Avenged

by Lynn Carthage

  With a sigh, Steven does so.

  “Tell me about last night,” says the officer.

  “Not much to tell. We had dinner and put our child to bed. We talked a little, watched one show, and went to bed ourselves.”

  “At what time?”

  Steven shrugs. “Maybe ten?”

  “Who else did you talk to?”

  “Just my wife and child.”

  “Anyone come to the door?”

  Steven frowns. “No.”

  “Did you go outside yourself last night?”

  “No.”

  “Your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Make any phone calls?”

  “No. Look, can you tell me what this is all about?”

  “I’m asking the questions here,” says Officer Stonecroft. Steven’s face tightens. “You and your wife saw no one but your child, and thus you vouch for each other’s presence here at home all night.”

  “That’s right,” says Steven.

  “Tell me a little about yourself,” invites the officer.

  “Seriously?”

  The officer gives him a narrow-lidded look.

  “Let’s see. I’m forty-six years old, born here but raised in the United States. I’m a software engineer. I have two children but only one survives.”

  Officer Stonecroft suddenly looks alert. “What happened to the other child?”

  “She died in a drowning accident while we still lived in California.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last year.”

  “And you moved to Grenshire just a bit ago.”

  I see how it looks to the officer. If there was anything suspicious about Phoebe’s death, it looks like her parents fled the country. And it’s dawning on me that Steven’s being questioned about Alexander . . . and possibly Dee.

  “We wanted a fresh start. And this house had been on the market for so many years with no takers. It seemed like a good way to give our youngest daughter a second start. All of us, really.”

  “You are Steven Arnaud.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you go by any other name in the States?”

  “No.”

  “So if I placed a call to that jurisdiction, they could confirm your address in . . . ?”

  “San Francisco. Yes.”

  “Please write it down here,” says Officer Stonecroft.

  As I drift back to check on Phoebe’s mum, Officer Stonecroft continues to ask questions of Steven: if he has a criminal record, if he has ever gone under any other name. I can tell he’s using a barrage of questions to try to get Steven to misspeak, to make a mistake and say something incriminating. How awful, after everything this family has been through, that he is now under suspicion of murder.

  In the dining room, I see that Phoebe’s mum is also suffering under an onslaught of questions. “We were both here all night,” she’s saying as I arrive.

  “Are you a light sleeper?”

  “I tend to be.”

  “Is it possible your husband could’ve slipped out at night and you wouldn’t have noticed?”

  She draws herself up at that and glares at Officer Huddleston. “My husband doesn’t ‘slip out’ at night.”

  “Two children have gone missing,” says Officer Huddleston. “Both Grenshire teenagers. One of them told her friends she was going to see the artifacts that had been discovered. She never came home.”

  Phoebe’s mum gasps. “So that boy we were seeing on the news . . . he’s not the only one missing?”

  “That’s right.” Officer Huddleston lowers his voice and leans in toward her, as if he is sharing a confession. “We need your help. Two mothers are missing their children tonight. You can imagine how that feels. If you know anything, please tell us.”

  She reacts as if she’d been slapped. “I feel for both the mothers and the fathers,” she says. “You don’t even know how much I can feel for them. I have been there and experienced it to the degree that no parent should have to endure. But if you are insinuating—and I believe you are—that my husband had anything to do with those missing children, you are dead wrong.”

  “I didn’t mean to insinuate that,” he says, although clearly that is what he meant. “We’re duty-bound to investigate. The last place this young woman spoke of going happens to be land your house sits on. We have to ask. It’s uncomfortable, but we have to do it.”

  She doesn’t respond, but hatred and misery blare out of her eyes. I’m wondering how much of the officer’s investigation is based on Dee’s statement to a friend that she was coming here and how much has to do with the historic legend of this house, a place where, over centuries, many, many children have disappeared. It hasn’t happened for a long time, but it seems coincidental, I can see from his view, that soon after Steven and his family have taken over residence at the manor, the disappearances have started up again.

  “Has your husband seemed changed since you moved here?” he asks.

  I see the struggle on her face. She wants to say, Of course he’s changed, we lost our daughter, but that would open up a terrible line of questioning, so she simply shakes her head.

  “Sure about that?” he asks.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I want you to think of me as a friend,” he says. “I know you care about these missing children. You’re a mother. I want to find them, and you do, too. If you can help me, call me.” He gives her a card.

  “Appalling sexism on your part,” she flares at him. “Maybe I’m the one with the kids in the dungeon, and he’s the one you should be handing the card to.”

  “Oh shite, lady, shut it,” breathes Miles, and we exchange a pained glance.

  “Maybe you haven’t seen the statistics,” says the officer unconcernedly. “It’s rarely women, and almost always men.” He stands up and starts walking down the hallway to the den, where Steven’s still talking with Officer Stonecroft.

  Maybe, after all, he hasn’t heard of Madame Arnaud?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  How fascinating to consider the boatloads of three Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who settled in the Roman province Britannia to found their own civilization, and, thankfully to those of us who speak it, a new language. Ah, to have been the king of Kent in 597 when Pope Gregory’s curious delegation arrived to find the tribes now organized as kingdoms, all under his rule!

  —History of Our English Tongue

  After the officers leave, Phoebe’s parents naturally begin a litany of comparing notes with each other. “They suspect you’re behind that boy’s disappearance,” says Phoebe’s mother. “And there’s a girl missing now, too.”

  Steven frowns. “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Probably hoping you’d slip up and say something about her.”

  Steven sinks to a chair at the dining room table, putting his head in his hands. “I’m tired of all this. It’s not worth fighting. They don’t want us here at the manor, and now we’re suspects in missing child cases? I know we wanted some distraction when we moved to England, but this is more than I bargained for.”

  “We’re not giving up,” says Phoebe’s mother firmly. “Phoebe’s doing something, with Miles and that other girl she spoke of. We have to stay here until they can figure out their task.”

  “But if I wind up in prison?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I hate this,” says Phoebe. “What if they really do think Steven’s behind this? Not just investigating but truly operating under some erroneous belief that he came to England to abduct kids?”

  “They’re casting about for any explanation,” says Miles. “Of course they had to interview him; Dee told her friend she was coming here, and they never saw her again.”

  I look down at my front, so newly black. I’m used to the gleam of white from my apron. I feel like a bloated crow, sick with seed. “Phoebe and Miles, would you mind if I take myself away for a bit?”

  Phoebe lo
oks stricken. “Of course. I’m sorry for what you learned yesterday.”

  I shrug. “It turns out I was the same as any other servant here. I took the coward’s way out.”

  “You thought she was going to torture you,” Miles reminds me. “You wanted a quick, easy death, not to spend years as her captive.”

  In a way, I have spent years as a captive, haunting the Arnaud Manor and the meadow. But at least physical pain was removed from the equation.

  I smile at them and intention myself onto the front courtyard of the manor. I look up at the façade of the home, so many mullioned windows and gables, a profusion of stone against the twilit sky. I have no idea where to go, but I know I need to be alone with my thoughts.

  The meadow is no longer a peaceful place for me . . . at least, not for a while.

  I decide to go to Austin’s cottage, where his family once embraced me as a member. I can look at the emblem on the door again, the same as on Austin’s tombstone.

  It’s a nice walk from the manor so I elect to do it as the living do, foot by foot, although that is only an illusion for me. A pleasant footpath, largely overgrown, leads up to a cart path along a hedgerow, and it is this I follow as darkness begins to fall.

  His cottage stops me right in my tracks.

  I thought it would be moss and ivy covered, lost to the creep of the forest’s claiming of the rocks that formed it . . . But instead its windows gleam with light. There are people moving around inside. A gentle peaty smoke drifts from the chimney.

  I pause at the door to look at the emblem, studying the monster’s face. Phoebe and Miles call it a dragon but that’s not exactly right. It’s got a human aspect somehow. Its visage feels expressive of emotion in a way only a human’s could. He is howling at his imprisonment.

  I pity him.

  I feel a rush of disgust and anger at his treatment. My fingernails long to dig into the wood, but I have no ability. I’m as helpless as the trapped beast.

  I enter the cottage and clap my hands to my mouth in shock.

  Where Austin’s family once had a modest collection of benches at the table and a chair by the fire, the house is now handsomely and modernly furnished. Overstuffed chairs provide a comfort that Mrs. Fairecloth’s simple cushions never could have. The lighting is warm; electric lights provide a brightness the candles and kerosene lamps weren’t capable of. It’s Austin’s home but rendered in completely different flavoring. It’s as if someone took a book I loved and bound it differently, using a wildly different typeface.

  And: there are people here. Not Austin’s family, but perhaps they are familial descendants. Reginald Boswick is here, which shocks me. Is this his home now? Is that why the symbol figures on his business card—only that, and nothing more? Just a curiosity?

  He is joined by another man and woman, roughly his age, and a teenage girl. I focus on her as she is the one talking as I enter.

  “I saw him,” she says. “We know he died, but he was before me as real as the living.”

  “It’s simply not possible, my dear. Your eyes deceived you,” says the older woman, whose gray hair is in a bun.

  The girl makes an annoyed noise and pushes her dark hair behind her ears. “I was in his house,” she says. “And I saw him. Who else would I have seen there?”

  I frown. I think that . . . she’s talking about Miles. After he drank the Sangreçu blood, he temporarily gained corporeality. He told Phoebe and me he’d seen a girl our age visiting his parents. I believe this must be her.

  “But surely you are mistaken. We attended the funeral. The lad is dead and in the ground.”

  “I came down the stairs and found him with his parents. It was a chaotic scene. He was trying to calm down his mother and simultaneously tell them about someone else, a girl at the Arnaud Manor.”

  “The child? The girl they call Tabitha?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say her name. He disappeared in the midst of talking to them. He was there, paler and paler, as if my eyes were blurring, and then gone.”

  “That is strange beyond belief,” says Boswick.

  “Do you believe he could have . . . ?” murmurs the man.

  “No,” says the woman firmly. “It is simply impossible. The dead do not drink.”

  “But how else to explain his sudden appearance to his family?”

  “Tell us everything he said, Raven,” he appeals to the girl, and by his naming her, I realize she is indeed the one Miles spoke of.

  “He said the manor had a family living in it, and he met their daughter, and he wanted his parents to work with the parents. He said there was magic there.”

  “So then perhaps there is something to this family’s line.”

  “I’d hoped so, given the fact the family has been tracked for centuries. But when he died we had simply lost hope.”

  “The threads we follow are thin indeed,” says Boswick.

  “Filigree,” says the woman.

  Silence falls among them. “Any other items to discuss?” Boswick asks.

  “The swords,” says the man.

  “And what are we to do with that?” asks the woman.

  The others rest, blank faced.

  “We can’t very well cover them back up, can we?”

  “It’s an opportunity,” says Raven. “Through their discovery, we may learn more about the prophecy.”

  “Along with the rest of the world.”

  “And is that so bad?”

  “It is if their mission contradicts ours.”

  “Forget the swords; our bigger problem is that two people have disappeared on the grounds of the manor.”

  “Related to our work?”

  “I think not. But possibly.”

  “And again: What can we do?”

  “Patrol the woods. Keep people out.”

  “Rebuild the wall blocking the driveway, shall we? And wall in that despicable new family?” the woman offers with a wry smile.

  “It would serve them right,” says Boswick grimly.

  “Is there anything we can do to find the missing? Do we think they’re . . . dead?” asks Raven.

  “Of course they’re dead,” says Boswick. “Something has happened at the manor. A shift in power.”

  “I feel helpless,” says Raven. “I wish I could have grabbed Miles when I saw him and brought him straight here.”

  “We should’ve spoken to him while he yet lived,” says Boswick.

  “We weren’t to talk to him until he turned eighteen, and no one could’ve predicted his death,” the woman reminds him.

  “Sometimes our own laws hamper our progress.”

  “And isn’t that the way of the world,” she says philosophically. “Now then. We would typically have our reading of the prophecy and then adjourn for another year. But there are so many things going on. I believe we should meet back here in a week.”

  “Sooner,” says Raven. “Things are happening. But I can’t stay at the Whittleby home. Too dire for my taste. My parents will murder me if I miss more school, too. How about meeting here the day after tomorrow?”

  “Indeed,” says the woman approvingly. “You mustn’t miss school for the sake of two silly teens who can’t listen to everything their body is telling them and stay out of the woods.”

  “Maybe their guts didn’t warn them,” says Raven. “Not everyone feels the premonitions of danger.”

  “But these woods . . . !” she says, and everyone nods, eventually even Raven.

  “All right, then. The official reading,” says Boswick. He unrolls a scroll that is made of soft, buttery leather.

  He clears his throat and begins. “‘On a stronde the king doth slumber, and below the mede the dragon bataille’—I’ve never known how to pronounce that,” he says.

  “No one here will correct you,” says the woman. “Each year I feel I understand it less, rather than more.”

  I’ve heard this language before. I try hard to remember. I have a vague memory of Steven reading it
aloud on the train in France. He must’ve read it from a book—and here’s the original scroll.

  “. . . ‘the dragon bataille the wicked brike with bisemare from yon damosel, and the goodnesse undone for she who bitrayseth. But an thee seche they of the ilke lykenes and lygnage, for a long tyme abide thee to come thereby the thre wyghts borne on the day of swich clamor for the kynge and han them drink of Sangreçu blood, then they may leere the halkes and lede the lorn to might, eftsoone do Brytayne arise to her gloire.’ Very clumsily done, I’m afraid.”

  “Not at all,” says the man. “You sound impressively authentic.”

  I stare down at the prophecy, burned onto the calfskin, resting on the table and curling at the edges. I wish we had known before that it was an important prophecy. How ironic that Steven just read a bit of it to us and none of us understood its significance. Or if Miles and Phoebe knew, they never told me.

  The words mean little to me. I believe they are Old English. I do note that three “wyghts” are born on the day . . . just as Miles, Phoebe, and I are children of October 20. We must be the three wyghts. What on earth does that mean?

  I study the end of the prophecy, where the long sentence comes to a close. We must “leere the halkes and lede the lorn to might.”

  The word leere makes me think of leery, so perhaps it is the root of that familiar word to me. Thus, we must beware of the halkes . . . do they mean hawks? It would be wonderful to learn exactly what we are to be afraid of. Perhaps it is the halkes that have killed Alexander and Dee in the woods.

  There was no danger in the woods until recently. Over the years since the manor had been abandoned, children had come and peered in the windows, sometimes penetrated into the interior, but nothing in the woods had halted their progress.

  I peer down at the ancient words, trying to sort through my thoughts. The biggest change has been Phoebe’s family moving into the manor. But in the time that followed, there were no disappearances. Was it the discovery of the swords or something else? Certainly the swords brought Dee and Alexander to the property, but was it also the genesis of the malevolent forces that wished them harm?

  “Each year, I feel at a loss,” says the woman. “I will die before we see the prophecy enacted.”