News was intriguing. “Let me guess: you’re married.”
He stopped in his tracks. “No!”
“Soon to be, then.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, looking at me closely. “Neither one.” He seemed crestfallen, as though now his news wouldn’t seem like much. “I’m done being a journeyman. My master, Mr. Rumsen, says when I return, he’ll make me a master myself. I may stay on with him, if he can use me. If not, he’ll help me find a post somewhere else.”
I picked my way over a fallen tree limb. “Is this good news?”
“It’s a year earlier than most,” he said. “Mr. Rumsen says I’ll be the youngest full mason in Chalcedon. Maybe in all of Pylander.”
I presented my hand. “Well, congratulations then, laddie,” I said. “Let me be the first to shake your hand. Well done.”
Aidan smiled, and for a moment he looked more like the boy I remembered.
“Now, isn’t this a pretty sight?”
I dropped Aidan’s hand. Aidan reached his mother in two strides, picked her up, and swung her around knee-high off the ground. I slipped away, smiling, and headed toward Grandfather’s house.
Chapter 3
Widow Moreau made Mrs. Hornby the chairwoman of handicrafts for the feast, and she’d scheduled Prissy’s time down to the minute. This left my friend out of sorts, for we both wanted to study for end-of-term examinations. Even though, in truth, they didn’t seem to matter much now, we were still both vying for the top school prize. Out of politeness, neither one of us ever mentioned it.
Another school day in the hot, stuffy classroom came to a close, and Priscilla and I had walked so far as the center of town when Matthew Dunwoody appeared, trotting as fast as his father’s old horse would oblige him.
“I got it all worked out,” he yelled, sliding off his poor horse. “Rode to Fallardston myself this morning, and fixed it all up proper.”
Folks came out of homes and shops to hear the news, like always, whenever the slightest commotion stirred in sleepy Maundley. Some days a breeze was enough.
“What did you fix up, Mr. Dunwoody?” Priscilla asked in a false shy tone that made me want to laugh out loud. She blinked so rapidly I thought perhaps she’d gotten a gnat in one eye.
“A caravan of gypsies camps in Fallardston at harvest,” he said. “I got ’em to come here for Saint Bronwyn’s. They’ll bring wares, music, dancing girls, fortune tellers, all sorts of things.”
“Dancing girls,” the miller said in a daze. His wife swatted his behind, and woke him up.
“You hadn’t ought to have taken it upon yourself to do that, Matt,” Mayor Snow said. “I don’t know as we want a whole troupe of gypsies mucking up our common and bringing their sicknesses here. We’ll have our throats cut in our sleep, likely as not.”
“Found some performers too,” Matthew said, ignoring the mayor. “Pair of brothers that put on live theatricals, playacting all sorts of stories.”
“The stage is an unsavory thing,” Father Pius said.
“Now, Father,” Widow Moreau said, appearing as if by magic, like she always did when things happened up town. “It’s entertainment for the king, not a meat dish. I dare say His Majesty is accustomed to theatricals and acrobatics and suchlike, living in Chalcedon as he does.”
Father Pius thrust out his lower lip and said nothing.
“And as for the gypsies, young Matt, you’ve done well,” she said. “I’ve needed a new skillet for an age. You and your dad need newer knives. Half the women in town need their scissors sharpened. It’ll be a boon having the caravan come.”
She nodded and put an end to the discussion. Matthew Dunwoody headed back to the butcher shop in triumph. I left Priscilla gazing after him in a humiliating state of reverence.
School had been a flurry of activity, with Sister Claire assigning recitations and poems to memorize to each form, from the young ones on up. I was tasked with memorizing Saint Menelos’s fabled discourse on biblical beasts, which was long, but far more lively and scientific than Saint Adelard’s treatises on sin, which had fallen to poor Priscilla.
Reaching home, I ambled through Grandfather’s orchard before going indoors. On a whim, I dropped my books in the tall grasses, all except for Saint Menelos’s, and climbed into my favorite tree. Here was as good a place as any to memorize my biblical beasts.
This particular tree’s branches formed a low cradle that I could rest in like a bed. I wondered if the branches could still support my weight, but they’d grown larger too, and I rested and read, snug and secure, rocked by the gentle motion of wind in the boughs.
The golden apples were heavy, warm and fat with juice. I helped myself to one, testing it. It was ripe. My bite broke off with a terrific crunch, showing flesh white as snow. I’d beaten Grandfather to this discovery, which never lost its glory, year by year. The apples were ripe!
I forgot my book as I ate that divine first apple. August light filtered through green leaves, beginning to redden. I thought of Grandfather, his little farm, and these trees where I’d spent so many happy hours. This slow, contented life wasn’t so bad, was it? I had Grandfather’s love, and Father’s books, and all the cider I could drink. Why would I want to leave?
Warm light played over my face. Hay-scented breezes cooled my skin. I closed my eyes.
I didn’t notice when my rest turned into sleep. A century might have passed. In my dreams the rocking, swaying motion of the tree branches became rolling, swaying waves on the sea. I swam, effortlessly as a fish, buoyed along by the swelling waves.
A shadow caught my eye. Far out, under the dark water, something was moving toward me, and not by accident. It had singled me out, and somehow it knew my name. Its great, fearsome head drew nearer. I was too terrified to escape. I flung out my hands to protect my head, and the creature opened its mouth, and bit.
I woke with a gasp. My eyes went straight to my hand, which still felt the stinging bite. Yet there was no bite on my hand.
But coiled around my wrist, like a long bracelet, was a snake.
I wanted to scream and fling it off me, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. The snake was small and thin, like a delicate, living twine, yellow scales intertwined in a perfect pattern with brown on its textured skin. How I saw all this so clearly, I don’t know. Part of me was still underwater, trapped and terrified. The snake lifted its tiny head and looked back at me, then worked its way around my wrist and up my arm.
It’s just a small snake, I told myself, like dozens you’ve dealt with before, in the fields or by the creek. But I’d never seen markings such as these, and how did I know if it was venomous? I couldn’t shake my muzzy-headed sense that somehow this little snake meant danger.
The snake worked its way up my arm and onto my bodice, until it lay coiled upon my breastbone. It raised up its head on its thin body and gazed at me, its slip of a tongue flickering. My arms and legs were still frozen, but I managed to lift my head and gaze back. It was so close now that my eyes couldn’t focus on it properly. There seemed to be two of them.
Its little head darted forward.
My breath caught in my throat.
The snake’s head brushed my mouth.
I felt the faintest prick of a razor-sharp fang on my lower lip.
It stroked its head and neck along my cheek, then slithered away, dropping out of sight among the branches below me.
Chapter 4
I sat up and tasted my lip with my tongue. A tiny drop of blood had formed. Was I poisoned? How quickly would the venom take hold? I flexed my arms and stretched my legs. They worked.
What did it mean, being kissed by a snake?
I ran indoors. If it was venom, at least indoors I could bid Grandfather good-bye. If it was not venom, well, I still wanted to get away from that place.
The cloying, heavy sweet smell of simmering vinegar filled my nostrils as I entered the cottage. Grandfather was pickling today. His pickles were famous in Maundley. He’d spent year
s adjusting the recipe. The great kettle stood on the stove, full of salted cucumber slices.
“Trouble, Evie?” Grandfather looked up from chopping onions and blinked at me. His red eyes streamed. “You see a ghost?”
“No ghost,” I said. “A snake. It bit me, just slightly, on my lip.”
Grandfather’s knife clanged on the chopping block. He hurried to where I stood, wincing slightly from his stiff knee. “What kind of snake? Where’s the bite? Show me.”
He took my face in his leathered hands and tilted my head back for better light. I could feel his rapid breathing and smell the onion on his fingers.
“I don’t know what kind,” I said. “Something small. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Grandfather squinted at my lip. “It’s a small mark,” he said. “Hardly broke the skin at all. Maybe I’d better … You’d best lie down, Evelyn.”
I wondered whether he should. The episode seemed more insignificant each moment. My heart still beat, my lungs filled with air. Perhaps the snake was just addled by the heat.
I stretched out on Grandfather’s bed, and he pulled up a chair to watch me. It’s an odd feeling, being stared at while you wait to see if you’ll die.
“Let me get you a drink of water,” Grandfather said. “You feeling dizzy? Nauseous? Your lip’s not swollen. That’s a good sign.”
He forgot the drink and snatched up my wrist to feel my pulse. His lips moved as he counted heartbeats while his eyes followed the clock on the mantelpiece.
I sat up and kissed his whiskery cheek. “I’m fine, Grandfather. Let me get you some more onions from the garden. You need them for your pickles, don’t you? Some garlic?”
“Onions can wait. Let me put a compress on your lip.”
He folded a clean cloth into a bandage and smeared his all-purpose ointment on it. It cooled where it touched me, and I breathed in drafts of camphor-scented air.
“Camphor’s supposed to repel snakes,” Grandfather said. “They don’t like the smell.”
“Bit late for that.”
But my grandfather couldn’t compose himself. I peeled off the compress and stood up. “I’m perfectly fine, Grandfather.”
Grandfather eased himself onto his bed. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I need to rest a bit.” He tried to smile. “My old heart can’t take the shock of something happening to you.”
I put both arms around him and squeezed him close. “Nor I you, Grandfather,” I said. “If I could be a physician like my father, I’d doctor you up and keep you with me forever.”
Grandfather’s smile was sad. “Not even your father knew how to do that.”
I gave him another squeeze. “I got a delicious apple off the tree just now.”
Grandfather seized upon this lifesaving change in subject. “Did you, now,” he said. “Well, well. Another season’s come around.”
“They seem to keep on doing that.”
“Don’t you be telling me about time passing, missy,” Grandfather said. “You’ve hardly even started. This old man knows.”
“Old man? Bosh. You’re barely over sixty.”
“Old enough.” Grandfather dusted his hands on his shirt, then returned to his chopping block. His slices were so even and precise you could measure a tailor’s stitches by them.
He watched me move about the kitchen. I caught him staring at my lower lip, still concerned. He turned back to his onions like a guilty child. “If you’re eating apples today, maybe there’ll be time to make some fresh cider for the Saint Bronwyn’s folderol they’re whipping up.”
Grandfather was as famous for his cider as he was for his pickles. He was ever experimenting, fiddling with the brew. “You’ll win a ribbon, then,” I told him.
“Hmph. Not if Widow Moreau has any say in the matter.”
Chapter 5
The gyspy caravan arrived midmorning on Saint Bronwyn’s eve. Their clothes and their painted wagons seemed more colorful than all the rest of the world put together. We gawked at them, I’m ashamed to say, every man Jack and woman Joan of us, as they tethered their horses and lit their luncheon fires.
“Do you suppose the king will fall in love with one of the village girls?” Priscilla asked me as we sat weaving flowers into wreaths. “It happens. Mary Grace is pretty enough.”
“Don’t be a goose,” I said. “Kings only fall in love with village girls in fairy stories.”
“Kings fall in love with whomever they like,” Priscilla said. “He’s a bachelor. He needs an heir. He could do worse than marry a strong, healthy country girl.”
I pricked my finger on a thorn. “You sound like a horse breeder.”
“Then what’s he coming for, if not to find his one true love?” Priscilla said. “He combs the kingdom, under pretense of royal duty, but secretly he’s searching for that face that will leap out from the crowd … ”
“He’s scouring for tax money, likely as not,” I said. “What’s gotten into you?”
“They say he’s handsome,” she said.
“Kings are always handsome.” I reached for more daisies. “Even when they’re half-dead, bald, and toothless. It’s a privilege of being king.”
“He’s not even thirty yet,” Prissy protested. “I’m sure he has all his teeth!”
“But is he as handsome as Matthew Dunwoody?”
Priscilla scowled at her lapful of blossoms. “That son of a butcher thinks he hung the moon in the sky, ever since he found those gypsies. You’d think he grew them from seed.”
“Matthew has fine, straight teeth,” I said. “A mouthful of them.”
“He needs them, too, tough as the meat they sell is.”
We rigged booths from sawhorses and planks and draped bedsheets over the top. The ice man’s wife practiced her song for the king until someone threatened to heave a skillet at her. The four Hafton brothers, famous for their hunting prowess, came whooping out of the woods with a massive boar trussed up by his ankles over a long ash pike. Ham and pork roast for tomorrow!
At last all that could possibly be done, and then some, had been done, and still there was no king in sight. No messenger to explain his delay, either.
We waited.
We fussed with our buttons and collars.
Butcher Dunwoody and the Hafton brothers gutted the boar until our stomachs flopped.
We ate bread and butter, saving the dainties the ladies had made all week for His Illustrious Arrival. All save Mayor Snow, who for once had no appetite.
Children fell asleep on the grass. The sun sank in the west. Night birds swooped through the soft twilight air.
I looped my arm through Grandfather’s. “Let’s go home before it’s too dark to see.”
“Well said, Evelyn, my duck,” Widow Moreau said. “I’ll go with you.” We headed home.
“Suppose he’ll never come?” Grandfather said. “A rude trick that’d be.”
“King’s privilege, I suspect,” Widow Moreau said. “The most trifling thing could make him change his mind, and still we wait upon his pleasure.”
“Not I,” Grandfather said. “These boots are laced like tourniquets. If I wait any more on his pleasure, soon I’ll have no feet.”
“For all that, you won’t walk any slower than you do now, Lem Pomeroy,” Widow Moreau said cheerfully. “You’re so thin Evelyn could carry you. I ought to fatten you up. Don’t you eat anything besides pickles?”
Grandfather stamped the butt of his walking stick into the dirt. “There’s not many foods more healthful than pickles,” he snapped. “They purge the digestion.”
“Grandfather!” I said. “Please!”
“Well, they do.”
Widow Moreau snickered. Then we stopped. Someone was crashing through the underbrush after us.
“Evie!” Aidan’s voice called.
I spun around, searching for him through the gathering gloom. “What’s the matter?”
He burst through the trees and stopped, panting. “King Leopold’s here,?
?? he said. “One of his men grew sick on the journey. The king is calling for a physician.”
I felt cold all over. Heal one of the king’s fellows? From some malady I couldn’t guess? Now, if he was about to have a baby, that’d be one thing …
In the dark behind me I heard Grandfather take a step forward. He cleared his throat. “What’s wrong with the man, son? Do you know? What are his symptoms?”
Aidan shook his head. “Fever, I think. That’s what I heard. He’s inside a carriage.”
Grandfather and I looked at each other.
I turned to Aidan. “Walk these two home, will you, while I run on ahead?”
Torches and fires from the gypsy caravan illuminated the common, where Maundleyans stood in anxious clusters, well back from the king’s coaches, as though they were full of contagion. And well they might be.
I approached the king’s carriage and stuck my head in the door. “Did someone inquire about help for a sick man?”
Half a dozen faces turned my way. I felt like a worm surrounded by robins.
“Yes,” a voice said slowly, from the darkness. “We did send for a medic or healer. Can you bring us one?”
“I am he,” I said boldly. “I mean, I am she.”
There were splutters of indignation, but no more. My patience wore thin. I could be home tucking into bed with my medical books. Like me or not, but I could help. At least a little.
“Where is the sick man?” I said. “Time is passing.”
The owner of the voice leaned forward in his seat and rose. I had no choice but to retreat from the carriage and onto the ground outside. I backed away before the man trod on my feet, and fell backward, landing hard upon my tailbone. I looked up at the man, now visible by the torch he carried, its light glinting off the medallion he wore at his chest.
“Oh,” I said. “You’re the king, aren’t you?”
Chapter 6
Quick as anything, he reached out a hand and pulled me up. I was more muddied than hurt, and more embarrassed than muddied, but the king made no comment. When I was once more upright I remembered my manners and curtsied to His Majesty.