“I’m Gerhard Lenz’s daughter. I’m here to get him out of prison.”
The man tilted his head, and his watery blue eyes regarded her over his spectacles. “Huh,” he went. “Huh-huh. Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh . . .”
If a blacksmith’s bellows could laugh, it might have sounded like that, if the bellows also had tuberculosis. Lizbet endured the peculiar noise for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll find my own way.” She glimpsed a marble stairway spiraling upward at the rear of the anteroom. She headed for it.
“Hans!” the man with the bellows laugh yelled behind her. “Show this girl to His Lordship’s office. Huh-huh. She may regret her eagerness to get there.”
Hans was a soldier, clad like the boy outside, but older. He motioned Lizbet up the stairway and ascended behind her.
She paused at the first landing. A labyrinth of bookcases stuffed to bursting with books sprawled out in every direction. Flickering oil lamps in sconces lit the scene dimly. Bent-over men with carts shuffled through the stacks, sorting, rearranging, reshelving.
Lizbet paused, but Hans behind her said, “Keep moving.”
The floor above was the same. And the floor above that. Lizbet turned a questioning glance to Hans.
“Keep going,” he said. “His Lordship’s offices are on the sixth floor. His Lordship is a bibliophile.”
“I thought he came from Saxony?” Lizbet said.
“A ‘bibliophile’ is a man mad with books. His Lordship buys books by the hundred. He has agents in Albion, Barbary, Cathay and the Indies. They send him crates of books from the ends of the earth.”
After five flights, the staircase ended at a narrow door bound in iron, to who knows where. Hans passed it by, instead leading Lizbet down a short passage into a large and noisy room full of ink-stained male secretaries bent over high desks, pecking with their quills at paper and parchment. Short fat men in frock coats toddled about, bossing the secretaries. At the office’s other end stood a great mahogany door guarded by a munifex with a musket. The munifex swung the door open at Hans’s request. Lizbet swallowed hard, and walked in.
Tall windows facing east filled the room with daylight. Lizbet had an impression of high walls of bookshelves that almost seemed to close in overhead, like trees bending over a forest glade. More piles of books were stacked around the room, and on top of a table that stood between her and the windows. The tabletop also held scattered small jars and flasks of many shapes and sizes, made of crystal, china, or brass. Behind the desk, silhouetted by the light from the window, a man. A man broad and tall.
“State your complaint,” Margrave Hengest Wolftrow said. “Be quick.”
His form like a looming shadow. His voice like the wind through reeds. Hengest wore fur-trimmed dark silks. He rested his hands on the desk in front of him: each hand was larger than both of Lizbet’s hands put together. Light from the window behind poured around him, but barely illuminated him.
Lizbet would have expected a man so large to seem as solid as a mountain. But staring at the Margrave’s dark form was like like staring into the dim recesses of an empty bookcase in a shuttered room.
She realized that she was trembling. She had bluffed the stripling guard at the gate, but she didn’t think she was going to be able to bluff the Margrave.
“I’m Lizbet Lenz,” she said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” Oops, should she curtsy? She tried to curtsy, but almost fell. Her heart was going as fast as a sparrow’s. Her palms were sweaty, and she tried surreptitiously to rub them on her pinafore. “I’m here to get my father out of the Houses of Correction,” she said. “To ask you, I mean. Please, that is. Please, your . . . Lordship. I’d like you to release him. Please.”
Hengest regarded her in silence for a moment. “Your father is in the Houses of Corrections on account of his crimes,” he said. “Half of Abalia is here to complain to me about this business with the mice.”
“But he didn’t mean it,” Lizbet said quickly. “And I promise he’ll never do it again.”
Hengest made a dismissive gesture. “How do you propose to set right the mischief your father has done? The town is in an uproar. Work and wages lost. Mice have scattered to infest every man’s house and barn. How are these troubles to be repaired?”
Lizbet was silent.
Hengest shook his head. “Your father remains in prison, lest he cause me even more trouble. I deny your request.”
That was all? It was over? In moments, Lizbet’s chance to free her father had fled. “Please!” she said. “I’ll . . . I’ll do anything to get him out. Anything you want. Please. Please!”
She realized, despairing, how useless her words were. What could she, a mere girl, offer this great magistrate?
Instead of replying, Hengest reached for one one of the vials on his desk. He tilted it, and a few tiny spheres, like pearls, fell into his palm. He returned all but one to the vial. The remaining sphere he rolled between thumb and index finger for a moment, while staring into space. Then Hengest popped it into his mouth and swallowed.
For the first time, light from the window illuminated his face. His gaze returned to Lizbet. Hengest’s stare was intelligent, unsparing, and sad. Hengest’s form seemed more solid, less an empty void than simply a man in dark clothing.
“‘Anything,’” Hengest finally said. “But what’s needed isn’t ‘anything.’ What’s needed is magic. Magic brought the mice, magic must dispose of them. Are you a magician, then?”
“No . . .”
“Your father said he was a magician. I believe he misinformed me. There is no good magic this side of the Montagnes du Monde. Over there, it’s different. They have all the magic in the world there.”
That didn’t help Lizbet. The other side of the Montagnes might as well be the other side of the moon. ‘She’ll marry you over the Montagnes’ people said when a man’s sweetheart jilted him. ‘I’ll be rich when I cross the Montagnes,’ men said when they lost at dice.
No magic this side of the Montagnes du Monde? “What about the witch?” Lizbet said. “Maybe the witch could—”
Instantly Hengest leaped to his feet. He loomed over her. “Never speak of the witch!” he shouted.
Lizbet almost shrieked. She clapped one hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry!” she said.
Hengest released a breath. “Witches have no magic, anyway,” he said. “Not what you would call ‘magic.’ A paltry lot of fiddlers and tinkers, that’s all witches are.” Hengest’s eyes swept over her, but could not seem to focus. “You have nothing for me,” he said. “You can do nothing for me. Your father could do nothing for me.”
“But how am I to get my father out of prison?” Lizbet burst out. “You’re keeping him in prison! For just a mistake!”
“Greater men than your father have suffered their entire lives for a mistake,” Hengest said. He motioned to the munifex by the door. “Take this girl away. We have no more to say to each other.”
The doorkeeper at the Houses of Corrections had a bald bullet head. His face was covered with seeping pustules. He let Lizbet in for the few pennies in her pocket. Another gaoler led her through dim stone halls that smelled of urine, down a creaking wooden staircase to the basement, where they found her father in a cell. “Please open the door?” she asked the gaoler.
“How many pennies you got?” the gaoler asked.
“Why, none. I gave them all to the doorkeeper!”
“Bring more next time, girlie,” the gaoler said and smirked. He stumped off.
Behind a door of rusted iron bars, Gerhard Lenz sat miserably on the floor. No cot, not even a mattress. Filthy straw on the floor, a leather bucket for a toilet. “Lizbet, sweetheart, is that you?” he mumbled. Their fingers touched through the bars.
Lizbet gasped: Gerhard’s right eye was blackened, his lips swollen, and his nose squashed and bloody. He wore only a linsey-wool
sey undershirt. “Father!” Lizbet said. “What happened to you? Where are your clothes?”
“Oh, sweetheart, they stole them,” Gerhard said. “And they hit me.”
“Who? Who did this?”
Gerhard didn’t know. Guards? Other prisoners? In the soupy dusk of the Houses of Corrections, who could be certain? Guards were scarcely distinguishable from criminals.
“Father,” Lizbet said, “I went to see the Margrave. I asked him to let you go.” She bit her lip to hold back the tears. “He wouldn’t do it. Father, I don’t know what to do next. What can I do to make him let you go?”
“Dear, I don’t know . . .” Gerhard’s voice, usually cheerful and confident, was distant, thready, and uncertain. It chilled Lizbet. She had never heard him sound like this. “It’s so dark in here,” Gerhard said. “It makes it hard to think. All I can hear is the cries of men being beaten. What can you do for the Margrave? Whatever you think best, I suppose. I can’t think of anything.”
“Father!”
Lizbet was frightened. Gerhard always had a plan, a plot, a trick, a card up his sleeve. He had always been able to find just the right thing to spirit them out of trouble. Gerhard Lenz was the fox with endless wiles, the bird who could not be caged.
But now he was caged at last. The effect that even a night of imprisonment had on him was terrible to see. His spirit had been broken, and spirit was all Gerhard had. He hadn’t much in the way of character, or depth of intellect, or physical strength. To break his spirit was to break the man.
Lizbet had to get him out. She was certain he would die if not released.
Behind Lizbet, a rough voice: “That’s enough for you, missy. Time to go.” The gaoler placed a big hand on Lizbet’s back and gave her a shove down the rubbish-strewn corridor. She stumbled and almost lost her footing.
But there was one more thing she had to ask Gerhard. She swiveled and ducked under the gaoler’s arm. “Father!” she yelled into the grate. “The Margrave said he needed magic. He said all the magic in the world is over the Montagnes du Monde. What is he talking about? No one can cross the Montagnes.”
“You go when I tell you to go, cheeky little whore!” the gaoler yelled. He grabbed Lizbet’s arm and swung her around.
“There’s a book,” came Gerhard’s voice from the darkness of his cell. “It’s a book of magic, or something. They stole it from him when he crossed the Montagnes, years ago. He only remembers little bits of it. He’s been searching for it ever since.”
The gaoler shoved her away from Gerhard’s cell. She stumbled down the corridor, toward daylight. She called back, “I’ll find a way to get you out, Father! I swear I will!”
The sun brooded low and orange in the western sky by the hour Lizbet arrived home. She had walked miles through the city streets and hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she was ravenous. As she was heating up the last of the sausages and sauerkraut on the stove, there was a knock on the door.
Fears fled through her mind. She sneaked to a window, nudged the curtain back a hair, and peered out.
It was only Drizzle, a neighbor’s boy. Drizzle was a couple years younger. He was always cheerful, whether or not the situation called for cheer, poked his nose into everyone else’s business, and talked before he thought. She unbolted the door and cracked it open an inch.
“You weren’t in school!” Drizzle said, grinning. His voice rang with both shock and envy.
“I know I wasn’t in school,” she said. “My father—” She thought of softening the truth, of saying Gerhard was ‘away,’ or something, but then she thought: Why bother? “My father’s in the Houses of Correction. I’ve been trying to get him out.”
Drizzle cared nothing for her father’s ignominy. He was too excited about his own news. “Do you know who was here today? The Magisters of Children! Ursula saw ’em.” Ursula was Drizzle’s sister. “She’s home sick, and she saw ’em. They came to your door. They had all leather on, and chain-mail gloves. Ursula says the gloves are if little children bite ’em. They asked Mother about your uncle. I didn’t know you had an uncle, Lizbet!”
“What did your mother tell them?” Lizbet asked.
“I don’t know. Lizbet, are you going in the Orphan Asylum? Father says the Asylum breeds highwaymen and strumpets. Are you going to be a strumpet?”
“No!”
“Then are you going to be a highwayman? Are you going to have a big black stallion and a blunderbuss pistol?”
“Listen, Drizzle,” Lizbet said, “tell your mother that if the Magisters come back, she should tell them I’ve gone to live with my uncle Bunbury. Okay?”
“So you’re not going be a highwayman?” Drizzle said, disappointment in his voice.
Once she had shooed Drizzle away and locked the door, Lizbet tried to eat. She had to force her food down. Each spoonful traveled in a painful knot from her mouth, down behind her breastbone, to her stomach.
The net was closing in. The Magisters of Children were already on her trail.
Maybe she should be a highwayman. Was this how people started as criminals, she wondered? When the world wouldn’t let them do anything else?
Lizbet was horrified at what she was thinking. To disobey the people God put over you was a sin, and a crime. Lizbet had always been a pious and obedient child. Now, within a single day, she had told lies time and again, and—for just a moment—she had dreamed of becoming a criminal.
What kind of terrible person was she turning into?
She didn’t want to become a terrible person. She didn’t want to be anything more than Lizbet, quiet, gentle, good Lizbet, fourteen years old, for ever and ever.
She cried herself to sleep that night. She cried until the pillow was damp and she had to turn it over to put her head on a dry spot.
In the morning when she woke, her tears were gone. In their place, dry-eyed resolution to do what she must to free her father and keep herself out of the clutches of the Orphan Asylum.
What would a highwayman do? she wondered.
Chapter 3
Lizbet washed with a washrag and dressed in work clothes, not school clothes: a short dress of tough brown serge, canvas bloomers underneath, knee-high wool socks, and roomy, dumpy, scuffed leather boots that you could walk miles in without hurting your feet. She had looked her best when she went to the Margrave yesterday, and when she talked to God, and it hadn’t made a bit of difference with either of them.
She gobbled a breakfast of cheese and stale bread, and left by the house’s back door as the cathedral bells were tolling eight o’clock. She didn’t know what time the Magisters of Children were coming back, but she guessed they’d show up at the front door, and she didn’t want to run into them.
Lizbet went directly to the Cathedral of St. Dessicata. You were supposed to fast before receiving the host. She hadn’t fasted. You were supposed to go to confession. But Lizbet had too much to confess, and didn’t have time. God would just have to put up with it. The short mid-morning service called Terce was in progress as she entered. She sat through two psalms, clicking the toes of her boots together with impatience and anxiety. When the priest invited the churchgoers to take the sacrament, Lizbet trooped down the aisle with a handful of others.
She trembled at a little at the thought of what she was about to do.
She crossed herself and knelt before the priest, close enough to smell the incense and camphor on his robes. The priest took one host from a gilt and silver pyx presented by an altar boy and placed the host on her tongue. Lizbet rose, turned, and walked back to her seat. As the host began to dissolve, she heard a familiar voice:
“Lizbet!”
It was Christ Jesus.
“How long has it been?” Jesus asked. “So glad I was able to catch up with you! I’ve been running my tail off banishing devils down in the Hebrew Quarter. They called me for Lilith again. Third time
this month. I’ve been tangling with her for almost two thousand years, and it’s not that I don’t love her—I love all created beings—but Lady Lil is one tough cupcake.”
Compared with His Father, Jesus was an easy touch when it came to sin. He often simply laughed off minor infractions.
“Jesus,” Lizbet said, “forgive me, for I am about to sin.” She reached her pew and sat down.
“Don’t I know it,” Jesus said with a sigh. “It’s not easy being fallen. Except Mom, who’s immaculate and all, but if you’re like most of us, it’s hard to resist the temptation to kick the cat now and then. Look, here’s a tip. If you’re about to sin, say the multiplication tables under your breath. Not only does it distract you from sin, but it helps your schoolwork. Ice cold baths are also great. Mostly for impure thoughts, they don’t help much with sloth or envy. Also, they’re not really safe in winter—”
“I don’t need advice,” Lizbet said. “I need forgiveness. For a sin I haven’t committed yet.” She wiggled in the pew, trying to see the priest. Had he finished giving communion?
“Lizbet,” Jesus said, “that’s not how this works. If you sin, Heaven can forgive you. But stocking up on forgiveness before sinning—take it from me, that’s a theological and ethical quagmire. What sin did you have in mind? I can give you some great ideas how to avoid it—”
Oh, well, it was worth a try, Lizbet told herself. She rose from her pew and started back down the aisle, toward the priest. She was almost too late. The last woman to take communion was getting to her feet, the priest had already put the cover back on the pyx—
Lizbet broke into a run. Her pounding footsteps echoed down the nave. People in the pews turned to look. When she halted in front of the priest, he stared at her curiously and said, “Miss?”
With a swift gesture, Lizbet knocked the gilded lid off the pyx, grabbed a fistful of consecrated hosts, and dropped them in her skirt pocket.
The priest gasped. For a moment he just stared at Lizbet. Perhaps he had never seen or imagined such a thing before. Perhaps he doubted his own eyes. Lizbet turned and walked back up the nave.
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