“N-no…. please… don’t… I need to put dinner on the t-table for my fa-family.” My grip on the knife tightened. “Hand it over, peasant!” I barked, taking in the man that cowered at his knees. The sack of grain that had been slung over his shoulder was now tossed on the ground and he clutched the money bag at his belt. “I swear I will cut your throat and let you bleed out on this country road, and I promise, no one will find you.”
She kissed me good bye this morning, just like every morning. She’s got lines around her mouth and crinkles from her eyes, but she’s the same girl I fell for all those years ago. She ties her hair back with a blue kerchief, same color as her eyes. The curls fall in her face anyway, frustrates her to no end. My Catherine.
“Please…. my children, my children…” The man begged, moving his hands forward, clasping them together like I was a holy idol. I kicked him, hard, back against the road, leaving him sprawling back. I stepped forward again. “I will kill you. Children be damned, I will.” He began sobbing at my feet. “It’s all I have....”
Every morning, she’s already awake with her mother in the kitchen, humming and dancing around, just like a little mother herself. She’s a bossy little one, and an old soul with it. A gossip too, always chattering our ears off about anything or everything, whatever comes to mind first. And the little man is always asleep when I first wake, but every morning, just before I leave he waddles into the room, one thumb firmly in his mouth and the other one tightly clutching the rag he insist on carrying from place to place. I tell Catherine he’s too old for it, but she says that I needn’t tell her how to do her job and flicks a dish towel at my face. My Mary, my Thomas.
“Not anymore. This is your last warning, I swear. You care for your children so much, live to see them another day, give me what you have.” Finally, with a shaking hand, the man passed me his coins. “Now, go.” The man got to his feet, leaving the sack of grain at my feet as he stumbled down the road. I picked it up shoved my dagger back into it’s sheath on my belt, grain over my shoulder, listening to the satisfying sound of coins in my hand as I walked towards home.
~
“Papa is h-“ I called out before being cut off by a loud ‘shhh’. Catherine stood up out of her chair I had once built her and smiled to me. “They both went to sleep early.” She whispered, going up on her toes to kiss my forehead. I placed the bag of grain and the pouch of coins on the table before going to my chair to take off my boots. I tried to avoid looking at Catherine, but I knew it was there. The same pained expression she made every time I came home with an unexplained bounty. She never asked, not in all the years we’d been married and I never told. It was more comfortable for both our consciences that way. But I didn’t do this for ale and women, I didn’t do this for my own hoard. I did this for my Catherine, my Mary and my Thomas. And that’s what I told myself. If Catherine ever did get around to asking, that’s what I would tell her.
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