Read The Brides of Rollrock Island for Free Online Page A

before.”
    “Besides, she is dying,” said Bee. I looked up, shocked. “Or so I heard,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
    “Praps she is hoping Missk will come and cure her?” Billy went noisily to his porridge.
    “She would have
said
, then,” said Grassy. “She would have sent Ambler to ask. How are we to know that, from a pair of sock-lets with no name on them?”
    “Well, someone wants
something
from our Missk. Who else would these fit? Look at them!”
    “It’s true,” said Lorel. “For all the rest of her roundness, she does come down to tiny feet.”
    “Like a seal.” Tatty was so taken up in her nastiness, she did not see Mam start toward her from the stove. “The way they—Ow! I was only
saying
!” Her spoon dropped and spilled porridge on the table, and she held the back of her head, and glared in outrage at Mam, who ignored her, taking up the pot ladle. “They have those tiny tails, I was going to say, to push their great fat selves along!” And for
great fat selves
she turned her glare to me, as if
I
had hit her.
    “Ask Fisher who bought the socks,” said Bee to me across the table, “and we will know who is your admirer.”
    I would not, and so that afternoon Bee and Lorel went down with the socks to Fisher’s store themselves. They came back disappointed. “He says they were not bought from him,” said Bee. “He has never carried that style, he says; perhaps they were bought in Cordlin.”
    “They look quite fresh,” said Mam, taking the socks from Lorel and examining them. She put them to her face and sniffed. “Lavender. And camphor. They have lain for years in some old lady’s camphor chest.”
    “See?” said Ann Jelly at Billy, all smug. “Ambler’s granny. A last gift before she passed on.”
    Finally the socks arrived back at me, everyone having had their fondle and wonder over them. I smoothed them on my knee, imagining them lying on the sunlit snowdrift awaiting me, trying to see the shape of the person who had come along, perhaps before dawn so that no one else would spy them, and left them there and hurried away.

    Fisher’s great-grandfather was a little wizened man who sat blanketed by the fire in the store. I idled nearby. It was hard to get him alone, for everyone who came in made chat with him—but if I had chosen a quieter time, people would have remarked on my visit.
    He farewelled Granger’s dad. His gaze fell to me, but skimmed straight past, for I was of no account to him, some staring girl-child.
    There was a good disguising noise of Missus Fisher making hearty talk with Blair Gower at the counter, and for the moment no one else was in the shop. “I was wondering,” I said, standing forward.
    The old man set his jaw, his face showing none of the cheerfulcreases he had presented Mister Granger with. “You were wondering? Yes, these are all my own teeth. That is what most children wonder, whose old ones keep their teeths in a jar, or manage without.”
    “I wondered if you knew anything about seals and seal-people.”
    Only now, when he went still, did I realize how much all of him had been tinily, busily moving. He ceased blinking; I looked into his staring gray eyes and thought he must have blinked most of the blue from them. In them I saw a Fisher I’d never suspected was there, from the time before he knew everything, when he could still be surprised or frightened. Just for a moment I saw that Fisher, before the granddad-Fisher covered him up, blinking several times to make up for the pause before.
    “I am not
that
old,” he said.
    “I didn’t mean you were,” I said. “Only, things you may have heard, from
your
old folk.”
    “Oh no,” he said quickly. “I was never privy.” He pulled his blanket higher on his lap. “Missus Fisher!” he cried out, and I stepped back from him, startled.
    “Yes, Pa?” came from the counter, and Missus Fisher and Gower glanced across, patience in both their faces.
    “Some tea, if you’d please, when