Ash & Bramble (14 page)

Outside the window, the sun tilts toward the west. When it goes down, the room grows dark. The clock strikes six, and each toll makes what's left of the window shiver in its frame. Nobody comes to bring me dinner. The room grows colder. The clock strikes seven, and then eight. The weight of grief settles over me again; to console myself I finger the silk-stitched seam along the hem of my dress. The loss feels almost physical, a yearning ache too strong for a mother I can't remember, or a father who died, I'm told, many months ago. Who is it that I miss so badly? What have I lost?

Wearily I drag the mattress from the bed—it is stuffed half with straw and half with mouse droppings—and make a kind of cocoon with it on the floor, huddling inside to keep warm.

During the night I sleep for a while, and then wake in the darkness. Slowly I climb out of my cocoon and pace the edges of the room, sliding around the bed, dragging my fingers over the cracked plaster walls. The room smells of mold and dampness and of mice. Something scrabbles in the walls, and I hope it is mice, and not rats.

It feels inevitable, my little prison, as if I've been pulled toward it ever since I woke up in the library, covered with cinders. I need to get out.

But then I'll still be in the house, and it is a prison too.

So is the city, I am starting to suspect. Maybe there's no escape from any of it. If I'm not careful, I could end up like Lady Meister. That, I think, is what Lady Faye has planned for me. At any rate, something has me in its grip, and the more I struggle against it, the more entangled I'll become.

“All right, then,” I whisper to myself. I'd tried simply walking away, and had failed miserably. “I'll make them think I'm not struggling. And while I'm being oh-so-good and obedient, I'll figure out another way to get myself out of this.”

H
ALFWAY THROUGH THE
morning, I hear a step in the hallway, a key in the lock, and the door swings open.

Stepmama fills the doorway. “Well, Penelope?” she says, and folds her arms. She looks me up and down, and her nose wrinkles as if she smells something nasty.

I brush a lock of hair out of my eyes. My hand, I notice, is grubby, as is the stocking on my wrist that I'm using as a bandage. I realize that all of me is dirty. My dress is stained and its hem is growing ragged. I bite back a sharp response. “Good morning, Stepmama,” I say meekly. “May I come out now?”

“Are you willing to behave appropriately?” Stepmama asks.

Appropriate behavior in this situation would be flying into a furious rage at having been treated so badly by my own stepmother. But I hold back, warily. I know this is not what she means. “Yes, Stepmama,” I say.

“Hmph,” Stepmama grunts. “Then you may be released. Go to the kitchen. Cook has some things for you to do.”

In the kitchen, I'm put to work scrubbing pots from last night's dinner. The scalding water wets the bandage on my wrist, turns my hands red, and slops down my skirt, but I grit my teeth and keep scrubbing.

At the stove, the cook, a surly, red-faced woman with a strong accent from some faraway land, is baking. I reach for the next dirty pot and fill it with hot water from the kettle and sit for a moment, waiting for the burnt porridge encrusted on the inside to loosen. At the long table at the center of the kitchen, maids chop vegetables into symmetrical shapes, and measure flour and stir spices into sauces; there is a hearth where a spit boy keeps chicken and venison browning; an undercook pauses now and then to stir a pot of river fish stewing in butter; and there are two ovens with pots and pans of delicious smells simmering on their stove tops. I never realized before how much work happens downstairs to make a perfectly prepared dinner appear upstairs.

The cook takes a pan out of an oven and sets it on the stove top. The smell of it wafts over me. It is spicy and warm, the best thing I have ever smelled. Gingerbread. My stomach growls.

Suddenly I want the gingerbread more than I've ever wanted anything in my entire life. It must be because I missed dinner last night and still haven't been given any breakfast. “Could I have a bite of that?” I ask the cook.

The cook casts me a cross glare.

“Please?” I add, and I must look hungry and pitiful, because she breaks off a piece, puts it on a saucer, and gives it to me. I take a bite. It is warm and richly spiced, and I close my eyes, expecting it to fill me up. But it doesn't. The gingerbread makes me feel empty; its sweetness makes me long for something, but I don't know what.

Tears well up in my eyes and I blink them away—I will
not
cry—and I eat every crumb of the strangely unsatisfying gingerbread. Then I am put to work scrubbing the kitchen floor, and then Precious calls me to her room so I can iron her dresses while she scolds me for being such a trial to everyone, and then after dinner—I take a quick bite while the servants are clearing the table—there are more pots to clean. Finally, after the kitchen floor has been scrubbed again, the fires have been banked, and the servants have all cast me narrow-eyed looks as they go to their cozy beds, I curl up on the hearth to go to sleep. The air in the kitchen is chilly, and smells of the ghosts of roast chicken and a burned cake that earned an unlucky kitchen maid a slap from the surly cook. Out in the city, the clock strikes.

I have spent exactly one day behaving appropriately. I wonder how long I'm supposed to bear it.

Have they made you sleep in the cinders yet?
Lady Faye's voice echoes in my head.

I shiver and edge closer to the smoldering coals. Yes, Lady Faye. They have.

I
T DOESN'T TAKE OLD
N
ATTERS LONG TO NOTICE HOW
extremely well made Shoe's boots are. “Where did you get 'em, lad?” he asks.

Shoe is busy cleaning each tiny pane in the front window. Getting the grime out of the edges where the glass meets the frame takes some doing. He glances down at his feet. “I made them.” In his workshop in the fortress. Which he's not going to mention to this old shoemaker.

Natters is wearing a leather apron and is at his bench cutting out a vamp from a roll of cheap leather. He does it with extreme care. If he makes the whole shoe that slowly, Shoe thinks, it'll take him days. “Were you an apprentice somewhere, then?” Natters asks.

“No,” Shoe answers, and wrings out the rag he's using to
clean the panes. “Not when I made these. But I must have been, before.”

“But you don't remember,” Natters says. Then he mutters something else under his breath that Shoe can't hear.

“What's that you said?” Shoe asks, starting on the next tiny pane.

“Never mind,” Natters says. “I don't want to know.”

Shoe scrubs the front windows until each tiny pane gleams. While he's working, he turns his plan over in his head. He must figure out how to get to the upper city, find Pin, and save her from the Godmother, assuming she needs saving. Knowing Pin, she's busy saving herself. He checks the thimble in his pocket, just to be sure. It's still pulling in the same direction.

“Do you have any packages that need delivering in the upper city?” he asks Natters. “Finished shoes, or anything like that?”

The old man is hunched over his workbench, still cutting the same vamp. “No,” Natters says shortly. “I don't make shoes for the likes of them.”

What Shoe needs is a spy, he realizes, somebody who can come and go in the upper city without being noticed. Tonight he'll sneak out into the lower city and see if he can find somebody willing to help him.

After he has swept out the shop with a mouse-chewed broom, Natters's Missus calls them to the kitchen for dinner. The house has three stories: the shop on the ground floor, the
kitchen and dining table on the first floor, and the Natterses' bedroom at the top. The kitchen is dim, lit by narrow windows and guttering candles. Everything is spotlessly clean, though, every hole neatly darned, everything well repaired. It's nothing like the grubby, messy shop downstairs, which makes Shoe wonder. And it seems different from the pristine upper city. It's homey. Comfortable.

Natters's Missus has put dinner on the table. The food is simple—gristly meat, potatoes, day-old bread, bean stew with lots of salt and pepper—but there's plenty of it.

“I was right,” the Missus says as she dumps the last of the stew onto Shoe's plate. “The boy can eat. Did he earn his dinner, Natters?”

“Too well,” Natters grumbles, and shoots the Missus another one of his speaking looks from under his bushy eyebrows. In response, she shrugs her broad shoulders and shakes her head.

Shoe concentrates on eating as much as he can. He's taking a final bite of stew when the leftover tiredness from his long trek through the forest overtakes him. He's still holding his fork, falling asleep while sitting up at the table.

The Missus says something that he doesn't quite catch. He hears a scrape as Natters pushes his chair back from the table, then feels a hand on his shoulder. Stumbling, he follows the old shoemaker down the narrow stairs to the ground floor. He'll sleep in a tiny cubby just off the shop, Natters says. There's an old mattress in it now, and they'll clear it out
properly in the morning. “Give me your coat, Shoe,” Natters goes on, “and the Missus will fix it up for you.”

Shoe barely gets his coat off and mutters a thank-you when he crashes onto the mattress. A blanket settles on him.

Tomorrow, Shoe thinks muzzily, as sleep comes over him. He'll start on his plan to find Pin tomorrow.

I
N THE MORNING
Shoe is standing in the street, wearing his freshly cleaned and mended coat and a borrowed shirt and trousers that don't fit him right, contemplating the sign hanging over the shop door. If he had some paint, he could repaint the red shoe so that people passing by would know this is a shoemaker's shop.

Not that Natters makes many shoes that Shoe can see. There are no finished shoes to display in the newly clean front window, and the old man is still working on the same pair from the day before. In the Godmother's fortress, Shoe could have made ten pairs of shoes in that time. Of course, there he'd had a particular motivation to keep up with the endless blue requisition slips.

He's about to step inside when a tall, well-dressed woman with iron-gray hair stops in front of the shop.

“Is this Natters's place?” she asks abruptly.

“Yes, it is,” Shoe answers. He shoves open the warped door and moves aside. “Would you like to step in?”

The woman looks down her long nose at him; then, picking up her skirts, she sweeps past him and into the shop.

Natters looks up from his workbench with alarm. “What?” he asks, his voice quavering. “What is it?”

“I want to order some shoes, of course,” the woman says. “I need four pairs, two men's, two women's, for my servants. Their measurements are here.” She holds out a piece of paper.

Natters just stares at her, gripping the hammer he's been using.

“Well, man?” the woman says. “I've heard Natters makes fine shoes at a good price; can you do these for me?”

Shoe steps up and takes the paper. “Yes, he can do them,” he answers for Natters. “When do you want them finished?”

“I suppose you'll need a day,” she sniffs. “Not tomorrow, then, but the day after. All right?”

At the bench, Natters gives a wide-eyed nod.

“Good,” the woman says briskly, and drops some coins onto the workbench, then turns and strides out of the shop.

The door closes behind her. For a long moment there is only silence and swirls of dust settling.

Natters sighs. “I suppose I'd better get started, then.” He gives a few coins to Shoe and sends him out for a roll of leather. The street is at the end of the river, the farthest from the upper city, and its air is thick with the foul smell of the tannery. While he's out, Shoe gets some paint, and he keeps a coin for himself, too. When he returns, Natters is studying the page of measurements and muttering under his breath.

“Just put it here,” he says to Shoe, who sets the roll of leather on the bench.

Then the Missus calls them for lunch. Shoe tells her about the customer, the order for four pairs of shoes.

“She said she heard that Natters makes fine shoes,” Natters says direly.

“
Did
she now,” the Missus says, and gives Natters one of those looks, along with a frown.

“She wants them the day after tomorrow,” Natters goes on.

“You won't finish them?” the Missus asks.

“Better not to,” Natters says, and shoots a glare at Shoe.

He blinks. Has he done something wrong? Wouldn't a shoemaker
want
to make shoes and get paid for it?

After lunch, Natters goes back to his bench to brood and stare at the page of measurements. Shoe changes into his own freshly mended shirt and trousers, and feeds the goat and the chickens that the Missus keeps in the tiny yard behind the house. Then he has a wash at the pump, and puts some of the Huntsman's salve onto his souvenirs from his time at the post. To his surprise, the welts are almost healed.

Then he takes the shop door off its hinges, borrows a plane from a neighbor, and planes the warp out of the wood so the door will hang straight. It's another thing that he doesn't remember doing before, but that his body knows how to do. But he can't think about what that means.

Shoe, do you remember anything from the Before?
Pin had asked him back at the Godmother's fortress.

No
, he'd told her.
Just the Now
.

And that's the way it has to be. No Before, no After, just the Now, until he finds Pin and they escape the Godmother for good.

That night, Shoe goes down to his cubby after dinner, but as soon as he hears silence from upstairs, he unlocks the shop door, eases it open, and slips out into the dark night. He doesn't remember a city, but he must have lived in one in the time Before, because he knows how to keep to the dark edges of the streets and pause before turning a corner to listen for approaching feet. He keeps a grip on Pin's thimble just in case there are pickpockets about. The curfew of the upper city is definitely not in effect here, maybe because it's too far from the sound of the castle clock striking. People pass like shadows, some of them drunk and trying to stifle their laughter, others hurrying on mysterious errands.

On one corner Shoe finds a tavern. There's no sign in front, and shutters cover the windows, but a little light leaks out and he can hear the murmur of talking from inside and now and then the muffled clink of a glass. He goes down two steps and enters. The room is smoky from a fire in an ash-choked hearth and crowded with shabbily dressed men and women who turn to look at Shoe as he walks by. They watch him warily, out of the corners of their eyes as they return to their conversations.

He finds a place at a rickety table shoved up against a wall spotted with mold.

“What'll it be, handsome stranger?” asks a boy his own
age with a rag, a tray, and a pert grin.

Shoe blinks. “Um, bread and cheese, please.” He leans closer and lowers his voice. “And somebody who can run me an errand in the upper city, if you know anyone like that.” He pushes a coin across the tabletop.

The tavern boy regards the coin for a moment. “A simple errand?” he asks, and cocks an eyebrow. “Or something more complicated?”

“It's probably not simple,” Shoe admits.

“Right!” The boy snatches up the coin and bobs away. A short time later, he brings a battered plate with a toasted cheese sandwich on it, and a cup of foul-smelling ale that Shoe didn't order. “That's from me,” he says, and gives Shoe a wink.

Shoe gulps and stares at the plate. He's not used to this kind of attention, not from girls, or from boys either.

“That's a very pretty red you're turning,” the tavern boy says, and goes off grinning. He's forgotten about the rest of the order, Shoe guesses, but as he's taking a bite of his bread and cheese, a filthy, wild-haired, humpbacked old man approaches his table.

“Greetings, Your Lor'ship,” the old man says, bowing. “I'm Spanner, and I hear you're looking for help with something?”

Shoe nods. “I'm Shoe,” he says, “and I'm not a lordship of any kind.” Spanner, he notices, is wearing an oddly hairy black suit.

Spanner plops down at the table, looks at Shoe's half-eaten food, and raises his eyebrows.

“Help yourself,” Shoe says.

“Don't mind if I do,” Spanner says, picking up the bread and cheese and stuffing the whole thing in his mouth. His suit, Shoe realizes, is made of rat skins stitched together, fur-side out. He's a ratcatcher. With his furry suit, his long, twitchy nose, and his small, close-set eyes, Spanner looks a lot like his own prey.

Spanner notices Shoe's interest. “If you wants to catch rats, young gen'leman,” he says through a spray of crumbs, “you got to think like 'em, see? Now what is it you're wanting from old Spanner?”

“I'm trying to find someone,” Shoe answers. “I need you to look for her in the upper city. Can you do it without getting caught?”

Spanner swallows and then shrugs. “Things is pretty tight up there right now. Talk of arrests and such, and extra viggle-lance.”

Shoe waits a beat and then figures it out. “Vigilance, you mean?”

Spanner touches his nose. “That's it, spot on! Vigglance. Lots of footmen about, lots of watching. Trouble's brewing.”

“Right.” Shoe thinks of the gold coins he's got hidden away in his cubby. “I can make it worth your while.”

“Can you now!” Spanner grins, revealing a gap where his front teeth should be, but Shoe catches a glimpse of wariness
in the ratcatcher's sharp eyes. “Where there's people, there's rats, in the upper city too, even though them that lives there don't like it known. I comes and goes as I please, catching rats. I can find your someone for you.”

“Her name's Pin,” Shoe says. “She's a girl about the same age as I am, and just a bit shorter.” He goes on to describe Pin, though the real Pin isn't someone who can be summed up in a simple physical description. “But be careful,” he warns the ratcatcher. “I think the Godmother brought her here.”

“Shhh, shhh,” Spanner hisses, and hunches his shoulders. “You don't want to be talking too much about her.” He glances nervously around. “So your girl Pin is important, you're saying?”

Shoe nods. That's what the Huntsman had said, too. Pin has been chosen by the Godmother for a
special fate
, he'd called it. Something bad.

“I follow what you're asking, Shoe, right enough,” Spanner whispers. “I'll keep my eyes open for your girl. If she's here, I'll find out.”