Rose’s older child had been born with the most special gift of all. Helen could have reestablished the right of lineage. She had so much power, so much vision. When the Woman of the Woods had appeared before her, Helen had looked at her with enrapturement. She had eagerly absorbed all that the Woman had taught her.
The Girl had been hopeful that Helen would join her and the land forever as Freddy and Rebecca had. She had been distracted by her own joy. She had been careless through her own thoughts. She had not seen the blue light slinking through the underbrush. Sidling up to the feet of Helen while she recited the oath to the trees, the blueness had touch the girl’s ankles with its swirling midnight tendrils. The Woman had noticed but too late. The blueness was in her, and once it went in, the Girl could not take it out.
She should have watched closer, but Helen was so young the Girl believed there was no threat. She was so much younger than when the blueness took Salome. Constance’s hair had gone gray before the blue came into her, although the Girl knew it had stalked around the cabin for years. Watching. Watching.
She had never imagined the blue would notice a young girl. “It must have felt the power from her and thought the girl was ripe,” the Girl had told herself the night that Helen passed. She lingered on the edges of the cabin and listened to Rose’s wailing until she couldn’t bear it any longer. Returning to her cave, she stoked the fire and huddled by the warmth with her arms around her knees. Rocking slightly forward and back, she muttered, “My fault. My fault.” The words echoed back from the stone walls until the Girl fell asleep.
Here, now, was Rose’s youngest, and she shook her head and mass of hair to rid herself of the bad memories. She crept along the tree limbs high above so Cleo wouldn’t sense her and be afraid. Cleo had always been skittish of the woods growing up. She had always kept to the well worn path that led from the cabin into town. The Girl knew why. She had tried to show herself to Cleo when she was three. She had shown herself to Helen at the same age. Helen had smiled and clapped her chubby hands. Cleo had screamed for her mother.
After that day, the Girl had always hidden herself when Cleo was near. Instead of showing the skittish child her impish face, she made the forest show its beauty in little ways to entice the child to smile. A spray of little violets appeared along the path when Cleo walked to town. The robins chirped cheerily on a log by the stream every time she returned.
Today was no exception in this game the Girl played. She wanted Cleo to stay. She wanted these wild boys of hers to roam the forest with her. If Helen had the power to join her in the afterlife, perhaps Cleo did as well. The Girl could teach her, if Cleo would finally allow it. Then the boys could be taught, and one of them would join her, too. She heard the youngest boy howl like a wolf which made his brothers join him, and she giggled with her hands clasped over her mouth.
She followed them all the way to the edge of the cabin, and for the first time in a long while, she felt hopeful. When Rose and Cleo sat next to each other in the rockers, the Girl sighed with contentment and the belief that this is why Cleo had come today. She was going to reconcile with Rose. She wanted to know her mother’s secrets at last.
The peacefulness between the women was short lived. There were storm clouds brewing in Cleo’s brow, and soon Rose’s pleading voice was carrying across the yard. Cleo was clasping the arms of the rocker until her skin went white, and the Girl fought a sinking feeling in her bones.
She watched Cleo take the boys away. She scratched the skin at her throat nervously as she tried to think how to salvage her hopes for the day. She made the ginger bloom. She tickled the butterflies out of their shrub so they swirled prettily into the sky. She asked the trees to sway to let the sunlight in brighter. All to no avail. Her little dark friends sensed the Girl’s despair, and they flocked to her. Their best intentions, the Girl knew this, and she didn’t have the heart to tell them that they only made matters worse.
Her skittish Cleo. Her scared and angry little one. She heard Cleo’s voice drift back to her, “I never wanted the girl anyway.”
The Girl, saddened because she knew the truth, said aloud, “But you do. You do wish for the girl you never had.”
________
Chapter: Belladonna and Robina
Her dreams had all been bathed in green for the last year. She hadn’t been able to explain it until this moment when she stood on the porch of the cabin and looked out at the trees and shrubs surrounding her.
“Home,” she said out loud. No more concrete below her feet. None of the harsh sounds of the city. Here was soft earth and birdsong. Here was her legacy, the one her mother had tried to hide from her.
Robina had asked Mother where they were from. All her friends had cousins and grandmothers, but Robina’s life only seemed to consist of the ones to be found on Father’s side.
When Robina would ask, her mother always pursed her lips for a moment, like she was tasting something sour. Her eyes would always narrow a bit, and she’d tell Robina, “We’ll discuss it when you’re older.” Robina would be dismissed from the room. There was nothing for her to do but dutifully exit, but her stomach always felt funny, like it wasn’t satisfied with the response she had been given.
She found the letters tucked in a drawer one rainy afternoon in April when she was fourteen. She had needed a pin, and rather go all the way upstairs for it she had decided to check her mother’s secretary. She may have never noticed them even then if one of the letters hadn’t managed to slip away from the other a bit.
Later in life, Robina would wonder if the Hill hadn’t been trying to capture her attention even then. As if the Hill had sent some force the long distance to find her, and then pulled the letter from the strict, neat pile by which the rest were bound, and then caused her to need a pin so that she would see the letter waving like a flag. She would have believed such a thing impossible once upon a time.
A corner of a return address had peeked at her, and she had stretched out one of her long fingers to tease it out further. She used the same finger to trace the full address as she read aloud, “Sister, 1 Hill, Eversburg, PA.” That was all she needed. The entire packet of letters thick with years was taken from her mother’s drawer and concealed behind a book she had taken from the library. All of it hurried to the privacy of Robina’s room.
Legs tucked up onto the window seat, she spread the letters out on the bench. Twenty in total. She selected the ones with the writing that seemed the most faded, assuming they would be the earliest sent. She had to start somewhere.
“Sister,” the first page always began and ended with this word. If the front of the envelopes hadn’t been addressed to her mother, Belladonna, she couldn’t have been sure they had been meant for Mother. Here was proof that her mother had a sister; one that had never been mentioned. Robina had family, other family, somewhere in Pennsylvania.
She spent the afternoon in a trance. Pouring over the words, she read about things she couldn’t quite understand. There were details about children born and then one letter about a child dead. Others talked about subjects as mundane as the weather or the growing population of the region. Every so often, there was a note about “their parents.” Once there was a line that read, “I saw the Girl today, but she disappeared in a moment.”
The last letter was dated, so Robina knew it was the most recent. It had been sent only a month ago, and this one was signed with a name: Rose. “You must come,” she read. “Cleo has refused the boon. All will be lost. The land must stay in the family. The secrets of our heritage will be forgotten in time. Send your girl to me. I will teach her.”
Robina walked around the room in a daze. Her stomach felt strange but not in the way it had before. A small red ball of knowledge felt like it bloomed inside her. She gathered the pages in her hand and searched the house until she found her mother. She thrust them onto the table in front of Bella. She felt power as she watched her mother quickly turn to her with startled eyes. Robina met the fear in them with he
r own intent green eyes. “I’m older now, Belladonna.”
********
The day she had confronted her mother, Robina thought that things would change. And they did, but not in the way she wanted.
Her mother became obsessed with Robina’s whereabouts. She insisted that Robina have a chaperone whenever leaving the house. She forbid Robina from contacting the relatives who lived in Pennsylvania. When pressed to reveal who the Girl was or why Rose needed Robina to come, Bella refused to answer.
She seethed with frustration. She plotted to find answers on her own, but with someone watching her every move, how could she? An entire year passed before a plan began to come together in her mind. Fifteen was a year for rebellion. She was nearly an adult. She could make her own decisions where her future was concerned.
Robina enlisted the help of a school friend. She wrote to her Aunt Rose, and then Robina would collect the letters in reply from her friend who lied and told her own mother that it was a new penpal. In this way, a slow trickle of detail began to make its way into Robina’s life.
There were stories of her ancestors and how they came from Scotland. Where they came before that, no one was certain. Rose drew Robina a chart so she could trace the relatives who had lived on the Hill. Robina became aware that if she agreed to come to Pennsylvania as Rose was requesting, she would be taking the place of another. She felt a small twinge of disappointment that she wasn’t the preferred recipient, but it was not enough to quell her determination to go.
In the letters that came over the next year, Rose told her about what life was like on the Hill. She described the beauty and the hardness. She talked about the practicalities of living away from the others in town. Once she had Robina’s assurance that she could accept such a life, only then did Rose begin to write about the other part of life that was required should Robina accept Rose’s offer of instruction. Only then did Rose reveal stories about the creatures that liked the dark of the woods.
By seventeen, she had devised a plan. It was the only way that she could see for her to obtain her objective.
Rick Barrett was enamored with her. She had seen his admiration growing steadily for years. He was not the most handsome, but he was strong and had been left a small inheritance. He would follow her anywhere, and her parents would approve the marriage.
Her way out. During the engagement, she talked about the green beauty of the home that waited for them until Rick had as many stars in his eyes as she. She wrote to Aunt Rose and told her to expect them soon.
“Hurry,” Rose replied. The whole letter, only that one word.
Three years of preparation, from the day Robina found the letters to the day the wedding bells chimed her freedom. She had done her best to reach Rose. When she searched her heart, she didn’t see a way she could have done more.
Bella brought the letter from Cleo in from the post. Aunt Rose had passed. With Cleo’s insistence, the Hill rightfully belonged to Belladonna.
********
Everyone in town called her Bella, and she preferred the shortening of her name. It was another way of distancing herself from her past. The old memories of running barefoot on the moss crept into her thoughts at times, but they were traitors to her new life. This life had silks that caressed her skin. This life was soft where her former life had been rough. This life was safe.
She hid her old life from everyone. From the beau who asked her to marry him: she had told him she was orphaned. From the people they saw at her husband’s church: Bella was poised and refined and spoke with an accent she had copied from the first woman who had employed her in the city. From her own child: “She is safer,” Bella told herself whenever she doubted her intentions.
When the first letter had arrived from Rose, Bella had been terrified. How had she found her? “Witch,” she had hissed at the envelope as she ripped it open. She had replied immediately, “Don’t write again.” Not that it stopped Rose. The letters came again and again. Bella’s only relief in the matter was that the servant always brought the post to her and not her husband.
She kept the letters wrapped together tightly and jammed them into the back of one of the drawers in her secretary. She felt them calling from the drawer at times. Their cawing sounded like a faint echo of the crows that lived on the Hill. The sounds sometimes invaded her at the dinner table or as she sat down to read. A terrible scrabbling like a large bird’s talons on a tree limb would drive her from her chair. She would complain of a headache and hide in her room upstairs.
She should have noticed that her daughter was growing up willful. She should have sensed the secrets her daughter was keeping from her. She misjudged Robina’s ability to cloak her intentions. “That must be her gift,” Bella consoled herself after the truth had come out. She tried to fathom what kind of gift evolved from the ability to plot and scheme. “She can mask her intentions.” Later on, Bella wondered if this was actually her daughter’s gift, or if the child had simply been born deceitful. “It would have served me right,” Bella mused. “I spent most of my life deceiving her, after all.”
When the time came, and Robina had thrown the letters onto the table and confronted her, Bella should have told her daughter the truth. All of it. Maybe that would have changed the course of her daughter’s fate. Or perhaps her daughter’s fate was sealed no matter what Bella had said to her. She would never know for certain, now that the damage was done.
Her voice had turned to rust in her throat when she thought briefly of telling her child about the past. The fear and the panic - and the wishing to be anywhere but the dark of the woods where she grew up - felt like it was closing around her again. It seemed easier to shut everything inside her down and simply forbid Robina from any contact with it. Another child might have listened. Another child might have cowed beneath her mother’s forbidding stare. Her Robina was not one of those. She belonged to the lineage of the people of the Hill. Even Bella still felt a small part of it, no matter how much she had squashed it down inside of her.
Bittersweet feelings for her home still lingered in her. The sweet that drove her to name her only child Robina. A remembrance of the robins that had always sung prettily to Belladonna and Rose when they were at the stream. The bitter that caused her to run from her childhood home. The memory of the day she had seen the sinister blue light that had coiled itself like a snake around a tree right in front of her. She could never describe to anyone how she knew what it was. There was simply a feeling that spoke to her. It said, “Danger.”
To be able to sense danger was her gift. Not that the ability ever seemed to matter. People seldom listened when you told them something was wrong. They only saw what they wanted to see.
The gift had served her own person well though, she had always thought. She had been able to navigate her life to this lovely new existence. If her daughter’s gift had not been the ability to mask her intentions, Bella’s inner voice would have certainly warned her. She supposed Nature liked a balance, though, and couldn’t decide if the circumstances were tragic or funny.
She thought she had taken measures to protect Robina, and on the day of her daughter’s wedding, she was finally able to see how she had been duped. She admitted that Rose was waiting for her on the Hill. She meant to reclaim their birthright, and Bella longed to tell her the truth. That it wasn’t Robina’s birthright, it was Cleo’s. That it wasn’t safe on the Hill. The words stuck in her throat again. She wondered if it was some working of her sister that somehow stopped her from speaking or if it was simply her own fear of the past.
She had sat in her home in despair as Robina packed her things. Then the post came, a letter from Cleo, and all was right again. Her niece had sent signed papers that transferred the property formally to Belladonna, and with them clenched tightly in her hand, she forbid Robina from setting foot on the Hill.
“Let her hate me,” Bella thought with resignation. “At least she is safe.”
********
The crows began to appear a
round the house a few weeks after Rose died. Bella told herself they were a coincidence. These crows looked nothing like the ones on the Hill. The ones she knew were not truly birds at all. Still, part of her was leery. There suddenly seemed to be more skulking around the grounds than she could ever recall seeing.
One waited on the top of the gazebo like a sentinel. Another perched on the back fence, and there were three that talked at her from the lowest tree limb next to the side porch. She couldn’t help but be reminded of her mother, Constance, and how the crows on the Hill had followed her everywhere. Constance had always smiled at them. Once, after a line of them had followed them home from the forest, she had looked down at little Belladonna and said, “I wish I knew what they were sayin’.”
All Bella could think was, “Nothing good.” She kept an eye on the creatures, but she kept her sentiments to herself. She didn’t want to take away that look of pleasantness on Constance’s face.
The black creatures, the dark forest, the midnight blue sickness - these were only a few of the reasons that strengthened her resolve. She would not give Robina the property on the Hill no matter how much she begged. Yet Bella could not bear to think of the land falling into a stranger’s hands. Every time she took the papers of ownership out of their hiding place, she thought she heard a murmur of “I’m yours, I’m yours.”
She couldn’t seem to make herself get rid of the land, and now it was too late. Somehow, she had managed to run her mind in circles for three years about what to do with the Hill. Now here was the sickness. Not quite the blue light, but just as deadly in the end. In her last desperate days, she tried to tell her husband to sell the acreage, but Robina had already conned him into promising the land to her.
He couldn’t understand why Bella sobbed. “I would think you would want her to have the land where your family came from.” Robina had told him everything, and this had succeeded in turning her husband away from her. Either Bella had lied to him all these years about who she truly was, or the disease that attacked her body had addled her mind. In any case, she was not the wife he had married.
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