“And pass him we shall,” I said, for Tiddy Rex was sure to be in the Alehouse, and I needed to listen to his cough. Just let it be different from Rose’s. Please let it be different!
“I want the funeral biscuits,” said Rose.
“Come along, then.”
“Doesn’t I spy two black-eyed lovelies!” Mad Tom flapped his umbrella at us as we passed. “Has you such a thing as a pair o’ wits about you?”
“I want the funeral biscuits,” said Rose. But we’d already pushed through the Alehouse door, into the smells of tobacco and lantern oil and the ghosts of fried sausages. A hand snuck into the crook of my arm.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming.”
I looked up, into Eldric’s switch-on eyes.
“You came just in time,” he said. “I was about to auction off your seats. They’re going for a fortune.”
There weren’t many fortunes to be made in the Swampsea, but neither were there many chairs. Mourners crammed windowsills, leaned against walls, talking, laughing, drinking, as all good mourners do. But there, at a table occupied by Mr. Clayborne and Father, were two seats, tipped onto their front legs to show they were taken.
How would a regular girl feel if an Eldric boy-man saved her a seat? Eldric, from exotic, faraway London.
Would a regular girl be happy? I don’t know much about certain feelings, like happiness. I have thoughts, of course, but thoughts stay in one’s head. Thoughts don’t feel.
“Introduce me to the new fellow, won’t you?” said Cecil Trumpington.
Cecil was Judge Trumpington’s son, but he didn’t mind sharing the next-but-one table with the ratcatcher and a fellow from the willow yard. Cecil was democratic when it came to drinking.
Cecil and Eldric shook hands. Two lovely boys, face-toface: Cecil, all dark ringlets; Eldric, all tawny mane. Cecil a bit the taller; Eldric a bit the broader. Cecil, all pale and dead-poet-ish; Eldric all electric and alive.
Cecil leaned over me; he smelled of money. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen milady!”
Milady. Such an old-fashioned word makes him feel clever. “Only five days,” I said.
“You count the days too!”
How would a regular girl feel if a Cecil boy-man stood looking at her with his pale fish-eyes, pressing a hand to his chest? Cecil, whose house has stained-glass windows and curved stairs, and a porch fixed securely to the front.
Would a regular girl want to smack him?
“I’m hungry for funeral biscuits,” said Rose.
“Funeral biscuits?” said Eldric. “Shall I hunt them down? Are they dangerous?”
“You’re mad!” said Cecil, but he rose to accompany Eldric. Two boy-men, stalking the wild funeral biscuit.
I let my mind go wandering. I pretended I was a regular person. I breathed in greasy air and sour ale, just like a regular person. I listened in on the conversation behind me, just like a regular person.
Eavesdropping is such a regular-person activity.
“Hark to my words,” said the constable. “The witch is like to be that Nelly Daws. She got that wicked red hair.”
Nelly Daws, from the Coracles, the smallest-but-one village in the Swampsea. She had red hair and dancing feet.
“Nelly Daws,” said Davy Wallace, a fisherman known principally for having caught a hundred-pound sturgeon with his one hand. “I always knowed her for a witch.” But you can’t trust what Davy knows: He’s not a knowing sort of person. He’s the sort to accept a wager to spend the night in the swamp without a Bible Ball. He’s the sort to meet up with the Dead Hand and come home minus one of his own.
Could Nelly have been that red-haired witch, screaming with laughter and swooping through the trees? It was hard to imagine.
“She got them sharp witch eyes,” said the Swamp Reeve. “I marked it well last time I seen her.”
Now I wished I weren’t eavesdropping. I didn’t want to hear about catching witches, and hanging witches. But you can’t just stop eavesdropping. Too bad a person can’t close her ears.
“Us mustn’t go by eyes,” said the Chime Child. “Too many people what doesn’t be witches been hanged as witches.” I pictured her, wind-roughened face, thinning hair. She was utterly unremarkable in appearance. You’d never guess she had a foot in the world of the Old Ones. You’d never guess she had the second sight.
“Witchcraft be a sin,” said the Chime Child, “but hanging an innocent, that be a sin too.”
“The Chime Child,” said the constable, “she be in the right o’ it. There can’t be no hanging o’ Nelly, not ’til us matches up the evidence.”
“An’ I doesn’t like hanging nobody,” said the Hangman, “without I be sure as sure. I doesn’t like hanging no girl what be said to be a witch, an’ she don’t turn to dust.”
The Hangman was a great ox of a fellow. I pictured him watching the hanged girl, waiting for her to turn to dust. The Hangman need only wait a quarter hour, and if the body continues to swing, he can be sure she wasn’t an Old One.
He can be sure that Judge Trumpington and the Chime Child made a mistake.
It works the other way too. Imagine Briony struck dead by a runaway horse. Imagine Father looking on, fretting about the cost of coffins these days, when of a sudden, his daughter’s body turns to dust. He’d made a mistake too. He’d never really known her at all.
“I got you some evidence,” said the coastguard chief. “I seen Nelly one midnight, dancing widdershins ’neath a horned moon.”
“Did you see her close-like?” said the Chime Child, as though she knew the answer would be no, which it was. “I be getting on in years. My mind, it don’t be clear like ’twere. I be scareful to judge yes when the truth, it be no. A person can’t just be thinking it be Nelly Daws dancing. He needs must know it be Nelly Daws.”
Now came Eldric and Cecil, laden with pies and pork and biscuits and ale and sherry, and now Rose had something to say, which put a blessed end to my eavesdropping. When Rose speaks, you can’t hear anything else.
“I knew it!”
“Knew what?” said Father.
“I knew the food would be brown. I don’t like brown.”
It was true, everything was brown: the pie, the sherry, the gravy, the biscuits, the caraway seeds on the biscuits.
Brown or not, it looked delicious. I reached for my fork. I’d grown used to eating with my right hand. I was rarely tempted to use my left. It would be harder if I still wanted to write, but all that’s behind me.
It’s just as well I switched hands: Witches are thought to be left-handed. Perhaps it’s true. Rose is no witch and she uses her right hand. We are mirror twins, she and I. What’s left for me is right for her; and if I wanted to feel sorry for myself, I might say nothing’s right for me.
But Rose was using neither hand. “I need Briony to cut for me.”
Cut for her? After all these years of teaching her to cut her meat? Of telling her knives weren’t dangerous if properly used? On the day I break down and slap Rose, I’ll probably use my dependable left hand.
“But you cut your meat ever so well on your own.”
Rose raised her clenched fist. “My hand prefers to be occupied.”
“What do you have, Rose?”
“It’s mine,” said Rose.
“Of course it’s yours, but I’d like to see it.” One never knew what hideous things Rose might pick up.
Lamplight glinted off the pewter tankards as they went up and down, although where Cecil was concerned, there was a lot of up and not so much down. Rose uncurled her fingers. On her palm lay a crumple of paper.
“He dropped it,” she said. “He didn’t prefer to have it.”
“It’s a Bible Ball,” said Cecil, stating the obvious, which was his specialty.
Father sat up very straight. “Who dropped it, Rose?”
“Mr. Drury didn’t prefer to have it, so it wasn’t stealing.”
“The fool!” said Mr. Clayborne. I’d never heard him raise his voice before. “And after all my warnings!”