When Harleigh decided on a quick visit to the kitchen, it was after eight o’clock and his hopes were not particularly high. Leftovers from any meal where Uncle Edgar had been present were not a safe bet. But there would surely be something in the refrigerator or the pantry, if only a couple of slices of bread. What he was not counting on, at that hour of the night, was seeing, or being seen by, anybody. Not even by Matilda, who by now surely would have gone off to wherever it was she lived, somewhere in the servants’ quarters in one of the branches of the west wing.
But when Harleigh pushed open the heavy swinging door, there she was at the kitchen table, writing something in a notebook. Harleigh stared at her in consternation, and she stared back for a long nervous-making interval before anyone twitched a muscle. Harleigh made the first move. Remembering their surprisingly friendly encounter over the pie crust, he ventured a smile and said, “Hi, Matilda. I don’t suppose there’s any of that chicken pot pie left. That was really great chicken pot pie.”
Matilda got slowly to her feet, and for an awful moment Harleigh thought she was going to grab him and drag him out of the kitchen and maybe all the way down the west corridor to Aunt Adelaide. But then a smile slowly penciled in across her big, blank face. “You hungry, boy?” she said, and without waiting for an answer she put down her pen and notebook and headed for the refrigerator.
Before long Harleigh was sitting at the table and Matilda was sitting across from him as he bit into a large, juicy roast beef sandwich. Matilda seemed to have lost interest in writing lists or menus, or whatever she’d been doing, and had settled down to watching Harleigh eat, while now and then offering brief observations.
“Yes,” she said at one point, nodding and smiling. “Real hungry.” And a minute later, “Too bad to starve a growing boy, no matter what he done.”
Harvey smiled and nodded while he chewed. “I’m glad you think so,” he managed to say, but what he was thinking was, You’re right about me not deserving starvation, but not—his lips twisted in a rueful grin—but not about the growing part of it.
“So, they going to send you away?” Matilda asked.
Harleigh stopped smiling, as a chill ran down his back. “Is that what they said?”
She nodded. “That’s what they were saying at dinner. She said they’d be sending you away to a soldierin’ school.”
Harleigh didn’t have to ask who she was or what soldierin’ school they were talking about. The bite he was chewing stuck in his throat and he had to swallow hard before he said, “Yeah, I was afraid of that.”
There was another long silence before Matilda said, “You don’t want to go.” It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t have to try to answer, which was a good thing, because the way she’d said it made his eyes burn and another bite of sandwich refuse to go down.
While he turned his face away, blinking and trying to swallow, Matilda got up and came around the table and stood there behind him for a moment before she patted him on the head.
That was what did it. Afterward he couldn’t imagine why, except that it had been a bad day and that pat on his sore head reminded him that he was hurting in more ways than one. For some reason that was the last straw, and for a minute he really lost it.
It was embarrassing. He hadn’t cried for years and years, no matter what happened, not even during and after all the useless operations. Matilda wrapped up the rest of the sandwich, and as he headed for the door, she handed it to him without saying anything more.
It wasn’t until Harleigh was back in his bed in the tower, trying to find a comfortable position for his sore head, that he realized that he’d been missing an important fact. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but he seemed to have made a lump halfway up the back of his head by backing into something that he used to be able to stand under with at least an inch to spare. Did that mean . . .?
It was an interesting thought. Fascinating, really. What it seemed to mean was that, after he’d given up on hoping, the third operation had really made a difference. He really had started to grow.
Getting out of bed, Harleigh went to the one of the cupboards that had once held supplies for the famous Weatherby sunset parties and took out a pile of clothing. He put aside the shorts he always wore during the warm Weatherby summers and dug out a pair of corduroys he hadn’t worn for three or four months. They were only a little tight around his waist, but the length . . . He couldn’t believe it. The pants that had rested on the tops of his shoes just six months ago now ended way above his ankles. He really had started to grow.
Back in bed, Harleigh stared wide-eyed into darkness, while his mind whirled in confusing circles. At one moment he was thinking that he couldn’t have found out that he was growing, and growing fast, at a better moment. At a moment when he really needed something to improve his state of mind.
And then, a minute later, he almost wished it hadn’t happened. Not that he wished he hadn’t started to grow. He’d never wish that. But just that finding out right now had made it hard for him to concentrate on how miserable he felt and how angry he was at all of them. At Aunt Adelaide for threatening to send him away to that awful school, and at Josephine for gloating about their stupid trap. And at Uncle Edgar, too, for being on Harleigh’s side and not having the nerve to say so. And even a little bit at Matilda for making him embarrass himself, by giving him a sandwich and a pat on the head.
It took him a very long time to get to sleep, but when he finally did he slept hard, waking up the next morning to a dark, gloomy sky and a confusing mixture of emotions—resentment and anger along with a certain amount of excitement about the definitely outgrown corduroy pants. For a while he just lay there, wondering exactly how much taller he actually was and how long it would take him to catch up to normal twelve-year-old height, before he suddenly remembered that this was Wednesday. The Wednesday when Aunt Adelaide and Josephine would go to town and Junior Weatherby would probably try his hand at a very important robbery.
Wrenching his mind away from all of the rest of it, the good and the bad, Harleigh focused instead on the problem at hand. The huge problem of what, if anything, he could do to protect the Weatherby treasure.