A Face Like Glass (13 page)

‘Useful?’ asked Childersin softly. ‘
You got caught
. How useful is that? And then, instead of coming to the family to admit what had happened, you tried to cover it up.
You decided you could trick the Facesmith into drinking Wine that would make her forget the last month, so that she would never remember you rifling through her bag. And when Neverfell blundered
across your path you roped her into the plan. Correct?’

Zouelle maintained a calmly respectful expression. She could not let herself tremble, for that would be a timid appeal for pity and would disappoint the man before her. Instead she simply
nodded, mouth dry.

‘You have quite a good eye, Zouelle. Look at the bottle on the table in front of you. What can you tell me about it?’

Zouelle cleared her throat, took a few moments to still the tremble in her hands, then examined the label.

‘It is a Permonniac – sixty-two years old, about a year from its prime. Very rare. Very valuable.’

‘And if I was asked which I value most, this bottle or yourself, what do you think I would answer?’

Zouelle felt her heart plummet. What answer could he possibly expect her to give? ‘It is a very valuable Wine. I . . .’

Childersin chuckled. ‘Don’t be silly. In terms of what I value, there is no competition. There is nothing more important to me than family. No bottle of Wine matters more to me than
you do.’

Zouelle did not relax. The conversation was not over. She could feel it.

‘So. Answer me a second question. Suppose right now I had to choose between saving you, or saving this bottle, which do you think I would pick?’

Zouelle looked up into the face of the man she admired most in the world, and could not muster a voice. She mouthed an answer, but lacked enough certainty to give it sound.

Me?

Childersin leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘That would have been a very easy question to answer a few days ago,’ he said. ‘Today it is much harder. As I say,
nothing means as much to me as this family. Nothing. Everything I do is to ensure the strength, safety and future of its members. This bottle –’ he tapped the cork very gently –
‘is an asset that can help me do that, so that I can strengthen our position and protect everyone. A few days ago, I thought of you as another asset, a seed for a bright future. Well, your
little games just put the family at risk. Should I really protect something that endangers everybody else here?’

Zouelle shook her head. Try as she might, she could not prevent herself shaking. In spite of her great-great-great-uncle’s gentle tone, she felt as if she were being systematically
stripped of her armour and skin. ‘If there is anything I can do to make things better . . .’

‘Why? Do you have another plan, my dear? Like the one that left us entangled with cases of burglary, fraud, attempted memory-theft and consorting with an outsider?’

‘Did the Enquiry say—’

‘—anything about you? No. Neverfell still hadn’t told them anything useful when I arrived. Of course, they would have forced the truth out of her sooner or later if she
had remained in their hands. The only way I could prevent that was to arrange her indenture and purchase her, at considerable expense. Buying Madame Appeline’s silence and forbearance will be
much more difficult and costly, I fear, but I have contacted her and it seems she is at least willing to discuss the matter with me.’

Hesitantly, the weight on Zouelle’s chest started to lift. Ever since the failure of her plan she had been haunted by thoughts of being dragged away by the Enquiry, interrogated in their
black halls and left to rot in some bat-infested hell-cage. Her uncle had saved her. That had to mean that he still valued her, in spite of the trouble she had brought.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I promise I will not interfere in Court business again.’

‘Oh yes, you will.’

Zouelle looked up to see her uncle regarding her with a sad little smile.

‘You decided that you were ready to start meddling in the great game. I really hope you were right, Zouelle, because once you start playing it you can never leave.

‘You are in the game now, my dear. There is no going back.’

Neverfell had never had the luxury of a bath with hot water and bubbles before, and over the next six hours she made up for lost time in no uncertain terms. Her pigtails were
matted so densely they were almost like wood, but Miss Howlick battled them with oils and teased them with spindles until Neverfell had hair, slippery clinging hair that got in her eyes, and
floated in the water, and slid over her shoulders like dark red paint.

Neverfell’s long-ingrained smell of cheese was the great enemy, and Miss Howlick fought it with thyme oil and with saffron, with sandalwood and with pumice-stones. Most of all, she fought
it with pot after pot of piping-hot water, until Neverfell’s fingers were wrinkled and her footsoles were bleached. When all that remained was a faint, phantom Stilton whiff that all but the
sharpest of noses would miss, Miss Howlick sent a serving girl to fetch ‘Miss Metella’.

When Miss Metella arrived, Neverfell took one look at her and then tried to hide under the soapsuds. Miss Metella was an elderly, apple-cheeked woman with a calming voice, the effect being
spoilt only by the fact that she wore two skin-pink silken eye patches, each with a picture of a wide, blue eye embroidered on to it.

She was obviously a perfumier, for all perfumiers had their eyes removed when they became apprentices. Perfumiers were notorious for disliking cheesemakers, whose reek offended perfumiers’
elegant noses, and who also had an annoying knack of noticing the use of Perfume when others did not. However, her air of calm and commonsense eventually lured Neverfell out.

‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ she beamed, adding the tiniest drop from a pipette into Neverfell’s bath. ‘We’re both friends of the Childersin family, so
we’ve got nothing to quarrel about.’

It was a very different Neverfell that confronted herself in a mirror seven hours later. Indeed, it took several minutes of flapping her arms like a penguin to convince her that she really was
regarding her own reflection. The new Neverfell had softly glossy dark red hair that hung to her shoulders, and wore a simple green dress with white fur trim at the collar and cuffs. She had
crochet gloves ornamented with small bobbles that her fingers itched to twiddle. Her green boots were fur-lined as well. Her face looked flushed beneath its freckles, surprised and gleeful.

She had just started to experiment, pinching and pulling at her face to make it do things, when she noticed Zouelle in the reflection behind her. To her surprise, the older girl pushed forward
and folded the mirror shut with a click.

‘Miss Howlick should not have given you that,’ Zouelle said, a little tartly. ‘I will have to speak to her about it.’

‘What? Why not?’ Neverfell stared nonplussed at the closed mirror.

‘Your face will spoil if you keep staring at it like that. Anyway, if you can remember what you just saw, you do not really need a mirror any more, do you?’ Zouelle’s tone was
confident and big-sisterly again. Her smile was even.

‘What’s wrong?’ Just for a moment Neverfell felt as if there were an invisible wire pulled to razor tautness between her and the other girl, humming tension into the room. If
she blundered towards it, it might snap or cut her, and yet she half wished it would, so that she knew where it was. ‘Is it something I did?’

‘What did you tell the Enquiry?’ Zouelle was still wearing her warm and confidential Face, but the eyes no longer matched it, frantically scanning Neverfell’s own features.
‘Uncle Maxim says you didn’t tell them anything. That isn’t true, is it?’

‘But it is! I mean . . . I told them bits of your plan, but I didn’t say who was in it except me. I never told them about you.’

‘That makes no sense.’ Zouelle kept slipping Face between her confidential smile and a look of polite concern as if uncertain what to use. ‘Of course you told them. Why
wouldn’t you tell them?’

Neverfell stared at her. ‘They would have put you in a cage like mine! I couldn’t let them do that! After all, you were just trying to help me, weren’t you? You’re my
friend!’

It was Zouelle’s turn to stare. At least that seemed to be what her eyes were doing. The rest of her face was still politely concerned. And then she looked away, and gave an utterly
charming little laugh.

‘That’s right,’ she said in her usual tone. ‘I’m your friend. And I’m going to look after you, Neverfell. Uncle has asked me to help you with everything. What
to wear, how to talk, how to act in good company. My uncle has . . . great plans for you.’

Neverfell’s spirits skyrocketed again. ‘So everything’s all right?’

‘Yes, Neverfell. Everything’s fine.’

Of course it was. Neverfell was just being nervous and stupid. She could see that now. Zouelle did not resist Neverfell’s hug, but there was something stiff about the way she returned it,
and her hands felt cold.

Drained, dizzy and bone-tired after the events of the day, Neverfell was shown to a beautiful little room in the Childersin townhouse, and told it was hers. She loved it, then
spent eight hours failing to sleep in it. The small four-poster bed had soft golden covers and strokeable curtains, but she was used to her rough hammock, and the flat mattress left her squirming.
The air smelt of dried violets instead of slumbering cheeses, and all the soft sounds around her were wrong. Besides this, the day had stuffed her head so full of new thoughts and sights that it
hurt, and now her mind whirled and whirled and would not shut down.

Then there was the cockerel-shaped clock on her dressing table. It had a weird face where the numbers only went up to twelve, and its tick was loud and unfamiliar, but worst of all it did not
chime. Every time it struck the hour she would be startled alert by the lack of chime. In the end she got up, sat down with the cockerel and did what she always did when she was ‘out of
clock’, and needed to calm her mind.

At some point she must have fallen asleep at the dressing table, since when a sharp rap at the door woke her she was lolling across its surface, her cheek pressed against a heap of cogs. She
started awake and staggered to the door to find Zouelle waiting for her in a white dress.

‘You’re not dressed! Didn’t your cockerel wake you an hour ago?’ Zouelle peered past Neverfell, and her gaze lighted upon a gleaming, half-dismantled shape, its beaked
head missing and several of its cogs scattered across the table doilies. ‘Neverfell! Did you take the cockerel-clock to pieces?’

‘I was fixing it!’ stammered Neverfell. ‘I wanted to make it chime! They said everything in here was mine, so I thought nobody would mind—’

‘You can’t just take things apart! Everything in this room is yours to use, if you use them the right way, but you can’t just do whatever you like with them.’ Zouelle
took a deep breath and stroked one hand over her hair. ‘Never mind, Neverfell. Get dressed quickly, or we’ll be late for breakfast.’

Having dressed and rejoined Zouelle in the corridor, Neverfell was somewhat surprised to find the whole family also in the process of rising.

‘Why is everybody getting up at the same time?’ whispered Neverfell. ‘Surely you don’t all keep the same clock? Don’t you sleep different shifts so somebody is
always awake?’ It seemed a very strange and impractical way of doing things.

Zouelle shook her head. ‘We always eat breakfast together in the Morning Room,’ she answered. ‘Uncle Maxim insists upon it – he is a great believer in family, and says
that we should all sit down together for at least one meal each day. Apparently people do that in the overground, and now he is determined that we will do the same. Uncle Maxim has quite the
passion for the overground. He even has us living by overground clocks.’

She gestured to the wall, and Neverfell realized that they were passing another outlandish twelve-hour clock, like her cockerel. It looked quite bare and bald with so few numbers painted on its
face.

‘But . . . then . . . aren’t your clocks telling totally different times from everybody else’s nearly all the time?’ asked Neverfell, feeling that her life was about to
get very confusing.

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Zouelle. ‘But one simply does not say no to Uncle Maxim, and he is usually right about everything. We started living by overground time back when I was seven,
and do you know something? Nobody in the family has been out of clock since.’

Neverfell wondered if that was why the Childersins all seemed so gleamingly healthy and full of life. You could spot people who spent a lot of their time out of clock. They were quite often
overweight, soapily pale and unhealthy-looking. The Childersins, on the contrary, all appeared to be clear-skinned, clear-eyed and alert.

It soon became clear that the Morning Room was not even part of the main house. Instead the whole family had to walk through a back door and along a private tunnel for half an hour. It was
bizarre to watch the extended Childersin clan strolling out resolutely, the ladies carrying paradribbles, the tasselled umbrellas that protected one from cave drips, and the babes pushed along in
silken carriages. They were a particularly tall and statuesque family, and it made for an impressive parade. The servants following after them with steaming urns and silver trays of croissants
looked stunted in comparison.