The Peculiar Page 5

  Mr. Throgmorton started laughing again, fat lips quivering. Mr. Lumbidule joined in. The faery folk only watched, faces blank.

  Suddenly Mr. Lickerish clapped his hands, producing a clear, sharp sound. The chortles of the two politicians lodged in their throats.

  The faery turned to Mr. Jelliby. “You are leaving now,” he said, and his voice made Mr. Jelliby want to shrivel up and fall through the cracks in the floorboards.

  Mr. Jelliby couldn’t remember afterward how he came to be back in the hall with the mermaid staircase. All he remembered was walking, walking through endless corridors, head lowered to hide the burning of his face. And then he was at the front door again, and the butler was letting him out. But before stumbling into the streaming misery of the city, he recalled looking back into the shadows of Nonsuch House. And there, on the staircase landing, stood the faery politician, a flicker of white in the darkness. He was watching Mr. Jelliby. His pale hands were folded across the silver buttons of his waistcoat. His face was a mask, flat and inscrutable. But his eyes were still wide. And it struck Mr. Jelliby that a wide-eyed faery was not a surprised faery. It was an angry, angry faery.

  CHAPTER V

  To Invite a Faery

  Bartholomew’s eyes snapped open. The air was foul. He was in his own bed and sunlight was pouring through the window. Mother was standing over him. Hettie clung to her skirts, staring at him as if he were a wild beast.

  “Barthy?” Mother’s voice shook. “Well, Barthy?”

  He tried to sit up, but pain roared inside his arms and he collapsed, gasping. “Well what, Mother?” he asked quietly.

  “Don’t play daft with me, Bartholomew Kettle, who did this to you? Did you see who did this to you?”

  “Did what?” His skin hurt. Oh, why did it hurt so? The pain went all the way to the bone, aching and throbbing as if there were maggots underneath, chewing.

  His mother turned her face away and moaned into her hand. “Larks and stage lights, he’s amnesiagactical.” Then she whirled back on Bartholomew and practically screamed, “Scratched you to ribbons, that’s what! Scratched my poor little darling baby to ribbons!” She lifted the corner of his old woolen blanket.

  Hettie hid her face.

  Bartholomew swallowed. All down the front of his body, down his arms and on his chest, were bloodred lines, thin scratches that looped and whirled across his white skin. They were very orderly. They made a pattern, like the writing in the room with the clockwork birds. In a violent, frightening sort of way they looked almost beautiful.

  “Oh. .,” he breathed. “Oh, no. No, no, I-”

  “Were it faeries or people?” There was fear in his mother’s voice. Raw, desperate fear. “Did one of the neighbors find out what you are? John Longstockings, or that Weevil woman?”

  Bartholomew didn’t answer. Mother must have found him in the street. He remembered crawling, half-numb with pain, out of the Buddelbinsters’ yard. The filthy cobbles against my cheek. Wondering if a cart would come and roll me over. He couldn’t tell Mother about the lady in plum. He couldn’t tell her about the changeling boy, or the mushrooms, or the room with the birds. It would only make things worse.

  “I don’t remember,” he lied. He tried rubbing at the lines, as if the red might come off on his fingers. The pain became worse, so bad that spots blossomed in front of his eyes. The lines remained the same, bright and unbroken.

  He looked up. Hettie was peeking at him again. Mother’s face was drawn, her mouth pinched to keep from shaking, the fear in her eyes about to spill over in another fit of hysterics.

  “I need to go,” he said. “Mother, I can ask someone. I’ll make everything better.” He got up, swaying a little as the ache struck him full force. He snatched his dirty clothes off the top of the bedpost. Then he made for the door, hobbling as quickly as he could.

  His mother tried to stop him, but he pushed past her, out of the flat and into the passage.

  “Bartholomew, please!” Mother whimpered from the doorway. “Come back inside. What if someone sees?”

  Bartholomew began to run. He was going to summon a faery. He had to. It was clear as rain to him now. A house faery could tell him what the ring of mushrooms was, where it led, and why the little creatures in the wings had written on him. It could keep them all safe, and bring them luck. And it could be his friend. A real friend that didn’t just wave at him through windows.

  I’ll make everything better.

  He limped up the stairs toward the roof. The house always felt safe in the morning hours, when the passages were empty and the dust motes whirled slowly through the yellow light from the windows. But it wasn’t safe. No one in the faery slums slept past five, if they slept at all, and Bartholomew didn’t want to know all the things that were happening just beyond the rotting walls. A sharp, metallic tang filled the corridor outside the Longstockings’ door, and behind it, what sounded like knives sliding against each other. Piskies were wailing and scampering inside the Prickfinger flat. On the third floor, where the heat rose and the air was thick as blankets, the smell of boiled turnips and musty bedding was strong enough to smother him.

  A door opened in front of him, and he only barely managed to skid around it. An old faery matron stepped out. She kicked the door closed.

  Bartholomew’s throat constricted like a wire trap. Not this, too.

  She was so close. Bartholomew could see every wrinkle in her apron, the blue cornflowers stitched into her faded ruffled cap. For a terrible moment she paused, head raised, as if listening. If she flicked her eyes around, even just a hair’s breadth, she would see him standing there, stock still in the middle of the passageway. She would see his pointy face, the tracery of lines, bloody along his arms.

  One. Two. Three. .

  Finally the old faery sniffed and began lumbering away down the passage. Behind her, a scuffle, then a bang. She stopped midstep and whirled.

  But Bartholomew’s heels had already disappeared up through the trapdoor into the attic.

  Once inside the secret gable, he pulled an old coffee tin from its hiding place in the rafters and opened it, laying out its contents quickly on the floor.

  His mother had forbidden him to invite a house faery, but she didn’t know everything. She was just afraid of faeries, had been ever since their Sidhe father had danced off into the night and never come back. That was different though; Bartholomew wished she could see that. His father had been a high faery, sly and selfish, and had whisked Mother away from her theater troupe when she was young and pretty and full of life. Mother had given everything up to be with him. And then, when her pretty face was gone, and her hands were cracked from the lye, from drudging to feed their children, he had simply left. Mother hadn’t spoken to a faery since.

  Bartholomew’s fingers found a slip of ribbon in the box, and he lingered a moment. Memories of his father were dim, but he knew he had been afraid of him, of those black eyes always turned toward him with disgust, and perhaps the hint of a question. One time his father had spoken to him in a strange language, on and on for what seemed like hours, and when he had finished and Bartholomew had simply stood there, dumb and wide-eyed, his father had flown into a rage and thrown all Mother’s dishes against the wall. House faeries weren’t like that, Bartholomew told himself. Nothing so cold and flighty. They were more like animals, he decided, like very intelligent birds.

  He looked darkly at the items before him, trying to ignore the pain in his arms. The faery wouldn’t throttle them in their sleep. It wouldn’t. Scratched out in black ink in one of Bartholomew’s books was a tiny shimmery creature, barely as tall as the candlestick it stood by. The faery wore a cap with a feather in it and had snowdrop petals growing out of its back. It looked nice.

  Bartholomew picked up one of his twigs and then threw it down again. Why did Mother have to go and forbid things? It just made everything worse. She was wrong. She would see that soon enough when the domesticated faery became the end of all their troubles. On
ce Bartholomew had the faery whisper away the red lines and tell him things and play hide-and-seek in the attic, he would make it work. It could help with mending, and run errands, and stoke the potbellied stove for the wash kettle. Mother wouldn’t have to work so hard, and maybe someday they could get out of the faery slums and live in a beautiful room like the one with the green drapes and the fireplace.

  Then she would see.

  Banging open a dusty volume, Bartholomew began to invite a faery.

  The domesticated fayrye, or “house fayrye,” is a magikal being originating from the Old Country, that lies beyond the fayrye door. It is immaterial and can appear in all shapes and syzes. The appearance of your fayrye will depend entirely on its personal charactre and mood.

  To invite this fayrye, you must find a quiet place, secluded and very stille. The dark and mossy hollows that form near woodland streams are particularly suited. (Have no fear, the fayrye will follow you home.) Gather an assortement of leaves, straw, twigs, and other plant-ish fibre. Weave them together into a hollow mound, leaving a little openning at its base. (This is the door so that the fayrye may entre.) Tangel scraps of naturel food (such as elderberries and annis) into the walls of the dwelling. Place inside:

  One spoon (NOT iron)

  One ribbon, prettily coloured

  A thimble

  A shard of glass

  Bits of domestic food (such as bread, or cheese)

  Lastly, sprinkle a pinch of salt over it all. Fayryes despise salt above all elss, but in putting it over your offering you will give them cause to respect you. Do not strew too much salt, however, or the fayrye will fear you as the Devil Himself and be of no use.

  Note: the higher the quality of each item, the better chance one has of attracting this fayrye. Also, the quality of the items is directly related to the quality of the fayrye swayed by them. A silver spoon and silken ribbon will likely get you a house fayrye kind and good.

  And then, in very small and faded type:

  Excerpt from the original “Encyclopaedie Fayrye” by John Spense, 1779. Thistleby amp; Sons Ltd. can make no guarantee as to the efficacy of the above-stated actions, nor can it take responsibility for any undesired results they might procure.

  Bartholomew had read all this so many times he could almost have said it from memory, but he read it again one last time. Then he picked up the ingredients and set to work. Each of the things on the list he had gathered over the course of many months, searching them out and hiding them away in his treasure box. The leaves were from the rope of ivy that clung to the back of the house. The straw he had taken from his own pillow. Spoon, breadcrumbs, three dried cherries, and the last of the salt, were all snitched from Mother’s kitchen.

  Twenty minutes later, Bartholomew clapped the dust from his hands and sat back to inspect his work. The faery dwelling didn’t look like much. In fact, it looked dejected, as if someone had simply emptied a pail of rubbish on the floor. He began to wonder if perhaps this was just silly and hopeless. His skin hurt so terribly. He didn’t know how long it took a faery to find such a dwelling, and he didn’t know if he should wait for it, or if he should go away and come back later. And what if the faery didn’t help him? What if it didn’t want to be his friend, and soured the milk like his mother had said it would? The more Bartholomew thought about it the more miserable he became, until finally he shook his head and crouched down in front of the round window. Hugging his knees to his chest, he looked out.

  A mangy black dog was wandering along the gutter, searching for a cabbage leaf or a bone. At the far end of the alley, two men were conversing quietly in the blue-gray shadows of some eaves. Light the color of lamp oil drifted down from the slit of sky. Across the way, the Buddelbinsters’ house stood hunched around itself. The sour-looking woman was in the yard, a basket of washing against her hip. She was laying sheets out on the grass to dry. She shuffled across the place where the circle of mushrooms had been, once, twice, a dozen times, but nothing happened. No wings, or wind. It didn’t work anymore. The magic was gone.

  Bartholomew’s gaze traveled on to the house. Something stirred in an upper window. He tensed, half expecting to see the figure again, the dark one that had stood there the day his friend had been taken. The window swung open. Some flimsy curtains were brushed aside. It was the faery mother, seated on a straight-backed wooden chair, head up, hands in her lap, looking out.

  Bartholomew pulled back from the glass. He had hardly ever seen her before. But then he hardly ever saw anyone. She was a wood spryte, small and delicate, with a crown of antlers growing out of her head. She was almost pretty. All but her eyes. They were flat, empty, staring out onto the yard as sightless as marbles. She had been weeping.

  Bartholomew squinted at her, puzzled. Does she miss her son? Was he kidnapped, after all? He had almost managed to persuade himself that the lady in plum was a magician of some sort, and a relative, and had taken his friend away with her to give him a better life. But all in an instant he wasn’t so sure. That was not the face of a lonely mother. That was the blank, disbelieving face of someone with so much grief locked up inside her that she didn’t know what to do with it, someone with a barb in her heart that no amount of crying or screaming could ever dull.

  In the yard, the sour-looking woman continued to lay out the washing. She faced the house, even walked under the window several times, but she never even glanced at the faery in it. What a rude, mean person, Bartholomew thought. He looked back at the faery mother.

  Her mouth had begun to move. Her lips were forming words, but he was too far away to make sense of them. In her lap, her hands folded, unfolded. Slowly she began to rock back and forth in the chair. The sour-looking woman was laying out bedding now, turning the yard into a checkerboard of pillowcases and withered grass.

  Bartholomew inched closer to the windowpane. A breeze was picking up. Wisps of the white curtain were blowing across the faery mother’s face, into her antlers and eyes. She didn’t move from her chair.

  The breeze gathered in strength. Sheets and bedclothes began to shift, skittering gently across the weeds in the yard. A shadow passed overhead. Bartholomew glanced up and saw that the summer sky had become low and angry, darkening with sudden weather. The sheets began to curl over themselves, piling up into heaps.

  The sour-looking woman worked on, flicking out more sheets, even as the other ones twisted across the yard. At the end of Old Crow Alley, the two men were still deep in conversation. The dog had found a scattering of slop and was scratching through it lazily. All seemed oblivious to the flooding darkness.

  The breeze was a wind now, churning the bedclothes, picking them up and hurling them into the air. Curtains slashed and flew across the window where the faery mother sat, now obscuring her, now revealing her stark against their whiteness.

  Suddenly there was a vicious shriek, like metal grinding against metal. The faery mother’s face exploded inches from his own, flat against the other side of his window. Her eyes were huge, dead-black, and sunken. Tears flowed from them, too many tears, streaming over her cheeks. Her mouth gaped open.

  Bartholomew screamed. He tried to jerk back from the glass, but he couldn’t move. His body had gone cold, stiff as the water pump in winter. The faery mother’s mouth opened even wider, and a horrid keening wail snaked from within.

  “You won’t hear it come!” she screamed, and her eyes began to roll back in her head.

  Bartholomew was crying, trembling, terror strangling the air from his lungs.

  “You won’t hear a thing. The cloven hooves on the floorboards. The voice in the dark. It’ll come for you, and you won’t hear a thing.”

  Bartholomew clamped his hands across the window, trying desperately to block out the face.

  But she only laughed a hopeless, anguished laugh, and sang:

  “You won’t hear it calling. You won’t know until it’s too late, too late, TOO LATE!”

  With a start, Bartholomew fell back and struck his head hard
upon the floor.

  The next morning, while Bartholomew was still in bed, his mother came in with a smelly, boiled poultice, and a wet rag for his head. She didn’t ask where he had been. When he thought of it-the little faery house in the attic, the round window, and the face-it made him feel a million times worse.

  “Mother?” he said quietly. “Mother, did you hear anything about the Buddelbinsters?”

  “The Buddelbinsters?” Her voice was almost as hoarse as his own. “Don’t bother about them. There’s enough of bad luck in this house. We don’t need anyone else’s.”

  “Bad luck?” Bartholomew sat up a little. “About their son?”

  “Shush now, Barthy. Lie still. Not the son. The mother. Driven mad with grief, Mary Cloud says, but that’s just talk. Likely she died of the cholera. It’s all a-raging in London now.”

  His mother finished patting down the poultice and left. The flat door banged shut, then the door to the alley. He heard Hettie pattering in the kitchen, and the clink of a bowl. A few minutes later she came into the tiny room. Her arms were bare. She had pressed the juice from the red bird-berries Mother used to brighten the colors in the washing and had painted her arms in sloppy, twining lines.

  “Hallo, Barthy,” she said. She smiled at him.

  Bartholomew stared back. He almost shouted at her. What a silly thing to do. What a silly, know-nothing little person you are!

  Hettie kept smiling.

  “Where’d Mother go?” he asked after a while.

  She stopped smiling and climbed up beside him on the bed. “To find some turnips for breakfast. It’ll be all right, Barthy.”

  Bartholomew looked down at their arms, Hettie’s dripping red, right next to his own delicate swirls. He knew why she had done it then.

  “Well, aren’t we the finest-looking people in Bath,” he said, and then they went to the wash tub and he helped her scrub away the red, and they were both smiling by the time Mother came back with the turnips.