CHAPTER: 4 The Mistress

It was a cold stormy night. Midnight struck and the doorbell of the orphanage rang. The mistress had trouble sleeping and was still awake by then.

The mistress was old, but an active and energetic woman with gray hair and small round glasses tied with a string around her neck. She was sitting up straight on her bed and reading a book. The lamp's light was on. That is when she heard the doorbell.

At first she got a bit scared of who could have come at this hour of night, but she mustered up enough courage to get up and go to the door. She put the book on her shelf and took a small stick with her. After reaching the lounge she switched on the ceiling lights.

"Who is there?" she asked with a trembling voice.

There was no sound to be heard except that of the lightning and the heavy rainfall.

"Is someone there?" she asked again.

Still, there was complete silence. But she was sure she had heard the bell. She walked towards the door, scared of who might be there. It could have been a thief or a gang of thieves, who knew?

She unlocked the door and opened it with shivering hands, but while being daring enough to attack any wrong person who came in sight. To her surprise there wasn't a gang of thieves or even a single thief to be seen, but only a child in a basket all wrapped up in a small blanket. The child seemed to be a newly born. She was a girl who had gotten all wet because of the storm.

The mistress rushed to pick her up and took her inside while locking the door behind her. Someone had left their baby on the doors of the orphanage. The mistress always thought of this as the worst kind of being orphaned.

She took the baby inside her room and put her on the bed. The baby was crying because of the cold or maybe because she was hungry. She rushed to bring clean, dry towels from the bathroom. She cleaned the baby and rolled her up in one of the towels.

After that she walked towards the trunk she had right in front of her bed and opened it up. The trunk had loads of baby clothes and small toys in it. She picked two dresses for the girl, a cap and a small blanket and sat on the bed to change her clothes and wrapped her in a warm blanket. Then the baby stopped crying. She immediately went to sleep after a minute.

The mistress took some deep breaths and sat beside the sleeping baby.

"Who could have done this to such an angel?" She thought to herself.

More than that she was thinking of what she would call her and while considering all the options she had in her mind, her eyes rested on the book she was reading.

'Linda Walker' was written in bold letters on the cover page. She was a famous author. The mistress thought of no name better than of the woman she was reading about when she found the baby and so named her after the author.

Linda grew as the years passed. She was the brightest child of her age. She woke up early in the morning and went to study with her friends in the small home school, which the mistress had built for the girls. She waited in a small line for her food and made her bed everyday. Every evening she went down to the music and crafts room to get piano lessons from one of the servant ladies. The lady was quite expert in that.

Linda had a simple life, but one thing never left her thoughts nor her dreams. It was the outside world. She wanted to explore it and cover all its lengths. The mistress took the girls out of the orphanage once every week and it was the only day that Linda called her 'life's living day'. She had enough of all the restrictions in her life and wanted to be free for once.

One day the mistress took the girls to a town's fair. All the girls put on their best dresses, brushed their hairs and made ponytails. The mistress had asked the girls to be ready by 10 but they were all dressed up by 9:30 as they were too excited for the fair.

"Ready this soon? I hope you all would have gotten up like this every morning. It would have saved a lot of my energy." She said while smiling at all the ponytail girls.

"Ok mistress." All the girls shouted simultaneously.

She guided all the girls while walking them to the fair and told them about all the rules of sticking together and not getting out of sight like a mother.

The mistress had given some money to each girl to buy something from the fair for themselves. The girls ran towards the entrance as soon as the fair got in sight. It was all decorated with colorful balloons and enormous number of stalls, having almost everything. There was a rush of people there, but the mistress had asked the girls to not go any further than where she couldn't see them. She then sat on a bench in a corner where there were less people and allowed the girls to go on and enjoy themselves.

Linda ran off to a stall where the stall keeper had all kinds of globes, journals and maps. There were small models of airplanes hanging from the ceiling, which he had made from cardboard.

The stall keeper was a thin old man with a lot of wrinkles on his face. He wore an old-fashioned cap on his head and carried a stick with him, although he didn't seem to have any problem walking.

"What do you want little girl?" he asked politely from Linda.

"Nothing much, sir." Linda replied in hesitation. She opened her right hand's fist to see how much money she had. Unfortunately, she didn't have enough to even afford a geometry box with the map of the world drawn on it.

The stall keeper was watching Linda the whole time.

"Hey little girl let me show you something very special." After saying this he went to the backside of his stall where all kinds of wasted papers were kept. He opened a small box and picked out a leather made, black colored journal. He walked towards the counter.

"Here, take it. As a gift for attending this old man's stall." He handed over the journal to Linda.

At first she didn't know if to accept the generous offer or not, but she couldn't resist the leather journal and took it.

"Thank you." She said in her sweet childish way and walked away to sit on a bench nearby.

The pages of the journal were rusty and yellowish. There was a feather in place of a bookmark in between. It seemed like the journal was decades old. There was a lot of dust on it. Linda used her shirt to clean it up. After cleaning it, she saw some sort of symbol on the back of the cover. It was carved in most probably with a stone with sharp edges.

She didn't know what it meant so she ignored it and went back to where all the girls had decided to meet. What they saw after changed their lives for good. There was a crowd of people circled around a lady who was lying unconscious on the ground. To all of the girls' surprise, she was no other than their mistress.

The mistress died later that day after being taken to the hospital and according to laws as the mistress didn't assign her duty to anyone else in her will, all the girls of the orphanage were taken to another orphanage nearby in the same town.

The house was larger yet the people there were smaller than anyone else. The mistress there used to beat the girls who didn't work properly. The girls were assigned their duties and worked 20 hours a day cleaning, laundering and mowing the huge garden's grass.

The elder girls used to take care of the younger ones and reserved their portions of food to give to them. Linda was one of them. When the mistress found out about this she punished the girls by keeping them standing in the scorching sun while raising their hands above their heads, 3 days in a row. They were only provided with a one-time meal and two glasses of water in a day.

Linda cried herself to sleep every night not knowing what to do. She felt hopeless. The one thing she always kept with herself was the journal she had brought from the town fair. Every night she used to write her incomplete wishes and desires in it. The pages had seen and absorbed all her tears.

One day, while a girl was cleaning the beds she saw the journal in the lower drawer and asked Linda about it.

"What is this?" the girl asked.

"It is my journal." Linda told her.

"A journal of what?" she asked while sitting on the bed beside Linda.

"Sort of a crushed wishes journal."

"Can I take a look?" the girl asked excitedly.

"Yeah, but only from outside." Linda replied while handing over the journal to her.

The girl touched the cover feeling its leather and turned it to see its back. She saw the symbol and asked Linda about it.

"Did you make it?"

"No. It was there already when I got it."

"Do you know what it means?" she inquired.

"No. I don't. Do you know about this?"

"Yes, this vertical 8 is the sign of infinity." She said while giving the journal back to Linda.

Linda stared at the symbol for some time. She was lost in her castle of thoughts.

"There are infinite possibilities in this world and I am holding none. I have tried none."

That was the moment that struck her hard. She promised herself to do everything and anything to achieve the greatest point of her life. She wanted to put a stop to all the cruelty. She couldn't bear seeing her life being ruined anymore.

That night is when she decided to finally climb out of her nightmare life. When the clock struck 3 in the morning Linda quietly walked out of her room, making absolutely no noise as not to wake the other girls or the mistress. She only had a small bag with some food she had saved up in the day, two pairs of clothing, a pair of shoes and her journal. She was planning to run away from the hell.

The hedge surrounding the orphanage was covered with thorny bushes. Linda climbed high enough to drag her body above the bushes and jumped on the other side of the hedge. She started running as fast as her legs could take her. She ran and ran, leaving all the streets behind, through a long field of grasses and finally reached another town.

She had run for more than 3 hours straight. She was out of breath. There was a water tank on the corner of the street. She walked towards it and poured the water from it in the glass which was kept beside it. There was a bench on its left side. She took the glass of water and sat there.

She then took out a half-eaten sandwich from her bag and started eating it as she was starving. She then drank the water from the glass and took out the journal from her bag. She stared at the symbol of infinity for a moment.

Linda worked in other people's houses cleaning their floors and doing their laundry to earn money for her food. She used to read the autobiographies and biographies of famous people from the magazines kept in the stores.

Linda struggled every day and night to earn more and more. She started by opening her own stall of food items and converted the small stall into a large food company. When she got enough money she bought the same orphan where she was punished by the cruel mistress. Of course the mistress was dead by now, but her ways of treating the girls were still followed by others.

Linda allowed all girls to live their lives by their will. Gave them proper food and provided toys to younger ones. She opened an NGO for orphanages and raised money for all the orphan children so they could get proper education and playtime.

No time later the only thing she wanted to do was to serve the helpless children and work for them. Her diary stayed in her bedroom drawer with all her dreams imprinted within it. She used to open it every day, but never got enough time to implement the things written in it in her life.