The Magicians and Mrs. Quent

by Galen Beckett

  Ivy set down the letter and saw that Lily wore a horrified expression.

  “An acquaintance of Mr. Wyble’s!” she exclaimed in a fair imitation of one of their mother’s outbursts. “How awful! Can you imagine what a friend of Mr. Wyble’s must be like?”

  Ivy smiled. “I confess, I am more confounded by the fact that Mr. Wyble can have a friend at all.”

  At last, their mirth subsided to a point where they could resume their sewing, while Mrs. Lockwell went downstairs to see what Mrs. Murch was doing now that might put the edibility of their supper at peril.

  “It was kind of our cousin to write,” Ivy said, extinguishing several of the candles as soon as their mother left the room. She meant what she said; a kind deed must always be appreciated, no matter what one thought of the doer. “I am glad he has made some acquaintances he admires.”

  Lily clipped a thread with her teeth. “And I hope he admires them so much that he spends all his time with them and never comes to call on us again!”

  DESPITE MRS. LOCKWELL’S fears, disaster was somehow once again averted, and Mrs. Murch’s supper was excellent, though it was a close call, for the salt and sugar jars had mysteriously been swapped—no doubt by an act of Cassity’s. As a result, they had nearly dined upon candied beef and salt-crusted plums.

  After supper, Ivy went up to her father’s room. Mr. Lockwell sat in a chair by the window, dressed in the same suit of gray wool that Wilbern always put him in. He made no sound or motion as she entered but rather sat rigid, staring through the glass into the night. Ivy knelt beside his chair and smoothed his shock of white hair, which seemed to grow tangled no matter how still he sat, as if it had a life and will of its own.

  “What is it you see out there, Father?” she asked cheerfully.

  His hand was limp in hers, and his eyes were as dark as the window glass. Ivy rose, kissed his brow, and left the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.

  She went up to the attic to see if Mr. Lockwell had pulled out any books again. However, everything was in place, though she did notice that her father must have been working the celestial globe, for the two outermost spheres were lodged against each other again. It pained her to see this, for as a man of science her father had well understood the workings of the heavens, and he would have known that the furthest two planets never appeared next to each other in the sky.

  When she was a girl, her father had delighted in giving her riddles and puzzles to solve. Use your wits, Ivy, he would tell her. Any problem can be solved through the application of sound reasoning. Despite this advice, she often became frustrated when trying to solve one of her father’s riddles. At such times he would give her a hint or a small clue—something to spark her imagination and help her arrive at an answer. But there would be no hint to help her with this puzzle.

  She touched the arms on which the balls were mounted, listening to the whir of gears from deep within the globe as she moved them apart. Then she went downstairs.

  She found Wilbern in the kitchen, finishing a late supper with Mrs. Murch, and let him know her father was ready for bed. Mrs. Lockwell had already retired, complaining that “If I am this weary when the days are brief, I hardly know how I’ll make it through even a middle lumenal when we next have longer days!”

  It was the darkness, Ivy told her; it made them all dull.

  Yawning, Ivy climbed the stairs to the bedroom on the third floor that she shared with Lily. They had given Rose the other room on that floor to have for her own, as she had a tendency to get up in the middle of the night for hours at a time.

  Exactly what Rose did while the rest of them slept, Ivy wasn’t certain, though sometimes she heard soft singing coming from Rose’s bedroom, and Ivy knew she often wandered about the house in her robe, passing silently from room to room. More than once Ivy had dreamed an angel was watching over her, only to wake and see Rose standing above her bed, smiling down at her. Ivy would smile in return, then she would shut her eyes and go back to sleep. Nothing ill could come into their house unnoticed, not when Rose was keeping watch.

  Ivy slipped into the bedroom, not wanting to wake Lily if she was already asleep. However, that was far from the case: Lily sat up in her bed, bathed in candlelight, her wide eyes transfixed on the book that rested on her knees.

  “It’s time to blow out the candles,” Ivy said after she had changed into her nightgown.

  “But you can’t!” Lily cried, turning another page with greedy fingers. “Lord Vauntly has shut Anabel up in a tower, and he’s going to marry her at dawn, even though she despises him and loves only Sir Brandier and would rather dash herself on the rocks below the tower than let Lord Vauntly take her hand in his.”

  “I hardly think that would do Sir Brandier a service,” Ivy said. “Besides, it’s going to be a long umbral tonight. Dawn is many hours off yet, which means Anabel has plenty of time to find a hidden door or send a secret message.” She blew out the candles, and night took the room.

  Ivy always found it a little unsettling: the sudden termination of the rule of light, and the swift and complete supremacy of darkness in its place. However, the darkness was not entirely victorious, for a thin trickle of moonlight seeped between the clouds through the window.

  “I don’t want to go to sleep now,” Lily complained. “Why do we have to go to bed?”

  “Because it is night.”

  “Well, I think if the day is short we should be able to stay up later. Besides, it’s to be a long umbral—you said so yourself—which means it will still be night when we get up. So what difference can it make?”

  “The difference is that you will be very tired when you get up if you don’t go to sleep.”

  “But I’m not at all tired now.”

  Despite this claim, she was asleep long before Ivy, who lay awake in her bed, staring into the darkness and wondering who would write a letter to Father and why.

  It had been many years since Mr. Lockwell had spoken to anyone outside the household. Who could have cause to write him, and concerning what business? While Ivy had no evidence to suggest such a conclusion, she couldn’t help thinking that the author of the letter was perhaps one of the men in dark capes who had come to the door a half month ago. And if that was the case, what was it the two magicians (for she was certain that was what they were) wanted from Father?

  All of her questions would be answered if she could just get a look at the letter. However, where Mrs. Lockwell had put it Ivy did not know, nor did she think it prudent to ask; her mother had not seemed interested in discussing the letter. Ivy did her best to put the matter out of her mind and tried to follow Lily into slumber.

  EIGHT HOURS LATER, though it was still pitch-black outside, the denizens of the house on Whitward Street rose from their beds and lit candles and lamps to carve a waking day out of the middle of the long night.

  Long umbrals were always hard, especially after several of them in a row. Ivy always felt a sense of wrongness getting up in the middle of the night, but like everyone else in Altania, they had no choice. They couldn’t very well sleep for twenty-seven hours straight. Though by the great yawns she cracked over her tea and toast, Lily might have made a go of it.

  After breakfast, Ivy went into the parlor and, by the light of a single candle, reviewed the household ledger.

  The room was frigid, but she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders instead of building up the fire. She sat at the secretary, taking demands and receipts from the various drawers in which Mrs. Lockwell had hidden them and entering them in the ledger. By the time she made the final tally, her hand was so stiff that she could hardly dip the pen and write the figures. When she saw her breath fog on the air, even Ivy could no longer make a case for conserving wood in the name of frugality and went to the hearth to stir the coals and add a few sticks.

  As the flames leaped up, she held out her hands, rubbing them to life. Despite the cheerful light, her mood was dark. As usual, their receipts for the month had barely cover
ed their expenditures, leaving them with only a tiny sum to save against a long night. And it was only due to Ivy’s constant vigilance that they had even that much left over.

  “But we must have at least a few fine things!” Mrs. Lockwell would exclaim as she made a fuss over some porcelain bauble or fancy bit of cloth in an Uphill shop. “After all, we have a fine house.”

  Perhaps too fine, Ivy often thought. Other than a small sum Ivy had managed to accumulate through economizing, their only asset was a modest income paid to Mr. Lockwell as a return on some past investments, which just covered their expenses.

  However, those returns would last only so long as Mr. Lockwell lived, and love did not make Ivy so blind that she could not see how frail her father was. Without Mr. Lockwell’s income, small as it was, they would not be able to keep the house on Whitward Street. Indeed, they could barely afford to keep it as it was.

  “Perhaps we should let Mr. Wyble have this house sooner rather than later,” Ivy said to the flames.

  The house on Whitward Street was already entailed to Mr. Wyble; it would go to him upon Mrs. Lockwell’s death rather than to any of his three cousins. However, as Mrs. Lockwell was not yet fifty, he would likely have to wait a long time for the house to be his—a fact that, on occasion, elicited some degree of impatience on his part.

  That impatience could be turned to their advantage. Their cousin was much better off than his appearance might suggest, Ivy knew. He had confided in her once that he had been hoarding a tidy sum against the day he would be married and would need to start a household. So far he had had little success in finding a wife, but no doubt his prospects would be significantly better living as a gentleman in Gauldren’s Heights than as a lawyer from Lowpark. Mrs. Lockwell could sell her interest in the house and its contents to him for a sizable amount, and with that money they might return to the old house on Durrow Street and live there comfortably.

  Ivy had only faint memories of the house in which she had spent her youngest years. Her recollections of the house on Durrow Street were indistinct images of tall staircases, narrow windows, and shadowed nooks.

  She had been very small when they lived there, so it was small things she remembered: the clock over the mantelpiece that showed whether it was light or dark outside, and if the moon was up, and how full it was; the coatrack in the front hall, with its brass hooks shaped like eagle talons; and the newel posts at the ends of the banisters, their knobs carved to look like eyes, their lids shut in sleep.

  It had been, in sum, a magician’s house. As such, Mr. Lockwell’s young bride had hardly found it to her liking, what with it being old and dark and located in a part of the Old City rather less seemly than the daughter of a gentleman might be expected to consider acceptable. For a time, Mrs. Lockwell had been content enough (or patient enough) to accept her husband’s peculiar abode as well as his peculiar pastime. However, by the time she had a small daughter and another on the way, she had grown more vociferous in her criticisms of the house on Durrow Street, and at her urging Mr. Lockwell moved their household to Whitward Street.

  From time to time her father had returned to the house on Durrow Street in the course of his work as a magician. But as the years passed and sufficient quantities of his books and materials were transferred to their new home, his visits there decreased in frequency. Then they ceased altogether with the onset of his illness. The old house was shut up now, and Ivy had not seen it since the day they left it.

  Her hands sufficiently warmed, Ivy banked the coals, then went downstairs to see if Mrs. Murch needed her to go to the market. For outside the window, despite the dark and cold, the streetlamps along Whitward Street were lit and many people were out, going about their usual business even though it was the middle of the night.

  THEY HAD PASSED twelve hours awake in the dark when they gathered for a meal. Afterward they retired to their bedrooms to conserve candles, though Ivy found it difficult to sleep, as she always did when lying down for the second time in the course of a long umbral. For hours she stared into the gloom, listening to Lily’s soft breathing, and tried not to think of the figures in the household ledger, or the old house on Durrow Street, or the letter that had come for her father.

  She must have fallen into a fitful slumber, for when she opened her eyes she saw pale gold sun spilling through the window. Finally, day had come. Nor was it to be a short lumenal but rather a day with hours enough to melt the snow and warm the air. A day with plenty of light for reading.

  Ivy dressed hurriedly. She made an attempt to rouse Lily, but the only response was a groan that emanated from deep beneath the bedcovers. Giving up, Ivy went downstairs. If she could finish the tasks that required her attention as quickly as possible, it would leave more time for perusing books from her father’s library.

  Mrs. Lockwell was still readying herself for the day—a task that could not be rushed—and Rose was in her room singing softly, so Ivy fixed a cup of tea in the kitchen and toasted a piece of bread on the stove. As Ivy took her little breakfast and Mrs. Murch made up a list for market, Wilbern carried in an armful of wood—his boots leaving puddles on the floor, to Mrs. Murch’s dismay, for the frost was already beginning to melt.

  It was discovered they were out of onions. Though the box had seemed full, upon opening it Mrs. Murch saw that Cassity had filled it with potatoes; in turn, the box for potatoes contained only a broken crock and some string. So onions were added to the list, which Ivy took, and putting on her bonnet and cape, she went out.

  By the time she returned, the frost was melted in the garden and the day was growing fine. However, Ivy’s thoughts were not of going on a stroll but rather of sitting in a sunlit corner and reading book after book. She deposited her basket in the kitchen and hurried up the stairs.

  On the third landing, she came upon Mrs. Murch leading her father toward his room. Ivy asked if he had been taking out books again, but Mrs. Murch replied that she had found him standing at the window “as quiet as a lamb.” Ivy promised she would come to visit him later, then climbed the last steps to the attic.

  She moved among the shelves but was unable to settle upon just one book to read, so she took out three, then started for the stairs, intending to go down to the parlor. However, as she passed near the celestial globe, she noticed that the two outermost orbs—the two that she had so carefully moved apart—once again abutted each other. Her father must have been working the globe again.

  Ivy might have simply left the globe out of order, but it was not in her nature. As she touched the orbs, the morning light glinted upon them, catching the letters engraved there. One orb was labeled Cyrenth and the other Vaelus, those being the names of the two furthest planets, which were also the two smallest and the only two that were never in conjunction in the heavens. She moved them apart again. Yet why did those names ring in her mind?

  Ivy remembered the book she had found in the attic, the romance entitled The Sundering of Vaelus and Cyrenth. She had assumed it belonged to Lily, that Cassity had brought it up to the attic by mistake.

  Again she looked at the globe. As a child, her father had taught her how the eleven planets were named after mythical figures of ancient Tharos. Like so many myths, the story of Vaelus and Cyrenth attempted to explain something the Tharosians had observed around them. In this case, the myth told the tale of two lovers whom the gods forced apart as punishment for a crime of which they were wrongly condemned. According to the myth, that was why the two planets never met in the sky—because it was the doom of the two lovers never to meet again for all eternity. It was a story her father had known well. Yet three times now she had found the globe arranged so that Vaelus and Cyrenth were next to each other.

  Ivy was moving before she fully realized what she was doing. She dashed down two flights to the third floor, hurrying to the room she shared with Lily. The book was still on the shelf under the window where she had placed it. She took it out, ran a hand over the cover, then opened it.

  The
re was writing on the overleaf. To my dearest Ivy, it read, On the occasion of her thirteenth birthday. For now this is but a story, and one I hope you will enjoy. However, one day you will learn that behind a myth can lie a greater truth. I hope you will seek it out.

  It was signed by her father.

  For a moment Ivy felt her heart was no longer beating. Reading the inscription was like hearing a beloved voice from the past. He must have acquired this book for her as a present, had even inscribed it, but he had never had the chance to give it to her. The affliction had come upon him just before her thirteenth birthday, and the book had been lost among her father’s things all these years, until the day when he pulled it out by chance.

  Her heart was beating again. No, it wasn’t chance that he had taken this book out. Just as it wasn’t chance that three times she had found the celestial globe configured in an impossible position. He was trying to tell her something in the only way he could, she was sure of it. But what?

  Again she read the inscription. He’s telling you to seek out the truth. So do it. But what truth? And where was she supposed to find it? It was a riddle, she realized, like the ones he always used to give her. The key to solving a riddle was looking for meanings other than those on the surface. He had told her where to find the truth. She was to look for it in a myth. This myth, perhaps. Which meant she had to read the book.

  Ivy sat on the bed and opened the book. But even as she read the first lines, something prickled in the back of her mind. No, this was not right. She was not applying logic properly. Again she looked at the inscription. It did not say the truth was in a myth.