Drowned Ammet Read Online Free Page A

her say, “Oh, I give in! Only don’t blame me when the soldiers come for you!”
    It must have been about a week after Milda said this, in the very heart of winter, when Mitt woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. A red light was flickering on the ceiling. He could hear crackling and distant shouting, and smell smoke. One of the big warehouses on the waterfront was clearly on fire. Mitt could see it, when he raised himself on one elbow, blazing into the sky and down into the dark water of the harbor. But what had woken Mitt was not that. It was the slow shuffling outside the door of the room. The sound made Mitt’s back prickle. He could hear Milda trying to light the lamp, whimpering with haste and annoyance because she could not get the wick to burn. Then the light came at last, and Mitt saw his father was not in the room. Milda ran through the room with the lamp, making lurching shadows as she ran, and tore open the door.
    Canden was on the other side of it. He was clinging to the door frame to hold himself up. Mitt could not see him well because Milda was holding the lamp all wrong, but he knew that Canden was either hurt or very ill, or both. He could see it in Canden’s face. He had a feeling that the part of Canden which was behind Milda and the doorpost was the wrong shape. It did not surprise him that Milda gave a dreadful strangled scream.
    â€œEeeeh! What—? I knew it would go wrong!”
    â€œHarchad’s men,” said Canden. He sounded disgusted. “They were there waiting for us. Informers—that’s what they were. Dideo, Siriol, and Ham. They informed on us.”
    After that Canden gave a quiver of indignation and slid down the doorpost to the floor. Milda knelt down to him, hugging the lamp and whimpering. “O ye gods! What do I do ? What can I do? Why doesn’t somebody help?”
    After that doors began cautiously opening and shutting up and down the stairway. Ladies came in nightgowns and old coats, with more lamps or candles. There were troubled whispers and soothing words, while Milda rocked about on her knees, moaning. Mitt was too appalled to move. He did not want to look at Canden or his mother, so he lay and looked at the ceiling instead. The bustling ladies thought he was asleep, and after a while he must really have gone to sleep. Canden was not there in the morning. But he had been there. He had left a stain on the floor. And Mitt’s father was still not there either.
    Mitt knew both of them were dead. Nobody told him, but he knew. What he did not know and wanted to be told was what had happened. He wanted to know why ladies in the tenement came and told Milda, “I should lie low, if I was you. You don’t want to get yourself arrested, too.” Milda stayed away from work for a while, sitting very still by the window. Her face was so drawn in by worry that the seam where her dimple used to be looked more like a puckered scar than a line. Mitt hated her face like that. He crouched beside her feet and asked to be told what had caused it.
    â€œYou’re too young to understand,” said Milda.
    â€œBut I want to know,” said Mitt. “What’s happened to Dad?” He asked at least forty times before he got an answer.
    â€œDead,” said Milda. “At least, I hope that’s what he is, because they all say it’s better to be dead than have Harchad after you. And I shall never forgive them that did it to him—never, never, never!”
    â€œWhat did Siriol and Dideo and Ham do?” Mitt prompted her.
    â€œLeave me be, if you know so much!” Milda said irritably. But Mitt went on asking, and in the end Milda told him as much as she knew.
    It seemed that when Mitt’s father had found it so hard to get work in Holand, he had felt so bitter against the Earl that he had joined a secret revolutionary society. There were a lot of them in Holand. The Earl’s son Harchad had spies and