The Queen's Librarian (7 page)

Ah, so
that
was what had happened to what was more of a baking
hall
than a baking
shed
, and which Lucas knew was neither “old” nor in danger of disuse. Lucas had heard that there’d been an accident at the castle last week with some dragon’s breath powder, but he’d just assumed it was one of Cráwa’s spells gone wrong, because—silly as it seemed now—it had never even occurred to him that anyone in their right mind would ever allow Laurie anywhere near anything explosive. Or sharp. Or important.

“No, Alex, thank you,” Laurie said from between what sounded like a sunny smile wrapped around tightly clenched teeth. “I would, however, be interested to know what you’ve done to my favorite cousin, and how it is you’re apparently unscathed when Lucas looks like he’s been rowing with cutthroats and ruffians.”

Wait, what?

“
What
?” cried Mother. “What’s happened to my baby boy?!”

“Nothing’s happened, Madame Tripp, honestly, it’s only a little scratch, nothing to worry about.”

Oh. Right. The bush. Stupid thorns. Stupid Laurie.

“Lucas! Lucas
Tripp
!”

“Yes, Lucas, come in here,” Laurie called. “Stop hiding out in the hallway and come let your mother take care of you.”

Lucas was rather surprised the Glare of Death wasn’t melting the lenses of his spectacles and burning a hole through the wall and right between Laurie’s eyes. He squared his shoulders and put on a smile as he stepped into the room, only barely keeping his feet when his mother sailed out of her chair and came at him like a very elegant, silk- and lace-draped battleship.

“What have you done to your lovely
face
?” she wailed as she took Lucas by the shoulders and shoved his face into her bosom. “Oh, I
knew
you shouldn’t be down in that dangerous little house all by yourself with that treacherous loft and all that splintery wood, and that dreadful
cat
! Was it the cat? It was the cat, wasn’t it, oh my poor
baby
, let me look at you.”

She shoved Lucas back again with enough force that his spectacles slipped down to totter at the end of his nose. “It’s a scratch,” he told her, probably a little bit desperately, though he’d never admit it, because then Laurie would think he’d won, and that was just unacceptable. “And I didn’t even get it at home, my house is
not
dangerous, for pity’s sake, Mother. I was just being clumsy, that’s all, and you know, you’re really kind of hurting my arms a little, and really,
how
are you so strong?”

Mother didn’t appear to have heard any of it—she gripped harder. “You’re moving back in here straight away, and you’re putting that awful creature right back out in the barns where it belongs. Alex Booker,” she intoned, turning an imperious glare across the room, “what in the
world
were you doing while that horrible monster was attacking my son?”

Alex gulped. Lucas didn’t blame him—anyone would. “It wasn’t—”

“Yes, Alex,” Laurie said with a tilt of his head and really quite a believable indignant glare, considering he was an evil Goblin King, “what
were
you doing while Lucas was being attacked by that horrible, awful fiend and almost losing an eye?”

Mother’s glance snapped back to the plaster on Lucas’s cheek, then widened, even as her grip tightened another notch. She was cutting off circulation now; forget the eye, Lucas was going to lose an arm, he just knew it.

“Your
eye
!” Mother shrieked. “It’s what they do, you know, they go for the eyes, oh, Lucas, my poor b—”

“It wasn’t Cat!” It had come to this—Lucas was defending a cushion with legs who had basically come with the carriage house because she wouldn’t leave when he’d moved in and only “allowed” him to share “her” space because he was sometimes useful to her. “It was a
bush
, Mother, a simple thorny bush, and it wasn’t at home, it was at the Duck, and I got a scratch—on my
cheek
, not my
eye
—because I was being clumsy and couldn’t get my sleeve unstuck from some prickers when I was—”

He stopped himself short. Because he wasn’t about to tell his mother that he’d been weeing outdoors “like a peasant” or that he’d been weeing at all. There were some things, though Mother was no doubt aware of their existence and necessity, Lucas had no intention of acknowledging in her presence, and what he had in his trousers was one of those things. He’d never be able to use it again—for anything—if he had to admit that she knew he had it. And that would probably disappoint Alex. Well, and Lucas too.

“Really, Mother,” Lucas said, trying to gently twist out of her clutches without looking like he was having some kind of spasm. “I mean, you know, ow.”

“The Duck?” said Laurie. “Do you mean the Drunken Duck?” His eyes were wide and his smile was pure evil. “So you
were
out rowing with cutthroats and ruffians. At a
tavern
!” He looked at Alex. “Which still doesn’t explain why you haven’t a mark on you, Alex.”

And why did everyone seem to think that, if Lucas
had
been fighting, it would have been Alex’s “duty” to step in and save him? There were dozens of insults in that assumption; Lucas couldn’t decide which one to start with.

“Yes, funny that,” Alex retorted, relaxing back into his chair with a small smile that had to mean some kind of trouble. He set to casually straightening his cuffs. “Because, since you brought up marks and all, I was just noticing that strange little bruise below your left ear.” He smirked a little when Laurie too obviously stopped his hand from reflexively reaching up to cover the mark. “Sort of looks like a love bite, but since I’m certain the Prince of the Realm wouldn’t dream of going about corrupting the innocent daughters of his mother’s subjects, that can’t be right, can it? I mean—ha!—whatever would the Queen say if she got it into her royal head that her only son was the randiest horndog to have ever, say, blown up a baking hall?” Alex took a prim sip of his tea. “I saw Miss Maida the other day when I had business in Applethrow. She sends her, um—” He cleared his throat. “—regards.”

And now Lucas couldn’t decide between boggling and smirking. How did Alex
know
all this stuff?

It had the desired effect on Laurie—he shut his mouth and glared then shot a quick cowed glance at Lucas’s mother. She didn’t notice. She was busy looking at Lucas with… drat. She was going to pull out the tears.

“You went to a
tavern
?”

She said it like she was talking about the third portal of the Netherworld—the one where all the debauchers and lusters went to cool their heels for eons until the Sentinel Wardens decided they were sexually frustrated enough and sent them off to the second portal to spend another few eons with the proselytizers and the radicals.

Lucas didn’t
want
to spend eons with the proselytizers and the radicals.

“Laurie’s got a love bite,” he said weakly.

“The Drunken Duck?” Mother sniffed. “The
Drunken
Duck?”

“It’s an inn!” Lucas defended. “And maybe it has a, um, you know, a sort of hall-type room, which
might
almost resemble a tavern, but there are more rooms in the place that
don’t
resemble a tavern, so it’s really just an inn with what some
might
consider one tavern-ish room among lots of other
un
tavern-ish rooms, which by its definition doesn’t necessarily make it—”

“Isn’t that where Mister Singer met his unfortunate end?” asked Laurie.

Lucas couldn’t tell if it was a deliberate prod or if it was simply one of those occasions where Laurie’s mouth hadn’t bothered to check with his brain before engaging. Either way, it made Lucas clench his teeth, and the headache that Miss Emma’s tea had almost killed came roaring back to life to pulse red and hot behind his eyes.

“Laurie,” Lucas said slowly, “I swear, if you don’t shut your mouth, I will kick your arse so hard you’ll have to reach—
bottom
!” Lucas snapped wide eyes back to his mother. “I didn’t say arse, I said bottom!”

Oh my god. He’d just said “arse” in front of his mother.
To
his mother.
Twice
. He’d gone a little light-headed, so he almost didn’t notice the squeals and shrieks coming from the south garden, or the bobbing heads that a moment later passed by the sunroom’s large eastern window on the way to the front door. He was too caught up in trying to turn back time so the past eternity had never happened at all.

“Oh look, Nan’s here,” he said, and he didn’t even care that it was so obviously wretched. Bugger not letting Laurie win—this one had been over before Lucas had even stepped into the room.

Bramble loosed a small, muffled
woof
from the main corridor as the front door slammed open and, “Grandmother!” echoed into the room on Anice’s ebullient cry.

“We do not shout,” came Nan’s stern tone, followed by, “and we do not run!” a bit louder to be heard over the sound of three sets of running feet and Bramble’s toenails on marble.

Stillwell beat his sisters through the doors and hurtled in like a small cannonball. And while Lucas might wince a little at the way the Stillwell-shaped projectile hit Lucas’s mother in the midsection, arms clinging and legs flailing, followed by Anice and Violet—no slouches themselves when it came to diminutive, destructive weapons metaphors—he did have to admit to a great deal of relief when it jostled loose his mother’s hold on his arms.

He offered a halfhearted, “Not too rough on your grandmother, now,” as he took unabashed advantage of the distraction and retreated to stand behind Alex’s chair. Alex took hold of Lucas’s hand and gave it a comforting squeeze, which didn’t fix anything, but at least made Lucas feel like it could.

“What a morning!” Nan said as she arrived. With a glance and a roll of the eyes at Laurie, she dropped an unenthusiastic curtsy and then ignored him. “Lucas! Alex! How nice to see you both.” She gave them a genuine smile and then kissed Mother on the cheek. “Here, now, Anice, do let go of your grandmother, she is not a tree, Stillwell, that’s lace, use your handkerchief, and Violet, honestly, will you
please
keep your clothes
on
for five minutes?”

Violet already had her shoes and stockings off and was working on her petticoats.

“We have a royal guest,” Mother intoned. “Show your manners, children.”

Nan gave Laurie another look, then looked at her children in their various stages of unmannerly behavior and waved a hand. “Curtsy, curtsy, bow,” she said to Laurie then dismissed him.

“Why, Nan,” Laurie said wryly, “I’m touched.”

“I’ve been saying so for years,” Nan told him blithely then glared him into cowed silence before dismissing him again.

God, she was impressive. There had been a time when Lucas had wanted to be exactly like her when he grew—

Right, then. Lucas decided the best thing to do would be to stubbornly ignore the fact that maybe there was some historical and empirical evidence to support the apparent general theory that he was, in fact, a little girl.

“Sit, Mother.” Nan’s pretty face turned down into a slight frown as she pried her children off and led Mother back to her chair. “You look a little pale. Is everything all right?”

Lucas was already short—maybe if he sank to his knees to hide behind Alex’s chair, no one would notice.

“Your
brother
,” said Mother as she allowed Nan to freshen her tea and then took a calming sip, “has been frequenting
taverns
. And getting into
fights
.” She sniffed and drew a hanky from the inside of her sleeve. “If your father was alive to see this….”

She trailed off and shook her head sadly, but it wasn’t as though she had to finish—according to Mother, if their father had been alive for the past two decades, Lucas would have killed him a hundred times over anyway.

“You got into a fight?” Stillwell asked, eyes wide. He bounced over to Lucas and regarded him with serious consideration. “I fell out of a tree once,” was his eventual assessment. “My plaster was bigger.” Still, there was a bit of admiration in that ingenuous gaze.

Lucas didn’t really want to deflate it, but he felt compelled to honesty. “I didn’t get into a
fight
,” he grumbled then had to smile when Anice snatched a sugar biscuit from Mother’s plate and climbed up on Alex’s lap, where she proceeded to try to smash the entire thing into her mouth in one go. The way Bramble eyed it all promised dire things for the crumbs that landed all over Alex’s trousers.

Nan grinned as she grabbed hold of Violet and sat on the floor to wrestle her back into her bloomers. “Huntley got into a fight once. Back when we were still courting. It was over tea, if you can believe it.” She shook her head and crammed Violet’s foot back into a stocking. “Not that I condone such things, you understand, by my
goodness
, it was something to watch.” She sighed somewhat dreamily as she hunted for the other stocking, which was now, inexplicably, flapping over Bramble’s swishing tail. Nan gave him a scratch between his ears then snatched the stocking and shoved it over Violet’s foot, though Violet had somehow already gotten the other one off again and was doing her best to squirm away and chase after the retreating Bramble.

“Huntley Pryce never stooped to fisticuffs,” Mother declared.

“Got himself a black eye for his trouble,” Nan answered. “I thought for a little while that his nose was broken, which would have been horrid—it’s such a lovely straight nose. But it was only swollen.” Her smile was quite coy as she accepted Violet’s shoes from Stillwell and simultaneously prevented Violet from removing her bloomers again whilst stuffing the shoes on and then proceeding to buckle them. She peered up at Alex with a wink. “I know Alex wasn’t causing the trouble, and I can’t see Lucas spoiling for a row.” She tilted her head and gave Laurie a grimace. “Ah,” was all she said.

“I wasn’t even there!” Laurie cried.