Page 17 of Curse of Immortality
In shock, Rose hurried to leave without saying another word. All the way home, she cried with her heart breaking more for every sob. It was difficult for Rose’s parents to understand what had happened because she couldn’t finish a full sentence without her voice breaking and sobs disrupting her speech.
“Come, my love. Let’s make you a cup of tea,” Rose’s mother said while her father held her in a tight hug.
With their comfort, love, and patience, her parents got Rose through the following weeks where she tried to come to terms with her strong grief over losing both her best friend and the girl she was in love with.
Her brother John never learned the truth about his sister’s feelings for Anne. The two siblings weren’t close and when he fell in love with her best friend, things happened much too fast for him to stop and reflect.
First, there was the awkward encounter when Rose found him and Anne kissing, and then there was her futile attempt to save Anne’s mother.
Anne was devastated and not knowing what else to do, John had comforted her the best he could. Soon her siblings fell ill, and that’s when the rumor spread that buying bread from the baker was bad luck.
John stayed loyal and tried to tell Anne that things would get better, but she kept mumbling about her family being cursed by a witch.
It created a deep conflict within John, who feared for his family whenever talk about witchcraft surfaced. But he was stuck. Being young naïve kids in love, John and Anne had done something that was only supposed to happen inside a marriage. On the morning before Rose found them kissing, Anne had shared the news that it had been seven weeks since she’d last menstruated. With her pregnant, John had felt trapped between protecting his parents and sister or his unborn child. When he confided his dilemma to his parents, they told him to do right by Anne.
He wanted to, but it scared him how Anne changed over the five weeks it took from her mother’s death until her father and four siblings had all died as well. Anne, who had been playful and untroubled, became cynical and mean.
Still, he married her and did his best to cheer her up, but it didn’t help much. Over the next months, Anne turned her grief into a battle for revenge and decided that Rose was to blame for the sickness in her family.
John desperately tried to reason with her, but grief and fear are enemies of logic and common sense. Anne wouldn’t listen when he reminded her that Rose was most likely the reason Anne was still alive. After all, it was Rose who had protected Anne from the disease with her herbal medicine.
Neighbors and friends of the Baker family joined forces with Anne and one fatal night it came to a confrontation between the village and his family.
If only John had had a horse that night, it would have given him more time to warn his family and things might have ended up differently. All he had were his two feet that carried him as fast as he could run from Anne’s house to his family’s home on the outskirt of the woods.
Banging the door open, John ran straight for his sister’s bed and shook her shoulders until her tired eyes opened and looked up at him. “Rose, come on!”
His father, Paul, called out from the small alcove where he and Matilda slept. “What is it, John?”
Rose sat up and stared at her brother with puffy eyes full of confusion.
“It’s Anne and the villagers. They’re accusing you of having placed a curse on them.” John pulled at his sister’s arm. “I’m serious, Rose. You have to leave right now before they get here. The whole village thinks you’re a witch.”
“Anne and the villagers are coming here?” Their mother’s bare feet made the wooden floor squeak as she ran from her bed to look out the window.
“I saw a large group marching this way. They’re coming to get you. I’m so sorry, I tried to stop them.”
Convinced this was a dream, Rose stared at her brother in denial.
“Didn’t you hear me, Rose? You have to hide!” John yelled and tried to drag her out of the small bed.
When Matilda gave a loud shriek, John joined her by the window where their mother stood pale and frightened.
“They’re already here,” John breathed and watched in horror as a mob of people came toward them with burning torches and angry shouting. Rose and her father moved to the window as well and now all four family members stood closely together facing what they had feared all along.
“Give us the witch or we’ll burn down the house,” a man from the mob yelled in anger.
“That’s Roger, the carpenter from East Street,” Mathilda muttered. “I know him.”
“Don’t go out there,” John warned his mother when she reached for her shawl.
“We don’t have a choice,” Matilda said and took a second to caress Rose’s chin before she gave a nod to her husband. Paul walked outside with Matilda, who faced the angry group of people.
“Roger McBree, your tone is certainly different from the night you fetched me to save your wife and daughter’s life. Have you forgotten how much you thanked me then? And you, Maureen. We both know you wouldn’t have survived giving birth to your twins if Rose and I hadn’t helped you. How dare you all march to our house in the middle of the night, calling our daughter a witch? Have you been so blinded by fear and superstition that you can’t see that we are healers? There’s nothing dangerous here. You can all go home.”
“I don’t believe you. My wife died in labor nine years ago and you refused to save her,” an old man with a hunched back growled. “You and your daughter are both evil witches.”
“Liar,” Paul called out and pointed to the man. “Matilda did try to help, but your poor wife gave birth to sixteen children in less than twelve years and we warned you after your last set of twins. You knew that she wouldn’t survive another pregnancy and you still put a child in her belly. Matilda didn’t kill your wife – you did!”
