Disclaimer: I own the people that I made up, but everybody else belongs to other people who aren't me.

Once Upon A Time
Chapter Thirteen

So as Rose was made to suffer James' affections, Ichabod was made to suffer searching through the room that had been his mother's. Hardly anyone went in the late Lady Crane's room anymore, and Ichabod was one of the three people who had a key. The other two were Lord Crane and the head housemaid, Juliette. But Juliette never went into the room to clean, and Ichabod had not seen Lord Crane go down the corridor leading to it in years.

Now he took his key from its hiding place in the secret drawer of his personal bureau and dared to explore the dank, dusty room. For indeed it was dusty, and the curtains were closed to shut out any and all light. He stumbled blindly through the clutter of things on the floor, coughing as he went, and pulled back one of the heavy velvet curtains. Beneath its perpetual layer of dust, the curtain was actually a fine crimson color, but Ichabod only knew this because his memory told him it was so. Had this been his first sighting of the curtains, he would not have known they were anything but gray

The curtain allowed a weak ray of winter sunlight to fall upon the bed, the ancient bed that creaked and squeaked violently if one were to just touch the bedposts lightly. The bed was gray, but he knew that beneath the dirt and grime and time was a lush field of emerald velvet. His mother had loved velvet, especially crushed velvet. Her finest gowns had been made of crushed velvet, mostly midnight blue crushed velvet. Her room was filled with it, from the curtains to the chairs to the rugs on the floor.

He wiped away the dust with one swift motion of his right hand, revealing the dark green beneath. The first bed he'd ever slept in had been this bed; he had been too small at birth, and his mother had been afraid to leave him alone in the cradle. He had slept beside her, sometimes curled up on her stomach, with his small head against her bosom. Now he looked up, and saw the old cradle in which he had first slept when he had lived but a single year of his life.

It was the cradle that had housed, for only a few months, his younger sister. Her name had been Susan, and he had known, from the first moment he had seen her, that she would grow into a carbon copy of their mother. But his hopes and dreams for her were shattered on a terrible morning when he had been woken by his mother's scream.

He recalled rushing out of his bedroom in his nightclothes and dashing through the corridors until he reached his mother's room. There he'd found the strong woman he so loved and admired in pieces on the bed, sobbing her heart out. He'd walked to the cradle and spotted his sister, whose dark little eyes were closed and whose little chest did not rise or fall. Her body was cold and she wasn't moving, and it was then that the five-year-old Ichabod Crane had broken down like his mother. He had fallen onto the floor, just there on that now-frayed rug, and held himself as he wept and rocked back and forth.

After Susan's death, Lord and Lady Crane had never again tried to conceive a child.

Now Ichabod grimaced and tried to blink away the tears that came anew to his eyes. He imagined his skinny little toddler self in a heap on the floor, and his mother strewn carelessly across the bed like one of Susan's would-be discarded dolls. He recalled the cries of anguish and depression that rang out even in Rose's home, the cries that had sent Lord Crane running away from his wife and his alleged son.

And then it occurred to Ichabod at that moment that Susan may not have been Lord Crane's daughter after all. If his mother had been attracted enough to James Hall to bear his child once, what could stop her from doing it again? He realized, as well, at that precise moment, that his entire world was falling apart in front of his eyes. He collapsed on his mother's bed, the bed in which he had been born, and thought of all the things that were going wrong.

His financial future was ruined, he couldn't be with Rose because his own father was stealing her away, and everything he had believed for the better part of seventeen years could easily have been a lie. He made a noise of anguish in the back of his throat and held his hands to his head, tempted to pull out a few good clumps of hair simply because he didn't know what else to do. "Damn it all," he said finally, and the bed creaked as if admonishing him for this rare use of profanity.

He sighed and spread his arms out on the bed, gently fingering the blanket beneath the thick layers of dust. He held his breath and tried not to cough, but it proved a more difficult challenge than he had anticipated. Finally he stood and began to search through the drawers of his mother's vanity table, pulling open things that had not been touched for nearly a decade.

There were pearls, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, amethysts. There were small books and scraps of parchment upon which were written messages in a strange language he could not understand. There were stubby candles and spots of dried wax. There were blood stains and dried blood spots that had all but faded over the years, and he wondered what she had been doing at night when she locked the door. There was a knife with a layer of dried blood that was thick as the dust that covered everything else. He dropped it in disgust and kept searching, determined to keep the image of his mother slitting her wrists out of his mind.

And then he found it. It was hidden in the back of a drawer, wrapped in a yellowed piece of parchment upon which there was something scribbled. He unfolded the parchment and read it, as it was addressed to him:

My dearest Ichabod,

I know that you'll be able to tell when the time is right, so I'll leave this for you to find in the only place that everyone else won't think to look. I want you to use it wisely and give it to your true love, but only when you feel comfortable promising her your heart. And don't worry about refusal; I know who she is, and I know she won't be able to resist you. And Ichabod, whatever happens when I am dead, I want you to know that things will be all right in the end, but not always in the way you expect. I will love you forever.

Signed sincerely,

your loving, adoring mother.

He looked at the ring, at the onyx stone that could seem so foreboding, but he knew that his mother had endowed it with some special magic before her death. He had never doubted her ability to work miracles, to know exactly what was going to happen days, even months and years, before it happened. It was such a natural part of her, in fact, that he'd hardly noticed it while she was alive. Now that she was dead, however, he knew there was something special about her. And he knew that even in death, she would try and make things as easy for him as she could in this rough and tough world. She was his guardian angel, watching over him even when he was too busy with everyone else's lives to watch over himself.

It gave him faith that, as she'd written, things would work out in the end. But one of her last comments intrigued him, and made him think that there was still much in store for himself and Rose. But for the time being, he was content to stuff the ring and the note into his waistcoat pocket and leave the room. He had time to puzzle over the meanings of her message later.


With his gift tucked securely in his pocket, Ichabod donned the crimson suit he'd worn to Rose's birthday celebration and made the short trek to the Hughes' home in the gentle snowfall. In the less than ten minutes it took him to reach her house, three carriages passed him, and it occurred to him then that her family's social circle must have been far more extensive than he had realized.

He arrived within less than a quarter of an hour, and was greeted politely at the door by one of the servant women he knew to be called Chelsea. He nodded respectfully at her as she bowed to him and gracefully waved him on to the large dining hall.

The dining hall was large enough to hold roughly around fifty people, but because of the surplus of guests, people were spilling over into the various sitting rooms and loitering in the corridors. But none had yet retired to the library, which worked well for Ichabod. It was his intention to find Rose and steal her away to the library before dinner, and to give her his mother's ring as a symbol of his everlasting love. Then they would sit down to eat and after that there would be dancing. He planned to return home at half past midnight, thoroughly exhausted and perhaps a tad tipsy.

Odd how plans can be so easily disrupted and changed.


I know it's a short one, but as I've already explained, I really am trying to stretch this out much. I guess I wouldn't be so desperate to finish it if I didn't really want to write the sequel. But I promise I'll try my best to make it as long as I can, though I can't guarantee a whole lot more. And OMG, the computer is working again! Yay! The blood is the life, Sikerra.