AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh no. Our plans for tonight involve a big, soft bed,” said Glenn, and the three hurried after the group.
Their conversation became general, but at the back of her mind, Xonra’s subconscious was trying to make sense of what she’d seen. And she realized that the costumed man had never re-entered the main tunnel.
By the time they emerged from the mine, they were all ready for a rest and a cold drink. Unsurprisingly, right by the exit was the blacksmith’s, the horse bazaar, and coach rides. Morgan wandered down Main Street to buy them some sodas, while Glenn and Xonra looked at the horses.
“Wow, fifty working horses in the village. That’s a lot.”
“Not just any horses, either. All Percherons and Clydesdales, which means big horses. I’m glad I’m not the one who has to brush them and feed them,” said Glenn, waving an arm at the stables where several men were watering a long line of animals.
“Oh, yes. Imagine having to muck out fifty loose boxes every day. Not my idea of fun.”
Xonra looked at the men working in the stables. They were most definitely not aged eighteen to thirty. She thought about all the men she’d seen here. The guide at the mine, the man at the musket firing range, the shopkeepers, the apothecary, the photographer. Not one of them was in the eighteen-to-thirty age group. Most of them would have been late forties, early fifties, a few approaching sixty. Now that is weird.
Morgan arrived back with three ice-cold drinks and they sat on a log seat drinking them, while they watched people playing a game of chess on a life-sized board. The white squares were sand and the black were gravel. People in costumes were the chess pieces, with children for the pawns and adults for the rest. The two people “playing” the game called out the moves and the “pieces” stepped forward, backward or diagonally as instructed.
“Bad move,” said Xonra, shaking her head.
“Huh?” asked Morgan.
“Mistake. Checkmate in two moves.”
The “pieces” waited impassively and sure enough, the game was over in just a few moves. As soon as it finished, a little girl walked through the crowd with her apron held out and people threw coins into it and compliments to her. The child smiled a little tentatively, and then walked back to an older man, who scooped the coins out of her apron and placed them in a leather purse at his waist. Then all the characters left the area.
“Next game will begin in half an hour, folks,” called the man in charge.
“You choose, Xonra. Where would you like to go now?” asked Glenn.
Xonra checked the map, then her watch. “It’s four-thirty now and the Sound and Light Show doesn’t start until nine. But we need to allow time for a meal, and it’d be good to have a bit of a rest first, too. How about we go back and check out the candy store, the Post Office and the school, then call it enough for today?”
“Since it’s four-thirty, won’t the kids have gone now? Maybe we’d better leave the school until tomorrow?” suggested Morgan.
“The brochure says the school is open eight a.m. until seven p.m., but maybe they just mean you can go in and look at it, not that the children and teachers are there. If there’s no one there, we can come back tomorrow, sure.”
The candy store was just as crowded as before, but this time they squeezed through the crowd to look at the old-fashioned boiled sweets and sticks of candy. From the long lines at the counter this was a very popular item. Signs above the counter proclaimed all the candy was made in the village from original recipes.
The Post Office had a series of “Wanted” posters on the walls, and both Glenn and Morgan had their pictures taken and their heads inserted into posters. “I’m going to put this up on the wall in the office,” said Glenn. “I’ve always wanted to be famous!”
The doors of the school room were wide open with a teacher standing at the front of the room, a long ruler in his hand, pointing at various things on the chalkboard. The older children were answering questions as he pointed to each one in turn. On the far side of the room was a group of smaller children, each copying letters onto a slate. A girl of maybe twelve was supervising them.
Quite a large crowd had gathered at the doors of the school, when the teacher rapped on the floor with his ruler. All the children stood. “Times tables. Begin,” the teacher ordered.
“Two ones are two. Two twos are four,” the children began. Even the littlest kids were chanting, Xonra noticed. When they got to the sixes she saw that most of the smaller children were now quiet, although quite a number of them chanted their ten times table. As the children chanted “Twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four” a burst of clapping came from the crowd, and the girl who’d been supervising the younger children came out of the classroom holding her apron out as the child had at the chess game. People dropped coins into her apron, and a few dollar bills were thrown in, too. Xonra looked back into the classroom and saw the teacher speaking with one of the children, a boy of maybe eight or nine. The child looked almost terrified. Surely not just for making a mistake in his times table? He must have done something bad I didn’t see.
Glenn gave her a gentle hug. “Tired?”
She looked up at him and saw Morgan’s light-blue eyes smiling at her as well as Glenn’s dark-brown ones. “Yes, I am, a bit. It’s been a full-on day.”
“Let’s go to the hotel then, check in, soak in the hot tub, maybe take a nap, so we’re ready to enjoy the Sound and Light Show tonight,” Glenn suggested, his eyebrows waggling as he said “nap.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Right now, she did feel tired and a little confused by some kind of undercurrent at Berisford Village. But she had to be imagining it. There were thousands of tourists here every day, and if anything was not right, someone would have noticed. Wouldn’t they?
* * * *
Their suite was huge, and the bed the biggest one Xonra had ever seen. And the hot tub, wow! “There’s enough space here for all the pieces off the chess board, not just us,” she said as she stood in the bathroom doorway. “It’ll take hours to fill!”
“Let’s turn it on now then, so it’s ready when we want it,” suggested Morgan, leaning over to close the drain and turn the taps on hard.
He soon had the temperature adjusted how he wanted it and they moved out to the sitting area, Glenn setting coffee on to heat and fiddling with the TV, while Xonra flopped into an armchair to look through the tourist brochures.
