All through the late afternoon, a thin ribbon of cold rainwater leaked down the blackened chimney flue at the back of the hall, striking the caked hearth ash with a slow, metallic drip-tick, drip-tick.
A living man could have stood up, kicked a piece of broken slate under the drip to break the rhythm, or walked out into the yard until his head cleared. Noll Vey, mortared into the western wall five feet above the flags, had nowhere to walk and nothing to look at except the wet soot sliding down the chimney bricks.
Soot and river water had a smell he knew by heart.
Two springs before Varn cornered him in the coaching stable, the snowmelt in the high hills had come down the Bracken River in a brown, timber-choked wall of water at two in the morning. It had torn the waterwheel off the lower gristmill at Bracken Ford, drowned nineteen sheep in the parish pound, and carried away the three stone cottages where the millers’ families slept. Seven people had gone into the river before the church bell even began to ring.
Noll and Hesta Quill had rolled into town three days later with The Palace of Wonders, expecting the usual April sheep-fair crowd and finding instead a street six inches deep in gray silt, women boiling salvage barley over open street fires, and men digging through collapsed thatch with crowbars.
Any sensible mountebank would have turned the horse around at the tollgate and whipped up for Crosskeys. You cannot draw blood from a turnip, and you cannot draw halfpennies from a town whose mattresses are drying in the apple trees.
Instead, Noll had stood on the wagon seat looking at a boy of eight sitting on a wet millstone with no shoes on his feet, and something warm and genuinely indignant had swelled up under his patched velvet waistcoat.
“We’re putting up the big canvas in the tithe barn,” Noll had told Hesta that afternoon, rolling up his shirtsleeves in the drizzle. “Every lamp we own, the full crimson valence, and the Pagoda drop. Two pence at the door for the gentry from the hill farms, a penny for the townsfolk, and every copper in the cedar box goes straight to the mill widows on Monday morning.”
He could still hear the dry, skeptical sound Hesta had made in the back of her throat as she unknotted the wet guy-ropes.
“All of it, Noll?” she had asked, looking up at him from under her battered straw bonnet with eyes that knew him down to the lint in his pockets. “No deduction for lamp oil? No little commission for the manager’s sore knees?”
“Not a brass farthing,” Noll had sworn, and when he said it, he had meant every syllable with his whole chest. “What do you take me for, Hesta? Those people lost their roofs. Tonight we do the show the way my mother used to talk about it—pure wonder, clean hands, and a full box at the curtain.”
And by the seven dukes, what a show they had given.
Noll remembered the smell of two hundred wet wool coats steaming in the packed tithe barn while four bull’s-eye lanterns threw warm yellow light across the crimson curtain. He had never worked harder or cleaner in his life. When he pulled six paper roses out of the miller’s little boy’s ear, the whole barn had cheered until the swallows bolted from the rafters. When Hesta did the Sylph of the Silver Bell behind the backlit linen screen—making her shadow grow twenty feet tall and bow to the parish reeve—old men who had spent three days hauling drowned timber out of the mud had wiped their faces on their sleeves and laughed aloud.
By ten o’clock that night, the cedar strongbox on the ticket table weighed four pounds. Twelve silver crowns, forty-eight groats, and a double fistful of copper pence—fourteen crowns and change in all, enough to buy seed barley and roof-thatch for all three mill families.
“We did that,” Noll murmured aloud to the empty fort chamber, his stone voice rough in the damp air. “That wasn’t a trick. Those people walked out of that barn standing an inch taller than when they came in, and the money in the box was real.”
The chimney flue answered only with its slow drip-tick, drip-tick into the soot.
Because the show had ended at ten, and the cedar box had not gone to the parish reeve until sunrise.
Between ten o’clock and midnight, Noll had carried the cedar box across the muddy lane to the back parlor of the Red Bull Inn to change the heavy sack of copper pence into silver crowns so the widows wouldn’t have to lug three stone of small change to the timber yard. That had been his reason. Even now, inside a dead dungeon core that weighed lies by the ounce, Noll knew that when he pushed open the parlor door at the Red Bull, he had intended nothing worse than buying himself a two-penny glass of hot gin and turning coppers into silver.
Except three drovers’ factors from the southern road were sitting by the parlor grate with a tallow candle, a pitcher of mulled ale, and a greased pack of forty-eight Spanish cards.
And the tall factor with the fox-skin waistcoat had been running a three-card turn so clumsy—so insultingly, transparently slow on the bottom deal—that Noll’s fingers had actually twitched on the lid of the cedar box.
Look at him, Noll had thought, the gin warming his ribs after four hours on his feet in a cold barn. He’s telegraphing the queen with his middle knuckle every time he squares the deck. If I stake two crowns out of the box on a single turn, I can double the widows’ money in ten minutes, pay back the four crowns we owe the wheelwright in Greyford, and buy Hesta a pair of dry boots before we hit the north road.
That was always how the rot got into Noll Vey’s wood. Never through cruelty. Never because he wanted the millers’ children to go cold. It got in because he truly, warmly cared about the boy on the millstone and Hesta’s split boots and the wheelwright’s bill, and he believed with all a showman’s fatal vanity that his own cleverness could stretch one honest loaf to feed three tables if he just shaved a little off the crust while nobody was looking.
The tall factor had not been clumsy. The tall factor had been baiting a stage magician with three slow deals before switching to a palmed cold-deck on the fourth.
By one in the morning, seven silver crowns—exact half of the Bracken Ford benefit box—were in the factor’s saddlebags, and the factor’s horse was already clattering across the stone bridge toward the south road.
Noll remembered sitting alone at the scarred oak table in the back parlor of the Red Bull while the tallow candle guttered in its own grease. His hands had been shaking so badly that when he counted the remaining seven crowns and four groats back into the cedar box, the coins had chimed against the wood like an alarm bell.
He had not taken the rest. He had wrapped the seven remaining crowns in a clean sheet of playbill paper, written From the Palace of Wonders across the fold in a hand that sloped downward at the corner, and left the cedar box on the parish reeve’s porch step at three in the morning.
Then he had walked back to the tithe barn, left the wagon, the horse, the painted Pagoda drop, and the unpaid tavern reckoning for the barn rental behind, and walked out of Bracken Ford on foot in the dark before Hesta woke up in the loft above the stable.
“I left the wagon for her,” Noll said aloud to the dead goat’s ribs, the old excuse rising automatically to his mortar lips out of sheer habit. “And the millers got seven crowns they didn’t have on Thursday. Half a loaf is better than river mud. Any reasonable man—”
He stopped.
In the quiet of the stone room, where no mark was listening and no ledger point could be won by a pretty speech, the words sounded exactly like what they were: a tin washer rattling in a box.
Seven crowns had gone to the widows because Noll Vey couldn’t bear to think of himself as an ordinary thief. And the other seven crowns—along with the tavern rent, the angry town, and the humiliation of standing in a muddy street explaining where the charity money had gone—had fallen squarely on Hesta Quill’s shoulders while Noll was ten miles up the road rehearsing his patter for the next fair.
“Fourteen silver crowns,” Noll whispered into the cold hall.
The exact sum Varn had beaten him to death for in the coaching yard. The exact weight of the two debts—the seven crowns stolen from the drowned millers and the seven crowns Hesta had been left to work off alone—added together.
Down in the hearth, a heavy drop of soot-blackened rainwater fell from the chimney lip and burst in the gray ash. Plink.
Noll stared at the dark stain spreading across the cold hearthstone. In his old life, he had always been able to walk out of town before sunrise and tell himself that the half he left behind washed out the half he took. Now he was mortared into a wall that couldn’t walk a single step, bound to a ledger where every half-truth sat on the slate until it was paid to the final grain.