The Dollmaker

by Nina Allan

  He turned the shop sign over to “closed” and they walked down through the city towards the harbor. A ship had recently docked. Uniformed sailors strolled about on the quayside, laughing good-naturedly amongst themselves, as if they had not been on dry land for many months. The sun sparkled in the rigging. Amber stood and watched as two able seamen maneuvered the captain down the gangway and onto shore, a huge, burly man in a wheelchair, his naval cap jammed down tight upon his ginger curls. The lower part of his right leg was missing, the trouser folded in half and sewn together like a pocket.

  “My brother dreamed of going to sea,” Tessmond said. “My father said he’d see him hang first. He became a bank clerk instead.”

  “You never told me you had a brother,” Amber said. She felt muzzy-headed and slightly unwell. The air of the harborside smelled fishy, rancid, the way it sometimes did before a storm.

  “He died,” Tessmond said. “He killed himself.”

  Amber drew in her breath, coughing at the fish stench. “I’m so sorry.”

  “He brought the calamity down upon himself. The man he worked for was also a magister, of the rune sept. Rick swore him his allegiance and then broke his word. There could be only one end.”

  “But if he changed his mind about his devotion?”

  “You cannot change your mind, not without doing penance. The man had offered him his ring. You understand what that signifies, surely?”

  They stood silently at the rail. Amber continued watching as the seamen began unloading cargo: crates of snapping gorgons, leather sea chests bounded with iron, vast sealed containers on trestle wheels, stamped with black-and-yellow biohazard stickers. Scenes like this conjured images of older times, the great age of sail, when the seas had been considered boundless and when the act of crossing the ocean had been to dice with monsters. A world that was gone now, mostly, to be recaptured only in dreams, or by reading the diaries and memoirs of long-dead explorers.

  She turned to look at Tessmond, who was gazing up into the rigging where some small animal – a marmoset or a lemur, it was too high up to tell – capered and leaped with practiced agility from rope to rope. Tessmond seemed both there and not there, his mind far away. Contemplating the tide of history perhaps, as she herself had been doing. His handsome head, his deep-set eyes, the ruby tie-pin on his lapel – these things set him apart, she realized, as much as his shortness of stature set him apart, if not more so.

  He is not of this world, she thought. That is what draws me to him. The promise that there might be an answer. To all of it, to the pain of living. Jaen was right – it is his power I am in thrall to. He has made me weak with it.

  “How did he die?” Amber asked at last. “Your brother?”

  “He injected himself with cyanide. It was instantaneous.”

  Amber folded her arms across her chest, clutching her sides. The waters of the harbor lapped at the concrete, viscous and black, like bitumen, she thought, or some other foul liquid. Then she realized there was nothing wrong with the water, it was simply darkness falling, the night curling itself around the ebbing twilight like a black feather boa.

  That cannot be so, Amber told herself. We’ve only just eaten breakfast.

  She turned to Tessmond in consternation. His face was barely visible in the dark.

  “We will be permitted to board soon,” he said softly. “I have reserved a cabin on the aft deck. The motion is less noticeable there, or so I’ve been told.”

  She took a step backwards. “What do you mean?” she said. Her lips felt numb. “What have you done?”

  He turned then to look at her. His eyes glinted in the firelight from one of the braziers. “Our voyage will take nine months,” he said. “Our daughter will be born three days after we make landfall. You will be anxious during the final weeks – who would give birth during a sea voyage? – but all will be well. The quayside hotel in Juno will have been alerted. They will set aside rooms for us. There is a doctor in the town. Everything will be provided, just as it should be.”

  Amber looked down at herself, the flat, pure line of her belly, the modest curve of her breasts.

  “I’m not—”

  “It is time.”

  She reached out with one hand, grasping at the harbor railings to steady herself. Around them, tides of bystanders ebbed and flowed. She could not help noticing that some were carrying luggage – suitcases, bulging haversacks, tooled leather traveling cases. She heard raucous laughter, a child’s shrill cry, smelled the savory aromas of frying onions and chargrilled lobster from the smoking braziers.

  “There is something I need to tell you,” Amber said. Her teeth chattered together as she spoke, though it was a warm night, sultry even. “I should have said something sooner, I realize that, but—”

  “He waited six months,” Tessmond said. His voice was level and perfectly steady but it was impossible to mistake the fury in it, the low growl of contempt. “He searched for you everywhere. He even came to the shop eventually, though you had forbidden it. He gave up in the end. What choice did he have? Give up, or go insane. He’s a trained philosopher, after all – he considered the nature of insanity, and rejected it. He understood how dull it would be, how stultifying, to trade his freedom for the bars of an asylum. And what good would it do? You would still be gone.”

  “Don’t say he,” Amber whispered. She felt faint with disgust. “Jaen is—”

  “An emasculated cobbler’s lad with ideas above his station. Good grades at school and a clever turn of phrase will never make of him what he aspires to. You are a queen, Ambergris. You demean yourself, playing in the dirt. But then you are young.”

  “None of these things are true. I am no queen.” You’re getting me confused with the song, she thought. What happens in the end? The queen dies and the dwarf is an outcast. He must be insane.

  “Then allow me to inform you that you do not know yourself. But you will.”

  He made a grab for her wrist, but she pulled back, evading him and backing away into the crowd. She caught her heel and almost fell, but a person in the crush behind her shoved her upright again. She elbowed someone in the ribs. They cursed loudly but moved aside. Amber dived through the gap in the press of bodies and found herself at the entrance to a narrow alleyway between two warehouses. She prayed it would not lead to a dead end. It was all too easy to imagine becoming trapped in a wired compound or in the backyard of an inn, sticky with refuse from overflowing dustbins, unable to retrace her steps for fear that Tessmond would still be waiting for her back on the harborside. She had to take the chance though, she had no choice. Gasping with relief, she emerged onto an open road, somewhere north of the docklands, she thought. In truth she did not know exactly where she was and nor did she care. What mattered was that she had gained the advantage, she could get away. Tessmond stood no chance of catching her now – his bent, foreshortened legs, combined with the disproportionate weight of his torso made it impossible for him to run for more than thirty seconds without becoming breathless. Even an hour ago, the idea that she might have exploited his disability in this way would have horrified her but now she rejoiced in it, she felt exalted.

  She dashed up the road, the hard night air sawing at her throat, the grogginess she had been feeling earlier forgotten. She ran with long strides, relishing her swiftness, slowing down only when she reached a brightly lit intersection, a small parade of shops that signaled to her that she was entering one of the outlying residential districts beyond the northern cordon. She still did not recognize her exact whereabouts but the lights and storefronts, the sight of people walking about were enough to reassure her she was bound to come to a tram stop eventually.

  From there she could make her way – where? She could not return to the shop, not even to collect her belongings, it was too much of a risk.

  She would go to Jaen. She would not be allowed in the prentice quarters, not aft
er sundown, but Jaen would be permitted to speak with her, to take tea with her in the canteen even. They would talk, decide what to do, then Amber would go to a hotel for the night. She would be safe there, and everything would look different in the morning. She had a camp bed at the studio, she could easily stay there until she found something more permanent…

  She stood at the curbside, waiting to cross. On the opposite side of the road, a woman wandered the length of the mall and back again, passing from storefront to storefront, killing time. Her red hair blazed in the light from the streetlamps, the color and density so like Amber’s own hair that she could not help but feel comforted, experiencing that strange frisson of kinship that is always ignited in the presence of the familial or the familiar. It was not just the vibrant redness of the woman’s hair that made her feel this way – something in the erectness of her posture, the briskness of her movements gave Amber the sense that she did indeed know her, that here was someone she could turn to, at least to ask for directions to the nearest tram stop.

  As she reached the other side of the street, a heavyset man clutching several carrier bags printed with the name of a citywide liquor store cannoned into her, jabbing her painfully in the side with his elbow. He turned abruptly to stare at her. His skin looked blotchy and moist, with yellowish, ugly bruising beneath one eye.

  “Watch where you’re going, can’t you,” he barked. “Are you blind?”

  She caught a whiff of his breath – cheap lager and pickled onions. “Sorry,” Amber said, but he was already gone. She made her way to where the woman was standing, before the window of a small boutique selling leather goods and gift items. As Amber edged closer, trying to find the right words to frame her question, the woman performed a strange but familiar gesture, raising her right arm towards the window and thrusting it forwards into the light from the display.

  She’s trying to look at her watch, Amber thought, only she can’t because it’s caught in her coat sleeve.

  The woman tugged off her glove and Amber saw that her fingers were deformed, twisted like a bunch of damp kindling. The watch on her wrist was gold, white dial and domed glass, the identical twin of the Aylward Tessmond had given to Amber on her name day the year before.

  The woman shifted slightly before the window, allowing Amber to catch a glimpse of her reflection. The skin of her forehead was taut and shiny, like molten plastic. Both her eyebrows had been burned away and one of her eyes was missing, or permanently closed. Her bottom lip appeared to have burst, entirely erasing the line of definition between her mouth and the lower portion of her face.

  Amber gasped aloud. The woman glanced at her sharply and recoiled.

  “You should have got away,” the woman mumbled. Her speech was slurred and barely audible, mangled by the mutilations to her mouth. “You should have listened.” Her single eye looked wet, bogged down, and after a moment Amber realized she was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” Amber said. “Sorry to bother you.” The words fell from her lips, hard as bullets. There seemed no sense to them. She stood paralyzed in front of the window, her likeness merging with the woman’s until she was unable to tell where the woman started and she left off.

  What has he done? Amber thought. What has he done to me? She closed her eyes, inhaled. When she opened them again the woman was gone. Her own perfect reflection stared back at her from the window glass, overlaid with the ghosts of hand-stitched leather satchels and silver cigarette lighters. She turned back towards the street. A bus was just pulling up outside the liquor store, illuminated from within and stately as a battleship. Its brakes groaned as it came to a standstill. Amber hurried towards it and got on. She asked for Dolmen Street, which was the stop closest to the Remarque Library. The driver nodded and released her ticket from the machine as she fumbled for change.

  The bus waited a few moments, then released its brakes and moved off into the traffic.

  * * *

  —

  “You can’t go down there, Mistress. Sorry.”

  There was police tape and crash barriers blocking the sidewalk in front of the library. The officer who spoke to her wore a hi-viz jacket and protective headgear. She looked harassed and mildly frightened. Other officers, similarly attired, were ranged along the cordoned street as far as the clock tower. A small crowd of onlookers, students mainly, stood huddled against the office buildings on the pavement opposite.

  “What’s happening?” Amber asked the officer.

  “I’m not at liberty to say, Mistress. We will be releasing information to the public as it becomes available. Until then, might I strongly suggest that you return to your place of residence?”

  “Is anyone hurt?” Amber said, but the guardswoman was already gone, striding down to join her comrades at the makeshift barrier.

  Amber hesitated, wondering if it might still be possible to gain access to the library quadrant from a different direction. You’ll get yourself arrested, Amber told herself. What good is that going to do?

  She stepped back from the barrier, moving towards the bystanders congregated beneath the tiled concrete portico of the College of Architects.

  “Does anyone know what’s going on?” she said. The eyes of the crowd turned upon her, fixing her with an expression caught midway between hostility and bemusement, as if she had spoken in the old language, or uttered an obscenity.

  Finally one of them deigned to speak to her, a skinny girl with her hair in dreadlocks, a leather haversack resting on the ground between her feet.

  “People are saying there’s been a bomb. In the catacombs.”

  “Runes, most likely,” another voice chimed in. “There are prentices trapped inside apparently, at least twenty of them.”

  The rune sept. Amber’s mind reeled in confusion. There hadn’t been a rune attack in years, not since she had come to the city, not against a public target anyway. The magisters’ endless petitioning to shut down the library had become an accepted and tedious fact of city life. But killing philosophers? Even the more extreme factions would not countenance such an action. Jaen would most likely tell her later that the rumors were just that – scaremongering.

  They had all those barriers up and it was just a broken drain, can you imagine? Typical guards’ hysteria.

  Amber craned her neck, shading her eyes against the fluorescent glare of the guards’ helmet lights, trying to see through the darkness to the library itself. There were no lamps lit in any of the windows, which was odd, but—

  Smoke rising from a hole in the Lower Tunsgate, a ragged space where a door had once been, streaks of white in the surrounding umber like old man’s beard.

  “Back, back!” The raised, terrified voice of one of the guards, then a juddering disturbance beneath her feet, as if something vast and subterranean were stretching its limbs. Then what sounded like a thunderclap, and the white noise of screams. Loose leaves of books and clumps of paper, raining down in ashen clods from a sky that stank, suddenly and unmistakably, of brimstone.

  Great flames – dragons’ breath – leaped like orange banners from the building’s burst facade. The library’s turrets seemed to be melting, crumbling away like icing sugar.

  The guards scattered. A length of police tape, untethered, bumped and flickered against the paving slabs like a cast-off snakeskin.

  “Jaen!”

  Amber screamed their name aloud, its single, jagged syllable exiting through her gullet like a twist of barbed wire. As guards spilled from the entrance quadrant Amber ducked, unnoticed by any of them, beneath the broken barrier, flinging herself towards the blazing library across the paper-strewn grass.

  West Edge House

  Tarquin’s End

  Bodmin

  Cornwall

  Dear Andrew,

  I’m allowed to make tea in my room. There’s a fridge in the first-floor lounge where I can keep milk, and also butter
and cheese if I want to make cheese on toast. I like to sit in the armchair facing the window, drinking my tea and looking out over the garden. In spring, Sylvia Passmore takes the deck chairs out of the garage and arranges them on the back patio. There are six chairs altogether, but the only people who make use of them regularly are Jackie and Diz.

  I’ve asked Jackie to come and have tea with me plenty of times, but she always says no. I think she’s afraid of my dolls. We put the kettle on in the first-floor lounge instead. Sometimes we play a game of Snap! with the pack of animal cards from the games box in the tallboy. Jackie always wins at Snap! – she’s incredibly fast. Each time she wins a point she slams down her hand on the table and laughs, as if that’s part of the game.

  It was August when I first arrived here. The fields were shimmering with heat haze.

  I was told it would be for a month. Just until you get your strength back, they said. That was twenty years ago last month.

  Of course I’m not a patient anymore, not really – I have a job here. From nine until one I work in the office, typing up the patients’ records on the computer and taking dictation from Dr. Leslie. Dr. Leslie doesn’t like the computer, even though it was he who insisted we have one.

  In the afternoons I carry on with my research into the life of Ewa Chaplin. I have been writing letters to the museums where her dolls are kept. I go over the replies and make notes. I write more letters. Sometimes I just like to reread Ewa’s stories. There is so much I don’t know yet, but I feel certain that one day all my questions will be answered.

  You asked me how I first became interested in Ewa Chaplin and I told you it was because my friend Helen was in a play based on one of her stories, but that’s not really true. I mean, it’s true about Helen being in the play, but I didn’t know the story was by Ewa Chaplin until a long time afterwards. I first saw a photograph of an Ewa Chaplin doll in Abraham Gold’s book, Costume Dolls of the Post-War Era. If you have a copy you’ll know the photograph I mean, the one called “Serena, or Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.” The doll is dressed all in black – even her petticoats are black, with gray stripes – and beside her is a rectangular wooden case, with a flute in it. The flute is just a toy but it looks like it could play, if you knew how to play it.