counter. He learned the smell of the wharf and the sound of the bridge rising to let tall ships pass beneath, which parks were good for sitting and thinking, and which parks were good for losing one’s wallet. He learned which alleyways led to the slums, and which to the darkened pubs where you could hire men to do anything for a price. He learned how to avert his eyes when ragged women begged for change in the streets, or the rouged ladies in low-cut gowns leered and called him “young master.” He learned that the factories, more often than not, employed boys half his age for wages that oftentimes made petty theft their only option for survival. And he learned that fearful whispers about the Nordlands were not limited to the Midsummer School kitchen, and had their place among other dark legends—of knife-happy burglars and deranged murderers—in the city taverns.
But I would be a very bad narrator indeed if I led you to believe that the quiet life Henry and the professor shared in the City was without a very surprising interruption.
Curses, as you surely remember, are meant to be broken. And once they break, unlike satchel straps or pairs of spectacles, they do not need to be fixed. However, to break something has consequences, and curses are no exception.
The twelve trustees of Knightley Academy sat around a battered circular table, staring distastefully at their chipped teacups. Lord Winter was late, and until he arrived, the trustees couldn’t start yelling at him. It is very difficult, you see, to yell at someone who isn’t present.
Lord Winter hadn’t meant to be late. In fact, he’d planned to be early, but that was before his daughter had shown up on the doorstep, kicked out of finishing school for the second time in three years.
“What was the problem this time, Francesca?” Lord Winter asked, frowning at his angelic-looking daughter.
“I’d rather not say.”
Frankie grinned and, without waiting for a servant to help with her things, dragged her trunk along the once-grand carpet in the entryway.
“Careful!” her father warned.
“Of what?” Frankie snorted. “This ratty old rug? Be honest, Father, everything in this place is falling apart and worthless.”
She abandoned her trunk in the middle of the foyer and swaggered into the parlor.
“It’s like a furnace in here,” Frankie complained, pushing up the sleeves of her traveling dress and collapsing into a wingback chair.
“Your mother loved this house,” Lord Winter said forlornly, his voice scarcely more than a whisper.
Frankie sighed. It had been six years since her mother died of influenza. Six years since Lord Winter had become ill as well—with grief that turned into a permanent depression.
Frankie remembered many days during her childhood when her father did not stir from his bed and would not so much as lift a cup of tea to his lips. She remembered other days when he would seem to be perfectly fine, and then suddenly he wouldn’t be. Lord Winter cried at the opera and the theater, and sometimes, he cried at the sight of cherry tarts, his wife’s favorite. The tears collected in his ginger beard, and when Frankie hugged him, she used to think her father smelled of salt, like the sea.
During his depression, Lord Winter had badly managed his accounts, and their once lovely home fell into disrepair. While Frankie was off at various schools, learning how to curtsy and embroider, leaks sprang and were rarely patched, the garden became a snarl and soon a tangle, and as if in response, the manor slowly began to tilt, until Lord Winter’s neighbors referred to the place as “that lopsided old manor house” behind the backs of their hands.
But these days, Lord Winter seemed depressed less and less frequently. In fact, he had applied for the headmastership of Knightley Academy when their grand chevalier announced he would be retiring just after his eighty-second birthday.
And now Lord Winter had made a mess of being headmaster barely two weeks into the summer. When Sir Frederick had sent a telegram with the scores from that beastly Midsummer School, Lord Winter had agreed to let him admit the servant boy with the startlingly high marks. After all, with a new headmaster, why shouldn’t Knightley undergo some changes?
And then Lord Winter had started thinking. That servant, Harold or Henry or What-have-you, had been the first commoner allowed to take the exam. Perhaps there were more boys who would have scored just as high if they’d only had the chance to try.
There was