In Which Tom Crowder Evolves A Plan

Thomas Crowder to Lynde Falconer:

Lynde my love,

Prepare to be disgusted by the swagger of my ego and the trumpet-blast of my self-congratulation. I went into the foothills with Katti and Timothy last night, and armed only with our minds, the sounds of our voices and the brilliance of my plan, we drove twenty armed men dithering into the benevolent custody of our pitchfork-wielding farmers. I am the conquering hero for the first time in my life, and probably my last, and while I officially despise such a yardstick for success I am amply prepared to make the most of it.

It helped a great deal that our friends from Marshweather were a dull and unimaginative lot who can be swung like wet ropes when they are not the ones in control of the situation. I had a feeling their superstition would render them ripe for picking if manipulated in the right way, and it turned out that I was right. I was rather astonished at how easily I was able to enter the thoughts of some hypothetical beef-witted bullies from a hypothetical chest-thumping kingdom and put my finger on their weak spot – be so kind, if you will, to help me pretend that it is my perspicacity and not anything I might have in common with the louts.

At the risk of perpetuating a cliché, it came to me in a dream. It was a dream halfway between anxiety and nightmare, the kind in which you are packing hastily for a journey in saddlebags made of mist, with that night's bogeymen of choice scraping through the door to get you before you leave. When I awoke, it was to a moment more of panic, since your father was snoring in a particularly demonic and sonorous manner, which made me assume immediately that the bogeymen were our tormentors from Marshweather, and that they had worn through the door and were coming for me. Once I realized that it had been a dream, I lay awake for several minutes to catch my breath and wish bitterly that I haunted their dreams as they haunted mine…and in that semi-lucid state when the membrane between dreams and reality was at its most porous, I realized that I had my plan. And when I realized how we could use the Dumcruckles' animal affinity it all fell into place.

I slept fitfully for the rest of the night -- in fact I'm not sure I slept again at all. At the first whisper of dawn I astonished your father by leaping out of bed, racing to the window to catch the light, and scribbling away feverishly on stray scraps of paper. Of course he is accustomed to getting up at dawn, but he is also accustomed to prodding me awake, splashing his face at the washstand and then prodding me awake, getting dressed and then prodding me awake, putting on his boots and then prodding me awake…you take my meaning. This is the first time since the siege started and we had to become roommates that I have got up before him.

I sailed into breakfast like a conquering emperor and presented my case to Lady Dumcruckle -- or rather, I ostensibly presented my case to the Dumcruckle family, but we all knew where the real judgment lay.

Katti and Timothy sat bolt upright the moment I began to talk, and their eyes grew gradually brighter and brighter as they shot anxious glances at their parents. Sir Roger fairly vibrated with emotion, as well as impatience that by necessity he could not be one of the party. But her ladyship merely sat pensive until I had finished, tapping the edge of her plate lightly with her spoon and gazing into the middle distance.

When I had wound up the plan, she sat without speaking for a moment. We were all staring meaningfully at her: Sir Roger impatiently, her children importunately, and I myself so intensely that it was only afterward that I realized I had been willing her with every fiber of my body and brain to embrace my plan.

Finally she laid down her spoon, pushed her plate away and smiled at me. "Yes, it will do," she said. "It is risky, and it isn't foolproof, but it is more likely than anything else we might come up with. You children had better work out the details among yourselves, and Roger and I will inform the rest of the castle. You will need all the strong arms you can get in reserve if your plan succeeds.

“It will probably take us all day," she added. "We don't want to risk an announcement; who knows if our Marshweather friends are within earshot."

So Katti and Timothy spent the rest of the morning laying our plans in detail, down to the last contingency. There was a bit of nostalgia as well; we thought it best to practice the old system of signaling that we all used to have when we were children and making forays on the pantry, or the granary, or the orchard, or some such mischief. And we missed you, darling Lynde, especially myself, since Katti and Timothy have always been an inseparable pair, and you and I so obviously another that I felt oddly as though I were operating without my right hand in contrast with them.

After lunch we went to get such rest as we could before nightfall, and I was especially happy of it since I lacked at least two hours from the night before and the excitement that had driven me let me down with a thump, now that all there was to do was wait.

As the dusk approached, Lady Dumcruckle came to wake me with her own hands. "Dress warmly," she said, "and meet the rest of us in the courtyard. I have a word or two to say before you go."

I put on my darkest clothing and hesitated over my boots; we would need silence more than anything, but if I got myself hurt over the rough terrain, it would make the going more difficult if the time came for flight. In the end I compromised on thin house shoes, and reflected that if they were ruined by my night's work, stocking feet on flagstones would hurt me less than stocking feet on open ground.

The others were already in the courtyard, and I saw that our thoughts were one in the matter of clothes and shoes. Of course Katti takes every opportunity she can to swagger about in trousers, and a fetching little gamine she looked, incensed as she was when I told her so and pinched me, which made Timothy laugh.

Lady Dumcruckle commanded our silence as she always does: by the simple expedient of clearing her throat. "Now," she said. "I would not wish to interfere with the details of young Thomas' plan; I do have confidence in it, in the brains that gave it birth--" here she grinned at me with one side of her mouth "--and in the hands that will bring it to fruition. All I would ask is that your first thought be for safety. If we lose this round, we can try again and win the next, but if we lose the youth of our house we have nothing." She cocked her head at us, and we all nodded and murmured abashedly. "Now go," she went on, and then fell out of her speech-making style and into the vernacular. "And we'll be waiting here to catch the bastards when you're done with them."

She grinned again, all over her face this time, with a gamine look like Katti's, and opened her arms to her children. They hugged her between them with the typical Dumcruckle exuberance, and I waited to the side, but once she had detached them, Lady Dumcruckle came over to embrace me too. "It will work," she said, just too low for the others to hear. "I have never believed anything more strongly. Take care for yourself, and for my rumbustious children, and it will work." She kissed me on the cheek. "And then what a story you will have for Lynde!"

(continued here)