by Anne Nesbet
“Look! Here’s that bizarro edge in the air again,” said Valko, pulling Maya right through it. “Farther away than last time, I think. I’ll just mark it really fast. And did you see what’s happening to that bench back there? Sheesh. Not to mention, we’re pretty late for your Cousin Louise.”
He paused, that interested look lighting up his eyes a bit as he studied the street behind them.
“It really can’t get through,” he said thoughtfully. “See that?”
Maya did see: the shadow leaning against that invisible wall in the air; trying, trying to writhe its way through. It made her feel a little sick.
“Like a fish tank for shadows,” said Valko. “But let’s go, or your Cousin Louise will pop us into an aquarium of her own.”
Pauline Vian was already ensconced in the backseat of Cousin Louise’s fluorescent-green Peugeot when it pulled up in front of the Davidsons’ building. Cousin Louise leaped out of the driver’s seat with all the showmanship of one of those people on old TV shows revealing the gorgeous dining set You Can Win.
“My goodness,” said Maya’s mother as she leaned a little against the nearest wall. She had come down to see them off, and to see for herself Cousin Louise’s new and astonishing car. “What an extraordinary color.”
“Allons-y!” said Cousin Louise, pleased as punch. “Packages and picnics into the trunk! Children into the car! Castles await!”
It was a bit of a squish in the backseat, and Maya ended up in the middle, so that Pauline and James could have windows to look out, which meant that Maya spent the next hour or so catching mere glimpses of tall buildings and busy intersections and edges of roadways, all while trying very hard not to think about the things going slightly wrong back there in the part of the universe nearest to the Bulgarian embassy—or about how carsick she was beginning to feel.
“Wow! The needle really jumps around when we turn corners,” said James on her left. “Look.”
Maya shook her head. Even opening her eyes was beginning to be a chore, but closing them wasn’t good, either.
“Whatever is that?” said Pauline from Maya’s other side. “Oh, the little compass toy!”
“We’re going to find the—what pole did you say, Valko? It was fancier than the one where the penguins live.”
“South-Southeast,” said Valko, looking back from the front seat. “Maya, are you all right?”
“Fine,” said Maya, spitting the word out as quickly as she could so that she could clamp her lips shut again.
“That sounds like a girl in urgent need of a pastille au citron,” said Cousin Louise, as she veered left into traffic. “Be so kind, Valko, as to open the little compartment just in front of you—you’ll see a small tin. Lemon drops. Voilà.”
“Okay, Maya, try this,” said Valko, pressing a small, round candy into Maya’s hand.
It did help a little, the sour sweetness of the lemon. She could open her eyes after a minute or two. And as Cousin Louise’s car whipped past the peripheries of Paris, the road became a huge, flowing highway, and that helped, too.
“Ooh, look at the needle now,” said James, his eyes glued to the compass. He had clearly inherited his inner ear from some more robust side of the family. “It’s pointing straight ahead. Are we going to get there soon? I’ve never seen a South-Southeast Pole.”
“Let’s be more precise: nobody has ever seen a South-Southeast Pole,” said Pauline Vian. It was scary how much she could sound like an adult, sometimes. “Even the poles that do exist, nobody has ever seen them. They are a concept, not a thing like a stick for people to see.”
“Scientists have seen poles,” said James stubbornly. “They go there on big sleds. Right, Maya?”
“Ah, Pauline, what a lovely idea I’ve just had,” said Cousin Louise. “You are excellent in histoire, are you not? Why don’t you tell us a little about the history of the château de Fontainebleau while we drive. . . .”
Little stifled groans from various passengers in the car, and then Maya let herself fall into polite oblivion for a while (punctuated by lemon drops), while Pauline recited what must have been whole chapters from some history textbook called Fontainebleau, the Renaissance Château.
(King François I.
Artists from Italy.
Catherine de Médicis.
François II.
Charles IX.
Henri IV.
Sixteenth century.
Seventeenth century.
Eighteenth . . . )
Boy, these poor French kids sure had a lot of names and dates to memorize, thought Maya, her eyes shut again, the latest lemon drop melting tangily on the tip of her tongue.
And then they were there, piling creakily out of Cousin Louise’s jewel-green machine, breathing the cold, cold air of a brand-new November, and being shepherded across acres of cobblestones to the entrance and the ticket office.
“Wow, look at this! It’s a great big huge SIDEWAYS CASTLE,” said James, looking at the staircases, the cobblestones, the long, long lines of windows everywhere. “I thought it would be going up in the air like the Disneyland one.”
“But non,” said Pauline. “Since the castle of Disneyland is not, as far as I know, originally from the Renaissance.”
Maya was still having trouble telling whether Pauline had no sense of humor at all or some very dry, very French sense of humor that you had to be an excellent student and a native speaker of the language to appreciate properly. She thought probably the latter, but she was paying close attention until she knew for sure.
“Keep up, please, children,” said Cousin Louise, who apparently believed in brisk visits. “I will be most displeased if anyone turns up lost. It is a vast place, Fontainebleau.”
“I’m hungry,” said James in an informative tone of voice, as they trotted up the entrance stairs.
He said it again in the long gallery of François I, but mostly he was counting carved and painted salamanders.
Salamanders! They were everywhere! Not to mention many, many golden Fs.
“The emblem of le roi François,” said Cousin Louise, whose sharp eyes did not miss a single flinch. “No need to look so concerned, Maya! An appropriate symbol for the Renaissance, in fact: the salamander is unscorched by the flames. Birth and rebirth.”
Maya’s hand had gone right to the Cabinet glass at her neck. There was an itty-bitty salamander in there, too—a tiny, magical echo of the bronze salamander guarding the Salamander House’s door. Salamanders lived in more than one world at once. That was why they were the symbol of her mother’s magical and amphibious family, the Lavirottes.
So: birth and rebirth. That was what renaissance meant: “rebirth.” She shivered a little.
“Maybe our compass used to belong to the king,” said James. “It has a salamander on it, too—see, there it is, sitting on a rock—and an F. You have to look close to see it, though.”
“Different F,” said Maya, biting her lip.
Why had they come here? That’s what she was thinking. Why did the whole world seem to be conspiring to remind her of her troubles all the time?
“And NOW the South-Southeast Pole is THAT way,” said James, looking up from the compass and pointing out the great windows.
Valko did that little shoulder-turning dance people do when they’re trying to figure out which direction lies where.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “That’s got to be west, not south. Let me see that thing.”
He took the little compass from James and for a while kept looking at it and then up out those windows again, perplexed.
“That’s definitely not south-southeast anymore,” he said. “Strange.”
“Keep moving, children! Did you see that statue of Diana? Remarquable!”
“Cousin Louise,” said James, jogging a little to catch up with her. “We’re going to find the pole, after the castle, right?”
“We’re going to have our pique-nique in the local forêt,” said Cousin Louise, pausing for a millisecond to
admire another detailed painting of a mythological scene. “It’s a cold day, but not damp. The woods will be refreshing. And you said you were hungry, I believe.”
“We’ll eat at the pole,” said James.
“If your pole is in a pleasant place for a picnic, then certainly,” said Cousin Louise. “Why not?”
They emerged from the castle after having seen only twenty or so of its fifteen hundred rooms, but they staggered out into the world rather stunned by the sheer castleness of the whole place: the height of the ceilings, the gilt decorations on the walls, the paintings and inlaid floors and tapestries and statues of goddesses and salamanders. It was all too much, somehow. It was a relief to be back out in the cold air and bickering pleasantly among themselves about the best place to eat their bread and cheese (and buttery, flaky vines and flowers).
Finally James put his foot down: Cousin Louise had promised they could have their picnic at the pole, and he wasn’t budging until they all agreed.
“Very well,” said Cousin Louise. “But you have to tell us how to get to this pole of yours, young man.”
“We can just get in the car and follow the needle,” said James.
“But not as far as Tunisia, please,” said Pauline Vian.
“No,” agreed Cousin Louise. “We follow your needle only in these woods here, and only for a little while. And when I say it is time for us to stop for our pique-nique, pole or no pole, then we cheerfully exit the car and eat our baguettes, yes?”
James accepted these terms quite graciously, for someone who was only five, but Maya could see he wasn’t paying much attention. He was sure the compass would lead them right where they wanted to go. Probably (thought Maya) he did think the pole would turn out to be a long thin stick, stuck right into the ground.
The search for the Mysterious Pole turned out to be quite a lot of fun (for everyone with tougher stomachs than Maya’s, anyway). Valko held the compass up in front of him, and as he pointed out the direction the needle was showing, Cousin Louise made daring swoops and turns. The riders in the backseat (the ones who weren’t Maya) grinned and shrieked and held on tight, and Maya chomped down on lemon drop after lemon drop and was overwhelmed by a combination of excitement and worry.
Was it wise to be following the needle of old Fourcroy’s own compass? Maya couldn’t really see any way of answering that question that sounded anything like “yes!” It was not wise.
But on the other hand, she was curious—very curious—about as curious as a person can be without actually flushing red from eagerness—about what that compass needle had in mind. And if they were going to thwart that shadowy Fourcroy in his resurrection plans, they needed to know as much as possible about those plans, didn’t they? Didn’t they?
Even if finding these things out was part of his plan?
And why had the strangeness returned this morning, anyway? (Remembering that brought the carsick feeling back.)
It was all dominoes falling, perhaps: she had had to find the writing desk, and now she had to follow the compass. But the trick was finding the—what had her mother called it?—wiggle room. She had left the letter behind in the writing desk, despite its important splotch of blood. Right? So that was what she would obviously have to keep doing. It meant being very clever and very careful. It was trying to fool the whole universe somehow, if the universe was really just a gazillion little rows of dominoes falling, one after the other after the other after the next.
Her mind got as far as this thought and froze a little.
She had another lemon drop.
Pauline Vian was tugging on her sleeve.
“Wherever did this compass toy come from?” she was asking.
An ebony bird gave it to me.
Maya squidged the lemon drop over to the side of her mouth.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
The car veered to the right.
“Wait,” said Valko. “I think—keep going a little—yes!”
He turned around to the backseat passengers and waved the compass in the air.
“Okay! We must be almost there!”
“How do you know?” said Maya, while James made the whole backseat bounce up and down to mark his impatience.
“The needle’s not stuck pointing in any one direction now. It moves a little every time we move. Let’s get out. I’ll show you.”
Cousin Louise parked the car on the edge of the road and peered out through the glass. They were deep in the Fontainebleau woods: bare November trees as far as the eye could see and a low piney ridge dribbled with boulders.
“There should be good picnic places over that way, among the rocks,” said Cousin Louise. “Bon! Out you all get! Bring the food!”
“So it is no pole at all, but a particular place,” said Pauline Vian, as she scrambled out of the backseat and pulled her sweater closer around her. “From the perspective of magnetism, that makes no sense whatsoever. How can it possibly be working, this little mechanism? I don’t understand it, not at all.”
“Neither do I,” said Valko with a grin. “This way!”
What Maya found herself understanding was that H de F’s compass was like somebody running a large-scale game of hot-and-cold. The needle pointed, and they followed (hot!). When they swerved off course, the needle veered back in the other direction (cold!). It took them right up the piney hillside toward all those quite incredible clumps of boulder—toward one particular pile of boulders, in fact.
“You’ve been looking for a rock?” said Pauline. She put her hand on it, testingly. “But this is just sandstone. It couldn’t be the least bit magnetic.”
They stood in a semicircle looking up at one of the strangest of the boulders, the long end of which stuck right out in the air like the head of a huge and ancient turtle.
“It’s magic,” said James, who seemed quite satisfied. “It’s a magic pole, and maybe before it was rock it used to be a dinosaur.”
Valko laughed, but James was already out of sight again, circumnavigating the huge stone dinosaur that the South-Southeast Pole had so surprisingly turned out to be.
Maya was thinking, I’ve seen this rock before. Where have I seen this rock?
And Cousin Louise started looking through the bag of picnic provisions at her side.
“James—,” she said, with the tone of someone about to start assigning small helpful tasks.
“I’m WAY UP HERE!” said James, from somewhere up above them.
Well, way up there was pretty much right—James was shinnying up the lizard-like head of the thing, too many feet above the ground for Maya’s comfort. Cousin Louise had already leaped to her feet again.
“James!” said Cousin Louise. “Descend from there! Immediately!”
“My dinosaur has a name,” said James as he scooted (reluctantly) back down. “Someone painted it right on his side.”
“You mean graffiti?” said Maya. Sometimes it was a good thing that James couldn’t read very well. Valko caught her eye, grinned, and ducked behind the boulder to see what awful thing might be scrawled there. He was back in a second, with surprise scrawled all over his face.
“You look,” he said to Maya, so Maya and Pauline both followed him around the rock’s corner, where in fairly neat lines of white paint someone had written Rocher de la salamandre.
“Ah,” said Pauline. “The rock climbers. They like to name their rocks.”
“So it’s almost a dinosaur,” called Valko to James. “But not quite: it says this is the Rock of the Salamander.”
“Oh,” said James. He was trying to decide whether or not he was disappointed. Dinosaurs are pretty cool, being so large and so extinct. But those sneaky salamanders kept turning up everywhere. And sneakiness is pretty cool, too.
“Well! Time for lunch,” said Cousin Louise briskly. “Maya, you are looking rather perplexed.”
“I’ll be okay in a minute,” said Maya. “Could I see that compass a moment? I’ll catch up.”
Cousin Loui
se gave her a look, but moved everyone a little distance away along the hillside, to a place where the rocks looked better for sitting.
Maya hardly noticed them leaving. She was looking at the compass again, at the funny salamander molded into its cover, standing on its tiny little metal rock. To the Origin Point—that’s what it said on the back.
“Here?” she said to herself. “Really? Here?”
Because she had finally remembered where she had seen the Rock of the Salamander before. It had only been pen-and-ink, of course, only the sketchiest of sketches, but a pen-and-ink little boy had been peeking into a hollow of it, with his pen-and-ink mother watching, in her long, old-fashioned skirts, at his side.
She walked around the boulder, looking.
There was maybe more earth around the base of it, more debris gathered over time, or something. But she finally found what might once have been the top of a hollow. With a little loose rock, she started working away at the earth there. The dirt was packed pretty tight, but to her relief, right underneath that thin-packed layer, the ground gave way, and her hand was reaching into a small cave tucked away under the rock itself.
“What are you doing? What’s in that gap?” said Valko.
She hadn’t heard Valko come up behind her. Maya was almost flat on the ground now, stretching her hand into the cool darkness of that hidden hollow place. It was like the entire universe had just turned itself into some immensely complex lens, and all the world’s attention was focused exactly here. She was no longer just Maya, but a part of that intensely focused attention.
“It was in the book,” she said, while her fingers kept exploring the earth and rock of that hidden place, following the curves of the stone, the edge—the straight edge—cold and metallic—of a little box.
“It’s really here,” she said, surprise shivering right back up her arm. “It’s here!”
“What’s here?” said Valko. “What book?”
She shifted around, scrabbled a little, and finally found a piece of something to grab on to.
“This,” she said, and out into the cold autumn air came her dusty, triumphant hand . . . and the hundred-year-old box of the Fourcroys.