by Anne Nesbet
“Wait a sec,” said Maya. She was trying to figure something out. Namely: Why did she suddenly need to duck under that police tape and climb up to the theater’s door?
“What are you doing?” said Valko.
But he followed her, all the same. Ducking under police tape was really much more Valko’s cup of tea than Maya’s, under most circumstances.
“I think I must have left something in there,” said Maya as she put her hand on the door. “Why can’t I remember what?”
And the door wasn’t even locked.
Inside the hall the air was very dim. Oval glints of glass from the doors leading into the theater proper. And through those doors, a cave of darkness where that bright, bright theater had been.
“Hm,” said Valko, and she heard him rustling through the pockets of his backpack. But she was trying very hard to put her finger—to put her mind’s finger—on that missing thing, whatever it was, that had been haunting her all day. All week. In fact, since that terrible Saturday—
And then she knew what it was she was looking for, stumbling all zombie-like down the dark aisles of the Alchemical Theater.
The hourglass.
“There!” said Valko, some steps behind her, and a little puddle of yellow light started wobbling along the floor in front of her feet. He had found his flashlight. “Ever since the power went out at the embassy that night, I’ve kept a—”
“Hurry,” said Maya, interrupting. “There’s a door at the back of the stage.”
The flashlight made the rest of the dark even darker. Shadows everywhere.
“This is a little bit nuts,” said Valko. He sounded quite cheerful about it, though. “Where are we going?”
“Back here,” said Maya. “Oh, watch out, there’s more of that tape. Wait.”
She wriggled her way past the tape and through that other door. And in this part of the theater, the darkness became something almost solid. Valko’s flashlight couldn’t do much against it, just flicked to the right and left. More doors. Except for their breathing and the soft scuffing noises their careful feet made against the floorboards, there was no sound in this part of the theater. None whatsoever.
“It’s that one,” said Maya in a whisper, waving her arm toward the left end of the hall. “I remember now. Quick!”
She practically ran to that door, pushed it open even ahead of Valko’s dim light, and then stood there, looking from one sort of darkness into another. The round room. The tree. She just felt it all there in the dark, as if it had been waiting a very long time for them to arrive.
“Whoa,” said Valko, turning his flashlight this way and that. A glimpse of carved branches, the glint of amber eyes, the backs of those benches, more police tape—she couldn’t see properly from here.
“Watch out, there are steps,” said Maya as she felt her way down toward the center, where the trunk was. It was hard to see, because of the tape.
It was hard to see—because behind the tape, nothing was there.
“Turn that light off!” said Maya in distress. The light must be tricking her eyes.
“Really?” said Valko, but there was a click, and the room tumbled into blackness.
Maya felt forward with her hands, found the stump of the tree, yes, but where the hourglass had been—nothing. Her hands were as blind as her eyes.
The hourglass was gone.
And all that vague sense of loss that had been sloshing around inside her since that Saturday coalesced around this one plain fact: The hourglass was no longer there.
“It’s gone,” she said helplessly into the empty dark. “Where’d it go?”
“Hey, Maya,” said Valko. “Look up.”
It wasn’t so completely dark, after all. There were tiny stars above their heads, peeking through the branches of the wooden tree. Pointless, glittering stars.
“Valko, listen. There was an hourglass here, before,” said Maya. “I’ve got to get it back. It stole my earth.”
Valko flicked the flashlight back on, and the darkness instantly rearranged itself yet again: shadows everywhere.
“You want some old hourglass that’s been carted off by the evidence guys?”
“I want my earth back,” said Maya. “It has three grains of my earth. That’s what I want back.”
There was a pause.
“Explain how you’re figuring this,” said Valko.
“I was in this room, that Saturday! I was tricked somehow. I put my hands on the hourglass, and it sucked the earth right out of me. Not a lot of it. But still. I want it back.”
“Because—?”
Because it was supposed to be for her mother, if anybody, that hourglass. So her mother could have been safe and well, not just for now, but forever and ever. It was like an ache that wouldn’t let up, having to let go of that dream. And it was awful to think that the only mortality salted away, after all of that, was just some tiny part of Maya’s own.
And those weren’t even the only reasons. She gritted her teeth.
“Those awful people!” she said. “The Dolphin’s awful parents! You may not care, but I do. I don’t want to turn into that, with all the earth sucked out of me. I mean, I didn’t lose much of it, really. Three grains! Nothing! But what those people were willing to do to James! What they did to Cousin Louise! That terrible Uncle Fourcroy with his terrible eyes—”
—What was it that happened then?
Almost nothing.
The tiniest of rustles, off in a corner. The shadows shifting ever so slightly. Or maybe it was just Valko’s flashlight, flickering for a moment because the battery was not really very new. But whatever it was, the whole world changed.
In that instant they both became very aware of certain things, like the fact they were in a dark, dark room in a building filled with shadows. They weren’t supposed to be there, nobody knew they were in there, they were completely alone, and something was rustling in the corner.
They looked at each other, turned, and skedaddled, not even caring anymore about the noise their feet made against the floor, or the way their elbows and shins kept banging into walls, doors, the backs of chairs. They didn’t stop until they were out again on the sidewalk in front of the theater, their lungs sobbing for air and their hearts thumping like crazy.
“And oops,” said Valko, raising his head just for a millisecond. “Here comes the police.”
Indeed, a gendarme was just at that very moment wheeling around the corner, coming back to his post from wherever he’d been. He took one frowning look at Valko and Maya and warned them away from the steps with a crisp wave of his hands.
“Allez-vous en,” said the policeman. “Off you go. Nothing to see here.”
As soon as they were out of the policeman’s sight, Maya and Valko had to lean against the wall for a moment, caught somewhere between gasping for breath and laughter.
“What was that in there?”
“A rat, I guess.”
“The shadow of a rat!”
“Policeman almost caught us.”
“One half second later—”
For a time they hardly even noticed the chill in the air. But then they had caught their breaths again, and Valko took her hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.
“Well, now you know, anyway,” he said. “Your hourglass is gone. It’s probably wrapped in seven layers of plastic on a shelf in the back room of the Préfecture de Police. No one will ever see it again.”
“I just wanted my earth back,” said Maya.
Valko looked like someone imagining what a police secretary might say, if a couple of kids came up to her counter and asked for three grains of earth, left by accident in an hourglass. He opened his mouth and snapped it shut again.
“What?” said Maya.
“What do you mean, what?” said Valko, innocently. “And what’s that you’re wearing?”
It was the shiny disk of Cabinet glass on its string; it must have slipped out of her jacket when they were running away from that s
hadow in the theater. She showed him its tricks, how it could melt in her hand if she asked it to, and then in another blink of an eye be solid again.
“Very cool,” said Valko. “What’s it made of, anyway?”
And he poked a finger at it, but the disk almost seemed to flinch away; at any rate, his hand couldn’t grasp it.
“It’s shy,” said Maya.
“Shy!” said Valko. “Necklaces aren’t shy!”
But his eyes were all alive with scientific interest.
“Can’t be mercury,” he said. “It’s transparent. And what’s that thing in it?”
It was true, there was something there, trapped in the glass. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? A narrow speck of darkness, like a question mark, like a microscopic creature caught in a drop of water on a slide.
It was,
in fact,
the tiniest of salamanders.
And it looked up over its shoulder at them, looked over its shoulder and flicked its tail.
They watched it for a moment in silence, and then Maya tucked the disk of glass away, a warm mysterious circle against the bottom of her throat.
“A trick of the light,” said Valko, shaking his head with a smile.
A little bit of Lavirotte in me, thought Maya, and something in her heart fell comfortably into place.
Because some people are like that: They live in more worlds than one.
They may have dogs and friends and a wonderful, ordinary life in some wonderful, ordinary town far away—and yet in Paris they can find themselves walking in magic.
And that, in the end, is the nature of salamanders:
Salamanders are amphibious.
Author’s Note
This story is also, like its heroine, a little bit amphibious. Everything that happens is fictional, as are all of the main characters, but some of the people and places mentioned are real. Antoine François Fourcroy (1755–1809) and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) were both chemists in France in the eighteenth century. They worked together for many years, and after Lavoisier was sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution, Fourcroy (who was part of the Revolutionary government) was widely accused of having played a role in Lavoisier’s death—or at least not doing much to save the man who had been his mentor for so long.
There are some excellent books about Lavoisier, who really did have an interest in everything from guinea pigs to sheepfolding: I recommend Antoine Lavoisier: Founder of Modern Chemistry (Great Minds of Science), by Lisa Yount (Enslow Publishers, 1997), for a good introduction. The book I got the guinea pig story from (and so much else besides) is a wonderful biography by Douglas McKie: Antoine Lavoisier: Scientist, Economist, Social Reformer (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952).
The painting in the Louvre Museum that Maya’s mother loves so much was painted by Jan van Eyck around 1435 and is called The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. Look closely, and you will see the island of the Lavirottes!
And if you are lucky enough to find yourself in Paris, do try to get to 29 avenue Rapp. There is a house there you might recognize—and it really does have a bronze salamander on its door.
Acknowledgments
No book ever had better friends than this one. Its editor, Rosemary Brosnan, is my hero. She read each revision with a gimlet eye and a kind heart: Madeleine L’Engle would have called her a Teacher.
Present at this story’s birth were some particularly generous and inspirational Parisian godmothers—Tioka Tokedira, Sarah Towle, Michèle Helene, and Emma Pearson Groleau. They read the earliest drafts with wise, writerly eyes, and I am deeply grateful to them.
Sharon Inkelas, Will Waters, and Jayne Williams have been the truest of friends, not just to this book (which wouldn’t be itself without them), but also to the author, whose breath is taken away time and time again by their patience, their support, and their love.
At a critical moment, Andrea Brown came aboard to pilot the book into safe harbor. Mary Kole, Lee Naiman, and Kathleen Duey saw early versions of the story and gave sage advice. Marguerite Holloway encouraged me. My tolerant colleagues in Slavic and Film have been as tickled by my interest in magical salamanders as any colleagues could possibly be.
Marie-José Hadifé is the true Keeper of the Cabinet of Earths and the kindest of hosts; she taught us some wonderful lessons about the nature of desert glass and how to treat bee stings.
My world wouldn’t be the same without my sisters: Barbara Nesbet made me the most beautiful salamander quilt when I finished this book, and Susan Nesbet Sikuta was always the one who found the best library books when we were kids—I hope Caroline likes this one!
My mother, Helen MacPherson Nesbet, would have been thrilled to see this story in print, and doubly thrilled to read the bit about a mother dragging a kid to the Louvre. I miss her. Thanks to her and to my physicist father, Robert Nesbet, I know all too well what it feels like to be popped into schools where no one speaks your language.
Eric Naiman has strange ideas about what should go into a book, but he is the best possible person with whom to explore the world’s odd corners. Thera Naiman, Eleanor Naiman, Ada Naiman, and Jenna Archer made life in Paris complete: This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to them.
About the Author
Anne Nesbet teaches Russian literature and the history of film at the University of California at Berkeley. She lives near San Francisco with her husband, several daughters, and one irrepressible dog. THE CABINET OF EARTHS is her first novel. You can visit her online at www.annenesbet.com.
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Credits
Jacket art and lettering © 2012 by Iacopo Bruno
Copyright
The Cabinet of Earths
Copyright © 2012 by Anne Nesbet
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nesbet, Anne.
The Cabinet of Earths / Anne Nesbet. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Twelve-year-old Maya, in Paris with her family for a year, lands in the middle of the mysterious La Societé’s quest for immortality when the magical Cabinet of Earths chooses her as its next Keeper, promising to restore her mother’s health. Includes historical notes.
ISBN 978-0-06-196313-1 (trade bdg.)
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Immortality—Fiction. 3. Family life—France—Paris—Fiction. 4. Paris (France)—Fiction. 5. France—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N437768Cab 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011019392
CIP
AC
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12 13 14 15 16 LP/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
Epub Edition © November 2011 ISBN: 9780062099198
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