He let out a small sigh that might have been a laugh. “Maybe you would have asked for the wrong things.”
I shook my head more vigorously. “No, I wouldn’t! I would have asked her to make your legs whole again. And then I would have asked her to make sure you got accepted by a school in Wodenderry.”
He turned his head just enough to look at me, and he was smiling. “Maybe those aren’t the things I would have asked for.”
I was too tired to sit up in astonishment, but my eyes widened. “Really? Then what would you have wanted her to give you?”
Now he was laughing, but he shook his head. “Maybe I have to think up some better dreams before I present them to the Dream-Maker. What would you have asked for? That’s what I want to know.”
I sighed and snuggled deeper into the sofa. My head tilted sideways till it was leaning on Gryffin’s shoulder. “So many things,” I whispered. “I want my father to do something to prove he cared for me. I want my mother to be happy. I want someone in my family to love me for who I am,” I said. “I want you to be well, or at least out of pain. I want Sarah to marry Bo and have a splendid life. I want Mr. Shelby to find every book he’s ever wanted to read. I want…I want…I want everyone I ever met to have at least one wish come true, even if they don’t deserve it. That’s what I want.”
Gryffin was laughing now, silently. I could feel his shoulders shaking. He picked up my hand and held it in front of him, turning it this way and that, as if it was a rare and beautiful stone he had just rescued from a riverbed. “Those are some very generous wishes,” he said.
“Except your uncle,” I amended. “I don’t want him to ever be happy again.”
“And Carlon,” Gryffin added.
I sighed. “Even Carlon should have one wish come true. But not Frederick. And you should get twenty for each one that all the other people get.”
“So have any wishes come true?” he asked. “Since Melinda’s been here?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been too busy to notice.”
“It would be interesting to find out.”
I yawned and sat up, still yawning. Gryffin dropped my hand. “One of mine did,” I said. “You survived.”
He watched me seriously. His face was so pale that his blue eyes seemed especially vivid. “I hope you get more than one wish,” he said.
I stood up. “It was the most important one,” I said. “I don’t have to ask Melinda for anything else.”
In the morning, I walked up to the Parmer Arms, where I was scheduled to work a full day. The restaurant served a steady stream of local and out-of-town customers for the first three hours of the day, and then we had a little break about an hour before noon. I drew Betsy and Sarah aside. My face was so serious that I could tell they were both alarmed.
“I don’t know if either of you heard that Gryffin got hurt a few nights ago,” I said.
Sarah nodded. “Yes, Ian Shelby mentioned it, but I didn’t get all the details. Will he be all right? I was under the impression his injuries weren’t severe.”
“They were bad enough,” I said quietly. “Though he’ll mend. But he can’t go back to his uncle’s house.”
I saw instant comprehension come to both of their faces—and, unlike Mr. Shelby, they didn’t seem inclined to doubt me. But I had learned my lesson about telling the whole story, and I wanted more than sympathy from them just now.
“When he’s well enough to move, Gryffin will need someplace to stay—and someplace to work,” I said. “You know he’s good with his hands. And he’s very smart. I wondered if you had tasks you could turn over to him. He could count money or keep your books—for the Arms as well as the freighting company. He can write out correspondence or hand-letter signs. He can even work in the kitchen, if you sit him down someplace and bring over all the things you want him to chop and slice. And I’m sure there’s more he could do if you asked him.”
Betsy and Sarah were exchanging glances. I often wondered if it made Sarah happy, just gazing at her mother, knowing how much she resembled the older woman and able to see what she would look like twenty years down the road. I had to assume she was pleased to see she would appear so serene, so kind, the sort of person anyone would be grateful to become.
“There’s the mud room right on the back of the house,” Betsy said. “Not very big, but big enough for a bed and a chest of drawers. No steps to go up or down, just a straight shot right to the kitchen.”
“Bo made a wagon for his nephew last month,” Sarah said. “I bet he could make a chair for Gryffin, something with wheels instead of feet, that would let Gryffin move around the house.”
“Your father was saying just yesterday that he’d gotten his receipts all in a jumble and he didn’t have time to straighten them out.”
“And I’m wondering if perhaps we might advertise a service? ‘Fair copies made here’? There must be travelers coming through who might need a little help with their letters. A lawyer or two working on a will.”
“The menus,” Betsy said. “We could change them every week, if Gryffin could write them out.”
“Dinner specials,” Sarah said. “He could make signs and we could post them in the town square.”
With every word they said, I felt the pain in my chest grow sharper. I felt my lungs labor harder, but bring in less air. There was no room. Hope and happiness had lodged over my heart, and they were crowding out everything else.
Betsy turned to me with a smile. “We’ll get the room ready. Bring Gryffin here when he’s ready. We have lots of work for him to do.”
Part Two
Chapter Twelve
The year that followed was the happiest of my life.
It was a few more weeks before Gryffin was installed at the Parmer Arms. During that period of time, maybe twenty guests came and went at my mother’s house. Summermoon arrived and was merry and departed again. I turned fourteen. Gryffin healed, but not completely. His legs were in even worse shape than they had been before Chase Beerin came to town, and his daily, ordinary level of pain was higher than it had been in years. The massages I still performed once a week gave him some relief, but not as much as before. I knew, because he told me when I asked, that places on his legs always felt like they were on fire. Night and day. Though he laughed and worked and slept and was only rarely snappish because of the pain.
Mr. Shelby had made him a new set of canes, coming to my mother’s house to measure him for the proper height. And Gryffin forced himself to use them every day, making a slow promenade from the parlor to the kitchen and back again. But I could tell the exercise was agony. Still, I was awed by his determination, by his refusal to simply endure. With Gryffin, everything was about the effort. He did not mind failure so much as he minded the idea that he might stop trying. It was hard to believe that anything would ever make him give up.
Sarah’s red-haired Bo showed up at my mother’s house one day with the contraption he had constructed—a heavily padded chair that ended with four small wheels instead of feet. Handles on the back allowed me to propel Gryffin from behind, though he found that, inside my mother’s house, he could easily maneuver the chair by pushing himself off of walls and furniture. He was so delighted with the chair that he allowed me to take him outside in it and parade him up and down the street in front of my house. The ride was rocky, but he didn’t mind, nor did he seem bothered by the stares and whispers of the people we passed on our trial run.
“I don’t think I’ve felt the sunshine on my face for five weeks,” he gloated, closing his eyes and tilting his head up. He lifted his cupped hands, as if to check for rain. “It feels easier to breathe, somehow.”
“I’ll have to take you out every day,” I said. “Unless the weather’s bad.”
“Even then,” he said.
When he was well enough, I wheeled him all the way to the Parmer Arms, a bag of his belongings strapped to the back of the chair, another bag in his lap. Some passersby still stared, but by now most of the people of Th
rush Hollow had had a chance to view Gryffin in his outlandish chair, so they either waved if they were friendly, or ignored us if they were not.
Sarah and Betsy had set up a very small room right off the kitchen and filled it with everything Gryffin might need. The bed, the dresser, the basin of water—everything was at a height comfortable for a seated man to reach. Gryffin practiced moving his chair from the bedroom through the kitchen to the dining room, and found a few places too narrow for him to pass. Furniture was rearranged. The route was practiced again. Everything was flawless this time.
Gryffin was grinning broadly. “I’m all set,” he said. “When do I start?”
It wasn’t long before Gryffin became a fixture at the Parmer Arms. For the busiest of the working days, Sarah and Betsy had built a small desk for him at the front of the dining area, and here he had much to do. He answered questions for travelers when they first came in, for he had been equipped with maps, a list of stage schedules and fares, names of people looking for passengers to specific destinations, and other information. He handled all the money when people paid for their meals, and was scrupulous about counting coins at the end of the day. When the crowds thinned down, he organized the books for both businesses, and found several places where both Josh and Betsy could save significant amounts of money.
When there was nothing else to do, he read. He was still hoping to gain entrance to a professional school in Wodenderry, still studying in every free moment. Myself, I had pretty much given up the notion of further schooling, though Mr. Shelby dropped by the Arms every couple of weeks to try to cajole me into returning to the classroom.
“Between working here and helping out my mother, I don’t have time,” I told him. Though, truth to tell, I was doing very little work for my mother these days. I still helped prepare breakfast every morning, and I was on hand at least twice a week to do laundry, but most of the rest of my time was spent at the Arms. My mother could scarcely complain, since I gave her more than half of my salary. “Anyway, I already know as much as I need to, don’t you think? I can read and I can count. What else is there?”
“I’m going to talk to Gryffin,” Mr. Shelby muttered.
So Gryffin added to his list of chores the occasional hour spent tutoring me. I can’t say I was a good student. I can’t say I learned that much. But I wanted to please Gryffin, so I tried. I read more difficult books than would have come my way otherwise, and I enjoyed them. I studied more history. I practiced long division and improved my understanding of multiplication tables, but now and then I would still count on my fingers or ask Gryffin to solve it if the problem was too hard. But as long as I made the effort, he was satisfied. As long as I didn’t give up.
Now that I was at the Parmer Arms every day, I began to be more familiar with the regular customers. These included the stagecoach drivers, a number of merchants of both high and low degree, members of wealthy families who were constantly traveling to Wodenderry on political business, and more ordinary folk who had family in other cities. I found I enjoyed getting to know them and hearing how their lives progressed—and, when they had good news, celebrating with them.
For that fall, there seemed to be an abundance of small victories. “Can you believe it? Jennie’s pregnant! After all this time!” said one of my favorite customers, an ample and affectionate woman with an immense family scattered around the country. “She’s growing so big I think there must be two in there! Well, she’s just tickled.”
“Did I meet Jennie?” I asked, for I had encountered so many of her relations that I could not keep them all straight.
“You did. She was with me—oh, three weeks back. Big girl, curly yellow hair. Horse laugh, which some people don’t like, but it always makes me smile.”
“Oh, I remember her! Well, tell her congratulations.”
There was also the young man who had passed through with his family and stayed the night because his son came down with such a high fever that they were afraid to travel. He and his wife were still a little worried when they took to the road again the following day, and I had thought of them from time to time, wondering if the boy survived the journey. But when his father returned in a few weeks, he was smiling. Yes, the fever had abated. No, it had done no permanent damage. All was well.
In addition, all of us were closely following the story of a woman named Juliet who had come through on the common stage, traveling by herself and looking defiant but afraid. She was on her way to Merendon, where her uncle lived, to contest a will that seemed to give him control of property she had expected to inherit upon her parents’ deaths. Gryffin had spent some time with her, as they puzzled over the terms of the will she believed was valid, and making a copy of it, which all of us witnessed. The copy remained behind at the Parmer Arms, while Juliet went on to the seaside city.
This was not, we soon learned, a matter that would be settled quickly. Juliet came through our doors about once every six weeks for the next few months, always with news of some new development in the case. A witness had been located, then mysteriously had disappeared. An investigator found even more money in her parents’ estate than was previously realized—which was good, if Juliet won the case, but bad if her uncle did. A confused old servant changed her testimony so many times that it was impossible to believe anything she said. Juliet’s lawyer grew impatient, informed her he had better-paying customers with more hopeful prospects, and quit the case.
“And now I must find another lawyer,” she told us mournfully one afternoon as she sat in the Arms and ate an excellent soup that Betsy had prepared that morning. “But no one in Merendon will work for me. I don’t know if my uncle has bribed them to keep away from this case, or if they just don’t want the bother because they think it is not worth the money. And I’ve spent almost all of the money I did have—now all I can promise any lawyer is that I will pay him from the estate, if I ever prove it’s mine. And no one will work for free, I’m afraid.”
“So what will you do, then?” I asked. I was serving her hot tea and an extra biscuit, for which she would not be charged. Sarah had told me once that I could use my own discretion to give a needy customer a free meal now and then, and I knew she would not mind Juliet benefiting from this policy.
“I don’t know,” Juliet said, a note of hopelessness in her voice. She was a thin woman, perhaps thirty-five years old, with very dark hair worn always in a severe style. Her face was plain, but I thought she was pretty when she smiled. She didn’t smile often. “I think I’ll go home and work for a while, saving as much money as I can, and then I’ll try again. Maybe by then there’ll be some new young lawyer in Merendon who thinks my case is good and is willing to help me try to win it.”
There was a muffled laugh from the table directly to Juliet’s right. We both looked over in some indignation to see who was auditing our conversation and finding it amusing.
“Raymond,” I said, my voice reproving. “You of all people should not be mocking others’ misfortunes.”
Raymond was a strange man who had lately been a frequent visitor to the Parmer Arms. He was, oh, sixty, with a full head of snowy white hair and a smile of great charm—when he was sober. It seemed clear that he had once been a man of some standing who had fallen upon hard times, for he was clearly both educated and genteel, though very, very shabby. I didn’t know if alcohol had been his downfall or if he had turned to the bottle when his other prospects disappeared. Now he made a meager living running errands for wealthier men, carrying small packages between cities for people who were too busy to do the task themselves, and completing other odd jobs. Josh hired him from time to time to work in the stables, though he wouldn’t allow Raymond to drive any of his horses. “Can’t trust ’im,” was the freighting man’s simple assessment. “Might start out sober, but there’s no way to be sure he’ll stay that way. And my horses are worth far more to me than he is.”
Raymond came somewhat unsteadily to his feet and gave us both a graceful bow. “My dear ladies,?
?? he said. “I mock, but I do not mock you. I mock what was once the most brilliant legal mind in the entire kingdom! I have sat in consultation with the queen. I have outargued foreign ambassadors and pretenders to the throne. I have solved legal tangles that sat for two centuries before the court, miring five families in bitter dispute. For two decades, if anyone in the land needed a lawyer’s help, the first question would be, ‘Can we secure Raymond? Will Raymond take our case?’”
Juliet and I looked at each other uncertainly. “Is that true?” Juliet asked me in a whisper. “Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“And why should you?” Raymond demanded. “Look at me! Fallen so far from grace I might as well have been born a beggar’s son. Not the sort of man to inspire confidence, and well I know it.”
“What happened to you?” I asked outright.
He made a broad gesture with his hand, signifying matters too great to summarize. “A mistake in judgment—an attempt to rectify—another error,” he said. “Then a cycle of censure, regret, disdain, and remorse in a continuing spiral downward until all that was left was the pathetic and nearly useless man you see before you today. But I was great in my time. That you should believe.”
“Well, I’m sorry for you,” Juliet said, since it seemed he was expecting us to say something. “You are a lesson to us all.”
“I don’t want to be a lesson,” Raymond said irritably. “I want to be a tool.”
Juliet and I again exchanged baffled glances.
“I can help you,” Raymond said, enunciating very clearly. “I can win this case for you. If you trust me.”
Now Juliet and I were completely silent.
Raymond took a couple of wavering steps over to our table, pulled out a chair, and, uninvited, seated himself. “You have a will. Your uncle has another will. One of them is authentic, but which one? In my experience, it is the man with the greatest resources and the greediest heart who has the bigger incentive to lie. Besides, you’re a nice woman and I like you. Therefore, I believe yours is the true document. I am willing to help you prove it in a court of law.”