Wicked Will by Bailey MacDonald

Author:Bailey MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Published: 2009-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

“Name what part I am for, and proceed.”

Peter Stonecypher, looking worried, sat outside one of the tents, talking to Watkyn Bishop. Beyond them, Dunce contentedly ate grass. “Tom,” said Peter as I came near, “how is the life in the town, lad?”

“Well, I thank you,” I said. “I suppose Alan is not yet back?”

“Nay,” Watkyn said. “He may have got to London by this time, if Molly did not stagger and fall from his driving her so hard.”

“Alan is a better rider than that,” Peter said quickly. I knew that Molly would make but a slow journey of it, for she was not the youngest of animals. If we’d been in funds, Alan might have rented stronger post-horses along the way. ’Twas said that renting one horse after another, you could ride a hundred miles or more in a day. On slow Molly, though, Alan would be lucky to go more than twenty or so miles before she needed a long rest.

“How do you fare here in camp?” I asked.

With a sigh, Peter jingled the little leather purse that my uncle usually carried. It rang thinly. “We have not much brass, and that’s the truth,” he said. “Michael won us eighteen pence at shove-groat in the Bear, but now no one will play with him. We must make what we have last.”

I could not keep from smiling. Shove-groat was a kind of shuffleboard, played on a table. A rectangle divided into nine parts, numbered from nine down to one, would be drawn in chalk. Then the players would toss for turn. Each one would put a coin—a King Edward shilling, old and worn smooth, for preference—at the edge of the table, so its rim just overhung. Then, with a quick slap, the player would send the coin sliding down onto the board.

You had to score nine on the first try. Then the goal was to send the coin onto numbers that would add up to thirty-one, no more and no less. You shot until you went over that number, or missed the board, or until your coin touched a line, and then you gave over your turn and waited, having to begin at nine all over again. Although most places had laws against wagering, people did bet with each other and with the players. Michael Moresby was an old hand at the game, and I could see how in one evening he could begin with but one penny and his favorite shooter, one of those old Edward shillings, and end with eighteen pence clinking in his pocket. Still, as Peter said, once the locals had lost bets to him, it would be hard for him to find another profitable game.

“I might be able to find some food for you,” I said.

Peter smiled and ruffled my hair. “We can eat, lad. ’Tis idleness that is our curse. We practice lines from the plays, and we do the dances and the tumbling and all, but not working—that is a curse, when a man’s willing to work.

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