“Eeeeh! What—? I knew it would go wrong!”
“Harchad’s men,” said Canden. He sounded disgusted. “They were there waiting for us. Informers— that’s what they were. Dideo, Siriol, and Ham. They informed on us.”
After that Canden gave a quiver of indignation and slid down the doorpost to the floor. Milda knelt down to him, hugging the lamp and whimpering. “O ye gods! What do I do? What can I do? Why doesn’t somebody help?”
After that doors began cautiously opening and shutting up and down the stairway. Ladies came in nightgowns and old coats, with more lamps or candles. There were troubled whispers and soothing words, while Milda rocked about on her knees, moaning. Mitt was too appalled to move. He did not want to look at Canden or his mother, so he lay and looked at the ceiling instead. The bustling ladies thought he was asleep, and after a while he must really have gone to sleep. Canden was not there in the morning. But he had been there. He had left a stain on the floor. And Mitt’s father was still not there either.
Mitt knew both of them were dead. Nobody told him, but he knew. What he did not know and wanted to be told was what had happened. He wanted to know why ladies in the tenement came and told Milda, “I should lie low, if I was you. You don’t want to get yourself arrested, too.” Milda stayed away from work for a while, sitting very still by the window. Her face was so drawn in by worry that the seam where her dimple used to be looked more like a puckered scar than a line. Mitt hated her face like that. He crouched beside her feet and asked to be told what had caused it.
“You’re too young to understand,” said Milda.
“But I want to know,” said Mitt. “What’s happened to Dad?” He asked at least forty times before he got an answer.
“Dead,” said Milda. “At least, I hope that’s what he is, because they all say it’s better to be dead than have Harchad after you. And I shall never forgive them that did it to him—never, never, never!”
“What did Siriol and Dideo and Ham do?” Mitt prompted her.
“Leave me be, if you know so much!” Milda said irritably. But Mitt went on asking, and in the end Milda told him as much as she knew.
It seemed that when Mitt’s father had found it so hard to get work in Holand, he had felt so bitter against the Earl that he had joined a secret revolutionary society. There were a lot of them in Holand. The Earl’s son Harchad had spies and soldiers hunting out these societies night and day, at all times. But when he found one and marched the members off to be hanged, there was always another to take its place.
The one Mitt’s father joined was called the Free Holanders. It was composed mostly of fishermen who felt there should be more justice and better living for the ordinary people of Holand. Their ambition was to have the whole city rise against the Earl, and, as far as Milda knew, they had never done much except talk about it. But when Milda and Mitt had been turned out of Dike End, Mitt’s father was so angry that he had tried to stir the Free Holanders to action of some kind. Why not set fire to one of the Earl’s warehouses, he said, to show the Earl they meant business?
Canden and the other younger Free Holanders were delighted by the idea. It would hit Hadd where it hurt, they said—right in the moneybags. But the older members, particularly Siriol, Dideo, and Ham, were clean against it. If they fired a warehouse, they said, the Free Holanders would be hunted down by Harchad’s men, and how would that help the city to rise and overthrow the Earl? The society split in half over it. The younger members went with Mitt’s father to fire the warehouse. The older members stayed at home. And when the younger ones reached the warehouse, Harchad’s men were waiting for them. All that Milda knew beyond that was that someone had managed to start a fire even so and that no one had come back from it except Canden to say that Siriol, Dideo, and Ham had informed on them. And Canden was dead, too.
Mitt considered all this. “Why did Siriol and them inform, though?”
The crease of worry down Milda’s face drew into a tighter seam. “Because they were frightened, Mitt, like I am now.”
“Frightened what of?” Mitt asked.
“Harchad’s soldiers,” Milda said, shivering. “They might come banging at this door any moment now.”
Mitt considered what he knew of soldiers. They were not so frightening. They brought you home when you were found wandering in the Rate. “How many soldiers are there? More than everyone else in Holand?”
In spite of her misery, Milda smiled. To Mitt’s relief, the crease on her face turned into a dimple again for a moment. “Oh no. The Earl couldn’t afford that number. And I don’t suppose he’d bother to send more than six or so to come and take us away.”
“Then,” said Mitt, “if all the people in this house, or all the people in Holand, all got together, they ought to be able to stop the soldiers, oughtn’t they?”
Milda was forced to laugh. It was quite beyond her to explain why everyone in Holand lived in dread of soldiers, and even greater dread of Harchad’s spies, so she said, “Oh, Mitt, you’re a real free soul, you are! You don’t know what fear means. It seems such a waste when Hadd and the Free Holanders have done for us between them, it does really!”
Mitt realised that by talking in this sturdy way, he had managed to comfort his mother. He had sent the hateful crease of worry out of her face twice. Better still, he had made Milda comfort him by calling him a free soul. Mitt was not sure he knew what a free soul was—it never occurred to him that his mother had no idea either—but he thought it was a splendid thing to be. By way of earning it, he said stoutly, “Well, you’re not to worry anymore. I’ll make it all right for you.”
Milda laughed and hugged him. “There’s my Mitt!”
3
Miraculously, no soldiers came for Milda and Mitt. It seemed as if Dideo, Siriol, and Ham had contented themselves with getting rid of the younger half of the Free Holanders and had not bothered to include wives and families.
All the same, Milda and Mitt had a hard time of it for a while. When, after a week or so, Milda dared to go back to work, she found her place had been taken. Mitt was furious.
“It’s the way things are in this town,” Milda explained. “There’s hundreds of poor women willing to work their fingers into blisters. And the rich people have to have their curtains ready on time.”
“Why?” said Mitt. “Can’t the poor people get together and tell the rich ones where they get off?”
That was the kind of question which made Milda call him a free soul. Mitt knew it was, so he made a point of asking such things. It was a great comfort to know he was a free soul who did not know what fear was, while Milda was out trudging from workshop to workshop. Mitt himself, hungry and miserable, spent the days hanging round the back doors of counting houses, or on the edges of boatbuilders’ yards, hoping to be sent on an errand. Few errands came Mitt’s way. He was too small, and there was always the crowd of bigger, quick-spoken city boys to jostle Mitt aside and run the errand instead. And of course they jeered at Mitt, too. But Mitt would tell himself that he was a free soul, he was, and wait patiently on. It helped him greatly.
At night Mitt had horrible dreams. He dreamed repeatedly that Canden was coming shuffling to the door again. Then the door would open, and there would be Canden, hanging on to the doorpost and slowly falling to pieces like Poor Old Ammet in the harbor. “All dead,” Canden would say, as pieces dropped off him, and Mitt would wake up trying to scream. Then Mitt would lie and tell himself sternly that he did not know what fear was. In the middle of the night that was not always so easy to believe. But sometimes Milda woke up when Mitt yelled. She would tell Mitt stories she had learned as a girl until he went back to sleep again.
Milda’s stories made good listening. There was magic and adventure and fighting in them, and they all seemed to happen in North Dalemark in the time when there were kings—though there were earls in the stories, too, and ordinary people. Mitt puzzled about the stories. He knew Holand was in South Dalemark, but this North Milda talked about seemed so different that he wondered for a while if it was real.