Inside, it was as it always had been: woody and paneled and busy with papers and instruments, a wreckage of pedantry and bachelorhood.
Use the notes I have sent along, Chalmers recalled. He found his writing desk, pulled its drawers, and dumped them. The rectory’s very fine Aubusson rug disappeared in a cloud of dusty mail and forgotten parcels.
The study door opened, spilling daylight over the riot of stationary in which Chalmers knelt, desperately burrowing. Vast as a prison hulk, Mrs. Gilleyen loomed in the threshold.
“Doctor Chalmers, have you lost your senses?”
“The post, Mrs. Gilleyen. Has it come already?”
The old woman frowned. “Post? Yes, sir, it’s all there. Smallduke Regenzi sent a footman by with an invitation to a welcome ball for the conference attendees, as well. Not half an hour ago. Quite a sudden thing.”
“No, no, no. I don’t care about balls or footmen. I want the other post,” he said, dragging himself into the chair behind his escritoire. “The girl—what’s her name who brings all the letters from Reverend Doctor Pierce?”
“Ohhh,” Mrs. Gilleyen said. It was a very long word in her vocabulary, a statement of not less than three syllables. “Well, that en’t any proper post, sir. Not what she brings.”
Phillip Chalmers buried his face in his hands. He was imagining the Old Cathedral of Corma two days hence, the only place big enough to hold all six thousand of the Ecclesiastical Commission’s attending members, and himself standing there in the pulpit, about to give the keynote with only half—no, with less than half—of the presentation in hand.
“I need the other post,” he moaned and dropped his head onto the blotter.
“It’s First-day,” Mrs. Gilleyen said. “That’s near when she comes ’round. Shall I have a boy send a spark, check for it coming soon?”
“Yes. Yes. Do.”
“Very good, sir.”
“And, Mrs. Gilleyen?” Chalmers lifted his head. In the reflection of a brass lamp teetering at the desk’s edge, he spied a blue bruise of ink smeared up to his hairline. “A little gin, please.”
She frowned. “’S’not even dinner hour, sir. Are you sure?”
He didn’t manage a word—just a squeak and a feeble nod.
4.
Ivor lifted Rowena’s chin with the butt of his hawthorn. She stood at the foot of the courier loft’s ladder, turning her head as he raked her with a customary scowl.
“Shall I wash up?”
“Nah.” Ivor’s flesh hand offered a leather letter pouch, stuffed full to bursting. “You’ll pass muster this time. Bring this to Reverend Chalmers, Coventry Passage.”
She took the package. Coventry Passage had been one of Bess’s routes. An old neighborhood, monied and clean. She was less sure than Ivor about skipping a turn at the washbasin.
“Any return goods?”
He took a long time figuring the reply.
“No,” the old man said, brows knitting. “Just be quick about it.”
New Vraska Imports squatted at the foot of Blackbottom End, less than a quarter mile from the docks of Misery Bay. The street ran steeply down toward the sea, and so the climb back up it was slow going, especially with the fishmongers driving their carts all around. With the weather turned unseasonably cold, the streets and markets should have winnowed down to the maids-of-all-work doing shopping, or the odd pair of young lovers looking for the novelty of privacy in a crowd. But the Decadal Conference was back in Corma. What exactly that meant was a mystery to Rowena, apart from the glut of high-collared reverends, sober deaconesses, and other squints of the EC taking up near every room in the Upper Districts. Like rats jumping a scuttled ship, the city natives had moved out of doors in search of air. That had made a riot of Rowena’s usual haunts. Beyond Blackbottom, Corma’s streets transformed into a maze of people. There was a dance to staying arm’s length from the cutpurses, eyes down from the beggars. Rowena knew its moves as well as she knew the city’s cobbled streets.
Coventry Passage sat snugged in the middle north of Corma, beyond the hue and cry of fisheries and coal barges and marketplaces. The alehouses traded places with row houses, each with narrow front gardens and tidy iron wickets. There were dozens of sober, black hansoms parked hereabouts—evidence of the EC philogians making social calls between the sessions of the conference, no doubt. Perhaps that accounted for the well-swept dooryards looking tidier than usual.
Rowena found herself regretting time unspent at the wash. The monkey-rat’s musk still clung all about her.
The Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers lived at 16 North Lamplighter Circle, Coventry Passage, in a vertiginous row house shadowed by the Old Cathedral on the High Hill. Most row houses had a bellpull to announce arrivals. The rope for number 16 seemed stuck, or perhaps the bell was off its mooring. Rowena all but swung herself from its rope before it finally sang out.
When the front door opened a half minute later, the wind had long since chewed its way through Rowena’s gloves.
An old woman with arms like rolling pins glared down at her. “No alms here. Shove off.”
“Delivery.” Rowena patted the bulging letter pouch. “For the Reverend Doctor Chalmers, if it please milady.”
“I’m not a lady. Give it here.”
Old bitch.
Rowena smiled innocently and passed the pouch over.
The old woman opened it, thumbed through the sheaves of paper crammed within, and sucked her teeth.
“Madam?”
The landlady peered at Rowena as if she’d left a shit on the stoop. “You,” the woman said, “are late.”
Rowena blinked. “I—what?”
Until that moment, Rowena Downshire thought only kittens’ and puppies’ necks had scruffs. But the landlady found Rowena’s all the same and dragged her, ankles swinging, through the rectory’s threshold.
“Two weeks, at least—no. Three weeks since we’ve had even one letter parcel, and the keynote speech just two days off! What does he pay you for?”
Rowena’s mouth opened to answer, but the woman shook her like a rag doll and pitched her toward the stairs to the second floor. “You’ll explain yourself to him, that’s what. Now up, you! No dawdling, and keep your hands close. I’ve no use for light fingers.”
The rectory’s vestibule opened to an array of great roll-armed chairs and overstuffed divans. It had, Rowena thought, something of a gentleman’s society air, though she’d seen about as much of those places in her life as she’d seen of square meals. Pushed and prodded like a calf to the charnel, Rowena took the stairs that rose up about a dozen steps before splitting right and left into a balcony circling the entry floor below. The landlady guided Rowena to the right and hissed like a kettle when she looked too long at a gilded urn sitting in a wall nook.
They paused at the door of a study. Rowena had seen a “study” once before at the end of the job with Bess’s picnic basket and the grouchy handcart. She supposed they were all the same, apart from small details. Imposing furniture, oddments and certificates and awards, looming bookcases bursting with leathery old tomes. There would be a little bar stocked with bottles of this and that, lots of leaded crystal stacked in presumptuous little arrangements by a fastidious maid. The only thing that varied was whether the help was some blushing minx or a sour old spinster. Clearly, the Reverend Doctor Chalmers favored the snarling sort. From the look of it, he also favored gin.
When the landlady appeared in her honorable tenant’s doorway with the packet of letters and a bedraggled Rowena, the reverend doctor scuttled toward her and snatched the parcel up as if it had just been conjured out of the air and was likely to disappear in a moment.
“I assumed you’d want a word with this little louse,” the landlady announced proudly. “Here. Explain yourself, then.”
“I—that is, milady—or, your honor—” There didn’t seem much use in trying to finish the apology, if that was really what was expected of her. Rowena fancied she could blow a crate o
f New Year crackers up in the room and Chalmers wouldn’t notice.
The reverend doctor paced a rut in the floor, reading unfolded letters and tossing them over his shoulder as they were finished. He seemed to be hunting for something in particular. Mouthing words, he walked back over his groove, trampling letters dropped moments before.
“Come in,” he said, flapping papers. “Come in. Have a seat.”
The landlady stiffened and pulled back her shoulders, as if she were about to let an objection fly like an arrow. Rowena thought better of noting she’d already come in, and trotted forward before the old woman’s temper could spoil a chance at a tip—or at the tea tray. It sat on a low table amid more game-lodge sorts of chairs, laden with six lemon buns and a crown of lovely strawberries.
Rowena chose the maroon chair with golden fringe. The cakes smelled warm and wonderfully sticky. Her stomach groaned.
“Um, sir?”
The young reverend looked up. He had pale eyes of some dishwater shade. “Hm?” Something in Rowena’s hopeful smile must have explained the gist of it. “Oh! Oh, yes. Yes, if you like. I’ll only be a moment.” He waved absently at the landlady. “Thank you, Mrs. Gilleyen. That’ll be all.”
“But, sir. The lateness. Don’t you want to send her back with a message for—”
“No, no, no. Everything’s splendid now. Thank you, Gilleyen.” Another wave, all dainty fingertips, painting dismissal.
Rowena smirked at the old woman and twiddled her own fingers in farewell. “Bye, missus.”
Mrs. Gilleyen’s face was a storm cloud as she whirled back into the hall and shut the study door with a good bit more force than Rowena imagined necessary. Well. There was no sense pretending at good breeding. Rowena tore off her gloves, claiming three cakes for her plate and the better part of the strawberries, licking her fingers after touching each. She was on her second cup of tea—perilously full, with as much milk as could be crowded in—when the reverend finally fell into a seat across from her.
“I can’t begin to say how relieved I am to see you,” he began, sugaring his tea and stirring the cup with a little too much enthusiasm. It swam in his saucer, balanced above a jogging knee. “So many new conclusions have been sent along. Nora must be longing to discuss them face-to-face. . . .” He stopped, as if finally seeing Rowena in earnest. “I’m sorry. You’re . . . not the usual girl.”
“No, sir.”
“Well.” Chalmers set down his cup and clapped his hands, as if that was all it took to do away with that little inconsistency. “Welcome to the dawn of a new era, Miss . . . ?”
“Rowena Downshire.”
“Downshire. I suppose it’s not every day you’re able to play a part in something so monumental!”
Rowena stared at him. She was working at another tea cake, chewing slowly. “Sir?”
“The Commission has been looking for this kind of information for years—years!” He laughed at himself, a sudden yipping noise that seemed to surprise him, too. “What a foolishly small unit of time. For centuries. This research is a breakthrough. An historical moment! It almost didn’t happen at all. Two hours ago, I was in despair, abandoned by my partner. This close to giving it up altogether, and now you’ve brought us right back into it!”
Whoever “us” was, Rowena had a fair notion she wasn’t properly a member.
The young man tore into his lemon cake with shocking abandon. He was supposed to be a learned type, a savant. Rowena frowned. He seemed more like one of the nervous, rodent page boys darting about Ivor’s warehouses, always eager for scraps to snatch.
“Um, your honor . . . sir,” Rowena began, “I’m just the legs here.” The young man turned his puzzled eyes on her. She tried it another way. “I’m the courier. I don’t know what’s in the packages. Actually, I don’t much want to know. Better that way for all of us. And you give a fine spread. It’s really jake of you. I’m obliged. But . . .”
The reverend sat back and reached for his napkin, patting the tray blindly for a moment before finding it. His gaze did not come loose from Rowena’s face for a long while. “But,” he supplied finally, “you’ve no idea what I’m talking about.”
She nodded.
“Oh. Dear.” Now the reverend didn’t look jocular or ravenous. He looked green. “I suppose when you say it’s better that you don’t know these things, there’s a reason for that?”
“You used to take deliveries from another girl—Bess?”
Chalmers waited expectantly.
“Well, she won’t be working for us anymore. Something happened, and . . . Well, it’s just that way sometimes. When people send things through a courier, it’s often because it’s better not to have hands on it themselves.”
“Your work is . . . dangerous?”
Rowena shrugged. She stuffed the last strawberry in her mouth. “En’t everything?”
“Well, no. I’m afraid I don’t go in very much for danger.”
That, Rowena supposed, I can believe.
“Why use Ivor, then?”
Chalmers frowned. “I don’t follow.”
Rowena had lived so long in a world of miscreants and thieves, the thought that anyone else didn’t—that anyone could be so positively out of touch—was completely baffling.
Rowena bit her lip. “Maybe . . . I’m sorry. I think I’ve gone a bit far.”
The young reverend shook his head vigorously. “No, now, now, wait—wait a moment. I don’t know your Ivor.” He looked down at the scattered letters on the floor, still somewhere in the green range of pallor. “I suppose the Reverend Doctor Pierce chose your employer for a reason. I’ve always relied on her discretion. In that she has it. And that, I suppose, I don’t.” The reverend stood up again. “And Nora’s been . . . delayed.” Something dawned in his eyes. “You say you deliver dangerous things?”
“Sometimes,” Rowena said cautiously. “Dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, savvy?”
The look on the reverend’s face was painfully eloquent: Do I look like I know what I’m doing?
Rowena knew the answer instantly.
Chalmers stood frozen behind his chair. Something was clearly going on between his ears—some quick calculation of details. “Delayed. . . . And, I suppose that in dealing with you, I might be doing something dangerous?”
“Um . . . maybe?” Rowena attempted a heartening smile. Seeing the reverend’s dishwater eyes widen, she knew it hadn’t been very convincing. “Do you have something to send back? If you do, that’s probably the bad bit, and it’s only bad for me, because I’m the one holding it.”
The young scholar flew at his desk. He pulled a drawer from its track and dumped it over his feet, releasing a puff of dust and a bomb of loosely bound papers that exploded around his ankles. He crouched in the detritus and after a few moments’ hunting emerged with something resembling a thick journal. He threw it on the desk and began wrapping it into a brown-papered package, knotted with a length of sisal.
“Brilliant idea. Here,” Chalmers said, breathless, and rushed toward Rowena. He held the packaged book at arm’s length, as if it might at any instant burst free of the wrapping and open its covers like snapping jaws. “Take this. Take it to your Ivor, whoever he is, and tell him to send it back.”
Rowena took the package. It was lighter than she expected, perhaps only half the mass her eyes told her it should be. “‘Send it back’?”
“Nora hired him to send the letters and notes to me. So he’ll know what that means—won’t he? Of course he will. Just send it back to her. That’s all I want.”
“All right,” Rowena said, hesitating. Ivor had said there’d be no return delivery. Then again, he might be glad of the chance for a surplus on the retainer. She was doing her job well—better, even, than had been asked of her.
“All right,” she repeated. “See, usually, there’s a gratui—”
She hadn’t time to finish the thought. The reverend stuffed the last two lemon cakes in Rowena’s jacket
pockets and all but shoved her out the door, the package in her arms, her heels skidding as he pushed her along and hiked her down the stairs with all the speed of a seasoned bouncer. All the while, he spluttered courtesies.
“I thank you very kindly for your services—You will be remembered fondly for your part in all this, I’m certain, but I am quite afraid our time is up, and there are urgent matters—urgent!—that require my immediate attention, not least of them conveying to those individuals concerned the need to make some important adjustments to the itinerary—”
The heavy front door of the rectory thumped shut again, this time nearly nipping Rowena in the rear. When she turned to look back, her eyes passed over the bundle in her arms, and she realized she was still clutching the silver sugar spoon. She could hear the reverend’s reedy voice piping some set of orders as he thundered back up the stairs, calling the landlady’s name over and over.
For a guilty moment, Rowena considered the spoon. She crouched down to set it on the mat.
She heard the landlady answer the reverend’s calls in a few brisk barks. Rowena paused, her spoon-bearing hand hovering midmotion.
Almost certainly the landlady owned the rectory’s housekeeping effects. There was a dull ache in Rowena’s shoulder from the woman dragging her about—nothing to one of Ivor’s blows but there all the same. And there was a return delivery, too, and no added clink for that added hustle.
Rowena slipped the spoon into one of her pockets, trading it for a lemon cake.
Strange man, she thought as she ate. She turned back down the street, brown paper package tucked under her arm, belly full, and the delivery run still a quarter hour ahead of schedule.
Between here and the warehouse was a maze of shops and stalls and public houses, and nearly any of them would be happy to change out a real silver spoon for a bit of minted coin. She had plans for that coin and time enough to drop it into Mama’s coffer in Oldtemple.
5.
When the hothouse of Crystal Hill came into view, gleaming in the midday sun, Rare caught herself truly admiring it. Her wonder lasted half a heartbeat—then, tossing her hair, she loosened her knife in its strap.
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