Free The Wolf in the Attic by Paul Kearney Page A

tell anyone.’ I feel the tears hot at the back of my eyes. There is no warmth in the fire now, and I am crushed by the darkness of the great wood around me, and the dark night, and the loneliness of it, here in the middle of these people. They could bury me here under the trees in a corner where I would never be found.
    ‘She’s shaking like a shitting dog,’ one of the men says, and laughs horribly.
    ‘Shut your mouth, Job,’ Queenie snarls. She has long brown teeth from which the gums have pulled back, and they look almost like fangs.
    ‘I believe her,’ the girl with her arm about me says. ‘There’s no harm in this one, Queenie. A proper little flat she is.’
    ‘T’ain’t for you to say, Jaelle. Job, call the boy back in, and we’ll get his word on it.’
    The old rat faced man raises his head, and gives a yipping series of barks which make me jump, so high and sharp they sound. Then he shrugs, and begins filling a clay pipe, all the while shooting looks at me, at Queenie, and at the others around the fire, who sit as silent as a jury in a trial. Some of the men nod at me, but the women are all slab-faced and hard.
    After a few minutes, Luca is there again, breathing fast. Steam rises from the open neck of his shirt, and his hands are covered in dirt, as though he has been scratching in the ground with them.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ he demands, quick and sharp.
    ‘This one saw you on the Meadow that night not a moon past when you had your trouble,’ Queenie tells him.
    ‘I know. I told you.’
    ‘So? What thinks you? Did she blab, or leave it be, like she says?’
    Luca stares at me. ‘She’s just a little ’un, Ma. Ain’t no harm in her. She even had a doll with her.’
    ‘That makes no matter boy.’
    The girl, Jaelle speaks up beside me. ‘Why would she be here if she had run to the peelers?’
    ‘She might be leading them on us,’ Rat-faced Job says, puffing on his clay pipe, eyes narrow as coin slots.
    Luca laughs. ‘She ain’t leading no-one nowhere. The wood is empty but for us. I been coursing it like a hare. She’s on her own, Ma, I’d take an oath on it.’
    Queenie holds my eyes with her own black stare. ‘Luca is my boy, and I taught him never to lie, ’cept to flats and peelers. What about you, girlie. Do you lie?’
    ‘Sometimes,’ I can’t help but say.
    Queenie cackles. ‘Well, there’s truth at any rate. My boy didn’t mean to kill no-one, Greek girl, and was like to have been cut himself if he hadn’t done what he did. Even by law, what he did wasn’t wrong, though no judge would ever let it go at that.’
    ‘I saw it,’ I say. ‘He didn’t start it. It wasn’t his knife.’
    ‘No, it weren’t.’ Queenie looks at me with her head cocked to one side. ‘Our folk has enemies you know nothing of, girl.’ Then she raises her head, and it is almost as though she is sniffing the air. When she meets my eyes again I can’t keep her gaze, but drop my own.
    Finally she throws up a hand.
    ‘She ain’t lying. Whatever she saw or didn’t see, the girl is straight, just a babe in the woods. And unless I miss my guess, there’s old blood in her. I can smell it plain as paint. Let her be, Jaelle.’
    The girl at my side looses her grip on my shoulders, and I half-see something disappear into the folds of her skirts, a shine of metal barely glimpsed before it is gone.
    ‘I knew you was all right,’ she whispers to me, her white teeth close to my face.
    ‘She can’t be staying here all night though,’ Queenie goes on thoughtfully. And she turns back to tending the pot above the fire
    ‘You no home to go to?’ she asks without turning round. ‘People to miss you this time o’ night?’
    ‘We have a house in Oxford, Pa and me. We’re all that’s left,’ I say, and as I do, I feel a moment’s panic as I think of father looking at his pocket-watch, and I wonder how long I have been gone, and how I am ever going to get back through the dark woods on my