Wanted

Chapter 14

"Upstairs, and stay in your room," Edwards told John in his calm and quiet, yet strangely commanding voice. He did not sound cross but John knew that this meant nothing. It was an order that was not to be ignored, so John scapered up the stairs away from the two as fast as he could. When he got upstairs however, he found his room was locked again, so he sat on the top of the steps with no other choice but to listen to them argue about him below.

The walk back from the schoolhouse had been uncomfortably quiet. Edwards tried to make small talk with his wife, pointing out that the teacher seemed pleased with John's intelligence and that the boy, as he always called him, had conducted himself well, but to no avail. She either did not hear him or actively ignored him. John knew the latter was the case but Mr Edwards kept trying nevertheless.

John tried not to care. If he didn't manage to get away during the night, at least he had school to look forward to the next day. Maybe going to school would present an escape route in itself, so like on the way to the school earlier, he kept his eyes peeled and his ears pricked.

As he was trailing behind them the thought crossed his mind to run away there and then, while they were distracted but the more he thought about it the more he realised how difficult running away was going to be. This was a town, although quiet, where everybody knew everyone, and despite this or maybe precisely because of it there were preying eyes everywhere. He wouldn't be able to hang around long. To get to the city or even just another town, he would have to walk along the river or the road, that much was obvious. Obvious however also to anyone who would want to follow him.

By the time they got back to the house John felt sufficiently disheartened. As he sat on the steps in front of his room, waiting for whoever would come upstairs to open his bedroom, he thought about the rabbit and the fox on the nightstand in the room that he slept in. He felt like that rabbit, scared, waiting, expecting, ready to run away from sudden danger. He needed to be like the fox and Hope the famous bank robber who nine out of ten times gets away. He needed to be smart. He needed to outsmart the adults. Just being obstructive to such an extent that they would send him away was not going to work. He could still end up with the blacksmith if he wasn't careful.

At first Edwards and his wife were inside the kitchen and he could hear them shout but was not able to make out what they were actually saying to each other. But then Mr Edwards came out into the hall and his wife followed him, still argueing with him.

"I don't care what you say, Theresa. I will not punish him for this," John heard Mr Edwards' voice booming up the stairs.

"I never asked you to punish him," she yelled after him, "I never asked you this morning either. I am just saying he hurt my feelings and I think he's doing it on purpose."

"Theresa, be reasonable. All the boy did was mention his mother. He answered the teacher's questions like any good child would," Edwards defended John.

"I am the boy's mother," the woman downstairs now shrieked, "I am the one who will look after him. I am the one who will care for him and love him with all my heart. Why would he mention that wretched woman who abandoned him and his brothers to the gutter? What kind of a mother leaves her children out on the street to fend for themselves? The length we went through to safe our Thomas, like any decent parent would but not her, she just left them to die. And yet he talks about her as if she was the best mother ever! Because she taught him how to count? But refuses to call me mother?!" she concluded her rant.

This time it was Mr Edwards who told her to hush, and she was the one who declared she did not care, if John could hear them or not. "Fiddlesticks, Martin. Let him hear it. She does not deserve him call her mother," she shrieked. The words squeezing all the air out of John's lungs.