Excerpt: Frary Luck

Chapter One: Where All Goes Badly

"Jon? Jon, psshht! Mother's looking for you, are you done yet?" Kate hung on the narrow ladder-steep attic stairs, pushing her tangled brown head through the trap-door. "I told her you were hunting the speckled hen's eggs, that's almost true, isn't it?" She squinted into the dusty shadows of the attic room, trying to see which shape was her brother, and which the trunks of papers and oddments that he searched through.
"Mm?" Jon turned his face toward her, looking half-asleep. That meant he was thinking hard, so Kate stilled her hasty tongue. Jon was a round-faced stocky boy, with short-cropped brown hair that stood straight up on his head. Kate thought he looked like a hedgehog, and was never sure whether she liked hedgehogs because of Jon, or liked Jon because of hedgehogs. "Kate, I think I've found it. Look, here's part of Great-grandfather's journal. It's been pulled apart--for curl-papers or other foolishness--but these three pages--"
"Not curl-papers," Kate objected, clambering into the attic and trotting over. "Who'd be curling hair here? Some perfumed Cavalier and his lacy lady at Badley Farm? The only thing that curls here is the hog's tail."
"Jar covers, then. Doesn't matter. Look--no, I'll read it to you." Jon tipped the yellowed pages to catch the light through the round attic window. His twin squatted beside him, bouncing impatiently on her haunches.
No one would have taken Jon and Kate for twins. She was all legs and arms, a sharp-faced untidy girl, never still. Even her hair wriggled free of its braids and pins and straggled out from under her linen cap. Unkind people said she would have made the better boy, and that the twins had muddled themselves up when they were born, with Jon getting the peaceable homely temper meant for a daughter.
"Just tell me," Kate said, "Don't read every line. Mother's temper's getting short."
Jon sighed. "Very well. Great-grandfather--"
"Are you sure it is him? If most of the journal's missing, how do you know?"
"Oh, very good!" Jon smiled at her. "You'll make a scholar yet, little Kate. Always ask questions. He signed his name on the flyleaf, and that remains."
"Thank you, I've no wish to crawl amongst dusty books all my life. What does he say?"
"Listen, then. He returns to the farm from London--this page is the list of his business there--to find the household 'in great lamentation'. The Luck of the Farm is lost, says his oldest son. He asks why, were the servants lazy or the children quarrelsome?"
Kate snorted. "Why ask that? I'd ask how he knew. What did he see?"
"Great-grandfather was a great moralist. He drew lessons from every happenstance. By times he writes like a copy-book. But will you let me speak?"
"Sorry."
"His son said they'd been woken in the night by a screeching and crying, then a strange voice called out: Badley's luck away is run, until there be a seventh son. Seventh lad or seventh lass, who shall find the Frary Glass." Jon looked up. "Kate, have you ever heard of the Frary Glass?"
Kate shook her head, and her cap slipped further down her shoulder. She jerked it into place and tied the laces with quick fingers. "How did he know it was the brownie who spoke?"
"The night's cleaning was but half-done, and little bare footprints all among the ashes. The servants were so distressed they'd not touched a thing, and Great-grandfather saw the footprints for himself."
"What does he write about the Frary Glass?" Kate leaned over her knees and put a hand on the attic floor to balance herself, looking harder at the papers.
"Only that he looked 'and found it missing from its proper place'. The next page is all how he hopes that hard work and prayer will serve in place of the brownie's work by night, and perhaps this is a blessing in disguise to teach his family and servants thriftier and more diligent ways."
"Humph," said Kate rudely. "They were already hardworking and thrifty, or the brownie would have set the kitchen all wrong ways about. Everyone knows that."
"Never mind that. Aren't you and I the seventh children?"
Kate counted on her fingers. "Thomas, Barnaby, little Meg-who-died-of-a-fever, Matt please-Lord-keep-him-safe-at-sea, Bet, Joseph--Does Meg count? Perhaps only one of us is the seventh, and the other is the sixth or the eighth?"
"Yes, well enough, but which? Seventh lad or seventh lass?" Jon frowned at the tattered pages. "Perhaps Mother remembers which of us was born first."
"Does it matter? If we both try our best to bring the Luck back--"
"Jonathan!" The voice rang sharply below the attic window, and both Kate and Jon twitched as if it had come from behind them in the shadowed corner.
Jon tucked the journal into his shirt, out of sight. "I'll go. Mother's patience must have worn out. We can talk about the luck tonight." He set his feet on the stairs, and looked back at Kate. "Don't come down yet. You know it will fret her to see us both idle."