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
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
“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!”
Yes, Mr. Dreary had been a fool, letting the Quicks have him for tea. He didn’t believe in the Bible Ball, he’d left it behind. Slurp and swallow. I’d been right. The swamp reached out and gobbled him up.
“His Bible Ball?” Eldric leaned forward, the very image of a boy who didn’t want to miss anything. Least of all Mr. Dreary; no, Eldric didn’t miss him. Why was it that Eldric could get away with a thing like that—not being sorry when a person was supposed to be sorry?
Cecil put on a solemn face for about five seconds, which happens to correspond with his attention span. “When in Rome,” he said, shrugging wisely.
“We’re not in Rome,” said Rose.
“What Cecil means,” said Father, “is that people who travel to foreign places ought to follow the rules and customs of that place.”
“But we’re not in Rome,” said Rose.
“Quite true,” said Eldric. “We’re far from Rome.”
“In the Swampsea,” said Cecil, showing off his geography. I still can’t understand how Cecil and my old tutor, Fitz, got along so well, when we often called Fitz “the Genius” and avoided calling Cecil anything at all, so as not to be rude.
“We’re in the Swampsea?” said Eldric. “Surely not! I’m certain I took the express train to the Dragon Constellation.”
Cecil put on his best dead-poet face. He’s far too highbrow for silliness.
But Rose laughed. She does sometimes understand when something’s meant to be silly. I never can predict when. But the laughing set off a fit of coughing. What was I doing, filling my belly and licking my burns? I needed Tiddy Rex and his cough.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of the Dragon Constellation!” said Eldric. “It’s very far, indeed, from London, and I for one intend to follow all its customs. If a native from the Dragon Constellation tells me to carry a Bible Ball,
