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His gaze fixed straight in front of him, Ernie kept talking. “My dad is Bill—we’re all named for our fathers—and he hasn’t been happy since Mom was sent to the farm, but he hasn’t taken a new wife either. I know Mr. Curlin offered him Trudy because Trudy told Tilly, my sister. Anyway Trudy was married to Jake the blacksmith and she was really happy because she got new clothes and to stay on her wedding night in the big hotel and had wine to drink and everything. But she’s not so happy now and Tilly is almost fourteen, and she thinks Mr. Curlin will marry her and she doesn’t like him. So I ran away to find Mom to beg her to take Tilly away to the farm.”
Boys sent off to a farm to work at twelve? Girls married at fourteen? Underage bigamous marriages? That wasn’t just medieval, it was also illegal. But Ernie looked so serious. And Chloe obviously believed him. Could he be making this up? Was this some plot for a crazy movie? Or was he telling the truth?
“One of my jobs is delivering bags of flour and yeast and baking things, so I know Chloe, and she gave me her cell phone number and I stole some of the tips and phoned her and she brought me here,” Ernie finished in a rush, his face flaming red when he confessed to taking the coins. But a stubbornly defiant look was on his face and Xonra guessed he might be embarrassed, but he certainly wasn’t repentant. He’d made a choice and was convinced he’d done the right thing.
Ellie quietly walked over to the sideboard, poured a glass of ice water and handed it to Ernie. He gulped the drink and handed the glass back to Ellie.
Xonra flashed a quick glance at Moss. His normally friendly, mobile face had gone harder than stone.
“Tell them where you live and about the work teams,” prompted Chloe.
That wasn’t all? There was more?
“We live in the mine. The married people have their own rooms. The babies live with their moms and the little kids are in the nursery, but the older boys have a dormitory, and so do the older girls. Tilly and I talk to each other every day. She still sees Trudy a lot, too, even though Trudy’s married now and works in the nursery instead of being on a team.”
Live in the mine? Is that what I saw with the men and the boy? That was strange, them being behind an iron gate and a locked wooden door.
“You’ve mentioned teams a few times. What do you mean by teams, Ernie?”
“Kids over six are divided into three teams. Each team does a different job each day. So there’s morning school, afternoon school, other jobs in the village like being a pawn on the chessboard or a kid in the Sound and Light Show, or a delivery boy like me.”
“And then all the older boys go to work on the farm and all the girls get married?” asked Xonra, forcing her voice to sound neutral, not enraged, as she was fast becoming. She’d thought something weird was going on, but child slavery? Underage marriages? Bigamy? Forced separation of married partners? That was far beyond anything she’d imagined. These were crimes, major crimes, not minor peccadilloes.
“Yes. Some of the boys who are bad in school are sent away earlier. And there’s more men needing wives than there are girls old enough to marry. Dad said Jake was thrilled to get Trudy because he thought he’d have to wait until Tilly was old enough to marry. Dad also said they’d thought some of the other women like Chloe would marry the men, but that plan hadn’t worked out yet.”
Xonra phrased her next question very carefully, not wanting to sound judgmental. “Your dad is happy for Tilly to be married at fourteen?”
“Girls always married young in the old days. Mr. Curlin said waiting until your twenties to get married is the main cause of immorality and promiscuity. It’s a great honor for Tilly to be married to Mr. Curlin. But she doesn’t like him and Anne does cry an awful lot, and he still has his first wife to look after him as well,” answered Ernie.
“Anne?” asked Moss.
“Anne Timothydaughter. She’s a couple of years older than Trudy and was married to Mr. Curlin on her fourteenth birthday. She had her second baby three months ago and cries every time someone tells her to leave the nursery and go back to her room with Mr. Curlin. Of course, he’s not there much. Mostly, he’s with his first wife. That’s why Trudy and Tilly are sure he’s going to make Tilly his next wife. He does look at her real strange.”
Moss cleared his throat and Xonra quickly asked Chloe some practical questions. Ernie explained more about their living quarters in a different section of the mine, and Xonra remembered again the boy being taken behind a wooden door. A locked door and a locked gate. That was unusually high security inside an old mine underneath an already impenetrably fenced historical compound.
“This is way beyond anything we can deal with. Way beyond my wildest imaginings. We need to talk to the police, Child Protection, likely a whole bunch of other agencies as well. What will happen when they discover you’re missing, Ernie?”
“At first, everyone will think someone else has given me a job to do. But tomorrow morning Timothy, Anne’s father—he’s our teacher—will ask where I am. I didn’t say anything to anyone so no one can tell on me.”
“This needs to be handled very carefully, or Jeremiah J. Curlin will sue our pants off.” Xonra sighed and picked up Moss’s phone. “Hi Jo, I need to speak to the CEO immediately. No, it absolutely can’t wait. Thanks, I’m on my way up.”
Xonra smiled at Chloe and Ernie then turned to Ellie, who was standing by the wall, looking pale and shocked. Poor woman. Likely she never expected anything like this when she arrived for work today. Fucking hell, I didn’t either, and I’m ten years older than her. “Ellie, how about you take Chloe and Ernie to the lunch room and get them something to eat and drink? I’ll meet you down there as soon as I can. Moss, maybe you’d better come with me. This might get messy.”
“Messy indeed,” murmured Moss very quietly.
Chapter Five
Xonra was supposed to be meeting Glenn and Morgan for dinner at Sally’s Place, a restaurant she particularly liked, but she was too on-edge about everything going on to face people, so she rang Glenn to cancel.
“I’m sorry, Glenn, but there’s just too much happening at work. I’m not good company right now.”
“Would you rather do something else? We’re happy to go with the flow,” suggested Glenn.
“It’s nothing about you or Morgan. It’s just my job. Way too complicated to talk about, but it’s consuming all my emotional resources right now.”
“Would you like to talk about it? We’re pretty good listeners.”
“It’s confidential, and not my story to tell.” But she was torn. It would be good to unload some of the worry. Besides, she did trust them. They were both quick thinkers, intelligent men, and instinctively she knew they wouldn’t spread her story around.
