The Silver Ghost Read Online Free

Ess, ess, mein Kind. It’s probably good for you.”
    “It must have some redeeming feature. Enjoy your dinner, dear. I’m going to mingle some more.”
    Sarah took her plate over to one of the long tables and sat down. There was no printed menu; she supposed not all the lords or ladies of the period would have been able to read one. At least everybody got his own knife and fork, although it appeared the forks were anachronistic. The gentry hadn’t started introducing them to their tables until sometime in the seventeenth century, and even then many considered them a silly affectation.
    She knew all this because Professor Ufford told her so. She’d picked a seat next to old Tom Tolbathy, whom she liked very much, assuming she’d be able to have a comfortable chat with him about who was who and why. Tom would have been only too glad to oblige, but Ufford had zeroed in on the empty seat at her right. Since then, neither of them had been able to get a word in edgewise. Her neighbors across the table, Buck Tolbathy and Young Dork, were no help. They were deep in a low-voiced conversation about the finer points of morris dancing, and eating frumenty almost as if they liked it.
    Well, it probably didn’t matter that she wasn’t accomplishing anything here. Marcia Whet and Hester Tolbathy had Max cozily tucked between them at the next table; no doubt he was gleaning plenty from them. Sarah tried to tune out the professor’s drone and concentrate on her dinner and the charming Renaissance music being piped in from Station XBIL. Pretty soon she’d find an excuse to change her seat.
    That wouldn’t be hard to do, plenty of people were table-hopping. Though any number of potboys and serving wenches were rushing about with trays and plates, and Melisande Purbody’s five Afghan hounds were foraging among the rushes that covered the floor of the pavilion, service was mostly do-it-yourself. Somebody would get up, wearing his napkin around his neck and carrying his cutlery as well as his plate, collect another helping of peacock pie and frumenty from the buffet, then plop himself down beside some other reveler he hadn’t yet got to revel with.
    Even after the surfeit stage ought to have been reached, Sarah couldn’t notice much thinning around the boards. The pavilion was more inviting now than the lawn. As so often happens on a May day in Massachusetts, a stiffish east wind had sprung up. The sky that had been so azure or perhaps cerulean an hour before had become overcast with the darkish gray clouds that foretold a shower.
    Sarah herself was comfortable enough in her silken gown and heavy brocade houppelande, but Abigail was sending a couple of the serving wenches who also happened to be her granddaughters into the house for extra wraps to protect the more thinly garbed. Apollonia Kelling, sitting over beyond Young Dork, was accepting a shawl with loud cries of gratitude.
    “Just what the old bones needed. Bodie ought to have one, too. Her rheumatics always kick up if she gets a chill.”
    “I’ll take it to her,” Sarah heard one of the young Purbodys offer. “Where is she?”
    “Let’s see. There—no, that’s Henry the Eighth. Or is it the seventh? Anyway, not Bodie.”
    Appie started prowling up and down between tables, turning the Kelling nose this way and that like a particularly undecided weathercock. “I can’t seem to see her. How odd. Sarah, have you seen Bodie?”
    There’d be no rest for her until she responded. Sarah murmured “excuse me” to Tom Tolbathy, who was working his way through an extra helping of frumenty with a somewhat bemused expression on his face. “I’m coming, Aunt Appie.”
    Sarah scanned the tables in her turn, but Boadicea Kelling’s well-ordered countenance appeared nowhere. “Sorry, Aunt Appie. Aunt Bodie did mention that she wasn’t going to eat much at the banquet, as you may remember. I expect she’s doing her four miles around the clover fields, or something of that