Chapter 11
Katherine awoke, ravenous, at dawn the next morning. Mr. Scruffles was lying on her chest and pawing gently at her face.
I’m hungry, he said.
“Mr. Scruffles,” she whispered, “stop that.”
Her sleep hadn’t been too terrible, but the silence of her own quiet cottage and the comfort of her own quilted bed would nonetheless be most welcome when she got home.
Forty years ago, she could have ignored the din from below at closing time, and even perhaps the irregular ragged breathing of the bedmate to her left.
Back then she also wouldn’t have minded the shifting weight of the bedmate to her right, who, true to her word, had made more than one nocturnal call to the loo.
Alas, she wasn’t the same person she was then.
The rest of the cats, she noticed, were still all bundled around Ruben, fast asleep like her other bedmates.
Silently, she wondered how long they would sleep, so that she could roll out one side of the bed or the other.
Inch-worming to the foot of the mattress was out of the question.
Perhaps she could nudge one of them awake to let her out?
She was preparing to shift her weight when a strange sensation stopped her, an unfamiliar tug of pressure pulling on one of her hands.
Craning her neck in the dawn half-light to see, she found that one of Ruben’s arms had worked itself out of his blanket casing overnight, and his fingers had apparently found hers.
Their hands were still clasped. She put her head back down on her pillow, surprised.
His skin felt like warm, dry paper. The contact tingled, now that she knew what it was, and she ran a thumb over each one of his knotty arthritic knuckles.
She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about Ruben, she admitted to herself, but it had been a long time since anyone had held her hand like this, and she was enjoying it.
After what seemed like forever, watching the light on the ceiling grow gradually brighter and trying to ignore the black cat still occasionally tapping her face, Katherine decided she’d rather not still be holding Ruben’s hand when he woke up, especially if he didn’t even know he was doing it.
She gingerly extricated herself and nudged Mrs. Chrysler to rouse her.
“I’m up!” the old woman bellowed, sitting bolt upright. Katherine noticed that she brandished the duckie scissors in her hand.
“Imogene, it’s morning. Get up and let me out, will you.”
“Oh, right, right,” her friend mumbled, putting her feet on the floor and fumbling for her footwear.
Katherine adjusted her cotton blouse and tweed skirt, which were mercifully comfortable enough for her to have worn all day and all night, and ran her fingers through her silver curls.
Thanking her past self, she also dug into her bag for some of the extra socks and underthings that she had conscientiously packed.
The tweed vest was bundled neatly under her pillow, securing in its folds the various valuables from her pockets, as well as her knitting needles, brooch, and lock-picking bangles and earrings.
Katherine retrieved the vest and began to reassign the items to their respective stations.
Mrs. Chrysler rallied too, smoothing out her long gray locks and wrapping them into her customary loose bun, then plunging in her knitting needles with a final flourish.
When the pair were ready, Katherine regarded the sleeping form of Ruben, still mostly bound up in his blanket except for that one arm, and turned to Mrs. Chrysler. “I think you should wake him, Imogene. You’re better at this.”
Some minutes of grumbling and fussing later, Ruben was raised to consciousness.
“Oh, good morning, ladies,” he finally croaked in recognition, bleary-eyed.
Katherine was sitting on the chair, strapping herself into her beloved boots, and she watched him open and close his palm a few times in seeming deep thought, before he cast off the blanket and rose to his feet.
His joints creaked loudly in the still morning air.
Ruben straightened his robe, smoothing out the wrinkles, then reached for the cane to fetch his scarf and poncho.
“Er, I don’t think the poncho’s quite the best wardrobe choice today, Ruben,” Mrs. Chrysler advised, folding it as neatly as possible and stowing it in her yarn bag. Presently, the perhaps not so bright-eyed, but certainly bushy-tailed, group stood ready to depart the Gilded Midden.
The tavern was eerily quiet and empty now as they descended the stairs.
Smoking embers spluttered in the large hearth, and the only evidence of last night’s affairs were—yes—stickier floors and a few unretrieved arrows stuck up in the ceiling.
The only soul around seemed to be the kitchen maid, who was now attending the bar, scrubbing it down with a tattered cloth.
Katherine slid her an extra coin with a kind smile as they passed.
Ruben’s new nun-given sandals didn’t catch so much on the gummy floor as those ratty slippers had, and soon they were stepping out into the sunshine.
“Feels like we were just here yesterday,” Ruben said as they marched over the dusty cobbles, most of the cats in tow; Mouser was once again perched on his spindly shoulders.
“We were here yesterday, Ruben,” Mrs. Chrysler reminded him.
“Ah… Right. Well, where to now?”
“The troll doctor—that was the plan, remember?”
“Right. Right. To figure out what that rock is, yes, I remember.” He stopped in the road and looked around.
Katherine urged him along. “Three days now, remember. Just three. I’m not looking forward to telling Sister Agatha that we failed to get the original contract from Tucker’s house, are you?
” Ruben shuddered, and Katherine nodded.
“It would be a lot better, wouldn’t it, if we could tell her what they’re hauling out of that mine, which she doesn’t even know about. ”
“Yes, yes, we’ll head to that troll doctor in a minute.” Mrs. Chrysler was sniffing the air. “There’s a bakery around here. I can smell it.” Katherine’s stomach rumbled loudly.
Mr. Scruffles also sniffed the air appreciatively. And a fishmonger too, he said.
“Food’s got to be the first stop, Katty,” Mrs. Chrysler said. “Let’s get you that bran muffin. I wouldn’t say no to one myself.”
After a round of bran muffins and tea—and fish for the cats—deeply discounted thanks to Mrs. Chrysler’s unflinching insistence on a senior rate, the group stood with satiated stomachs on the threshold of last night’s destination, the curtains now welcomingly open.
Katherine laid a hand on the doorknob and turned to Mrs. Chrysler.
“What’s our play, Imogene?”
“You just leave it to me, Katty,” her friend answered with a wink.
Katherine nodded and opened the door, beholding a neat, tiled reception area, set here and there with comfortable-looking boulders.
Decorative moss tastefully adorned walls plastered with gray spackle to give them a rough-hewn air.
A faint, nondescript burble of mountain sounds played softly on a music box in the corner.
And yet, the room smelled of disinfectant like clinics everywhere.
A smallish, preoccupied-looking troll sat behind a high granite slab at the far end of the room, and peered at them over a pair of truly massive spectacles.
“Can we help you?” the receptionist asked, looking dubious that they could.
“We’d like to see the doc, please.”
“Um. We’re not really equipped for… soft-bodied ailments here. There’s a human clinic just up the street,” they added helpfully.
“Oh, Brother Hoode here just has some questions”—Mrs. Chrysler pushed the hapless old man forward, taking full advantage of the robe’s hint at holy authority—“’bout nutrition and things like that. For his ministry up in the mountains, you know.”
“Aha.”
Katherine regarded her old friend with a quiet and complicit esteem. Ruben managed an assenting smile.
“So, if we could just have a few minutes of the doc’s time,” Mrs. Chrysler said. She looked around the empty waiting room. “We’re happy to wait.”
The receptionist laid down a slate and removed their glasses. “She’s out on house calls this morning,” they said. Ruben’s weak smile fell into disappointment. “But perhaps our tech can help you.”
“Ah, that would be fine,” Mrs. Chrysler said, even though, Katherine felt quite certain, she was unsure what a “tech” was.
The receptionist pulled a large horn, connected on one end to a hose, from the wall beside them and rumbled some careful Trollish into it before placing it back on its hook.
Presently, a door they had not previously noticed swung open on its hinges, and in strolled a young human woman wearing a beige overcoat and several stone bangles in her long, mossy braids. She held a large rock hammer in her hand, which she quickly plunged behind her back.
“Oh. Human people. I’m so sorry, Grrthnack, I must have misunderstood you. Still learning, you know.” This latter comment was aimed at the visitors with an apologetic smile. “Come this way, will you?”
“Thank you,” Katherine addressed the troll receptionist, and they smiled obligingly, their eyes following the trail of cats shadowing the human trio through the door.
The group followed the woman down a corridor into a cramped, wood-paneled back room, lined with shelves and a wide workbench. “This is my laboratory,” she said brightly, indicating the brass plate on the door, which merely read: “Storage.”
“You’re a… tech?” Katherine asked uncertainly, noting the plate with pity.
“Yes. I’m training in Trollish medicine. My name’s Melinda Storage.”
“Aha.”
“Yes. The name does lead to mix-ups sometimes. The cleaning staff kept trying to put things in here when I first arrived.” Melinda Storage appeared to suddenly notice a broom and dustpan and, with an apologetic expression, set them out in the hallway.
“So you’re going to be a troll doctor someday,” Mrs. Chrysler guessed.
“More of an apothecary, really.”