The Blackthorn Key

“I see,” I said, though it had been a long time since I’d understood four-year-old logic.

It didn’t take much longer to become clear. In the last of the uncountable alleys, we came upon . . . I didn’t know what to call it. It wasn’t a house anymore.

What had stood here had once been the largest home on the street. Last summer, a fire had gutted it. The top floor was completely gone. The second floor was halfway to ash, too, just bare, blackened walls and charred timbers piercing upward like giant toothpicks. In one corner, the bottom of the house had collapsed, leaving nothing but rubble and splintered oak.

The black house.

Cecily was in the alley. She paced, hands tugging at the front of her lavender dress. When she spotted me and Molly, she glanced over at the back door of the house. It hung loosely from a single wobbling hinge, swaying back and forth behind the man waiting for us.

Dr. Parrett smiled. “Welcome,” he said.





CHAPTER


27


THE INSIDE OF THE HOUSE was just as scarred. Soot streaked across fire-licked beams that somehow still supported the upper story. Dried mud tracked over every floor, so thick it was like we were still in the streets. Above the fireplace, a ruined painting of some long-forgotten landscape hung from a broken frame, oils melted, canvas crumpled.

Dr. Parrett. Poor, mad Dr. Parrett, whose family had died in the blaze last summer, still living here with the ghost of his son, James.

Molly didn’t seem bothered by the house at all. She stared in fascination at the ruins around her, too young to understand what it really meant. Cecily wasn’t so calm. She wrapped her arm around mine and pressed against me. I pressed back, chilled to the bone, wondering if James’s spirit was really still here.

“My son is sleeping,” Dr. Parrett whispered, “and he has to work on his studies tomorrow. So don’t you lot stay up all night.” He wagged his finger at me good naturedly.

“We won’t,” I said. It was all I could do not to make the sign of the cross.

“You can stay with James, in his room. It’s in the back.”

He lifted a lantern from the mantel and led us around the rear to a small room without a door. A bed with a straw mattress was tucked into a corner. The straw was fresh, and unlike the rest of the house, there was no mud in here. Everything else was badly burnt. Scraps of shriveled damask peeled away from the pitted wall. The bed’s headboard was charred and broken. One leg was gone, the corner propped up by a pair of bricks. A soot-stained pillow rested at the head, and beside it, a worn woolen knight doll with a missing button eye.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Dr. Parrett said.

He smiled and left. Molly immediately went for the doll. She plunked herself down on the floorboards, and soon she and the knitted knight were having a conversation about where his horse had gone.

“How did you all know where to find me?” I asked Cecily.

“We didn’t.” She huddled against me, glancing at the blackened walls. “When Tom saw the King’s Men coming, he was worried you might go back to the house. So he sent my sisters out to look for you. He asked me to arrange a place for you with Dr. Parrett.”

My battered body overcame the chill at being in James’s room, haunted or not. Slowly, I lowered myself to the straw. My back howled, then cooled to a low moan, the weight finally off it. Cecily helped me down, looking concerned.