Amber House: Neverwas (34 page)

through.” He held the coin up, dangling from its chain. “Because

you
knew
where not to be. And yet did not warn anyone else.” He finished his explanation patiently, even though Dobson was no

longer listening. Only I. “You were responsible for the loss of my

ship, the death of my wife — alone, in poverty, the misery of

my infant daughter in a hellhole of an orphanage. You were

responsible. And now I have made you pay.”

I released the goblet back into the trunk.
The sins of the fathers
, I thought. I said, “I hate this place. Let’s just take some of these things and go, all right?”

216 O

“Sure,” Jackson said. He gathered up the things I pointed to

and closed the trunk. I swore to myself I would never come

to this secret room again.

N

On the way down, I described for Jackson what I’d seen. “The

Janus coin again” was all he said.

On the second-story landing, I remembered that there was

another exit here. Jackson had found it in that other time.
Using
his future sight
, I realized. “You found a sliding panel here, last time. When I asked you how, you told me, ‘It seemed logical.’ It

was before I knew you could see the future.”

“I’ve never liked hiding things from you, Sare. I bet he didn’t

either.”

Weird
, I thought,
for Jackson to use the third person there.
“It was up there, on the top edge — some kind of catch.” He felt until I

heard the small click. A section of the wall, from chair rail to

ceiling, popped inward a few inches so that it could be slid on a

metal track behind the neighboring piece. We climbed out the

opening to the hall near my room, then pulled the wall back into

place.

Jackson put the things from the trunk on the floor of my

closet. Then I walked with him toward the conservatory. We

didn’t use the flashlights, finding our way in the suggestion of

moonlight that fell through the windows of the upper gallery. I

slid my fingers on the chair rail to keep myself on track, search-

ing with my hand for the balcony banister when we reached the

main hall.

My fingertips touched wood; a fan of light spilled from

beneath Deirdre’s bedroom door.

“Jackson,” I said, but he was not with me anymore. I had gone

somewhere else. Somewhen else.

o217

Not Deirdre’s door
, I thought, but I made myself go to it. I heard voices coming through. I took the knob and turned it, opened

the door.

The room was lamplit. I saw Deirdre propped up with pillows

in bed. Her hair was shot with iron gray and her once-beautiful

face had been pulled into harsher angles and looser skin by hard-

ship and illness. I remembered a sickly Deirdre from the other

time — she had been locked away in the third-floor garret and,

falling into a coma, had lured two dreaming children to a fantasy

nursery in her sleep.

This Deirdre seemed to be healthier, recovering her strength.

She had a tray over her lap, set with paper, a quill, and an ink

pot. She was pulling at her shawl, speaking to the Captain,

unhappy, confused. “But why should I write to him? Our con-

nection is so distant. Why would you have him come?”

“I explained this already, wife,” the Captain said. “He has

influence among the colonials. He can get me a commission.” He

stepped closer and took her by her wrist, twisting it slightly.

“Would you deprive me of this opportunity? Shall I send you

back to the nursery?”

“No, no,” she said, tugging her wrist loose, fumbling to take

up the quill. “Of course not.” She dipped the quill in the ink. She

began to write, slowly and carefully.

Dear Cousin
,

“Sarah.”

The room fell dark.

Jackson touched my elbow. “I lost you. I didn’t realize you’d

stopped. What is it?”

I shook my head a little. “Nothing. I don’t know. The Captain

wanted Deirdre to send an invitation.”

“To whom?”

I shook my head again. “I don’t know. Her cousin.” I pulled

the door shut.

218 O

A new crack of light flared, this time coming from beneath

the double doors to the Captain’s suite.

“Another one,” I said grimly.
The house accepted my invitation —

it’s talking to me.
I opened the door.

The Captain sat behind his desk, one of his leather-bound logs

open before him. I saw him flip a coin, a silver coin —
Dobson’s
coin
— and slap it on the table.
Thunk.
Then he checked the coin and made an entry in his log. He did it over and over again.

I walked closer as the Captain kept flipping his coin. I slid in

behind him, leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing.

He used the long feathery script of the era, so I had to work to

decipher the words. Large letters at the top said
Advancement
.

Below that, the words
British
and
Colonial
, with a line drawn through the latter. Below that, many neatly crossed-out words:

Ships
,
Battle
,
Smuggling
,
Financing
,
Espionage
,
Sabotage
. The word
Assassination
was circled.

On the next page, a list of names that I had studied in history

class in that other time: Dickinson, Shipley, Mason, Hamilton,

Varnum, Pickens, Jefferson, and more. Several names had been

crossed out; as I watched, the Captain drew a line through yet

another. Then he flipped the coin again.

I stepped back, appalled. In order to get ahead in the world,

the Captain was deciding who to kill, by flipping Dobson’s

lucky coin.

“Jesus,” I said.

The room fell dark. I felt my way to the lighter rectangle of

the door.

“I saw something,” I said as I reached it. “It’s —”

“— the coin,” Jackson said. He was slumped against the wall,

a small, dark, wet trail oozing from his nose. “We have to get

the coin.”

CH A P T ER TW E N T Y-THR EE

K

We met the next morning in the stables, because we figured it

was a place where even Sammy wouldn’t find us. I told Jackson

everything I’d seen about Deirdre and the Captain and Nanga,

but none of it pointed us to what had caused the massive changes.

“It all comes back to the coin,” Jackson said. “We have to

get it.”

“The gun’s probably already in New York. We’ll have to wait

until they send it back.”

“No,” Jackson said. “We can’t wait. We have to have that coin

back here on the first.”

“The first?” I said. “Now there’s a time limit on this?”

Jackson nodded. “I’ve seen it. It has to be here. We have to

get it.”

“How?” I said. “How are we supposed to do that?”

“We’re going to have to steal it from the exhibit.”

I started to laugh. Then I saw he was completely serious.

“Come on,” I said. “Maybe I can just ask my mom if we can bor-

row it.”

“How does that conversation go?” he asked me.

How would it go? What could I possibly say to Mom to let me

walk off with Claire Hathaway’s family heirloom?
“Um, the house

needs it, Mom?”

What about asking my dad? Or maybe asking Claire?

I just sat there shaking my head. Those conversations would

be crazy, but to
steal something from New York’s Metropolitan Museum
?

That was even crazier.

220 O

“Sarah,” he said to me, “we can steal it. We do steal it. I saw it

last night.”

“You saw it?”

He nodded. “You were wearing a long red dress.”

The Marsden
. An item I hadn’t shown or even described to

him. I thought about that vision: Jackson had seen us stealing

Dobson’s lucky coin from the Metropolitan. Successfully. Which

meant — didn’t it? — that it
could
be done. Which meant that we
had
done everything that
needed
to be done to make that possible. Starting from this moment. Didn’t it?

I thought of the consequences of changing time last time. The

Japanese Empire. The Thousand-Year Reich. The continuation

of slavery into the twentieth century.

I was Pandora
, I thought.
And I needed to put all the bad stuff back
in the box.

I sighed. I shook my head. I wanted to throw up. “Tell me,” I

said, “what we need to do.”

N

We had only one day to figure out how to break into a museum

neither of us had ever visited, in a city neither of us had ever

seen, to steal an object whose exact purpose we did not know.

But further planning would have to wait. Jackson needed to go

home to take care of Rose. “I’ll be back as soon as possible,” he

promised.

I decided to walk into Severna. I wanted not to have to talk to

my parents. I wanted some cold fresh air and physical activity

to clear my head. And I wanted to see what the Metropolitan

looked like. I headed for the public library.

My path took me past the hardware store and up the street to

the Palace Theater. Two stores down, a woman wrapped in a

o221

dark green velvet cloak was trying to scrub painted graffiti off a

front window.

Exodus 22:18.

She caught me looking. She rolled her eyes. “Fundamentalists.

Or maybe the Confederate Nazis. Getting to be a lot of them.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Exodus twenty-two eighteen,” she said. “ ‘Thou shalt not suf-

fer a witch to live.’ The joke is, I’m Catholic.”

I noticed, then, the store’s name: The New Dawn Metaphysical

Bookshop.

“Person can’t help it if she can see things other people can’t.”

She’d gone back to scrubbing; she was mostly talking to herself.

But she looked back at me again, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

“Do we know each other?” She was peering at me as if she were

having trouble focusing.

“I don’t —” I shook my head. “No.”

But I had the sense, a memory, of a night sky filled with a

thousand floating lights.

The woman took my hand, lifting it. The unexpected contact

startled me. “May I?” she said. I nodded and she spread my palm

flat. “What’s this mark on your hand?”

“What mark?” I looked for some kind of smudge or stain, but

she was pointing to the two pinpricks of red that had been in the

center of my palm my whole life. “Oh. Those. Just some kind of

birthmark. I’ve always had them.”

She stared a moment more, puzzled. “It cuts your life line into

three.” Then: “May I read your cards?”

Tarot
, I thought. She looked concerned suddenly, as if she

might have blundered. “I hope I haven’t offended?”

“No. I” —
how did I say this politely
— “don’t have any money on me, so —”

“No charge.”

222 O

I did know this woman. I remembered her from a fabulous

birthday party —
my
party. Once upon a time, in Sarah One’s world.

She pressed me. “I think it’s important. I don’t think we met

by accident.”

I let her tug me into the store. She shook a cloth out on a glass

countertop. She pulled a deck of cards from the shelf below her

cash register. She set it facedown on the cloth. “Cut the deck,”

she directed, and so we began.

First card — a man surrounded by a fence of sticks. “The

nine of Wands,” she said. “This is your issue. It has to do with a

need to finish what has been started.”

Yes.
I nodded.

The second card laid across the first: “The three of Wands,

reversed.” Someone or something, the psychic told me, would

try to prevent me “from finishing what must be finished.”

The distant past below — The Moon. Illusion and deception.

Hidden enemies. Plots. Dreams.

I saw Maggie in the Queen of Cups, set in the place of the

recent past: a psychic or a dreamer who helps others realize

their talents. And Jackson in the near future — the Knight of

Pentacles. Someone who assumes responsibility, someone who

can be counted on.

I watched all this as if from a distance. I listened to her speak

the words and saw the colorful images on the cards, but part of

me heard echoes of her voice, as if I had heard it many times and

this was all part of a ritual, repeated endlessly, like the images in two facing mirrors. The thought frightened me to the core.

The last card in the diamond around the central pair: the far

future, the two of Cups. “It speaks of partnership, maybe even

true love. Soul mates.”

I wondered.
Did anyone ever love Pandora after she opened the box?

o223

“Just four more to go,” the woman said, flipping another card

to the right of all the others. “The seven of Cups, reversed,

which means a loss of hope. The cards are telling you, don’t

despair, keep on going until you” — she tapped the nine of

Wands — “finish what needs to be finished.”

She flipped another card above the last. “The seven of Swords.”

I saw a man sneaking away from a camp with swords in his arms.

“This usually means theft or guile, the use of deception, but it

can also speak of a journey overland, possibly in secret.”

She set another above those. “The Page of Wands. How other