“Ah! Your Imperial Highness! There you are!” Sandra's voice broke the spell.
My grandmother slipped the book on her lap under the sleeves of my dress and allowed Sandra to pull her up from the chair.
“Will she be alright? I met her crying,” I said, my voice filled with concern.
“She will be alright. You see, she is on medication. The medications make her cry all the time,” said Sandra with a smile.
On medication? The old lady did not look sick in her body so what was she on medication for? Was Uncle Napoleon trying to cure her mind?
I folded my hands together and made my way to my room, careful not to allow the book I hid beneath my sleeves to fall. Once in my room, I pulled the book out. It was a rather old book and it looked somewhat like a journal.
But as I turned to the first page I was interrupted by Sandra walking into my room and as discreetly as I could I dropped the book on the floor and kicked it beneath my bed.
“I have put the Queen Dowager to sleep. She says all kinds of things you know. I feel sorry for…”
“Sandra, I will appreciate it if you…” I was about to scold her for entering my room so abruptly. The right thing for her to do was to inform me of her presence and wait to receive an invitation before coming inside. But Reginald’s shrill cry threw all of that outside the window.
I picked him up and tried to rock him to sleep but he would not sleep.
“He must be hungry. Boys do get hungry all the time,” Sandra said. For some weird reason I could not explain, I found her talkative nature this time annoying. Her presence was irritating to me. Come to think of it, how was it that she was everywhere all at once? Did she not have a job as head maid to do?
“I can take care of Reginald; you may leave us, Sandra. I appreciate your help,” I said with a firm voice so that it was clear I did not want her around.
Surprisingly, Reginald quieted once Sandra had left the room. I could sense he could not stand her sight for long either.
I placed him back in his crib and bent down to pick up the journal but Emily's voice stopped me.
“Did you lose something?” I stood up at once wondering why she had come in. Did nobody here have a knocking culture?
“I was only stretching, Emily. What brings you here?” I asked in my sweetest voice less she discovered my irritation at her abrupt entrance.
“Only stretching, you say? Why is that? Does your body hurt? Should I call Simon?” she asked with worry.
“Oh! No! I am okay. I read somewhere that it is good to stretch for blood circulation,” I had to come up with an excuse.
“I see. Well, I stopped by to see my nephew and niece,” she said with a wide smile as she carried Reginald who was awake. He cooed softly as she held him close.
I looked upon both of them lovingly.
Grandmother had to be wrong for the sake of my cousins and especially for mine.
******#******
It was not until a few days after that I had the privacy to read the book my grandmother had slipped to me.
When I opened the very first page, I discovered it was a diary written by my mother, Marilyn Aurelius.
The very first entry read:
Dear Secret Holder,
That is what I am going to call you_ secret holder. Mother says she gave you to me so I could journal the precious moments of my life but what good would that do? Anyway, I need someone to tell my deepest thoughts to and it can not be my family. The reason is simple_ I want to bad-mouth them. Especially that brother of mine. You might ask about Camille, after all, she is my best friend but I do not trust her fully. What if the day comes when we are no longer besties?
My mother must have been very young when she started journaling in her diary. The next few entries were similar and filled with her nostalgia for her twin brother. It seemed like they never agreed on anything as children. The diary made it clear that they were at loggerheads. One particular entry struck me as surmising the relationship between them:
Dear Secret Holder,
When I tell people that I do not hate my brother, they never believe me. They think that my brother loves me dearly and I hate him very much. That is not true. I do hate my brother on occasion because he can be very annoying but Napoleon hates my guts. Today was for practicing arrows. I am better at shooting arrows than my brother so naturally our instructor praised my archery skills and decided it was time I did something more challenging. So we went to an open field to practice and Micah marked a tree for me as my target. I fired my shot at the tree. Unknown to me, Napoleon was behind the tree and guess what? The moment I shot the arrow, he came out from behind the tree and stood at the front. Of course, it was too late. The arrow pierced his ear and he was a baby about it. Father and Mother scolded me severely saying that I had a wicked rage but I saw Napoleon smiling. He had planned for it to happen that way. So that I would be the evil one. He is the evil one. He is always trying to manipulate everything and everybody to his advantage.
The first few entries were filled with similar events. Napoleon always did things to make her appear as a bad person. But that was ages ago. Surely, Uncle Napoleon had grown from the little jealous twin that Mother wrote about in her diary.
Mother wrote about other things too. Like when she had her first crush. It was surreal to read about it because her entries were filled with how amazing it would have been if she were a boy.
To my mother, it was rather unfair that Napoleon had been born a boy. She felt that her brother was wasting his gender as he was no good at anything. While she had excellent archery skills and had mastered sword fighting, Napoleon loved to read silly books and debate history making him father's favorite and her mother's favorite.