The Raconteur's Commonplace Book Page 2

  She did not appear to notice any of this, and he could hear no song.

  After a moment, Jessamy took her hands back and got to her feet. Self-consciously she tucked a stray bit of hair into place and smoothed it back with her palm, a gesture that left a small rose-tinted streak among the pale blond finger waves over her ear. She walked out of the lounge and across the hall, then slipped into the parlor. Petra and Madame looked over sharply, but when Jessamy closed the door behind her, they relaxed.

  The song, improbably, had not yet begun to slow. “Do you want to dance too?” Maisie asked, reaching for the newcomer’s hand, ignoring the blood that marked Jessamy’s gloved palm like stigmata.

  Jessamy spun Maisie around by the fingers that held hers, but her feet stood firm on the floor as she shook her head. “I don’t dance,” she said with a smile. “But I know that song well. I tried to play it once, but it’s more difficult than it sounds. I was a musician, you know. Long ago, back in another lifetime.”

  Musician or not, Miss Butcher is a dancer too, thought Maisie, who could always tell. I wonder what her secret is.

  There were six other people at the Blue Vein. The Hay­pottens, of course, and Sorcha, the maid, who was sixteen, plump and black-eyed, and utterly smitten with Negret Colophon, a thing that had shocked everyone who’d realized it, because in the same inn there was Sullivan, whose face was so perfect it would’ve been blinding except for that tiny scar he wore under one eye. But Sorcha, like Maisie, was a girl, not a fool, and she sensed unerringly that there was danger in that much beauty. And even though he wasn’t precisely what you’d call handsome, there was something about Mr. Negret, with his face obscured by the swirling pattern of dotted tattoos, that made her need to look closer, and to sneak surreptitious glances whenever she came across him looking through the books on the shelves in the lounge, or the atlases on the mantel in the parlor, or the decades’ accumulation of assorted bound material that stuffed the corner bookcase where the stairs turned midway between the first and second floors. Not to mention that when he thought no one was paying attention, he sang under his breath as he pieced his paper scraps together into hand-stitched tomes or stood at a window, reading by whatever light managed to filter in through the rain.

  But of course, in an inn, the maid, at least, is almost always listening, and more than once when she went around at night to bank the inn’s fires after everyone else had gone to sleep, Sorcha had caught herself singing the words of the firekeeping prayer she’d learned from her mother’s father to the tune she’d gotten from Negret.

  The last three guests were in the public bar at the front of the inn, where they were allowed to smoke. There was Antony Masseter, a tall traveling merchant whose right eye was green as a cat’s and whose left was hidden by a rust-colored patch. Mr. Masseter had a round, dappled scar like a firework on one palm and appeared to suffer from insomnia that drove him to wander the halls of the inn at night. Between his light footsteps and the rain, he was almost soundless, but Sorcha and one or two of the others had caught glimpses of him, when nightmares or thirst or the need for a bathroom or the fear of the fires going out or something else had driven them out into the halls in the darkling hours.

  Three nights ago, when Petra had caught him at it, Mr. Masseter had given himself away with music. As she’d been returning to her room, she’d caught a faraway, barely audible spill of tiny notes from somewhere down on the first floor of the inn: “High Away,” the song played by a red casket on the bottom shelf of the glass cabinet in the parlor. Petra had paused at her door, trying to remember whether she had given the key back to Sorcha after she and Maisie had finished with the music boxes in that cabinet earlier in the evening. She glanced over her shoulder to where Sullivan was frowning in his own doorway. Their eyes met. “Masseter,” he had whispered so quietly that only the sibilants were audible. “He’s always up late.” He nodded to the door of the next chamber down the hall to the right. “I hear him go out.” Then he’d touched his fingers to his lips, not quite a blown kiss, and disappeared into his room.

  Sullivan, as Sorcha could have told everyone, did not sleep either. She’d heard him later that same night pacing in his chamber when she passed on her way from her own tiny room to the kitchen to sing the firekeeping prayer as she checked the stove to be sure it hadn’t gone out.

  Sorcha usually slept soundly, but something about all this rain gave her nightmares. The peddler who’d sold the hot watter system half a century ago hadn’t had the parts on hand to heat every room in the inn and he’d never come back in all those years to finish the job; not to mention the system had to be stoked up every morning anyhow to sizzle and knock what heat it did give to the rooms that had coils. Sorcha’s banked fires kept well overnight, but lately she woke up twice, sometimes three times a night in a panic about the fires, so twice, sometimes three times a night, she tied her apron over her nightgown and went around the inn, checking every stove and fireplace she could get to without disturbing a sleeping guest. No, Sullivan did not sleep, but at least he stayed in his room—unlike Mr. Masseter, who had scared her half out of her skin the first time she’d come upon him staring into one of Mrs. Haypotten’s hallway display cases as if he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. Now she knew to expect him in the corridors, but that didn’t make it any less shocking when she came across him suddenly in the dead of the night. He walked like a cat.

  In the light of day, however—even at sunset—Masseter was ordinary. Today, after Haypotten popped into the public bar to announce supper and popped out again, the traveling merchant offered a pocket box of small cigars to the other two men sharing the room: Phineas Amalgam, a freckled and salt-and-red-​pepper-haired neighbor of the Haypottens who’d come the day the rain had started just to borrow a box of matches and had wound up stuck there along with the travelers; and an artisan printmaker called Gregory Sangwin with darker gray hair and skin the color of a wash of good walnut ink on fine Creswick paper, an acquaintance of Amalgam’s who had come to stay at the inn on his recommendation.

  Sangwin’s usual work was printing delicate, detailed pictures and illustrations from carved wooden blocks, and he amused himself by crafting small animals out of wood that found their way to Maisie every night at dinner. This had become a joint effort between himself and Sorcha, who saved all the smallish bits of firewood she came across and passed them to Mr. Sangwin, who, once he’d magicked them into beasts and birds with his inlaid whittling knife, passed them back to the maid. At supper the creatures turned up on Maisie’s plate, in her napkin, even in her soup on the day Mr. Sangwin had turned a longish splinter into a swimming dragon.

  Today the printmaker squinted through his pince-nez at a tiny seabird with outstretched wings that he was busy carving from a scrap of pearwood. Maisie’s animal, a river otter, already sat finished beside his cup. The bird was meant as a thank-you to his co-conspirator. He looked up, blinked, and accepted one of Masseter’s cigars. “Thanks.”

  “Albatross?” Masseter guessed.

  Sangwin nodded. “For the maid. She’s a good sport, passing along the little girl’s critters.” The cigar temporarily forgotten, he lifted the bird, squinted at it, and touched the point of his knife to a tiny hole in one wing to cut away a nearly invisible splinter. “Perhaps Mrs. Haypotten will have a spare bit of ribbon it can hang from.”

  Phineas Amalgam stood staring down at a small card house that Al Tesserian had built on one of the bar tables the night before and that was somehow still standing. He accepted a cigar but tucked it in his vest pocket rather than lighting it. “I’ll go ask her, shall I?”

  “Good of you, Mr. A.,” said Sangwin.

  “Think nothing of it,” Amalgam said. “Sorcha’s a good egg. Known her since she was a tot.” He nodded his thanks to Masseter and left the parlor. Later, as they all drifted into the dining room, he passed a length of blue velvet ribbon to Sangwin.

  Mrs. Haypotten, bustling through a moment later, paused to squee
ze the printmaker’s elbow and murmur, “So kind.” And as everyone else was smiling at Maisie’s delight at discovering the river otter peeking out of a bread roll, Sangwin tucked the albatross on its ribbon into the maid’s hand.

  After supper, as they had done every other night, the guests moved into the parlor for coffee and tea beside one of Sorcha’s well-kept fires. It was Phineas Amalgam who, on the evening of that seventh day of floods, suggested the stories.

  “In more civilized places, when travelers find themselves sharing a fire and a bottle of wine, they sometimes choose to share something of themselves, too,” Phin told them as he settled into his favorite chair, one of three that stood before the hearth. “And then, wonder of wonders, no strangers remain. Only companions, sharing a hearth and a bottle.”

  Mr. Haypotten, laying out the coffee on the sideboard, winked at his wife, who held the teapot. Amalgam, a folklorist, made his living collecting tales and putting them into books, so perhaps the innkeeper was thinking that his neighbor’s suggestion had a bit of self-service to it. And it might have been that he was right. Still, it was a way to pass the time.

  The wind and rain rattled the windowpanes and the French doors as the folks gathered in the parlor looked from one to the next: the young girl in her embroidered silk stole; the twin gentlemen with the tattooed faces; the gaunt woman with her nervous gloved hands constantly moving; the other woman, gaunter still and hidden beneath two layers of voluminous shawls, whose red-brown skin showed in small flashes when her wraps did not quite move along with her. The gambler in his old porkpie hat, building a castle on the floor before the fire with a pocketful of dice and at least six decks of cards, not counting the strays planted here and there about his person. The captain, lurking by the sideboard, where he’d stowed the half-hour glass and was itching to turn it but was also thinking it would be rude to interrupt Amalgam or get in the way of the Haypottens as they worked. The printmaker, smoking Masseter’s cigar by one of the windows overlooking the river. The young man with the perfection and the scar, and the young woman with the dragonfly in her dark curly hair sitting just far enough from him on the sofa that the arm he had stretched out along the top of it did not touch her shoulder; and the gap between them, where Maisie had been before she had gone to sit beside Tesserian on the floor to help build the castle. The maid beside the door to the hallway, who must be counted here because no one who sings prayers set to stolen music when she works at a fire can be left as mere set-dressing in a tale; and the merchant, leaning on the mantel, toying with the filigree on the big music box that lived there: a case the size of a loaf of bread, which stood open to reveal a beautiful tree wrought of several kinds of metal, with roots entangled among the device’s gears.

  “If you will listen,” Phineas Amalgam said, swirling his glass, “I will tell the first tale. Then perhaps, if you find it worth the trade, you will give me one of yours.”

  “Hear, hear.” Mr. Haypotten passed Amalgam a cup of coffee. “Let’s have a good one, Phin.”

  “Could you tell the one about the house in the pines?” Petra asked. Amalgam glanced at her, surprised. “I read it in one of your books,” she explained.

  “Oh.” The folklorist had collected hundreds of stories into books. It was perhaps not terribly surprising that he did not immediately remember that the story Petra had asked for was not actually in any of them. “Yes, I suppose I could tell that one.”

  It can be hard to keep one’s stories straight.

  “Thank you,” said Petra.

  Unable to restrain himself any longer, Captain Frost turned the half-hour glass, and Phineas Amalgam said again, “Listen.”

  TWO

  The Game of Maps

  The Folklorist’s Tale

  L isten.

  There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be drawn. It stood at the bottom of a hill on a street called Fellwool, a lane with broken pavement that had been overgrown and mostly hidden by ancient, knotty pines. It was the kind of house that, in simpler times, might have been called enchanted or haunted or cursed. These houses appear now and then in towns and cities that will tolerate them. Sometimes they survive. Sometimes they do not.

  This house, the house in which this tale takes place, had survived for many, many years. It had copper pipes that reached down into the earth like roots; its woodwork had taught its stonework how to breathe in exchange for lessons in strength; and the ironwork that chased the eaves and climbed the walls and curled along the windows danced in the sunset. It allowed its rooms to roam like cats. It had permitted residents now and then, when the endless march of the years got lonely, but it never kept them long. It was a crafty dwelling, and it had ways of regaining its solitude when visitors overstayed their welcome.

  A truth I have noticed—I believe it’s a truth, at any rate—is that the extraordinary calls to the extraordinary. Over time, little by little, spoon by spoon and cup by clock, one cupboard and one key and one battered hat at a time, this singular house collected things to it: things remarkable and peculiar and marvelous and uncanny. When the house was occupied, this led to occasional . . . let us call them adventures, although by adventures I don’t mean only the cheerful and happily ending sort of occurrences. When it was empty, the house and its collection of wonderful and terrible furnishings whispered to one another. What happened this time? Well, I’ll tell you. It was wonderful. Or, It was terrible.

  Sometimes people ventured in uninvited. The house and its denizens dealt with this in different ways, depending. Much of that community was inclined to be more curious than annoyed, but some of the rooms were antisocial or easily insulted or worse, and some of the furnishings had questionable senses of humor or were inclined toward troublemaking or were simply malicious. The house itself came to dislike visitors simply because they caused so many tensions between the spaces and items the structure contained. Eventually it began to really discourage intruders, both for their own good and to keep the peace.

  And to limit the amount of damage. Sometimes there was fallout when the more malevolent rooms and objects really got going, and the tools and brooms and mops in the house resented being made to clean up everyone else’s messes.

  One autumn, a man came to town. Though he was a peddler by trade, he was in town that year not to sell, but to acquire. The peddler had lost a thing belonging to his employer, and he had been tasked with the almost impossible duty of replacing the mechanism in question. The first of the many arcane pieces the reconstruction required was among the most important: a keyhole. Not a key, not a lock, but the actual keyway belonging to a particular sort of cabinet—the sort that formed an adit-gate, which is a technical term for what you might otherwise call a portal. And not just any portal, but the sort of portal that could bridge space and time, for the mechanism the peddler was attempting to build had to be able to manipulate both.

  The peddler had traveled widely, and in his travels he’d read tales of this sort of portal: adit-gates hidden in wardrobes, and in looking-glasses; in clocks, in wells, in bedknobs. But it wasn’t every building that would tolerate the presence of border furniture within its walls; buildings, after all, are mostly meant to keep the world out, not let other worlds in. And though he was a foreigner, he knew the city of Nagspeake well, and he suspected that if such a thing as an adit-gate was to be found there at all, it would be found in the peculiar house on the pine-choked street.

  So the peddler went in search of a child, because while it is very difficult for an adult to pass through an adit-gate or even find one in the first place, children—especially the right sort of children—fall through them into other worlds all the time.

  It wasn’t long before he happened upon a small boy being ganged up on by a group of bigger boys who, conveniently, were giving him hell for being gutless. The peddler didn’t catch what the boy called Pantin had done to deserve this, but he wasted no time in coming to the child’s defense. “I bet he’s braver than you,”
the peddler said, hauling the loudest of the bullies away by his collar. “Let him prove he’s not a coward.”

  “How?” the bully snarled, trying unsuccessfully to twist out of the peddler’s grip.

  “Yes, how?” Pantin asked, curious.

  The peddler thrust the bully away. “Let him stay a night in the house on Fellwool Street. I’ll wager none of the rest of you would dare it.”

  They all shrank back at this suggestion; everyone knew the house on Fellwool was cursed. But poor Pantin was trapped. If he refused, he would be shown to be a coward, provably and perpetually. On the other hand, if he did it, he would be a legend. And so he agreed, because while small children are all prone to beastliness to some degree or other, they are also all capable of moments of most extraordinary courage.

  That night, Pantin snuck out of his house with a lantern and a satchel full of supplies, and he met the other boys at the end of Fellwool Street. They walked over the broken pavement and through the twisted trees to the house, with Pantin, who figured he’d better start looking for his courage now, leading the way. Soon they saw lights in the thick darkness up ahead: candles glowing in the windows of the house. They found the peddler waiting on the porch. One side of the French front door was open, and through it they could see a cluster of lamps and candlesticks standing on a table in the center of the room beyond.

  The other boys hung back, leaving Pantin to climb the porch stairs alone. “I thought I could offer some help, since it was I who got you into this,” the peddler said. “A night is a long stretch, unless you have some way to pass the time.”

  “What sort of way?” Pantin asked, entranced by the dancing shadows inside the house.

  “A treasure hunt,” the peddler said, and Pantin looked at him at last. His eyes were blue and cold, even in the darkness. “And if you find the treasure and bring it out to me when your night is up, I’ll pay you for it.”