than a hovel.
Windows were clouded over with grime and cobwebs, casting a false twilight and making it difficult to see where I stepped. The edge of my shoe struck a discarded wine bottle and it rolled under a table, clinking at others hiding there, and I immediately understood.
They’d spent the coins on drink.
Wine and ale and whiskey.
I spotted the evidence all throughout the cabin.
Casks and barrels and bottles, all empty.
Another volley of coughs drew my attention from the kitchen shelves toward my parents’ bedroom. I pressed my lips together, wishing I’d brought a pomander with me, before wandering in to investigate.
“Mama?” I asked, lingering back from the bed. There were twoforms lying in it, but it was too dark to determine who was who. The stink of them made my eyes water.
There was a low grunt, and I could make out a set of eyes peering from the soiled blankets, black as beetles.
“Who’s there?” the other figure asked, struggling to sit up. “We’ve nothing to steal, leave us in peace.”
“It’s not a robber,” the first said. Mama. That awful, emaciated crone was my mother. I blinked, trying to see her as she’d been.
Her cheeks had sunk into deep pits, and her skin was a mottled map of broken capillaries and spots. She was nearly as gaunt as Merrick, and the jut of her clavicles looked as sharp as a knife’s edge.
“Hazel.”
It wasn’t a guess, it wasn’t a grab. She knew who I was. My heart warmed a little, but I kept my distance.
Papa squinted from his mess of sheets, his eyes never quite focusing on mine. His mouth hung open, and I could see he was missing several teeth. “Don’t be daft, you stupid woman. That’s not Hazel. That’s a fine lady.”
Mama struck him with such force his spittle flew through the air, tainting the bedding with flecks of red. “I know my own daughter.”
He scoffed. “She’s not yours, she never was yours. She was always his.”
I glanced back toward the open door, wondering how much of this Merrick heard.
“It’s your birthday, isn’t it?” Mama realized. “Is that why you’ve come back? You’ve come to celebrate your birthday? I should make you a cake. I never…I never made you a cake.” She tried to push herself from the sodden mattress but fell backward into the dank mess with a cry of pain.
Her anguish spurred me to action, and I crossed the last few feet to kneel beside the bed. I set down my kit and grabbed her hands. Her skin was papery thin and clammy, with a feverish sheen. “No, Mama, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about any of that. I came…” I paused. “I came to make you well again.”
I was dimly aware of Merrick filling the doorframe, backlit and limned with the morning sun. He hadn’t entered, and I wasn’t sure if he was attempting to give me a moment of privacy as I reunited with my parents or if he simply couldn’t fit into the room.
Mama’s eyes drifted to him and she jerked back, pulling the sheet in front of her as a shield. With hooked fingers, she made a ward of protection against my godfather, then poked roughly at Papa. “He’s here. He’s returned,” she hissed.
Merrick remained in the doorway, watching everything play out with hooded, worried eyes.
“Be gone, devil,” Papa spat. “I’ll not have you darken the door of my home again.”
I suddenly remembered how Merrick described him in my birthday retellings.
The very foolish huntsman.
As I watched him flounder against my godfather’s presence, I couldn’t think of a better epithet for him, and it struck me as terribly funny. I’d been so scared of him as a child, but here he was, unable to even get out of his own bed.
“It’s not you I’m here for,” Merrick muttered, his voice low and dangerous. “My only concern is for Hazel.”
