I already knew what the message would be, she had been writing constantly to me the past months reminding me to come home back to Rearwood hall.
"What did she say again?"
He stood near the chimney as he arranged some papers in his hands.
I tore open the letter to read.
"Williams! Williams! I never hear enough of him!"
He laughed and came to sit beside me.
"She mentioned him yet again?"
"Yes."
For the past year, my mother never failed to mention the new steward she had gotten for our home after years of it being in ruins.
"He must have done a good job"
"Indeed" I folded back the letter and threw it at the table. She wanted me home. Hearing my sigh as I laid back on the bed, he asked;
"You don't want to go home?"
"Don't act like you don't know my predicament, it traumatizes me"
"I understand, and won't blame any of you, I mean, you have avoided the house and the lady for the past five years"
"And so has Dennis"
"Well, Dennis has responsibilities, his children and the company"
Dennis was my eldest brother and as you would guess, he too was running away from the house. I had my studies as an excuse for the past five years and now there was nothing else to be used as an excuse for avoiding it. I wished there was.
"And on the other hand, I know your reason for not wanting to be home, I mean, according to what I have heard," he laughed nervously. "I wouldn't take a box of one thousand gold coins to live there" he looked at me with his brown eyes. I knew the glint there, he would start ranting, and yes he did.
"Annabel never fails to describe the house to me in her letters"
Annabel was his sister who had recently been married to a man in Bewifield.
"She said it looks hunted with its falling structures and coupled with the fact that it lies on the outskirts of the village. Its once beautiful fields were now as dead as anything can be and children in the parish avoided passing through or even playing there anymore as there had been rumors of ghosts gallivanting the place. It has left to rotten, Eugene"
A titter escaped my lips. "I had been the same as a child, after that incident."
We both grew quiet. He knew how it weakened and angered me at the same time.
"It is a catastrophe," he said. "But you can't avoid it forever, it's your home"
"I wonder why she stayed back, after everything. Then, when she sent us away we had hoped she would come with us, but no. She insisted on staying at her lord's domain, despite the dangers"
"How does she survive there alone?"
"I don't know. Her love for the house was something I couldn't understand."
She sent me away to live with my aunt ten years ago and sent Dennis to a boarding school. We were very young then, but she stayed, at her husband's home. A place where his life was taken. I hated to recall it. Isn't she afraid of being killed by the same person who annihilated him?
"It is her beloved lord's domain. She wouldn't mind dying there alone in obscurity, even if her own children disowned her"
"You must go then?" He asked.
My eyes went to my trunk left open on the floor yet to be packed. My books and clothes, my whole belongings, I needed to pack, but I had no strength.
The room we spent five years of our life in. The brown-tainted walls, the wooden shelves we had built by ourselves, our oak study chairs and desks. Everything, I would miss it.
"I will spend only a few weeks and leave for Cerneth to join Dennis. I won't stay there"
"What if it was true?" he asked.
"What?"
"That the so-called Williams had made the place better."
I stood up and began to fold my clothes into the trunk.
I had made my decision. Spend a few weeks, two or three and leave, before Mrs Houston seeks to tell the vicar of how her children abandoned her and then he would continue to taint our name by excommunicating us from the parish and church.
"Surely, he must have, but it wouldn't be enough to entice me to stay, I have a toxic relationship with the house and I doubt anything would resolve that trauma."
He shrugged. "Alright, if you say so"
"When will the carriage arrive?" I asked.
"Friday."