“Hired help,” Kitt mumbled, repeating Gren's words from before.
“I do apologize!” Alexia said, coming down the stairs, sans Iago. “He becomes a little boisterous from time to time.”
“Wrath of the lantern boy,” Eddie joked.
“Lantern boy,” Dolly said. “You keep calling him that. Is there a reason?”
“Oh, you shall see!” Alexia said, clapping her palms together in a most otherworldly fashion. “All in good time! Now, there's the matter of dinner. Eddie?”
“I know, I know,” the brawler said. “Into the kitchen.”
They moved through the room and paused briefly in one corner.
“I'll need a bit more...oh! Mister Pocket!” Alexia said. “Have you been here all this time?”
I snapped out of my gaze and realized that I was a part of this scene.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I have.”
“Well, excuse me. I need to get in here.”
“Oh...” I hadn't realized that I had been leaning against a large white door. I stepped out of the way. “Sure.”
Alexia started fishing in the pockets of her apron for a key. I glanced up and noticed a sign on the door.
SHELVED REFLECTIONS AND TEA STORAGE
“Shelved reflections?” I asked.
“It's a bit of a collection,” Alexia said, pulling out an old key. It didn't want to slide into its corresponding hole as its teeth had been somewhat misshapen by a layer of rust. Alexia mashed it into place with a grunt and forced it to turn the tumblers.
“Old key,” Eddie said.
“I see,” I replied. “But, um, reflections?”
“It's just an old storage closet,” he said, careful so that Alexia wouldn't hear. “Old odds and ends and teabags. She likes to play make believe.”
“Come on!” Alexia said, rattling at the keyhole. And then there was a snap. Frowning much like little Iago when I failed to retrieve the moon, she pulled out the broken half of the key. The rusty teeth remained in the lock.
“Drat,” she said, putting the broken half back into her apron. “Well, so much for that. I'll have to make do with what's lying around in the kitchen. Come, Eddie!”
And they were off.
“Are you tired?” the Doll asked me. “You look tired.”
“Do I?” I said, dragging myself over to the others. “I guess it's been a long week.”
“A bit of an understatement, don't you think?” said Gren.
I dropped my body facedown onto a sofa. “You realize we can't stay here,” I said into the cushioning.
“Why not?” Kitt said.
“She's already set up such a nice room for me,” the Doll said. “I can't insult her by turning it down.”
“You're worried about the militia?” Gren guessed. “They aren't going to find us here.”
“Maybe not today,” I said. “But I'm guessing it won't take them long to get back on our trail. And what do you think they'd do to this place once they got here?”
“Torch it,” Gren said.
“But we don't have anywhere else to hide,” Kitt said.
“Look, if someone comes around knocking, we'll go hide in the attic,” Gren said.
“Mm-mmsky...” I said into a pillow.
“What?”
I lifted my head. My hat fell to the floor and I ran my fingers through my hair. “I said it's too risky. Especially with that kid around.”
“He seems nice,” Dolly said.
“Yeah, we met outside. He tried to slice me with a sword.”
“Kids,” Gren snorted.
“Well…” Dolly began, “I mentioned our situation to the tea lady.”
“And?” I said.
“She just nodded and hummed to herself.”
“Lovely.”
“She seemed to understand. I think she was thinking it over.”
“She can think all she wants. We can't stay here.”
“But there's nowhere else!” Kitt pointed out once again.
“Hmmm...” Gren said, scratching his arm.
“You have an idea?” Kitt asked.
“Maybe. Sort of. I don't know.”
“Sounds great,” I mumbled. The Doll bopped me with a pillow for my pessimism.
“What are you thinking, Gren?” Kitt asked.
“Well...” he said, “it's not much, but I have a friend.”
“A friend?”
“Yeah. He works on a steamship. Might be able to get us onboard.”
“I don't want to stow away,” I said. “We're in it bad enough as it is.”
“No, no. No stowing away. It's a small crew. They tend to take sympathy on people like us.”
“And by ‘like us,’” I grumbled. “You mean…”
“Troubled travelers, outcasts. They'd probably...well, I mean, hopefully, they’d allow us on. Anyway, it's a chance. Only problem is that it'll be a week before they'll be docking anywhere close to us.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve ridden with them. And I’ve done it enough times to know their [adjective] itinerary… routine…. they nearly always make the same damn [] at the same damn []. Predictable as hell, like clockwo—“ He paused and glanced at the Doll. “Uh, sorry,” Gren fumbled.
“Hmmm...” Kitt said. “What do you think, Dolly?”
“I don't know,” she said. “A ship would be helpful. But this is nice too.”
“A week here,” I said. “Still risky, but if that's all we've got—”
Our conversation was quickly interrupted by Alexia stomping out from the kitchen, her arms presenting a lopsided dinner dish that she referred to only as “tomato surprise.”
“Your meal,” she spoke with grand enthusiasm, “is served!”
Next thing we knew we were in the kitchen, sitting around a wobbly table. Alexia kicked a leather-bound copy of A Modern Application of Tasseography under the short leg and sat down at the table's head. The table was covered with a worn cloth stamped with various zodiac symbols and shapes. Upon that sat pewter plates, each with a heaping lump of tomato surprise. We all reached for our forks until Alexia cleared her throat at us. We froze in position and looked at her. She raised a brow.
“Oh,” I said, bowing my head and putting my hands together to pray. “Uh, right.”
“Thank you,” Alexia said. She then pulled out a large cheese grater and slapped it on the table. She then pulled out a fresh pomegranate and ran it ferociously against the metal until its red-pink skin was reduced to a pile of curled shavings on her plate.
“What are you...” I began.
She struck a match and ignited the pile of shavings. Burning pomegranate filled the air. Most of us covered our noses at the smoke, but Alexia eagerly welcomed it into her nostrils.
“It is important to set an establishing scent before dinners, meetings, and events,” she said. “It sets tone and soothes the humors. Well, what are you all staring at? Eat before it's cold!”
“She's scary,” Kitt whispered to me. I chuckled quietly to myself.
“Something humorous, Mister Pocket?” the tea lady asked.
“Nothing at all,” I said, lifting my glass. “Here's to the courtesy of the Gaslight Tea House!”
“To new friends!” Alexia said, lifting hers. The others followed suit.
“Incidentally,” I said. “What is it we're toasting with here?”
“Hard cider,” she said. “I brew it myself.”
I smiled wide. “Oh, yes. I do like you people.”
We supped. We talked and we went to bed and we woke and we talked and we supped again. Days rolled by with the fog, one slopping and smearing into the next. Looking back, I can only mark the passings with the grand and oft-unusual dishes that were prepared for us each night. Tomato surprise. Eggplant medley. Beggar's pheasant, whatever that was. Boiled eggs. Tea samplings. And with each meal, each passing night, I found myself growing curiously familiar with these people. We were such odd victims of circumstance, cr
ammed together and so quickly cordial. I didn't know if the lot of them considered me a friend, a traveling companion, or just a fixed nuisance, but for that time at the tea house, they soon seemed to me the beginning and end of humanity.
But perhaps I'm getting too soft and sentimental. Let us move to a scene of violence for those disinterested with my whims and waxing.
Gren Spader's cheeks quickly tinted deep pink, a match for the color dominating the rest of his face. His head also seemed to slightly swell, which I suppose is a natural reaction to being locked and squeezed under Eddie's clenched arm.
There. Is that slightly more animated?
“Much more violent, Pocket. Good work.”
“Thank you, Alan.”
Eddie and Gren had been tumbling around the clearing behind the tea house's back porch on that particular night. We had been lodging for a stretch of days and Eddie was starting to get restless. As a street brawler, he felt that he constantly needed to keep his arsenal of combat moves sharp and rehearsed, so he grabbed Gren for a little grappling outside.
“Gah!” Gren uttered, fighting to free his neck from the hold.
This had been six minutes into it.
Eddie laughed and pushed the gambler loose. Gren got his bearings, hopped around in the dirt, and rushed Eddie while his back was turned. Gren succeeded in knocking his opponent off-balance for a brief moment, but quickly found his arm bent and pinned behind him.
“Damn you!” Gren said, trying to slip out of the hold.
“Relax,” Eddie said cheerfully. “You're doing pretty good! Most people run away by this point.”
“Well, I ain’t most people!”
“I was hoping you'd say that!”
Next thing he knew, Gren was lifted into the air. I laughed.
“Hey Pocket,” he said, rubbing dirt out of his hair. “You want to step in for me?”
I had been on the porch, leaning against a post and stirring a hot cup of tea that Alexia had prepared for me. I took a sip. Peppermint.
“No thanks, Gren,” I said. “Wouldn't want to spill my tea. And besides, you seem to have things tied up here.”
“That's really funny, you—gah!” And he was in the air again.
I sipped my drink and laughed and watched this great piece of entertainment for a bit longer before I heard a faint tapping on one of the glass windows behind me. I turned my gaze and found Alexia standing expressionless, holding her hands down. I lifted my teacup to her and she waved me over. I glanced back at Eddie and Gren, who were twisting legs on the ground, and headed for the door.
“Hello,” I said to the lady as I came inside. “Can I help you?”
Alexia nodded. “I need your help,” she said.
“What with?”
“Laundry.”
“Oh,” I said. “I thought Dolly has been helping with—“
“She's with Mister Kitt.”
That's right. When I had last refilled my teacup, Kitt had discovered an old chessboard and, clueless to the workings of the game, was setting up random pawns and rooks with the attempt to create “a more interesting style” while the Doll collected “the horseys.”
“Right,” I said. Children playing inside, children playing out.
“Oh, and you're a wise old man?”
“Alan...”
“Hmm?”
“...sigh...nothing...”
“Okay then,” I said to Alexia. “Chores it is.”
She nodded and chucked at me an empty wine crate meant to hold the linens.
“Come then, bard,” she said. “I'm interested to see how a man of papers handles cloth.”
I smiled. No problem.
Minutes later, I was rolling up a long white sheet with a fresh mud spot.
“Once again, I’m very sorry,” I said, squeezing brown drops from the linen over the dew-coated ground outside. “Wind was a little heavier than I thought when I took it from the line.”
“Mmm...” Alexia said, staring off into the distance.
“This will come out. Just give it another rinse. It was just the wind and the fog and...well, it'll come out.”
“Mmm.”
“Hey,” I said, tossing the mess aside. “You all right?”
“Pocket,” the tea lady said, very quietly, “I want to talk to you about Dolly.”
“Dolly?”
“I've enjoyed having her company.”
“Yeah, I've noticed. And I think she's appreciated having another woman around.”
“I thought as much. I'm quite fond of her.”
“That's good.”
“But then, so are you.”
“Oh...well, hey. I mean, yeah. She's, um, she's something.”
“Yes, she is. Pocket?”
“Yeah?”
“What exactly is the Watchmaker's Doll?”
I shrugged. “Just that. An inventor's girl.”
“No...there's more there.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Come now, Pocket,” she said, plucking items from the clothesline. “I've caught you looking into her eyes.”
“Well...I was...I don't know...”
“When they light up the way they do, you can tell,” she said, pointing an accusing finger through a non-muddied sheet. “Can't you?”
I turned my eyes away. “Yeah,” I said. “What are you getting at?”
“I'll come right out with it. I want to do a reading.”
“A reading?”
“For her. And you. The whole group. I want to see what I can read in the steam.”
“The steam? I don't understand.”
“Just trust me,” said the lady of visions.
“I don't know...” I looked up at the sky and thought things over.
“Pocket?”
“Still here.”
“Do you always look at the moon like that?”
“I guess. No particular reason. It just happens to be there and I'm here and it's easy to end up looking at each other.”
“That makes sense,” she said, folding the last of the laundry. Alexia was the kind of woman who always seemed to have it all figured out, or if she didn't, she was at least very aware and in control of what she did not understand.
Why the hell not, then?
“All right,” I said to her. “I'll agree to a reading. But you have to answer two questions.”
“Fair trade,” she said. “Go ahead.”
“Why are you asking me for permission?”
“I wasn't sure how the Doll would respond if I approached her directly. I didn't want to upset her.”
“I see.”
“And your second question?”
“Why do you hang teabags from the ceiling?”
She smiled in the light of the night.
“Because tomorrow the world could flood.”
The next thing I knew I was drunk, my tea swapped for cider. I was propping myself on the armrest of an old sofa on which I would be sleeping a few hours later. Kitt, Gren, and I had been taking nightly turns resting there rather than upon the floor or whatever armchair we could get comfortable enough in to lose consciousness. Tonight was my night on the sofa and I was quite excited for it, having spent the previous midnight bent knees to nose on a legless chair with my feet pressed against an overturned ottoman that I eventually sent sailing out of the backdoor. In the morning, when I was considerably less grumpy, I apologized for the act to Alexia and Eddie and the assaulted footrest in question.
Anyhow, at the moment I was drunk and, thinking upon such nocturnal incidents, was paying little attention to Alexia as she sang about her favorite teas. The only part of her quite lengthy song I can recall went like this:
“Low tea for the higher ones, high tea for the low! I've never met the Earl of Grey, but I'd buy him an English Rose! In London Town a garden sits, they'll bring you hot Darjeeling! But I need not a garden grown, for my stock comes from my ceiling!”
She gave her song a rousing “tee-hee-hee”
and applauded her performance, nearly falling off of the overturned wine crate that she had planted, bereft of laundry, in the center of the main room. Alexia was far drunker than I or, I suspect, anyone else in the room. When we had returned from collecting the laundry, Alexia had called everyone together to make an announcement, as she put it, “of immeasurable importance.” Before she made such an announcement though, she insisted on drinks, and though we now sat well-filled with cider, she had yet to inform us of anything.
“All in due time,” she drunkenly said to Gren, who had bluntly suggested that she get on with whatever the hell she had to get on about.
“She's going to fall down,” the Doll whispered, sitting with her hands on her skirts beside me.
“Is this going to take much longer?” I heard Kitt ask Gren, tapping a nearly-untouched mug of cider.
“Better drink up,” Gren suggested back to him. “It'll make things more bearable.”
“More bearable!” Alexia repeated in her stupor. Then, with a laugh, she made claws out of her hands and began imitating a grizzly. “Rawr!”
“Very nice,” Gren said as Kitt quickly began to sip his drink. Eddie seemed to notice our collective confusion and tugged on Alexia's dress.
“I think you're losin' 'em,” he said, sloshed.
Alexia put on a pretend face of sternness and shook a finger at all of us like a scolding schoolteacher. “I will remind you that this is Britain and the business of tea is a serious one!”
“But we’re not having tea,” Kitt mumbled.
“Doesn’t matter,” I responded.
“Doesn’t matter?!?” Alexia growled, picking up on my words but not their context. “Did you know that our late Victoria, may her spirit rest, was known to cast her teacup across rooms and into walls if the flavor did not suit her tastes?”
“That true?” Gren said, chuckling. “Well, good for her. You don’t meet many women these days with that kind of fire in them. It’s attractive.”
“Attractive?” I responded.
“Yes, attractive. Don't raise your brow at me, Pocket.”
“I just didn’t realize you were such the romantic, Gren,” I said wryly. “It's a shame you and the Queen never got together. Could’ve been your kid could be sitting on the throne now.”
Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) Page 23