The Water and the Wild (8 page)

Just before her, on Mr. Wilfer's desk, was a silver abacus strung with beads that looked like fresh-cut flower buds. Next to the abacus sat a massive leather-bound book that looked too thick to be a dictionary, yet too thin to be a proper encyclopedia.

Mr. Wilfer harrumphed and lit a pipe that quivered between his lips. The dusky smell of tobacco crept into Lottie's nostrils, and it reminded her of being much younger, when Mr. Yates had been alive and had smoked a pipe religiously, three times a day. Lottie shook her head of the faint memory and tried her best to sit up straight in her chair.

“Are you the letter-writer?” she asked.

“I am.”

Lottie looked at the rumpled old man uncertainly.
This
was the source of her birthday presents?

“Well, then, Mr. Wilfer,” she began, “I'm not sure where this is or how I got here. I only came because Adelaide told me that you have a medicine to make Eliot better.”

Mr. Wilfer released a puff of smoke. The firelight glinted off his goggles, so Lottie could not tell whether he was looking at her.

He spoke quietly. “You've always had a very firm idea of what you want, Lottie Fiske, ever since your first letter. I trust all of your previous presents arrived in good condition?”

“Oh!” Lottie whitened. She was, she realized, being exceptionally rude. The letter-writer had given Lottie many presents over the years. “Um, yes. Of course. Thank you very much. They were all nice presents. That is, except for that one book about the fairy queen.”

Mr. Wilfer raised an eyebrow over his goggles. “You don't like fairy tales?”

“Should I?” she asked.

“It would be helpful if you did,” said Mr. Wilfer, “as I'm a fairy myself. A
sprite,
to be precise. We sprites and your Earth's fairies share old blood.”

Lottie blinked.

“But you can't be something magical,” she said sensibly. “You're a doctor.”

“I'm a healer, yes,” said Mr. Wilfer, standing up. “And that is, currently, the most important point of our conversation.”

There was a glass case resting on the study's mantel-piece, and it was to this case that Mr. Wilfer now directed his attention. He turned his back to Lottie, and she heard the sound of a key opening a lock. Mr. Wilfer returned to the desk and sat down. In one hand, he still held his pipe. The other hand he extended to Lottie. He uncurled his fingers to reveal a squat, square vial in his palm. It was filled with a liquid colored the most anxious of reds.

Lottie scooted her chair closer. On the vial was a label written in thin, scrawling script:
Otherwise Incurable
.

Lottie read the label out loud and looked up. “Does it really work?” she whispered, reaching out. “Does it cure incurable things?”

Mr. Wilfer retracted the bottle before Lottie could touch it. “I'm afraid the whole matter still requires . . . time.”

“But,” Lottie said, “Eliot doesn't have time. He's only got weeks left!”

“Medicine,” said Mr. Wilfer, “is like magic. You cannot rush it. You cannot pinch it off and tie it up, clean and neat. You cannot make it behave. This potion”—he tapped the vial—“has become my life's work, and much as I've tried these past months to expedite the process, I am still missing one important ingredient.”

“What sort of ingredient?” asked Lottie.

Mr. Wilfer raised a hand. “There are things I still need to explain to you.”

Lottie did not see what else needed explaining. If one missing ingredient was all that kept Eliot from getting better, nothing else could possibly matter. Then again, Mr. Wilfer was the one with a medicine in his hand. She nodded begrudgingly.

“What's this?” she asked, poking her finger against the spine of the massive book on his table. “Does this tell you how to make your medicines?”

“That?” said Mr. Wilfer. “It does, in fact, tell me how to make
one
medicine. I have hundreds of notebooks like these.”

Mr. Wilfer opened the book and pushed it across the table. Lottie wiggled to the edge of her saggy chair to get a better view. It was neither a dictionary nor an encyclopedia.

“It's a—
scrapbook
?”

Lottie scrunched her nose in distaste. The only people she knew who made and kept scrapbooks were Mrs. Yates and the sneer-lipped ladies who came over for tea.

“A
note
book,” Mr. Wilfer corrected her.

The pages of the book were ragged and uneven with pasted pictures of plant diagrams, an article on cloud condensation, and what looked like a recipe torn from a cookbook. Around the pasted scraps, every spare sliver of paper was covered with thin-edged words and symbols. It looked like two pages full of nonsense. Lottie turned the page. Two
more
pages full of nonsense. Only these two held a clump of dried flowers and twigs, a poem, and a checked-off checklist.

Lottie looked up. “What is all of this?”

“This,” said Mr. Wilfer, “is my best guess for how to concoct a cure for foot blisters. Medicines take years of
inquiry and research. Long nights of experimentation, decades of case studies and careful observation—all to compile what you see in a book like this. My notebook for the Otherwise Incurable is nearly twice as thick.”

“You mean, this is how you're going to save Eliot? With dried flowers and photographs?” Lottie looked at the book with more scrutiny. “And recipes for lemon chess squares?”

She chewed her lip anxiously. What had she gotten herself into? Mr. Wilfer wasn't a real doctor at all. He thought he could heal Eliot with nothing more than a giant, nonsensical scrapbook!

“Medicines aren't made like that,” she said at last. “Medicines are made from precise measurements and chemical reactions. It's a very scientific business.”

“Is that how they do it where you come from, Lottie?” said Mr. Wilfer. He didn't look offended, only curious.

“Yes. Everyone knows that's what medicines are. Especially doctors.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Wilfer. “But what about your healers?”

Lottie wavered. “We don't have those. Not like you. Not that I know of, anyway.”

Mr. Wilfer looked genuinely surprised. “None? No healers at all in New Kemble?”

“No healers
anywhere,
” said Lottie. “Not even on the mainland.”

Mr. Wilfer spent a full, silence-stuffed minute pondering this information.

“Well,” he said, “that is sad but believable news. Healers are a rare enough breed here. Only ten of us in all of Albion Isle. Healers are doctors, yes, but we are not so backward as to discount the great uses of intuition, of the art of the soul, of
magic
.”

Lottie gulped. “You mean . . . you're a magician?”

“Oh, no, that's quite a different thing. There are no easy recipes or chemical formulas or magic spell books on hand here. Each one of my cures I extract from experience, from music, from poetry, from the wilds of this world, from—ah! I can tell from that face that you don't believe a word I'm saying.”

Lottie was thinking of her green apple tree. She was thinking of her copper box. Magic had been so tidy back home. Each year, she had closed up her wishes in a box and every following year she'd received her reply. Magic stayed in the box. But Mr. Wilfer was talking like magic was—well, was
at large
.

“Mr. Wilfer,” Lottie said at last. “I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I really don't. But where I come from, you don't get rid of the flu by . . . scrapbooking.”

“You would like proof,” said Mr. Wilfer.

Lottie thought about this. “Do you have any?” she said dubiously.

“Dear girl! Magic may not be reasonable. It may not be tamable or even reliable. But it does provide plenty of proof.”

Mr. Wilfer reached into his desk drawer and handed Lottie a vial, thin and fragile, filled to the top with a suspicious-looking gray liquid.

“That is a cure that took me a year to perfect. I had to capture ten laughs on a rainy day and all the ingredients of eggs Benedict. Then I had to quote a full book of sonnets at it. Go on, try it. It's for the cut across your forehead.”

Lottie raised a hand to her eyebrow and found that there was, in fact, a nastily scabbed cut there, which must have come from her bicycle accident. She looked suspiciously at the medicine, and it looked suspiciously gray back at her. She unstoppered the vial, and the prettiest smell of hot omelet drifted out. Lottie raised the vial to
her lips, looking all the while at Mr. Wilfer, and took the tiniest of sips. A prickle fizzed across her forehead and a sound like a
snap!
smacked around the walls of the room. At first, Lottie thought her head had exploded and how stupid she had been to taste a strange potion from a strange man! But her head was still very much intact and in much better shape than it had been a second before. Her cut had healed. Lottie rubbed her finger along her smooth skin and set the vial back down.

“It worked,” she said.

“It worked,” said Mr. Wilfer.

Lottie was still rubbing her forehead. Trees that were elevators, doctors that weren't human, New Kembles that weren't New Kembles, and now medicines made from eggs Benedict! It was all a bit much to take after a full day of school.

“You don't believe me yet,” Mr. Wilfer said. “I understand. This is hardly the ideal way to tell you everything, all at once. I hadn't even intended for you to root shoot until your sixteenth birthday.”

“Did my letter change your mind?”

“That,” said Mr. Wilfer, “and something else. Something complicated.”

Lottie wasn't much in the mood for complications. Eliot was what mattered.

“All right,” she said. “Say I believe you, Mr. Wilfer, and all of this business about cooking up medicines. If it's true, then I can't go back to Thirsby Square. Not until I've got a cure for Eliot.”

“That is what I expected,” said Mr. Wilfer. “I've made all the arrangements to have you stay with us for however long it takes.”

“It can't take long,” Lottie whispered. “There isn't much time.”

Mr. Wilfer looked Lottie straight in the eye. She had never seen a man—not even Mr. Walsch on his worst day in the calligraphy office—look so tired as Mr. Wilfer did at this moment. Still, Lottie could not help but ask the question.

“What's the final ingredient for the Otherwise Incurable?”

“It is late,” said Mr. Wilfer, “and both you and I are weary. Adelaide will show you to bed. In the morning, we will revisit this conversation.”

“But—” protested Lottie.

“This,” Mr. Wilfer assured her, “is better.”

When Lottie emerged from the laboratory, Mr. Wilfer instructed a waiting Adelaide to take their guest to a bedroom on the second floor, at the tip-top of the foyer's spiral staircase. Oliver was nowhere to be seen, which was disappointing. Even though his poetry quoting and eye color changing were more than a little strange, Lottie had decided that she liked the sly-faced boy. She also would have much preferred Oliver to Adelaide as her guide through the house called Iris Gate. The entire journey up the stairs, Adelaide spouted off boring facts and corrections as though she were preparing Lottie for a short-answer quiz at Kemble School.

“The banister is very old,” she said solemnly. “The wood was a gift from the Southerly Court to our great-great-grandfather as a token of friendship. So don't clutch it so hard, please. Oh, and be careful walking on the hall rug. It's fine wisp-weaved, practically antique. I should've asked you to take off your shoes. You clomp so carelessly. I guess that's a human trait.”

Lottie was annoyed, but she said nothing. Mr. Wilfer was offering her a chance to save Eliot, after all, and she
was
a guest in Adelaide's house.

The guest bedroom was smaller than any of the other rooms that Lottie had seen, but it was still terrifyingly large for a bedroom, and Lottie had begun to suspect that perhaps she had shrunk during her bumpy tree ride here. The room's vaulted ceiling towered over a lush-carpeted floor, and a marble fireplace yawned in one corner next to a big canopied bed.

“Father said you might be coming one day soon,” Adelaide said, tugging down the bed's duvet, “so I made some arrangements. You should sleep like a changeling.”

She pointed out a neatly stacked pile of clothes. “Those are mine. They'll be a little long on you,” Adelaide eyed down the good six-inch difference between her and Lottie, “but they're still better than what you've got on.”

Lottie did not particularly like having her wardrobe under attack. She put up with enough of those remarks from Pen Bloomfield without Adelaide's contributions.

“That's so
awfully
good of you,” Lottie said in a very awful way.

Adelaide blew a puff of air through her lips and rolled her eyes.

“It was a thrill,” she said, sounding anything but thrilled. “There's an adjoining bathroom just there, and if you need anything, I'm the next door down.”