The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  Then, right at the edge of the pier, he hesitated. What to do with his fog?

  He hadn’t actually bought it intending to inundate Nagspeake for purposes of turning linklighter again. Something about that didn’t feel right—pouring the fug over the city just to make money helping people get around in it. And he did remember that bad things could happen in the fog. There were thieves who posed as linklighters only to lead their customers into dark alleys and rob them. People drifted into the paths of horses. People wandered blindly off embankments and into the Thames to drown. People got sick—just a little sick if they were strong or lucky; deathly sick if they weren’t. And to manage in a fog—just to move about in it without getting hurt, never mind finding your way to where you wanted to go—you had to know how to do it. You had to learn, which took time and experience. Even just pouring out a particular now and then could be deadly. What damage might he already have done, letting it loose the night before?

  Hugo had been intending to find a boat to take him down the river to Bayside, where he could let the fog loose over the Magothy, but now he reconsidered. Bayside would be one of the worst places to unleash a particular. It had miles of water frontage, dozens of boats coming, going, and lying at anchor, and thousands of people staying there who weren’t from Nagspeake at all and would be even more lost and helpless than the locals, who would be plenty lost and helpless themselves.

  He had just decided to go inland along one of the Skidwrack’s many branching creeks instead and see what a dollop of London fog would look like poured out in an abandoned bit of woods when a sailor heading down the pier elbowed past him with a sharp whack to the ribs, muttering “woolgathering landlubbers” in a not-specially-quiet voice as he went along. But Hugo didn’t hear the words at all, because he had felt the crunch between his shirt and his vest. The sailor’s elbow had cracked the glass box like an eggshell.

  Immediately, rills of fog began to seep out of his pocket.

  Hugo reached in, hoping against hope that the blow had merely knocked the lid open a bit. But he could feel the crack that spanned the glass dome and the cold, almost viscous smog that was issuing forth. He stumbled off the pier and into an alley, trailing fog behind him, and untied the kerchief from his neck. He folded the kerchief twice, took the box from his pocket, wincing at the break across the lid, and wrapped it tightly, even though he was certain that if three layers of cotton were nowhere near enough to keep a particular out (a thing he knew well from experience), they wouldn’t be enough to hold one in, either.

  And they weren’t. The fog kept seeping free, and once it had escaped the confines of the round glass box, it pooled and began to thicken, rising like bread dough on the banks of the Skidwrack. Hugo cursed.

  His instructions had warned him not to put the fog into anything other than the container it was in, but something more had to be done, and fast. He unwrapped the kerchief again and set it on the ground with the box sitting in the center. Trying ineffectually to wave away the pooling, thickening fog so that he could see what he was doing, Hugo opened his bag and took out the small crock of pitch. Reluctantly, he smeared a dollop of pitch tar along the length of the fissure, then tore a bit of rag from his old shirt and pressed the fabric against the tar, gluing it down fast. Then he rewrapped the whole thing and stood with the parcel in his palm to examine the results. The seep of fog drifting down had slowed, but it did not stop.

  He cursed again, pocketed the wrapped box, and put his torch together as quickly as he could. Hugo struck a match and lit the pitchy rag at the top, then ventured out into the street again.

  The particular was already spreading across the river and rolling up the banks. All around him, the busy waterside district was beginning to react to the sudden change in conditions, but so far the voices he could hear were more bemused than worried. The fog hadn’t risen quite enough to turn the day to night; even before his desperate pitch-and-rag patch job, it had been leaching out of his pocket much more slowly than it had done when he’d opened the container properly the night before. But already the air was suffused with the fug, the daylight having to work hard to filter through the thickening yellow-gray, and if the particular behaved like it did last night, congealing and expanding, mounting to the heights of the houses and beyond . . . well, in that case, the midday darkness was coming, and then there would be panic.

  Hugo took a moment to remember where he was and plan a route; then he navigated carefully to the Deacon and Morvengarde office where he’d placed his order.

  He lost his way twice and detoured three times to help others who’d misplaced the familiar streets of the Harbors in the smog, so it took him an hour to get there. The air was thick and dark by the time he opened the door and stepped into the warmth and light of the office to find the same young woman who’d helped him place his order sitting at the desk.

  The woman wore fog glasses, but they were pushed up on her forehead as she worked. Hugo pushed his up too and closed the door on the darkness.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Hugo held up the broken box, from which yellow fog was still seeping. “The container is broken, and I can’t put the fog back. How quickly can I get a replacement?”

  The woman took the box gingerly and examined it. “We didn’t ship it to you this way, did we?”

  “Well, no. It was in my pocket and someone ran into me.”

  “I thought as much.” The clerk eyed the miasma leaking sluggishly out and pooling on the office floor, then held out the box. “Take this outside, please, and I’ll write up the order for you.” And she named a price almost as high as the amount Hugo had paid to get the fog in the first place.

  He stared, shocked. “I can’t afford that.”

  “Then I’m afraid you can’t have another container.”

  “But the fog won’t stay in anymore! The city’s drowning in it. These people aren’t accustomed to this sort of fog. They’ll go out of their minds!”

  She made a condescending face. “Hardly our fault, as you admit you broke the container yourself.”

  He dredged up a memory of the enclosure that had come with the box. “But the paper in the parcel said not to hesitate to contact Deacon and Morvengarde if they—it—you—can be of further assistance!”

  “Which you have done. Good on you.” She coughed delicately, then again, but much less daintily. The fog he’d brought in with him was beginning to fill the room.

  Hugo stared, then sputtered, “I’ll—I’ll tell them it came from you! I’ll tell the papers, the mayor—”

  The clerk shrugged. “We have no liability here. We only sell the fog. It’s up to the buyer to be responsible with it. In fact . . .” She turned to a cabinet behind the desk and took a paper from it. “Yes, here’s your original order. I believe you mentioned you wanted the fog for reasons of homesickness, which designates your particular fog as a panacea and makes this purchase a medicinal one. As you see here”—she held out his form and pointed—“you yourself signed and acknowledged that Deacon and Morvengarde is not responsible for unwanted side effects of medicinal products. I think,” she said deliberately as she refiled the order form, “that if you were to step forward and admit that you let loose this fog on Nagspeake, things would not—ahem—go well for you.”

  From the sharp look that accompanied her words, Hugo couldn’t be sure whether she meant things wouldn’t go well for him with his neighbors in Nagspeake, or whether she meant things wouldn’t go well for him with Deacon and Morvengarde. Or maybe that was just the miasma, obscuring her face and making it look more threatening than she meant it to. That was another thing the fog could do.

  “Now,” the young woman continued, folding her hands on her desk in a businesslike fashion, “I am happy to order you a replacement box, if you’re able to pay. If not, please take that mess out of my office immediately.” She waved a hand, half gesturing toward the door and half fanning the seeping effluvium away from herself.

  Hugo, who wel
l knew what a pea-souper could do even indoors, got an idea. “I’m not going anywhere until you order me another box, and free of charge.”

  “No,” the clerk said, trying to stifle a cough.

  Hugo shrugged and sat down in the chair opposite her desk.

  “Deacon and Morvengarde has no responsibility—”

  “I’m a customer,” Hugo protested. “I’m unhappy with my purchase.”

  “That would perhaps count for something if you hadn’t ordered and received exactly what you wanted,” she argued, blinking hard as the level of yellow fog began to rise and the room began to fill. “And if you hadn’t signed a form taking all responsibility yourself.”

  “And that,” Hugo said, pulling his fog glasses down over his eyes, “might count for something if I wasn’t willing to sit here and ruin your office until you fix things.”

  The young woman reluctantly pulled her own glasses on. “If you’re unhappy with the service you’ve received,” she said, climbing onto her chair and stepping from there onto her desktop in order to keep her chin above the level of the miasma, “perhaps you’d like me to escalate things to my employer.”

  There was an edge to her voice that made it sound less like an offer and more like a warning. Still, “Certainly,” Hugo said, tying his pocket handkerchief around the lower half of his face and climbing onto his own chair just to keep them at roughly the same height.

  The clerk glared at him as she tied a handkerchief over her mouth. “I’ll call Mr. Morvengarde if you like,” she said, her voice slightly muffled, “but I wouldn’t advise it.” And despite having to cough a bit as she spoke, it was perfectly clear this time that “I’ll call Mr. Morvengarde if you like” was definitely a threat. He decided he emphatically did not want to meet the young woman’s employer. Still, perhaps it needn’t come to that.

  Hugo nodded. “All right.” Then he looked around the darkening room. The fog had risen over the level of the lamp on the woman’s desk, and now what had been a bright and cozy light was muted to a dim glow, changed from a warm sun to no more than the hint of a faraway hidden moon on a cloudy night. It had gone from day to night in the office, just that quickly.

  “How long will that take?” he asked quietly. “Is he here?”

  “No,” the young woman said at last.

  “I can wait,” Hugo said.

  The two of them looked at each other.

  She hacked up a series of coughs. Then she sighed. “All right.” She climbed down, muttering. Then, louder, she said, “Ordering won’t do the job, anyway. It would take another week for it to get here. And they’d take the cost out of my salary,” she added mutinously. “But I can tell you where to find a new container here in town, if you’ll just promise to leave.”

  Hugo heard her pulling open drawers, though he couldn’t see anything at all. “But the instructions said never to put it in anything but the box it came in.”

  “I know that’s what they say,” the woman said, and there was the sound of a pen scratching on paper. “They say that because it’s not good business to send you to our competitors for replacement parts.” The woman’s hand appeared out of the fug, clutching a piece of paper. “I’m fairly sure this is the right address, but honestly I can barely see two inches in front of my face.”

  Hugo took the page and read the words scrawled on it. Feretory Street, Printer’s Quarter. “This is just a street.”

  “Anyone on that street can help you.” The woman’s hand appeared again, pointing desperately at the door. “Please go, will you? And if you tell them—or anyone—who sent you, I’ll kill you myself.”

  Hugo went.

  He avoided the river and cut through the woods that carpeted the hill to the northeast. It was certainly a very long route to take to get from the Quayside Harbors to the rest of Nagspeake, but the Skidwrack was twisty and shoaly under the best of circumstances, and he didn’t trust anyone to navigate even their home waters in the kind of pea soup he was pouring out. Plus, although Hugo was trailing fog behind him, the woods and inlets ahead still had perfect visibility.

  It took what felt like hours before he reached the outskirts of the artisan’s district called the Printer’s Quarter. He was thirsty and tired, but he didn’t dare stop anywhere for even a moment longer than it took him to ask for directions. The quicker he moved on, he thought, the less fog he would leave behind and the longer it would take for it to congeal to fill whatever space he’d been in. Not to mention, with the particular spilling out as if something in his vest was on fire, Hugo was getting some strange looks.

  He found Feretory Street as afternoon began to stretch toward evening. It was the street of the Reliquary Makers.

  Now, a thing that Hugo, not being from Nagspeake, did not know, was that there had been a time when the city had been full of holy men and women, and then a time when a plague had taken them all. For some years after that, not long before Hugo had arrived, it had been the fashion to carry relics of those holy folk. But of course it would never have done to carry a charred crumb of a dead man’s fingerbone about in one’s pocket like a stray penny, and so reliquaries became all the rage: special purpose-made containers meant to house those precious miraculous bits and pieces. They could take any shape or style imaginable to accommodate any sort of relic, and they were crafted by jewelers, by clockmakers, by cabinetmakers and coffin builders, by glassblowers and potters and every kind of artist. Most of the reliquary makers eventually found workshops and studios on Feretory Street.

  When Hugo arrived and started to read the signs that hung over the doors up and down the lane, he began to think he understood why he had been sent that way. Of course his replacement box would have to be a container made to hold something miraculous. Trailing his wake of fog, the boy headed for the nearest of the workshops.

  This one happened to belong to a man called Gaz, who cast his reliquaries in silver metal set with windows of Roman glass for peeking in at the holy object inside. When Hugo entered, he found Gaz deep in conversation with a customer. Afraid of lingering too long, Hugo started to turn away and head back to the door with the fog swirling at his feet. But Gaz, who was perhaps eager to be finished with this specific piece of business, caught the boy’s eye and held up a single finger. Wait.

  While the maker of reliquaries concluded his business, Hugo roamed the workshop, peeking into display cases of reliquary jewelry—rings, pendants, pocket-watch cases—and glancing over the presentations of bigger objects—trinket boxes, curio cases, even bookshelves—made to hold larger relics. At last, as Hugo paused to peer down at a box the size and shape of a sarcophagus, the artisan raised his voice to a bark. “I tell you, sir, there is nothing to be done without the winder. I can work with the spring you’ve got here rather than the piece specified by the original plans, but it changes the works. I have explained it and explained it. If you still don’t understand, you will simply have to take my word for it. If you don’t believe me, you are welcome to take your requirements to a different reliquarist.”

  “We both know you’re the only one who can assemble the device,” the customer, a tall man with a single bright blue eye, said coldly.

  “Then come back with a winder.” The reliquary maker stepped pointedly around the counter. “In the meantime—” He coughed, frowned, and noticed for the first time the smog rising from the general direction of Hugo. “I have another customer who has been very patient.”

  The blue-eyed man took a deep breath—too deep, considering the worsening air quality in the room—opened his mouth to argue, and hacked up a lungful of fog instead. He collected a handful of objects from the countertop and stowed them in pockets around his person, then yanked a handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it over his nose and mouth as he stormed from the room, leaving Hugo looking helplessly at the reliquary maker as he observed the curling, clabbering fog with curiosity.

  “Interesting,” said Gaz. “Is this the relic that needs keeping?”

  “I haven
’t got a relic,” Hugo said. “I’ve got a particular. A pea-souper. A proper London fog.” He took the cracked and pitch-wrapped glass vessel from his pocket. “It came in this box, but someone hit me and it was broken, and now I can’t put it back or stop it spreading.”

  Gaz waved the boy over to the counter. He took a jeweler’s glass from his pocket and fitted it to his right eye, then carefully unwrapped the kerchief and peeled away the pitch-stained rag. Immediately the fog began to pour forth in earnest. “Oh, my,” the reliquary maker said with a laugh. He dropped the loupe back in his pocket, replaced the seal, then turned to a wall of cabinets behind him and took a jar of thick gold liquid from one and a small paintbrush from another. He uncorked the jar and, working rapidly, unwrapped the box again and painted a line of the gold substance along the crack.

  “That will hold for a few minutes, at least,” he said, corking the jar and setting the brush on top of it. He lifted the box, screwed the jeweler’s glass back into one eye socket, and looked at the roil of fog. “I think you’re wrong,” he said at last. “If this isn’t a relic now, it may ripen into one someday. But it hardly matters. Whoever sent you to us was right. Reliquary glass is what you want to hold the stuff. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m the man for the job.” He coughed again. The sickly yellow fog had reached about the level of the countertop.

  “Why?” Hugo asked. “The longer this takes, the more danger people will be in.”

  “I can quite imagine,” Gaz said. “But you have come to an artisan quarter, and while it is true that anything may be a reliquary if it holds a relic, on Feretory Street we take a certain amount of pride in crafting the perfect vessel for each precious thing brought to us.” He reached for a bell on the counter and rang it three times. “But don’t worry. The person you want is my apprentice, Edita.”