Havemercy Read Online Free PDF Page A

However, it left the wife, the children, the servants, and me alone together, and not one of us able to speak.
    “Well,” the wife said at length, though it seemed every word she spoke pained her, “these are the children.”
    “Yes,” I agreed. “They are indeed.”
    “Alexander is the eldest,” said a new voice, warm and uncertain. “William is about to break your pocket watch.”
    I refocused my attention just over the wife’s shoulder and noticed someone unfamiliar hanging back not as a servant would, but neither like a true member of the family. I decided right away that he must have been no more than a distant cousin, which was why no one had seen fit to trim his hair.
    “Then there are Etienne and Emilie,” he went on, shifting a poorly bound roman from under his left arm to under his right.
    “Emilie and I have already met,” I said.
    “Etienne is shy,” the young man explained, shrugging. He had a strange sort of grace about him, the unusual and post-adolescent combination of complete self-consciousness and blissful distraction. He bore it well despite the hair.
    “Which we will very soon break him of,” the wife added sharply. She seemed to be on the verge of having the vapors.
    “Like a horse, I presume,” I replied, and then added smoothly, coming up to take her hand and press it against my lips in my most formal of bows, “I am your servant, Mme, in all things. Your hospitality overwhelms me. I shall repay it any way I can.”
    “Oh, well,” she said, fluttering like a poor man’s peacock—a rooster with too much tail for its own good but a rooster nonetheless. “You’re family, of course.”
    I was, for good or for ill. “And who is this?” I asked, gesturing to the young man. I realized now the dreamy air that hung about him—like dust motes in a shaft of light—must have been a reflection of the great and secret desire he was harboring even now: that he wished to be elsewhere, reading his book, completely unbothered by our posturing.
    “Who? Oh, Hal,” the wife said. “He’s to be Alexander and William’s tutor, when Alexander comes of age.”
    “Next summer,” Alexander said proudly.
    “Very good,” I replied, distracted. The tutor-to-be was pale but freckled along the bridge of his nose, and he was neither awkward nor shy but acutely polite. I shook his hand. “What are you reading?”
    “This? Nothing,” he said, and endeavored to hide it from me.
    “Hal very much enjoys his romans,” the wife said. She was sniffing again.
    I thought about offering her a handkerchief, then discarded the notion. It would not do to offend my brother’s wife all at once. There would be no sport left for later on, and now that I was in the country, I needed to ration my amusements as meagerly as I could.
    Instead, I offered the youth a thin smile, taking advantage of his preoccupied state to lift the badly concealed volume from his hands. It was uncouth of me, but I did not expect to be reprimanded by the lady of the house, who had already made it quite evident that Hal was not among her chief priorities.
    “Oh,” he said, not sounding distressed but merely surprised.
    The roman was a familiar one, though not the most widely respected or circulated collection of information on the Basquiat. The author had taken several creative liberties with the origins of the thing, for one, and there was scarcely even a mention of the Well. It skirted the matter of its overzealous guardians entirely, save a small notation that they called themselves the Brothers and Sisters of Regina. Yet I raised an eyebrow, surprised in turn, for I hadn’t expected to find any touchstone to the city here.
    “Are you interested in the Basquiat, boy?” I smoothed my fingers down the roman’s spine, judging how long it would be before the pages began to fall out. Cheap books were a terrible shame, and no doubt a result of spending all your money on sheep.
    “No,” he said. “Well, yes, that is—I do like