The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly Page B

but cold.
    He had never, he realized, seen anyone who wasn’t supposed to be dead. No, that wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put it any better to himself. It had been his mother’s time to go. She was sick, and old. Her final years had mostly been spent sleeping, misremembering, or forgetting entirely. Only once in her last months of life could he recall her speaking with any lucidity, and then he had just been thankful that they were alone together in the room. He wondered if, in her dementia,she had spoken of such matters to the nurses. If she did, they must have dismissed them as the ravings of an old woman on her way to the grave, for nobody had ever mentioned them to him. Those words came back to him now.
    “I saw them do it once,” she had said, as he sat beside her in an uncomfortable hospice chair. “I wanted to look. I wanted to know.”
    “Really?” he replied, only half listening, practiced in the art of nodding and ignoring. He was thinking of his business, and money, and how it had all gone so wrong for Erin and him when it continued to go well for so many others, both within and beyond the boundaries of Prosperous. After all, he and Erin played their part in the business of the town. They did as they were asked, and did not complain. How come they were suffering? Weren’t the benefits of living in Prosperous supposed to be distributed equally among all? If not, what was the point of being part of the community in the first place?
    And now his mother was rambling again, dredging up some inconsequential detail from the mud of her memories.
    “I saw them take a girl. I saw them tie her up and leave her, and then—”
    By now he was listening to her. Oh, he was listening for sure, even as he cast a glance over his shoulder to make sure that the door was closed.
    “What?” he said. “Then what?” He knew of that which she spoke. He had never seen it himself, and didn’t want to see it. You weren’t supposed to ask; that was one of the rules. If you wanted to be certain, you could become a selectman, but selectmen in Prosperous were chosen carefully. You didn’t put yourself forward. You waited to be approached. But Harry didn’t want to be approached. In a way, the less he knew, the better. But that didn’t stop him wondering.
    “Then—”
    His mother closed her eyes. For a moment he thought that she might have fallen asleep, but as he watched a tear crept from her righteye and her body began to shake. She was crying, and he had never seen his mother cry, not even when his father died. She was a hard woman. She was old Prosperous stock, and they didn’t show frailty. If they had been frail, the town would not have survived.
    Survived, and bloomed.
    “Mom,” he said. “Mom.”
    He took her right hand in his, but she shook it away, and only then did he realize that she wasn’t crying but laughing, giggling at the memory of what she had witnessed. He hated her for it. Even in her slow dying, she had the capacity to horrify him. She stared at him, and she could see by his face how appalled he was.
    “You were always weak,” she said. “Had your brother lived, he would have been stronger. He would have become a selectman. The best of your father’s seed went into him. Whatever was left dribbled into you.”
    His brother had died in the womb three years before Harry was born. There had been a spate of miscarriages, stillbirths, and crib deaths during the same period, a terrible blight upon the town. But the board of selectmen had taken action, and Prosperous had been blessed with only healthy, live children for many years thereafter. Harry’s mother had never ceased to speak of his dead brother, though. Earl: that was the name she had given him, a melancholy echo of the status he might have attained had he lived. He was the Lost Earl. His royal line had died with him.
    There were times in her dotage when Harry’s mother called him Earl, imagining, in her madness, a life for a son who had