The Fiddler's Gun Read online

  At this, several napping boys sat up to take closer notice of the goings-on.

  “Mr. Bolzius has seen fit to provide the town with a new chapel and wishes to build it here on our grounds.”

  This impressed almost no one.

  “He will provide all the necessary materials, and the architect, Mr. Thom Hickory, will oversee construction. However, a detail of able young men chosen from our orphanage will be the chief laborers. You’ll all do well to understand that such work may one day lead to an apprenticeship, and that to a fruitful life beyond our walls.”

  The eyes of every boy in the room widened with excitement—as did Fin’s. Hands shot up around the table and waved furiously.

  “Order! Hush! Hands down!” snapped Sister Hilde.

  “Sister Hilde and I will consider whom to send to Mr. Hickory in the coming days, so it would behoove the lot of you to be on your best behavior.” She paused to let that sink in, then continued, “Now to the next matter of business. Brother Bartimaeus,” she nodded his way, “has requested that we provide him an assistant. Though he denies it, I continually assure him that he is getting old.”

  Bartimaeus grumbled something unintelligible in his defense.

  “Having someone around to help with the daily preparations of food and cleanup after meals will be a relief for his weary bones,” explained Carmaline.

  This not only impressed no one, it seemed to terrify everyone. Children shrank back into the shadows, desperate not to draw any attention that might warrant their being chosen. A doom of endless dishwashing and pot scrubbing was a horror thought to be visited only upon children in the lowest reaches of hell.

  “We will consider this appointment for the next few days, so I once again suggest that you behave to impress. You are dismissed to evening chores, and I will see you all in the morning.”

  Carmaline bobbled out the door and Hilde took command of the room. “Miss Button will to tend to the dishes this evening.”

  Fin knew it was coming and didn’t look surprised, though she did afford Sister Hilde the appropriate glare.

  “The rest of you, off to your chores. I want horses fed, water hauled, and floors swept within the hour. Dismissed!” Hilde clapped her hands together and a flurry of bodies whisked dishes to the cleaning trough and left Fin staring at a mound of scrubbing to be done.

  “A word, Miss Button,” said Hilde when the hall was emptied.

  Fin clenched her teeth and turned with her eyebrows stuck up.

  Hilde ignored Fin’s obvious irritation. “You’ll do well to learn a thing or two while you attend the dishes. No man will have you as a wife the way you are. The sooner you learn your place and learn your work, the sooner you’ll be married off and away. Mind me, Miss Button. It is the way of the world.”

  Fin’s inclination was to teach Hilde a thing or two about the world by way of a sharp cuss and a right hook. But she bit her tongue and kept her hands.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Fin with a sarcastic smirk that set Hilde’s nose aquiver. Hilde narrowed her eyes briefly before turning on her toe and marching out of the dining hall with a sniff.

  When Hilde was out of sight, Peter stuck his head through the door.

  “Want some help?” he said.

  “No, if she catches you helping she’ll give me more work. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She gave him a crooked smile and rolled up her sleeves as he walked out the door. She didn’t mind the chore so much. At least it was quiet.

  Building a new chapel sounded like more fun than she’d had all year. Working with her hands and being out in the sun with the boys—that was where she belonged, not sitting in sewing class with the girls where the sisters would have her. Who wanted to sit around knitting blankets and spinning yarn when you could be outside building a new chapel?

  “At it again, eh, missy?” She jumped at the sound of a voice from behind her.

  “Good Lord, Bartimaeus! You nearly scared me to death.”

  He chuckled in his breathy, creaking way as he rolled up his sleeves and began drying dishes as Fin got them clean. He was tall and wiry and bent like a fishhook as his shoulders bowed down under the weight of his years. Whatever hair he had in youth had weathered to silver and long since ceased to cover his head in any meaningful way. Now it just hung on above his ears like moss clung to an old oak. His sun-darkened skin covered him like aged leather and was parted everywhere by creases that gave the impression someone had drawn a map on his hide; Fin wondered if there might be buried treasure to find if she studied him long enough. His arms and hands seemed to bear more scars and fading tattoos than original material, but for all his battered coarseness, his way was smooth as water. When he spoke, his voice seeped out like the groan of a ship’s timbers.

  “What did you think of Sister Carmaline’s speech?” he asked. “Could be good work for one that’s willin’.” He threw his towel onto his shoulder and placed the dried dishes into the cupboard.

  Fin shrugged. “At least there will be something to show for it. I haul water from the well fifteen times a day, I sweep floors, wash linens, and feed pigs, and for what? So I can get up and do it all over again tomorrow?” Fin had a mind to spit at something, but didn’t. “But this? This has results.”

  “Aye, cookin’s got results you can taste! It’s nice to see the fruit of your labor. Never tire of it,” he said. “Nothin’ does me so good as the table rounded about with mouths at the feast.” He wiped his face with the towel and laughed to himself. “You see that Danny Shoeman tonight? Boy can jabber away like a bothered chicken but he shut it up quick when the pork hit the plate, cain’t he?” He looked at Fin and lowered an eyebrow at her. “There’s some power in a pig when it’s roasted up right, missy. Power, see here?” Then his face opened up into a smile and he smacked his lips.

  “I was talking about the chapel,” Fin said flatly.

  Bartimaeus smacked his lips once more then wrinkled up his face and frowned at the dish he was holding. “Oh, hmm. ’Course you were.” He returned to drying the dishes.

  Fin shifted back and forth on her feet in the awkward silence. She’d managed to embarrass the old cook. She felt she ought to make it good somehow but was almost as out of practice at apology and tact as she was at the spinning wheel.

  “You run along now,” he said. “I’ll finish this up, and if Sister Hilde bitches hellfire about you being done so soon, you tell her to come deal with me. Go on.” Bartimaeus waggled his arm at her. She hesitated a moment but decided not to give him a chance to change his mind.

  The next day the boys at the orphanage turned on their charms for the sisters. Changes from the daily routine didn’t come nearly often enough to suit most of them, and the prospect of building a new chapel set even the most mischievous boy straight as an arrow. Danny Shoeman came to breakfast in his Sunday best—not that it was significantly better than his Monday worst. Elroy Snell sat next to Sister Hilde and served her plate with the greasiest grin he could muster; he even cleared her place and offered to wash the morning dishes. Some argued that the sisters schemed up the entire situation just to see what sort of behavior the orphans were capable of when they put their minds to it.

  All this was preposterous to Fin. From where she sat, milking a cow, she saw boys all over the courtyard being overly courteous and working three times harder whenever Sister Hilde walked by. It made her sick. When she spied even Peter going out of his way to smile at Sister Hilde, she’d had all she could stomach. She picked up the nearest hard object—a horseshoe—and lobbed it at him in irritation. It barely missed him, and Peter’s smile turned down into a grimace.

  “What was that for?” he demanded.

  “You know bloody well what it was for, Peter LaMee. You’ve never in your years smiled at that woman, and now you’re selling your smiles for a few nails and a hammer. You should be ashamed, acting like the rest of these buggers.”

  “Can’t hurt to try,” said Peter with a mystified shrug.


  “If that’s what it takes, you can count me in for another summer’s worth of hauling water, milking cows, and spinning silk. I’m not going to prance around here like a grinning idiot, and it’ll be a cold day in August before I turn a smile at that old bat.” She was milking the cow so hard that Peter winced for fear she might pull a teat right off.

  Around the corner came Sister Hilde. As she passed, Fin gave a good, sharp yank on the teat in her hand. The cow groaned and kicked a hind leg out, narrowly missing Hilde. Hilde’s nose shot up and quivered directly at Fin.

  “Miss Button, I suggest you be more careful or you’ll have more than dishes to wash this evening.” Her nose attempted to calm itself as she spoke. “Mr. LaMee, I hardly think Miss Button needs you here to distract her.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Peter and hurried away out of sight.

  Hilde put her hand on Fin’s shoulder and leaned down. Fin’s eyes transfixed on Hilde’s quivering spike of a nose, and she devoted all her attention to making sure she didn’t laugh.

  “Miss Button, I hope you don’t have any convoluted notions of going to work on that new chapel. Stone and wood work is no place for a young woman, even one so coarse as yourself.” Fin flashed her eyes at Hilde, all thought of laughter now gone. Before she could protest, Hilde raised a finger in warning. “Ah-ah, I’ll hear none of it.” For a moment, Hilde looked almost happy, and then she straightened up and stalked off around the corner of the stable.

  Fin gritted her teeth and glared at the cow. “Next time kick her right in the chin, won’t you?” she said. The cow swished its tail.

  Hilde seemed to hate everyone, but she held out a special place in her dark heart for Fin. It would be trouble enough convincing people she could do a man’s work, and Sister Hilde intended to make sure she never got the chance.

  Fin leapt up and ran to the chapel. She flung open the door and climbed the ladder into the bell tower. No one could see her here. It was the one place she felt was her own. The sisters were too old or too large to make the climb, and the other children knew it was against the rules.

  The empty bell tower lifted her above the walls. A boundless green country rolled out before her, a world free of sisters and rules, a world where she imagined she could do as she pleased and be who she was and no one could tell her how to dress or talk or act. How she might ever enter that world and make it her own was a problem she hadn’t yet solved.

  CHAPTER III

  Fin spent the following week in a mischievous pout, a mood that manifested itself in a number of misfortunes befalling Sister Hilde. On Tuesday morning, Hilde discovered her shoes mysteriously filled with cow dung. She shrieked in anger and threw open the closet to fetch her second pair and shrieked again, finding them treated the same. Despite the intense scouring she gave her footwear before breakfast, she was accompanied the rest of the day by the odor of fresh manure—not to mention the squish of wet shoe.

  On Wednesday, curious misfortune struck again when the hogs escaped their pen and ran amok, soiling the freshly hung linens, pulling many of them down and dragging them about the yard. Hilde stood amid this porcine calamity shrieking demands like a general and waving her nose at any orphan in sight until the riotous pigs knocked her legs from beneath her. She landed squarely on her rump and came snout to snout with a great, swarthy hog that nuzzled at her cheek and licked her shuddering nose. Hilde wrestled the beast to the ground and dragged it back to the pen in a feat of determination and anger that quite impressed the on-looking orphans.

  At other times during Fin’s pout, acorns, pecans, and cypress balls fell with astonishing accuracy to connect with the top of Sister Hilde’s head. For reasons unexplainable by orphans, these only seemed to fall when Hilde wandered near the front of the chapel and directly under the bell tower. It was also in odd coincidence that Fin managed to be out of eyeshot whenever any such malfeasance occurred. Sister Hilde could find no proof of any culprit however, and Fin, though primely suspected, stayed safely out of the cook pot. Such small but total victories gradually succeeded in lifting Fin out of her pout and into more of a satisfied sulk.

  Peter tried to cheer her spirits, but Fin used his attempts as opportunities to induce him to join her plots against Sister Hilde. It was Peter who kept lookout while Fin stuffed Hilde’s shoes with cow-pie and loosed the hogs, and it was Peter who lured Hilde into the target area while Fin lobbed her missiles from the bell tower.

  On Friday after evening chores, Fin stepped out of the dining hall with a scandalous glint in her eye. She slipped across the courtyard, keeping a sharp look around to see that Hilde wasn’t watching and darted into the barn. She emerged moments later carrying a rusty claw hammer and a handsaw, and then dashed back across the yard to hide in the shadows under the awning of the chapel door.

  In the dusk, amid the chirping of insects and the clamor of twenty-five orphans readying themselves for bed, there came the less natural sound of metal scraping on wood. While the lamps of the orphan house were being snuffed, Peter stepped outside the door and looked around. The sound of metal on wood came again and he cocked his head to one side, listening, before stepping away from the door and walking toward the chapel.

  “What are you doing?”

  Fin jumped and held the hammer up as if she was ready to throw it. She was kneeling in the grass beside the front door of the chapel and had managed to work the first of the three front steps loose. When she realized it was only Peter, she smiled and motioned for him to be quiet.

  “This is going to be the best. If I take off the steps and saw through them a bit from the bottom, then I can put them back on and the next person that tries to climb up, they’ll snap and fall right through and I’ve got a whole pot full of hogslop hidden behind the dining hall so I can pour it underneath, so when Hilde goes in for prayers before breakfast . . . it’s going to be great.”

  Fin barely suppressed a cackle as she went back to prying the second step up with the hammer. “How’d you know I was out here?” she added as she rocked the hammer back and forth.

  “Heard Delly Martin upstairs complaining that everyone was in bed but you. Hilde will be out looking any minute.”

  “That little girl needs a lesson in keeping her mouth clapped shut.”

  “This is a bad idea, Fin.” Peter was shaking his head.

  “I’m full of bad ideas.”

  Peter knelt down. He reached out and put his hand on the hammer to stop her.

  “Have you thought that someone could get hurt? Hilde’s not the only one that says prayers before breakfast. What if Carmaline walks into this? What if it’s Owen?”

  Fin’s shoulders slumped. She sat still and contemplative for a moment then wrenched the hammer away from Peter and continued her work. “You telling me what to do now, Peter? Thought that was Hilde’s job.”

  “You know I’m not. But I’m worried.”

  Fin stopped working and snapped her head up to look at Peter. “You’re worried? What have you got to worry over? You’ll find an apprenticeship soon, or go to work on a farm, or join the army, and you’ll be out of here and away from Hilde and her chores and rules, and her ever-waggling tongue. But what about me, Peter?” Fin shrugged at him.

  Peter didn’t answer.

  “What’s going to happen to me? I’m seventeen, but I’m not like the other girls—you know that. ‘It’s a matter of a man and a marriage,’ isn’t that what Carmaline tells all the girls? All they want is to get married off and spend the rest of their days sitting in skirts and mending holes in a husband’s pants. I don’t know how to want that, Peter.”

  “So what do you want?”

  Fin didn’t answer and instead continued tearing up the step. Peter sat down beside her. He reached for the hammer once more but Fin pulled back. Peter didn’t withdraw. She hesitated and ground her teeth and then gave the hammer over and crossed her arms.

  “I don’t need looking after, you know?” said Fin.

  “’Course you don’t,�
� said Peter. Fin could see his smile in the dark and gave him hers in return. Then she shook her head.

  “I suppose this was a pretty terrible idea, huh?”

  “The worst.”

  They broke into laughter and tried to muffle their amusement in the darkness but the sound may as well have been a siren to Hilde’s ears. She followed the commotion to its source and set her bony hands upon her hips, looming over Peter and Fin for some time before either saw she was there. When she spoke, both of them lurched upright and wide-eyed.

  “Do you care to offer an explanation for this, Mr. LaMee?” said Hilde.

  Fin opened her mouth to claim her part but Peter elbowed her in the ribs and lifted the hammer up so Hilde could see it.

  “Sorry, Sister Hilde. I meant to tell you earlier,” said Peter. “I noticed the step boards were loose and wanted to nail them back down before someone got hurt. Fin was just helping me.”

  Hilde narrowed her eyes at the both of them. Her nosed ticked from side to side as she considered Peter’s explanation. Before she could make any judgement Peter bent down and hammered the step back into place while Fin nudged the saw out of sight with her foot.

  “There. All done,” said Peter. He stepped up onto the step and tried it with his weight.

  Fin could hear Hilde’s breath whistling in her flared nostrils as she considered the scene.

  “To bed. The both of you, before I choose to see more than darkness allows.”

  Neither argued.

  On Sunday, Sister Carmaline declared that an announcement would be made at breakfast. She didn’t say what the announcement might be, but everyone was sure the topic was the selection of the chapel detail. Boys laid odds on who might make the list and bet slingshots, knives, and the odd bear’s tooth. John Cooper, Danny Shoeman, and Peter LaMee were heavily favored.