CHAPTER TWO
For Damaris the days after that were nightmare. Dressed in endless black, she moved through them in a hurting that blurred all else around her.
Everyone was kind to her. Her aunt and her uncle. The strangers who came and went so much through the days before the funeral. Agnes who had tended Damaris’ mother as a baby and known her grandmother and now saw to Damaris without questions or too many words at all. Sometimes it was Virna who would sit and talk to her when everyone else had other things to do. Having someone, anyone, talking to her helped fill the great emptiness in Damaris, who seemed to have very few words of her own left in her. But usually and best it was Aunt Elspeth or Uncle Russell who were with her through those days, explaining what things were happening and why and, at the last, who all the people were, all the strangers, come to the funeral in St. Cuthbert’s church in Gillingthwaite down the dale.
Through those days Damaris nodded to their voices, understanding what they were saying while they said it and doing what she was told; but when they were no longer talking to her or she had finished what they asked of her, almost all of what they had said and what she had done slid out of her mind again because nothing was very real to her just then except the pain around the emptiness where her parents should have been.
Her father’s Uncle Robert came to the funeral. Afterward, in the parlor at Thornoak, Damaris was introduced to him and was told he would be taking her parents to be buried in her father’s family church in Lancashire. She nodded, accepting that because it did not matter. He was not taking her parents, only their bodies. She had seen the bodies lying in their coffins and known those empty, motionless shapes were not her parents. Her parents were gone. They had left those bodies behind, and this stranger could take them if he wanted; it did not matter. But to his face she only nodded and let him shake her hand while he looked down his broad nose at her and said in deeply doubtful tones, “A pretty little thing. If she were a boy now, I’d be able to manage maybe. But a girl…”
Behind her, hands resting lightly on Damaris’ shoulders, Aunt Elspeth answered, “There’s no worry. She’s more than welcome here.”
As simply as that, for all Damaris understood, it was settled that she would stay at Thornoak, and when Uncle Robert and the rest of the strangers were done with and gone, Thornoak’s life folded Damaris into itself. The spring gathered to warm days, rain days, sun days, with lambs in the near pasture and a spindle-legged foal with his dam in the paddock behind the barn. Damaris saw them from an upstairs window, watched the days come and go from there and other windows, but when Uncle Russell asked if she wanted to go out to see the foal, to see the lambs, she shook her head and backed away.
“Why not?” he asked gently.
The why not was because everything in her world had fallen apart and disappeared and she only felt safe with walls around her. But she could not say that. Could only shake her head and say, “I don’t want to.”
Maybe he understood anyway, because he never tried to make her go, never teased her to it; and in the evenings, near the fire in the parlor, he would sit with his arm around her and read to her, stories out of books he said his sons had loved when they were small, before they went away to school. “Our time” he called it, so she would know it was particular and special.
Then every evening at the end of their time, Agnes would come to take her upstairs and see her settled into the trundle bed she slept in at the foot of her aunt’s and uncle’s bed. She had slept alone at first, but the nightmares came more nights than not and it was better to wake to Aunt Elspeth hugging her than alone in a room of her own, waiting for someone to come to her crying. Agnes would have stayed with her if she had wanted to stay in what they called her own room, but her own room was far away and she would never see it again, and in the night only Aunt Elspeth could ease the clamoring fears and help her back to sleep, and soon, during the days, after Agnes had dressed her in the mornings, Damaris took to following her aunt everywhere about the house and out into the gardens that were high-walled enough they felt nearly as safe as rooms. She would have followed Uncle Russell as willingly as she did her aunt, because – like Aunt Elspeth – he was somewhere safe to be, but he was out and about Thornoak’s lands almost every day and so it was Aunt Elspeth she kept near to; and that meant – because it was spring – most days they were outside in the high-walled gardens more hours than not.
There were two gardens behind the manor house. Their outer gray-stoned walls stood higher than Uncle Russell’s head, but they were only low-walled from each other, with a stone-flagged path between them, running from the door at the end of the house’s back corridor to the gate into the stableyard. When Damaris followed Aunt Elspeth out the back door, the kitchen garden was on the right, with its leafing peach tree spread out and uncompromisingly fastened against the wall above straight paths between well-dug beds of black earth with firm little notices on stakes to announce what the early vegetables – just beginning to show green – were going to be. A man and boy saw to the digging and the planting and the weeding there and answered to Cook for what she wanted in season. It was the other garden, to the left of the path, looked out on by the back parlor window, that was Aunt Elspeth’s particular own, where she worked with Virna often helping her.
Damaris’ experience of gardens was limited to Hull’s parks where the flowers were confined to polite islands carefully scattered among vastnesses of grass and meant only to be looked at from a respectful distance and not touched. In Aunt Elspeth’s garden, it was the other way around. The grass was an island, surrounded by garden beds mostly full of plants, some of them herbs, some of them flowers, only a few of the beds bare earth because, “Only some of these need yearly planting,” Aunt Elspeth told Damaris. “The others are here from one year to the next to the next. The bare beds, dug last autumn after frost had come, are where the plants that will only live the one year will go. Or, see.” Pointing to small spots of green in one of the beds. “Some are already growing because their seeds were planted in the autumn.”
Aunt Elspeth never questioned why Damaris followed her. She simply talked while she worked, as if Damaris were there to learn things. While cutting away last year’s dead growth for the new to come, and thinning and moving plants too enthusiastically crowding at each other, and patting in seeds saved from last year, and plucking out too-forward weeds, she talked about what each plant was good for, sometimes almost absentmindedly to herself when only she and Damaris were there or, when Virna was there, deliberately teaching and answering Virna’s endless questions.
Virna made up for Damaris’ silence, always wanting to know more and yet more about everything, with seemingly never enough answers to satisfy her. Day into day Aunt Elspeth told herb lore and flower lore and reasons for everything in the garden being where it was and all the varied plants’ varied uses, because it seemed everything there was good for something beyond just the pleasure of looking at it, even the roses tenderly kept along the house wall where the sun fell warmest.
“They make a syrup that’s an excellent purge,” Aunt Elspeth said. “And a conserve that helps against coughs and colds. The dried flowers in infusions serve against hemorrhages, and in potpourris to sweeten the air of closed rooms.” And, “Mint,” she would say, kneeling over some spindle of bare twigs, easing the straw away from their roots to show where, small but certainly, the first green was coming on what otherwise looked like dead wood. “To ease pains in ears, quiet uneasy stomachs, and soothe headaches.” And over a shrubby twisting of branches that showed no life at all, “Sage. It always leafs out late here. It can help stop wounds bleeding and cleanses sores. It warms aching joints if you make a poultice of it, and its juice in warm water helps hoarseness and coughs.”
In the gentle sunshine or soft rain – sometimes coming one after the other so briefly and so often there was no point in leaving the garden because of them – Damaris listened and edged closer and finally, one day, sat on her heels with her skirts bunched under her beside Aunt Elspeth and with a trowel at first awkward to her hand dug up a corner of a bed for parsley to be sown.
Virna, to show she knew more than Damaris, said, “It opens the body and settles wind in the belly.”
Aunt Elspeth, putting the tiny seeds into Damaris’ hand for her to set in the soil herself, added mildly, “It also makes a lovely border.”
“But it’s the use that matters,” Virna said.
“There’s use in loveliness,” Aunt Elspeth answered, still mildly; but Damaris, chancing to look up at that moment, saw Virna’s scowl at the back of Aunt Elspeth’s head.
In truth, Virna scowled more often than Damaris ever saw reason for, nor could Damaris tell if her scowls were from anger or fierce thought. Certainly – though mostly she hid it – she ceased to be friendly at Damaris, and once, when she and Damaris happened to be alone, she said fiercely, for no reason Damaris saw at the moment, “I’m not a servant here, if that’s what you’ve thought. I’m your aunt’s apprentice. You’ll do well to remember that. Your aunt’s been teaching me and I’m going to learn all she knows.”
Damaris, not knowing what to say to that, said only, “Yes,” a little bewildered, and that night had told Agnes what Virna had said and asked, “Is she Aunt Elspeth’s apprentice?”
“She is and she isn’t,” Agnes answered. Agnes was old, so old she looked to be no more than aged skin over thin bones, but neither her body nor mind were frail, and her voice was sharp as she went on, “She’s village, is Virna.” Agnes nodded toward the window from which, in daylight, Damaris could see along the road to the slate-roofed, stone-built houses of Thornoak village clustered further up the dale. “Her people are from there and have been for time out of mind, and good people most of them have been, her mother and grandmother not the least of them. They were skilled with herbs, her mother and grandmother. Nothing like so skilled as your aunt, mind you, but good enough. There’s many a sickness they cured and not a few hurts they eased among folk here in the dale. Your aunt does much that way, but she can’t do everything, she’s only one body. Well, that said, she has to do it all now they’re gone, and it gets to be too much for her some days, and even she can’t help everything. It was lung sickness took Virna’s mother and grandmother before their time and before they had taught Virna all they could. So it’s right enough your aunt should teach her, and with fortune’s favor some day Virna will take her mother’s and grandmother’s place in the village.”
Damaris, standing still and with her chin up for Agnes to button her nightdress up to the ruffle around her throat, heard more than Agnes said and asked her, “But why is she mad at me about it?”
“That’s hard to say. Likely she fears you’ll take her place, which you won’t, but I doubt anyone will make her see that.”
Something in Agnes’ voice made Damaris ask, “You don’t like her?”
Agnes sniffed and went on buttoning. Damaris could have done the buttons herself, but Agnes had seen to Aunt Elspeth and Damaris’ mother when they were small, and to the unknown Nevin and Kellan when they were little, and in her often-grumping way she was happy to have Damaris to care for, so Damaris let her do the buttons and waited and Agnes finally said, “Well, that Virna, she wants more than is good for her, if you ask me. I’m not saying anything I haven’t said to your aunt, so I’m not telling tales out of school to say so.” She finished with the buttoning but did not shoo Damaris into bed as she usually did, just stood there, her hands on Damaris’ shoulders, frowning over her words before going on, “Your aunt hopes she’ll settle, but I have my doubts. So does your aunt, and be sure she knows better than to tell Virna things Virna shouldn’t know. But there’ll be trouble, mark my words, when Virna finds out there’s things your aunt isn’t going to tell her. There’ll be the end of her nice ways then, I’ll warrant you. So don’t go wasting your time trying to be friendly with her. Or let her be too friendly with you either, come to that. Now settle you into bed and go to sleep.”
Damaris did, taking with her into sleep the doubt there was any chance she would ever be “too friendly” with Virna.
In the days after planting the parsley, Damaris was allowed to do more in the garden and found her hands were clever at the work and that she liked it. Besides that, very much of what Aunt Elspeth said from day to day stayed with her, so that sometimes she unthinkingly answered a question meant for Virna; and one morning, when she’d been sent into the house to fetch a packet of seeds from the still-room – the herb-scented place where Aunt Elspeth kept her harvested herbs and the things she made from them – and was coming back, almost out the door into the garden, she heard Virna say, “But should you be telling her so much?” with a worry that somehow, under its earnestness, was edged by something else that stopped Damaris where she was. And so she listened as Aunt Elspeth answered, even-voiced, “Most of what I’ve told her is in books for everyone to read. The rest most any herbwife could tell her.”
“But you promised her mother…”
“The promise is kept,” Aunt Elspeth said more curtly than Damaris had ever heard her say anything. “There’s nothing secret about anything she’s learned. No one’s word is broken.”
And Damaris stayed where she was, a little shivered with a sudden fear she did not understand. – A shadowed bedroom and storm-driven night and her mother pleading, “Promise. Promise.” – But there was sunlight and warm morning beyond the doorway, and the shiver of fear faded and Damaris went out, deliberately seeming as if she had just come and heard nothing.
The trouble was that fear came to her so easily anymore, often seizing on her for even less reason than what she had heard between her aunt and Virna, and sometimes for no seeming reason at all, so that maybe there was simply only the one great fear in her – a haunted certainty that because once, with no warning at all, her world had fallen to pieces and reshaped itself into something else, there was no reason it would not do it again and even more terribly. And so as the spring warmed toward summer, she insistently kept to what she was most certain of – to the house and its gardens – not willing to trust anywhere beyond their walls, even in her aunt’s or uncle’s or Agnes’ company and despite that meant letting Aunt Elspeth leave her when called away by someone’s need for her skill with herbs and medicines. That happened often, because the nearest doctor – the one her father had hoped to reach – was in Skelfeld at the far end of the dale, and most people could not afford him anyway, so it was Aunt Elspeth as lady of the manor who they asked to come, and always she went, with her basket of simples and often Virna. But never Damaris.
Summer came, and because somewhere out in the world school was ending and the unknown Nevin and Kellan would soon be home, there was a day when Agnes was busy ordering the maids at turning out their bedrooms at the far end of the upstairs hall, to have everything clean and ready when they came. Both Aunt Elspeth and Uncle Russell were gone for the day, and Damaris went to watch the bustle. Agnes, never one for idleness and seeing Damaris, said, “There now. Extra hands. Come here and be useful,” and Damaris found herself set to dusting while the maids turned mattresses and remade the beds with fresh sheets and carried off the blankets to be aired.
Damaris had hardly thought about her cousins beyond Uncle Russell’s stories and Aunt Elspeth’s occasional mention of them, and out of new curiosity she asked, “Whose room is this?” as she worked her way along a bookshelf cluttered less with books and more with interesting boxes, a curved sheep’s horn, various strange-shaped rocks, and some things of which she was not certain at all.
“It’s Master Nevin’s,” Agnes said. “Nor do I know what half those things are he has there, so there’s no need you ask. Just know I’d handle them careful if I were you. Particular is Master Nevin about his things. And Master Kellan’s no better. My thought is they go about collecting those things just to make cleaning their rooms the harder.”
Damaris thought otherwise, was so careful at dusting each thing and the shelf, too, and putting each thing back exactly where it had been that she was left behind, alone in Kellan’s room, long after the maids and Agnes had finished with the beds and gone. The last thing she did was set a well-polished purple-glassed bottle of peculiar shape back on a window sill where it gleamed in the afternoon sunlight, and turned from it to find Aunt Elspeth in the doorway, smiling at her.
“I didn’t break anything,” Damaris said, smiling back at her.
“You’ve done very well. Would you like a room of your own?”
Taken by surprise, the question coming from nowhere, Damaris had a moment of choking panic, knowing she could not bear the room that had been “hers” after her parents died. There were too many nightmares there. But just as quickly she caught hold on the certainty that if she said no, Aunt Elspeth would simply let the matter go, not force any change upon her. She was being given a choice, and because it was a choice, not a demand, she surprised herself by saying warily, “I might.”
“Which one would you choose?” Aunt Elspeth asked as if she did not hear the wariness.
Damaris hesitated. There were other bedrooms along this upstairs hall, all of them safely close to her aunt’s, but surprising herself again, she said, “I’ll show you,” and went past her aunt, out of Kellan’s room, and along the hall to the stairs at the farther end that went up to the top of the house. Sometimes when Aunt Elspeth was gone, she had roamed the house to that very top, knew much of it was storage but also that there was a small room with a slanted ceiling tucked into the front gable, with a single window and a seat. The room was so small it was almost more a hiding place than somewhere to live, and maybe that was why it was the room Damaris thought of and led her aunt to.
Aunt Elspeth walked around it without saying anything, needing to stoop a little where the ceiling came too low, and went to stand at the window looking out a while before she turned to Damaris and said, “Yes. It’s a happy room. You’ll be happy here.”
That had meant more cleaning for Agnes and the maids and Damaris, too. Uncle Russell sent men to paint it a creamy white, and afterward they moved in a narrow bed, a small worktable, a small bookshelf, and a braided woolen rug from elsewhere in the house. The cupboard for her clothing had to stand in the hallway outside the door but that was no matter, and the night before her cousins came home, Damaris slept in her room for the first time and alone and had no nightmares.
Because the public coach came no nearer than Skelfeld, the coach was sent down the dale next day to collect her cousins there. Damaris, suddenly frightened at thought of meeting them, had asked Aunt Elspeth with pretended bravery, as if she did not care, if she had to be downstairs when they came.
“You can come down when you choose or at dinnertime, whichever is first,” Aunt Elspeth said easily, and so Damaris fled to her room when a watching servant called from the front step, “Here they come!”, and it was from her window, high and far away as if she were a bird, that she watched the carriage draw to a stop, Tom the coachman putting a fine flourish to it before two boys tumbled over each other out the carriage door. From where she was she could tell nothing about them except that they had brown hair; and then her aunt and uncle came out to greet them with hugs and handshakes, and afterward led them inside.
Damaris stayed curled on the window seat. From there she could look out, almost like a bird in flight might, across the green reaches of the dale – its patterning of stone-walled fields and stone-built farmhouses, with the blue and silver glint of the river running down its heart, and the steep rise of the green land to a dark line against the sky that she knew were the moors, though she could not imagine what those were and did not care. It was enough that from where she was, everything was too far away to hurt her.
But below and behind her in the house rose her cousins’ loudness and laughter. They were here and they would not go away until autumn took them back to school. At least they did not come seeking her, but time came for dinner and she had to go down to where they were, entering the dining room timidly. This was their home after all, not hers. She had no way to know what they might say to her or do, how rude they might be, being boys.
What they did was hardly notice her. When she slid into her chair at the dining table, Uncle Russell said, “Here’s Damaris now. Damaris, that’s Nevin sitting across from you, and Kellan beside him.”
She said, more to the tabletop than to them, “Hello.”
They both said, “Hello,” back to her and returned to telling how one of the passengers riding outside on the mailcoach had fallen asleep and been jounced off and had to run shouting after the coach until the other passengers had finally made the coachman understand he had to stop; and through the rest of the meal they were too busy telling of their last days at school and their plans for the summer and asking about one thing and another at Thornoak to notice her at all. Much later, Damaris wondered if maybe they had been warned to do that, to give her a chance to grow used to them; at the time she was merely grateful to be ignored, and as the meal went on, she even dared to snatch glances at them. Despite Nevin was two years the older, there seemed very little difference between them, not in height or hair or anything else, but by the time dessert was served, Damaris had decided Kellan laughed the louder of the two of them and had a quicker tongue than Nevin. Otherwise they were too nearly the same for it to matter which was which, and if Nevin kicked Kellan a few times under the table for jibing and teasing at him, it was good-humored on both sides, neither of them angry about any of it.
Damaris had not known boys could be like that. There had been no boys in the dame school she had gone to, and her mother had always warned her away from any when she had played in the park. Her mother had said boys were too dirty, too loud, too mean for little girls to play with, but these two seemed none of those things. Not only that, they left her alone not just that first evening but through the next few days after. But then they were hardly ever in the house at all those days – were usually there for breakfast, rarely for dinner, always for supper, with tales to tell of hiking up to the moors or fishing in the river or riding out with Uncle Russell to see how everything was around the manor.
It seemed to be as Agnes had told her: That they had months of being gone to make up for and only the summer to do it in, and because they were mostly out, busy at their own concerns, Damaris’ days went on much as always, until a day came when Aunt Elspeth was called away to see to someone’s hurt on a Thornoak farm, taking Virna with her, leaving Damaris behind to weed among the lavender plants. The day was bright, with high white clouds on a warm wind so that the garden was a very pleasant place to be, and the smell of the lavender loosened knotted places deep inside of her. She had just finished and was sitting back on her heels, deciding what to do next, when dog noises in the stableyard outside the rear gate in the high stone wall brought her to her feet, startled but curious. She had liked what little acquaintance she had had with dogs in Hull, but her mother had been afraid of dogs; had wanted her to be afraid, too, so only sometimes had she had a chance pet one, never a chance to really meet one. Curious enough that she forgot to be fearful, she ran the little way to the stableyard gate and opened it.
Just outside was a scuffle of half a dozen half-grown puppies tumbling, bounding, and falling all over each other; and beyond them, running to catch up to them, were Nevin and Kellan. Surprised at the suddenness of so many puppies and at seeing her cousins, Damaris was already starting to shut the gate when Kellan exclaimed, “Look! It’s the princess! She’s escaping from the tower!” He swept her a bow. “Pray, fair damsel, may we aid your flight from your vile pursuers?”
It was his grin as much as offer of a game that caught at Damaris’ loneliness, and before she could think otherwise, she said, “Yes, please. They’re close behind me.”
“Then come on,” Nevin said, holding out his hand to her. “We’ll run for it.”
Taking his hand was easy enough, but to “run for it” was much harder with that tumble of puppies around their legs and under their feet. By the time they had run and lurched and stumbled and laughed and leaped their way out of the stableyard and across a back pasture to a wide path along the gray stone wall of another field, even Damaris had forgotten she was a fleeing princess and was hardly more than one of the puppies to her cousins.
The puppies, out for an afternoon’s run did exactly that – they ran – and Nevin and Kellan and Damaris ran as much after them as with them, on up the path that left the stone wall and curved first along the edge of a deep, wooded valley until that narrowed and shallowed to plain hillside in an upper pasture, leaving the path to go on by itself to a last stone wall. There a carefully built thin gap with a stone step up to it barely let the puppies tussle their way through one at a time – or two at once if one was scambling over the top of another as they went. Nevin and then Kellan slid through after them, and Damaris followed, finding a stone step down on the further side, where she paused, panting, finding there were no stone walls beyond this one, nor anymore pasture or farmed land. Instead there was wild, dark heather and the rough green of bracken, and she realized she was on the edge of moorland like that she saw across the dale from her window. She had not known there was more on this side of the valley but she did not have time to think about it. Boys and puppies were away, following the path’s curve up and away, and she followed them. She was tiring, though, and short of breath and she fell behind and found herself trudging among such of the puppies as had lost interest in running. Instead, they were snuffling their way back and forth across the path, finding interesting things along the way, but Damaris could only watch her feet taking one step after another until finally, unexpectedly, she at last caught up to her cousins. They had come to a place where the moor was flattened into a smooth stretch of grassy turf around a tall stone, and there had collapsed, boys and puppies stretched out and happily at ease together.
Breathless, Damaris trudged over to them, flopped down onto the grass, and closed her eyes.
The puppies recovered before she did and began to wander around. Since there was no way to rest while being walked all over by puppy feet, Damaris sat up and in the midst of shoving a puppy off of her saw for the first time where she was – on a high shoulder of hill, with the moor rolled vastly away on three sides, a wild emptiness bare of trees, green with grasses and young bracken, dark-patched with heather, all rolling and falling and rising, curving up to a sky that nothing eased from horizon to horizon in all the ways she looked, until she turned and found the dale behind her, below her, farther away than it was from her bedroom window, everything smaller – houses, field-walls, roads, the river, all small as toys, hardly real, they were so far away – with beyond them the green lift of the dale’s far side to moors again, rising up against the sky. And everywhere, save for the snuffle and yip of the puppies, no sound but the endless sighing of the wind through the grasses, bracken, and heather.
Damaris stood up, puppies and cousins forgotten, and slowly turned around and around, looking and looking and not afraid at all, because somewhere in her something was beginning to sing with gladness.
She ended her slow turning facing her cousins. They had sat up, too, leaning their backs against the tall stone thrust up from the sheep-cropped grass. Nevin was playing tug-of-war with a puppy and a short piece of rope, but Kellan was watching her, and she wandered toward him, not to sit but to stand and lay her hand on the rough black flank of the stone. It stood nearly twice her height, weather-grooved and unlike any stone she had ever seen. Certainly unlike the gray ribs of rock thrust here and there out of the flanks of the dale and the moors.
“It looks brought here,” she said, still touching it.
Kellan looked up at her. “Very good,” he said appreciatively. “It was, they say. A long time ago.”
“Why?”
“It’s called The Lady and they say that so long as she looks down on the dale all will be well and safe here.”
“Kellan,” Nevin said as if disgusted at him for telling such an old tale.
“It’s in some book in Father’s study,” Kellan said easily. “I’ve read it. She can, too, if she wants. Anyone can.”
Nevin stood up. “Come on,” he said. “We need to go back.”
Calling in the puppies took a while. They knew their manners, but did not much like the bother of them, and when they finally all started down the path again, the way seemed longer – even going downhill – than Damaris remembered it being. Her legs began to ache, and her feet, in light-soled houseslippers never meant for long walks, began to hurt. Her cousins, busy with the puppies, went further and further ahead of her as if they had forgotten her, and she was walking with her head down, trying not to cry with pain and weariness and being left behind when there was the sound of heavy boots on the path ahead of her and suddenly Uncle Russell was there, scooping her up into his arms, exclaiming, “Damaris! Where have they dragged you to and back? You’re not a hound to be hauled all over the countryside, poor girl. They’ve a beating coming for this.”
Glad as she was to be cradled and carried and saved from anymore walking, Damaris roused to that threat against Nevin and Kellan. “They didn’t do it!” she protested. “I wanted to go.” And, “Can I go again?”
Uncle Russell cocked his head down to look into her face with deep, considering eyes. “You want to go again?”
Despite she was so tired she could hardly keep her own eyes open now that she was off her feet, Damaris pleaded, “Yes. Please. Yes.”
Uncle Russell smiled. “Then surely you can. Only I think we’d best find you better shoes to wear before you do.”
Continue with Chapter 3 tomorrow!
Or click here and read now:
