The Peculiar Page 9

  It was not very long before the two women were quite merry in the other room. Every so often, a burst of giggling would erupt, and the voices would become so loud that Bartholomew could hear every word.

  “Did you see she’s planted roses?” Mother was saying, and he heard wood straining as one of them leaned back in her chair. “Roses, Aggy! As if she wants to make that ugly yard all beautified.” She laughed, a trifle bitterly. “They won’t grow, you know. The dirt’s rotten out here with the factories going day and night, and even if it weren’t, roses won’t help that wretched house a bit. Not that one. She’d have been better off making jam out of the hips if she insists on buying such frivolousnesses in the first place. Or tea.” Her voice became wistful. “Rose-hip tea does taste lovely. . ”

  Mrs. Skinner made an incoherent sound of consolation. “I wouldn’t know, Betsy, but I wager it doesn’t even compare to yours. Why, it warms my bones, it does. Every time.”

  Bartholomew could almost see Mother preening at the words, trying to be dainty, trying to be prim, flapping her work-worn hands as if they were the soft white fingers of a gentlewoman. “Nonsense, Aggy. But do have some more, won’t you? There now, mind you don’t snort it up when I tell you what Mr. Trimwick did last-”

  The voices dropped low again. Bartholomew could hear nothing but a murmur through the wall. He sank to his knees and scooted silently across the floor, feeling in the dark for Hettie. He found her at the far end of the room. She was crouched under the window, playing silently with her doll. Its name was Pumpkin and it had a checkered handkerchief for a dress. It had a checkered handkerchief for a head, too, and handkerchief hands and feet. It was really nothing but checkered handkerchief.

  “How does he look, Hettie?” Bartholomew’s voice was the tiniest whisper. Mrs. Skinner mustn’t hear them. Mother had probably told her they were asleep. “Hettie, what’s the raggedy man like?”

  “Raggedy,” she said, and danced her handkerchief into a different corner. Apparently she was not about to forgive him for leaving her under the stairs.

  “Shhh. Keep quiet, will you? Look, Het, I’m sorry. I already said I was, and I shouldn’t have run off like that. Please tell me?”

  She eyed him from under her branches. He could practically hear the cogs whirring inside her head, debating whether to ignore him and give him what he deserved, or to enjoy the satisfaction of telling him something he desperately wanted to know.

  “He doesn’t stand straight,” she said after a while. “He’s all crooked and dark, and he’s got a hat on his head with a popped top. I can never see much of him, and it sounds like he has bugs in his throat when he breathes, and. .” She was having trouble putting it into words. “And the shadows-they follow him about.”

  No petal wings, then. Not nice at all. What a fool he’d been. “Oh. All right. Did he tell you anything? What are his songs about?”

  Even in the dark Bartholomew could see her gaze go hard and flat. “I’m not going to talk about those,” she said. She turned away again and hugged her doll to her cheek, rocking it like a baby.

  Bartholomew felt a horrible guilt at that. This was his fault. The faery and all its tricks. And Hettie was the one suffering for it, more than him. The guilt turned to anger.

  “Well, did he tell you who he was? Did the little beast tell you anything at all?”

  Too late he realized he had said it louder than he had wanted to. It was quiet on the other side of the door. He heard Mother clear her throat.

  Mrs. Skinner spoke. “How are your children, Betsy?” Was Bartholomew imagining it, or did her voice hold an unpleasant edge? “Mary says your boy’s been up in the attic an awful lot lately. And nobody’s seen nothin’ of the girl all summer.”

  “They’ve been ill,” Mother said sharply. For a long moment no one spoke. Then the cork popped again and there was a trickling sound, and Bartholomew could tell from Mother’s voice that she was smiling. “But it’s naught to fret about. They’ll be up and running in no time. Now, let’s hear about you. Business has been right fair lately, if I’m not mistaken?”

  Bartholomew let his breath out slowly. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding it. That was good, he thought. Agnes Skinner loved nothing more than to talk about her “business.”

  “Ah, one can’t complain is all I say. Though there was a tender morsel slipped right through my fingers a few weeks back.” Mrs. Skinner sighed. “All in purple velvets she was, and weighted half to the ground with gemstones. I wanted to bag her on her way out, but she never came. I s’pose someone else got her first.”

  Mother must have answered with something funny because the two women started laughing. Then the conversation was flowing again, drowning out all other sounds.

  Hettie touched his arm. “He asked me a heap-load of questions,” she whispered. “The raggedy man did. About you and me and Mummy, and who our father was. And when I didn’t want to answer him anymore and pretended to be asleep, he just stood there and watched me. He stands so still in the dark. He just stands and stands until I can’t bear it.”

  “And Het, he is a faery, isn’t he?”

  “Well, what d’you suppose he is! Mummy locks the door every night, and the hobgoblin downstairs bolts the door to the alley, but the raggedy man still gets in. He puts his finger into the keyholes, see, and the locks spring open, just like that.” Hettie wasn’t playing with her doll anymore. She was sitting very still, staring at Bartholomew. “I don’t like him, Barthy. I don’t like the way he watches me, all bent over, and I don’t like his songs. Last night I fell asleep while he sang, and I had the most frightfullest dream.” Her black eyes were glistening, wet.

  “It’s all right,” Bartholomew said gently, crawling next to her and putting his arm around her. “It was only a nightmare. You know I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Hettie buried her head in his shirt. “It didn’t feel like a nightmare, Barthy. It felt real. I dreamed I was lying all alone in the passage outside our door, and someone had nailed my branches to the floorboards. I called and called for Mummy and you, but no one heard. The house was empty. And then I saw that all the spiders were scurrying out of the walls, and the birds and bats were flying out, too. I couldn’t see what they were running from, but I heard it, coming up through the house toward me with such an awful squeaking and chattering. I turned my head and asked a beetle that was racing by what everyone was running from. The beetle said, ‘The Rat King. The Rat King is coming.’ And then it ran on and left me there.” Hettie took a breath. “You know the raggedy man goes to your room afterward. After he’s sang to me.”

  Bartholomew shivered. He hadn’t known that. He waited for her to say more, but she only closed her eyes and nestled against him. He sat looking down at her for a few minutes. Then he too curled up, and pulling his old blanket around them both, tried to sleep.

  It was very late by the time the sounds of departure came from the other room. The voices became firm and businesslike in farewell, the flat door slammed, and the treads groaned as Mrs. Skinner tramped back downstairs. For a few minutes Bartholomew was afraid Mother would forget to unlock the door and he would have to wait even longer to put his plan into action. But once Mrs. Skinner’s footsteps had echoed down Old Crow Alley and another door had slammed in the night, Mother came and looked in on them.

  Hettie had fallen asleep in Bartholomew’s lap. She was rolled up in a ball. Her twiggy hair was all that showed, and it looked as if a clump of shrubbery had sprouted out of her clothes. Bartholomew pretended to be asleep, too. He heard Mother take a few steps into the room. He made his breathing low and regular, and wondered what sort of expression was on her face.

  After a moment she lifted Hettie up in her arms and carried her out.

  No sooner had the door closed than Bartholomew was moving, crouching on the cold floor next to the wall. He mustn’t drift off. He mustn’t be too comfortable. He had a faery to catch. Wrapping his arms around his knees, he waited for everythi
ng to go quiet in the other room.

  It took an age. The bells of Bath tolled five minutes after five minutes, shouts echoed in the alleys nearby, and still he heard Mother in the kitchen, creaking over the floorboards, stowing the blackberry cordial in its cobwebby corner, wiping the tea mugs, and crushing leaves and flower petals for tomorrow’s washing. Sometime later he heard her blow out the lamp. Then her first soft snores. Bartholomew pulled himself up and crept into the kitchen.

  The weather was good, but Mother still had to build fires in the potbellied stove to boil water for washing. There was always a good heap of ashes in the coal scuttle. Bartholomew tiptoed across the room and heaved up the scuttle, careful not to make a sound. It was too heavy for him. He only managed a few steps before he had to set it down again. He took a handful of the fine ash and began tossing it on the floor. He put a lot in front of Hettie’s cupboard. Then he wrestled the scuttle back to his room and did the same around his own cot. When there was a heavy layer of ash on the floor, he filled the dipper from the drinking bucket, and walking backward, dribbled water over it all. He heard it splash in the darkness, and trickle, and when he leaned down to touch the mixture it stuck firmly to his fingers. That would do. Leaving the dipper by the door so that he would not have to disturb the carpet of sludge, he climbed into bed.

  He was fast asleep when the lock to the flat clicked open.

  The light from the windows was dull as an old pot when Bartholomew woke. The house was quiet.

  He sat up straight. The ash. If Mother saw the mess it would mean more than just a box to the ears. It would mean an immediate trip to the hack doctor in the court behind the Bag o’ Nails public house, and any number of prods and nasty ingestions. There mustn’t be a flake left by the time she woke up.

  He threw off his blanket and leaned over the edge of the bed, squinting. The water and the ash had dried together overnight, mixing into a sort of gray caked mud. And all through it, pockmarking it like scatterings of acorns, were tracks.

  Now I’ve got you, Bartholomew thought. The tracks were small, two-pronged, with a cleft in the middle. They were all around his bed, all over the floor, hundreds of them going this way and that. They led away in a dirty trail under the door.

  Bartholomew was a city boy through and through. He had never climbed a tree or run in a field. He had never seen a farm, besides the ones on the coffee tins. But Mother had taken him to markets when he was small, and he knew the bottom of an animal’s foot. These were the tracks of a goat. Hooves.

  He saw the sheets again, curling across the Buddelbinsters’ yard, the sky turning to iron, and the faery mother’s face gaping against the attic window.

  You won’t hear a thing, she had cried, and her voice echoed inside his head, aching, heart-rending. The cloven hooves on the floorboards. The voices in the dark. It’ll come for you and you won’t hear a thing.

  Trembling, he got up and followed the tracks into the other room.

  CHAPTER X

  The Mechanicalchemist

  “Ah, Melusine, Melusine.” Aunt Dorcas shook her head, clasped her hands over the cheap pewter brooch at her bosom, and looked ever so wistful and pitying. She spoke the name of the mysterious lady as if referring to the dearest of old friends.

  Ophelia looked up from the dining room table where she was sorting through the bolts of cloth that Aunt Dorcas had brought with her in the steam-carriage. It was not so far to walk from Curzon Street to Belgrave Square, and the draper always supplied runners for larger purchases, but as Aunt Dorcas had said, “It is so terribly low to go by foot.” Never mind that she’d had to beg the fare from the Jellibys’ cook.

  Mr. Jelliby, who up until this point had been slumped glumly in his paisley armchair, sat up straight. Aunt Dorcas knew. She knew of the lady in plum.

  He cleared his throat. He fiddled with his shirt cuffs. Trying not to sound too interested, he asked, “And? Aunty, who is she?”

  “Yes, who is she?” Ophelia echoed, a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  Aunt Dorcas smiled benevolently. “Melusine Aiofe O Baollagh,” she said, flapping her fan at her red cheeks. The fan was supposed to look like that stylish sort where a tiny pisky is mounted on a stick and forced to stir the air with its gossamer wings. But hers was not alive. It was a poor copy made from sculpted wax and cotton, and one would have to be somewhat blind to mistake it for a live faery. Aunt Dorcas didn’t seem to realize it, though, and no one could ever be so hard-hearted as to tell her. “From Ireland,” she added quickly, noticing their blank looks. “The poor dear. I mean, she was only a merchant’s daughter-tradespeople, you know-but such a wealthy merchant!”

  Mr. Jelliby blinked. “Was?”

  “She has fallen from favor.” Aunt Dorcas sighed. “It was because of her sweetheart, I think. He was the most handsome person in all the world, if the stories are to be believed. They were engaged to be married. But there was an incident. Very mysterious. No one knows any details. At any rate the family grew suspicious of him, and the two little dears eloped! She was disowned, and they were never heard from again. It’s just terribly romantic.”

  “Yes, terribly. .,” Mr. Jelliby said, leaning back in his chair thoughtfully.

  Ophelia set aside a particularly fine bolt of Venetian lace, and asked, “Might I ask where you know this passionate creature from, Arthur?”

  “Oh, I don’t know her,” Mr. Jelliby said, shrugging somewhat sheepishly. “I’ve just heard of her. From some gentlemen at Westminster. Aunty, how long ago did all this happen?”

  “Oh, not long. Let me see.” She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Two seconds later they popped open again and she said, “Last month! Last month I overheard Lady Swinton speaking about it whilst I was hemming up her pettico- that is, while I was visiting. ” She stole a sharp look at them both. “And then again two weeks ago from Madam Claremont, and last Tuesday at the Baroness d’Erezaby’s. It’s been all over the place, really. I can’t imagine you haven’t heard of it.”

  “Yes, how strange. Well, thank you, Aunty.” Mr. Jelliby got up and bowed to her, then turned and did the same to his wife. “And good day, my dears. I’m afraid I must be off.”

  With that, he hurried out of the room.

  The other day, as soon as the old woman had sent Mr. Jelliby on his way with the mechanical bird held gingerly in a dustpan and his wounded hand well bound in a piece of Herald’s pajamas, he had hurried straight back to the coffeehouse on the corner of Trafalgar Square.

  Tossing the waiter a shilling so that he could sit without having to order any more unnaturally colored drinks, he laid the broken creature on the wobbly wrought-iron table and looked it over. A spring popped out from between its breastplates as it touched the tabletop. Mr. Jelliby swore silently. The bird was in ruins. Its wings hung in shards, and the black eyes, only a few hours before so keen and watchful, were now dull as coal. Shooting it out of the sky might have been an improvement.

  He unclipped the capsule from around its leg and twirled it in his fingers. There would be a hidden clasp here somewhere. . He ran his nail across the surface, found it. The capsule clicked open and a loop of paper popped out. It was crisp, fine quality, an even unblemished white. He unrolled it carefully.

  Send it to the Moon, it read, in fine spidery lettering. And then, spattered with ink and underlined with a vicious slash:

  Child Number Ten is coming.

  Mr. Jelliby blinked at it. He read it again. He flipped it over and looked on the back side. The words were odd and unsettling, but they didn’t really tell him anything. No address. No “to so-and-so with regards from such-and-such.” Nothing about the lady in plum. All that work for ten short words that may as well have been written in some Old Country faery dialect for all the sense they made to him. Why did someone have to send something to the moon? He didn’t suppose the Royal Mail delivered there. And Child Number Ten? Who was-

  An icy shiver trickled down Mr. Jelliby’s spine despite the warmth of the day. The
sounds of the Strand-the clop of horses’ hooves, the shouts of the vendors, and peels of the bells of St. Martin-in-the-Fields-were all suddenly echoey and far away.

  There have only been nine. . Those were the faery gentleman’s words; the ones he had spoken to the lady while Mr. Jelliby listened from the darkness of the cabinet. Child Number Ten was a changeling. Mr. Lickerish was going to kill another one.

  Mr. Jelliby glanced around him. It was late afternoon, and the coffeehouse was well attended. Several couples sat at the street-side tables, a handful of single gentlemen as well, and one of those modern, radical women who wear bloomers and go to cafes all by themselves. And they were all staring at him. Discreetly, they thought, from behind raised fans and newspapers, over the tops of sun spectacles, and under the brims of flowered hats. But staring nonetheless. Just to see what the handsome man with the dustpan would do next.

  Slowly, he turned back to the bird. For a second he wanted to run. To leave the bird and the coffeehouse, take a carriage back to Belgrave Square and drink brandy as if nothing had ever happened. Those people didn’t know. Nobody knew what he knew, and nobody would care if he didn’t do anything.

  But somewhere in the faery slums a child was waiting to die. He couldn’t drink brandy knowing that. It would make him gag. It would taste of blood and bones, and if his carriage should crash off a bridge the very next day, he didn’t suppose he would feel very sorry for himself lying in the black depths of the river. He was the only one who knew what was going to happen. And so he was the only one who could do anything to stop it.