Chapter 8 #3
“Mam! I never shoulda done it!” he wailed. “I’m a bad boy, Mam, but I swears to you, I’m gonna mend my ways! I’ll go back to Jerry’s and work in his shop, and this time I’ll be good, I’ll listen to whatever he says and learn to do it right!”
“Oh, no you won’t, I won’t hear of it!” Mrs. Goddard answered, her arms tightening. “I ain’t letting my little boy go again! It was never your fault, never your doing! It was that rotten Rodney Rookshanks what caused all the trouble!”
Luna raised an eyebrow, but thought perhaps to keep her opinion on the subject to herself.
She couldn’t repress a little snort, however, and this brought Tobias’s attention her way at last. “Miss Talbot!” he gasped, pulling back from his mother and swiping his nose with the back of his hand. “You’re all right!”
Not wanting Mrs. Goddard to get wind of the more dramatic elements of her evening, Luna answered serenely, “Why, of course, Tobias. Why wouldn’t I be? I’ve been with your mother all this time. Since we met on the corner of Mirthmeadow Street. You remember?”
She finished by giving him a stern look, willing him to catch her drift.
He blinked a few times, looking quite stupid, and she feared he would give it all away.
Just at the last moment, a gleam of something similar to intelligence shone in his eye, however.
Tobias nodded slowly. “Aww, right. Outside the bar. Yeah, I remember.”
“I told you that your mother was worried about you. Then I came back here.”
“Yeah.” He nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, I remember. That was, uh, that was very good of you, miss.”
“I know,” she answered coldly.
Mrs. Goddard spared them further awkwardness by clapping her hands suddenly.
“Green Mother above, enough of this chatter! We’ve kept poor Luna up far too late, and she has work in the morning, don’t you, luv?
Tobias, you scurry up to the shower right away, and none of your lip!
Don’t you forget to wash behind your ears, or it’s the back of me hand you’ll be having.
And Luna, duckie, you come this way. I’ll show you to me guest room.
You can stay here tonight, no sense in you venturing out into this dark and cold on your own. ”
Luna accepted the offer with gratitude and followed Mrs. Goddard up her poky staircase to a room as whimsical as one might wish for, almost suffocated in quilts and lace and embroidered doodads.
Mrs. Goddard gave her a fresh toothbrush, towels, and a comb, pointed out the bathroom (from which the sounds of Tobias’s ablutions could even now be heard), and told her to sleep in as long as she wished in the morning.
“When I takes his breakfast, I’ll just mention to Mr. Grimm that he ought to expect you late,” she added.
Luna didn’t have the energy to protest. Just before she closed her door, however, she did call out to the good woman’s retreating form, “Mrs. Goddard? Please. Don’t say anything to him. About Wednesday, I mean.”
Mrs. Goddard’s cherry-red face crinkled with distress beneath the lace of her old-fashioned cap.
But she shrugged and said, “Your business is your business.” Then, biting her lip, she added, “I don’t know what’s got you so spooked, sweet duckie.
But I hope you won’t let yourself be frightened out of a lifetime of goodness.
” With that she turned and bustled back downstairs.
Luna quickly shut the door before turning and sagging back against it.
She covered her face with both hands and pressed the heels of her palms hard into her eye sockets in an attempt to drive back tears.
But they would come rolling down her cheeks.
At last, with a gasp that was almost a sob, she moved to the bed and dropped her purse on the quilted comforter.
It opened, and a broken shooting star earring spilled out, along with the edge of an envelope.
Luna’s gaze fixed on that envelope.
Moving slowly, as though afraid of being stung, she stretched out her hand, pulled it the rest of the way from her purse.
She flipped it open and slid free the thaumagraph of her and her employer, taken only a few short hours ago at the Moat House Café.
Her own frozen face she passed over without interest, but her gaze fixed with some intensity on the likeness of Mr. Grimm.
On the way he looked at her. With so much undisguised longing.
Luna worried her lower lip. She touched the picture, allowing the tip of her finger to linger over his mouth.
“He might help you, you know,” she whispered, her voice very soft in the overly-whimsified atmosphere. “If you go to him now, if you tell him the truth . . . he might be strong enough. To fight the Brotherhood. To change your fate.”
He would certainly try. If she asked him to.
A man who looked at a woman like that would attempt to move heaven and earth.
She knew it. Knew it with a conviction she should have recognized weeks ago.
Had he not been showing her his heart for at least that long?
As far back as her birthday, as far back as Green Yule, no .
. . farther even than that. All the way back to the first day she met him, when he’d tried so hard to make her tea and offered her a job and literally fell over himself with the desire to please her.
If she asked him to fight, he would.
But Mr. Grimm was not in that vision she’d scried so long ago.
Which meant . . . which meant . . .
“He’ll die,” she whispered. “He’ll die, trying to save you.”
And she couldn’t bear that idea. She’d rather offer herself up to the Brotherhood right now, lay herself down on that dark slab of stone, docile as a sacrificial lamb. Anything rather than let him die for her.
“So, you’ll leave,” she whispered. “Wednesday morning. Four o’clock.” She pressed the thaumagraph to her chest, closing her eyes tight as two hot tears escaped and rolled off her chin. “You’ve just got to get through Tuesday first.”