The Hidden Blade Read Online Free

sure someday you will find someone who can, someone with a soul far loftier than mine. Convey my regards to Leighton and tell him—” Herb’s voice turned hoarse. “Tell him I will miss him with every fiber of my being.”
    Leighton squeezed his eyes shut. No.
No
. Herb could not simply walk out of their lives.
    The door of the library opened and closed.
    Soft sounds came from below—Father, sobbing.
    A long time passed before Leighton realized that he too had tears rolling down his face.

    Herb had first visited Starling Manor almost three years ago, on a miserable day for Leighton: Mother had left on yet another trip without him.
    She had explained, with a catch in her voice, that the cousin she was visiting was elderly, that they would spend all their time drinking tea and chatting about long-dead relatives, that the only reason Marland was going was because he was too young to be without her.
    But Leighton did not find old people boring, a rail journey by itself would be interesting, and she hadn’t considered Marland too young to be without her when she’d gone for three days to a great-aunt’s funeral.
    She had not taken Leighton because, in the end, she had not wanted to. And that knowledge had weighed like a millstone upon his chest.
    Then Herb had appeared, as if by magic. His first question to Leighton had been, “So, my young friend, what does one do around here for fun?”
    And though Herb had been a stranger to Sussex, he had found more fun things to do than Leighton had known existed under the sun. They explored Arundel Castle, almost as old as the Norman conquest of Britain, hunted for fossilized shark teeth at Bracklesham Bay, and sailed a sloop out of Chichester Harbor into the Solent.
    Even without venturing afield, Herb made his stays the stuff memories were made of. A game of bowling on the lawn, a ride in the surrounding countryside, a rainy evening spent inside, taking turns reading
Pride and Prejudice
out loud to Father.
    Herb’s joie de vivre had infected Father and Leighton. And in a way enfolded them, almost as if in a cocoon, and made it possible for Leighton to ignore certain cold, hard truths about life at Starling Manor.
    But now that protection was withdrawn. Now there was nothing between Leighton and everything that frightened him.
    Nothing but what a boy two weeks short of eleven could do for himself.

    The cottage, with its small sitting room and even smaller bedroom, had been the home of the groundskeeper until a larger place had been built for the man. When Herb began visiting Starling Manor regularly, he had asked for the use of the cottage to stow the portable darkroom he’d lugged down from London, to take photographs of Leighton and Father around the estate.
    The pungent odor of silver nitrate hung in the air. There were several developed plates in trays of fixers, the images imprinted on the transparent surfaces just visible. Leighton had taken two photographs of Father and Herb—he had become quite adept at the entire process, from the preparation of the glass plate to the final exposure of the albumen paper—and Herb had taken one of Father and Leighton.
    Leighton waited in a corner of the cottage’s sitting room, a lit taper on the table beside him, alternately dozing and starting awake as the mantel clock chimed every half hour.
    “Leighton. What are you doing here?”
    He opened his eyes. Herb, valise in hand, was crouched before him. Leighton glanced toward the clock: quarter past five.
    “I thought you might come here before you go.”
    “How do you know that—”
    Herb stopped.
    An uneasy silence grew between them.
    Leighton got up from his chair, went to the linen closet in the bedroom, and brought back a box. In the box was a book of pressed flowers and two geodes, one with a tiny cave of amethyst at its center, another a walnut-size opal of a blue at once milky and shimmery. “I found the geodes in the attic—I think someone brought them back from