Nan was surprised to hear how clearly he remembered all this. He was usually quite forgetful. “What do you mean by your ‘Charlie way’?” she asked.
The creature shrugged and looked down at his hands. “Um . . .” Loose soot crumbled from his fingers. “I made it wake up in you.”
Nan shook her head. “Made what wake up?”
He looked up at her. “Your heart.”
“You made my heart wake up?”
Charlie nodded. He drew a line on the floor with his foot.
Nan knew Charlie sometimes had odd ways of explaining things, but this was strange, even for him.
Toby marched up to Charlie and seized his hand in both of his own. “Allow me to shake the hand of the fellow that saved my best girl’s life.” He shook Charlie’s hand vigorously. “My name’s Toby Squall.”
Charlie seemed rather to enjoy having his hand shaken. “Oh, yes,” he said. “You are a giant pest.”
Toby grinned. “So she’s told you about me?”
Nan rolled her eyes.
Toby invited himself to supper, and Nan could tell that Charlie was happy to have the company, and so she allowed it. They didn’t have much food in the larder, but Toby produced from his emporium a tin of herrings, which Nan fried up and served with day-old rolls and the rest of the milk. She had to admit it made a pretty good feast.
As they ate, Toby asked Charlie all sorts of questions—things that Nan felt foolish for not having thought of before.
“Are you soot all the way to the middle, or is there something else inside?”
“What happens if you get wet?”
“Can you breathe fire or just make yourself hot?”
“If your foot breaks off, will it wiggle around on its own?”
“Does Nan snore?”
Even when Charlie’s answers didn’t make exact sense—which was often—Toby would listen and respond as though he understood.
“Can Toby live with us?” Charlie asked, chewing on a piece of coal that Nan had brought up from the cellar.
“Absolutely not,” Nan said.
Toby was one of those irritating people who got on with everyone. Wherever he walked, people would wish him a good day. And not just other children. She had even seen a policeman tip his hat once.
After supper, they all played a giant game of hide-and-go-seek. Prospero won by hiding inside a teakettle. It was late by the time Nan led Toby up to the turret window.
“It is very dark and cold outside,” Charlie said. “You should probably just stay here and live with us.”
“I’ve already told you, no,” Nan said. “And if you ask again, I’ll banish them from ever visiting.”
Toby put on his cap. “It’s nice of you to ask, Chuckles.” He was already trying on nicknames for Charlie. “But even if Nan said yes, I could never live in a place like this.” He stared out the window and released a dramatic sigh. “My roof is the open sky.”
“Your roof is the underside of a bridge,” Nan muttered.
Toby ignored her. “The whole of London is my home, Charlio. Every street, every steeple, every river, every park, every blade of grass. Mine to savor.”
“Oh, yes,” Charlie said. “I used to see those things when I was little. Only now I am big and I stay here.”
Toby looked from Nan to Charlie and back to Nan. “He stays in here . . . all day?”
Nan shrugged. “It’s not safe for him out there.” She could still remember the horrified screams from Bonfire Night. She opened the turret window, and cold air rushed in from outside. “We’re fine. We have a good life.”
Toby stayed where he was. He lowered his voice. “Cooped up in a house day and night? Can you really call that a life?” He stepped out through the window.
Nan closed it behind him.
LEARNING TO READ
As the last days of November wore on, the demand for sweeps grew. Nan wanted to work as much as she could before the first frost. Sweeping was infinitely harder with frozen soot. She had spent the last four days sweeping every house that would have her. By the time she climbed through the turret and reached her bedroom that night, she was ready to collapse. “Today was terrible,” she groaned. “You don’t think fingertips can ache until your fingertips ache.”
Charlie was sitting on the edge of her bed, just as she had left him that morning. For all she knew, he had been waiting in that spot the whole time. “Can you read me a story?”
He was holding a book of English tales, which included “Jack the Giant Killer,” “Tom Thumb,” and “The Wee Bannock.” It was the only proper storybook in the house, and he had been asking Nan to read it over and over for weeks. “The Wee Bannock” was his favorite, but it also troubled him. It was about a sort of cookie man who came to life and ran away to escape being eaten. Charlie was convinced that the Wee Bannock was a golem like him. “Why would all those animals and people want to hurt him?” he would always ask at the end.
“I’m tired of that book,” Nan said, unwrapping her muffler. “And my hands are too sore to turn the pages.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. And then, “I will turn the pages for you. I will be very careful not to rip them.”
Nan rolled over and looked at him. She wanted more than anything in the world to go to sleep. But there was something in Charlie’s face that checked her response. She thought about Toby’s question. What sort of life was she giving Charlie, cooped up in this empty house?
She pulled herself up. “I think it’s time we taught you to read.”
Charlie’s eyes went wide. “Will it hurt very much?”
“Of course not.” Then she added, “But it might give you a headache.”
Nan and Charlie went to the study, which seemed like the right place for a lesson. “Just think, when we’re done, you can read any of these books,” she told him.
“I thought these books were dull,” Charlie said.
“They are,” Nan said. “But you can still read them.”
She found some books filled with nautical charts, which she decided would make excellent scrap paper.
“Before you can read, I need to teach you to spell,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” Charlie said. “I know about spells. Spells are magic that witches and fairies do.”
“Let’s start with the letter A,” Nan said. She took a bit of chalk and wrote A on a piece of paper. “Now you try it.”
Charlie put his finger to another sheet of paper and traced out an A of his own. His lines were clumsy, and his first two tries ended in failure.
“It’s okay,” she said, giving him another sheet. “Take your time.” This was what the Sweep had always said to her when she was learning something new. Most adults were impatient with children—snapping at them to hurry. But the Sweep had been different. He would say, “Take your time” over and over for as long as it took to get a thing done. He said it so much that you couldn’t help but take your time.
At last Charlie finished an A that looked something like Nan’s.
“The letter A makes the sound Aaahhh,” she explained.
“It does?” Charlie’s eyes went wide. “How wonderful!” He leaned very close to the paper and pressed the side of his head against it.
“What are you doing?” Nan asked.
“Shh,” he said. “I want to hear it make the sound Aaahhh.”
Nan tried to explain. “The letter doesn’t make a real sound. You just hear the sound in your head when you look at it. The words happen inside of you.”
“Now I understand,” Charlie said, nodding. “Words are feelings.”
Nan sighed. She wondered if it had been this hard for the Sweep when he taught her about letters for the first time. “Maybe we should try again in the morning.”
When Toby heard that Charlie was learning his letters, he gave him a set of wooden blocks with a different letter carved into each side. It turned out to be just the thing Charlie needed to learn his alphabet. The blocks were sturdy enough that he w
ould not break or tear them.
Instead of writing words, Charlie learned to build words.
They made a game out of it. Nan would make a little tower with some letters that spelled a certain word. Then she would make Charlie copy her tower. Only when he got all the letters right was he allowed to knock the towers down. (That was his favorite part.)
Once they had figured out the right way to teach, Charlie learned as fast as he learned everything. By the first frost, he could spell all the little words and a few useful bigger ones, including:
SPARROW
CHARLIE
CHIMNEY
SOOT
TOBY
PEST
KETTLE
POCKET
EAR WAX
He stacked up all the words he knew in a row.
“Look at you, Smokey!” Toby was still on the nicknames. “It’s pretty as a poem. Before too long, you’ll be the one telling us the stories.”
“Toby is a very good teacher at reading,” Charlie said.
Nan rolled her eyes. “How can he be a good teacher when he can’t even read himself?”
Toby smiled, stacking up his own gibberish word. “Somebody sounds jealous.”
Nan kicked over his tower and marched upstairs.
MISS BLOOM
Nan knew she could prove herself the better teacher, if only she had the right tools. That night she crept out of the house and traveled to Miss Mayhew’s Seminary on Harley Street. Surely a school would have some sort of reading primer that could do the teaching for her.
Nan pulled herself onto the flat roof of the seminary and felt a flicker of terror as she approached the main chimney stack. This was the very same place she had nearly burned alive months before—if it weren’t for Charlie, she would have died here.
The school library was on the top floor, and Nan had to travel only a few feet before touching down in the hearth. The ashes in the firebox were soft and warm beneath her bare feet—an hour dead, at most. It wouldn’t do to leave tracks, so she dusted her soles off before stepping onto the floorboards.
The library was not a large room—much less grand than the captain’s study. It had one low bookshelf running along the inside wall. Nan crept along the shelves, trying her best to read the titles of books in the moonlight, which barely reached her through the windows.
The collection was not terribly inspiring. Most of the shelves contained sets of identical titles—so that every girl in class could have a copy of her own, she assumed. It seemed like a terrible waste. Why not let every person have a different book?
She found a book called Bright Verses for Bright Minds, which had a poem dedicated to each letter of the alphabet. She took the most worn copy from the shelf and turned back toward the chimney.
And that was when she noticed that there was someone else in the room.
Angled toward the fireplace was a large reading chair with a high back and stuffed arms. Nan had stepped past the chair without paying any attention to it, but now she saw that there was a woman there. She had an open book on her lap and the look of someone who had just woken up. She was staring straight at Nan.
“Am I dreaming?” the woman said.
Nan could see that it was the teacher, Miss Bloom. She must have fallen asleep while reading by the fire. “Yes, you’re dreaming,” she said. She slipped the primer behind her back.
The woman closed her book. “It’s you,” she said, rising from her chair. “The climbing girl.” She walked around Nan in a slow circle, her eyes wide—as though at any moment Nan might vanish. “They told me you’d been caught in the crook of the flue. That you’d been . . .” She put her hands over her mouth as though unable to speak. “I heard you . . . I heard you screaming.”
Nan recalled that Miss Bloom had been there when Roger struck the match. She and Newt had both tried to stop him. “Please don’t tell them you saw me,” Nan said. “It’s better if they think I’m dead.”
“Of course,” the woman said. She shook her head, as if shaking off an unpleasant feeling. “When I asked them your name, they said it was Nan Sparrow.”
Nan shrugged. “Still is.” She liked that this woman had wanted to know who she was. Most grown-ups preferred to pretend that climbers didn’t exist—doubly so when they died.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She said this as if Nan were a person worth meeting. “I’m Miss Bloom.” And then she added, almost hesitantly, “Esther.”
“That’s a pretty name” was all Nan could think to say. “Esther.”
A sort of shadow flickered across the woman’s face. “Not everyone thinks so.” She looked down at the book she had been reading, still clasped in her hand.
“Is that a teacher book?” Nan asked. She tilted her head and tried to read the title but found she could not. “What are all those funny letters?”
The woman paused a moment before answering. “It’s a siddur—a Jewish prayer book. My mother gave it to me when I was young. The ‘funny letters’ are Hebrew.”
Nan’s eyes widened. “You’re Jewish?”
“I am . . . or I was, once.” The woman raised a brow. “I see from your expression that our reputation precedes us.” She said it like a joke, but Nan didn’t think she was really joking. “Tell me what you have heard.”
Nan shrugged. “Nothing.” She shook her head. “Lots of things.” The way some folks talked about Jews, it seemed as if all the pains of the world were because of what they had done. She knew that wasn’t true, though; she’d suffered plenty at the hands of God-fearing Christians. “But I know it’s all lies. I know another Jew named Toby, and he’s harmless as a hamster.” She wanted to add that she hated Toby’s guts and wished she could throw him in the Thames, but she didn’t think the woman would take it the right way. “Do the other teachers in the school know?”
Miss Bloom stiffened. “It’s not as though I keep it a secret.”
“Sure you do,” Nan said. “That’s why you’re reading your Hebrew book while everyone else is asleep.” She could tell from the woman’s expression that she was right. She added, “I know a thing or two about keeping secrets.” She thought of Charlie waiting for her back at the house. “What does the book say?”
Miss Bloom ran her thumb along the pages. “I couldn’t tell you the exact words, though I do remember certain passages.” She looked up. “In my family, girls were not taught to read Hebrew. They were scarcely taught to read at all. Girls were expected to keep the home until they could marry and keep another’s home.”
Nan shifted her weight. “Is that why you became a teacher? To help other girls like you?”
The woman made an incredulous face. “The girls at this school enjoy privilege and opportunity that we mortals can scarcely imagine.” The way she said this, it was as though she saw herself as being apart from the school—an outsider looking in. “But they, too, are trapped by the expectations placed upon them.” She smiled. “I daresay some of them might even envy the freedom of a chimney sweeper’s life.”
“Our freedom?” Nan felt a flush of anger. Did this woman really think her life was one to be envied? “They don’t know a thing about us.”
The woman seemed to understand. “No, they do not.” She shook her head. “And neither do I. Forgive me.”
Nan wasn’t sure she’d ever had a grown-up ask her forgiveness before. She wasn’t sure how to reply. She said, “Why are you looking at a book you can’t read?”
“A fair question.” Miss Bloom looked down and smiled. “Tonight is the first night of Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. I suppose I am feeling . . .” She searched for a word. “Sentimental.” She tucked the book into the folds of her skirt.
Nan could tell that the woman had finished with the topic. But she still had one question. “Miss Bloom?” she said. “Do you know anything about golems?”
“Golems?” She gave a sort of chuckle. “I haven’t thought about golems since I was a little girl.”
“So th
ey’re real?” Nan said.
“They are not.” She folded her hands together. “You will someday learn that many of the things you believe to be real as a little girl prove not to be.” She gave Nan a searching look. “But tell me. Why does a climbing girl want to know about golems?”
Nan shifted, uncomfortable. She knew better than to tell this woman about Charlie. Toby already knew about him, and that was bad enough. “I just heard the word and was curious is all.”
The woman did not quite look as if she believed this. “Did your friend Toby tell you about them?”
“He’s not my friend,” Nan snapped. “He told me they were some kind of pastry. But he’s ignorant. He can’t even read. Not like you and me.” She liked the idea that she and this woman were the same in some way.
Miss Bloom nodded and sat back. “Golems are monsters formed from clay.”
“Monsters?” Nan said. “Are you certain?”
The woman misread Nan’s tone for fear. “Not all monsters are frightening.” She gave a reassuring smile. “Most golems are protectors.”
Nan screwed up her mouth. Thinking of Charlie as a protector didn’t quite sound right. If anything, she spent her time protecting him. “Do you have any books on golems in this library?”
“There are no books about golems that I’m aware of,” Miss Bloom said. “But I do know a story of one. It’s a story my mother used to tell me when I was a little girl.”
“Could you maybe tell it to me?” Nan said.
“I might be persuaded.” The woman rose from her chair. “But first, perhaps you’d like to tell me about that book you’ve got behind your back?”
Nan felt her cheeks go hot. “I’m not a thief,” she said. “I was only going to borrow it.” She drew out the book of poems and gave it to Miss Bloom, who examined the title. “I was hoping to use it to teach someone to read.”
Miss Bloom looked up with a teasing smile. “This someone wouldn’t by any chance be named Toby, would he?”
Nan felt the burning spread to her ears. “If you’re going to make fun of me, I’d just as soon be off.”
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