The Blackthorn Key

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Tom called for his sisters. Within a second, the five of them came thundering down the stairs. Then we sat down for dinner. Under different circumstances, I would have savored the beef, roasted to perfection with pepper and sage, but with every bite, Tom’s father pinched his lips as if I were eating his future. And I couldn’t stop thinking about poor Dr. Parrett. It scared me. I’d lost everything, too. One year later, would that be me? Living among my own life’s rubble, begging for scraps, imagining Master Benedict was still alive?

After dinner, Tom and I were ordered to clean the table and scour the pots. Normally, the Bailey girls would have been assigned their own tasks, but Tom’s father seemed to feel he’d get his money’s worth out of my staying there if I did all the chores. Free from their usual duties, the girls decided to hang around the kitchen and use us for their own amusement.

Cecily, delighted at this turn of events, decided she’d be taskmaster. She kept up a steady stream of orders as we worked, telling us how this pot needed more scrubbing, and how that pot should be scraped just so. Plump and cheery Isabel sat on the countertop, swinging her legs under her frilled orange petticoat and chattering away at us—something about a duck who had a sheep for a friend—not seeming to care whether anyone was listening or not. The other three, Catherine, Emma, and little Molly, found a ball of yarn and played some game called stick-tock. I don’t know what the rules were, but the girls appeared to score points each time the ball hit me or Tom. Double if it bounced off our heads.

As Tom and I finished with the pots, the three youngest girls clamped onto my legs, declared I was their prisoner, and refused to let me go until I paid for my freedom with a story. So upstairs we went to the girls’ bedroom, where the Baileys kept their only book, a dog-eared copy of Le Morte d’Arthur.

We all piled onto Cecily’s bed as I opened the cover. Cecily, sitting behind me, seemed more interested in braiding feathers into my hair than listening to the story. Isabel amused herself by smearing rouge on my cheeks and giggling a lot. The other three listened, ears pricked like wolves, as I read them the tale of “King Arthur and the Giant of Mont Saint-Michel.” The giant terrorized the countryside, killing its people and pillaging the land until the villagers begged King Arthur to save them. Molly, the youngest at four years old, hid her face in my lap as the giant ate twelve children like roast chickens on a spit. And she and gentle Emma both clutched at my waist during the final battle, when the two rolled down the hill to the sea, until the Great King of Britain smote the monster with his dagger.

Cecily leaned her slender frame against me, her head on the back of my neck. “I wish he were here,” she said sadly.

“King Arthur?” I said.

“Uh-huh.” She rested her chin on my shoulder and locked her arms around my chest. “He’d stop the Cult of the Archangel. Then they wouldn’t have hurt your master.” She sighed. “But I guess he’s just a story.”

She held on to me as Molly and Emma turned to the next page in the book, pleading with me to keep reading. Tom, watching from the doorway, hushed them and tucked them in. “That’s enough sport for one day. You’ll get another tale tomorrow.”

Tom and I blew out the candles and went outside, sitting on the well-scrubbed step in the back alley. Tom handed me a woolen rag so I could wipe the rouge off my cheeks. As I did, he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

“What?” I said.

“You’ve gone all quiet,” he said.

“Have I?”

“Uh-huh.” He sighed. “So what are you getting me into this time?”

“What do you mean?”