by Sam Gayton
He laughed at her, at the fire. “Why, it’s an alchemical, of course. It’s what we alchemists use to change things. Every alchemical works a different change. Mammonia, for example, changes pebbles into shillings. Gastromajus, another of my potions, changes people into their last meal.”
“And what does æther change?” said Lettie.
“Why, temperature!” said the Snow Merchant, squeezing a drop of æther onto the fire. It snuffed out the flames in an instant, plunging everything into darkness and leaving a smell in the air, like the start of a storm. The ladies shrieked in their armchairs and the Snow Merchant cursed and cried out: “I told you to fetch a light!”
Lettie fumbled for the lamp in the kitchen and brought it out. After a while her eyes adjusted, and the Snow Merchant threw open the curtains to let in the cloudless night. In came the moonbeams. They pooled on the window ledges like wax. Everything now looked silver and expensive. The plates stacked by the pianola shone like shillings.
“I almost prefer it like this,” Lettie said.
“I certainly don’t,” said the Walrus, rising up from her armchair, her mink coat wrapped around her. She wore a powdered wig one size too big, and it wobbled over her forehead. Her earrings tinkled and swung. “I am chilled to my bones!” she declared. “The least I deserve is a cup of tea! With cream and three sugars . . . make that five sugars.”
“I will have peppermint,” said the Goggler. “With a splash of rum.”
But Lettie wasn’t making tea. Her head was a kettle of questions.
“Do you know what snow is?” she asked the old ladies.
The Walrus smiled sweetly and said, “That is not the question you should be asking.”
“Why?” said Lettie.
“And that is not the question, either,” said the Walrus, in a higher voice.
“What’s the question I should be asking, then?”
“The question,” she shrieked, “is, ‘How many times does a guest need to ask for a cup of tea before she gets one?’ ”
“Be quiet!” said the Snow Merchant as he put drops of æther on the pianola keys. “You are lucky I am letting you watch my alchemy at all.”
“Lucky?” cried the Walrus. “We are stuck on this drab little island, waiting for a ship that will take us to Laplönd! That is not luck, that is torture!”
The Goggler rubbed the rings on her hands. Lettie had tried a few times to count how many the jeweler wore. Almost fifty, she reckoned, and all of them were gold. A small fortune stacked on each long, bony finger. “I don’t know what is worse,” she declared. “The boredom or the frostbite.”
“The Wind is worst of all,” sniped the Walrus. “The inn sways so much I feel quite queasy—”
“I am trying to freeze this room!” thundered the Snow Merchant, slamming the pianola lid shut. “Yet you insist on filling it with hot air! Sit down! ”
The Walrus looked at him, outraged. But she did flop back into her armchair.
“I want a cup of tea,” she declared, waving a fat finger this way and that. “There should be tea and cake for a lady of my standing.”
“Madam,” said the Snow Merchant. “If you eat much more cake, then standing really will be an issue for you.”
“How dare you? When we get to Laplönd, I shall be the height of fashion!”
“But for now, madam, you are just a blob of blubber, babbling nonsense,” said the Snow Merchant. “So kindly shut up, and let me work.”
Lettie clapped a hand to her mouth. Lettie Peppercorn, don’t you giggle.
The Walrus sat numb with shock at being spoken to so rudely.
The Goggler stood to her full height of one and a half meters, and fiddled with her scopical glasses so she could glare at the Snow Merchant more ferociously.
“I am the most famous jeweler in all Bohemia!” she announced, in a voice full of accent and arrogance. “The Lady is my customer, and I demand you apologize at once!”
“Why?” asked the Snow Merchant simply.
“Because we are Ladies of Elegance!” spluttered the Goggler. “Because we are Women of Stature! Because—”
“I beg your pardon,” the Snow Merchant interrupted, “but how can you be a woman of stature, when I mistook you earlier for a footstall? Sit down, you crinkled-up, craggy-faced crone!”
The two ladies seemed as lost for words as Lettie.
Finally, though, the Walrus recovered first from the Snow Merchant’s astonishing attack of rudeness. Her chins were trembling with fury. “All I am asking for is a cup of tea!”
“My customer is too busy to make you tea,” said the Snow Merchant.
“I am?” Lettie said. “I thought I was just standing here with my teeth chattering.”
“Then do your job!” he snapped. It seemed even Lettie wasn’t safe from his bitter temper.
“Job?” said Lettie. “What do you want me to do?”
“Get rid of the drafts, girl! Every last breeze.”
Kicking Out the Breezes
Lettie stood in the front room, feeling the inn sway on its stilts and wondering how this night could get any stranger. The Snow Merchant had just asked her to get rid of the breezes, but how? Why?
“This is an inn built on stilts,” she said at last. “You can’t escape the Wind up here.”
“Maybe that’s why your guests do nothing but moan,” said the Snow Merchant, and he laughed at his own wit.
Lettie scowled in the dark. She loved the Wind, she envied it: it traveled the world; it went wherever it wanted, while she was stuck inside, held prisoner by her job and Ma’s last message. She looked over to the note, hanging on the wall above the door. It didn’t matter that it was dark: she knew it off by heart. Just forty-three words, but they ruled her life:
LETTIE—THESE THINGS YOU MUST REMEMBER:
1. I’ve gone away to save your life
2. Until I return, you are in danger
3. The danger is inside Albion
4. Don’t set a foot upon Albion, for it can kill you
5. I love you, and I’m coming back
It was because of the note that Da had raised the house on stilts. Then he’d made Lettie promise on her life that she’d do everything the note asked. She had tried everything to convince him to let her leave the White Horse Inn. When she was nine, Lettie had even made herself a miniature pair of stilts, so she could walk into town without touching the ground at all. But Da had shaken his head, like always, and said it was too dangerous.
Lettie didn’t know what the danger was. She had asked Da, but he didn’t know either. When Lettie was little they had sat long into the night, trying to figure it out. But, like an impossible riddle, Ma’s words led them around in circles. “Let’s sleep on it,” Da had said, when the hour got too late. “Maybe we’ll crack it tomorrow.”
Now, Da left Lettie to wonder about the note all on her own. “Trust your ma,” was all he would say. “Remember your promise.”
It was a hard promise to keep, day after day, high tide after low tide, guest after guest. At least in the winter it wasn’t so bad. She had Periwinkle and the Wind to talk to. She had her telescope. But still, sometimes it made her so angry she could scream. Ma wrote a note, vanished out of the window, and that was that: all the mothering Lettie would ever get.
Lettie Peppercorn, clear your head of all this useless thinking.
And so she did. Lettie set to work, chasing out the breezes. She followed them with a tea towel, all the way back to the places where they had wriggled in, then plugged up the cracks with newspaper or Da’s old socks.
“Be off with you,” she told the Wind, stuffing hankies in the keyholes. “You’re good for keeping me company, but you’re bad for business.”
The Wind wasn’t happy. It tickled the Walrus’s feet and knocked over Da’s half-empty cup of khave. When Lettie finally shut it out completely, it whirled around, rattled the windows, and tried to sneak down the chimney. She covered the hearth with newspaper. The Wind
howled and the timber stilts groaned. The house lurched forward, and the ledger fell from the table.
“You stop that right now!” Lettie called up the fireplace, and the Wind went still and sullen.
The Snow Merchant raised both eyebrows, which made crackling sounds. “I’ve never seen a little girl shout down the Wind before. It never does what I say.”
Lettie shrugged. “That’s because you’ve got no manners. What do we do next?”
He scowled. “Now we let the cold come,” he replied. “We let it settle deep. And you can fetch me a bucket of water from the well.”
The well.
Lettie clenched up like a fist. She was going to have to tell the whole room about her promise. Her anger churned away. She hated to say it, especially to travelers who came and went whenever they pleased. It made her feel so horrible, angry and ashamed.
“I can’t go outside,” she muttered. “Not even to the Vinegar Street well. If I climb down that ladder, I might die.”
When they looked at her in confusion, she just pointed to the note that Ma had left. There was a silence as they all read it by the moonlight. The Goggler’s scopical glasses made flicking sounds as she adjusted the lenses.
“How preposterous,” said the Walrus.
Lettie looked at the floor. Lettie Peppercorn, don’t you cry, or swear, or do anything moody.
“My ma wrote it down, just before she vanished ten years ago,” she told them.
“How droll,” said the Goggler.
Lettie wondered what “droll” meant. Perhaps it was a mix between “dreadful” and “dull.” If it was, then that just about summed it up.
The Snow Merchant didn’t say anything. His eyes were like frozen lakes. Lettie couldn’t fathom his gaze.
“I’ll do it myself then,” he said sourly.
Lettie nodded. “The bucket’s on the porch.”
He stamped out the door and down the ladder.
Lettie took her two-draw telescope from her apron pocket and went into the kitchen, away from the piggy eyes of the Walrus and the glare of the Goggler.
“I wouldn’t have fetched it for him even if I could, Peri,” she muttered. “He’s the rudest guest I’ve ever had. And he’s put frostprints all over the living room.”
She went to the window, pulled open the telescope with a snap, and put it to her eye.
The moon was out. All down Vinegar Street the gas lamps had been lit, and Lettie could see the cobbles and a hunched man upon them, riding a horse that seemed to hang between his knees. She turned her gaze down the cobbled street and into Barter, a place of brine and blubber and beer. Drunken sailors shone under the lights as they danced and tripped and fought in the streets. She knew those roads off by heart, though she’d never stepped down any of them: Briney Bridge. Swill Street. Pickle Lane. She looked to them. Then farther, to the ships moored on the jetty. Then farther, to the emptiness.
She looked back to the Snow Merchant at the well. It had frozen already and the coldest months were yet to come. The Snow Merchant picked up a stone and tossed it down to break the ice, then hauled up a bucket of gray slush and water.
“It would have been so easy,” Lettie murmured. “To step down and get that.”
The Wind blew fierce around the inn. Remember your promise, it seemed to be saying.
“All right,” she said out loud. “I will, I will.”
So Lettie did what she had to do in the moments when she felt tempted: she thought of all the things that needed doing before midnight, and bed.
Periwinkle cooed on the perch by the stove.
“Peri!” she said, relieved at the distraction. “I’ve got a message for Da.”
Lettie scooped up her pigeon and took him to the window.
“You look a little better today,” she said, even though Periwinkle didn’t. Lettie felt it was important to keep her sick patient in high spirits. “Less gray. Maybe it’s the carrot peel I’m feeding you. Do you think you can deliver some shillings to Da for me?”
Periwinkle puffed out his chest and Lettie laughed.
“Silly bird. You’re heavy as a stone but you still fly for me.” She slipped the three shillings into a tiny brown envelope and wrote:
To Da, here are some shillings. A man with an icicle beard made them for me. Please don’t bet them all at once, and please don’t come back to gamble any more of the furniture. We’ve only got one rug left. Lettie.
She had a think, and added:
And IF you win big tonight, we need wood, coal, a new broom head, herbs, carrots, candles, wool, a needle set, khave, paper, pencils, and soap. Oh, and loo roll! I’m not having you use the table napkins anymore, you hear? x
It was quite a lot to fit on one piece of paper, but she managed it. Tying the note and the money to Periwinkle’s leg, she opened the window.
“You know where to go, Peri! Same place as always!”
With a coo, he spread his wings and struggled off into the night. Lettie watched him go. She loved that bird like the sea loved to roar. Along with the Wind, he was Lettie’s joint best friend. Neither of them could speak (not in a language of words, anyway), but it didn’t matter. Lettie did most of the talking, and Periwinkle tried his best to be a good listener. But still, she yearned for a friend who could talk back. Keeping her promise to Da kept her safe, but it kept her lonely too.
The Snow Merchant was back on the ladder, with the bucket heavy and slopping. Lettie helped him carry it up the last few rungs. He didn’t even say thank you.
“I should have sent the boy to do this,” he said anxiously.
“What boy?” said Lettie.
“The boy who brought me to Albion on his boat,” said the Snow Merchant. “He was mooring his ship on the jetty. I told him to come up here with my stirring spoon.”
“Maybe he got lost?” Lettie suggested.
“Impossible,” he said. “I told him to follow my frostprints.”
Lettie took her telescope and followed the Snow Merchant’s muddy, frozen steps back into town. “Is that him?” she asked suddenly, pointing to a distant shape.
“About time,” the Snow Merchant said, stomping inside. “Direct him up here, please.”
The boy approached the ladder. He wore a thick coat with the hood up. He looked at the creaking stilts and the inn on top of them.
Then he looked at Lettie and waved.
What she first noticed about him, long before the stalk on his shoulder, were his bright-green eyes.
One Boy Travels a Very Long Way
“Is this the White Horse Inn?” the boy called.
“It is, sir,” replied Lettie with a curtsy.
“I’m not a sir,” he said. “Just a sailor.”
“Oh,” she said. “Should I call you ‘Captain,’ then?”
The boy laughed and shook his head.
“So you sailed the Snow Merchant here?” she asked doubtfully. The boy didn’t look like he could lift a spoon, let alone steer a ship.
The boy just shrugged and smiled. “I did. But right now, I’m just carrying luggage.”
He held up what was in his hand: a large wooden spoon.
Lettie didn’t know what to do or say back. She felt awkward and guarded. She had never met the other girls and boys from Barter, the ones who spent their days on the beach, combing the shingle for shells to trade. Sometimes she watched them with her telescope as they fought and laughed, their plaited hair whipping about them like angry arms. Sometimes they’d spot her, up at her window.
They shouted, “Your ma was trouble!”
They shouted, “Your da’s still trouble!”
They shouted, “Where’re your friends?”
But this boy didn’t do anything like that. He just blew into his hands and said, “I’m not captain, or sir, or anything. I’m just Noah.”
And with that, he scurried up the ladder onto the porch. Now that he was closer to her lamp, Lettie could guess his age. He was nine or maybe ten. Younger than her!
Then she reached out and took the spoon from his hand, adding, “And I do the luggage-carrying around here.”
“Thank you,” said Noah.
Lettie smiled, and together they stamped their shoes on the porch and went inside.
Now that his hands were free, Noah unwound the long strip of cloth wrapped around his shoulder. “My stalk was bent backward walking up from the harbor. I was scared it might snap!”
When Lettie saw the green shoot growing from his shoulder, she knew Noah wasn’t from Barter, or even from Albion.
“You’re from the Fifth Continent!” exclaimed the Walrus, stroking her whiskers. “How interesting.”
“How exotic,” said the Goggler.
“Not really,” said Noah.
Lettie didn’t know much about the Fifth Continent. No one did. It was so newly discovered, it hadn’t even been named yet. She had heard the stories, though: every girl and boy there had a seed planted in their shoulder when they were a newborn, and it grew as they did.
“You’ve come a long way,” said Lettie.
“I like to travel,” he said with a shrug, as if crossing the entire Occidental Ocean hadn’t really bothered him. The leaves on his stalk rustled.
“Welcome to Albion.”
“Oh, I’ve been to Albion lots of times. Crossing the Channel is what I do. And while I’m here, I sell my flowers down by the harbor.”
“Then welcome to the White Horse Inn,” said Lettie.
His stalk bloomed: an orange flower.
“You’re late,” said the Snow Merchant, putting drops of æther on the rug. “Give me my spoon. At once, at once!”
He snatched his spoon from Lettie and began to inspect it. Noah’s orange petals wilted and fell to the floor. In their place he grew a thorn.
The Snow Merchant seemed not to notice, or care. “You will wait for me to conclude our business, and then take me away from this wretched place. Is that clear?”
He swept off before Noah could answer, carrying on with his unfathomable preparations. The old ladies sat in their armchairs, looking bored and furious. The Goggler struck her tinderbox and lit her pipe of mint leaf.