Both ruffians reflexively clamped their knees together. Tess might have found this amusing in better circumstances.
Reg abruptly resheathed his knife; maybe he feared imminent quigutl attack, or maybe he decided she wasn’t worth his time. “You’re clearly our fellow malcontempt,” he said, gazing over her head into the great hall. “I respect that, and you may keep whatever you’ve taken. There’s plenty enough here. Rowan, bring in the old man.”
Tess was too busy taking deep, shaky breaths to wonder whom he was talking about.
Rowan and Reg looked out at the bright afternoon sunshine. “Damnation, he’s bogged off again,” said Rowan, trotting outdoors. After some yelling and thumping, Rowan returned with a beardy old man in tow, pale and skinny, his right hand missing two fingers.
It was the beggar from Trowebridge.
* * *
The oldster met Tess’s gaze and held it. Surely he didn’t recognize her. He’d been half asleep and addled, and she’d looked like a girl. He put a skinny finger to his lips, though, as if they shared a secret.
Rowan steered him by the arm while Reg directed his attention around the front hall, pointing out distinctive artwork and asking, “How about this unicorn tapestry, Griss? No? Were you an aflictionado of green-men?”
“He is a green-man,” muttered Rowan under his breath.
“You’d prefer Yawning Nancy?” said Reg, and they both laughed.
They were appalling. Tess shuddered to think that if they’d arrived an hour earlier, they would have spied her bathing. She thought about bolting while their backs were turned, but didn’t like her odds. She wasn’t a fast runner, and they’d surely give chase. That was basic hound logic, learned from Faffy: if you ran, you were prey.
They led Griss into the great hall and continued the odd interrogation. Are these your armchairs? Your hearths? Your spooky buck heads? The old man shook his head after every question and said, “I d-don’t know. I think I own a fire…fire…fire door like that.”
“Damn it all.” Rowan kicked over the lacquered fire screen—the word Griss had been looking for and hadn’t found—and it clattered to the floor.
“Temper,” said Reg, his frown plowing furrows beside his mouth. “I told you, his brain’s a wormy cheese. What we need are lords and ladies who recognize him. He comes from quality, trust me; someone will know him.”
Tess boggled. Had they broken in to determine whether this was the old man’s home? Were they trying to return him to his family? She supposed a noble family might offer a reward for a missing lord, but she couldn’t believe the old man had ever been lord of anything.
“Dear Lord Grissypants,” said Reg, pinching the man’s sallow cheek. His fingers left a red welt. “You’ve put us to a great deal of trouble. I think we deserve a little condensation.”
They went upstairs to look for it, leaving Tess and the old man alone, to her great surprise. Were they so sure she wouldn’t run away?
Griss made no move to flee; he shakily seated himself in one of the velvet armchairs and unsmilingly waved Tess over. She considered ignoring him, getting herself well quit of this house and these villains, but guilt won out and pushed her to the old man’s side. He seemed recovered from the ferocious rib-kicking, thank Allsaints, but what might these two villains do to him if they never found his manor house?
And what could she do about it? She owed him an apology, at the very least.
He rose at her approach, grabbed Tess by the shoulders, and shook her. “What are you doing here, Johnny?” he hissed. “These are dangerous men. I’ve been trying to lead them away from you, and Annie and baby Lion, and now you…you…you…”
His eyes went vacant and fearful, as if he saw something that wasn’t there, or had suddenly lost his bearings.
“I swore I’d kill you if I saw you again,” he said mournfully, “but I’m not sure I have the…the…” He patted his concave chest meaningfully.
Tess pulled out of his grasp; his gnarled hand wasn’t strong enough to hold her. “I’m not Johnny. My name’s, uh, Jacomo.”
Griss looked crestfallen, which compelled her, absurdly, to reassure him. “Easy mistake to make. Same first letter.”
“Jacomo?” said the old man, scrutinizing her. Even his eyelashes were white, the eyes behind them dark as well water. “Sweet St. Siucre! Forgive me, child: you’ve grown so tall I didn’t know you.”
Griss approached again, raising shaky hands to her face. She let him touch her cheeks with hands as dry as paper. “You look like your mother.”
“My mother…Annie?” asked Tess. It was the only name she had to guess with.
Griss’s face fell. “Oh, Johnny. Haven’t you heard? Annie’s dead, and it’s your fault.”
In Trowebridge, Tess had found him frightening. The truth, now that she was talking to him, was of a different flavor, and nearer her heart: he was like Grandma Therese.
Before the baby came, Tess had spent two months at Dombegh Manor with her paternal grandmother, who’d been convinced that Tess was her dead sister, Agnes. Uncle Jean-Philippe had called his mother’s condition antiquitus extremus; Chessey the midwife had preferred second childhood. Tess had thought of her grandmother, somewhat poetically, as having come unbuttoned from time. She always thought it was some other year, other place, other people.
Griss was not some contemptible creature worthy only of her pity. There was a person in there, however confused he might be.
Tess guided Griss back to his chair. “I’m not Johnny, but tell me all about him.”
Tess knelt, holding his withered hand. His beard was matted, and he was missing several teeth (his remaining teeth, emboldened by the extra room, had rebelled against the tyranny of standing in line). He licked his lips with a pale tongue and said, “I mistook you for my brother. Your face—I thought I—this keeps happening. Nothing stays where I put it. I’m sorry, Ja…Ja…”
“Jacomo,” said Tess.
“You were the most honest of your household, with the greatest…the greatest.” He patted his heart again; apparently he found that word too slippery to hold. “I’m glad they haven’t beaten it out of you. We try, don’t we?”
“We try what?” asked Tess, barely following. He seemed to mean some Jacomo he’d really known, not his brother Johnny again, but it was hard to be sure.
Griss stared into the cold hearth. “We try to do right, and we…we…they gang up on us, fear and pain and revenge and…and then we find we’ve done wrong.”
Tess felt her own slippery heart constricting. His words touched close to the truth she’d meant to tell him. She had only enough courage to whisper: “I need to tell you I’m sorry.”
“For what?” he asked, his face slack and baffled.
She took a shaky breath. “I kicked you in the ribs, back in Trowebridge, and then I ran off and left you because I couldn’t face what I’d done.”
Griss’s shaggy brows drew down as he studied her face. She thought for a moment that he might recognize her, but then he said, “Was I in Trowebridge?”
“Trowebridge isn’t the main thing,” said Tess. “Do you recall someone kicking you?”
His expression went dreamy; he touched his side with his three-fingered hand. “It wasn’t a…no, no, I saw the dragon. It took Annie, and I…I ran after it. Then I couldn’t work out how to get home. Someone moved the mountains.”
It should have been a relief to know that she hadn’t left him permanently wounded or terrorized, but still Tess squirmed with frustration. It was like apologizing to a wall: how could he forgive her if he didn’t remember she’d wronged him? How could she assuage her guilt without his forgiveness? It didn’t evaporate when she apologized, instead continuing to rack her fiercely.
Loud cursing resounded from the front of the house, followed by a whistle and raucous barking.
Tess’s blood froze in her veins.
The caretaker had come to check on the lodge and found the broken door.