The photograph made a kind of echo-memory in my mind. But I didn’t know what sound it was echoing. It was snowing, but there was enough sun to cast a slanted shadow from the electric candle. The echo-memory was like that shadow. You can’t see the sun because of the snow, but you know the sun is there because of the shadows.
“After the trial,” I said, “Gentleman Jack and I will come home to you.” It was silly to speak to a photograph, but I did anyway.
I always spoke to Grandmother’s photograph.
The dagger and I went downstairs. “Pay attention to the exits,” said the dagger. Exits were important, Gentleman Jack always said.
“There’s one exit,” I said.
“The front door is one,” said the dagger. “The door into the kitchen is two.”
“A door’s not an exit if you don’t know where it goes.” That was one of Gentleman Jack’s rules. “Do you know where the door at the other end of the kitchen goes?”
The dagger didn’t know.
If I could turn the dollhouse around, maybe I’d know where the kitchen door led. So far, it looked as though the dollhouse was just the same as the cottage, except for a few details—like the grandfather clock. There was no grandfather clock in the dollhouse.
Down the polished corridor and through the library we went. There was the fireplace—blue tiles, yellow tulips—but there was no fire. There was always a fire in Grandmother’s fireplace.
“Fireplaces,” said the dagger. “Grandmother has lots of fireplaces.”
And here was the funny thing I’d seen last night. The walls were made of books.
“Not made of books.” The dagger loved knowing more than me. “There are bookshelves on the walls and books on the bookshelves.”
The dagger was old. It had been into lots of houses when it belonged to Gentleman Jack. It knew about things like walls that were made of bookshelves.
I’d seen the Judge’s table last night, but now I saw how long it was, with lion’s feet on the legs. I saw the things on the desk. A wooden box, painted the bright blue of cornflowers, and painted on that, purple irises. I opened the box and I closed it. I opened it and closed it. Each time, the lid fit squarely on the shoulders of the box.
If I were a box, I’d always want to wear my lid.
“That’s a taming thought,” said the dagger.
But I wanted to keep thinking it. Maybe I could think it sideways, so the dagger couldn’t hear.
“I can hear sideways,” said the dagger. “I can hear upside down.”
The box was full of thumbtacks with little cloth heads and tiny patterns on the cloth. I would take the most beautiful ones. There—pink, green, yellow.
“They’re only made of brass,” said the dagger. “Not as good as cold iron and carbon.”
There was a scatter of coins on the desk, and an inkwell.
“The inkwell is made of silver,” said the dagger.
“I’ll take the inkwell when we leave,” I said. “I’ll take the coins.”
“But not the photograph,” said the dagger. “The frame isn’t valuable.”
I put the lid back on the box. I didn’t want the dagger to know what I was thinking, which was that the box could be happy now that it wore its lid. The dagger would say that boxes and lids were taming. It was wearisome to have the dagger always listening in.
I remembered the Blue Rose’s first precept. First it said, “Accept your sorrows.” Then it said, “Embrace your joys.” The words seemed clear, but the idea behind them was kind of bendy. It was the kind of idea the dagger wouldn’t understand. The dagger would say you should never accept your sorrows. But I’d taken off the box’s lid, which was a sorrow to the box. Then I’d put it back on, which meant the box could be joyful.
Accept your sorrows, I thought. Maybe the dagger wouldn’t understand.
The dagger said nothing.
Embrace your joys, I thought.
The dagger said nothing.
I turned my back on the library, on the bookshelf walls and the box and the frame, on the coins and the inkwell, which was made of silver. I pushed through the kitchen door into the smell of coffee and bacon. The Judge and Mrs. del Salto sat at the table.
“Where do we send the girl?” said Mrs. del Salto. She looked at me. “Where do we send her after it stops snowing?”
The Judge lifted the yellow cup off a hook beneath a shelf and put it on the table. He was going to give me milk; he was going to give me honey. But what if Mrs. del Salto told him to send me away first?
And suddenly the reason I hadn’t told the Judge I’d testify at Gentleman Jack’s trial seemed like the stupidest reason in the world. It would be terrible if Gentleman Jack thought I was going to tell the truth at his trial, but it would be even more terrible if they sent me away so I couldn’t testify at all.
I had to tell the Judge I was going to testify. I had to tell him now, but no one had spoken to me since last night. I had to get them to speak to me first. The yellow cup sat on the table. I remembered how its shadow turned the milk the color of the cottage, but that didn’t matter now.
I took two steps to the table. I snatched up the cup, I dashed it on the floor. Now they’d have to say something.
At first there was only silence. I looked at the Judge. My tooth marks were red on his cheek. I looked at Mrs. del Salto, eating ashes and salt.
“What was that about?” said the Judge.
“I want to tell you I’ll testify—testify in court—about Gentleman Jack.”
“Breaking a cup is a peculiar way to do so.”
I looked at the cup. It lay in pieces on the floor. It wasn’t as strong as my tin cup in the hideout. Things made out of metal were the best. Another best thing was eating and drinking in the hideout. There I ate by myself.
“I’ll get some glue,” said the Judge, “so you can repair it.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
But the Judge was already swinging through the kitchen door to his library. Then he returned moments later with a small glass bottle. “Please count the number of pieces into which you have rendered the cup.”
Rendered? I didn’t know that word, but I knew what he meant. I counted. There were eight pieces.
“You will go to school for eight days before you may see Gentleman Jack.” The Judge placed the bottle before me.
“So many days,” said Mrs. del Salto.
The bottle of glue was shaped like a gourd. When you unscrewed it, there was a brush attached to the inside of the lid. That was smart. I glued the pieces; the Judge and Mrs. del Salto watched.
Eight whole days, I thought. For once, Mrs. del Salto and I were thinking the same thing.
The Judge was looking at the cup. “You have restored its bloom.”
Here were more words I didn’t understand, but the Judge explained: it was when something needed to grow, like skin, say, after you’d scraped it—
“Or,” said Mrs. del Salto, “your heart after you’d broken it—”
“Monica!” said the Judge, and they both fell silent.
But I didn’t need to hear any more. Restored its bloom. I understood what it meant.
“Let’s start over,” said the Judge. “Good morning.”
I knew what to say. “Good morning.”
“I’m glad you’re to testify at the trial, but I wonder what changed your mind.”
Mrs. del Salto interrupted. “How long until the trial?”
“The trial is set for May sixth,” said the Judge.
I thought a moment. “Ninety-three days.” I’d had practice figuring out days. I would start counting backward again until I got to another Day Zero. Day Zero had always been the day Gentleman Jack and I were going to start living in Grandmother’s house.
“You count fast!” said the Judge.
“That’s a lot of days,” said Mrs. del Salto. She didn’t want me in the cottage, casting my shadow on the memories of Magda and Isaac. You could tell by the way she look
ed at me with her black-button eyes. She didn’t want a living girl in the cottage, when her own two children were stuck in a frame.
“He’s to be tried in the capital,” said the Judge. “You know how crowded the trial calendar can be.”
“May sixth is good,” said the dagger. “You can eat grasshoppers in May.” The dagger was right. I might have to get to Netherby Scar by myself. But I could always find things to eat. There’d definitely be daisies, which were almost lettuce, and grasshoppers. You could eat anything, if you’d a mind.
“You’ll need a name,” said the Judge. “For us to use, of course, but especially to use in school. I’ll give you one if you’d like.”
The dolls had given me a name. It was better than Magda or Isaac. I didn’t want the Judge to give me a dumb name like that. “My name is Starling.”
“What a terrible name,” said the dagger. “Starlings are small and plain.”
“What a lovely name!” said the Judge. “Starlings are fierce fighters. Starlings are feathered iridescence.”
I’d never seen a starling, but I could tell the name was good. A name was good if the first name went with the last name. I couldn’t read, but I knew letters and their sounds. I knew the words Starling and del Salto went together. They both had the S and the L sounds, which were soft. They both had the T sound, which was like a little jump to help get your tongue to the next sound, which was soft again.
“It’s too long,” said the dagger.
It was exactly the right length.
“It’s longer than Gentleman Jack,” said the dagger.
There were four sounds in Gentleman Jack. There were five sounds in Starling del Salto. “It’s just one sound longer,” I said. “That’s like a quarter inch longer.”
“A quarter inch is too long,” said the dagger.
“Not in a knife,” I said. “In a knife fight, an extra quarter inch might mean winning.”
“Starling,” said Mrs. del Salto. “A murmuration of starlings.”
I didn’t know what that was.
“It’s when they all fly together,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Each starling turns and swoops at exactly the same time, as though they’re in a ballet.”
I didn’t know about a ballet, but it was such a pretty word, it must be taming.
“Can I have some cleaning things?” I said.
“Oh?” said Mrs. del Salto.
“I want to clean the dollhouse.” I really just wanted to polish the watch, but I couldn’t say that.
“You approve of cleaning, don’t you?” said the Judge.
“In moderation,” said Mrs. del Salto. “In extreme moderation.”
“Can moderation be extreme?” The Judge laughed, and even Mrs. del Salto smiled. I’d never seen her smile before.
The cleaning things were through a door that led to some narrow stairs. “Stairs to the cellar,” said the Judge, “where the butter waits and dreams.”
“Butter doesn’t dream!” said the dagger.
Before you got to the cellar and the dreaming butter, there was a little landing with some shelves. I recognized cloths for dusting and brushes for scrubbing and soaps for rubbing. Mrs. del Salto gave me wet cloths for washing and dry cloths for drying. I let Mrs. del Salto tell me about spirits of ammonia and spirits of turpentine, even though I already knew about them. I would mix them together to clean the watch.
I hadn’t known about beeswax, though, which was for polishing furniture. I hadn’t known it smelled of honey, which was from bees, mixed with the smell of fresh wind. The fresh-wind smell was from lavender oil.
Mrs. del Salto took me through a door from the kitchen that led into a dining room. Its walls were the color of cream, with painted roses and ribbons making swoops along the top. Mrs. del Salto said that the swoops were called a Garland. The carpet was strawberries on cream.
In the middle stood a great table. “It shines like that because of the beeswax,” she said. I looked at the table, and then at the wall, where the garland looped up toward the ceiling, making an arch. In the arch, on the wall, was something that might have been a picture, but it was covered by a cloth.
“A mirror,” said Mrs. del Salto.
But mirrors are for looking, and you can’t look through a cloth.
“One must always cover the mirrors in a house of death,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Otherwise, the souls of the dead might get stuck.”
But I thought Mrs. del Salto would want the souls of her children to get stuck. She didn’t like it that they’d died and gone away.
It was good to learn about beeswax. Then I’d know about it when I got to Grandmother’s house, which was sparkling clean. Gentleman Jack said that every day they washed the windows with newspaper and water. The newspapers were so old, they’d gone gray and soft as powder.
Mrs. del Salto wanted me to smell the bottle of lye. She said if I smelled it, I’d never drink it by accident. But I refused. I already knew how lye smelled, even though I’d never sniffed any. I knew the smell from my imagination. It smells like gravy that’s been bled from a tablecloth, which was how she got out my gravy stain. It smells like eyeballs stewing in hot sauce; it smells like throats on fire. The idea of fire makes sense because when you mix lye with certain other things, it can explode.
Mrs. del Salto said I must never drink lye. She said it would eat through my insides and kill me. She didn’t know that my imagination had been poached in the smell of lye.
I asked Mrs. del Salto why there was a tablecloth in the kitchen and not the dining room. Weren’t tablecloths fancy, and wasn’t the dining room fancier than the kitchen?
She shrugged. “The dining room is for entertaining, but I no longer care to entertain.”
I went back to the attic smelling of lye.
The Judge had been to the attic while I’d been learning about beeswax and lye. He said he’d realized I couldn’t see the back of the dollhouse, so he’d set the dollhouse on a plate. It wasn’t a plate for eating, though, not the kind of plate you’d sit in front of, at a table, your eating hand limp and heavy as a dead bird.
It was an enormous plate, the kind you could push with one finger and send spinning round. The dollhouse spun round with it, so the back of the dollhouse went flashing by and then the front again. Round it spun, easy as anything, from the front to the back, from the back to the front.
“It’s pleasant to go spinning round,” said the voice of the mother doll.
“Very pleasant indeed,” said the father doll.
I dragged my finger against the edge of the plate. It slowed, then stopped. The dolls were in the back of the dollhouse.
“You won’t forget about the tasks?” said the mother doll.
“The three tasks,” said the father doll.
“I’ll be here for ninety-three days.” It was good the trial calendar was crowded. It meant I could travel when it was warm and eat daisies and grasshoppers.
“First the dog,” said the mother doll. But I’d already talked to Nilsson about the dog.
“Then the collar,” said the father doll.
“Then the baby,” said the mother doll.
“Stop talking to the dolls!” said the dagger. “They’re not real!”
Why couldn’t the dagger hear the dolls? It could hear things inside my head, like the things I was thinking. And it could hear things I heard, like people talking.
“Maybe you’re the one that’s not real,” I said.
“I am six inches of carbon and iron,” said the dagger. “I have two edges and a deadly tip. When you have edges and a tip and carbon, you’re as real as anything.”
The dagger felt real, but the dolls felt real, too. Look at them, moving around on their stiff little joints. Of course they were real. Look at them, walking to the back of the dollhouse.
The front of the dollhouse went like this, left to right: parlor, foyer, library. The back went like this: dining room, kitchen. There was a door between the dining room and the kitchen. It w
as a door that wasn’t an exit.
The mother doll and father doll stood in the dining room, which was almost identical to the human-size dining room I’d just seen. There were the red roses and ribbons, the strawberries-and-cream carpet.
“The table is bare,” said the mother doll. “It wants a tablecloth.”
The mother doll had found the words I hadn’t quite found when I’d asked Mrs. del Salto about the tablecloth. I saw it now: the dollhouse table was too bare. It was gritting its teeth.
“It should be a lace tablecloth,” said the mother doll.
“There should be a mirror on the wall,” said the father doll. “The dining room wants a mirror.”
There was no covered-up mirror in the dollhouse dining room, just an empty space where the garland looped up, making an arch.
“The dining room is a happy color,” said the father doll. “People eat more when they eat in a room the color of crimson.”
Not red, I thought. Crimson. I knew the color Crimson, but I’d forgotten I knew. It was the color of Grandmother’s velvet chairs.
“The dining room is dusty,” I said. “So is the kitchen.” The second floor needed cleaning, too: the mother and father dolls’ bedroom in the front, above the parlor; and the two bedrooms in the back, staring at each other from either side of the landing.
“One for the sister,” said the mother doll.
“One for the brother,” said the father doll.
Magda and Isaac, sister and brother, the children in the photograph, squeezed into the frame so they could never grow. The rooms were so dusty, the carpets had gone gray. I would clean them, but first I’d polish the watch. That was the important thing. If I kept it polished, I’d get to Grandmother’s house.
I got all the tarnish out of the bird engraving, which isn’t easy, because it gets down in the tiny lines. But when it was clean and sparkling, it made me think of what the Judge had said: “Feathered iridescence.”
Iridescence, I thought, had something to do with shininess. The watch was shiny and starlings were shiny, and my name was Starling. I knew that Gentleman Jack thought I was dull, even though he didn’t always say so. But maybe with a new name, I could start to shine.
The Robber Girl Page 11