Highfell Grimoires by Langley Hyde

Author:Langley Hyde [Hyde, Langley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, steampunk, novel
Publisher: Blind Eye Books
Published: 2014-03-18T22:19:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When I headed upstairs, past the schoolrooms and through the boys’ dormitory, I heard a soft murmur and saw a shadowy figure hunched over a boy’s bed. Alarm filled me.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

A female voice said, “Oh, sir, Lord Franklin, sir, it’s me!”

“Molly?” I asked.

“Mommy!” young Thaddeus said.

The long and uncomfortable silence in the darkness broke when Thaddeus started talking about squirrels. He’d seen one, drawn in the margins of a grammar, and now he now fixated on squirrels eating up our building. Thaddeus seemed to class them, size-wise, alongside elephants.

“Hush, hush, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Molly stroked Thaddeus’ hair. She said, “Be quiet now, my sweet. I’m going to go, but I’ll be back soon. You stay there and sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

“Okay,” young Thaddeus said.

Desperation edged Molly’s voice as she faced me. “Sir, I can explain everything, if you’ll give me the chance.”

I replied, “Let’s speak in the schoolroom.”

“Sir, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not,” she said. “Watchmen patrol the schoolrooms on occasion, sir.”

“The garret then?” I offered my elbow and escorted her between the boys’ beds to the ladder. Seams of light shone down from the trapdoor below. Realizing they illuminated her ascent up the ladder, I rapidly whipped around to preserve her modesty.

Golden light poured down as she opened the hatch. I could hear the scuffling as she climbed up into our room, then the perplexed greeting that Leofa gave her. I followed her up.

Leofa struck a match and lit a second tallow candle.

I offered Molly our chair and something to drink. When she refused, I filled our single cup with water from the rain tanks, gulped it down, refilled it for Leofa, and handed it over.

I took a seat on my cot, and then noticed that the bedding at the foot had a puddle of ice forming on it. I had located it a good distance from the drip this morning, and now this! I’d have to ask Leofa if I could share with him again tonight, after Molly had left.

Molly stared downward, fidgeting, and then said, “Well, it’s like this, hold your peace and try not to think too badly of me until I finish speaking, right? I was sixteen when I got a real good place at a lord’s house in the city, a fine house. The work pleased me. The lord of that house, he saw me tending the gardens. I’m passing well at the household garden.”

“You can say that again,” Leofa said. “I can’t believe you can make those cabbages grow up here.”

Molly flushed and smiled, but her nervousness showed. “He said he wanted to work with me, help me put together a folio on city gardening. It’d be real popular, he said. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what he wanted from me and I’d go only so far without a wedding. So he married me.”

I could see where this was going, but I didn’t interrupt.

“He wanted to keep it secret, you know,” she continued, “for political reasons.

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