The Foundling's Tale, Part Three: Factotum

by D M Cornish

  “Well, I . . . ah—,” the young factotum began, but was happily overborne by the sickly Frangipanni.

  “For the true teratologist and her devoted servant the contest with the monster is too serious to be so lightly treated,” she declared imperiously in Rossamünd’s defense, a faint Gottish lift in her accent.

  “You would surely know, Franny,” Avarïce responded. “I have never seen a more serious teratologist than you, and you never laugh at the pantos.”

  The young skold stared at her coldly, coughed feebly and said nothing.

  Unable to goad her, Avarïce turned to the young factotum. “So tell us, Master Factotum,” she demanded happily. “Tell us of the Branden Rose.”

  So began an assault of questions.

  “What is she like to work for? Is she overly harsh?”

  “Well, she is not overly taut,” Rossamünd tried.

  “Does she pay well?” This from Eusebus.

  To this Rossamünd just frowned, yet their eagerness was undiminished.

  “Is she as careless of men as ze pamphlets say?”

  Dumbfounded, all he could think to say was, “She is a private woman . . .”

  “What first stance does she prefer? Procede sinister or procede dexter? Or does she do away with such formality and adopt perto adversus?”

  “I—”

  “I knew it! Perto adversus! Like any fighter with a proper, modern mind ought.”

  “How many effreins—nickers—has she killed?”

  At this he shrugged. “A lot, certainly . . .”

  “I heard she marks her arms with little crosses; is that true?” Avarïce pressed, and went straight on without an answer. “I shall do just the same upon my first kill—none of these vulgar so-called noble marks more common fighters get.”

  “Does she add anything . . . well, additional to her treacle?” Rookwood inquired knowingly.

  Rossamünd could not think of what additional part might be so infamously added to treacle, beyond sweet-lass.

  “Ah yes!” Avarïce added. “Some of Sinster’s children like to have sang egregia or extract of goat weed put in their plaudamentum,” she said with all the authority of a genuine factotum, “or replace xthylistic curd with lard of Nmis.”

  “Oh . . .” Rossamünd scowled, recognizing these parts as those that, though they went to make a person brave and strong, were dangerously habit-forming and spoiled a person’s soul. “No, nothing beyond the proper list.”

  “Were you zere when zis Licurius fell?” Trudgette asked, her voice low and shaking with scarce-contained enthusiasm.

  Not at all willing to explore such a memory publicly, Rossamünd simply stared at her.

  Rookwood intervened. “Come! Let us not swamp the fine fellow with our zeal!”

  That very moment, on a street of narrow-fronted countinghouses and clerical suppliers, the takeny overtook a gaggle of dolly-mops on their way to night-working mills and spinning halls, working even through a Domesday. Each was dressed in bright versions of maid’s clobber, laughing and chatting and accosting any awkward fellow unfortunate enough to be in their path. Leaning far out from the window, Eusebus tipped his hat to them and sang loud and clear:

  Dance with a dolly with a hole in her stocking,

  a hole in her stocking, a hole in her stocking . . .

  To this the laboring-girls shrieked friendly taunts.

  “Come down here, my sweet, and we’ll dance ye!”

  “Ahh, modern girls.” Eusebus beamed, at which his friends laughed heartily, and they passed on.

  Though Rossamünd could have with fair accuracy found north, after only fifteen minutes of the carriage’s mazing progress in the dark and the increasing fog down rows of storehouses and shipping clericies, he had little notion of where they arrived. Now that the carriage was still, saturnine tollings of floating hazard bells could be heard lolling on the waves—some near, some far, speaking of his proximity to the sea. Indeed, the sweet vinegar stink and the pocked precipice of the Stunt Veil sea wall confirmed it. Across the gloomy street stood a lonely house, four stories tall and built on the harbor’s edge right into the sea wall. A green bright-limn hung above its cherry-red painted front door, one of the few lights visible in the miry night.

  “What is this?” Rossamünd asked skeptically as they huddled from the damp beneath its eaves.

  “The Broken Doll, my fine fellow!” Rookwood proclaimed cheerfully.

  “The merry end of the night,” Eusebus added, peering through water-splashed lenses. “Vittles, vino and gaming vices.You’d better hope Droid is smiling down upon you.”

  Droid? Rossamünd frowned. He instinctively looked up to locate this heavenly light and was foiled by the obstructing cloud, a cloying roof on the night.

  “How could Droid not smile on such an illustrious young man?” Rookwood returned, grinning at him grandly.

  A correct answer from Eusebus to the rough challenge through an iron lattice at the top of the crimson portal had the six admitted by sleek-looking door wards in deep green soutaines. Led down a long obverse as red as the front door, Rossamünd felt shrewd observation from the row of grilled loophole slits on either hand.Through double doors of dark green they were brought into a suddenly swelling din. Here was a wide room of gilt furnishings, confidentially lit by large paper lanterns of white and vermilion, both walls and floor blood-red much as the gun deck of a ram, as if wild and splattering violence was expected. Folk of all stations gathered about oval tables to play each other at cards, lots and calling games. Coins sat in unequal count by each player—golden sous, oscadril billions, grassus from the Gottlands, silvery sequins, larger carlins, Hergott doubles, strange foreign counters of unusual shapes—and with them wads of folding money. Thick and uncomfortably tepid, the atmosphere was heavy with suppressed anger and naked greed.

  Chanceries—gambling houses—were illegal in Boschenberg; surely it was the same in Brandenbrass?

  Gaggles of admiring spectators collected wherever aristocratic clients played, oohing and ahhing at the twists and tricks, calling encouragements and commiserations as they sought to ingratiate themselves with their chosen sponsor. In his brief review, Rossamünd spotted a wit dressed in an unremarkable gray soutaine, his entire face spoored with a thick blue arrow; a sagaar wrapped in tight hide, wearing the mask of a white horse and gently rocking from foot to foot in the restless motion of the perpetual dance; and several pistoleers with their telltale curling mustachios. While he watched, there came a confused roar of dismay and delight. Cards were thrown down in disgust while one happy fellow in a high periwig gathered his winnings.

  Ear bent to Rookwood’s brief instruction, a footman in deep verdigris took the six on through the clamor and up broad red stairs to a smaller, quieter room arranged with a trio of gaming tables. One green wall was almost entirely formed of tall grated windows that peered north out on the rain-washed spectacle of Middle Ground at night. Harbor lights glowed dully, clustered in terrestrial constellations of blue and white and the occasional red. In one corner a highwigged quartet of string-fiddlers sat playing gentle music for the quieter collection of clientele gathered about each table.

  “Ahh,” Frangipanni declared with a thin, rare smile of pleasure at the sweet melody.

  “Hmm, yes, always like a snip of Stumphelhose,” Rookwood added, naming the supposed composer and smug in his cultural enlightenment.

  “It is Greenleaf Whit, actually . . . ,” Frangipanni corrected with a derisive sniff and a slight unhealthy wheeze while the other three laughed.

  “Ah . . .” The white-haired gent’s face twisted to collect itself against embarrassment.

  “Don’t worry, my man,” Eusebus smirked, patting Rookwood on the shoulder. “It is easy enough to confuse the two; one is a disciple of the other, after all.”

  “Certainly,” the other returned tightly, then quickly went to sit at the available table standing by a massive white hearth taller than a man. “I’m always ardently fon
d of the fire here . . . Perfectly distinct and excellently warm!”

  “You are not playing?” Avarïce inquired of Rossamünd, noticing him hanging back by the door as she took her seat.

  “No, miss, I will just watch,” he answered, recalling with a twinge of melancholy the friendly games of pirouette and lesquin he joined with Threnody and the lighters of Wormstool, where winners and losers traded only chores. “I might sit a hand for favors but not for money.”

  “Whoever heard of such a thing!” Avarïce returned.

  “Perhaps he is shrewd enough to know that Droid is not in a smiling way for him,” Eusebus interjected with a sardonic smirk and an understanding wink to Rossamünd.

  The observation held some merit, for Rossamünd had never won a single hand with the Wormstool lighters. “I am not very good at cards,” he concurred.

  “Sit with us anyway, Master Rossamünd,” Rookwood murmured in his ear. “We shall teach you proper carding.”

  “We surely will, my man,” Eusebus declared winsomely to the young factotum. “Droid and I are poor friends when I sit the table, so we can lose together, you and I.”

  At such an invitation, Rossamünd consented, and while food was ordered—pullet and ramsin broth, slices of warmed vinegar pie and bottles of zin—he watched the fall of cards.

  The game they preferred was called flout, where—from what Rossamünd could fathom by the incomplete instruction he received—low cards were high and a player had to bluff his or her way to success. When he finally joined, he kept his face as blank as possible, betting small and losing small and wishing he had a falseman’s eyes. Rookwood and Trudgette seemed best at the bluff, winning almost as much as each other, and despite himself, Rossamünd was drawn into the play, sipping his never-empty glass of vin with excitedly careless frequency. By the fourth round, the pot in the middle growing and growing until it was up to nigh on thirty sous, only Rookwood and Trudgette had stayed in too, their own hands spread before them, the want-to-be fulgar already triumphant with red hag and both crocidoles.

  Gaze vibrating and unfocused, Rossamünd looked at his hand: red selt, black selt and a black hag—it could not get any lower. Nervously, he laid down his ask—his bet—small as always. Then, rather unceremoniously, he slapped his cards down on the black velvet tabletop to a collective gasp.

  Astounded faces blinked in turn at him and at his play.

  He had won!

  “Ah-hah!” Rookwood exclaimed, clapping him heartily on the back. “Well done, that fellow! Droid smiles on you after all!”

  Astonished, Rossamünd beheld the pile of silver and golden and crisp papery loot.

  Smiling through their teeth, Rookwood’s friends tried to appear as enthusiastic as their white-haired friend over Rossamünd’s astounding win.

  Perceiving this, the young factotum summoned a footman and asked for more drinks and a dish of the best taffies and glairs for them all.

  “Perhaps our new friend might better like the entertainments below . . . ,” Avarïce offered, only somewhat mollified at his largesse, her voice heavy with suggestion.

  “Um . . . yes, certainly.” Rookwood rose. “Collect your earnings, Master Bookchild; allow me to show you the other delights here.”

  “I shall come with you,” Eusebus declared. “I always do better at dogging than the table, anyway . . .”

  Gathering his winnings by shaking handfuls into the ample pockets of his gorgeous new coat, Rossamünd followed the two young men out. Going by stairs to the floor below, his two hosts led him along a broad passage and down a double flight right into the foundations of the Broken Doll.

  “If my sire had sent me to the abacus to learn counting as I had wished for, rather than the athenaeum,” Eusebus whispered drolly to Rossamünd on the way, “I would do better at the table, I am sure.”

  “Certainly, Master Euse,” came Rookwood’s quiet rejoinder. “Yet if you were a mathematician they would never let you within sight of a table.”

  “So the Lots have spoken, then!” his lanky friend retorted. “Like my nanny-pander used to sing me:

  Multiplication is vexation,

  Division is as bad

  The Rule of Three doth puzzle me

  And practice drives me mad!

  Alas, I am a student of nature now. Better dogging for me, brother!”

  The pair of young swells laughed as they halted two floors lower before a pair of heavyset footmen standing guard over an ironbound door. One footman was holding the portal open for a couple emerging from the dark beyond, the woman in her tentlike finery clearly upset, hiding her blotched cheeks behind a frilled kerchief. “Why did you bring me here?” she was demanding, voice tremulous. “Why did you bring me here? I’ll never be able to forget that poor—” A sob rendered the next few words unintelligible. “I’ll be telling Mother—make no mistake, sir!”

  Her partner in neat velvet frock coat was bent about her, muttering rapid apologies. “I thought it might be a lark, a variation on the usual salons . . . The Archduke himself is rumored to come here on occasion—even owns a share here! And you so often complain of the tedium of our usual settings . . . Don’t tell your mother—we shall go to Sachette’s next vigil’s eve and you shall order whatever you will from the vin-compte . . .” He gave Rossamünd a brief, almost imploring look, as if the young factotum might somehow relieve him of his distress.

  “The night was already started?” Eusebus enquired of the doorman when the troubled pair had moved on.

  “It’s yer happy ev’ning,” one footman replied, looking them up then down. “The first bout’s already begun and we was about to lock the doors and keep everyone safely shut in. But for such select young gents we’ll make an exception.” He smirked, with a touch to his forelock. “You’d best gallop along, sirs, if you want to make it for the next bout. Hope you like long stays, ’cause we won’t be letting you out ag’in till half the bouts are done—can’t have folks strolling in and out all night as they please,” he concluded.Then, with narrow and meaningful scrutiny to Rookwood’s fine pistols, he added, “Them irons better be filled with sack.”

  Rookwood made a face as if to say, Since when are they not? and passed the fellow a flashing silver coin.

  Ogling the fine cut of Rossamünd’s clobber, the other footman let him by with a wink.

  Rossamünd gave a puzzled nod and hurried through.

  Immediately beyond they found a tight descending stair—almost a furtigrade—leading to another equally black door. Rookwood pulled noisily on the door’s brazen knocker.With a subdued thump the door opened and a young thin-faced doorman stepped out, all polite smiles and expectation. He raised a hand. “I am afraid you must wait, sir.”

  Through the doorway behind him was a dark blank like the throat of some ravenous sea-nicker. A tingle of sorrow shivered down Rossamünd’s backbone—an almost threwdish kind of distress. Here?

  A tiny bell made its tiny silvery tinkle, and they were let onward down a closely spiraling stair of stone, its walls covered with black leather dimpled and glistening. Smelling strongly of subterranean chalkiness and animal hide, the air here grew decidedly colder with every curve down. Rossamünd could hear the bubble of water through the leather and rock, and he imagined the immemorial currents pressing against eroded brickwork without.Were they under the harbor itself?

  “Have you been dogging before, Rossamünd?” Rookwood asked chattily.

  “Ah, no, sir, I have not . . . ,” he answered, beginning to feel out of place. “What is it?”

  “Ahh, you shall see. The night ends on a high note for you, sir!”

  Achieving the bottom, they passed along a long brick passage lit with oil-burning cressets whose heat made the lime-painted walls sweat. Heavy-proofed men regarded them searchingly as the tunnel took them toward cheering: angry, almost hungry and unwontedly wild.With every yard the threwdish grief waxed, becoming a great weight of confusion and distress and frustrated rage. What manner of event could produce s
uch a terrible cacophony of soul and sound?

  “Come along, Mister Bookchild.” Rookwood grinned. “By that ovation the first fight must be ending.This is a spectacle one of your caliber and trade will surely relish.”

  The other end stepped onto a wooden boardwalk that made a circuit behind a whole edifice of stall-boxes, very similar to those at the Hobby Horse. A great array of people were sitting in them: high and low, rich and poor, teratologist and naivine, thrust rudely together, all hollering at whatever was occurring below them with singular fascination. As Rossamünd observed, the whole mass erupted into a great whooping cheer, hands flung up, little tabs of paper flying and falling like the rare snows of deep Hergott winters.

  “The cubes bet in a frenzy and the pigeons watch in high spirits!” Eusebus cried, looking happily to the celebrating crowd of said cubes—the true gamblers—and pigeons—the mere spectators. “Excellent evidence for an excellent night!”

  A woman in thick face paint and a too-tight stomacher-dress greeted the older two with a saucy curtsy as if she knew them well and passed small white-daubed paddles to them. Rookwood shouted something in her ear, and she thrust a paddle into Rossamünd’s grasp, crying, “Goodly evening, little lordling. Wave your pug to pose your stake! Chance your gooses wisely!”

  Bemused, the young factotum took the pug and inched forward in the wake of Rookwood’s and Eusebus’ passage through the throng until they came to a high balustrade.

  “The dogs!” Rookwood held out a presenting hand, eyes twinkling with excitement, while Eusebus pushed along the front row of the stalls to find seats.

  Full of bawling, exuberant souls, some clapping each other on the back and others with face in hands, the stalls ran about the entire circumference of a large quadrangle, going up and down for several more stories. Below them all was a square pit cleft in halves by what appeared to be a brown iron gutter; new blood was soaking into the hard-packed floor. A proud-looking fellow strutted about its circumference, heavy chain gripped in fist, leading an enormous brindle tykehound, its gagged muzzle dripping gore, its still heaving flanks rucked and bleeding. Flowers and coins and paper rained on the brute stupid beast—half dead from whatever ordeal it had just faced—and its beaming owner. A servant came out to grovel for the spoils, and the man and his dog exited through a heavy iron door in the far corner to the farewell of one final hurrah.