The Windflower Read Online Free PDF Page A

shadow-box puppet theater. Carl followed, holding two puppets aloft in salute. The fiddles stopped scraping, and the crowd gave a cheer of comfortable appreciation. The act was a popular attraction.
    The puppets were nearly three feet in height. The first was an aristocrat with an exaggerated sneer painted on his lips and dressed in absurdly foppish clothes with glass jewelry; the other puppet was a revolutionary, outfitted in sansculotte rags, a cockade, and a wide, anarchistic grin. They were attached to long handles by very active springs and had rolling joints at the elbows and knees. Merry felt like laughing just looking at them.
    Jason talked the part of the aristocrat, in a high comical lisp, and Carl made the sansculotte the essence of hearty vulgarity. It was a routine they had developed as schoolboys, with many refinements since, and like every good puppet show, it was a delight for any crowd, children and adults. The sansculotte would bellow a republican anthem, and the aristocrat would take a swipe at him, and then the aristocrat would try to sing "God Save the King" and the sansculotte's musical sensibilities would be violently offended. And at the end they were both yelling their respective anthems and trying to turn each other into splinters. The place was in an uproar, and when the play ended with the sansculotte shouting the aristocrat into a dead swoon, the applause was long and loud, and Carl and Jason were surrounded by backslappers.
    For all their roughness Merry began to discover a certain charm to the company, which was raw and lively, like the salt winds that seeped through the rotted moldings on the windows. A fair number sent a grin and a wink her way, but they were good-humored ones mostly, and when they seemed too bold, she looked away from them, into the fire.
    It was midway through one of these retreats that she caught an intent look on her brother's face. Carl glanced at her and hoisted his glass suggestively toward the door.
    The man had entered whom she had been brought here to observe for later sketching. He was pale, loose-skinned, and bird-faced, his chin a fallen pouch, his ears perked forward like the handles of one of Aunt April's china pitchers. It was the face of a man distrusted on sight. He picked his way across the room to a roly-poly bulldog of a man sitting alone by a far window, and the two greeted each other with such a show of hand pumping that you'd have thought one of the pair had just been wed.
    The entering man was a traitor, the bulldog-faced man the unknown who received his secrets, and the secrets were the departure dates of American ships trying to slip through the British blockade to trade with neutral ports in Europe . Carl had friends in the Navy who thought it might be very useful to slip false information this way, as soon as they could -discover to whom the information was being sold. Using Merry's sketches, Carl said, it wouldn't take long to find out.
    "Can you do them?" asked Carl, come to lean over her shoulder.
    "Yes. It won't be hard. If you and Jason want to start packing the theater ..."
    "You've had enough time already? Good girl! Will you look at Jason? What a sharper! He's been around two times already with that darn money box of his."
    "Well, collect him, Carl, and let's go!" said Sally, casting a glance of sisterly exasperation at her brother. "The sooner we're gone, the better."
    "I haven't forgotten that for a minute," Carl growled back. "Start for the door. We'll meet you."
    Following her cousin to the door. Merry paused to smile back into the room and think, That was easy, that really was easy, and then somewhere in the middle of the smile and the middle of the pride, the tavern doors opened, front and back. Simultaneously two gigantic men stepped inside, surveying the crowd impassively before blocking the doorways like sentries. The men were twinned, with shaven heads and bristling cavalry mustaches, and fat chests woven of muscles like the