Nettle Blackthorn and the Three Wicked Sisters (9 page)

“Come
on, Jazz,” Nettle began, trying to appease her cousin. “I know you
don’t believe we had nothing to do with this. But we want to
help.”

Jazz
jabbed a finger into the soft spot on her shoulder. “Hey,” cried
Nettle, wincing.

Jazz
drove her back with the tip of her finger. “I don’t care what Uncle
Fred says, you’re both liars.”

“We
didn’t do this,” Bram protested.

Jazz
spun around, her nostrils flaring and glared daggers at her little
cousin. “Get out NOW!”

Bram
gave her a fierce stare, his blue eyes big behind the thick lenses
of his glasses. He dumped his armful of snapped heels and broken
sling-backs on the ground with a scattered thump and marched
out.

Unable to do
anything else, Nettle followed. Jazz slammed the door shut behind
her so forcefully it made her jump with fright. She rubbed her
tender shoulder and found Bram leaning against the hallway wall
with his ear pressed against it. He still wore a dark scowl from
Jazz’s accusations as he listened intently.

“
What are you doing?”

Bram
quickly held a finger to his lips demanding silence. Nettle
immediately complied - when he was in one of these moods, Nettle
dared not speak nor move. After a while, with nothing heard, Bram
stealthily moved into his bedroom.

Nettle
quietly followed, curious. She sat on the rocking chair in his
nursery watching him go from wall to wall. He shot her a little
glare when the rocking chair squeaked beneath her weight. Nettle
stopped rocking, holding the chair still with her
calves.

He leaned, listening, not moving for what seemed an age.
Nettle sat so still her muscles started to ache.
Come on Bram, hurry
up.
She was
anxious to learn if he’d heard anything, and what on earth was he
up to? Finally Bram relaxed. He turned with an appreciative smile.
“Thanks. Thought I heard them.”

“
Heard who?”

“The
rats. I’m sick of Jazz blaming us. I’m going to catch them and
prove to her that we’ve had nothing to do with her stupid earrings
and her stupid bedroom.”

The image that
sprang to Nettle’s mind of an enraged Jazz and walls drawn with
crude pictures enticed a case of the giggles. “It really was
funny,” she laughed.

“Stoopid
Jazz,” added Bram slumping to the floor chortling. It was some time
before the guffaws subsided. Though they gasped deep breaths, their
faces sore from laughing, it felt so good.

Nettle r
ose assisting Bram to his feet. “Why don’t we go up to the
attic, we may find something there that could help.” Nettle didn’t
think talking rats, let alone average non-talking rats had anything
to do with Jazz’s destroyed possessions and vandalised bedroom
walls. But as to who, or what, could have caused the chaos, she was
at a loss. Still, rummaging around in the attic would be an
interesting way to while away the day and fill in Bram’s
time.

CHAPTER NINE

An
Unwanted Gift

When the siblings climbed the ladder into the attic, they
found someone else had been up here before them. Footprints had
been scuffed into the dusty floor and a few storage boxes had been
dragged out and rifled through.
Dad,
surmised Nettle. He’d been looking for
something.
I
wonder what?

The siblings spent the
rest of the morning in the musty attic,
crowded with brown boxes stacked upon one another and old leather
trunks. The rafters were thick with spider webs, and the small
dirty window provided a dull light, bright enough for them both to
work with.

Bram had found an old bird cage, not made from metal but
woven from thin dried branches with thorns which put Nettle in mind
of rose branches. She had sourced him a toolkit and he sat on the
floor creating a trap of sorts from a collection of odd bits of
wood, cardboard and
string.

Nettle
sat beside him, cross legged, as she sifted through a tattered old
shoe box filled with photographs. The collection had been taken
when she was a toddler, obviously by her father, as they mainly
captured her and her mother, Briar.

She hadn’t appreciated, until looking at the photographs,
just how much
Bram resembled their mother. Petite, with slight frames,
there was an air about them both that was mischievous. While Bram
had her full lips and extraordinarily wide mouth, his radiant skin
lit his hair into a deeper shade of amber than his mothers, and
whereas her face was heart shaped, his was a little more broad and
boyish.

Nettle stopped flicking through
the photographs, to rest upon one in
particular. Her mother was caught mid-laughter, her head pulled
sideways as Nettle, a chubby baby with a mop of dark unruly curls,
tugged on a lock of molten honeyed hair. Her mother’s vivid
turquoise eyes, framed by feathery brows, were flicked wide with
merriment. She was hugging Nettle with long golden arms that seemed
to sparkle.

A wretched longing overwhelmed Nettle’s senses and her
throat began to choke up. Briar looked beautiful and young and
vivacious and so in love with her baby daughter.
It wasn’t fair, why
did she leave?

She hated feeling this way, of loss and want and
emptiness.
Was life really that bad Briar couldn’t bear to be around
them any longer?
These questions weren’t new, she’d asked herself the same
thing over and over again, year after year. Had she done something,
that made her mother not want her anymore? Was she the reason Briar
left? And even when she rallied a resolve to let Briar go, forget
about her, and all those silly feelings of inadequacy, inevitably
it always ended with anger and rage.

How dare she walk out on us!
A fire of abhorrence and fury exploded
within, it was like a ball of crackling energy that had to be
released in some physical way. Nettle tore the photograph into two
pieces, then three, then four, before being crumpled and thrown
into the air to scatter all over the attic floor. It felt good,
satisfying, justified even. But Nettle couldn’t erase the memory of
her mother gazing adoringly at her baby. Nor could she ever
permanently let go her bitter resentment toward Briar.

Bram had
his head in a large cardboard box, his voice was slightly muffled.
“Hey take a look at this.”

Pleased for
some sort of distraction, Nettle shuffled over. When Bram’s head
reappeared from the box, he gave her a baffled look. “Are you
OK?”

“Of
course I am,” she replied, a little taken aback and
annoyed.

“Oh,
OK,” he said in that way, she knew, he didn’t believe her. “It’s
just you’ve got that moody-brow-thing going on.”

“
Huh?” She had no idea what he was talking about.

He pointed at
her nose. “When you’re cranky, you have that furrow across the
bridge of your nose, is all. And your lips kind of pucker up.”

Nettle ran a
finger between her brows and eased the sullen crease, while
relaxing her mouth. “I didn’t know I did that.”

“Yeah,
well, we sure do,” he said. He cast a glance at the torn photograph
behind her. “You’ve been doing it a lot, since coming back
home.”

Why wouldn’t
I
, she scowled,
Briar is everywhere her
e.
There was nowhere to be free of
her.
She
realized she had fallen into that moody-brow-thing again, and
rearranged her features into a more pleasant expression. She turned
her attention back to the cardboard box. “What is it? What’s in
there?”

He
shifted the box over to her. Like him, she was kneeling. She gave
him a perplexed glance before peering into the depths of the box.
For a moment she thought it was empty until she spied something
very small at the bottom, possibly made from wood.

She leaned
into the box, her head and shoulders disappearing inside to
retrieve a small wooden box that fitted nicely into the palm of her
hand. There was a name carved into the wooden surface with a
decorative motif of flowers and thorns.

“
Looks like it belongs to you,” said Bram, with an
expression just as bewildered as her own. The letters of Nettle’s
name were carved in an elaborate script. Nettle turned the box over
in her fingers. It felt light and when she shook it, she heard
something small bouncing around inside. The wood was smoothly
varnished but she could see no line separating the lid from the
box. “Strange,” she mused, “there doesn’t seem to be any way into
it.” She spent a little longer inspecting the box and feeling it
with the soft tips of her fingers. She could find nothing that
indicated a way to open it. Bram also tried, to no avail. The
thrill of a mystery sent a prickling ripple down her spine. “I’ll
see if Dad knows anything about it.”

Slipping the
mysterious box into her pocket, she left Bram tinkering away with
his makeshift trap.

Fred
was sitting in his old leather chair in the small library,
leafing through a large dusty book. His glasses had slipped to the
tip of his nose and his fingers were stained with black ink from
his pen. Fred flicked a page over and compared it to something in
another old tome cradled in his lap, before hurriedly scribbling in
a small notebook he had on the armrest. There was a stack of books
in a wobbly pile beside the chair he’d evidently been copying
information from, as well.

“Dad,” Nettle called softly as she approached. Fred was too
engrossed to hear her,
lost in the words and illustrations of the book
before him.

T
he
sun filtered through the stained glass window, casting a gloomy
bluish tinge over Fred. All of a sudden, he seemed to her so small
and lost, almost like a child, holding onto the slightest thread of
hope. He’d dragged them all over the country searching for their
mother. It was depressing. To Nettle it was plainly obvious, Briar
didn’t want to be found.

“Hey
Dad,” she said again, startling him out of his research. He snapped
shut the books and slid them down the side of the armchair. He
wasn’t as quick with the journal, and she was able to gain a
glimpse of a scribble of text and some rough sketch of something
with wings, before it too disappeared.

“What is it
, Nettle?” Fred pushed his glasses back to the bridge of
his nose. His voice sounded a little strangled, as if he was
unnerved to be caught out by her.
What was he up to
, she wondered,
he clearly doesn’t want me to
know what he was reading.

“
We were up in the attic-”

He said
a little too sharply, interrupting her. “What were you doing up
there?”

She
shrugged. “Bram was curious to look through some of our old stuff.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. She
wasn’t sure how he’d react if he found out Bram was going to try
catching the talking rats. She didn’t know why she felt hesitant to
tell him, but she had that feeling, the one that felt like the
beating wings of moths caught in a paper lantern, in the pit of her
stomach. That feeling had kept her out of harm’s way many an
occasion. Instead, she asked, “Is there some reason we can’t be up
there?”

“Well…
no…” he answered. “It’s just with all this unpleasantness going on
with Jazz, I don’t know, maybe whoever it was got into the house
through the roof.”

Nettle’s eyebrows rose up, but she didn’t say anything
aloud. The attic was in the roof and that was four stories
high.
She
gave a nonchalant shrug instead. “I’m starting to wonder if Jazz
doesn’t have some sort of split personality, and all this
destruction is just her way of telling herself she’s a
jerk.”

Fred couldn’t
help the grin, but didn’t comment.

Nettle
remembered the scuffed dust in the attic. “Were you up there
earlier?”

“
Yes. I was looking for something.”

“Was it
this?” She didn’t know why she suddenly thought he’d been looking
for the box, but it felt right. She produced the box from her
pocket and presented it to him in the flat of her palm. “We found
it in the attic.”

Fred
reached out with his worn fingers and plucked the box from
her hand. She heard him draw in a sharp breath.
“
You
found it.” It
wasn’t a question. He looked at her in a way she couldn’t fathom.
“Strange, I have been looking for it everywhere and it’s you who
found it.”

“
It wasn’t me, not really, Bram did.”

“Hmmm,”
he said with a distracted air, squinting at the intricate pattern
carved into what Nettle presumed was the lid of the box.

“
What is it? There’s something inside, but I can’t find a way
to open it.”

Fred
turned it slowly around before him. He answered without
thinking. “It’s not something you can open… its more like, it’ll
open on its own accord.”

Nettle
almost laughed, that was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard,
until she saw, to his horror he’d said too much. Her spine tingled
with curiosity. Her thick brows arched inquisitively. “What’s
inside?”