Of course there was. I tried not to sigh. “How long is the waiting list?”
She looked me up and down. “Six months.”
Fucking fine.
“Great,” I said, my forced smile starting to waver under the strain of holding it for so long. “If you’d put me on it, that’d be fantastic, since I’m going to be here for a long, long time and I’m not going anywhere. Have an awesome day.”
I strode past her and back into the street, and almost ran smack bang into a horse.
I looked at the horse, and the horse looked at me.
It was definitely a horse, and it had a cart attached. I supposed that when there were no proper roads on the island, and no cars that I’d seen, people used different methods. The Dauntless Islanders were probably a bit like the Amish. But, you know, arseholes.
“Mavis isn’t so bad,” said a soft voice at my shoulder, and I almost jumped out of my skin. I turned around to see Robbie standing there, offering me a faint smile. He hefted a couple of churns into the cart—empties, by the hollow sound they made. “She’s just a little old fashioned.”
She was blatantly hostile, but okay.
“Right,” I said. “Um, says the guy with a horse and cart, huh?”
He snorted, and patted the horse’s flank. “You need milk?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I really do.”
“I don’t have any extra on me,” he said. “But if you can wait a bit, I can bring some to your house in about an hour.”
“That would be great,” I said. “I’m Dominic. Dominic Miller.”
He didn’t shake the hand I held out, but he at least looked a little rueful about it. “Robbie Finch,” he said. He slapped the horse on the rump, and it started to walk, pulling the rattling cart behind it. “Do you need eggs too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“I’ll see you later then,” he said, and hauled himself into the back of the cart with the practised ease of a man who’d done it a thousand times before.
“Okay,” I said, and lifted my hand in a wave.
He nodded, but didn’t wave back.
Something told me that was the best I was going to get from the Dauntless Islanders.
Eddie Hawthorne turned up at the police station a few minutes after I got back from my unsuccessful trip to Mavis’s shop. He had the baby strapped to his chest again.
“Hi!” he said. “How was that storm last night? You look like you didn’t get any sleep at all.”
“Not much,” I said. “But that’s probably more to do with the fact I haven’t had any coffee. I think my milk got left in Newcastle, and Mavis at the shop wouldn’t sell me any.”
Eddie rolled his eyes. “God, this place, right? Did she put you on her waiting list?”
“You too, huh? How long did it take you to get off it?”
“Oh, I’m still on it,” he said, waving a hand and making the baby gurgle with delight. “I just make Red Joe buy our groceries.”
“Red Joe the mayor?”
“And my boyfriend,” he said, and I jolted in surprise at that. Eddie gave a knowing grin. “What? You thought they’d be as backwards about that as they are with everything else over here on Dauntless?”
That felt like a trap. “Maybe,” I answered slowly.
“Well, it helps that Red Joe is a Nesmith.” Eddie’s grin grew at the look of confusion on my face. “Oh, man. They just threw you in the deep end, didn’t they? Josiah Nesmith started the mutiny. He’s the one who hanged the captain of the HMS Dauntless. Everyone here is descended from mutineers, and Josiah Nesmith is like their hero, to this day. Joe is one of the few people who can claim to be a direct descendant, and that means something.” He blinked at me through his glasses. “Well, on Dauntless, it means everything. People have been killed over it, and I’m not even kidding.”
