The Grenadillo Box: A Novel Read Free Page A

clearly was this: “What is beyond my comprehension, however, is why he should choose to bleed himself during this evening’s dinner.”
    The sound of the closing sash drew his attention back to me. I teetered towards him, sensing an arrow of disapproval let loose in my direction. All at once he addressed me directly. “In any case, as I’ve already told you, this is no business of yours. Indeed if there’s an alien body in this room, I fancy it’s not these creatures but you. Who the devil are you? For I swear I never saw you before.”
    “You are right, my lord,” I conceded, gulping to dispel the acrid taint in my mouth. “We have never met until tonight. My name is Nathaniel Hopson, and I do not belong here at all.”
    I have long prided myself on the quickness of my fists and feet, yet the speed and violence of his reaction flabbergasted me. He gathered his brows to a black line and, placing his candle so close to my chin I fancied he might singe me, pressed my scalp back with his other hand and held it there. I felt my wig slip awry and tumble to the floor. Like a horse at market, I was being prodded and pulled, assessed for teeth and temperament. Yet Lord Foley had already made clear he expected me to be pliant, and I’d no desire to anger him unnecessarily, thus I could do nothing but submit. Eventually the unnerving examination was complete. He released my head and drew back. “Explain yourself, man. This is no time for puzzles or impudence, and besides I detest both.”
    I retrieved the fallen wig and held it in my hand. “Forgive me, my lord, I didn’t intend to muddle you. I’m journeyman to Thomas Chippendale, cabinetmaker, of St. Martin’s Lane, London.”
    Here I should explain, as I knew I must that night for Lord Foley (despite chattering teeth and queasiness still lurking in my belly), the unusual events that had brought me to Horseheath Hall. But first let me also set down something of the awkwardness of my predicament.
    Until I stumbled upon the grisly scene I’ve just described, I’d led a carefree existence. I was born lucky, never troubled by the burden of choice that blights the lives of so many in our complicated modern age. My father was a kindly joiner, as was his father before him. I was his only child. There was never a question that I would not in some way follow him.
    According to my mother, I was a gangling fledgling who unfolded from her womb like a bolt of cloth and never quite fitted my lanky proportions, always more limb than loveliness, more appetite than angel. For her part, my mother was a woman of powerful maternal disposition who demonstrated her affection in fondly administered scrubbings and scoldings. (A torn blue coat and a kidney pudding and pigeon pie eaten without her say-so are still emblazoned in my memory and on my rump.) My father was no less mindful of my well-being. By his account, I took to a saw and chisel as easily as I did to breathing and walking, although strangely, he used to say, it wasn’t carpentry that was born in me but rather the reverse—the urge to demolish things. Ever since a small boy, I’d a compulsion to unscrew, dismantle, break open, detach. He attributed this to the fact that once, while bathing me in the washing copper, my mother dropped me on my head on the kitchen flags. The sudden gush of water that accompanied me had knocked over a three-legged stool, which had fallen apart. For weeks afterwards I’d tried the legs on every other piece in the house to see if they too could be dismantled. When they could not, I took up a turnscrew and a chisel to assist me. My mother made valiant attempts to starve or scold or beat the inclination out of me, but she never succeeded. My father joined my mother in warming my behind, and when that failed he sought to distract me by teaching me joinery.
    In vain did I try to explain to them my preoccupation was not idle vandalism; what drew me was what had gone into the creation of the outward