The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  They returned to the parlor. Negret now lay sprawled on the sofa, humming to himself and gazing out into the rain with one hand tucked in his vest pocket and his glass of sherry forgotten in the other, but Reever, still staring moodily into the half-hour glass, had not moved from the chair by the music-box cabinet, and the castle, of course, stood precisely where Tesserian had told it to stay.

  “I would hate to knock it over,” Maisie said, eyeing the castle. “It’s not finished.”

  “The beauty of castles made of cards is that they are temporary, meant to be built and rebuilt,” Madame replied as she reached for the door of the cabinet. “But I do not think Mr. Tesserian’s castles fall until they are ready.”

  “Shall I find Sorcha for the key?” Maisie asked.

  At this, Reever roused himself enough to chuckle. “The lady needs no keys.”

  Maisie frowned. She had not realized that the twin gentlemen with the decorated faces had particularly noticed Madame at all, beyond holding doors for her and waiting, as they all did, for her to sit first at meals.

  The old lady’s body blocked the lock and handle from the girl, so Maisie couldn’t see what she did to manipulate the mechanism—but she remembered Madame’s secret, so she was able to guess. Sure enough, the door opened easily, and Madame took down a box shaped like a teapot. “No sad songs tonight.” She wound the teapot and lifted the lid, and a joyful melody Maisie didn’t know spilled from the spout like steam.

  Madame offered Maisie her hands. The girl hesitated, glancing at Reever, the nearer of the twins. She beckoned the old lady close. “But they’ll see,” she whispered. “They’ll know your secret.”

  “My dear, they already know,” Madame whispered back. “They have been in Nagspeake longer than anyone. The city has no secrets from them.” She smiled at Reever. “Only people confuse them these days.”

  Reever snorted. “Too much truth, my lady.” He got to his feet. “Fine, then. No sad songs. You have always danced with us, so dance with me now.” He held out his arms and, as Maisie laughed in delight, he and Madame Grisaille began to swirl around the room.

  Then, “Come on,” Negret said. He set down his drink and got to his feet, then reached for Maisie’s hands and swung her around, following the other two. Madame and Reever danced like family who had not met in a long time; Negret and Maisie danced with sheer, silly abandon, the young man adding twirls and dips as often as possible to keep his partner laughing. Mr. Negret, Maisie thought in between flourishes, danced as if he had no secrets, or at least didn’t care who might see the truth of them. And she was right, which was perhaps how he and Maisie managed to match their steps so perfectly and effortlessly to each other’s.

  The music began to slow to its inevitable halt. Then, before it had quite wound all the way down, the notes paused altogether for a moment. All four dancers glanced to the little table where Madame had set the teapot. Sorcha finished winding the box and set it down again, and the music picked up once more, faster than before. She opened her mouth to apologize and tell them all not to mind her, for she’d only come in to check the fire, unless anyone wanted a blanket?

  At the same moment and without a word between them, Madame Grisaille extricated herself from Reever, who, in turn, spun Maisie easily away from his brother and commenced twirling her about in Madame’s place. Suddenly, before she could speak a word, Sorcha found herself dancing with Negret Colophon, who murmured the words of the song as he danced, so quietly that she would not have been able to hear them if his lips had not been so close to her ear.

  * * *

  Jessamy stood just outside the door for a few minutes, out of sight but listening, with her arms full of the blankets she had insisted on taking from Sorcha before the maid had gone into the parlor to pretend to check the fire. Then she turned on her heel, dumped the blankets unceremoniously on a chair in the hall, and followed the scent of spicy-sweet cigar smoke into the public bar. Tesserian, Amalgam, Masseter, and Sangwin sat around a table against the far wall. This room was drafty by intention, so that the breezes off the Skidwrack could help waft away the smoke that accumulated there. But even as the panes rattled, at a table by the window overlooking the road the more modest house the gambler had built the day before was, improbably, still standing.

  Jessamy pulled up a chair to join the four men. Masseter put away something small and glittering that he had been worrying against the scars in his palm, tucking it into his watch pocket. Then he took the box of little cigars from inside his vest, opened it, and held one up in an offering. Jessamy nodded and waited while the peddler notched the end with his knife. Tesserian lit a match for her, and the five of them sat smoking in silence for a few minutes. Then the gambler reached out again and took the cigar nimbly from Jessamy’s gloved fingers as she crumpled, dropping her head into her hands on the tabletop, and began quietly to sob.

  Her companions passed a silent conversation around between them. Amalgam, sitting to her left, put a hand tentatively on her shoulder. “I apologize.”

  Jessamy shook her head, hiccuped, and managed, “Not your fault.”

  She composed herself, and Tesserian passed her cigar back. “May I ask what instrument you played?” Masseter asked, rubbing the scar in his palm with the thumb of his other hand.

  “I can play them all,” Jessamy said simply.

  “Jack of all trades, master of none?” Sangwin guessed.

  She looked at him for a moment. “Master of all of them, too, Mr. Sangwin. But it takes more than mastery. More than gifts.” She drew on the cigar, exhaled. “I don’t know what it takes, but on that night at least, the night when it mattered, I didn’t have it.”

  Masseter tapped the ash from the smoldering end of his own cigar. His eyes rested on Jessamy’s bloodstained pink gloves. “Do you know how long?”

  “How long I have?” She lifted the hand that held the cigar and looked at the rust-colored marks on her palm. “No.”

  “If it were your last night . . .” Sangwin began thoughtfully.

  “I begin every day with a similar thought,” Jessamy interrupted coldly. “Respectfully, Mr. Sangwin, but forgive me if just once I waste an hour like everyone else.”

  The printmaker nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “Thank you.” She took another pull on her cigar, then pushed herself to standing. “And thank you for this, Mr. Masseter,” she added, setting the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray at the center of the table. “Good night, gentlemen.”

  “Pleasure,” Masseter said as she left the room.

  “I don’t imagine she’ll tell us,” Tesserian said quietly as the cigar smoke swirled in Jessamy Butcher’s wake, “but I’d wager it’s a hell of a tale.” Phineas Amalgam gave a mirthless chuckle. Tesserian shot him a glare. “Pun not intended.”

  Sangwin cleared his throat. “Speaking of tales . . . Masseter—”

  The peddler waved his cigar. “Don’t give it a second thought.”

  “Good of you.” Sangwin frowned. “Thing is,” he went on, troubled, “I really don’t recall mentioning that tale to the young lady, Petra. I can’t imagine I would have been so . . . so tactless.”

  Amalgam tapped ash into the dish. “Odd, isn’t it?”

  Masseter said nothing. He blew a series of smoke rings and watched them stretch, distort, and dissipate, looking for patterns.

  * * *

  Jessamy grabbed one of the blankets from where she’d abandoned them on the chair and fled up the stairs. She passed Petra coming down from her room, where from the window she had been watching the two figures under the iron arch in the road and wondering who would return and who would not. Wordlessly, without slowing their steps at all, each woman reached out and grasped the other’s hand, a quick exchange of pressure. Each stood just a hair taller as she moved on.

  When at last both Sullivan and Captain Frost climbed the stairs to the porch, Petra opened the door. She handed the larger of the blankets to the captain with one hand and reached up to take
off his tarpaulin hat with the other. “The stories are finished for the night, I think,” she said, hanging the hat on a peg by the door to dry. “But I saw Phin and the travelers in the bar, and Masseter always seems to have a spare in that cigar box of his. I turned your glass at a quarter to ten, Captain. You have time.”

  “Thank you,” Frost said. He wrapped the blanket about his shoulders. “I’ll just see my way to some dry clothes first.” He stomped down the hall and up the stairs, leaving Petra and the sopping Sullivan facing each other.

  “You’re a bit of a puppeteer, aren’t you?” he observed.

  She looked over her shoulder, toward the sounds of laughing from the dancers in the parlor and the scent of smoke from the men in the bar. “When circumstances require.”

  “And have you accomplished whatever it is you were after?”

  “Not yet.” But the words weren’t meant for him, and she spoke so quietly that Sullivan almost didn’t catch them.

  Then Petra turned back toward him and hung the blanket she held on the peg beside the captain’s hat. She reached up, and Sullivan tilted his face down nearer to hers. Neither of them blinked, or breathed, or looked away as she ran her fingers through the hair still streaming water down his neck, gathering it behind his head and wringing the rain gently from it. Then she took the blanket down from the peg and tucked it around his shoulders.

  “Good night,” Petra said.

  Stay, he wanted to whisper. But with effort he managed, “Good night,” instead.

  She let go and backed away, and then she was gone. He counted to fifty in three different languages before he followed, just to be sure she would be safely locked away in her own room before he reached the hall they shared.

  * * *

  In the parlor, Maisie yawned for the third time and stumbled over her feet. Sorcha stepped out of her own dance and caught the girl before she could step on the card castle. “Come along, miss. Let’s get you up to bed.”

  “Wait.” Maisie pulled out of Sorcha’s grip and crouched by the structure. She adjusted a single card, then allowed herself to be shooed out into the hall with Sorcha on her heels.

  “Thank you for the dance,” Negret called.

  “Welcome,” Sorcha’s laughing voice shouted back from the hallway.

  Reever put the teapot music box away, then helped Madame Grisaille, who had taken one of the chairs by the half-hour glass, to her feet. “I take it we stand with the woman, if it comes to that?”

  “If it comes to it,” Madame said. “If one of them would save the city and one of them would watch it drown, yes.”

  The brothers nodded. No more needed to be said. Reever and Madame Grisaille started for the door, but Negret held back. Before he left the room, he banked the fire, doing his best to copy the firekeeping ritual he’d seen Sorcha do over and over since his arrival at the Blue Vein, even singing the words she’d set to the song she’d borrowed from him.

  On his way up to his room, after a moment’s listening to be sure he was alone, Negret paused to examine the contents of the bottom shelf of the bookcase where the stairs turned. Then he stretched up on tiptoe and shifted the books on the top shelf, looking at each book and then peering into the space behind it. Finally, not finding what he wanted, he stretched his body another six inches taller so that he could reach one hand into the space between the top of the bookcase and the ceiling. He felt around with his left hand, then reached into the farthest corner with his right. Then he stepped back, empty-handed, and brushed dust and cobwebs from his many-pocketed tweed vest.

  “Good grief,” Reever muttered, appearing on the stairs above and trotting down to join his brother. “You’re a giant.”

  Negret snorted as he relaxed back down to the twins’ usual, just-shy-of-six-feet height. “They’re all asleep. There’s no one to see.”

  “They’re never all asleep.”

  “No,” Negret conceded. “That’s very true.”

  The two of them stood for a moment, listening.

  “Let it go,” Reever said quietly. “This isn’t why we’re here.” He tilted his head upward, toward the second floor. Negret nodded reluctantly, rubbed the last shadow of dust from his palms, and took the stairs two at a time, following his brother to their rooms.

  A draft swirled through the parlor as the case clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten times. Captain Frost’s half-hour glass continued to drain in a fine thread of sand. Not a card in the castle so much as stirred, not even when, much later that night, Antony Masseter, on one of his witching-hour perambulations, wandered in, effortlessly picked the lock of the display cabinet, and began winding music boxes one by one.

  TEN

  The Blue Stair

  When the sun came up, the rain had not stopped and the waters were still rising. The day that dawned was indistinguishable from the night before in all ways except for the difference in illumination and the height of the water.

  Of course, some of the guests were not quite the same as they had been the day before, but those kinds of things are often harder to see in the light of morning, before the coffee has been brought.

  From the front door, Petra could see the pebbly mud of the road washing in a brown slick down to the place where it met the vanguard edge of the flood tide creeping upward by agonizing degrees. Between the darkness of the sky and the rough gray curtain of the rain and the still-darker shadows of the blue pines that overhung everything, it felt more like twilight than morning. The threshold where runoff met flood was nothing but a vague and shifting line of frothy mire, but it was now well past the iron arch that had not been there the morning before. The road was going to the river, and the river was coming to the inn.

  Gray morning became gray midday, and under occassionally flickering lights and the unpredicatable knocking and sizzling of the reluctant heating coils in their wall cases, the guests haunted the inn like uncertain ghosts. The exceptions were the Haypottens and Sorcha, who had an establishment to run and twelve guests to care for, and Maisie, for whom the Blue Vein and its denizens seemed newly painted in mystery after the previous night’s stories. The innkeepers inventoried food and drink and planned meals and strung lines beside the two kitchen fireplaces and the potbellied stove in order to dry freshly washed linens that couldn’t be hung outside. Maisie crept about the inn, looking for secrets and clues to secrets. And, frequently, finding them.

  Sorcha passed from room to room seeing to fires, the little wooden albatross hanging from her neck on its bit of ribbon. After lunch she found Maisie in the parlor, looking adrift; the younger girl had followed one set of clues to what appeared to be a dead end and, stymied, was trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong and where to look for the next one.

  Although ordinarily Sorcha was too observant to make this sort of error, she mistook Maisie’s temporary confusion for boredom. She plunked the girl down at the corner table where Jessamy had been the night before and ordered, “Stay.” Then she hurried to the tiny writing desk in her own bedroom, where in the single drawer she kept a stock of fancy papers saved from parcels and colored envelopes and the endpapers of books she’d found in the attic that were too old and broken to be saved. Then, hands full of scraps of gold and silver and scarlet and marbled stuff, Sorcha returned to the parlor.

  She passed Negret on the stairs. Both Sorcha’s step and Negret’s faltered for a heartbeat, as if, having danced the night before, their feet couldn’t bear to pass by each other so quickly. He stopped and glanced, curious, at the bounty she carried.

  “I thought I’d make some fancy spills with Miss Maisie,” Sorcha explained. Then, remembering the book he’d been stitching together the day before, she picked a nice piece of heavy stock swirled with blue and green and gold and held it out. “For your next bookbinding, Mr. Negret. I believe it came from a book of poetry.”

  He took it with a brief bow of his head, as if the receiving of the scrap was a great honor. “Would you use it, if I made one for you?”

 
; Sorcha smiled. “I could find a use for a book, yes.”

  A different pair of people might have hesitated then, before moving on, but Sorcha had Maisie waiting below, and Negret was not the sort of person to feel he had to capitalize on a chance meeting on the stairs for anything if he thought there might be a better time for it later. So he nodded and murmured, “Thank you,” and tucked the marbled paper carefully into his vest as he continued on up to the second floor. Sorcha continued on down, humming as she went.

  In the parlor, she deposited the rest of the paper in front of Maisie, who was waiting obediently but impatiently with her head lying sideways on the tabletop. Sorcha took a box from her apron pocket, and from that produced a pair of scissors she usually used for trimming wicks. Then she picked out a piece of gold paper, tore it into three strips, and cut a fringe into the long edge of one before rolling the paper tightly and at a slight angle into a long, narrow tube so that the frill spiraled elegantly up the outside.

  “Now, watch,” Sorcha said with a wink, and she took the tall, fringed tube over to the hearth and reached the end into the fire.

  The spill caught, and the flame flickered slowly up to consume the rolled paper, with the gold fringe giving off greenish sparkles as it burned. Sorcha used it to light a candle on the table, then tossed the unburned remnant into the hearth, where the fire finished it off with a bursting pop and a little sizzle of jade sparks.

  The two girls laughed, then got to work twisting more scraps into matches as the candle flickered on the table before them. Maisie cut and rolled her pieces into the spiraling fringe Sorcha had taught her, and Sorcha herself crafted ever more complicated spills from the pile of scraps and the occasional dab of melted wax. The first ones resembled long-stemmed flowers, then slender and branching trees. And then, twisting four or six or ten smaller pieces together, Sorcha produced a cavalcade of gaunt, long-legged, long-necked, or long-horned paper creatures. Since these wouldn’t have fit in the spill vase on the mantel anyway, the girls lined them up on the hearth, and when the final twiggy, silver-paper hart stood under the last marbled green-and-white tree, Sorcha held out one of Maisie’s fringed matches. Maisie reached past the menagerie to light it in the fire, then, at a nod from the older girl, began to set the parade aflame, one creature at a time.