The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy)

by S. E. Grove

  “I lost track of the time,” Sophia said anxiously. “Completely.”

  “Ah, no matter,” he replied with a sigh. “On such a bad day—the sooner it ends the better.” He released the brake and the trolley began to roll slowly forward.

  “Are you going back into the city now?”

  He shook his head. “I’m heading out to the yard. You’ll have to get off at the wharf and look for a trolley heading back through downtown.”

  Sophia had not been to this part of Boston in years. “Is it the same stop?”

  “I’ll point you to it,” he assured her. They picked up speed as they made a sudden sharp turn to the left. Then they emerged from the tunnel, the light dazzling Sophia’s eyes. The trolley stopped once again almost immediately, and the conductor shouted, “Wharf trolley. Final stop. No passengers.” A waiting crowd looked impatiently at the tunnel for the next trolley to emerge. “Walk about fifty paces that way,” he said to Sophia, pointing past the crowd. “There’s another stop there that says ‘inbound.’ You can’t miss it.”

  — 14-Hour 03: At the Wharf—

  NEWS OF THE borders’ closure had already reached Boston harbor. People rushed this way and that through a confusion of carts, improvised market stands, and piles of crates, shouting orders, hurriedly unloading cargo, and making hasty arrangements for unexpected journeys. Two men were arguing over a broken crate full of lobsters; claws reached feebly through the cracked wooden slats. Seagulls cried out from every corner, dipping lazily, snapping at the stray pieces of fish and bread. The smell of the harbor—brine, tar, and the faint, enduring scent of something spoiling—wafted by on waves of hot air.

  Sophia tried to get out of the way and found herself repeatedly pushed aside. As she struggled to find the trolley stop, she gave in to that familiar sense of defeat that always came with losing track of time. Their housekeeper, Mrs. Clay, would be worried sick. And Shadrack—he might still be looking for her at the State House and fear the worst when she failed to appear. As she stumbled along, Sophia suppressed the tears of frustration that threatened to spill over.

  It was a frustration she felt all too frequently. Sophia, to her infinite mortification, had no internal clock. A minute could feel as long as an hour or a day. In the space of a second she might experience a whole month, and a whole month could pass in what felt to her like a second. As a young child, she had fallen daily into difficulties as a consequence. Someone would ask her a question, and Sophia would think for a moment and suddenly find that everyone had been laughing at her for a full five minutes. Once she had waited for six hours on the steps of the Public Library for a friend who never arrived. And it seemed to her that it was always time for bed.

  She had learned to compensate for her missing internal clock, and now that she was thirteen she rarely lost track of time during conversations. She observed the people around her to know when it was time to eat or finish school or go to bed. And she had become accustomed to keeping a tight hold on her watch, which she checked constantly. In the drawing notebook that was always in her satchel she kept careful records of her days: maps of past and future that helped guide her through the vast abyss of unmeasured time.

  But having no sense of time still troubled her in other ways. Sophia took great pride in her competence: her ability to navigate Boston and even places farther afield, as she grew older and traveled with Shadrack; her carefully disciplined work at school, which made her popular with teachers, if not always with classmates; her capacity to order and make sense of the world, so that all of Shadrack’s friends commented that she was wise beyond her years. These mattered deeply to her, and yet they could not compensate for the flaw that made her seem, in her own eyes, as flighty and absentminded as someone who had none of these abilities.

  Being from a family famous for its sense of time and direction made it all the more painful. Her parents reputedly had inner compasses and clocks worthy of great explorers. Shadrack could tell the time down to the second without looking at his watch, and no amount of encouragement on his part could persuade Sophia to forget the piece of herself she felt was missing. Their joint creation, Clockwork Cora, made light of a problem that Sophia only pretended to take lightly.

  She never spoke of it to her uncle, but she had a dreadful suspicion of how she had come to lose her sense of time. She pictured herself as a very young child, waiting for her parents at a dusty window. The little Sophia’s clock had ticked on and on, patiently and then worriedly and finally desperately, counting the seconds as her mother and father failed to come back. And then, when it became clear that the waiting was futile, the little clock had simply broken, leaving her without parents and without any sense of time at all.

  However much Shadrack loved his niece, he could not spend every second of every day with her, and the steady stream of graduate students whom he hired to assist with the combined tasks of cartology and child care were prone to the same distractions he was. While her uncle and his assistants pored over maps, the three-year-old Sophia had spent plenty of time alone and had, in fact, sometimes waited for her parents with hands and face pressed up against a window. In her memory—in her imagination—those moments contained long hours of endless waiting. The sun rose and set, and people passed the window in a constant stream, but still she waited expectantly. On occasion, the figure of her imagination blurred, and it seemed that not a near-infant but an older child—one who had waited for many years—stood at the window. And in fact her uncle sometimes found the grown Sophia sitting at her window, lost in thought, her pointed chin tucked into her hand and her brown eyes focused on something far out of sight.

  Now she stood on the busy wharf, wiping her eyes angrily and trying hard to compose herself. Then, amidst all the shouts and the bustle, she spotted about a dozen people standing in line. With a monumental effort, she drew her thoughts away from the four hours she had lost. That must be the line for the inbound trolley, she thought. As she approached, she heard, over all the other noise, the sound of a man shouting through a megaphone. She tapped the shoulder of the woman ahead of her. “Excuse me, is this the line for the inbound trolley?”

  The young woman shook her bonneted head excitedly. She was clutching a flyer, which she pushed into Sophia’s hand. “No such thing. They’ve brought creatures from the other Ages,” she said breathlessly. “We’re going in to see them while we still can!” Her laced glove pointed to a sign that stood only a few feet away.

  Beside the sign stood the man who was shouting into the megaphone. He was small and sported a small, pointy beard and a tall hat that made his head look tiny. He flourished a silver-topped cane. “Wild men, monsters, creatures that defy your imagination!” he cried, his cheeks red with heat and exertion. He spoke with the accent of the western Baldlands; it made all his vowels sound bow-legged. “Discovered by the intrepid Simon Ehrlach and displayed here for the entertainment and instruction of visitors!” He pointed to a heavy velvet curtain that covered the entryway to the warehouse behind him. A woman even smaller than he was sat to his left, deftly counting money and dispensing and stamping tickets, her small forehead creased with concentration, before ushering each visitor into the curtained warehouse.

  “Every man or beast in a continuous exhibition of all the fascinating variety of the Ages!” the little man continued, showering his audience with energetic bursts of spit. “Each enacting constantly the bizarre and indeed mesmerizing habits of its Age, so that the visitor will hardly believe that he stands still in time!” With the tip of his cane, he tapped a large cage that stood to his right. “The wild boy from the Baldlands, in his fierce warrior dress. And inside there are even fiercer creatures from the Baldlands. Centaurs and mermen and children with tails. See them while you still have the chance!”

  Sophia stared in fascination at the cage, all other thoughts forgotten. There stood a boy who seemed only a little older than herself, dressed from head to toe in feathers. She could tell at once that he belonged to a different Age.
His hair was twisted up around colored plumes that appeared to spring from his skull, and his limbs were covered with multicolored down. A skirt of trailing feathers hung at his waist, while an empty quiver dangled from his shoulder. His costume might once have been impressive, but most of the feathers were broken or crushed. To Sophia he looked like a beautiful bird, trapped in midair and dragged down to earth.

  But it was not his beauty that captured her attention. It was his expression. He was imprisoned in a cage, and he was made a spectacle to everyone around him. And yet, for all that, he surveyed the crowd as if they and not he were the spectacle. A faint smile tugged at the edges of his mouth. Gazing calmly at them, he made the cage seem like a pedestal; he was serene, unshakable, magnificent. Sophia could not take her eyes off him. She had lost track of time once again, but in a way that seemed entirely new.

  “I assure you, ladies and gentlemen,” the little man went on, “that you will even see battles enacted among these fierce creatures in Ehrlach’s Circus of the Ages. And after today’s decision in parliament, your days to view the wonders of the other Ages are numbered! Seize the opportunity now before it’s too late!” At this he reached with his cane through the bars of the cage and gave the boy dressed in feathers a careless jab.

  The boy looked at the cane and grabbed it easily, as if picking up a stray feather. Then he pushed it back toward the circus master, disinterested, and resumed watching the crowd. As the man continued to advertise Ehrlach’s marvels, Sophia realized that the boy was looking directly at her. He raised his hands and placed them on the bars. It seemed to Sophia that he could see her thoughts and that he was about to speak to her. She knew she was blushing, but she could not look away. She could not move; she did not want to move.

  “Hey, hey,” she heard someone say. The young woman ahead of her in line was shaking her shoulder. “Didn’t you want the city trolley, sweetheart? There it is—better run for it.”

  Sophia tore her eyes away from the boy. Sure enough, a trolley was approaching. If she hurried she would catch it. She looked back once more at the boy, who was still watching her thoughtfully. Then she ran.

  3

  Shadrack Elli, Cartologer

  1891, June 14

  And who (in time) knowes whither we may vent

  The treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores

  This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent,

  T’inrich unknowing Nations with our stores?

  What worlds in th’yet unformed Occident

  May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours?

  —Samuel Daniel, Musophilus, 1599

  SOPHIA LIVED WITH Shadrack at 34 East Ending Street in the South End of Boston, in the solid brick house her great-grandparents had built. White shutters, an abundance of ivy, and an iron owl perched discreetly over the entryway made it similar to the other brick houses adjoining it on the quiet street. But no other house had the small oval sign, pine-green in color, that hung on the red door, announcing:

  In reality, the sign had little use, because anyone who sought out Shadrack knew exactly where to find him; furthermore, they knew that the mere title “cartologer” did not begin to describe his occupation. He was as much historian, geographer, and explorer as he was cartologer. Apart from being a professor at the university, he was a private consultant to explorers and government officials. Anyone who needed expert knowledge of the history and geography of the New World found their way to Shadrack’s door.

  They came to see Shadrack simply because he was the best. In a time when most of the world was uncharted and no single person knew more than a few Ages, he was the most knowledgeable. Though he was young for a master cartologer, no one could match Shadrack for breadth of knowledge and skill. He had mastered the history of every known continent, he could read the maps of every civilization known to New Occident, and, most importantly, he could draw brilliant maps himself. The great cartologer who had trained him was said to have wept with wonder when Shadrack Elli presented his first complete map of the New World. He had precision and artistic ability on his side, but any draughtsman had that; it was his bottomless knowledge that made Shadrack so extraordinary.

  Having grown up surrounded by her uncle’s work, Sophia sometimes had difficulty seeing it as exceptional. She thought of mapmaking as a noble, learned, and rather messy profession. The house on East Ending Street was papered from top to bottom with maps. Maps of contemporary, ancient, or imaginary worlds covered every inch of wall space. Books and pens and compasses and rulers and more maps, lying flat or rolled up like scrolls, littered every flat surface. The parlor and the study fairly overflowed with equipment, and even the kitchen had begun to shrink from the edges inward as the countertops and cabinets became receptacles for maps. Sophia moved like a tiny island of tidiness through the house, straightening books, rolling maps, gathering pens, all in the effort to stem the cartologic tide around her. The only two relatively orderly places were her room, which had a few select maps and books, and the third-floor apartment of their housekeeper, Mrs. Clay.

  Mrs. Sissal Clay had arrived years earlier, when Sophia was only eight, and after a long consultation with Shadrack had simply moved in to the uninhabited third floor. Shadrack had always frowned upon the custom of keeping servants, believing such arrangements perpetuated a system in which the children of the servant class withdrew early from their schooling. Even when he was entrusted with the care of his three-year-old niece, he refused to hire a nanny, relying instead upon the paid assistance of his graduate students—who, he reasoned, were not abandoning their education to perform domestic duties.

  Immense love is almost always enough to sustain a child. But it does not always provide the logistical and practical necessities, including a steady supply of clean clothes and an understanding that toddlers can become bored with certain aspects of adult life, such as two-hour university lectures on the glaciation of the Eerie Sea.

  Shadrack’s well-meaning but mostly unsuitable assistants had no more command of these necessities than he did, and they were fleeting presences in Sophia’s life: brilliant, inventive, memorable, and usually rather incompetent as caretakers. One had built her a magnificent boat out of lacquered paper that she sailed on the Charles River to the everlasting envy of all the neighborhood children. Another had attempted to teach her Latin and had mostly succeeded, so that she could converse quite fluently in that tongue about farmers, sheep, and aqueducts by the time she was seven. All in all they were very lovable, but few understood the usefulness of mealtimes and bedtimes. Sophia had learned early on to see them as friendly companions rather than reliable guardians, and she did what any reasonable person would do: she learned to take care of herself.

  Then Mrs. Clay arrived. For reasons he did not explain, Shadrack broke his own rule. Mrs. Clay became the housekeeper at 34 East Ending Street. Had Mrs. Clay been a different sort of woman, Sophia’s life might have changed dramatically at this point. Mrs. Clay was a widow, and she had been the housekeeper at the academy of cartology where Shadrack had studied for two years in Nochtland, the Baldlands’ capital. The house might have flourished under her guiding hand, so that Shadrack’s high-spirited chaos and unbounded affection would have found some complementary order and good sense. But Sophia soon realized, young as she was, that their housekeeper needed more taking care of than she herself did.

  A moody, silent woman with sad eyes and a wide face, Mrs. Clay moved through the rooms of 34 East Ending as she did through the streets of Boston: quietly, almost fearfully, as if the only thing she was looking for was a proper place to hide. She was one part melancholy kindness, two parts mysterious unease; Sophia both liked her and felt that she did not really know her. Over time, Sophia simply accepted Mrs. Clay’s presence and went on relying more and more on herself, becoming the independent and peculiarly practical person that she was.

  — 15-Hour 19—

  WHEN SOPHIA FINALLY returned home, she found a red-eyed Mrs. Clay and a harried-l
ooking Shadrack at the kitchen table. They both rose to their feet the moment Sophia walked in. Shadrack rushed to embrace her. “Sophia! Finally!”

  It was such a comfort to find herself back home, crushed up against the familiar scrape of Shadrack’s chin and the familiar smell of Shadrack’s pine soap, that she held on tightly for a while before speaking. “I’m sorry,” she finally whispered, pulling away. “I lost track of time.”

  Mrs. Clay placed her hand on Sophia’s shoulder, murmuring a fervent thanks to the Fates, and Shadrack shook his head with an affectionate smile that still bore traces of his concern. He tucked her hair behind her ears and held her face in his hands. “I was just about to go back to the State House—for the third time—to look for you,” he said. “I thought you were going to wait for me on the balcony.”

  “I did, but I didn’t know how long to wait, and then they started shouting about a fire . . .”

  “I know,” Shadrack said grimly.

  “When I finally got away I took the wrong trolley. And then I lost track of time. I ended up at the wharf,” she concluded with embarrassment.

  “It’s all right,” Shadrack said, taking her hand and pulling her over to the kitchen table. “I was worried, but it’s all right. I know the fault is not yours.” He let out a deep sigh as he sat down.

  “What happened to you?” Sophia asked.

  “I made my way over to the balcony stairs with Miles, and then he started a fistfight with some hothead in a bow tie. By the time I separated them, the balconies were empty.” Shadrack shook his head. “What a day. Mrs. Clay has of course heard the news—the whole of Boston has by now, I’m sure.”

  “But at least you are home safely, Sophia.” Mrs. Clay said. She spoke with the clipped accent of the southern Baldlands, and her manner of dress had never lost its foreign eccentricities. She always tucked a stray flower or clover stem or even an autumn leaf into her buttonhole; today, she wore a wilted violet in her hair. Her face was still blotchy and red, and Sophia understood that the tears had nothing to do with her absence: Mrs. Clay had no lifewatch and no papers.