Page 88 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
“Your dead friend has been talking to me and I’m very sorry I didn’t mention it before now” seemed somehow tactless, but she wasn’t certain how else to phrase it. Maybe I could… err… say that I only now heard her? Then it wouldn’t look like I had been hiding it? Because I didn’t mean to hide it, it was just that I didn’t think anyone would believe me, and then everything was very… very… She let that thought trail off because she wasn’t certain how to describe the last few weeks, even in her head.
Dammit, she hated to lie to her friends. And it was probably just a bad idea. No, she should try to explain, and if they were angry that she hadn’t told them sooner (and how could they not be?) she’d bear up to it. She deserved it.
She picked at breakfast. Only Hester and Imogene were down yet, although Willard joined them a moment later. Her stomach churned and she told herself sternly that she would not wait another day, these were her friends and she had already waited too long and dammit, they must want to talk to Penelope, of course they would, it was selfish to hold off just because she was scared.
She set down her napkin and opened her mouth and the door to the breakfast room slammed open.
Hester stopped in the middle of buttering a roll as Richard flung open the door. He never gets that particular crease in his forehead unless there’s a problem, and he never slams doors unless it’s a big problem.
“Something wrong?” asked Imogene. “You look like you’ve just drawn the queen of spades in a game of Bluebeard.”
“I think you had better see this for yourself,” said Richard. “All of you.” He took Hester’s arm and helped her to her feet. She might have protested that she could do it herself, but a look at his face made her think that they had bigger problems right now.
He led them around the back of the mews, to the pits where garbage was burned. “This is where they buried Falada,” he said grimly. “I saw it myself yesterday morning.”
He pointed.
Hester followed the line of his finger. She heard Cordelia make a soft sound of horror, but for a moment, she could not think why. The grave had to be around here somewhere, perhaps beyond that cattle wallow…
The presentiment of doom, which had been so quiet since she had acknowledged Lady Evangeline’s presence, suddenly poured cold water into the chambers of Hester’s heart.
It wasn’t a cattle wallow. It had the same look to it, a wreckage of earth churned up by hooves, but far narrower and sloping downward. The far end emerged from freshly disturbed dirt, edged by a semicircle of grass. A few stray feathers lay scattered through the dirt, and Hester didn’t need to look closely to know they came from geese.
“Hell and damnation,” said Imogene. “He dug himself out.”
CHAPTER 32
“He was dead,” said Evermore, when they had all retreated indoors. “We cut his head off. I used the axe myself. And then we burned it. His body can’t have just dug itself out of the ground.”
Cordelia put her face in her hands. “He’s not a real horse,” she said, through her fingers. Her mind was an empty horror. “He just looked like one.”
“He’s got no head!” said Imogene. She sounded more outraged than frightened, as if the notion of monsters going around without heads was a terrible social faux pas. “Things don’t just walk around without heads!”
“Chickens, sometimes,” offered Willard.
“That was not helpful, Tom.”
“No, but I’ve already poured tea, so I’m afraid I’ve run out of helpful things to do at the moment.”
“What if he’s even less like a horse than we thought?” asked Hester, into the glum silence that followed. “What if he’s like a ghost?”
Cordelia jumped, wondering if Penelope had seen what happened, but heard nothing. She resolved to ask her the next time she spoke.
“You can’t cut off a ghost’s head,” Hester went on. “Or I suppose you could, but it doesn’t do anything, because they’re not using their head to think with. They’re a spirit. All the thinking bits happen… I don’t know, somewhere else. Another plane of existence.”
“He was rock solid, though,” said Evermore. “It wasn’t a ghost that bit off Old Bernard’s ear.”
“But familiars are tame demons, aren’t they? Or tame spirits, anyway.” Hester rose to her feet, patting absently at her pockets. “Where’s that book… I must have left it in my room… not that the author knew either. Familiars can touch things and move things in the real world, but that doesn’t mean they follow the same rules as the rest of us.”
“He doesn’t have to eat,” said Cordelia. “He can, I mean. I think he did when he was pretending to be a horse. But he doesn’t have to.”
Imogene yanked out a deck and began dealing cards so rapidly that several spun across the table and had to be rescued by Willard. “I feel like there’s a big difference between not having to eat, and being able to gallivant around without a head!”
“Is he gallivanting?” asked Willard. “Has anyone seen him?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” said Hester, making her way to the door. “The geese will tell us.”
It was a little after sunset. Hester sat on the little patio that led into the garden from her rooms. She was quite certain that the room that she had been given was not actually a bedroom, but a former parlor with the furniture moved out and a bed moved in. There were no stairs between it and the main floor, though, and only three down from the patio to the garden. Her knee was grateful for Richard’s kindness. Her pride wasn’t sure how to feel.
