Free Chime by Franny Billingsley Page A

lovely boys, face-toface: Cecil, all dark ringlets; Eldric, all tawny mane. Cecil a bit the taller; Eldric a bit the broader. Cecil, all pale and dead-poet-ish; Eldric all electric and alive.
    Cecil leaned over me; he smelled of money. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen milady!”
    Milady.
Such an old-fashioned word makes him feel clever. “Only five days,” I said.
    “You count the days too!”
    How would a regular girl feel if a Cecil boy-man stood looking at her with his pale fish-eyes, pressing a hand to his chest? Cecil, whose house has stained-glass windows and curved stairs, and a porch fixed securely to the front.
    Would a regular girl want to smack him?
    “I’m hungry for funeral biscuits,” said Rose.
    “Funeral biscuits?” said Eldric. “Shall I hunt them down? Are they dangerous?”
    “You’re mad!” said Cecil, but he rose to accompany Eldric. Two boy-men, stalking the wild funeral biscuit.
    I let my mind go wandering. I pretended I was a regular person. I breathed in greasy air and sour ale, just like a regular person. I listened in on the conversation behind me, just like a regular person.
    Eavesdropping is such a regular-person activity.
    “Hark to my words,” said the constable. “The witch is like to be that Nelly Daws. She got that wicked red hair.”
    Nelly Daws, from the Coracles, the smallest-but-one village in the Swampsea. She had red hair and dancing feet.
    “Nelly Daws,” said Davy Wallace, a fisherman known principally for having caught a hundred-pound sturgeon with his one hand. “I always knowed her for a witch.” But you can’t trust what Davy knows: He’s not a knowing sort of person. He’s the sort to accept a wager to spend the night in the swamp without a Bible Ball. He’s the sort to meet up with the Dead Hand and come home minus one of his own.
    Could Nelly have been that red-haired witch, screaming with laughter and swooping through the trees? It was hard to imagine.
    “She got them sharp witch eyes,” said the Swamp Reeve. “I marked it well last time I seen her.”
    Now I wished I weren’t eavesdropping. I didn’t want to hear about catching witches, and hanging witches. But you can’t just stop eavesdropping. Too bad a person can’t close her ears.
    “Us mustn’t go by eyes,” said the Chime Child. “Too many people what doesn’t be witches been hanged as witches.” I pictured her, wind-roughened face, thinning hair. She was utterly unremarkable in appearance. You’d never guess she had a foot in the world of the Old Ones. You’d never guess she had the second sight.
    “Witchcraft be a sin,” said the Chime Child, “but hanging an innocent, that be a sin too.”
    “The Chime Child,” said the constable, “she be in the right o’ it. There can’t be no hanging o’ Nelly, not ’til us matches up the evidence.”
    “An’ I doesn’t like hanging nobody,” said the Hangman, “without I be sure as sure. I doesn’t like hanging no girl what be said to be a witch, an’ she don’t turn to dust.”
    The Hangman was a great ox of a fellow. I pictured him watching the hanged girl, waiting for her to turn to dust. The Hangman need only wait a quarter hour, and if the body continues to swing, he can be sure she wasn’t an Old One.
    He can be sure that Judge Trumpington and the Chime Child made a mistake.
    It works the other way too. Imagine Briony struck dead by a runaway horse. Imagine Father looking on, fretting about the cost of coffins these days, when of a sudden, his daughter’s body turns to dust. He’d made a mistake too. He’d never really known her at all.
    “I got you some evidence,” said the coastguard chief. “I seen Nelly one midnight, dancing widdershins ’neath a horned moon.”
    “Did you see her close-like?” said the Chime Child, as though she knew the answer would be
no,
which it was. “I be getting on in years. My mind, it don’t be clear like ’twere. I be scareful to judge
yes
when the truth, it