A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer Read Free Book Online

ought to be ashamed!”
    I turned ‘round, surprised, and was pleased to see Old Bill, the groundskeeper and jack-of-all for Calipash Manor, standing behind me.
    “Bill!” I cried, and embraced him. “How are you? Oh, just look at you!”
    “Let us be gone, Miss Burchell,” he said gruffly. “Waited for you at the station, but they said you’d traipsed hither for your own purposes. Hold your tongue, we can talk on the drive. Lord Calipash is not long for this world and I have no wish to follow him into the grave if this weather turns wet.”
    At first I attributed his poor spirits to his age, for he must be closer to seventy than sixty these days, white-haired and gaunt as a skeleton. But he got my trunk onto his skinny back and into the cart quickly enough; indeed, by the time he had scrambled onto the seat, ready to leave, I had hardly finished saying hello and asking after my guardian.
    “Things are quite dire,” was his reply. “‘Tis good you’ve come now, though you might’ve sent more notice of your arriving. Lizzie is beside herself getting your old room ready, not to mention the cooking for an extra person.”
    “I telegraphed yesterday,” I replied, rather taken aback by this admonition. “And really, Lord Calipash himself invited me—bid me come with all possible haste!”
    “As you say,” said Bill, looking at me askance as he chucked the reins.
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “Master’s not been able to lift a quill in some time,” he said with a shrug. “Before his son come home, I was writing all his letters for him.”
    “You, Bill!”
    “Aye. I went to the village school as a youth and learned to read, write, and cipher—no need to look so surprised, Miss! I do tolerable justice to my lord’s handwriting, he himself asked me to learn the trick of it when he was struck with arthritis. But now him that’s to be the next Lord Calipash has taken over the duty, so he says, but unless he posts the letters himself, nothing’s gone out in some time. Hasn’t asked me to go into the village since his arrival anyways.”
    “But that woman said Mr. Vincent delivered the letter himself!”
    “Did she now?”
    “Yes … perhaps Mr. Vincent was the one who wrote to me. But, then, why disguise his writing? I should have come if he had extended the invitation to me, of course.”
    “Couldn’t say, Miss. He’s a strange creature, full of notions and temper. Perhaps he thinks you are like him. I had to write to him in the Lord Calipash’s own hand, begging for his return, to get him to come! Ignored all the letters I wrote as myself.”
    “Rotterdam is a very far distance to travel on short notice …”
    “Aye, and the road to hell is a short and easy path! Honor thy father says the Bible.”
    “Oh, Bill. I’ve missed you,” said I, shocked to find it was the truth, as I had always remembered him as the bane of my childhood. Somehow he knew when I was up to mischief and would foil my plans if he could, with a Bible verse ready to shame me for my willfulness.
    I opened my mouth to ask him another question, one about Mr. Vincent, but my power of speech left me entirely at that moment. We’d crested a hill, and Calipash Manor had come into view.
    I looked upon the ivy-wreathed front doors and the ancient moldering stone of the house, pale in the weird light of the coming storm, and felt a strange flutter inside my chest. I could not help thinking that manor looked as if it had weathered a good deal more than ten years during my decade-long absence. The tower, where I had once held tea-parties with my dolls, or played at being Rapunzel, now looked so rickety it would not support a dove’s nest; the plentiful windows, upon which I had painted frost-pictures in the winter and opened to feel the breeze during the mild country summers, looked smaller, and dark with the kind of soot and filth one sees in London but few other places.
    “I have been away a very long time,” I whispered