Goblin Moon (48 page)

Chapter
41

In which Sera’s Homecoming is not what she
Expects.

At Mittleheim, Hermes Budge and the young ladies
boarded a pleasure barge moving down the Lunn to Thornburg. Sera
and Elsie had abandoned their ball gowns for something a bit more
functional: dresses of flowered chintz, provided by Tilda, and wide
brimmed hats of chip straw. Mr. Budge had also changed out of
finery; yet he appeared as sober and gentlemanly as ever in Ezekiel
Karl’s Sunday suit. They spent a long quiet day on the river, then
part of another, and reached their destination the folwing
afternoon.

While Mr. Budge was occupied trying to procure sedan
chairs; Sera took Elsie by the hand, and the two girls, moving
swiftly along the docks, disappeared into a crowd of bustling
humanity.

“But Sera,” Elsie protested, as they left the river
behind and proceeded down a narrow lane. “I thought we could
trust
Mr. Budge.”

“It is not that I do not trust Mr. Budge—or his
friends, either,” said Sera. “But I have misplaced my confidence so
many times already, I no longer feel as though I can trust my own
judgement. And really, we don’t know anything about these people;
this Mr. Owlfeather or any of the others. Lord Skelbrooke said they
were friends of Jedidiah, but what to make of Lord Skelbrooke,
himself, I really do not know!”

“Except,” said Elsie, who was panting by now. “Except
that you are madly in love with him.”

“Madness certainly has something to do with it,” Sera
agreed, as they dove down another twisting lane.

Two seasons had turned since Sera and Elsie last
strolled the streets of Thornburg. The peddlers were still there,
hawking roasted apples, strings of hazelnuts, and lanthorns made
out of dried gourds. The country girls were selling caged field
mice for pets and blackbirds for pies.

“But Sera,” said Elsie. “If Francis Skelbrooke were
not our friend—if he hadn’t our best interests at heart—why should
he have come to rescue me from Lord Skogsrå—or warned us about the
Duchess—or made arrangements to keep us safe?”

“I don’t know,” said Sera. “But Lord Vodni also
warned me against Jarl Skogsrå—and for that I was willing to give
him my confidence. I trusted Vodni, we both trusted the Duchess,
and
you
were actually falling in love with
Skogsrå!”

They paused for a moment, by a lamp post, to catch
their breath. “No,” said Elsie, “I don’t believe that I was. But I
felt safe with him, and I thought he would always take care of me.
And I thought, if I couldn’t marry—Well, if I couldn’t marry
someone that I loved, Lord Skogsrå would do as well as anyone.

“But you cannot imagine what it was like at the end,”
she added, with a shudder, “standing there so helplessly, doing
everything he told me to do, hearing myself speak exactly as he
instructed me, and all the while some part of me knew that
something was very, very wrong.”

“It must have been dreadful,” said Sera, as they set
out again. “And of course, we have no way of knowing how much of a
hold the Duchess has on Cousin Clothilde or Cousin Benjamin—even if
we
could
trust them, I must suppose we
would only succeed in drawing the Duchess’s wrath down on them as
well. So we must not go home. Lord Skelbrooke said that we must
not, and on that point, at least, I am willing to trust him.”

“You don’t think—you don’t think he might have been
warning you not to go back to your grandfather’s bookshop?” Elsie
asked.

“My dear, Lord Skelbrooke has never
been
to the bookshop. I don’t even know that he
knows where it is. Besides, we cannot go away without speaking to
anyone.

“If there is anyone in all this whom I know we can
trust,” she added, “that someone is Jedidiah. If the Glassmakers
are
his friends and Jed is in their
confidence, he will know in an instant where we have gone, and he
will come there to find us.”

They arrived at the bookshop half an hour later, only
to discover that the shop was closed. Sera surveyed, with
considerable surprise, the shuttered windows above and below. Then
she gave another tug at the door.

“How very odd. He is always open for business at this
time of the day,” she said. “I wonder if Grandfather is ill?”

She knocked on the door, waited a long time for an
answer, and then she knocked again. Finally, the two girls heard
shuffling footsteps moving toward the door. There was the sound of
a bolt moving, and the door opened by perhaps six inches.

Caleb Braun peered cautiously out through the narrow
opening. “Burn me, if it ain’t Miss Sera!” He did not appear overly
pleased to see her.

“Do let me inside, Caleb,” said Sera, trying to peer
into the shop, over his head. “I have come to visit my
grandfather.”

“Well, you can’t,” said Caleb, shaking his head. “He
ain’t—he ain’t in. And I got my instructions: no visitors!”

“But that surely does not apply to me,” said Sera,
pushing her way past Caleb and into the shop. Elsie slipped in
behind her.

Hand in hand, the two girls went up the steep stairs,
with Caleb following more slowly. In the little sitting room under
the eaves, Elsie took a seat by the fire. But Sera insisted on
opening the shutters, before plunking herself down in a chair by
the window.

Caleb seated himself on a stool and sat there glaring
at her. Then, suddenly, all the stiffness and stubbornness went out
of him. “There ain’t no use you sitting there waiting,” he said
wearily. “Fact is, he ain’t acoming back, your grandpa. He’s gone
for good, Miss Sera. Wish I could tell you otherwise, but that’s
the truth.”

Sera stared at him disbelievingly. Her grandfather to
leave the bookshop after all of these years—and without even
telling her? “But then,
where
has he gone?
Where can he possibly have gone? Give me his direction and I—“

“He ain’t left no direction,” said Caleb, with
another shake of his head. “He left real sudden and I’m certain
sure, he don’t want you following him, not where he’s gone!”

Sera continued to stare at him incredulously. “Caleb
Braun,” she said at last. “Either you are telling me an outright
lie, or else you have gone completely mad!”

It was then that they all heard the footsteps and the
creaking, the steady progress of someone climbing the stairs.
Someone who had let himself in with a key down below—or had been in
the bookshop all along. Sera shot a triumphant glance at Caleb and
headed for the door.

But she was only half way across the room when the
door opened and a stranger came in: a dark-haired man with a
greying beard and a curiously waxen complexion. Sera drew back in
surprise.

The stranger favored her with a cold and haughty
glare, then transferred his gaze to Elsie. “And who might these
young women be?”

Caleb stared at his hands, grown suddenly meek. “Miss
Sera and Miss Elsie,” he said slowly and heavily. “Guess I told you
about Miss Sera. She’s Jenk’s granddaughter.”

The stranger smiled at Sera, but without any warmth.
“Then we are cousins, I find. An unexpected pleasure. How do you
do?”

Sera frowned at him. She did not like his looks or
his manner, and he did not sound at all like any cousin of hers—he
sounded much more like a foreigner. “I don’t do very well at all, I
am afraid. This is much too puzzling and mysterious! And I demand
to know what has happened to my grandfather.

The stranger turned his dark, colorless gaze on
Caleb. It was not so much that his eyes were hard, Sera decided, as
that they lacked any spark of expression. “You have not told her,
then?”

“I told her—told her he was gone, but she don’t seem
inclined to believe me,” said Caleb, gazing down at the attic
floor.

The stranger moved across the room and placed a cold
hand in Sera’s. He bowed, almost imperceptibly. “Your grandfather
left Thornburg several weeks past. He does not intend to return,
and so he has left this establishment in my charge. As it happens,
I am (in some sense) already a partner in the business, for it was
my father who provided the money to open this shop so many years
ago, and the money was never repaid.”

Sera frowned at him, withdrawing her hand. She felt
there was something very wrong here, but she was not certain what.
“You claim to be the son of Bartholomew Penn, my grandfather’s
cousin?”

“I
am
the son of Bartholomew
Penn,” he answered. “I am your Cousin Thomas.”

Sera shook her head. She did not remember much about
Bartholomew Penn, but surely . . . surely she had heard that he
died a bachelor? “I do not believe a word of this. What is more, I
think that the Chief Constable will be exceedingly interested to
hear of my grandfather’s disappearance. And as for you, Caleb
Braun, whom I have always thought my grandfather’s friend—“

She stopped speaking, because someone was knocking
loudly at the door of the bookshop down below. Caleb limped to the
window and looked out.

“It’s Jed,” he said, in a trembling voice. “Don’t
know what he’s doing here, this time of day.” Inexplicably, he
turned a pleading look on the stranger. “This ain’t my doing. I
told him not to come no more. I told him—“

“I fancy,” said Sera, with a toss of her head,
because she did not understand what any of this was about, “I fancy
that Jed has come here looking for Elsie and me.”

“It is of no consequence how he comes to be here. You
are not to admit him,” the mysterious Thomas told Caleb. “And these
young women—“

But this was all too much for Sera—whoever this man
was, whatever he was doing here, he had no right to give orders in
her grandfather’s house! “But of course Jed is coming up,” she
said, striding toward the door.

Caleb gave a strangled cry and rushed after her.
“Don’t let him come up, Miss Sera, don’t let him. You ain’t got no
idea who this man is, what he might do if somebody crosses
him.”

“Yet she will soon discover,” hissed Thomas, reaching
for Sera at the same time, and moving so swiftly that she had no
time to draw away. “Thanks to your indiscretion.”

Sera intended to pull out of his grasp, but the
moment he had her by the wrist, the moment he looked into her
startled brown eyes with his own cold, dull black ones, she began
to feel exceedingly odd. She could not stir, a cold sensation crept
up her arm, the room began to spin—and when she tried to scream,
she found that she could not force out any sound at all.

It was Elsie who screamed, at the top of her lungs.
And Caleb—moving with surprising agility—snatched up an iron from
beside the fireplace and brought it down hard on the stranger’s
head.

As Thomas crumbled to the floor, the room around Sera
slowly settled back into place. Elsie was at the window, calling
down to Jed. Sera had not seen her leave the chair by the hearth,
but there she was. And Caleb knelt on the floor by the stranger,
searching through his pockets.

Sera finally found her voice. “Caleb Braun, I demand
an answer—“

“No time for that now,” said Caleb, rising stiffly to
his feet.

In his hand, he held a large iron key. “Don’t know
how long he’ll be out. You young ladies come along of me; I got
something to show you. We’ll let Jed in as we go.”

There was a battering and crashing sound coming up
from the street. “Guess we won’t have to,” said Caleb, as he headed
for the stairs. “Reckon Jed’ll have the door busted down by the
time we get there.”

“Caleb,” said Sera, as she and Elsie followed him
down the two flights of narrow stairs. “Caleb, are you certain that
man up there isn’t dead? You struck him rather hard. And what was
it that he
did
to me? It was the most
extraordinary sensation!”

“Guess he was trying to do to you what he done to
Gottfried.” Caleb paused for a moment at the first landing, and his
voice choked up for a moment. “Sera, your grandpa’s dead. I would
of said sommat afore, but I wanted to protect you, wanted to
protect Jed and the little ‘un, too! Guess I was afraid for myself
as well.”

Sera stumbled and almost fell. “My grandfather is
dead?”
Yet somehow she felt she had
already guessed it, in that terrible moment when she was in the
stranger’s grip.

“Wish I could of broke it to you more gentle,” said
Caleb, as they proceeded down the stairs. “But we got to hurry.
That wicked man . . . Thomas Kelly he calls hisself . . . he may
come around again any time. I wish I could of killed him with that
poker but he don’t die so easy. The Powers know I tried to kill him
often enough. I—I poisoned his tea, Miss Sera, and set his bed on
fire. But none of it did no good.”

They reached the bookshop just as Jed crashed through
the door. “Don’t ask no questions, there ain’t no time,” Caleb
forestalled him. “Just you come along of us and I’ll tell you what
I can.”

He led them all between the crowded bookshelves to
the room at the back, talking as he went. “That’s him upstairs as
was in the coffin, and he weren’t dead—and Gottfried and I didn’t
have no more sense than to wake him up.” Jed opened his mouth as if
to say something, then thought better of it and remained silent.
Caleb continued on, as he fitted the key in the door. “He murdered
Gottfried just the same way he would of killed Sera just now,
rather than you come up and recognize him. He’ll kill us all, we’re
still here when he come downstairs.”

Caleb paused with his hand on the door, looked back
at Sera with a pleading look. “Guess it was partly my fault he done
for your grandpa. We wasn’t . . . we wasn’t such good friends,
there at the end, Gottfried and me. We was too suspicious of each
other to pay enough mind to the real danger, and that’s how this
Thomas got at him. Then he kept
me
on,
because he needed someone to help him pretend that things was all
as they oughter be.”