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Jess closed her mouth with a snap. She knew he was right but couldn’t bring herself to admit it.
“You are still taking too much of a risk. I cannot run this house by myself if you end up behind bars. You know I can’t. We would have to sell up and move to somewhere smaller.”
Ben shrugged. “Is that a bad thing?”
He had made his hatred of the house, and the life they lived, known on numerous occasions from a very early age. All of it had fallen on deaf ears.
Jess sighed. “I know what you mean.”
“Do you?” he snapped.
“Yes, I do. But what else is there? I am not trained to do anything except run a place like this. I have no skills. How am I supposed to earn a living if we lose this place?”
“You could charge the guests a bit more. The pittance they pay is downright insulting,” Ben muttered.
“We are lucky to get guests at all in an out-of-the-way backwater like this. Nobody ever travels through here. People travel through the village but rarely venture this way. I cannot expect the guests we do get to pay any more. They would pack up and leave, and you and I both know it. Look at what we provide,” she sighed.
Ben knew she was right.
“We could sell it,” he suggested hopefully. “This house may be a little run-down, but it has value.”
“Only to someone who would want to buy it, Ben,” Jess sighed sadly. “Look at it. It is only the termites holding hands that are keeping this place upright. It should have demolished years ago. Nobody is going to want to buy it in its current state. Besides, even if we do find anyone stupid enough to pay good money for it, we can’t expect much for it. It needs too much work.”
“We could sell it and buy a smaller place. You know, for the two of us. I can get a job to provide for us,” he suggested, his eyes full of youthful hope.
While Jess didn’t want to extinguish that innocent enthusiasm, she couldn’t allow him to live in ignorance either. She struggled to keep the emotion out of her voice when she was able to speak past the lump in her throat.
“Doing what?” She nodded toward the pheasants now hanging from a hook on the ceiling. “I won’t let you make a living out of stealing. What other skills do you have, Ben?”
She did manage to put enough menace into her voice to dampen her brother’s enthusiasm. For the first time in a long time, her always happy brother began to look solemn and doubtful.
“What else can I do?” He shrugged as though he had never contemplated the issue before, and was a little stymied by it.
“Stop,” Jessica pleaded. She captured his shoulders between gentle hands and shook him once. “Just stop stealing. I cannot bear to see you behind bars, Ben, and that is what is going to happen if you keep helping yourself to things that don’t belong to you. It isn’t the kind of life mother would have wanted for you. Don’t forget, because you keep bringing the stolen goods here; I could face arrest too. That is not fair to me, Ben. I need to be here. I need to work to keep a roof over our heads.”
Ben snorted and glared at her. “What roof? It is barely keeping us dry,” he countered.
It was clear from the hardness in his gaze that he wasn’t going to listen to her today any more than he had any other day they had argued about this.
“Mother wouldn’t want this, Ben,” she replied.
She sighed with regret when he yanked her hands off him and stepped away. Her heart broke just a little more. She wanted to hug him but made no attempt to touch again. It was as though human emotion, or physical displays of affection, made her brother acutely uncomfortable, and it hurt.
Maybe it makes him think too much.
She watched him scour the room furtively. He looked like he was trying to find somewhere he could hide something.
“Ben, what’s going on?” she whispered.
She didn’t know how she knew, but she suspected he had something to hide. Secrets he didn’t want to share with her and, given his recent exploits, it was deeply disturbing.
“If our mother doesn’t like what I am doing then she shouldn’t have died, should she?” he replied quietly.
The confused and wounded look in his eyes made her want to cry even more. She was at a loss to know how to get him to open up to her. At the minute, she wasn’t sure what she would do if he did. Her emotions were scattered to the four winds already; driven into despair by the financial problems they were suffering. Ben’s increasingly errant behaviour didn’t help. Nor did the guests, who appeared to be getting stranger and stranger with each day that passed. To add to that was her lack of ability to do anything significant to change everything that kept going wrong in both of their lives.
“It wasn’t her fault she had influenza, Ben. She would have stayed if she could. You know that,” Jess whispered. “This hurts me too, you know. Unfortunately, at the moment, this is the situation we are in so we have to do our best and get by as well as we can. That means we have to stay safe because all we have is each other. You are the only family I have, Ben. If you go off to prison, I will be here all alone and I cannot-”
Her voice trailed off beneath the weight of defeat she struggled to contain. There were times when she just didn’t want to get up in the morning, but she did. Each day was the same. If she wasn’t preparing food she was sweeping, cooking, cleaning, and seeing to other people’s needs. The monotony of it; the sheer relentlessness of it, was getting to her. Nobody ever seemed to stop and consider her wants and needs. She desperately wanted to take a breath and simply enjoy her day. But, besides Ben, there was nobody around to care much at all about what happened to her.
