Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(16)

Uncertain of what, precisely, she did not like, I indicated the collection at the barrel by the door. “But he’s doing a very fine job.”

“Better than fine, or worse. I can scarcely get his attention for any other task. And I know,” she said with a shake of her head, beating me to my instinctive argument. “He’s a lad still, and lads behave oddly without any prompting. But this has gone on for some time, and it’s becoming more and more of a problem by the day.”

I sighed and set my bag down on the counter beside her. “Perhaps you’d better begin at the beginning. What exactly is he doing that worries you? Apart from overfilling the stock barrel, which I can see for myself.”

She exhaled deeply and her chest sagged, squeezing an abundance of bosom forward, over her arms. “It began a month or two ago. First he was having a hard time with the nets—he wasn’t paying attention, and he was dropping stitches, tying them into the wrong kinds of knots. When he was finished with a net, it wouldn’t have held anything. It wouldn’t even spread for the throwing. I watched him work, and I tell you, his mind was elsewhere.”

“Again,” I said, “a common complaint when it comes to young men.”

“But you should’ve seen it—the look in his eyes: There wasn’t one. Thought it was in my imagination, I did, but no . . . I’m sure of that now. Over time it’s gone from a boyish lack of attention to something . . . something I can hardly bear. Sometimes when he looks at me, he looks right through me. He doesn’t see me! He doesn’t hear me.”

“He isn’t listening?”

“I know. This, too—it sounds like a boy being a boy, but—” She stopped herself, as if she’d meant to tell me one thing, and changed her mind, offering me another thought instead. “He’s listening, but not to me. He’s listening to something else.”

I frowned, and she frowned, too. Then she heaved her torso up from the counter and came to stand beside me. She laid a hand on my elbow and guided me to the window beside the front door. Its glass was scummed by years of salted air, but I rubbed the back of my hand to shine one corner of a pane, and I could see all the way to the coastline beyond the edge of the road, perhaps a hundred yards away.

“Watch him,” she murmured, standing very close beside me. Her breath was low and rushed, as if she’d been running and was pretending otherwise. “Look at him, and you tell me what he’s listening to.”

I watched as she’d commanded. The details were unclear; I was too far away to see much more than a long-limbed fellow picking around on the rocks, his face pointed down and his dark, wild hair billowing in the ocean air that gusted off the inrushing tide. At first I saw nothing remarkable, merely the same lad I knew on sight, in his natural habitat, performing his usual task.

But the longer I looked, the odder it seemed—and it was nothing I could immediately pinpoint. I stared. And I thought I saw an unusual jerkiness to his movements. He lacked his usual grace, the ordinary leaping, climbing, and leaning that typically characterized his hunts. He moved more heavily, and slowly, too. He did not jump from rock to rock, but he slid down one and scaled the next. His hands hung from his arms like dead things, or like whole things without fingers. They were flat and immobile, like fish at a market stand.

“He’s listening,” his godmother breathed. “Look at him. He’s listening.”

Yes, he was. I could tell it from the tilt of his head; every time he turned or pivoted, every time he changed rocks or changed directions—dipping down to the same level and poking through the sand. No matter which way he turned, the crook of his neck aimed his head at the ocean.

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Hamilton urged, “you could have a word with him. Talk to him, please, Doctor. I’d feel better knowing you’d looked him up and down, even if you decide there’s nothing amiss, or nothing you can do.”

As I stood there, peering through the small, clear square of windowpane with Felicity Hamilton’s labored breathing puffing against the back of my neck, I would have rather done anything else than to go talk to young Matthew. I wanted to turn, wish the woman a good day, and make an excuse or apology regarding some fictional patient requiring my immediate services.

But I did not. I gathered up my scraps of inner fortitude and forced a smile upon Mrs. Hamilton as I said, “Very well. I’ll do just that.”

She opened the door and saw me out, and when I looked over my shoulder she was still there, watching through the spot I’d smudged to clarity on her window, her nervous eyes darting back and forth between me and her ward.

I took a deep breath.

This was a simple thing—likely the simplest task I’d be asked to perform all day—and it should not have repulsed me so. On countless brief, perfunctory, casual occasions through the years, I’d exchanged more than a handful of words with the fellow out there on the rocks. That lad over there, picking his way between the tide-washed boulders and always moving so that his head was cocked toward the Atlantic . . . he was no stranger. I’d always known him to be the pleasant sort, relatively eager to please and optimistic that any errand might earn him an extra penny for his trouble.

So why did I feel such dread as I slowly trudged toward him? He’s only a boy, I told myself. A simple truth, and one so obvious that it scarcely needed any mention. What else would he be? What was I so afraid of?