The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

And Negret smiled apologetically, for Jessamy Butcher had been the one person he had not wanted to overhear him singing this song. But there was no anger in her face, so he tied a knot and bit off the thread, stood, and delivered the finished book to Sorcha, along with a brief kiss on her cheek. Then, perching on the arm of his chair, he began to whistle the song that the music box with the crossroads scene would never play again, and Maisie’s heart leaped into motion just as it had when she’d heard these same notes played the day before.

  Jessamy’s heart did a different kind of lurch, but she forced herself to ignore it. “And the second thing she will have is even rarer than the gift of that song,” she said, compelling warmth into her voice. “And that is nothing. No secrets left to keep, nothing to lose, nothing held back, and nothing she wants more than to beat the Devil. And so she will dance.” She held out her hands to Maisie, and, when Maisie reached back with her own, Jessamy lifted her right up off the ground and twirled the girl in her arms again. “I don’t know for certain that there is any dance the Devil cannot do, and I no longer lay wagers myself. Still, if I did, I would bet that if there is a dance outside his capability, it’s this kind.” She bent the laughing girl back in a dip. “A dance of nothing: nothing hidden, nothing held back—nothing, perhaps, but joy. And if Petra had forgotten how to put those sorts of steps together—many of us do, you know, as we grow—you will have taught her again yourself.”

  Maisie sighed with happiness, even though she knew Jessamy had it exactly backwards. The right dance would be everything, not nothing—but perhaps that was how the same steps done by different people could look so very dissimilar while still being technically the same dance. Or the same story told by two people could seem like such entirely different accounts, like the two versions of Amalgam’s tale of the enchanted house in the pines.

  “And when she is finished,” Jessamy continued, spinning Maisie back down onto her own two feet, “all the dead and dark things of the jury will declare the winner they have chosen unanimously. ‘The lady takes the game,’ they will say in voices like the tomb, like the wind, like the groan of ice against the hulls of ghost ships—voices with an arcane music to them that will make poor Mr. Masseter’s head, always tortured by patterns, ache for days. But he will cheer through it. And the Devil will rise in a fury, because although he is bound to abide by the rules of his own wagers, there’s no law that says he’s got to be a gentleman about it. But when at last he has finished venting his fury, our friends will be left standing tall at the crossroads. And someday, someone will tell their story, as I have told it to you.”

  “But differently,” Maisie put in, “because it will have happened.”

  “Yes.” Jessamy nodded, then tilted her head as she considered. “Or perhaps the truth is more complicated. If, as Mr. Masseter told us, time is not a single thread, then perhaps, somehow, in some way, it already has happened. Or perhaps it’s simpler still. Perhaps in some way it already has happened, merely because I’ve told it.”

  Maisie nodded. She looked out at the Skidwrack through the dwindling rain for a long time. The adults in the room behind her waited, none of them quite willing to walk away, just in case, in spite of everything that Jessamy had said, in spite of the music Negret was still whistling, the girl broke her reverie and darted out to fling herself onto the river.

  At last, Sorcha came to stand beside Maisie at the door and took her hand. “Think of the stories she will have when she comes back.”

  Maisie sighed and turned back toward the parlor, and the dissatisfaction on her face reminded Amalgam of the strange blend of gratification and discontent that occasionally seemed to follow even his best-told tales. Because sometimes the better the story, the greater the restlessness that comes when it ends and the listener has to go on, imagining the story continuing somewhere, but untold and out of sight.

  Then: “I’m hungry,” Maisie announced, and the spell was broken.

  “Come on, then,” Mrs. Haypotten said briskly, crossing the room and holding out a hand. “Let’s find you an apple.”

  “Cake,” the girl specified, correctly guessing that, in this moment, she could’ve asked for a marzipan turtledove in a spun-sugar tree and gotten it.

  “Cake it is,” the innkeeper’s wife agreed.

  As Maisie crossed the room to claim her dessert, Tesserian cleared his throat from the hearth. When she looked over, he nodded at the castle that now stood almost as tall as Maisie herself, with all her wooden creatures peeking from its windows and doors and porches and balconies.

  “Shall we?” he asked, pointing to a card that made up part of the very top of the cupola.

  Maisie grinned and all but pranced over to the castle. She reached out and plucked the card the gambler had indicated from its place. The others watched curiously; surely it would’ve been more effective to topple the structure by taking a piece from the foundation. But when Maisie removed the queen of puppets from its place, the castle exploded outward in all directions, including upward, as if that single queen had been anchoring the entire assemblage to the ground.

  The cards rained down as the sparks of Sorcha’s border fire had done. Except, somehow they never quite fell all the way. Caught, perhaps, in some sort of vortex, the cards swirled like confetti in the air, and Maisie twirled again, dancing this time with scores of assorted kings, queens, knaves, jesters, and saints, and a tiny menagerie of wooden beasts that paraded through the air as if they were nothing more than paper themselves.

  Jessamy watched all this from beside the glass doors, her attention divided between the child and the river. Reever Colophon came to stand beside her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

  “I wish I could have gone too,” Jessamy said. She looked down at her gloved hand, which lay against the glass of one of the French doors. “But there’s no knowing how long these hands will do what I ask them to.”

  Reever said nothing, but he held out his own palm. Jessamy considered, then put hers into it.

  “Still yours?” he asked.

  She nodded. He interlaced his fingers with Jessamy’s and glanced over his shoulder, to where Negret sat on the arm of his chair, still whistling the song that was everything and nothing, but laughing now in between lines as he watched Maisie twirl with the cards and creatures that somehow still refused to fall to the ground.

  “Will you dance, Miss Butcher?” Reever asked. When she didn’t answer right away, he leaned close to her ear and added quietly, “I promise I’ll keep your secrets.”

  She let out a long breath. “All right.”

  So one High Walker danced with the Headcutter as the other whistled the only song the Devil cannot play, and the folklorist ordered chapters in his mind and the printmaker imagined how he would carve the scene. The gambler watched his cards parade, and the captain forgot to turn his glass, and the innkeepers held hands and smiled as the Queen of Building Castles of Cards reached a hand out first to the firekeeper and then to the lady who was the avatar of the city’s wild iron, and she pulled them into the dance too. The flames in the hearth sent a flurry of sparks up like tame fireworks to illuminate the parlor as the three dancers, the youngest and the eldest of the storytellers, spun each other round and round, laughing.

  So they danced away their secrets. Outside, unnoticed, the floodwaters of the Skidwrack began to fall.

  A Note About the Clarion Books Edition

  Many of you will already be familiar with The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book from Greenglass House and Ghosts of Green­glass House, in which a mysterious guest at the Pine family’s inn shares the book with Milo during the winter holidays. I first encountered Raconteur’s and its author, Nagspeake folklorist Phineas Amalgam, back in 2010, while working on an as-yet-unpublished book called Wild Iron, the first story I ever wrote that was set in the Sovereign City. I’m delighted to present this new edition of The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book to you, complete with beautiful original art by Jaime Zollars an
d Nicole Wong, who have brought Amalgam’s book and The Blue Vein Tavern in Nagspeake circa 1930 to life as beautifully as anyone could wish.

  In the writing of The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, which would become his most famous work, it’s likely that Amalgam was inspired by Charles Dickens’ 1855 book, The Holly-Tree Inn, which shares a similar structure: guests at an inn pass the time during inclement weather by sharing tales. The combination of tales and interludes incorporates a wide range of folklore—not merely legends, myths, and fairy tales but also superstitions, riddles, ballads, dance, fortunetelling, folk art, and so forth.

  Phineas Amalgam was both a collector and a creator of lore, and in Raconteur’s he uses a combination of his own stories and older Nagspeake tales of more mysterious provenance. The gambler’s tale, “The Ferryman,” is probably derived from a poem in Aunt Lucy’s Counterpane Book (“Crossing, Crossing”); “Three Kings” is recognizable as a version of Griffin Walter’s story of the same name, occasionally anthologized in other collections of Nagspeake lore; and “The Devil and the Scavenger” is believed to come not from Nagspeake at all, but from the itinerant peddlers who have passed through the city since time immemorial. Nagspeakers will recognize the protagonist of “The Unmappable House” as half of the inseparable pair from the anonymously authored The Tales of Troublewit and Pantin, but as far as we know this is the only Pantin story in which the boy appears without his shape-shifting iron sidekick. (This story, by the way, has been the root of a number of scholarly feuds over the years. One bar near City University still has a line painted down the middle of the main room thanks to a decades-old feud between scholars who can’t agree over what it means that Phineas Amalgam wrote himself into the book as a guest at the inn and then proceeded to have his character tell a Pantin story rather than any of the tales in the book that are more recognizably his own inventions. Some believe this was his admission that he is the author of The Tales of Troublewit and Pantin. Other folklorists will hit you in the face with whatever object’s closest for even suggesting this, as almost every one of them has a pet theory about the true identity of the Troublewit and Pantin author.)

  In editing this edition, I did make one significant departure from the version Milo would have read. In my research into Phineas Amalgam for Wild Iron, I came upon a manuscript version of Raconteur’s dated 1932 in which the stories were arranged in a slightly different order than they were in the “slim red volume” Milo had been given. I have a pretty good idea why Amalgam rearranged them for that edition, but there’s evidence in his letters that suggests he regretted it. I’ve restored the 1932 order for this version. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

  Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the great debt I owe this collection for the influence it’s had on my own works set in the Roaming World. If you’d like to know more about the characters here and where to follow their trails in my other books, here are just a few suggestions. Find the man who sees the patterns in Bluecrowne and The Kairos Mechanism; in Bluecrowne and The Left-Handed Fate you can sail again with Melusine and Lowe (whose name, I’m sorry to say, Mr. Frost may have misremembered). You will find more High Walkers in The Broken Lands and lurking in the background in Bluecrowne; in Bluecrowne you will also meet an ancestor of Maisie’s and a few familiar peddlers. To find others like Jessamy, along with more tales of crossroads, read The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands; or pair The Broken Lands with Bluecrowne to meet others like Sorcha. Nagspeake’s self-aware iron is everywhere in the city, of course, but it’s most visible in The Left-Handed Fate and The Thief Knot. And lastly, many of my books are set in the Sovereign City of Nagspeake, but for peak exploring-the-place reading, you may enjoy The Left-Handed Fate and The Thief Knot most.

  Kate Milford

  Creve Coeur, Nagspeake, 2021

  Acknowledgments

  The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book might represent the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. I’ve never not had fun writing a book, but Raconteur’s required the most puzzle-work I’ve had to do while putting a thing together, and since “short” is not my forte, writing all the individual tales was both a challenge and a delight. But this book took a lot of bandwidth, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help and encouragement and support of a truly wonderful network of people.

  Firstly, always, most of all, all my gratitude and love to Nathan, Griffin, and Tess (and the auxiliary Milford team of Ed, Maxy, and Maz). I love you with all my heart. And Griffin, you were only four at the time, so you may or may not remember the night at a fancy-pants restaurant when you started to tell me about the King of Finding Things, the King of Opening Things, and the King of Tying Things, but thank you for telling me they existed and inviting me to write about them. The idea of bookbinding as fortunetelling became part of this story after Zane Morris (whose company Cradle makes notebooks from discarded materials and uses the proceeds from their sales to fund music workshops), showed me the beautiful branching thread patterns hidden in the center pages of his books. The reliquaries of Gaz of Feretory Street were inspired by actual objects made by an artist named Stan Gaz who I once met many years ago in New York. I’ve had the idea of a maker of reliquaries kicking around in my brain ever since. Dhonielle Clayton gave me the name of the inn almost a decade ago, back when we were in a critique group together. Thank you all for the inspiration. Thank you also to Chelsea Youss and Rayhan Youss, Kate Compton, Alice Mackay, and Tova Volchek for helping me find the time to do all the work of writing and revising and traveling and all the other oddball tasks that go into bringing a Nagspeake tale to life (and for occasionally taking over when, say, a cake needs to be iced). And to Gus and the very special folks at Emphasis Restaurant, Coffee RX, and Cocoa Grinder in Bay Ridge, thank you for giving folks like me in the neighborhood such great places to get stuff done. But there wouldn’t be stuff to get done without the folks who heard me talk about this oddball book I wanted to write and thought, “Hey, that sounds like a fun project,” and then proceeded to handle the business end of things. So thank you always, always, always to Lynne Polvino for taking a chance on another leap into the Sovereign City of Nagspeake with me; to Jaime Zollars for another staggeringly beautiful cover and another bit of architecture I wish I could live in forever; to Nicole Wong for bringing the tales to life so fantastically; and to Sharismar Rodriguez and Celeste Knudsen for assembling it all into such a beautiful object. Thank you to Barry Goldblatt, Dana Spector, and especially Tina Dubois for managing all the stuff that makes this career possible. Tina, I still reread your in-flight email from Thanksgiving whenever any shred of worry starts to creep in. Thank you so, so much.

  I have spent ten wonderful years working alongside the wonderful folks at McNally Jackson Books, and it’s hard to put into words how grateful I am to have been part of the family. Thank you to Sarah, Doug, Cristin, and all of my dear, dear friends. Thank you for letting me sling books with you. Thank you for all that you do. I am also hugely grateful to all the other wonderful bookstores, schools, and libraries who’ve helped my books find their readers over the years. Thank you for making me feel so welcome, and for all the work you do every day.

  And to all the readers who’ve come back to Nagspeake and the Roaming World over and over to join me on these weird adventures, I simply can’t thank you enough. To share these tales with you has been a joy and a gift for me. Roam well, my friends, until we meet again.

  Visit hmhbooks.com to find all of the books in the Greenglass House series.

  Visit hmhbooks.com to find more books by Kate Milford.

  About the Author

  Daniela Volpi Photography

  KATE MILFORD is the New York Times best-selling author of the Edgar Award–winning, National Book Award nominee Greenglass House, as well as Ghosts of Greenglass House, Bluecrowne, The Thief Knot, The Boneshaker, The Broken Lands, and The Left-Handed Fate. She is also a regular columnist for the Nagspeake Board of Tourism and Culture. She lives with her famil
y in Brooklyn, New York.

  Learn more at www.greenglasshousebooks.com

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