“Just Charlie is plenty good enough for me.”
A TRIP TO THE EMPORIUM
Charlie may not have wanted to know about golems, but Nan did. And that’s how she found herself trudging along the cold banks of the Thames on a chilly Tuesday afternoon.
The south side of the river was lined with factories and stockyards and more ships than she could count. Nan peered out across the docks. Even in the autumn cool, the river here smelled terrible. Folks called the Thames “the Queen’s Chamber Pot.” Most days she would gladly walk ten blocks out of her way to avoid the smell. But not today. Today she had business.
The river was at low tide, and all along the banks, children and old folks waded in the shallows, scavenging for trash. Nan traversed the rocks around the enormous stone pillars at the foot of Blackfriars Bridge. She could hear horses grumbling and clip-clopping overhead, oblivious to the world beneath them.
Eeep!
A little white rat sniffed at her foot.
“Hello, Prospero,” Nan said. “Is Toby around?”
The rat scurried past her and climbed up the shoulder of Toby Squall. The boy had just emerged from the water and was holding what looked to be part of a croquet mallet. His trousers were rolled up and his bare legs were muddy to the knees. He was wearing the most irritating grin in the world. “Hullo, Smudge.” He dropped the mallet into his open bag. “I was wondering when you’d come around.”
She wrinkled her nose. Toby smelled almost as bad as the river. “I find that hard to believe. I’m supposed to be dead.”
Toby’s smile got wider. “The boys all said you were burned up in that fire. City inspectors fined Crudd and everything. But I knew it wasn’t true.” He fed the rat on his shoulder something from his pocket. “Me and Prospero had a look at that school where they said you’d burned. Found a footprint, cake crumbs, and a broken window in a roost above the attic.”
This surprised Nan. Toby was afraid of heights. He must have really wanted to know.
“Prospero thought you’d run off to Canada, but I told him you couldn’t keep away from your dear old Toby.” He tipped his cap. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I come on business.” Nan knew if she asked him about golems outright, he might figure things out. If Bonfire Night had taught her anything, it was that other folks were afraid of Charlie—and would be even more so now, given that he looked like an actual monster. Not a monster, she reminded herself. A golem. Whatever that was.
“On business, you say?” Toby clutched his heart. “The great Nan Sparrow wants to buy something from the emporium? After all these years of passing me by? Surely I’m dreaming! Someone pinch me.”
Prospero nipped his toe.
Nan was beginning to regret she’d come. “If you’re going to make fun of me, I’ll just go somewhere else.” She turned toward the bank. “Maybe Porky Dibbs over in Eastcheap. He’s always offering me free gifts.”
Porky Dibbs was a rag-and-bone man who had never offered Nan so much as a grommet. But Toby didn’t know that.
“Now, hold up,” Toby said, running in front of her. “I certainly can’t leave my best girl to try her chances with the likes of Porky Dibbs.” He gave her a smile. A real one. “I want to help, however I can.”
Nan bit the inside of her cheek. “I don’t need anything from the emporium,” she said. “Or not exactly, anyway.” She removed a yellowed piece of paper from her coat pocket. “I need you to make me one of these.”
Toby took the paper, which Nan had torn from an old edition of The Times. He unfolded it and squinted at the tiny columns of tiny letters. His smile faded. “Smudge . . . You know I can’t, um . . .” He shrugged. “Can you read it to me?”
Nan rolled her eyes and snatched the paper from him. “Here. At the bottom. There’s an announcement.” She read the beginning of the article.
The Times reports that Joseph Glass has been selected by the London Friendly Society for the Superseding of the Necessity of Climbing Boys as the winner of its £100 prize for the design of a mechanical brushing mechanism that allows sweeps to clean chimneys without the use of climbing boys . . .
“You get the idea.” Nan handed back the paper. “There’s a drawing of the design beside it.”
“Glass,” Toby said. “Now, there’s a name. . . .” He scratched his orange curls. “So they finally figured a way to clean chimneys without climbers. Master sweeps’ll hate this.”
“I don’t think they’re too worried. This clipping’s more than fifty years old. Whoever this Glass fellow is, he’s dead by now and his invention’s forgotten. I found it while clearing out the captain’s—” She caught herself. “It’s none of your business where I found it.”
“The captain?” Toby gave her one of his looks, as if she were a puzzle and he was one step away from putting her together. “What is my business, then?”
Nan shoved her hands in her pockets. “I want you to make one. For me.” She could feel her cheeks flushing.
Toby’s eyes went narrower, as though she’d just given him the last puzzle piece. “You’re still sweeping? Even after what happened?”
“I got soot in my veins.” Nan poked her toe in the mud. “Can you imagine if the Sweep comes back to find I’ve given up the trade? It’s bad enough I lost his hat.”
“The Sweep?” Toby gave Nan a look that she couldn’t quite understand, but then he shrugged. “Soot or not, your climbing days are numbered. That’s why you need this brush, isn’t it? To go up the flue once you can’t.”
Nan shifted, looking away from him. Toby was right, and he knew it. She had split the seam in her trousers, and the sleeves of her coat were halfway to her elbows. Twice the previous week she had secured a job only to turn it down when she got to the house and saw the square nines. “So, you think you can make one?”
“Remember who you’re talking to. Making things is in my blood.” Toby liked to say he came from a long line of German tinkers. Nan liked to say he came from a long line of pests. He had been born in a town called Dresden. His folks had sent him to England when he was little because his home had been a bad place for people like him. His real name was Schaal. But when he came here, he changed it to Squall so that folks wouldn’t give him trouble.
It didn’t always work.
Nan had met Toby when she was still with the Sweep. They had come upon a pack of boys who were beating a smaller boy, calling him “Jew.” The way they said it made it sound like a curse. Nan hadn’t known what a Jew was at the time. She still wasn’t entirely sure. The Sweep had rushed into the fray and chased off the bullies and given Toby what money he had. A few days later the Sweep was gone. Toby had followed Nan around like a stray puppy ever since.
Toby was still discussing the clipping with Prospero. “A pretty shoddy design.” He rubbed his chin. “We’ll need to make it sturdier. No use if it comes apart on the first job . . .”
“Do you know what a golem is?” Nan tried to keep her question offhand.
Toby glanced up. “Sure I do.” He shrugged. “It’s a . . . kind of pastry, right?”
Nan rolled her eyes. “Right.” She was disappointed that the one Jewish person she knew in London didn’t know any more about golems than she did. “I’ve changed my mind.” She reached for the paper.
“Hang on,” Toby said. “I think I can make it.”
“Fine, keep it.” She’d already gotten her real answer. “The design’s probably rubbish anyway. Otherwise, we’d all have one already.” She turned and walked toward the bank.
“Wait!” Toby called after her. “Hang the brush—Crudd’s still looking for you. I need to know you’re safe. Will you at least tell me where you’re staying?” He clambered up the slope. “Nan?”
But she was already crossing over Blackfriars Bridge, stepping between hansoms and wagons, heading back toward the city. She thought she heard Toby call her name again. She didn’t answer.
DEATH AND TAXES
One of the best parts about sweeping for hersel
f was that Nan had enough money to buy her own food, and there was one food she preferred above all others.
“We’re out of licorice,” she called to Charlie from the turret window, which served as their front door. “I’m off to the sweets shop.”
“Wait.” Charlie’s head poked out from the landing. “Can you get me some sugarplums?”
“Those are too expensive.” She pulled her coat on and swung a leg out the window. “Besides, you don’t eat people food.”
“I do not,” Charlie agreed. He drew a swirl on the wallpaper with his finger. “It is . . . for my friend.”
Nan drew her leg back from the window. “Your friend?” She felt a clutch of panic in her stomach. Had someone else discovered Charlie? “What is your friend’s name?” She tried to keep her voice calm.
Charlie took his hand away from the wall. “Not my friend,” he said hastily. “I meant for my . . . finger.”
Nan closed the window. “You are the worst liar I’ve ever met.”
Charlie nodded, a little proud. “Yes, I am.”
She walked to him and set her hands on his shoulders. “I need you to tell me. Who is your friend?”
Charlie looked at the ceiling. He looked at the floor. He looked anywhere but at Nan. “My friend visits me in the Nothing Room. But only if I have food to share.”
Nan shook her head. “I suppose that’s where all my licorice has got to.”
“My friend likes sweet things very much.”
“I’ll bet.” Nan snatched a Grecian urn that hung from the wall and started down the hall. “Is your friend there now?” Whoever this “friend” was, she would make him sorry he’d trespassed in her home and eaten her licorice.
“Please don’t be angry,” Charlie called, clomping after her.
“I just want to meet him.” She threw open the Nothing Room door and raised the urn over her head.
Eeep!
Crouched near the wall was a small rat with white fur. It was glaring at her with horrible red eyes.
Nan returned the glare with interest. “Hello, Prospero.”
Charlie shuffled past her. He knelt down in front of the rat, who skittered into his hands. “My friend,” he said. “I think his name is Eeep!”
Nan set the urn down. “I’m fetching licorice. When I get back, that thing had better be gone.”
But she knew it was too late.
Wherever Prospero went, Toby was soon to follow.
“Hullo, Smudge!” Toby was waiting for Nan when she returned. “Need a hand?”
Nan pulled herself onto the eave. She had picked up a jug of milk from the market, which made the whole climb a bit tricky. She couldn’t use the front door on account of not wanting to be seen entering a supposedly abandoned house. Also, she didn’t have the key. “I thought you were afraid of heights,” she said.
“Deathly afraid,” he admitted. She saw he was clutching some ship’s rigging he had anchored to the finial. “But I thought you might need help getting things up and down, so I made this pulley.” He worked one end of the rigging and pulleyed up a tattered sail whose ends had been gathered, making a giant sling. “I reckon it’s just the thing for someone needing to haul goods from the street.” Toby opened the sails to reveal his emporium. Prospero was sitting on top.
Nan scowled at the rat. “I suppose I have you to thank for this.”
“Don’t be sore at Prospero. We got no secrets, me and him. Tell each other everything. That’s the way it is with best mates.” He peered at the chimneys all around him. “When he told me you were holed up in the House of One Hundred Chimneys, I knew I had to see for myself. I’d tip my cap, if I wasn’t terrified of falling.”
Nan shrugged. “I just needed a place where no sweeps would come looking.”
This made Toby laugh. “They are a superstitious lot. Did you know some of them actually believe that this place is haunted?” He said this as if it were the funniest thing he had ever heard.
Nan blinked at him. “Isn’t it?”
Toby’s eyes widened. “You really don’t know why this house is empty, do you?”
Nan felt her cheeks go hot. “Are you going to tell me?”
Toby sat down on the gable, propping his feet on the gutter. “It’s like I always say, the only sure things in life are death and taxes.”
“I’ve never once heard you say that.” She uncapped her jug of milk and took a sip.
She offered it to Toby, who took a long pull. “Taxes are the money that rich folks pay the queen so she can afford all her tea and gowns.”
“I know what taxes are,” Nan said.
“And the way Ol’ Vickie tallies her taxes is by chimneys. The more chimneys a house has, the more money she gets. You can bet that a place like this buys her a lot of gowns. When the captain kicked off, all his family set to fighting over who would get the place. But none of them wanted to claim it outright, on account of having to pay for all the chimneys. But they also didn’t want to let anyone else snatch it up. So they’ve all just been arguing over it for years and years. S’pose you’re lucky they haven’t just up and sold it.”
Nan couldn’t tell if he was teasing. “Do you think they’d do that?”
“Who’s to say?” He shrugged. “But never you fear, there’s always plenty ’o room under Blackfriars Bridge with me and Prospero!” He craned his neck toward the turret window. “Speaking of Prospero . . . he tells me you got something in this house with you. Something . . . unusual.”
Nan moved to block his view. “Even if I do, it’s none of your business.” She folded her arms.
Toby shook his head. “Be that way, if you must. But if I figured it out, you can bet Crudd will, too. He’s crafty, and dangerous.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Toby tilted his head to one side. “You’re really not going to show me, are you?” He pointed toward the winch. “After I made you a housewarming gift and everything.”
Nan bit the inside of her cheek. Irritating though he was, she knew she could trust him. “Fine,” she said. “But if I show you, you need to promise not to tell a soul.”
Toby put two hands to his heart. “I will be a dais of discretion. The very picture of prudence. A fortress of forbearance—”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” Nan interrupted. “Just swear it like a normal human person.”
“I swear it on the Thames.” Toby nodded gravely. “And if I’m lying, I will let you hold my hand at the May Day parade.”
Nan rolled her eyes. “Nice try.” May Day was sacred for sweeps—they led a parade through the whole city, with thousands of folks watching and cheering. Toby had been trying to hold Nan’s hand on May Day for as long as she’d known him. “I’ll be boiled and plucked before I let you or anyone else hold my hand.”
“All right, then.” He removed his cap. “I swear it on the emporium and everything in it.”
Nan hesitated. The bag was tattered and full of junk. But it was all he had in the world. She knew he would never risk losing it. She turned and climbed through the turret window. “Watch your head.”
LIFE
Nan led Toby down the stairs. She was oddly self-conscious about the mess. “I wasn’t planning on visitors,” she muttered, kicking a pillow out of her path. It was as though Toby being there made her see the house with fresh eyes.
Toby gawked at the parlor, which had been cleared to build an enormous fortress out of furniture and bedding. “If the boys could see you now.”
“They won’t,” Nan said. “Because you promised not to say anything.”
Toby raised his hands. “Obviously.”
Nan sighed and continued down the stairs. Soon they were outside the Banging-Pots-and-Pans Room on the ground floor. She stopped at the door and looked Toby dead in the eye. “Remember what you promised.”
He seemed amused by her gravity. “Have you got a body in there?”
“You might say that.” She opened the door. “This is Charlie.”
<
br /> Charlie was on the far side of the room, drawing. He had lately taken to drawing on the white plaster walls, which were easier for him because they did not rip. He had filled one entire wall with pictures of lumpy circles with eyes.
“Oh, hello,” Charlie said, turning to greet them. “I am drawing a little me.”
Toby was standing beside Nan. His mouth was slightly open. He had removed his cap, as if out of reverence. Prospero hopped down from Toby’s shoulder and greeted Charlie with an eager Eeep!
Toby blinked, as if trying to wake from a dream. “You . . . ?” He turned toward Nan. “He . . . ?”
“Charlie is a golem,” Nan said. “As you can see, a golem is not a kind of pastry.” She was rather enjoying seeing Toby at a loss for words.
“A soot golem,” Charlie added, pointing to the picture. “I used to be small like this. But that was a very long time ago.”
“That was last week,” Nan said.
Toby scratched the back of his neck and took a step closer. “What . . . Where did you come from?”
“I came from the Sweep’s hat,” Charlie said.
Nan explained. “You remember that clod of char the Sweep left me? The one that was always warm?”
Toby had learned about the Sweep’s gift a few years back when Prospero had nosed around in her coat and tried to run off with it. “Sure I do,” he said. “I tried to buy it off you, but you told me to go eat a boiled eel.” It was eerie how well Toby recalled the things Nan told him.
“Well, that char was . . . Charlie.” Nan turned over a giant pot in the middle of the room and sat on it. “It happened when I was trapped in the Devil’s Nudge. The fire hatched him somehow. And now he’s like this.”
The crack along Charlie’s face formed into a proud smile. “Nan said ‘Help’ and so I helped.”
Toby snapped his fingers. “I knew it!” he said. “It’s him that broke you out of that flue. He probably smashed right through it with those big arms.”
“I did not have big arms then,” Charlie said. “I used my head to push the bricks away. And then I helped in my Charlie way.”
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