William Macandrew and His Sons

PART FOUR

Many years ago, when the town of Sconston was just a few scattered cottages, a man named William Macandrew came with his wife Abigail, who was a fairy, and decided to settle there.

At first people thought he was strange because he had built himself an underground house in the forest and other people didn't like the forest. But as he could trace his ancestors back to when they used to live on Earth and because he was a good worker, nothing much was said about it. William continued to be a good worker, in fact by then he had quite a large farm and a rapidly growing family. Because of this, he was labeled: “Successful”. Then some of his children grew up and got families of their own and the successful William became a rather important person in the now large town. The inhabitants then decided that William was not only successful but he was now “Wealthy”. Then out of no one knew where there came a king and a government who right after he was crowned started taxing the land to bits. No one liked this so William's eldest son, Mark, who owned a lot of land, went up to the castle and gave them all a good telling off.

After that, there was only a little bit of taxing and William's third son, Steven, became part of the government to keep it that way. The king's private excuse was that he was rather afraid of William because the Macandrews had lots of friends in and out of town and also William had quite a few daughters and the king had a son who would want a wife at some point. Life was quiet for a while until Patrick, William's seventh son, turned eight and was allowed to go outside unsupervised. He was intrigued by the forest and started making secret expeditions into it. His mother objected to this when she found out where he had been going and tried to get him interested in one of the local girls because having a female friend would encourage him to stay at home. However, whenever the girls came visiting Patrick always managed to be somewhere else. Once, when he was 15, he pretended to be friendly to one of the girls and then went and lost her in the forest. His excuse was that he forgot she was there and ran on ahead, accidentally rubbing out his foot marks and absentmindedly climbing a tree.

After that his mother gave up and concentrated on her other children.

Patrick thought that the only reason for marrying was so that the men could tell the women what to do and he didn't really feel like doing that. In all the romantic books he had read the characters would marry after a very short period of time, this even happened in history, even the very old stuff.

Patrick decided he wasn't going to marry any of the local girls or he would have fallen in love with one of them already. He had been thinking about this when he heard Anise screaming and he continued to think about it for the rest of the day.