by Prue Batten
Severine had been out and about early, rain not withstanding. Dressed in a slick ebony oilskin fashionably cut with vent and tab and with her hair piled underneath an oilskin bonnet, she entered a sedan-chair and accompanied by Luther, was swiftly carried to the address of the glassmaker on the Calle del Vetro.
Earlier in the day, she had sent to the six master architects of Veniche. Would they kindly attend her this afternoon? Knowing they would never refuse her, she almost salivated - the secret key to the locked gate so close.
Luther held open the door of the glassmaker’s, shielding her from the rain with a black umbrella the style of which drew glances from curious eyes. Never had they seen such an item. Severine had the forethought to bring it home from a trip to the Raj, ordering several made to match her wardrobe and each time she used one it raised odd interest.
‘Luther, stay outside. Keep guard and prevent anyone from entering. The business I have is exceeding private and I do not wish to be interrupted.’ She pushed past him and the door rattled shut, the bell chiming like a crystal clapper inside cut glass. Severine proceeded across the floor to a cabinet filled with millefiori paperweights and in her diamond-cut manner, called for service.
A door opened and a blast of hot air assailed the showroom. Over the shoulders of the glassmaker, Severine could see the artisans with their long pipes looking as if they played in some woodwind orchestra. The door slammed shut and the man wiped his sweating brow with a red paisley square.
‘Contessa! If I had known I was to be so honoured, I would have dressed accordingly. Please accept my apologies. As you can see I work in the fabbrica today.’
‘Signor Niccolo, good-day and please, it does not signify.’ Severine’s aristocratic manner brought her to an elegant chair and she eased the long coat tails aside and made herself comfortable in front of the eminent display of paperweights.
The glassmaker ran his fingers quickly through his damp hair and untied the singed leather apron, tucking in his striped shirt. ‘Contessa, may I offer you some wine?’
‘Indeed. Whilst I tell you what I require, a nip would not go astray.’ She inclined her head graciously to the side and the glassmaker hastened to pour two goblets of ruby liquid. She took the glass from him and sipped what was a surprisingly good vintage. Carefully placing the wine on the counter, she looked up at the man and smiled her most engaging smile. ‘Signor Niccolo, I am in urgent need of a large order by the eve of Carnivale. Sooner would have been better, but I realise you will need a little time.’
Her long fingernails tapped the glass surface of the display cabinet, indicating the millefiori paperweights underneath and she delivered her words carefully and with deliberation, because this was of such import. To have the charms was one thing but the need to hide them was another entirely – and of paramount importance. Her idea was perfect. ‘I require four small, personally handcrafted millefiori paperweights, each one different except for the central flower.’
‘Four! Madame!’ The glassmaker quailed with obvious distress at the excessive workload. She knew that he was a perfectionist and that such things took time...
‘Please!’ She held up an admonishing hand, her manner blunt. ‘I truly don’t want to hear you say it can’t be done. I will make it worth your while. After all, you know what it is to have Di Accia patronage behind your business. That said, I’m sure you are also aware that it would be unwise if you didn’t accept my commission.’
Her point was made and she could see the glassmaker’s mind working - he would work day and night to have this finished by Carnivale. ‘Madame, I accept.’ He lifted his glass and took a huge draught of the wine.
‘Good.’ she replied, ‘As I thought you would. When you have blown and cut the rods for the central flowers, I want you to deliver them to the palazzo and when I am done with them, Luther will return them to you post-haste. No doubt you think it a bother but you will have to indulge me; these paperweights are going to mean more to the future of Eirie than you can imagine. Thus I will require your total discretion. If ever the planning and making of these should leak out, then it will be at the cost of your business. Or worse.’
Signor Niccolo remained silent. Thoroughly threatened and not at all blessed by the patronage forcibly dropped in his lap, he assumed the woman had some diplomatic gesture to make abroad. Who knew? The Di Accia web was wide. He also knew none but he could make the paperweights for his craftsmen were loose-lipped. So the fabbrica would have to close with the men on full pay! She had better make it worth his while, he thought with a slight tremour.
‘Signor’, she broke into his troubled revery. ‘I will pay you five hundred gelt for each paperweight!’
His mouth opened wide and remained open longer than was polite.
‘I see it meets with your approval’. There was a noise in the street, her man arguing with someone. She stood and adjusted the folds of her rain-beaded coat. ‘Then I shall see you tomorrow afternoon. I have no doubt you will be busy and I have no doubt you will not let me down.’ She turned and walked to the door as it was pushed open by a tall individual whose face was concealed by a dripping hat. The Contessa pulled her trailing folds away from his damp wake and scowled at him.
Phelim held the door open. ‘Your pardon, Lady.’ He said as he sketched a bow. Under his coat and beneath his shirt, a grey chamois bag burned deep welts into his skin. When he straightened, the woman was climbing into a sedan chair, the lout who had barred his way closing the chair’s door and walking behind, unaware the man who had argued at the door was the Other who had tripped him up so maliciously and purposefully at Ferry Crossing.
Adelina sat on the chaise, the robe stretched over her knee so she could appliqué the groom to the centre back. Tiny stab stitches edged the cloak and around his velvet boots. As she stitched his face with delicate straight stitches, she tried to fill it with expression and animation to bring it to life, for stumpwork is a rendition of reality, not just an artist’s vague impression, and therein lay Adelina’s skill.
She was content to sew. Gallivant had left early, having found her some breakfast and having lit lamps to light the dark corners of the rain-shadowed room. She felt restful and calm and not at all in an adventuring mood. At one point, she opened the balcony doors and stood shielding her head from the persistent downpour. Leaning out, she observed the umber and terracotta walls, the cobbles shining with moisture, washed and polished with the rain, the canal waters pockmarked with the cascading drops. The few people she spied were dressed according to the Dark code. She returned to her stitching intrigued with the traditions of this city she had never visited but was content to let it flow past her like the water outside. The day drifted on with the robe having finishing touches placed upon it and the last few of the books begun and finished, shrunk and concealed.
She hung the robe and began the perambulating inspection that was so much a part of this mammoth task she had undertaken, finding the need for a thread here, a stitch there - taking it down again to sit in a state of such equanimity that she wondered if the hob had mesmered her, the better to keep her out of the city and safe. The thought lasted a second and she shrugged her shoulders to continue her work, the pearlescent silk cascading over her lap.
The peace in which she had so thoroughly wrapped herself disintegrated like torn paper as the door burst open and a dripping hob walked in, muttering angry invective. He seemed unaware of Adelina as he thrust all his parcels on the floor and as he continued to snarl at the world at large, he dragged off the wet coat and flung it on a chair by the door, noticing Adelina at last on the chaise by the balcony doors.
‘Aine Gallivant, what goes? You have cursed all and sundry since you walked in.’
‘You may well ask!’ He threw himself down next to her, crushing part of the robe under his legs.
‘I am asking - something has obviously disturbed you. And can you mind the robe?’ The air in the room thinned with expectation and already her neck prickled. She had a fe
eling she knew what he would say...
‘It’s her!’
I knew it, thought Adelina, her heart sinking to lay itself under her feet on the parquet floor. The woman, despite Adelina’s freedom, still had the capacity to reduce her to the state of victim. She jammed the needle into her thumb in her distress. ‘Severine! Then you had better tell me...’
Chapter Thirty One
‘I was purloining some garments and such for our stay here.’ Gallivant rubbed taut fingers over his forehead. ‘I found a little glove-maker amongst the glassmakers in the Calle del Vetro and who should I spy guarding the door of one such fabbrica but Luther, with a very sumptuous sedan-chair parked outside. I stayed concealed, it’s easy when you know how, and watched and before long a man came down the calle and tried to enter. I couldn’t see his face as he, like everyone else on this loathsome day, was hatted and garbed against the rain. But I heard his voice as he asked Luther to step aside and I felt a frisson drifting all around and I knew it was the fellow off the ferry. Anyway he and Luther got into a stiff discourse and he pushed past Luther and opened the door.’
Adelina chose not to interrupt for the hob was wound up like a clock spring and it was easier to let him run on. But she worried, noting how tightly he clasped his hands together.
‘For a moment the fellow stood still,’ he said. ‘But then he bowed and Severine, the bloody woman, swept out like some Sultana from the Raj and climbed into her chair. Now call me odd, call me anything you like, but sink me I’m beginning to see a connection with all these people appearing in the same place at the same time. And if that wasn’t enough, I raced across in my invisible way to listen as Severine stepped into the chair. She said, ‘Done, Luther. Now to my meetings at the Palazzo. By tonight I have no doubt I will have the location I require and then it will only be a matter of time.’
He jumped up and proceeded to track back and forth in front of Adelina, the parquet squeaking in syncopation with his footsteps. ‘And you don’t have to be too clever to work it out, Threadlady. She’s after the location of the Gate - what else can it be? And by tonight, in her own miserable way she’ll have it.’
He lapsed into silence and Adelina allowed the pattering of the rain to fill the space left by his voice as she digested this latest revelation. She began to fold the robe, resolving to have the hob clean it with a mesmer as soon as possible. Each turn of a sleeve or placement of a fold became deliberate as she thought carefully. At last she spoke. ‘Gallivant, I’ve no doubt you’re right. Of course she seeks the Gate, just as one would expect. And as there’s nothing we can do about it until we find the location ourselves, I propose we forget about it - no, don’t look like that - just forget about it for a minute. You revealed something of far greater important a moment ago and I think it is more like to help us than anything.’
‘I did? Tell me!’ He threw himself down again. The little chaise shuddered and rocked.
‘You mentioned the other man, the stranger from the ferry. You also mentioned there was a frisson. Gallivant, I’m no ingénue; I know a frisson can only emanate from Others, especially the Faeran. I have felt it myself in the past. Indeed I swear I felt something similar from that man when he was at the Water Festival, as well as aboard the ferry. I chided myself that it was my overwrought imagination but it wasn’t, was it?’
‘No.’ Gallivant bit his lip.
‘Then let’s assume that he’s here because of Severine. After all, he did mention her name. Perhaps Jasper sent him to meet Lhiannon and convey her safely to the Gate. Is it not also entirely logical that he should know where the Gate is? After all he’s Faeran and they’re privy, all of them, to the secret. All we have to do is seek him out, talk to him, explain our predicament and I think he’ll help us. He seemed approachable, didn’t he?’
Gallivant’s heart sank and he cursed himself for his overenthusiastic tongue and his unguarded comments. Adelina was beginning the wild goose chase - this was the start.
‘Yes,’ he admitted half-heartedly. If only you knew how he’s already helped us, he thought, and yes, he is the logical solution to our quandary. Hadn’t he thought so himself on the ferry? But he had hoped against all hope that she would give up on this ridiculous idea to seek out Lhiannon, so much so he had indeed placed a hob’s mesmer on her this morning just to keep her safe. His anxieties rattled his composure. Sink me, I have no chance of getting her away before Carnivale.
‘Gallivant, did you mesmer me before you went out?’ She asked the question placidly, so different to the Adelina who would have bitten heads off and spat out the pieces. Events had indeed wrought some changes...
‘Yes I did,’ he answered. ‘So? It was only a little one and I did it for you and the babe because imagine if you’d seen Severine, you’d have been in a right state.’ Righteousness had never been something he thought he would feel, but in this instance…
She smiled at him, patting his arm and standing. ‘I think you were right, the baby and I do need to rest.’ She put a hand on her belly. ‘This child of Kholi’s is the most important thing in the world now and I’ll try not to jeopardise its safety more than I really have to.’ As she walked to the mirror, she began twisting her hair into a tight plait.
‘What are you doing?’
‘We need to find the Faeran and I also need threads to finish the robe - a hank of cream silk and a hank of burgundy silk, I’m sure one of the haberdashers will have what I need.’
‘Adelina, you can’t possibly go out into the rain. We’ll do it tomorrow. And besides you can’t wear those pale clothes. I purloined black clothes for each of us,’ he reached for the parcels on the floor. ‘There is a pair of breeches and another knitted tunic. I thought something a little bigger may be comfortable over your expanding bump. And there’s a weathercoat and gloves.’
‘You have thought of everything...’
‘No, not quite.’ He looked exceedingly glum, a fitting reflection of the gloomy conditions outside. ‘I remembered how abundantly colourful your hair is and no matter how subdued you think your clothes are, when anyone sees your hair, it’ll be like a flaming beacon to everyone, marking your presence in the town for Severine and Luther. I have no hat or scarf and the headgear I did buy won’t fit over the top.’
‘And what is it that you purloined?’
He rattled around and found the last parcel on the floor. ‘This, he said,’ thrusting it into her hands.
She stripped off the damp paper in a second and was confronted with something that could have been Ajax’s tail. ‘It’s a wig, a black wig.’
‘And it won’t fit over your own hair.’ Gallivant picked up the torn paper and threw it into a woven basket near the door.
Adelina let the fall of black hair sift through her fingers. ‘Do you really think I’m in that much danger, Gallivant?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so, Stitch Lady - more than ever. By escaping from her lair, you’ve rubbed Severine’s nose fairly and squarely in her doings.’
A cold shiver rippled across Adelina’s skin. She could feel Luther’s grasp on her wrist, feel her hair pulled hard as Severine expressed anger. She gathered her plaited hair, holding its fiery fall, thinking on its thickness and how Kholi had loved it, running his hands back and forth through its weight. ‘Then you had best cut it off,’ she said. She reached for her dressmaking scissors. ‘Now, before I think on it. Just grab the plait and cut and then tomorrow we’re going hunting, you and I, and I don’t want a word in argument.
’
As Gallivant forced the blades of the scissors down, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was a bizarre sort of symbolism. Was the hair symptomatic of Adelina’s life? Was it going to be cut as short as her hair.
With a dull thud, the thick copper plait fell to the floor.
***
And so my crowning glory became a piece of waste to be consigned to the rubbish. But you know, I didn’t care. I had quite a few things to accomplish and if it must be done in disguise then so
be it. Besides, perhaps the hob’s mesmer blunted the loss of my hair a little.
That whole day had passed like a dream because of the hob’s charm. Sometimes his intuition surprised me. I think he understood my babe’s and my own needs more than I did, because until Gallivant so wisely put me to rest, I had no idea just how much I had been on tenterhooks.
This day I had been content to lie amongst the feathered pillows on my bed in a somnolent state or to drift to the chaise and calmly embroider another part of that final piece: a stab stitch here, a Venichese knot there. Time took on a different meaning; time to recoup my energies and to work in a calm, almost disconnected fashion. Time for the babe as well too, to hear my heartbeat at a soothing pace rather than the stormy stampede that had been its accompaniment from conception. My body and mind had felt the pressure of those two promises - one to the Others and one to Aine - diametric opposites that caused my heart to beat forever in a state of acute anxiety and my head to rattle like bees in a bottle. But Gallivant’s gentle mesmer had induced such a tranquil state. I viewed all things from a safe place, almost with ambivalence.
As to the robe - did it have to be in the Museo by Carnivale? No, of course not - because it would have been incomplete. It would not have the final book, the one destined to bring my story to its inevitable conclusion.
I am sure you think you know what the conclusion will be. Then let me tell you this... you would know more than me at this time! For even on this day - so close to the Gate and to Severine, I couldn’t envisage how it would end. I knew how I wanted it to end but Fate often has other ideas.
So the first Day of the Dark ended without me placing a toe outside of the Orologio. Of course tomorrow would be different and as I lay my head once again on the pillows and cupped my hands over my moving belly, I directed my voice at my friend on the other bed as he lay staring distractedly at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his head.