“And you, good sir,” the eldest among them managed, and dropped an awkward, ungraceful curtsey. The others followed suit.
The Captain dragged Jack across the kitchen. Jack’s hip bumped the edge of the washing trough with excruciating force and he cried out again. Hot water flew. Smoking droplets hit the boards and ran, hissing, between them.
“Phew!” the Captain said in a low voice. “I don’t like this, not any of it, it all smells bad.”
Left, right, then right again. Jack began to sense that they were approaching the outer walls of the pavillion, and he had time to wonder how the place could seem so much bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. Then the Captain was pushing him through a flap and they were in daylight again—mid-afternoon daylight so bright after the shifting dimness of the pavillion that Jack had to wince his eyes shut against a burst of pain.
The Captain never hesitated. Mud squelched and smooched underfoot. There was the smell of hay and horses and shit. Jack opened his eyes again and saw they were crossing what might have been a paddock or a corral or maybe just a barnyard. He saw an open canvas-sided hallway and heard chickens clucking somewhere beyond it. A scrawny man, naked except for a dirty kilt and thong sandals, was tossing hay into an open stall, using a pitchfork with wooden tines to do the job. Inside the stall, a horse not much bigger than a Shetland pony looked moodily out at them. They had already passed the stall when Jack’s mind was finally able to accept what his eyes had seen: the horse had two heads.
“Hey!” he said. “Can I look back in that stall? That—”
“No time.”
“But that horse had—”
“No time, I said.” He raised his voice and shouted: “And if I ever catch you laying about again when there’s work to be done, you’ll get
“You won’t!” Jack screamed (in truth he felt as if this scene were getting a bit old). “I swear you won’t! I told you I’d be good!”
Just ahead of them, tall wooden gates loomed in a wall made of wooden posts with the bark still on them—it was like a stockade wall in an old Western (his mother had made a few of those, too). Heavy brackets were screwed into the gates, but the bar the brackets were meant to hold was not in place. It leaned against the woodpile to the left, thick as a railroad crosstie. The gates stood open almost six inches. Some muddled sense of direction in Jack’s head suggested that they had worked their way completely around the pavillion to its far side.
“Thank God,” the Captain said in a more normal voice. “Now—”
“Captain,” a voice called from behind them. The voice was low but carrying, deceptively casual. The Captain stopped in his tracks. It had called just as Jack’s scarred companion had been in the act of reaching for the left gate to push it open; it was as if the voice’s owner had watched and waited for just that second.
“Perhaps you would be good enough to introduce me to your . . . ah . . . son.”
The Captain turned, turning Jack with him. Standing, halfway across the paddock area, looking unsettling out of place there, was the skeletal courtier the Captain had been afraid of—Osmond. He looked at them from dark gray melancholy eyes. Jack saw something stirring in those eyes, something deep down. His fear was suddenly sharper, something with a point, jabbing into him.
Osmond took two neat steps toward them. In his left hand he held the rawhide-wrapped haft of a bullwhip. The handle narrowed only slightly into a dark, limber tendon coiled thrice around his shoulder—the whip’s central stalk was as thick as a timber rattlesnake. Near its tip, this central stalk gave birth to perhaps a dozen smaller offshoots, each of woven rawhide, each tipped with a crudely made but bright metal spur.
Osmond tugged the whip’s handle and the coils slithered from his shoulder with a dry hiss. He wiggled the handle, and the metal-tipped strands of rawhide writhed slowly in the straw-littered mud.
“Your son?” Osmond repeated, and took another step toward them. And Jack suddenly understood why this man had looked familiar before. The day he had almost been kidnapped—hadn’t this man been White Suit?
Jack thought that perhaps he had been.
3
The Captain made a fist, brought it to his forehead, and bent forward. After only a moment’s hesitation, Jack did the same.
“My son, Lewis,” the Captain said stiffly. He was still bent over, Jack saw, cutting his eyes to the left. So he remained bent over himself, his heart racing.
“Thank you, Captain. Thank you, Lewis. Queen’s blessings upon you.” When he touched him with the haft of the bullwhip, Jack almost cried out. He stood straight again, biting the cry in.
Osmond was only two paces away now, regarding Jack with that mad, melancholy gaze. He wore a leather jacket and what might have been diamond studs. His shirt was extravagantly ruffled. A bracelet of links clanked ostentatiously upon his right wrist (from the way he handled the bullwhip, Jack guessed that his left was his working hand). His hair was drawn back and tied with a wide ribbon that might have been white satin. There were two odors about him. The top was what his mother called “all those men’s perfumes,” meaning after-shave, cologne, whatever. The smell about Osmond was thick and powdery. It made Jack think of those old black-and- white British films where some poor guy was on trial in the Old Bailey. The judges and lawyers in those films always wore wigs, and Jack thought the boxes those wigs came out of would smell like Osmond—dry and crumbly-sweet, like the world’s oldest powdered doughnut. Beneath it, however, was a more vital, even less pleasant smell: it seemed to pulse out at him. It was the smell of sweat in layers and dirt in layers, the smell of a man who bathed seldom, if ever.
Yes. This was one of the creatures that had tried to steal him that day.
His stomach knotted and roiled.
“I did not know you had a son, Captain Farren,” Osmond said. Although he spoke to the Captain, his eyes remained on Jack.
