The Raconteur's Commonplace Book Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Blue Vein Tavern

  The Game of Maps

  The Whalebone Spring

  The Devil and the Scavenger

  The Queen of Fog

  The Roamer in the Nettles

  The Hollow-Ware Man

  The Coldway

  The Tavern at Night

  The Blue Stair

  The Storm Bottle

  The Ferryman

  The Reckoning

  The Particular

  The Three Kings

  The Gardener of Meteorites

  The Summons of the Bone

  The Crossroads

  A Note About the Clarion Books Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from the Greenglass House Series

  Read More from Kate Milford

  Can You Solve the Case?

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2021 by Kate Milford

  Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Nicole Wong

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  hmhbooks.com

  Cover art by Jaime Zollars

  Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez

  Interior design by Sharismar Rodriguez

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-328-46690-7

  eISBN 978-0-358-41122-2

  v1.0121

  To Lynne, who makes every story shine,

  and to Tess, Griffin, and Nathan,

  because every story is for you.

  ONE

  The Blue Vein Tavern

  The rain had not stopped for a week, and the roads that led to the inn were little better than rivers of muck. This, at least, is what Captain Frost said when he tramped indoors, coated in the yellow mud peculiar to that part of the city, before hollering for his breakfast. The rest of the guests sighed. Perhaps today, they had thought. Perhaps today, their unnatural captivity would end. But the bellowing man calling for eggs and burnt toast meant that, for another day at least, fifteen people would remain prisoners of the river Skidwrack, and the new rivers that had once been roads, and the rain.

  They passed the day much as they had passed the day before, and the day before that. Eventually, Mr. Haypotten, the innkeeper, announced supper in half an hour; he apologized for the state of the meals and the flickering lights, but without real worry. The Haypottens might run out of provisions eventually, but they had not kept this inn and tavern on the Skidwrack for a quarter of a century and more without seeing a flood or two, and they were well prepared for the whims of the river and the rain. The electricity might flicker and the hot water heating system, bought by the previous owners off an itinerant salesman when Mr. Haypotten was still in short pants, had never worked properly, but since the inn’s fireplaces never went dark, its rooms never went particularly cold. Nobody would freeze, nobody would starve, and as for the rising water: “See that?” Mr. Haypotten would say, opening one of the windows in the lounge barroom against the cold and wet and pointing across the porch that wrapped halfway around the inn to indicate a blue step in the stairway leading down to the river. “That’s where the river came back in ’fifteen. She doesn’t dare come nearer than that. Water won’t rise past a blue stair. Isn’t that so, Captain?”

  “That’s so, Marcus,” Captain Frost agreed today as he had every day, because Mr. Haypotten kept the captain in very good sherry. But when Mr. Haypotten left the lounge to go help his wife and the kitchen maid finish preparing supper, the captain sang a different tune. Captain Frost’s eyes were deep-lined, his face tanned to mahogany, and his hair and beard bleached to a yellowed bone color from his decades at sea. He felt himself, not inaccurately, to be somewhat an expert in weather lore, and when the innkeeper was out of earshot, he muttered that he’d never heard such doss before in his life o’ years at sea, and if painting a thing blue were all it took to put water in its place, then how was it every ship in the harbor wasn’t sky-colored? Then he finished his very good sherry, pulled on his coat, and stomped into the hall and back out to check the weather and the roads yet again, as he did at every turn of the cracked half-hour glass he tended as religiously as if he were still aboard ship. It was never far from his elbow when he was inside the house, though it meant rearranging the place settings a bit at meals.

  He left four guests behind in the lounge. Jessamy Butcher got up from her chair by the window, where she could see how very close the water was actually coming to the much-discussed blue stair, went around the bar, and found the captain’s bottle of sherry. She poured herself a glass, then held the bottle up in one thin, gloved hand, offering it silently to the rest of the room. The tattooed young man named Negret declined and went back to the pages he had taken from the pockets of his tweed vest and was stacking together on the bar top: a mismatched collection of liquor labels, scraps of newsprint, wallpaper, remnants of the long, match-like twists of paper called spills that the maid kept in vases in each room for lighting the lamps and fires around the inn, and other scavenged oddments. When he had them where he wanted them, he took a sharp, round-handled awl from a roll of tools that lay open on the countertop before him and, pressing the pages flat with his palm, began to poke holes along one edge.

  But his brother, Reever, nodded in response to Jessamy’s offer and murmured his thanks as she reached across the bar to pass him a glass. Jessamy tried once again to decide whether or not the pale, brick-haired Colophon brothers were identical under their facial decorations. It was impossible to say. The tattoos were very similar but not quite the same, plus Negret wore his hair long and floppy, while Reever kept his short-cropped and cowlicky. And one didn’t like to be rude by looking too long. Jessamy turned to the fourth person in the room. “Mr. Tesserian?”

  At his table across the lounge, Al Tesserian looked up from his half-built castle of playing cards. “Dear God, yes. No, my dear, don’t bother,” he said as Jessamy made a motion to come around the bar. “Be . . . right . . . there.” He placed a card and got up. The other three held a collective breath—but Tesserian’s castles didn’t dare fall until he gave them permission, which was generally done by calling Maisie, the youngest guest, to do the honors. Then and only then, when Maisie had pulled away a queen or gusted a sharp breath onto an ace, they toppled spectacularly, cards flying in all directions as if the laws of physics held no sway in the realm to which they truly belonged.

  Tesserian accepted his glass with a bow, then returned to his architecture. He paused on his way to look at Negret’s handiwork. “Binding another book?”

  Negret nodded as he lifted the stack of papers and held the edge he’d perforated up to the light, checking to be sure the holes were lined up the way he wanted.

  “It needs covers,” Tesserian observed. He felt inside one sleeve, frowned, then took off the battered and narrow-brimmed porkpie hat he wore at all times except meals. From inside the lining, he produced a pair of aces and tossed them on the bar. “Will those do?”

  Negret added the cards to his stack, one on top and one on the bottom. “Perfectly, if you can spare them.”

  Tesserian laughed. “An old gambler alw
ays has a couple of spare aces someplace.”

  * * *

  Elsewhere in the inn, Petra, the guest who had been there the longest, borrowed from the maid a key to one of the countless glass cases that occupied walls and corners all around the inn so that she and Maisie could take down one of Mrs. Haypotten’s music boxes, very carefully wind it, and dance for a bit.

  Maisie Cerrajero was young and had been traveling alone to meet the aunt who was taking her in, with no luggage but an old ditty bag that held everything she owned. Each day someone said something along the lines of, “Won’t your auntie be relieved when she gets here and sees that you’re safe?” Most often that someone was Mrs. Haypotten, who had a habit of misplacing her spectacles or her ring of keys or her best little sewing scissors and was never quite sure what, other than “Thank you,” she ought to say when Maisie inevitably found them for her, no matter in what unlikely place they’d been left. Flummoxed, she always came out with something like, “Won’t your auntie be so happy to see what a nice, polite, helpful girl you are when she gets here, dear?”

  Petra, however, never said anything like that, not even when Maisie found the dragonfly-shaped hair clip she had lost at breakfast two days before, half-hidden by the hem of one of the dining room curtains. Petra instead went for a key and a music box, because the unspoken truth was that, given the volume of rain and the slope of the hills, if Auntie had been on the roads at the wrong time, she was never coming—and Maisie was a girl, not a fool. But when that girl danced, sending her short sleek dark hair fluttering and the pleated skirt of her jumper frock swishing around her knees, her face lost its fear. And Mrs. Haypotten had an improbable collection of music boxes—forty-one that Petra and Maisie had managed to count—no two of which, as far as they could determine, played the same song.

  Today, with the dragonfly back in its customary place among Petra’s dark bobbed curls, they picked one from the tall cabinet in the parlor, which, like the lounge, looked out over the riverfront. The cabinet had the thick, bubble-pocked green glass that was the only sort that could be made from Nagspeake sand, and Mrs. Haypotten had told them it held some of her favorite pieces, so they took extra care. Maisie chose a music box shaped like a kite with a terrifyingly delicate-looking ceramic key. She wound it gently, the eggshell-colored winder stark against the brown of her fingers. When she set it down and lifted the lid, it took a few notes before the tune resolved itself into “Riverward.” Maisie hummed along as she spun in a wide-armed circle, swirling her shawl behind her as she turned, making the embroidered chrysanthemums upon it float in the air.

  Sullivan, the young man who’d been sitting in a chair facing the fire, his eyes glazing over as they stared up at the big antique map that hung above the mantel, shoved himself abruptly to his feet and hurried out, briefly grasping Petra’s wrist in apology as he stumbled past. That was unusual enough to make Petra look after him curiously. In the seven days since he’d arrived, Petra had never seen Sullivan do anything without an almost eerie sort of grace. He was so implausibly elegant when he moved and so bloody good-looking to boot that it was hard to believe he wasn’t a hallucination. Petra had had to stop herself more than once from sticking him with a pin as he crossed a room just to see if then, finally, he’d make a misstep.

  But apparently all it took was “Riverward.” Interesting.

  The old woman in the corner, thinner even than Jessamy Butcher, rocked her chair gently in time with the song as the music box wound down. Her skin, like Maisie’s and Petra’s both, was dark, but ruddy here and grayish there, uneven and slightly pocked, while Maisie had the clear and perfect skin of a child and Petra the kind of faultless complexion it would’ve taken a motion-picture actress an hour in makeup to achieve. The lady they all called Madame Grisaille spoke little, but she hummed as she rocked. It wasn’t a loud sound—if the hot water coils in the cast iron case mounted on the wall across the room happened to be sizzling at the same time a wind rattled the windows, the hum was almost impossible to hear—but Petra and Maisie could feel it like a thrum in their bones as they danced, as if Madame’s tune flowed through her and into the very boards, the very nails in the floor, and back up through their feet, so that it could sway with them.

  “Madame is a dancer,” Maisie had whispered to Petra the first time she had noticed this.

  “When she was younger, you think?” Petra had whispered back. This had been three days ago, one evening when they were all on their way into the dining room, where Madame was always seated first out of unspoken respect for—for what? For her age, perhaps, or for her stateliness. If watching Sullivan was like watching a mirage that was too beautiful to be real, watching Madame was like watching a queen trying badly to disguise what she was, too regal for her sham ordinariness to be believed.

  “No,” Maisie had replied softly. “Not just when she was younger. Now. She’s a dancer. She wants to dance when we do, but she holds herself back.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know.” But the girl’s eyes had begun to glow. “Maybe it’s a secret.”

  “That she’s a dancer is a secret?”

  “No . . .” Maisie had looked thoughtfully at Madame as she followed Petra to the sideboard, where a buffet supper had been laid out and where Maisie had found a tortoiseshell button that had gone missing from Mrs. Haypotten’s housedress earlier that day. “But she has a secret, so she doesn’t dance. Because you can’t dance and hide who you are.”

  Petra had thought that this was a very wise observation, and said so. She had also thought that if dancing showed one for who she was, Maisie danced like someone with no secrets to keep. That idea made her smile. But she hadn’t wanted to make Maisie feel self-conscious, and sometimes the girl’s dancing revealed as plainly as tears that she was carrying something that, when she remembered it, made her very, very sad. So Petra kept her thoughts to herself.

  Today Madame Grisaille hummed along with “Riverward,” and then “Gaslight,” which was the tune plinked out by Maisie’s favorite music box, a chrysanthemum-shaped one that nearly matched the flowers on her shawl. Then, another new thing, as if Sullivan tripping over himself hadn’t been strange enough: as the sun began to set across the river and the chrysanthemum played its last, slow notes, Madame stopped rocking. She reached into the white fur hand muff she always carried with her, even indoors, and took a new music box out of it.

  This one was plainer at first glance, just a round box of gold and ceramic with a scene painted on the lid. She raised one finger to her lips and then began to wind it. There was something so secretive about the motion, Petra instinctively checked to be sure both the parlor door and the French doors to the porch were closed and that the three of them were alone.

  “This one is from my room upstairs,” Madame murmured in a voice gravelly with age. “I don’t know that Mrs. Haypotten would be comfortable with my carrying it about, so we shall keep this between ourselves. But it plays a remarkable song.”

  She finished winding, held it out on one spread hand, and lifted the lid. Maisie turned her head sideways, trying to make sense of the now-upside-down painting on the lid—two people sitting at a fingerpost, perhaps?—but only for a second, because when the song began, it was everything the girl’s dancer’s heart could have wished for from a piece of music. It was joy and love and exquisite pain; it was danger and the thrill of adventure and the certainty of failure and the thrum of hope. It was dream and nightmare; it was flight; it was winter and summer and water and stone and metal and fire and earth, and Maisie danced as she had never imagined dancing before.

  After a moment, Madame handed the music box to Petra, and at last, perhaps because it was only the three of them in the room, the old woman joined the young girl and they danced together hand in hand, and suddenly Maisie understood why Madame had refused to dance before. And she knew what the old woman’s secret was, too, and she understood the knowledge for the gift it was and wrapped her arms around it, concea
ling it in swirling embroidered chrysanthemums as the two of them whirled together, both dancing now like people with no secrets to keep as the sunset over the river painted them in golden light, orange light, crimson light. Madame caught Petra’s eye over the girl’s head, and the two women smiled at each other.

  Perhaps the notes found their way out through cracks in the windows, drifted on the rainy wind along the length of the porch facing the Skidwrack, and snuck back into the house through another chipped pane of glass in a different room altogether. Perhaps they had other ways of making themselves heard. Either way, beyond the hall, beyond the stairs, two people in the lounge heard the song too.

  Negret Colophon, stitching an elaborate binding into his scrap-paper book, dropped his needle in surprise, then quickly picked it up again and pretended not to have heard anything. Jessamy Butcher, who had been deep in conversation with Reever Colophon a short way down the bar, was less subtle. Her head turned so quickly in the direction of the music that several joints in her neck and shoulders cracked. The popping might even have been audible had her gloved fingers not at the same moment crushed her sherry glass to fragments and powder.

  Reever, who had been debating just then whether it was time to invite Miss Butcher to continue their conversation in a more private corner of the inn, jerked back as glass and liquor flew. Jessamy did not appear to have noticed what she had done. “Remarkable,” she said in tones of quiet wonder, ignoring his stare, along with those of Negret from a few seats away and Tesserian from the table with the card castle.

  “What is?” Reever asked.

  “That song.” Jessamy breathed out, a strange huff that wasn’t quite a sigh.

  Reever looked back down at the bar top between them and saw that she still clutched pieces of the glass she had destroyed. He took her hands in his and gently uncurled her fingers. One by one he removed the shards carefully from her palms, where small spots of blood had begun to seep through her pristine pink gloves. Then he held her hand for a moment when he had finished, watching her face.