The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  The paper animals danced as they burned, as if the fire had endowed them with a literal spark of life, and Maisie watched in awe. So even fire had secrets. Who could have known?

  Gray midday became gray twilight, and when dinner had been served, the guests found themselves once again gathering around the hearth while the storm rattled the old windowpanes and the fire smoked as it worked on the damp logs. The dry wood had run low, and even Sorcha’s careful firekeeping couldn’t do anything about that—not if she wanted a normal blaze, anyhow.

  Maisie dropped onto the floor next to Tesserian, emptied her pockets of the collection of wooden animals she’d brought down from her room, and began secreting them around the card castle so that they peeked out of windows or perched on balconies. This elicited a wince of concern from Mrs. Haypotten, who set a glass of juice at Maisie’s knee just as the girl balanced the river otter on a tiny ledge that didn’t look as though it could have possibly supported so much as a feather. But Tesserian merely grinned, scooped up the remaining beasts, and began passing them to Maisie one by one. When they were all in place, the two architects began building an addition on the castle, using a different set of cards printed with the likenesses of saints.

  Madame Grisaille sat in her usual rocking chair to the left of the fireplace, swathed in her wraps, watching the construction with her hands tucked in her white fur muff. Amalgam, Sangwin, and Masseter sat in chairs drawn around the corner table to the right of the fire, where Jessamy had been the night before. From his waistcoat pocket, Sangwin took a piece of wood Sorcha had passed him earlier in the day, and he began to cut small, neat curls away from it. Periodically one or the other of the men shot curious looks at Petra, who had chosen a spot on the sofa again.

  Sullivan entered and, discovering that she had not curled herself against the very farthest edge of the couch today but instead sat a bit closer to the center, decided to follow her cue and do the same. Jessamy swept through the room and took a seat on the hearth behind the two card architects. When Sorcha entered with another split log, Jessamy made a point of waving so that the maid would see she had switched her stained gloves for one of the pairs from the attic.

  “They fit?”

  “Perfectly. Thank you. I’ll return the other two pairs.”

  Sorcha beamed. “Welcome, miss. But keep the others. I asked Mrs. Haypotten, and she agrees you ought to have some spares. Be sure to bring me your old ones, and I’ll do my best with the stains.”

  Negret Colophon strolled in, looked around, and, since none of the three chairs by the fire had been taken, chose the one closest to the side of the room overlooking the Skidwrack, which had a small table between it and the chair to its right. From his pockets he took a small assortment of newly scavenged paper, including Sorcha’s marbled endpaper. He set them out on the little tabletop, along with his sharp, round-handled awl. Mr. Haypotten gave him a wary look as he rolled in the beverage cart; punching holes in paper on the bar in the lounge was one thing, but his wife would take a dim view of any holes left in her parlor furniture. Having set out the paper and awl, however, Negret showed no inclination to do anything more with them. He stood again and went to pour himself a glass from one of the bottles on the sideboard.

  Reever had followed his brother into the room, but before choosing a seat for himself, he paused to reach down and lift one of Jessamy’s hands. She flinched but allowed him to examine the embroidery that covered the backs of the new gloves. “Interesting pattern. Reminds me of wrought iron,” he said. “Beautiful.” He stroked his thumb across her knuckles just before he let go. Then he dropped into the chair nearest Madame Grisaille in her corner.

  Captain Frost with his half-hour glass was the last guest to join them as he returned from his habitual weather check, followed closely by Mrs. Haypotten with a glass plate full of biscuits in her hands.

  The captain cleared his throat as the Haypottens and Sorcha moved around the room with drinks and edibles. “I caused rather an abrupt end to the telling last night,” Frost said, carefully not looking at Sullivan as he set his glass on the table between the chairs by the display case. “To make up for it, I’d be glad to tell the first tale this evening.”

  “Any peddlers, tricksters, gamblers, or lovers?” Masseter asked lightly.

  The captain considered. “No, but there is an uncanny sea,” he said, looking out at the river. On this side of the inn, which was higher than the roadway out front, the water had risen only—but exactly—to the level of the blue stair. “I thought it might be appropriate.”

  ELEVEN

  The Storm Bottle

  The Captain’s Tale

  The troubles began, as they almost always do at sea, with an omen. There is always an omen. The difficulty is spotting it and determining its meaning in time to anticipate whatever it is it happens to be foretelling.

  The children of the captain of the schooner called the Fate often argued over omens. It seemed to the captain’s young daughter, Melusine, that her still-younger brother, Lowe, had a very solid instinct for spotting them, but that he tended to get exactly wrong whether they were good or bad. Some of this might’ve been because Lowe and Melusine had different mothers and had been raised with different tales and traditions, and moreover Lowe hadn’t been at sea for quite so long as Lucy had. Still, everyone knows that corposants coming down a mast are bad luck. Everyone except for Lowe, who staunchly insisted that it was when they moved up the mast that you were in for it. And he couldn’t keep straight when you ought to whistle and when you shouldn’t under any circumstances so much as think of it. Whistling might be permissible if, for instance, you needed a wind and had already stuck a knife in the mast and the sailing master was safely out of earshot, but you ought never to whistle at almost any other time aboard ship, ever, or that same sailing master would find some particularly unpleasant and probably smelly bit of busywork to occupy the rest of your natural life.

  Then came the matter of Lowe and the storm bottle, and this time, for once, they were in complete agreement. Breaking the storm bottle was bad luck for certain, if for no other reason than it had belonged to the captain’s steward and he would be furious, and he had the power to make certain Melusine and Lowe ate nothing but stewed millers for a month if that was the punishment he deemed fair. And if stew sounds nice enough, it might change your mind to know that millers is the polite way of referring to rats if you have to eat them, which is not an unheard-of thing aboard a ship after months at sea, or as proper punishment for a particularly grievous offense.

  The steward, Garvett, had bought his storm bottle from a glassblower in Venice. It was a narrow vessel full of liquid and some pale fluffy stuff that got cloudy or snowy or formed crystals, apparently according to what weather was coming. He had taken a bit of ribbing from the rest of the crew, who had scoffed at the idea that any sailor worth his salt needed a flask of milky water to tell him what he ought to be able to deduce from the sky and the sea and the plenitude of other signs the Good Lord had given him for interpreting the world. But then one day the storm bottle predicted snow on a perfectly mild and pleasant day in latitudes where snow had no business falling. Everyone laughed, until the sky began to cloud over. The steward sat, smug and vindicated, as the snow began to come down from on high. After that, the bottle was treated with more respect—until Lowe broke it.

  Lowe thought the stuff in the bottle was camphor, which was a substance he knew well, since Lowe had a passion for fireworks, and some fireworks call for it as an ingredient. And while no one else particularly cared how the bottle worked so long as it did, Lowe became obsessed with figuring out whether he was right, and if he was, how camphor could not only make fireworks more brilliant but also foretell a storm. The steward, who had the good sense to be wary of seven-year-olds toying with treasured glass objects, took to hiding the storm bottle. But you couldn’t conceal things from Lowe for long. He was observant and curious, and he was small and light enough to climb anywhere. Nothing was sa
fe. But the steward kept trying, finding new places to hide the bottle, only for Lowe to locate it anyway and then be caught because he could never quite get around to putting the bottle back before the steward returned from wherever he’d gone. This went on and on.

  And then came the day the Fate put in for a brief stop at Valletta, which is a port town on the island of Malta. That very morning, Lowe came sprinting into Melusine’s little cabin as she was preparing to go ashore, a look of panic on his face and two bits of broken glass in his hands. “What do we do?” he whispered.

  Melusine gasped. “You didn’t.”

  Lowe brightened. “I know what was in it now, at least. I was right. There was water and alcohol and camphor. I could make him another one.”

  Melusine looked down at the remnants of the beautiful Venetian glass bottle. “He’ll know, Lowe.”

  “I’ll make him a better one,” Lowe insisted. “You find a bottle. I’ll get what goes in it.”

  He dropped the broken glass on Melusine’s tiny table and darted out again, leaving her to wonder how he’d managed so quickly and efficiently to make her an accessory to his crimes in addition to ruining her chances for going into Valletta that morning.

  If they had anything going for them, it was that they had some time. A third of the hands had already gone ashore, and Melusine had seen the steward and the cook row away from the Fate with the purser. They had to replenish the ship’s stores, and they wouldn’t be back for hours. The surgeon had left with them too, which was convenient because Melusine thought he might have a bottle among his medicines that would do, even if it wouldn’t be as pretty as the broken one.

  She found a suitable flask and emptied it, glancing briefly at the label and hoping paregoric wasn’t anything particularly important. Then she hurried back to her own cabin, nodding at the hands who tapped their foreheads in salute as she passed and trying to come up with a likely answer to give to the shipmate who would inevitably notice that she’d just come out of the surgeon’s quarters and want to know was she feeling all right. Miraculously, however, no one stopped her.

  In her cabin, she found Lowe waiting with two mugs sitting before him on her table. “There’s a problem,” he said. “We have no camphor, on account of I made that nice bunch of exploding stars, and that was about the same time Cook wanted camphor when he was practicing that lovely dessert he learned from that ship’s cook from Goa, and then the surgeon took the last bit to make up some of that pear-gory stuff he uses when someone’s belly goes off. We shall have to improvise.” He took a jar from one pocket, handling it with unusual reverence. “Hard snow,” he said.

  “Hard snow?” Melusine repeated warily. “Is there such a thing? Is it to do with fireworks?”

  “There is, but no, not for fireworks. And I haven’t made it exactly in the proper way—really it’s not the sort of thing you can just whip up in the powder magazine, but we don’t have time to refine the stuff. Still, it has a bit of mercury in it, which is also in the ship’s barometer, and the barometer does nearly the same thing as the storm bottle did. And it sounds like how the camphor crystals looked, so I thought it might do.”

  He took the surgeon’s bottle and poured in the contents of the two mugs, which turned out to be water and rum, and then tipped in a spoonful of the stuff called hard snow, which was syrupy and vaguely metallic. He corked the surgeon’s bottle, and Melusine helped him seal it with wax. At last they sat back and considered their handiwork. It didn’t look like much: just a round, wide-mouthed medicine vial—nothing at all like the narrow and graceful Venetian storm bottle—with a lump of thickish stuff at the bottom and watery grog filling the rest of the bottle up to the top.

  They stared at it for a moment. Nothing happened, of course. They kept watching. “How will we know if it works?” Lowe asked, twisting the end of his braided pigtail.

  Melusine, who couldn’t imagine how it possibly could, shrugged. “This is your commission, Lowe. I haven’t got the foggiest idea.” And then something stopped her cold.

  The thickish stuff in the bottle was moving. And not settling down to the bottom the way, say, stray tea leaves or grounds of coffee might do. No, it was hard to see—it was happening slowly—but Lowe’s hard snow was climbing up the walls of the bottle.

  “What does that mean?” Melusine and Lowe asked each other at the same time, both jabbing index fingers at the bottle.

  And then the wooden world around them rocked under their feet. It was a small motion, but the Fate had been Melusine’s home for most of her life, and there was no shift, no change, no matter how small, that the ship could’ve made that she wouldn’t have felt. She grabbed Lowe’s hand and, with her brother in tow, ran for the companionway ladder that led up to the weather deck.

  The world beyond the Fate had changed. Valletta Harbour was gone, replaced by a shocking sight: a wide expanse of deep red sea.

  “I’ve heard of waters like this,” Melusine whispered. “I’ve heard sailors talk about them, but I’ve never seen one.”

  “Look.” Lowe tugged her arm, and Melusine turned to follow his pointing finger across the expanse where, if Valletta had been where it ought to have been, the Mediterranean Sea would’ve met the Ionian. But Lowe was pointing not at whatever sea was there, but at what was creeping out across it toward them: a thick white fog, borne on a cold wind that told Melusine they were no longer anywhere near Malta. Lowe whispered, “I can hear it; can’t you?” Melusine cocked her head into the silence and listened, and yes, she could hear it—or she could hear something, just barely, in the sea smoke: a rustling, clinking, almost like ice when it fell from the rigging. As if concealed within the fog were bits of solid matter that clinked and clattered quietly as the mass rolled across the red waters toward them.

  This is when Melusine realized that, under normal circumstances, she should never have been able to hear anything so quiet, not at that distance. She could hear it only because the ship was silent. No voices, no footfalls, no whistles or bells. As far as Melusine knew, the Fate had not been empty of sailors since the day she’d been launched, and probably not even before that. There would never, not ever, be less than a skeleton crew aboard, and in any case, she could think of no circumstances under which their father, the captain, would have left the ship without passing word to her and Lowe. But Melusine knew, abruptly and certainly, that despite the impossibility, despite the fact that mere minutes before, there had been at least seventy-odd sailors aboard, somehow she and Lowe were now alone on the ship.

  “What’s happening?” she whispered, fighting down terror. The silent ship was more than she could process. Nothing else—not the disappearance of Valletta Harbour, nor the nightmarish color of the sea, nor the strange creaking and tinkling sea smoke—was as frightening as the sudden emptiness of the Fate.

  Lowe lifted his storm bottle in both hands. Inside, the oily, metallic hard snow was weaving impossible, branching patterns like frost on a window as it climbed the sides of the glass. “I don’t know,” he whispered back. “I don’t know what the bottle means to say.”

  “It’s saying something, that’s certain.” Fear would get them nowhere, so Melusine folded hers up and mentally shoved it in a pocket. The cold sea smoke rolled closer. Lowe shuddered. “Go and get yourself a jacket,” Melusine said. “And get Papa’s glass from his desk.”

  Lowe nodded once and darted away. While she waited for him to return, Melusine walked the length of the vacant ship and back to the low rise at the stern that passed for a quarterdeck, and as she did, the mist reached the Fate and wrapped everything above the red sea in cold, pale gray. Somewhere out there, the crystalline tinkling was coming closer, too, but not quite at the same rate as the fog. Melusine leaned over the starboard rail and stared out, looking for . . . well, she wasn’t sure what. For something. Anything.

  Her brother came scrambling awkwardly up the ladder, with their father’s spyglass under one arm and the homemade storm bottle still clutched in his fist. He had
forgotten the jacket. “Papa’s not there,” he said softly. “Where have they all gone?”

  Melusine said nothing. Her eyes had picked out a smudge of rose in the fog, something riding above the water and reflecting its scarlet color. She held out a hand, and Lowe put the glass into her palm. She stared through it, following the sound and searching—and there. There it was, and it was a ship. A xebec, she thought. In that case, perhaps they were still somewhere in the Mediterranean. Its hull was red, but everything else, from the gunwales to the tops of the masts, was shadow and shroud. And it carried no lights that Melusine could see, despite the thickness of the fog. She passed the glass to Lowe and pointed.

  “A ship?”

  “A xebec.” Now she could see it without the glass, with its unusual forward-sloping mast and the strange angle of its bowsprit. And she could hear that the tinkling noise was definitely approaching with the xebec, as if the other ship was parting not water, but shards of ice. And yet she still could see no lights, and she could hear no voices.

  She glanced down at Lowe’s storm bottle, which he’d passed her when he’d taken the spyglass. The hard snow lay all over the inside of the glass in patterns like sharp-horned, haloed moons. Wind and rain, the sailors would say to that, if they’d been there. But what would they say about the strange ship? Melusine didn’t really have to wonder. She knew.