Chapter 16: Under the Rug

I went out of that window eight months pregnant and a few days from my time, with a brown bottle in my bodice and Rhys's hand under my elbow.

I did not make a sound.

Hattie's cellar was a stone room under the kitchen, with potato bins and a trapdoor under the rug.

We put Lydia on a cot among the jars.

She lay with her cast across the blanket and her eyes on the ceiling.

"He locked my mother up for four years," she said. "I used to bring her bread."

Nobody answered her.

Hattie held up the bottle to the lamp and read the label.

"That's his hand," she said. "I'd know it anywhere. He wrote my school reports."

She pulled the cork, and sniffed, and put it back.

"Moonbane. And Godfrey wrote the date."

It was the third thing I could put on a table in front of the pack.

The page, the bottle and the girl.

I climbed the stairs to the kitchen and sat down on the rug over the trapdoor.

I had barely settled when the knock came.

It was the cane, three slow raps.

Hattie opened the door.

Godfrey stood on the porch at sunrise with eight wolves behind him and a kind frown on his face.

"Hattie," he said. "Child. I am so sorry to trouble you."

"Then don't," Hattie said.

"Lydia is ill. She has been taken from the ward in the night, and the Luna has gone from her room."

He looked past her at me, on the rug.

"Carys. Thank heaven. Are you hurt?"

"I walked out," I said. "I'm not hurt."

"The writ says the Hall, my dear."