Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(15)
“Oh dear. You’ve found some new . . . some new trick, that you want to try?”
“I don’t think it’s a trick,” I told her. I got down on my hands and knees. I positioned one nail at the far left, against the doorframe. “I don’t know why, but I think it will keep them out, even if I’m not here.”
I drove the nail hard. The bang of the hammer was louder than thunder in our night-quieted home, and I flinched, but I hit the tiny spike again until it went flush with the floor.
Emma propped herself up on the pillows to watch me. She was resigned to this. It was not as if she could stop me should she want to, and she knew she could not talk me out of it. We’d fought about it often in our first year at Maplecroft, and never once had she won.
When I find a thing that works, I will implement it.
If it is inconvenient, if it is ridiculous, if it is insane . . . I do not care and will not let that stop me. I will try everything, and if even some of it works, some of the time, that’s a measure of protection we would have otherwise lacked. I will never let it be said that my sister died, or was turned, or taken, by those insidious fiends. Not on my watch, and not from my home.
First, I would pound a million nails into the house, and do it gladly. First, I would let the whole town think I’m a madwoman and a murderer, let it scorn and reject me, let its children compose hateful rhymes to be sung whilst jumping rope, let the entire Atlantic bubble and boil and storm against our shores—throwing up with the tides a thousand such inhuman, unholy creatures as the one I’d killed that night.
One by one I lined up the nails and beat them into place, and when I was finished with Emma’s doorway I moved on to her windowsill. And when I was finished there, my hands were chapped and beginning to bleed, so I stopped.
I could save my own doorway for morning, like everything else.
BE SURE YOUR SINS WILL FIND YOU OUT
Owen Seabury, M.D.
MARCH 17, 1894
Matthew Granger has been a patient of mine since the moment he was born. I delivered him on a Sunday night, late enough that we may as well call him a Monday’s Child. What’s the lore on that one? Monday’s Child is fair of face, isn’t that the way it goes? Nonsense, of course. Even if he’d been a good-looking boy, one shouldn’t read too much into these things.
Young Mr. Granger was not particularly handsome, though he wasn’t the sort to frighten horses with his homeliness, either. An ordinary lad, you could say. Neither large nor small, thin nor fat, smart nor dull.
His father died when he was very young and when he was ten his mother passed away also. Following this, he was taken in by Ebenezer Hamilton and his wife, Felicity—the godparents, I believe. They keep a shop down at the waterfront, performing all sorts of odds-and-ends duties for the fishermen who work the waters. At Hamilton’s Ocean Goods and Supplies one can pick up stray parts for navigational equipment, find new nets and get old ones mended, acquire bait for more casual fishing, and pay a penny a pound for stray bits of wave-and sand-tumbled glass and shells from a barrel by the front door. These bits end up in decorative ponds and small aquariums, in water closets, and sometimes in jewelry, hair sticks, or other baubles . . . most often marketed to the tourists who visit the shores when the season is right.
Among Matthew’s many minor duties was this one: He was obligated to keep the barrel brimming with attractive sea detritus.
Often he could be spotted down on the rocks, either in bare feet or wearing soft, flat slippers. He moved between the boulders like a cat on a shelf, picking his way deftly, his eyes on the cracks where soaked sand had been washed by the tide, threading itself in thin white seams full of tiny treasures. To watch him, you’d swear he was a creature of the shore himself, moving from stone to sand to surf with such unwavering expertise.
Just a child still, really. Not a man yet, though nearing that cusp where people hesitated to call him “boy” but wouldn’t yet call him “sir.”
When his godmother summoned me, she did so without his knowledge. She asked it as a favor, offering to pay me in the freshest seafood she could barter. Dutifully I appeared in her shop, strung with its nets, its gleaming brass instruments both assembled and disassembled for restoration, and its barrels of salt, stones, shells, floaters, linen scraps for sail patches, and every other thing a coastal shop might carry.
Mrs. Hamilton, stout of frame and white of hair, was frowning worriedly when I arrived.
After greeting me she said, “He’s out there now, like always.” And she wrung her hands together.
“Filling the barrel?” I asked, and glanced toward the door.
There it was, and overflowing. Literally—its contents spilled into drifts and hillocks across the creaking wood floor. Mrs. Hamilton had deployed a bucket to address the surplus, but it too was brimming. Likewise the mugs and the saucers were piled to heaping. It looked for all the world like there must be some leak in the ceiling through which these button-sized sea notions dropped in an unending trickle.
She told me, “Yes, that’s all he does now. It’s always been his favorite, you know—something he does when he’s bored, or taking a moment from working the till or stitching up nets.”
I crooked my chin toward the water. “The whole town knows to look for him there, out on the bay.”
“More now than ever. It’s strange,” she said, leaning forward and crossing her arms on the counter. “And I don’t like it.”