Except the noise it makes. I can only hear it at night when things are very quiet, but I can hear it then. The tiniest ticking, the faintest crepitation, like something very small inside there, breathing or tapping its toe.
Oh, on the front of it, twining all around the numbers is a design of leaves and vines, and I think they are meant to spell out letters. Sometimes I look at them for a long, long time, trying to make the letters out. Two, I’m almost sure, are Ss. Two, I’m almost sure, are As. I think there’s a B and a C, but I can’t be sure. Since I don’t know what it is, I call it my mysterious thing, and it sits on the chest with my other things.
I like the tower very much.
As it happened, Papa had gone off somewhere before the aunts even found out where I am living. When they found out, there was much consternation, buzzing, and confabulation. The aunts wanted to know who suggested such a thing?
No sense getting Doll in trouble. I told them it had been my own idea.
More wide eyes, open mouths, and thrown up hands. More fussing and steaming and orders to move here, move there.
“My mother lived up there,” I said to them at last. “If you want me to get out of it, you’ll have to tell me why!”
Which settled them down in a hurry. Not one of them is willing to say why or what or when. Since Papa is off viewing decayed bits of saints’ bodies, he isn’t available to offer an opinion. Aunt Sister Mary Elizabeth and Aunt Sister Mary George, whose thoughts on the matter were solicited by Aunt Terror in a thick letter sent by messenger, have replied that they are unaware of anything ungodly about the tower room. This sent the aunts into a frenzy of calculation, trying to decide whether either of the elderly nuns was present at Westfaire at any time when my mother was here.
I stood it as long as I could, and then I went to Doll. “Doll,” I asked her, “tell me what this is all about.” I’ve asked her about my mother many times over the years, and she has always shaken her head at me. Still, the last time I’d asked had been a long time ago, when I was a child.
“Be my gizzard’s worth,” she said. “Be worth my life and soul if they found out.” She wrung her hands, one in the other, trying not to look at me.
“Not from me,” I swore, spitting in my hand and making a cross on my chest with ashes from the cook-fire.
She wrung her hands again, staring over my shoulder. Finally she gave a kind of sigh and a shrug and said, almost in a whisper, “When your papa insisted on makin’ a great celebration out of your Christenin’, she invited some relatives of hers, and when your papa found out about that, they fought about it. I don’t know what it was about because I couldn’t hear anythin’ except them yellin’. Then, when the Christenin’ was over, your papa took you away and gave you to a wetnurse down in the village, then he locked your mama in her room up there in the tower. He nailed the door shut, and he went up every day to yell at her through the door, tellin’ her the whole thing had been her fault and she’d had no business marryin’ him without tellin’ him.”
“What did he mean?”
She flushed and twisted her hands together. “It’s not something I’d speak of, Beauty. Besides, I don’t know for sure. None of us common folk knows for sure. Third day after your mama was locked up, your papa got no answer when he yelled at her, so the carpenter jerked the door open and they found her gone.”
“Jumped?” I asked, thinking Doll knew something she wasn’t telling me. Her face was red, like she was holding something back, but I didn’t want to push her too much or she’d refuse to talk about it at all.
“Too high to jump,” she said.
“Went down the firewood rope.”
“Your papa took the firewood rope down first thing he put her in there.”
“Flew away?” I offered as a jest, watching in amazement as Doll crossed herself.
“There’s those that say she did exactly that.”
“I did get christened, didn’t I?” I asked, wondering why Mama had made such a fuss about it.
“Of course you did, silly,” she snorted, going back to her cleaning, obviously not wanting to talk about it anymore. Needless to say, this has given me a great deal to think about.
6
ST. LADISLAS DAY, JUNE, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347
Yesterday Papa came back from his trip full of plans for the wedding, which he seems in a monstrous hurry to accomplish, and this has given the aunts something else to worry about besides where I am housed. None of them chose to be the one to tell him I am living in the tower, and I’m certainly not going to tell him.
The weather has been having a sulky spell, with gloomy clouds and chill rain. I’ve kept the shutters closed and a fire going, to make a warm shadowy space. What with the wall hangings and the carpet and the low ceiling (though it is vaulted up from five stone piers to join in a carved rosette high in the middle), it stays warmer than my old quarters did, even though the fireplace is a tiny little thing next to the door where the stairs go down behind the one straight wall. Though it took him several days to get used to it, Grumpkin has come to like the tower room, both for sleeping and for prowling about on the balcony. I love it. I can practice on the lute without anyone’s hearing or learn new songs or read, all by the light of
