Goblin Moon

by Teresa Edgerton

  "If that is so," Sera said, a trifle severely, "then I do not think very much of this intuition, it is so very unreliable."

  The parlor door opened, and a large young man with a shock of red hair came into the room. "Horses are ready, Dr. Crow, as soon as you've a mind to go."

  "Yes, I thank you, Ezekiel," said Lord Skelbrooke. "Sera, the time is short, and I still have a number of things to say to you." He leaned a little closer; his manner became urgent. "I daresay you will not care for my speaking out before all of these people, and the more so because you have already received one proposal tonight already—but it may be a long, long time before we meet again." He took one of her hands in both of his, grown suddenly, desperately earnest. "Sera, I want you to be my wife. Will you consent to marry me?"

  Sera found that she could not breathe, much less speak, she was so very surprised. This was scarcely the time or the place! Yet everyone in the room seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to reply.

  "Lord Skelbrooke—if that is indeed who you are," she said crossly, "how can I possibly consent to marry you when—when I scarcely know you. It is true that we have been acquainted for some time, but really, you are so odd and changeable that I hardly know what to make of you. Why, I am not even certain of your name!"

  Lord Skelbrooke released her hand. If he had been pale before, he was several shades whiter now. "Mr. Budge can confirm that the name is my own, as well as furnish you with abundant details concerning my character and the early years of my life. The recital, however, is likely to be long and not particularly edifying." He rose heavily to his feet. "I confess, I had hoped you would take me on faith. But perhaps, after all, that was too much to ask." He started moving toward the door.

  "Lord Skelbrooke—" said Sera.

  He paused with his hand on the door, turned back to gaze at her with a look of weary resignation. "Yes, Miss Vorder?"

  Sera shook her head. "I don't—I only meant to say, sir, that I hoped we might speak of this again."

  The ghost of a smile came into his eyes as he crossed the room and knelt by her side once more. "We shall, Miss Vorder, you may be certain of that. I do not know whether it will be soon or late, but discuss it we shall." He lifted her hand, brushed it softly with his lips. "Until then, I shall have to possess myself in patience."

  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 to know—"

  "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."

  Inside the laboratory, Caleb moved swiftly, snatching up a little wicker cage from one of the long tables. In the dim illumination of a single lanthorn, Sera could not see what the cage contained but there was something moving about inside—a bird or a small animal.

  "Here now," said Jed, looking around him in considerable surprise. His gaze fell on a pile of books on one of the tables. "You say we shouldn't ask questions, but I want to know—"

  "Guess you seen them books afore," said Caleb, as he sidled out of the room. "You can explain to the young ladies. But we got to go now; we got to go. Them books is proof of that. Reckon they'd all be crumbling away t
o dust, if I'd finally killed him. But they ain't; so he's still alive."

  Caleb disappeared through the door, but the others did not immediately follow him. They were still too stunned by all they had seen and heard, were still trying to make sense of it all.

  Then Jed crossed the room and gathered up an armful of books. "Guess Mr. Owlfeather and the Guild ought to take a look at these!" he said. With the books under one arm, he grabbed Elsie by the hand and started to pull her out of the room. "Come along, Sera, we don't know if Uncle Caleb was telling the truth, but maybe it's not so safe to stay and find out."

  They were still in the bookshop when they heard footsteps, rapidly descending the stairs. Without pausing to look up the steps as they passed, Jed and Elsie ran out the door and into the street, and Sera was only a step behind them.

  CHAPTER 42

  In which one Adventure ends, and a New one begins.

  The city of Ilben at the mouth of the river Lunn was a thriving seaport: a collection of salt-scoured buildings; exotic little shops selling curios from distant lands; shipyards, warehouses, seamen's boarding houses—all very clean and breezy—separated from the ocean and her restless tides by a stout seawall and a broad mud flat. Built out upon that dark expanse was a network of piers and boardwalks bleached bone-white by the sun and the wind, all leading down to a deep water harbor, where fishing scows, pleasure boats, merchantmen, and navy ships rode side by side with passenger vessels bound for all the ports of Euterpe, Orania, and the New World.