Notes: I was wondering what Maud would think when she thought on her mother.
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Mother
By archaeobard
I had felt the knife plunge. I had felt the warmness of the blood come gushing from Richard's flesh. It was not the angry tearing and ripping that had overcome me in the library, nor the hurtful screamed imaginings of nightmares. It was a vengeance, a justifiable homicide, a crime of passion. I killed him for the love of another. I killed him to protect that, to have the chance of life and of redemption...as much as it is possible to redeem oneself through the killing of another. For I had been dead. I had functioned but I had never lived. It was not until she sent Sue to Briar that I began to spark with life. It frightened me, it shamed and flushed me. It was Sue she had treated as a daughter all those years she banished me. It was Sue she had loved, not me. Yet it was not Grace Sucksby who came to me when I shrieked in the night and shook from fright. It was Sue. It was Sue who blunted my tooth, turned foul eggs into soup and fastened herself to my soul. It was Sue who taught me to love. It was Sue she had betrayed as much as me. For she had cultured her like a pearl; grown her from a scrap of a thing into the tool that would seek me out and destroy me. Yet, it was Sue who was expendable. It was my mother who had made the choice, not Richard, not me. My mother, not the dead thing that lay at Briar that I had cursed and cried over. That was Sue's mother, who, like Sue was expendable. But what of my mother? I did not know her. I think perhaps I had a dream where I may have wished to love her. For everyone without a mother wishes they had one to love; even a snide swindler who would see their daughter banished for a few thousand pounds. It is the thought of kind eyes, a warm hand and a complete embrace that would smother harm that I perhaps wished to love. Perhaps at the end she saw that too, that she had swindled and cheated herself more than the rest of us. Perhaps, my mother thought that at the end of it all a good death was better than a bad life. End
I used to think I killed my mother on the day of my birth. In truth I killed her on the day of my eighteenth birth, there was little difference. There was pain, there was blood drip, dripping on the floor; though it was Richard's blood spilling, rivers of it. It was a horrid thing. It was a beautiful thing. With it I killed my mother, condemned her as surely as if I had ripped the womb from her, fracturing the life of her. For, like the mother she admitted herself to be, having now got me, she would protect me with as much gumption as she had originally given me up.