Oddity

by Eli Brown

  They rode in a tense silence, Nessa combing her hair and Hannibal pecking sullenly at a spider hiding between the boards of the wagon.

  And then, before Clover had readied herself for the sight, the wagon crested a hill and New Manchester appeared like a beehive broken open, the bustling city spread across the earth. Clover gasped and held that breath. New Manchester was bigger than she had dreamed it could be.

  Nessa stopped singing and reined the horses to the shoulder of the highway so the riders could admire the view. The city Clover had dreamed of visiting now stretched before her, arches and spires, aqueducts and cathedrals, the modern capital of Farrington. It was strange to think that she’d been born here. Some part of her belonged in New Manchester, Clover the city girl. She let her breath out at last, feeling chap-lipped and light-headed.

  Hannibal hopped to the ground, saying, “It would not do for a colonel to be seen riding into the city on a charlatan’s wagon. Now, if you’ll follow me, Clover, I’ll introduce you to Senator Auburn.”

  “That is not why I’ve come to New Manchester,” Clover said, her giddy feeling dissolving.

  “I assure you, he will be eager to meet you. This is the sort of introduction that changes the course of a person’s life, isn’t it? Just have tea with the man. Tell him of your experiences on the border. He’ll be keen to hear it.”

  “Why would someone like Senator Auburn want to talk with me?”

  Hannibal paused, then cleared his throat. “The good senator trusts my judgment, and when I meet a promising individual, like yourself —”

  Clover shook her head. “But I must find Mr. Agate. I made a promise.”

  Hannibal considered her in silence. “A word of advice: learn your strengths before others do. I hope that, when you’ve finished your errand, our paths will cross again. To find me, ask any soldier. Now I must make my report. I wish you the very best, Nurse Elkin.”

  “What about me?” Nessa said. “Am I not a promising individual?”

  “You are certainly individual.” Hannibal chuckled. “Farewell, charlatan.”

  “Please!” Clover said, but she wasn’t sure what she was pleading for. Did she really expect Hannibal to escort her every step? “I don’t like to see you go, Colonel Furlong.” Clover saluted, trying to be brave as she saw the Rooster turn to go. “Thank you for your help.”

  “It’s fighters like you who will secure our victory in the end,” Hannibal said, strutting away from the road. “Even if you’re still saluting with the wrong hand.”

  Clover watched the Rooster until he had had disappeared into the roadside shrubs, and felt her chin tremble. She couldn’t help feeling abandoned.

  “You’ll really miss the old bird?”

  “Of course I will.” Clover sniffed and sat up straight. “He gave me courage.”

  She turned her attention to the enormity of New Manchester, a city that could swallow her as easily as the lake swallowed minnows. The Melapoma River ran through it like a jade-colored eel.

  Nessa pulled the wagon to a stop at the city gates and waited as Clover gathered her bags and jumped to the ground.

  “I should like to give you a memento to remember me by,” Nessa said, fishing through a leather purse. She examined something small and glinting before handing it to Clover.

  “A gold tooth?” Clover laughed.

  “It’s the only gold I have.” Nessa shrugged. “Uncle pulled teeth. Do you want a bottle of tonic instead?”

  “No, this will do just fine,” Clover said, pocketing the strange gift. “But aren’t you taking the wagon into the city?”

  “I don’t care to go in, myself.”

  “Oh, you mean you can’t enter New Manchester,” Clover said. “They won’t let you.”

  “Not everyone likes the tonic.” Nessa smiled. “I do my business with folks outside the walls.”

  “They found out what was in the tonic, didn’t they?” Clover chuckled. “Kicked you out and said ‘Never come back.’”

  “Just be careful in there, sister,” Nessa said, and gave the reins a quick slap. The wagon started down a side road shaded by willows and clouds of gnats.

  “Did they tar and feather you?” Clover shouted.

  Nessa didn’t look back.

  Clover watched, sorry to see Nessa go too, then set her bags down with the gates of New Manchester looming before her. She was about to enter the biggest, most modern city in the state, maybe in the world. She had hoped to do so with friends. The wall was too high to see over, but she could hear the bombination of city life just inside the gates.

  And somewhere in that restless bustle was Aaron Agate, the man who had real answers. She touched the Watch in her pocket to check that it was still there, then grabbed her bags and walked toward the gates. She looked behind her once, but the yellow wagon was gone. Statues of falcons bearing shields stared down at her from the high walls. She straightened her hat and entered New Manchester.

  New Manchester welcomed Clover by sweeping her into the carnival eddies of its busiest streets. Craning her neck to take in the ten-story marvels of granite and brick around her, Clover was elbowed down the avenues as much by noises and smells as by crowds and coaches.

  She had only just covered her mouth against the insulting stench of a soap manufactory when that smell was replaced by the intoxicating steam rolling off a confectioner’s cart, where the molten lacquer of caramel was being ladled onto roasted peanuts.

  Modern lamps hung from posts on every corner of the main street, maintained by lithe men in red caps who carried ladders on their shoulders and clambered about like monkeys, trimming wicks and refilling the oil. Clover had expected modern marvels, but the inspiring audacity of lighting an entire city every night left her a little breathless.

  Some blocks sparkled with finery. Even the sign above a cobbler’s shop had been illuminated with gold leaf. Clover leaned against the tide to get a better look at a public drinking fountain inlaid with a mosaic of fish and octopuses. She dipped the ladle and drank. The water was surprisingly cold, tasted of iron, and bubbled forth endlessly, like a mountain creek captured in a bowl. Clover wasn’t sure if she was jealous or angry with these people who had lived here so long they passed such marvels without so much as a glance.

  Clover didn’t see the wagon that clipped her shoulder and spun her around. She was shoved and bumped down the avenue like a leaf on the wind, all the while saying, “Pardon! Excuse me!” The general etiquette on the streets of New Manchester had all the order and decorum of a slow-moving avalanche. Everything was jumbled together. Musicians on one corner played a giddy jig while, just a dozen yards away, another group was playing a funeral dirge. Gentlemen in swallowtail coats escorted women over wooden planks above dozing beggars.

  Clover pressed her back against a brick wall to make way for a nanny clutching sheet music to her chest and scowling as if temper alone could cut a path through the crowd. Behind this jowled chaperone was a flock of young women Clover’s age, a tittering bustle of bonnets and silk. Hiked skirts revealed boot buttons ascending like the notes of a scale. They were students, no doubt, headed to music lessons, curls bobbing, cheeks scrubbed rose pink. As they passed, their lilac cologne swept over Clover like a breeze from paradise.

  What would it feel like to be wrapped as carefully as a gift? It was rude to stare, but Clover let her head swivel after them until they were a vanishing bouquet in the distance. Did they feel as unsullied as they looked, parasols twirling like halos?

  Clover looked down at her own muddy pants, her freckled forearms, her calloused palms, the moss-stained boots that had carried her all the way from the lake. It was too late, of course, far too late for a different life. The stains that mattered could not be scrubbed away. And, of course, Clover would never trade what she knew of the spine’s viola curves or the heart’s rhythm for any amount of chamber music frippery.

  But, perhaps, if her mother had lived, Clover might have endured, might even have enjoyed, a corset�
��s embrace. If things had been different, there might have been an untarnished blossom named Clover carried breathless and carefree in the wake of her chaperone.

  In an open square, a gleaming pillar rose toward the sky, a monument to the treaty that had ended the Louisiana War twenty years ago. Marble doves spiraled up the monument, frozen in flight. It surprised Clover that something so fine could have come from war. She pressed her palm against the cold stone. Had Miniver touched this monument? As Clover moved through New Manchester, she couldn’t help but wonder: had her mother walked on these cobbles, looked at this stained-glass window, heard this blacksmith’s staccato rhythm?

  But Clover had more pressing business. “Can you help me find Aaron Agate?” Clover asked shopkeepers and fruit vendors. “Where does Mr. Agate live?” she asked passing ladies and cart drivers. She asked a lamplighter. But the answer was invariably no. A sheriff blew beer foam out of his mustache to grumble, “Don’t go looking for trouble, little miss.”

  Clover was so overcome by the feverish pulse of the city that she’d almost forgotten her father’s directions.

  “The canary among doves . . .”

  She began studying the birds on the rooftops. Gargoyles mocked her from above, their stone tongues black with soot. Someone with a sense of humor had put a real scarf around one of their necks. When Clover asked people about a canary, she got even less help. City folk were too busy to bother with a lost bird.

  Walking with her eyes on the sky, Clover wandered into a different part of the city. Here the houses leaned together like boats thrown ashore by a storm. Clover stepped around beggars whose faces bloomed with sores. Many of the people she passed were dark-skinned. New Manchester was known as a haven for Black people, emancipated, born free, or fugitive. Clover had supposed everyone in the big city lived side by side, as they did in Salamander Lake. But this neighborhood might as well have been a different city altogether.

  The manure sweepers carted their loads only as far as this street before heaping them into great flyblown dunes. Older Black men, too frail for more rigorous labor, sat around the mounds with buckets, mixing manure with clay to make fuel to stave off the night’s chill. They teased and laughed, passing the time, but Clover saw that some of their legs were warped by beriberi, a disease whose simple cure was food.

  Clover had sutured black skin. The needle knew no difference. Her father had treated slaves, freemen, and Indians, anyone who needed it. He’d taught Clover that all bodies were cured with the same medicine. Clover had expected this capital of the free state of Farrington to reflect that simple truth. Instead, New Manchester was cracked like a plate.

  A flower girl sang out as Clover passed, “Pretty flowers for the lady!” Her hair was plaited against her scalp, the oiled braids tight as cords of licorice. She’d taken great care to look proper. Born somewhere in these stepped-on streets, the girl was more “tidy” than Clover had ever been.

  Widow Henshaw had told Clover that when slave catchers couldn’t find their fugitives, they sometimes kidnapped free people instead, selling them to the plantations whether they had papers or not. Clover had only just encountered men capable of something like that, but this girl had lived her whole life under such a threat. Yet she stood as fearless as a ship’s figurehead, calling out, “Flowers! Flowers for the pretty lady!”

  Clover did not feel like a pretty lady, so she shook her head and pushed on.

  Her father’s bag felt heavier with every passing moment, the weight of its mystery making her parched. More than water, more than food, more than sleep, Clover needed Aaron Agate to lift her burden.

  Her search for the canary drew her eye to the handmade beauty that brightened the slums: jewel-colored shawls pressing babies tightly to their mothers’ backs, doorways painted with geometric patterns. The smell of fried okra made Clover’s mouth water. But she also recognized the smell of cholera and diphtheria. And below it all, so deep that it might have been coming from her own trembling bones, Clover heard the grinding of that terrible mill.

  This was another secret her father had kept. “Cities are swollen with woe.” He’d told her that much. But how could she have guessed that all of the woe had been pushed to one side of the city?

  Clover felt queasy. She needed to find Aaron Agate. She half ran through the dust, then stopped. She’d seen something: a patch of yellow. Had it been the canary? She retraced her steps but found herself looking only at a dried yellow rose in a basket. “A flower for the pretty miss?” the girl said, her forehead shining like a brass bowl.

  “Have you seen any canaries in this city?” Clover asked.

  The girl couldn’t have been much more than eight, but the wariness in her eyes looked older. She held the flowers up, a mass of muted colors. “Five cents for a single, seven for a nosegay.”

  Clover dug in her father’s bag for the last dime and handed it over. “I’ll take a nosegay.”

  The girl gave Clover a dried rose nested in lavender and pointed downtown. “The canary lives on the glue maker’s roof. You won’t catch it, though,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. “It’s too quick.”

  Clover hurried down the avenue.

  Even without the sign painted over the door, Clover would have recognized the glue maker’s shop from the abominable smell of boiled horse. She stuck her nose deeply into the brittle flowers as she stood before the building, craning her neck to see the roof.

  It was there.

  Surrounded by doves hunkering and cooing in their drowsy manner sat a canary. The city’s soot had tarnished its once-bright plumage to a muddy brass. Still, it was a welcome shard of color in the smoke-woven air.

  Clover watched as it dropped from the roof, lit into the street to snatch at some crumb, then darted away. She raced after it, clutching her bags, trying to keep her eye on the bird as it dipped behind a wagon, through a miasma of chimney smoke, and into the limbs of an ancient oak. She’d lost it.

  Clover was so frustrated that she screamed through her teeth and dashed the dried flowers against her thigh. Only the horses tied to their posts looked at her. City folk had no trouble ignoring her.

  Clover went back to the glue maker’s to find that the bird had returned to the shade of the chimney. She followed it twice more, and both times, the bird came back. It seemed tethered, invisibly, to this particular rooftop.

  Clover walked around the building. It was a brick-walled factory with several open doors, each one revealing another glimpse of the huge kettles. The workers moved in a shimmer of swampy heat. But there was no sign of a famous oddity expert.

  On her second pass, Clover pushed through the hanging branches of a parched willow and found herself in the twilight of a hidden alley. It was quiet here, and at the bottom of three stairs, as if waiting for her, was a heavy basement door.

  Clover knocked. She noticed that the canary had perched on the willow above, watching her. From behind the door, a man shouted, “Password!”

  “How am I supposed to know that?”

  The canary flew away. She knocked again. Pressing her ear to the wood, she heard a low ruckus coming from inside. “Hello?” She kicked the door and tried to peer through the gap between the door and the jamb. The sound of hammering and heavy scraping came from inside, but she could see nothing. She slumped, pressing her forehead against the wood. “My name is Clover! I have to find Aaron Agate,” she hollered.

  The voice behind the door said, “Clover who, exactly?”

  “Clover Elkin,” she said. “From Salamander Lake.”

  The canary appeared again, darting so close to her face that the wind from its wings parted the flies. The man inside cleared his throat. “Clover Constantinovna Elkin?”

  “You know my name?”

  After an uncertain moment, the voice delivered a string of strange words: “Travels footless. Hungers gutless. Bites toothless.”

  Clover swallowed. It was the same riddle Widow Henshaw had tested her with since she was a little girl. Even in de
ep winter, the widow had made Clover stand in the cold doorway until she’d recited the ritual words.

  Now Clover answered by habit, “Soot’s sire, fire. Latch and key, admit me.”

  Just “fire” would not do. Widow Henshaw had insisted that Clover say the whole thing before letting her into the kitchen for a bowl of chowder or a piece of oven-warmed molasses bread. And, remarkably, it worked here too. Clover heard the latches opening.

  The bolts took a few seconds to free, but finally the door swung open.

  The old man was a mess. He had no fewer than three pairs of spectacles on his head, one hanging low on his nose, one he stared through, and another pulling his rat’s-nest hair away from his forehead.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Aaron Agate,” Clover said.

  “You have found him.” The man bowed, and the loosest of his spectacles clattered to the floor.

  She had expected the strapping hero she had seen illustrated in the journals, a full-chested explorer in a beaver hat, overlooking a river with a bear cub heeled eagerly beside him. This man looked like a librarian who had recently lost a fight. He wore what used to be a fine suit, but the vest buttons were in the wrong holes. The only evidence of a lifetime spent squinting against the sun were the deep wrinkles radiating from the corners of his eyes.

  “Is it really you?” Clover asked.

  Mr. Agate fished around on his head for a hat. Finding none, he lifted a pair of spectacles instead and made a little bow. “Aaron Thomas Agate, at your service,” he said.

  Clover grabbed his hand and shook it as though she were trying to pump water. She trembled with relief. Before she knew what she was doing, she had wrapped him in a fierce hug, smelling wool and chicory coffee.

  When she let go, Mr. Agate studied her face closely. “I am honored to meet you,” he said. “As much for your pedigree as for your intrinsic nature.”

  “My what?” she asked.

  “But you’ve come at a bad time. A terrible time, I’m afraid. Forgive me, but I must keep at it, distinguished company or no. Don’t linger in the doorway.”