Felicity: The Sixteenth Life

Chapter Four Part 2: Wrong Day to Go Out to Town

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Several hours later, inside the Sapphire mansion’s dining room, the Acker children had been relieved off their duties for the home-coming ceremony and gotten so hungry and exhausted that they wolfed down their food without paying attention to table manners and went on a well-deserved rest.

Hazel waited alone to keep guard inside the sitting room whilst her brothers retrieve the parcels hidden inside the greenhouse. Everyone was busy with the party in the grand hall and thus they got out and went back unnoticed by using the east-wing entrance opposite the direction of the hall and the kitchen area.

Then the children sat down on the comfortable carpet and circled the items they have laid down right at the center.

“Gosh, this thing is so dusty…” Hazel said as she picked up one of the receptacles that she picked up from the master bedroom of the second floor. She looked for something to wipe it with, got a handkerchief out of her dress pocket and used it as a duster.

“If your maids see you doing that to the precious silk handkerchiefs they got from that famous boutique, they’re gonna cry,” Liam commented as he watched his twin furiously scrub the handkerchief onto the container.

“Well, they’re not here, are they? What they do not know won’t hurt them,” Hazel said matter-of-factly.

Ryder picked up a locked box and wiped the dust off it with the fabric of his long-sleeved shirt. “Are we gonna destroy the locked boxes? It’s impossible that you’ve gotten the keys for these things…”

“I guess we have no choice but to pry them open forcibly… If we can’t do it by ourselves, we’d have to ask for someone’s help,” Liam answered.

“Nah… I got a hammer stashed inside my room,” Carter suddenly said.

“And I got some nails and a mallet. We can bore holes in the boxes by ourselves by using that,” Chase followed.

The older children found themselves looking up and staring at the seven-year-old twins with blank expressions. “Why in the name of the gods do you have a hammer, a mallet and nails stashed in your bedrooms?” Hazel asked incredulously.

The twins merely shrugged. “It’s for self-defense and for making a bird house once spring comes when the blue-breasted hummingbirds migrate back to our forest,” Carter answered matter-of-factly.

“We’re planning on catching a few of ‘em,” Chase added with a smile that crinkled his silver eyes.

“Goodness, we’re raising a couple of future psychopaths in our midst,” Hazel remarked, shaking her blonde head. Liam and Ryder snorted in amusement.

The twins went to get the tools from their bedrooms and the children got to work, trying to make as less noise as they could. It was a good thing that the party in the hall was rowdy; the noises they made with the hammer and mallet were masked off with the bursts of laughter and merry-making downstairs.

With half an hour’s worth of diligent work, they were able to unbox the three wooden locked boxes, pry off the lid of the two receptacles and uncapped two tightly-sealed tin cans. As expected, there were rolled-up parchments inside the receptacles. In the first wooden box, there were a couple of old notebooks and some stationery; on the second one were copies of fairytale picture books that the children have seen in their own library and on the third were old pressed flowers and leaves and a lot of pretty stones that someone must’ve collected. One of the tin cans had small wooden blocks in it with letters of the kingdom’s alphabet on each side and in the other, there were wrappers of candies and chocolates.

The tin cans were found by Chase and Carter in the living room on the first floor whilst the three boxes and the receptacles were found by Liam and Hazel from the rooms on the second floor.

“Thinking about it, Ryde wasn’t able to bring anything right?” Hazel asked, looking at his younger brother.

Ryder confirmed her statement by shaking his head.

“Oh yea, you promised to tell us what on earth happened to you while you were exploring the Opal mansion’s grounds… Where the heck did you go that you had to go back wounded?” Liam followed, using his ‘I’m-the-eldest-so-you-better-listen-to-me’ tone.

Ryder gave a sigh as all of his siblings looked at him with silent anticipation. “Do you want to hear what I have to tell first, or should we look at the items first?”

“You should talk first. These things can wait,” Hazel said, pushing the objects aside.

“Okay then,” Ryder said and took a deep breath. “Well, I was looking around the old garden when I saw something off the distance from a drop-off – some sort of cabin or cottage a bit far down towards the border of the west part of the forest. It seemed to be an extension of the grounds but the path leading to it was already blocked with weeds and marshes. So I climbed down to check it out and I went near the cabin and it looked like someone had been living inside it. There’s a garden with vegetation and some smoke from the chimney and when I was about to enter the garden, some big dog jumped on me and scratched me. That’s how I got the wounds. Then some girl stopped the dog and she treated my arm and helped me go up the drop-off by letting me ride on the dog’s back. Then I heard you guys calling for me and I went to find you. That’s it, really…” he narrated and stopped for a long breath before continuing. “Honestly, what happened was kinda surreal; if not for my injuries I thought I was hallucinating or something… I mean, a little girl who looked younger than me and a big dog live in a cabin belonging to a piece of land in the Opal mansion’s grounds, it’s absurd. I’m not fully certain but there were no traces of an adult living there with them. So I originally planned to return there and check but then all of us got confined to our rooms and got supervised day and night… There was no chance to sneak out,” he added then finally looked at the faces of his siblings.

His siblings blinked at him blankly as if trying to understand what he just said, then Hazel and the youngest twins all burst in laughter.

“Oh come on… That alibi you came up with about rolling down the forest and scratching your arm in some thorns is way more plausible than what you just said,” Hazel remarked, wiping tears from the corners of her silver-blue eyes.

“Did you eat some kind of funny mushroom in that garden that made you cook up such a fairytale?” Carter said, still sniggering.

“I’m being serious here! That really happened,” Ryder insisted, quite red in the face for being laughed at.

“Now, now, let’s go check that old map from before and see if there’s really a cabin,” Liam said, playing peace-maker. He got up from the floor and took the map from a cabinet.

Upon flattening out the parchment, they looked for the Opal mansion’s old garden then at the border of the west forest and indeed, there was a cabin. Labeled under the drawn infrastructure was ‘Caretaker’s Cabin’.

The laughter in the eyes of Hazel and the twins died down and they looked at Ryder once again.

“You’re serious? You met someone living there?” Chase asked incredulously.

Ryder nodded, his sapphire-blue eyes twinkling at finding out a concrete evidence about the cabin’s existence. “I’m positive now that she’s real. Actually, I thought I saw her in the crowd while we were parading back from Burke’s town…”

“Gosh…” Carter breathed out in disbelief. “Well, maybe she’s a kid of a caretaker who worked for Opal mansion before…”

“Maybe. I didn’t ask. I didn’t even ask for her name,” Ryder answered.

“She could’ve had an adult with her though… You said she looked younger than you. A kid can’t survive all on her own,” Liam said, developing an interest on this unknown girl that his younger brother met.

“She wasn’t alone. She has a dog with her,” Ryder corrected.

Hazel rolled her eyes. “Big deal. Like a dog’s gonna be much help for everyday survival,” she commented.

“It could’ve, it was quite capable… And the girl said that it attacked me because I was a trespasser. The dog was guarding the house,” Ryder said.

“We definitely have to see this cabin. I won’t believe it unless I see it for myself,” Chase remarked then he moved his feet from their current position. He was sitting cross-legged for quite a few minutes and he felt his legs going numb.

“Carter, move over a bit. My legs are dead,” he said, stretching out his legs.

Carter inched away from his twin’s feet and ended up nudging one of the rolled parchments that came from the receptacle they just opened. It rolled out quite smoothly and the children just watched dumbly as it was revealed before their eyes.

In seconds, they found themselves staring at a painting. Or a portrait? They weren’t sure.

But the whole picture was preserved wonderfully and on it was a woman with her long brown hair held up in barrettes, with a baby on her lap also with brown hair but curlier and shorter.

The woman has a charming face, not outright gorgeous but still pleasing to the eyes. She has large, brown eyes framed with black lashes and a relatively tanned skin. Her smile was warm and motherly, like sunshine or bright yellow flowers.

On the other hand, the baby had very cute facial features, suggesting that she would be pretty once she grows up but there was no smile on that little face. Everything from her deep blue sapphire-like eyes framed in gold-speckled brown lashes to her upturned nose, rosy cheeks and her little pink mouth looked stoic and indifferent.

Ryder’s jaw dislodged from his mouth and that moment and he quickly crouched down the portrait. He looked for a label and found one right behind the parchment at the bottom left side.

The words were written in pretty, curled handwriting with blue ink.

‘Lady Dalia, aged eighteen and Lady Felicity, aged one’

“It’s her,” Ryder said, staring at the baby in the portrait as if mesmerized. He looked at his siblings with an excited glint in his eyes and an unknown feeling in his chest.

“This baby right here,” he said and pointed at the portrait. “She’s the girl I met three days ago! I’m sure of it!”