Read Online Midwinter Nightingale by Joan Aiken - Free Book Online

promise you!”
    “It is not the pain!” ground out the baron. “Do you think I would care about a mere pain?”
    “What then?”
    At that moment there was a tap on the door, and an exceedingly small, grimy boy entered, laboring under the weight of a heavy tray. This he bore with great difficulty as far as the table, then retreated, after a terrified glance at the baron, and scuttled out the door, leaving it open.
    Lothar immediately went over to inspect the tray and picked up a slice of bread and butter from it, which he folded into four and crammed into his mouth.
    “Hey!” protested his sister. “That was meant for me.” And she quickly poured herself a cup of tea before he could move on to that.
    “It ain't so much the toe itself,” Lot told Jorinda in an undertone, nodding toward their father. “It's the aftereffects of being clobbered by a sack of silver shekels.”
    “Why? What is it? What aftereffects?”
    “Why, sixpences are silver, don't you see? Lordy, it was funny! The sack bust open and the sixpences was rolling all over the shop. It's like being hit by a silver bullet, don't you see?”
    “What has their being
silver
got to do with it?”
    “Don't you
know
, you dummy? Silver breaks the power of a you-know-what.” Lot let his voice sink even lower so that Jorinda could hardly hear him. “That's why he's in such a wax. Now he finds he can see himself in the glass. Puts him in a real bate.”
    “Should he not?”
    “O' course not! Didn't you know
that?
He's mad because I had the sack fetched here. Something special has to be done with it.”
    Now Jorinda began to recall various dark hints dropped by Nurse Mara in conversation with her grandfather's housekeeper Mrs. Smidge. Looking about the room, she saw there were half a dozen hand mirrors lying about.
    Lothar picked up one of these and handed it to her.
    “Can you see yourself in the glass?”
    “Why, naturally!” Her round pink face dimpled at her in the mirror; her dark eyes sparkled. How
can
Father not like me, not think I'm pretty? she wondered. She asked Lot, “Should I not be able to?”
    “If you were one
of them
, you wouldn't be able to.”
    “Can you?”
    “Ay,” he said sourly. “I can. But sometimes the change comes on after age twenty-one—so they say”
    “So Pa's lost his power…. How queer. Does that matter?”
    “People won't be so scared of him. A leader has to be able to terrify his followers.”
    “Who is he going to lead?”
    “The Burgundians, o' course.”
    “What about the duchess of Burgundy? Doesn't she lead them?”
    “Oh, she don't count. She's only a female. Pa will soon drop her in the basket.”
    “I wouldn't be so sure of that. Not long ago she came and talked to us at school. Told us not to let our brothers push us around. She looked like a tree that's been growing for five hundred years. Shouldn't think anybody'd push
her
around. So, what does Pa plan to do?”
    “Put me on the throne,” said Lot with immense self-satisfaction. He was contemplating himself approvingly in the hand mirror and did not notice the look his sister gave him.
    “Why not himself?”
    “Wasn't born in this country. That rules him out.”
    Jorinda wrinkled her brow. “I'm sure there were plenty of kings who weren't. What about William the Conqueror? He was born in Normandy”
    “They've changed the rules since then.”
    “I'd think Pa would soon change them again.”
    At this moment, with an anguished caterwauling, Jorinda's cat, which had been left in its basket in the hall and had taken all this time to scratch a hole through thebasketwork, managed to push open the door and make its indignant way toward its owner.
    “Oh, poor pusskin! Was it a starving pussums, then? Here, have a bit of ham.”
    Jorinda took a fragment of fat from one of the used plates on the table. But, before she could give it to the cat, Baron Magnus, his eyes glittering with rage, hoisted himself from his armchair, took six limping,