Story: Be a Helper (part seven)

Be A Helper

(part seven)

Langham plied his fork in silence. Bede, too, thinking Langham deserved the sprites unfettered, and might just get them…

He calmed himself over ginger cake. There was Mrs. Langham to consider, whose husband thought her not worth bringing along, nor asking what she thought herself about the woolens.

And if the sprites wreaked havoc with the crops…

You couldn’t call it sense, punishing someone in a way to make him dependent on your charity. Not unless you were truly heartless and wouldn’t give it.

“And what do you think now,” Langham said, on his feet and squinting after his hat, “about that proclamation?”

Bede traded a look with Jorinda.

“Whose proclamation?” she asked. “Do you mean one of the Queen’s?”

“What would I mean else? It’s the times we live in. Me, I don’t care for the asking. Maybe you and Mr. Dwale will make the easier job of it, having more help in the house.”

“Langham, neither of us knows what you’re talking about.”

“Yours has gone astray.” This, in a definite way, from Melchior. “They leave me off the circuit, of course, because I never answer the census. I never answer because, being I’m the only giant for miles around, if I were listed, they’d come calling on me for all of it. The heavy lifting, I mean, the uproo… Hem! And the shouting down the valley, all that sort of thing. But as I say, I spied the little fellow a-riding on his swan. I take it elves call that tradition, and refuse to hear a word against it. Foul-demeanored fowl, swans.”

Melchior paused to chuckle. The sprites chuckled.

“While, you would think the Queen with all her magic could miniaturize a horse, a nice reliable saddle horse.”

Bede cleared his throat sharply. Langham’s shuffling boots hadn’t done the job (though Langham shuffled in an agony of spent sociability); and the sprites, Finch in particular, who had clutched her mother’s arm, were showing a dangerous twitch about the ears.

“Well, he stopped, anyway, this elf, at one house and another,” Melchior went on. “Now I think of it, he looked to be making for yours. Are you sure your copy has gone astray?”

“Pay no mind,” Bede said. “I ought not to have mentioned it. But what are the contents of this proclamation?”

“All us all, on the border of the Fell, they’ll be having to set up a guard and keep watch,” Langham said.

“Set up a guard!” Jorinda said.

“Keep watch… What on earth would we be watching for?” Bede said.

Gadwall sidled to tug at Langham’s sleeve; Jorinda, spotting this in time, drew him back by the collar. “We help when we’re asked to, and with…?”

“Hands, feet, and…good ideas we think of? I can think of a very good horse for an elf. I see it right in my mind.”

“Enough.” Bede felt the prick of a late suspicion. “One of you.”

“No one likes a proclamation. We thought you and Jorinda would be happier if it wasn’t.”

8

 a Helper

Be a Helper (part eight)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)