The Sisters of Straygarden Place

by Hayley Chewins

  Mayhap collected the shreds of her parents’ letter and read the torn words, blinking tears away. She untied the ribbon at her left wrist and slipped the pieces into her sleeve, tightening it so they wouldn’t fall out. When all of this was over, she would ask the house to glue the letter together. She would ask it for a new frame.

  What she really wanted to ask the house to do was turn back time — to make it so that Winnow never went walking in the grass. She wanted to ask the house to get rid of the silver grass altogether, in fact. She wanted to ask it to bring their parents back.

  In the days following their parents’ disappearance, Mayhap and Winnow must have asked the house a thousand times to return them. But it never did. They had realized soon enough that there were things the house could do and things that were beyond its power.

  Later, when Pavonine was older and had begun to spend most of her time in the library, she explained to her sisters: “Even magic is limited. There are different types, and the type of magic determines what it can do.”

  And the girls had understood: The house could feed them, could clothe them, could keep its carpets clean and its mirrors shining. It could draw their baths and make their bed. It could pour them tea and serve them dinner. It could even fluff its carpets when they tripped so they wouldn’t bruise their knees too badly.

  But it could never give them what they wanted most in the world.

  Mayhap sat in the hallway, picking little stars of glass out of the bottoms of her slippers. Seekatrix lay on the carpet beside her.

  A few doors down, she could hear Pavonine speaking to Winnow in their bedroom, whispering comforting lies.

  “You have kept the grass from her,” another voice said, and Mayhap looked up to see the Mysteriessa standing before her. Seekatrix sat up and wagged his tail.

  “She’s not getting better,” said Mayhap.

  “You don’t know that,” said the Mysteriessa.

  “I do. I can see. She’s my sister. I know when something’s wrong.”

  “Even our sisters can surprise us,” said the girl.

  “But isn’t there anything else I can do?” asked Mayhap. “To help her?”

  “No. You have done all you can. You will keep doing all you can. You will leave her to rest. You will not agitate her any longer.”

  This reminded Mayhap of Winnow’s words to her. Leave me alone. Leave. Me. Alone.

  Mayhap laughed bitterly. “Why should I trust you?” she said. “I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are. I don’t care if there are things I don’t understand about the house; you need to explain it to me if I’m going to —”

  “Can I sit beside you?” asked the Mysteriessa. The words had cracks in them, like dropped and mended vases.

  Mayhap didn’t exactly want the Mysteriessa to sit beside her, but she didn’t see how she could say no, either. So she nodded silently — and couldn’t help but squirm when the Mysteriessa’s arm brushed against hers. Her skin was cold, like a china doll’s.

  The Mysteriessa leaned toward Mayhap and whispered, “I’ve been here a long, long time.” She looked down the hallway and back at Mayhap. “I’m the one who made this place what it is. Before, it was only an ordinary house.”

  Mayhap sat up straighter. “You made the grass?” she said.

  The Mysteriessa shook her head. “No, no. Not the grass. The grass was here before everything.”

  Mayhap looked down at her folded arms. “How many years have you been the Mysteriessa?”

  “One hundred and twelve.”

  “So you’ve looked after many families before us.”

  “I’ve taken care of all of them.” The Mysteriessa smiled. “I told you. I understand how things work around here. That is why you must trust me, Mayhap.”

  Mayhap didn’t want to rely on the Mysteriessa. But she needed help. She had so many questions. “The other families who lived here before us,” she said. “Their portraits are in the gallery. Did the grass ever make them sick?”

  “Sometimes. But most of them didn’t stay long enough. Most of them couldn’t last.”

  “Why not?” asked Mayhap. “Please,” she implored. “Tell me.”

  The Mysteriessa blew out a sigh. “Fine,” she said. “But only if you promise not to tell Pavonine. We don’t have to make this any more complicated than it already is.”

  Mayhap’s stomach tingled, but she said, “I promise,” and she shifted so that she was facing the Mysteriessa. Seekatrix curled up on her lap.

  “The grass takes things,” said the Mysteriessa. “From families. So that they can live here.”

  “Takes things?”

  “It’s so that the house can look after them,” continued the Mysteriessa. “So that the magic of the house can touch them. It’s the cost of it.”

  The Mysteriessa paused as though she were remembering.

  “Once,” she said, “a man came to the gate. The house had been standing empty for years, so the grass offered it to him. The man accepted the house gladly, even after the grass told him that he would have to give something up. When he stepped inside, he couldn’t believe its grandeur. He had a nice hot bath, and after a sumptuous dinner of roast lamb and figs, he fell asleep in one of the house’s large, clean beds.

  “The next morning, the house served him a delicious breakfast of rich coffee and tea cakes — but he could not eat a single bite or swallow a single sip. The tea cakes tasted like mud; the coffee, like water from a dirty puddle. I told him to leave, but he wanted the house. He was stubborn. He had never seen a place so beautiful.

  “The house kept serving the man food — rich, lavish meals — but he could not stomach any of it. The grass had taken good tastes from him. Taken them, as though they were coins in a purse.

  “Eventually, after weeks of being able to eat only the most meager of mouthfuls, he crawled out into the silver grass. But he was so weak that he died before he could get to the gate. If he’d only listened to me, he might have survived.

  “That’s what I do, Mayhap. I help the families who live here. I help them to enjoy the luxury of the house but also to manage the grass’s magic. Because if they don’t, tragedy befalls them.”

  The story sifted through Mayhap like flour through a sieve. She hugged Seekatrix tightly. “What other sorts of things does the house take?” she asked.

  “Oh, sometimes it’s memory, sometimes music. Sometimes it’s love, or language, or solitude. The cost of light is darkness.”

  “Our parents used to say that,” said Mayhap.

  “That does not surprise me. It is the motto of Straygarden Place.”

  “Is this — is Winnow’s sickness — is it one of the things the grass takes? Her health? Or — is that why our parents left? Did it take them?”

  The Mysteriessa shook her head quickly. “No,” she said. “It’s like I said: Winnow’s sickness is a consequence of touching the grass, of being out there for so long. And I — I don’t know why your parents left. I’m sorry, Mayhap. I did try to get them to stay. But they insisted.”

  “You knew them?” asked Mayhap, identifying the tight, vicious feeling in her chest as jealousy.

  The Mysteriessa nodded. “For a little while, yes.”

  Then it dawned on Mayhap. “The grass took sleep from us,” she said. “That’s why we have droomhunds. That’s why we can’t close our eyes for more than a minute —”

  “Yes,” said the Mysteriessa. “You’re right. And I was the one who interceded on your behalf. I brought the droomhunds to your beds. So you could get your rest.”

  “So you only appear when something goes wrong?”

  “When there’s a conflict between the grass and the family, yes.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” snarled Mayhap. “None of it.” The ideas were a jumble of knotted ribbons in her mind, and she couldn’t separate them out.

  The Mysteriessa looked at the carpet. “I’m sorry, Mayhap.”

  Mayhap buried her face in Seekatrix’s fur.
Her helplessness made her furious, the kind of anger that came after you touched a hot stove. “Don’t be sorry,” she said to the Mysteriessa. “Be helpful.”

  “But I am sorry, Mayhap,” said the Mysteriessa. “Just keep the grass from touching Winnow and let her rest, and it’ll all be well. I’m sure of that.” She touched Mayhap’s shoulder, but Mayhap shrugged her hand away. Seekatrix whined softly.

  “Just leave me alone,” Mayhap said.

  She felt the Mysteriessa drifting from her like a dissipating mist.

  “What are we going to do, Seeka?” she moaned. “What are we going to do?” She looked down the hallway, toward the room she shared with Pavonine and Winnow.

  She heard Pavonine’s faint voice again. “Would you like me to tell you a story, Winn?”

  “A story,” Mayhap said to Seekatrix, and his ears darted forward.

  She stood and began to walk, and her droomhund followed her dutifully.

  Mayhap had never liked the library.

  Though Pavonine often spent entire days there — reading stories herself and asking Tutto to tell them to her — Mayhap had visited it just a handful of times.

  She went there only when Pavonine begged her to go — usually on Tutto’s birthday or when Pavonine wanted to show her something in a book from the reference section: an encyclopaedic entry on some outlandish animal, or the pressed and preserved leaf of a rare and irreplaceable plant.

  The truth was, Mayhap hated the library. She hated it because the books, lined up like an army, made her feel as though there was so much she didn’t know about the world and about herself.

  And she hated it because it always — always — smelled of coffee.

  Her parents had asked for a coffee trolley to be added to the room, and there it remained. According to Tutto, they’d said that the smell of coffee was a bewitching thing, able to make anyone think faster and think better. Mayhap liked the idea of coffee — and the image of her mother and father bent over their books, cups of the steaming elixir by their sides — but the smell was nearly unbearable. It made her feel as though someone were burying her. She could taste earth on her tongue, could feel the weight of soil on her chest. It made her want to cough and cough until she spat up blood.

  Which is to say: going to the library was no small feat.

  But she would do it for Winnow.

  The library had a floor of green marble. Sofas were dotted around it, as well as reading desks with low-bent lamps. Shelves lined the walls and reached all the way up to the domed ceiling, curving with it, the books somehow staying on their shelves even as they met the oculus in the cupola’s center.

  In the middle of this large circular room was the coffee trolley, positioned between two velvet armchairs. Tutto stood beside it.

  Tutto was a large hippopotamus — about the same size as a real hippopotamus, Mayhap guessed — fashioned out of silver and holding all the library’s thousands and thousands of catalog cards. He had about a hundred palm-sized drawers in his left side, and he moved about on creaky wheels. Each of the drawers contained countless cards, and each card was inscribed with the name of a library book.

  Winnow seemed to remember a time when Tutto had not been alive — when he was unable to speak. She had told Mayhap and Pavonine about climbing onto his back, feeling the hammered metal beneath her hands. But she couldn’t remember how he’d started talking. She used to say that maybe he got tired of sitting in a room filled with words while not having anything to say himself. Mayhap couldn’t remember a time before he’d spoken, and neither could Pavonine.

  Now, as she and Seekatrix approached him, she unblocked her nose and tried not to wince. “Hello, Tutto,” she said. Seekatrix barked once, as if to say hi.

  The great hippopotamus turned around on his wheels, his drawers rattling and tinkling. “Ah!” he said. “Mayhap! Good early morning to you. And dear old Seekatrix. I was just asking the house for a cup of coffee. I do love the smell.”

  Mayhap nodded. “That’s nice,” she said. Seekatrix wagged his tail and trotted in a circle gleefully.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mayhap,” said Tutto. “Of course, of course. You don’t like the smell and that is why you don’t come to the library, isn’t it? Let’s wheel away from the trolley, then, no harm done. One shouldn’t let something as petty as a smell keep one from the library. A library is a place where dreams are categorized. Isn’t that a wonderful idea? For all we know, we are caught in the mind of an artist, and each of these books is a dream she has had.”

  Mayhap thought that was a pleasant enough idea, but she had other pressing concerns. She did appreciate, however, how kind Tutto was to her even though she hadn’t paid him a visit in so long.

  “It must be something special that’s brought you here,” said Tutto, “since Pavonine isn’t with you, and it is not my birthday.” He stopped. “It’s not my birthday, is it?”

  Mayhap almost allowed herself to laugh. But then she remembered Winnow’s cries, and all the laughter in her was frozen in place. “No,” she said. “It’s not your birthday. I came to check if you had any books about the grass — or about the families who lived here before.”

  “Oh?” Tutto’s eyes widened with concern. “And why would you need books like that?”

  “Winnow’s ill,” Mayhap said, “and I don’t know what to do. And Pavonine always says every answer under the moon and stars can be found in the library.”

  “Hmmm,” said Tutto. “I do hope Winnow gets better soon. What ails her?”

  “We don’t know,” said Mayhap, lying a little. “We think — I think — the grass has made her sick. But we don’t know exactly. That’s why I thought if I found some books . . . I want to see if anyone else who lived here — if anyone else has gotten sick.”

  Tutto looked at Mayhap quizzically, narrowing his eyes. “That’s terrible to hear, Mayhap. Winnow has been coming to this library since she was four years old. I do hope she gets better.” He looked at the walls, as if wanting to see through them and scowl at the grass, then wheeled around to face Mayhap again. “Now, you know how this works, don’t you? You haven’t forgotten?”

  Mayhap nodded. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  Tutto spun around on his wheels, his drawers facing Mayhap.

  Mayhap cleared her throat so that she could enunciate her request clearly. “I’m looking for books about the silver grass that surrounds Straygarden Place,” she said. She clasped her hands together and waited.

  From inside Tutto’s cavernous body, she could hear a ruffling and a rattling, like pages being turned very quickly in a book and spoons clattering onto tables. Then a rumbling sound echoed. The rumbling went on and on, and Mayhap thought it would never end. When it finally stopped, the little drawers remained closed. Not one opened, and no catalog card was presented to her. Mayhap huffed.

  “That means,” said Tutto, “that there are no books in this library that have anything in them about the grass.”

  “How can that be possible?” Mayhap said, half to herself and half to Tutto. She looked around the sweeping library. There must have been thousands of books in it.

  Tutto had swiveled to face her again. “It isn’t too surprising,” he said, “when you consider that this house is a rather lonely one.”

  “Mamma and Pappa — they wanted to. Write about it, I mean. But they left. They left us. They never got the chance.”

  “There, there,” said Tutto, nudging her with his warm metal nose. “We still have to address the matter of the families — the ones who used to live at Straygarden Place.”

  Mayhap nodded, gritting her teeth. Coming to the library had been a pointless pain. There probably wouldn’t be any books about the other families, either. And then what would she do?

  Tutto seemed to read her mind. “There’s nothing for it but to try, Mayhap.” He spun around so that the drawers in his left side faced her again.

  Mayhap aligned herself with Tutto’s drawers. And maybe it was the coffee smell, o
r maybe it was feeling verklempt over Tutto’s gentleness, or maybe it was everything that was going on with Winnow, but instead of saying, “I’m looking for books about the families who have lived at Straygarden Place,” she found herself saying, “I’m looking for books about my family.”

  She realized too late; the process had already begun.

  The rattle again, then the rumble. But this time, after a few seconds, one of Tutto’s drawers shot out like an extended arm, and a card flew from it, tumbling through the air toward Mayhap, twisting like a diving bat.

  She jumped to snatch at it.

  At first, the letters skittered like ants. But then her vision settled, and the card settled, and she could read it clearly: The Collected Diaries of Quiverity Edevane.

  “I don’t understand,” she said under her breath.

  Seekatrix growled.

  “Let me help you there, Mayhap,” said Tutto, and he wheeled about to stand beside her, careful not to bump her over. He read the card. “Oh, dear,” he said. “No, no. That’s not right.” The drawer in his side shot open, and the card was drawn back into it.

  “What happened?” asked Mayhap, her heart turned spiky.

  “Oh, it’s only a mix-up,” said Tutto. “You asked for information on your family, and I’m afraid the wrong card was brought up.”

  Mayhap hesitated. “But — Tutto, you chose the card.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong. The library chose it. It’s an arcane process, even to me. Anyway, let’s try again. Nothing more for it than to try again. I daresay even magical libraries can have glitches.”

  “But why would the house bring up a card with the name Quiverity Edevane on it when I asked about my family?”

  “It is strange,” said Tutto. “Clearly you are not an Edevane. Why, you’re a Ballastian, through and through. Eyes like dug holes, that’s what your mother used to say. And skin like a peach rose. A botanist’s daughter, through and through.”