The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds Read Free Page A

right?”
    The child nodded, still giggling. Malcolm felt relieved to see him still enjoying the game. Hiding the boy would become much harder if he were frightened.
    “Remember how we play this game?”
    “Quiet and still, all the same,” said the boy.
    “Good lad.” Malcolm tweaked William’s nose with the pad of his thumb and shut the cabinet. A sliver of light shone on the boy’s face. The cabinet doors didn’t join together properly. “I’ll return to fetch you soon.”
    The duke, William’s grandfather, had gone on many long expeditions about the grounds with his own son over the years. Grouse hunting, he’d claimed, though he seldom took a gun. The only thing Mr. Malcolm knew for certain was that they’d spent much time in the glade upstream from the house. The same glade where the staff refused to venture, citing visions and noises. Years after the duke’s heir—William’s father—had produced two sons of his own, he’d taken to spending time in the glade alone. He returned to the manor at all hours, wild-eyed and unkempt, mumbling hoarsely of blood and prices unpaid. This lasted until he went to France and died fighting the Hun.
    The duke’s grandsons moved to Bestwood soon after. They were too young to remember their father very well, so the move was uneventful. Aubrey, the older son and heir apparent, received the grooming expected of a Peer of the Realm. The duke showed little interest in his younger grandson. And it had stayed that way for several years.
    Until two days previously, when he had asked Malcolm to find hunting clothes that might fit William. Malcolm didn’t know what happened in the glade, or what the duke did there. But he felt honor-bound to protect William from it.
    Malcolm left William standing in the cabinet only to find the duke standing in the far doorway, blocking his egress. His Grace had seen everything.
    He glared at Malcolm. The majordomo resisted the urge to squirm under the force of that gaze. The silence stretched between them. The duke approached until the two men stood nearly nose to nose.
    “Mr. Malcolm,” he said. “Tell the staff to return to their duties. Then fetch a coat for the boy and retrieve the carpetbag from my study.” His breath, sour with juniper berries, brushed across Malcolm’s face. It stung the eyes, made him squint.
    Malcolm had no recourse but to do as he was told. The duke had flushed out his grandson by the time he returned bearing a thick dun-colored pullover for William and the duke’s paisley carpetbag. Malcolm made brief eye contact with William before taking his leave of the duke.
    “I’m sorry,” he mouthed.
    William’s grandfather took him by the hand. The ridges of the fine white scars arrayed across his palm tickled the soft skin on the back of William’s hand.
    “Come,” he said. “It’s time you saw the estate.”
    “I’ve already seen the grounds, Papa.”
    The old man cuffed the boy on the ear hard enough to make his eyes water. “No, you haven’t.”
    They walked around the house, to the brook that gurgled through the gardens. They followed it upstream, crashing through the occasional thicket. Eventually the crenellations and spires of Bestwood disappeared behind a row of hillocks crowned with proud stands of yew and English oak. They traced the brook to a cleft within a lichen-scarred boulder in a small clearing.
    Though hemmed about by trees on every side, the glade was quiet and free of birdsong. The screeches and caws of the large black birds that crisscrossed the sky over the estate barely echoed in the distance. William hadn’t paid the birds any heed, but now their absence felt strange.
    Several bundles of kindling had been piled alongside the boulder. From within the carpetbag the duke produced a canister of matches and a folding pocketknife with a handle fashioned from a segment of deer antler. He built a fire and motioned William to his side.
    “Show me your hand, boy.”
    William did. His