Mr. Locke’s hand landed on my shoulder for the second time that evening. “We’ve asked you here tonight for a little announcement. After much careful thought and discussion, my colleagues and I would like to offer you something rather rare and much sought-after. It’s quite unorthodox, but we feel it is warranted by your, ah, unique situation. January”—a dramatic pause—“we’d like to offer you formal membership in the Society.”
I blinked at him. Was this my birthday gift? I wondered if I ought to be pleased. I wondered if Mr. Locke had known how, as a girl, I’d dreamed of joining his silly society and trotting around the world having adventures, collecting rare and valuable objects. I wondered if my father had ever wanted to join.
That bitter taste returned, and something else that burned ember-hot on my tongue. I swallowed it back. “Thank you, sir.”
Mr. Locke’s hand knocked me twice in hearty congratulations. He launched into another speech about the formal induction process and certain rituals and oaths that must be made before the Founder—see that capital F like a saluting soldier—but I wasn’t listening. The burning in my mouth was growing stronger, scalding my tongue, and my invisible veil was crumbling to ash and char around me. The room around me seemed to pulse with heat.
“Thank you,” I interrupted. My voice was flat, almost toneless; I listened to it with detached fascination. “But I’m afraid I must decline your invitation.”
Silence.
A silver-eyed voice in my head was hissing at me—be a good girl, mind your place—but it was drowned out by the alcohol thudding in my blood. “I mean, why should I want to join your Society, really? A bunch of fussy old aristocrats who pay braver and better men to go out and steal things for you. And should one of them disappear you don’t even pretend to mourn him. You just carry on—as if nothing—as if he didn’t matter—” I broke off, panting.
You don’t really realize how many small sounds a house makes—the tocking of the grandfather clock, the sighing of the summer breeze against the windowpanes, the moaning of floor joists beneath a hundred pairs of expensive shoes—until you’ve stunned a room into absolute silence. I clutched Bad’s collar as if he were the one in need of restraint.
Mr. Locke’s hand tightened on my shoulder and his munificent smile became something gritted and painful-looking. “Apologize,” he breathed at me.
My jaw locked. A part of me—Mr. Locke’s good girl, the girl who never complained, who minded her place and smiled and smiled and smiled—wanted to fling myself at his feet and beg for forgiveness. But most of me would rather have died.
Locke’s eyes found mine. Chill, steel-colored, pressing into me like two cold hands against my face—
“Pardon me,” I spat. One of the Society men gave a crack of derisive laughter.
I watched Mr. Locke work to unclench his teeth. “January. The Society is a very old, very powerful, and very prestigious—”
“Oh, yes, so prestigious.” I sneered. “Far too prestigious for people like my father to join, no matter how much garbage he steals for you, no matter how much money you make auctioning it off in secret. Am I light-skinned enough to sign up, is that it? Is there a chart I can consult?” I bared my teeth at them. “Maybe one of you can add me to your skull collection when I die, as some sort of missing link.”
The silence this time was absolute, as if even the grandfather clock were too insulted to make a sound.
“Looks like you’ve raised quite the little malcontent, Cornelius.” It was Mr. Havemeyer, watching with a smile of purest malice and twirling an unlit cigar in his gloved fingers. “We did warn you, didn’t we?”
I felt Mr. Locke inhale, whether to defend or chastise me I didn’t know, but I no longer cared. I was finished with it, with them, with being a good girl and minding my place and being grateful for every scrap of dignity they tossed my way.
I stood up, feeling the champagne fizz sickeningly in my skull. “Thank you, gentlemen, for my birthday present.” And I spun and marched out the dark-stained doors with Bad trotting at my heels.
The crowd had grown sweatier and louder and drunker. It was like being trapped in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, green-lit faces spinning around me with ghoulish expressions. I wanted to set Bad on them, all teeth and burnished bronze fur. I wanted to scream myself hoarse.
I wanted to draw a door in the air, a door to somewhere else, and walk through it.
The silver tray materialized again at my elbow. Warm air whispered against the back of my neck. “Outside, west wing. Five minutes.” The tray vanished, and I watched Samuel slide back into the chattering horde.
When Bad and I slipped out the west wing door, feeling like escapees from some hellish fairy ball, we found Samuel alone. He leaned against the still-warm brick of Locke House, hands jammed in his pockets. His neat waiter’s costume looked like it had recently suffered an escape attempt: his tie was loose and crumpled, his sleeves were unbuttoned, his dark coat had vanished.
“Ah, I did not know if you would come.” His smile had finally extended past his eyes.
“Yes.”
Silences are easier to bear outdoors. I listened to the snuffling sounds of Bad rooting through a hedgerow for some unlucky creature, and the scrape and hiss of a striking match as Samuel lit a roughly rolled cigarette. Twin flames glowed in his eyes.
He drew breath and exhaled a pearl cloud. “Listen, I—we heard about what happened. To Mr. Scaller. I am sorr—”
He was going to say how sorry he was, how tragic and sudden it had been, et cetera, and I knew with sudden clarity that I wouldn’t be able to bear it. Whatever lunatic rage had allowed me to storm away from the Society had curdled and cooled, and left me very alone.
I interrupted before he could finish, gesturing abruptly at Bad. “Why did you give him to me? You never really said.” My voice was too loud and false-sounding, like a poor actor in a town play.
Samuel’s brows rose. He watched Bad crunching merrily on something field-mouse-sized, then gave me a one-shouldered shrug. “Because you were lonely.” He twisted his cigarette out on the brick beside him and added, “And I do not like to see people outnumbered. Mr. Locke and that old German woman, bah. You needed someone on your side—like Robin Hood needed a Little John, eh?” His eyes sparked at me; I’d always made him play Little John in our games of Sherwood Forest, alternating at need to Alan-a-Dale or Friar Tuck. Samuel pointed to Bad, who was making a series of unpleasant hacking sounds to dislodge the mouse bones in his throat. “This dog, he is on your side.”
So casually, thoughtlessly kind. I found myself leaning closer, listing toward him like a lost ship toward a lighthouse.
Samuel was still watching Bad. “Do you swim much, these days?”
I blinked at him. “No.” He and I had spent hours flailing and splashing in the lake as kids, but I hadn’t set foot in the water for years. It was just one of those things I’d lost somehow, along the way of growing up.
I caught the tilted edge of his half smile. “Ah, then you are out of practice. Bet you a quarter I could beat you now.”
He’d always lost our races, probably because he’d had to help in his family’s store and lacked the endless summer afternoons I’d had to practice in. “A lady doesn’t bet,” I said primly. “But if I did, I’d be twenty-five cents richer.”
Samuel laughed—a boyish, immoderate sound I hadn’t heard since we were children—and I smiled rather foolishly back at him. And then somehow we were standing closer to one another, so that I had to tilt my head upward to see his face, and I could smell tobacco and sweat and something warm and green, like fresh-cut grass.
I thought a little wildly of The Ten Thousand Doors, of Adelaide kissing her ghost boy under the autumn constellations without a single heartbeat of doubt. I wished I were like her: feral and fearless, brave enough to steal a kiss.
Be a good girl.
… To hell with being good.
The thought was dizzying, intoxicating—I’d already broken so many rules ton
ight, left them smashed and glittering in my wake—what was one more?
Then I pictured Mr. Locke’s face as I’d swept from the smoking room—the stiff lines of outrage around his mouth, the disappointment in his chilled gray eyes—and my stomach went cold. My father was gone, and without Mr. Locke I would have nothing at all in the world.
I cast my eyes to the ground and stepped away, shivering a little in the cooling night. I thought I heard Samuel exhale.
There was a short silence while I relearned the trick of breathing. Then Samuel asked, lightly, “If you could go somewhere else right now, where would it be?”
“Anywhere. Another world.” I was thinking of the blue Door and the smell of the sea when I said it. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but Adelaide’s story had dragged it back to the surface of my memory.
Samuel didn’t laugh at me. “My family has a cabin on the north end of Champlain. We used to go every summer for a whole week, but my father’s health, and the shop… We have not gone in years.” I pictured Samuel as I’d known him before, young and wiry-armed and so tanned he seemed to emanate secondhand light. “It is not a very large or very nice cabin—just a cedar-shake box with a rusted stovepipe sticking out—but it is very alone, at the edge of its own island. When you look out the windows there is nothing but lake water and sky and pine trees.
“When I get sick of all this”—he waved his hand so widely it seemed to include not only Locke House, but everything inside it, every expensive bottle of imported wine, every stolen treasure, every trilling banker’s wife taking a glass from Samuel’s tray without ever seeing him—“I think of that cabin. Far away from bow ties and suit coats, from rich men and poor men and the space between them. That’s where I would go, if I could.” He smiled. “Another world.”
I was suddenly very certain he still read his story papers and adventure novels, still kept his eyes on the distant horizons.
It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.
I wasn’t. Then.
“It’s late. I’m going in,” I announced, and the harshness of it erased the miraculous circle we’d drawn around ourselves like a shoe smudging away a chalk line. Samuel stiffened. I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face—would I have seen regret or recrimination? Desire or desperation to match my own?—but merely whistled to Bad and turned away.
I hesitated at the door. “Good night, Samuel,” I whispered, and went in.
The room was dark. Moonlight drew pale edges around the ivory gown now crumpled on the floor, the burr of Jane’s hair against her pillow, the curve of Bad’s spine pressed against me.
I lay in bed, feeling the champagne tide retreating and leaving me beached, like some unfortunate sea creature. In its absence the Thing—heavy, black, suffocating—returned, as if it had been waiting all evening for the two of us to be alone. It slid oil-slick over my skin, filled my nostrils, pooled at the back of my throat. It whispered in my ear, stories about loss and loneliness and little orphan girls.
Once upon a time there was a girl named January who had no mother and no father.
The weight of Locke House, red stone and copper and all those precious, secret, stolen things, pressed down on me. After twenty or thirty years beneath that weight, what would be left of me?
I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it.
I walked through it into another world.
Chapter Two
On Miss Larson’s Discovery of Further Doors and Her Departure from Documented History
A timely death—The boo hags of St. Ours—The hungry years and their conclusion
Mama Larson died in the bitter March of 1885, a week after the early-rising daffodils had been felled by a hard frost and eight days before her granddaughter turned nineteen. For the Larson aunts their mother’s death was a tragedy on par with the falling of a great empire or the collapse of a mountain range, almost beyond understanding, and for a time the household degraded into scattered, aimless mourning.
Mourning is a self-absorbed business; it should not therefore surprise us that the Larson women failed to pay much attention to Adelaide Lee. Ade was grateful for their inattention—for if her aunts had considered her countenance, they would have found it very far from despair or sadness.
Standing beside her grandmother’s deathbed, woolen dress still smelling of black logwood dye, Ade had felt the way a sapling might as it watched one of the old forest giants come crashing magnificently to rest: awed, and perhaps a little frightened. But when Mama Larson’s final breath rattled from her ribs, Ade discovered the same thing the young sapling would have: in the absence of the old tree, there was a hole in the canopy above her.
Ade began to suspect that, for the first time in her life, she was free.
It wasn’t true that she’d been unfree for the previous several years. Indeed, compared to other young women in those times, she led an unfettered and feckless life. She was permitted to wear canvas trousers and men’s work hats, primarily because her aunts eventually despaired of keeping her skirts presentable; she was not expected to ensnare any eligible young bachelors, because her aunts shared a collectively dim view of men; she was not forced to attend school or find employment; and while her wandering habit was not encouraged, her aunts were at least resigned to it.
But Ade still felt as if an invisible collar rested around her throat, its leash leading back to the Larson farm. She might disappear for two or four or six days, riding a train north and sleeping in strangers’ tobacco barns, but in the end she always circled back home. Mama Larson would wail about fallen women, her aunts would purse their lips, and Ade would go to sleep heartsick and dream of doors.
Her leash grew loose and frayed over the years, until it was just a single thread of love and familial loyalty. With Mama Larson’s death, the thread snapped.
As happens with many caged creatures and half-domesticated young girls, it took some weeks for Ade to realize she could truly leave. She stayed for her grandmother’s burial in the lumpy, ivy-eaten plot on the far side of the farm, and paid Mr. Tullsen to engrave a limestone marker (HERE LIES ADA LARSON, 1813–1885, A MOTHER MOST DEAR), and three weeks later she woke with her pulse beating a marching rhythm in her throat. It was a bright spring morning, full of promise. Most travelers are familiar with this kind of weather—when the wind blows westward and warm but the ground still chills the soles of your feet, when the tree buds have begun to unfurl and scent the air with secret springtime madness—and they know those days are made for leaving.
Ade left.
Each of her aunts received a kiss on the cheek that morning in order from oldest to youngest. If the kisses were more sincere than usual, and if their niece’s eyes had a feverish glow, they did not notice. Only Aunt Lizzie looked up from her boiled egg.
“Where you going, child?”
“Into town,” Ade said evenly.
Aunt Lizzie looked at her for a long moment, as if she could read her niece’s intentions in the forward tilt of her shoulders, the slant of her smile. “Well,” she sighed finally, “we’ll be here when you come back.” Ade barely heard her at the time, already flitting out the kitchen door like a loosed bird, but later she would return to those words and rub them for comfort until they were worn smooth as creek stones.
She went first to the sagging barn and unearthed a hammer, a pocketful of square-topped nails, a horsehair paintbrush, and a rusted paint can labeled Prussian Blue.
She took her supplies west toward the old hayfield.
Time had stepped very lightly across the field. It had been briefly mowed and hayed by a wealthy neighbor, then abandoned again; a few crews of surveyors had scurried about with intentions of building a shipping house along the riverbank but found the ground too low-lying. Now there was only a rusted line of barbed wire with a tin sign indicating that it was private property and suggesting that trespassers should be wary. Ade ducked beneath it without breaking stride.
The cabin timbers had never been fully cleared away but were left to rot in a weedy tangle of honeysuckle and pokeberry. Ade knelt before the old lumber with her thoughts running deep and silent, like subterranean rivers, and scrounged through the pile for unrotted wood, brackets, old hinges. Farm life without uncles or brothers had left her with more-than-passable carpentry skills, and it took only an hour or so before she’d assembled a frame and rough door. She hammered the frame into the earth and hung her scrapped-together door in it. It creaked in the river breeze.
It was only when she was entirely finished, and the door was painted a deep, velvet-ocean blue, that she fully understood what she was doing: she was leaving, perhaps for a very long time, and she wanted to leave something behind. Some kind of monument or memorial, like Mama Larson’s headstone, that marked her memory of the ghost boy and the cabin. She also couldn’t help hoping, at least a little, that one day the door might open again, and lead elsewhere. This, in my considerable experience, was a misplaced hope. Doors, once closed, do not reopen.
Ade abandoned her aunts’ tools and walked the scant miles into town. Then she tucked her hair up beneath a leather hat so shapeless and worn it lay like a sleeping animal against her skull and strode out on the docks to wait for a likely steamer. This, too, felt less like crafting a plan and more like swimming downriver, swept along by some force grander and madder than herself toward unknown seas. She did not fight it but let the invisible waters close over her head.
It took two days of loitering and begging before she found a steamer desperate enough to take her on as a deckhand. It wasn’t her sex that barred her; her paint-striped trousers and baggy cotton shirt offered sufficient disguise, and her face had a freckled squareness that sidestepped beauty and landed somewhere nearer to handsome.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 9