The Whatnot (7 page)

Hettie started. Piscaltine scooted a little straighter in her chair. “Oh, dear,” she whispered. “Oh, they weren't supposed to come tonight. I
told
the reconstructionists to keep them in the Dragonfly Wing and to turn all the passageways around on them if they decided to leave!”

Hettie had no idea what reconstructionists were, but she wished they had been more obedient. Because the creatures advancing on her now were the strangest, most dreadful bunch Hettie had ever seen, stranger even than Piscaltine's riding party. There was a lady who had small curtained windows where her eyes should have been and a wooden door for a mouth. There was another who was exquisitely beautiful on the front, with a great pleated gown and a dark, high-boned face, and a back like a hollow tree, gnarled and crawling with beetles. There was a man with a huge black spider for a head, its long legs curling around his shoulders. There was a water-fay. She floated in an upright tank, its wheels pushed by two tiny sprytes barely a foot from head to toe. There were many others, and all of them were dressed in rich clothes and complicated dancing dresses; all were bizarre in some way, misshapen or mad-looking. One had a key protruding from her back.

They rustled forward, and Hettie and Piscaltine watched them approach, the faery lady poised in her chair like a statue. “Don't say anything,” she hissed, her lips barely moving. “Not a word.”

The creatures came within five steps of the chair and formed a half circle. Hettie heard Piscaltine take a breath.

“Ooh,” said a tall, pale lady with a hooked nose when she caught sight of Hettie. “Ooh my, what is
that
?” There were white, wriggling maggots sewn all over the lady's skirts, and every few seconds she would squish one between her fingers and eat it.

“Why, Piscaltine, it is positively
grotesque
,” gurgled the water-fay from inside her tank. Perfect little bubbles plumed from her mouth with every word.

All of Piscaltine's air went out of her in a burst. “What?” she cried, dragging Hettie up into her lap. “No, she is a rarity! A curio and a peculiarity! She is going to be my Whatnot. Her name is Maud and she's from the Smoke Lands. All the way from London, can you imagine?”

“Uncivilized.”

“Uneducated.”

“Horribly vulgar.”

Piscaltine put her nose in the air, but her mouth was starting to twitch again. “As if any of
you
would know.”

The lady with the maggot dress waved her hand dismissively. “Silly, of course we know. We're the King's people, don't forget. Most of us have been there. To London. To Darmstadt, and Prague, and St. Petersburg. Completing our little tasks. Putting our fingers in the pie and making sure the humans are doing things just the way he wants them to. It is the most difficult place to get to, not to mention the journey through the wings always fills my shoes full of
feathers.
” She laughed and looked around at the others to make sure they were laughing, too. They were not, but the lady with window-eyes reached up obligingly and opened her door-mouth, and a little red bird sprang out on a brass wire and twittered. The maggot-lady turned back to Piscaltine. “You see?” she said. “Which is why none of us would want one so close to us. Contagions, you know.”

All the ladies began nodding and whispering at once, then, and every few seconds Piscaltine would wriggle and try to say something over Hettie's shoulder.

And then Hettie noticed that two of the women in the group were not speaking. They were standing very, very still, a little ways apart from the others, watching Hettie. They were both incredibly tall, and they wore matching dresses of thick, crimson velvet. Their faces were glazed like dolls' faces, one porcelain white, and the other black and smooth as the trees in Deepest Winter. Their eyes were empty holes, rimmed in red. They both stared, silent and unblinking, at Hettie.

Suddenly the pale twin spoke. “Where did you get her?” she asked, her voice sliding above the prattle. It was a flat, hollow voice. Instantly everyone in the hall went silent.

“What?” said Piscaltine. “I found her. It isn't any of your business.”

“Everything is our business.
Where
did you find her?” The dark twin spoke now, too, at exactly the same time as the pale one. Hettie shivered.

“At—in the woods. In Deepest Winter. No one was there. She was all alone, and she's quite useless and pointless; she said so herself.”

“You would tell us, of course, if the creature would be of interest to our King. You would not keep it from him.” It was not a question. Hettie noticed that the other creatures seemed to be just as afraid of the red twins as Piscaltine was. They all stood stock-still.

“Oh. Of course not! What a thought. Anyway, she's nothing so special. Just a curious little stray.” Piscaltine laughed, too brightly.

“Have her roll up her sleeves.” The twins stepped toward the chair, both at the same time.

“What?” Piscaltine wrapped her arms around Hettie and squeezed her so hard that Hettie gasped.

“Have her roll them up,” the women said again.

Piscaltine frowned. Then she hunched over Hettie and struggled with the sleeve of her nightgown. The fabric rolled up an inch.
Strands of red, winding and winding over pale skin. Eleven. Eleven. Eleven, they said in the language of the faeries.
Piscaltine saw. Hettie didn't know if the red twins saw, but she was sure no one else did, because in a wink Piscaltine had pulled the sleeve back down and was searching Hettie's face. Her eyes were not angry. They were wide and quivering and very, very frightened. Behind her, Hettie knew everyone was staring, stretching those long white necks for a glimpse.

Piscaltine shoved Hettie off her lap. “Maud? Leave.” She faced the others. “I think we should all go to the Hall of Intemperance and eat wild goblin until we're sick. Don't you agree? My hunters caught it almost a fortnight ago. It will be delightfully decayed.”

Hettie didn't bow to anyone. She broke into a run. Behind her, Piscaltine was talking, going on and on in a quick, annoying voice, and the red twins were staring at Hettie, and so was everyone else. She reached the door. It was heavy, but it was no longer locked. She pushed against it, out. It closed behind her with a solid
clank.

Hettie let go a long, slow breath. What had all
that
been? What had they been talking about? Hettie didn't like the way those twins had stared at her, and she didn't like the way everyone talked about her as if she wasn't there. She didn't like this place. She had to get out.

The painted hallway was no longer on the other side of the door. Instead, she was standing on a huge, dark staircase that went up and down and was carpeted with wine-red carpets that were faded and threadbare in some patches and dusty everywhere. She looked up the stairs. She looked down them. Then she hurried to the banisters and looked over the edge. She was very high up. Above her, she dimly saw the roof, but everything below it was a tangle of construction. She saw rooms being built, others being dismantled, drawing rooms and sleeping rooms and ballrooms being fitted together like puzzles. Rooms hung from ropes and chains or were set on top of one another in teetering stacks. Doors opened into nothing. Hallways simply ended. And all around, creaking through the dark on little metal swings and harnesses, were goblins and gnomes, building, hammering, hauling.

Someone who might have been a maid hurried down the stairs, carrying in her arms a load of panels painted to look like a kitchen. She stopped long enough to stare at Hettie.

“Oh,” Hettie said when she saw her. “Oh, excuse me, ma'am, could you help me?”

The maid jumped at the sound of Hettie's voice, as if she hadn't expected Hettie would actually be able to speak.

Hettie didn't notice. “I'm Lady Piscaltine's . . . well . . . I'm her Whatnot. And I need to know where a door to the outside is. I need to leave.”

“Leave?” the maid whispered, and her eyeballs practically popped from her head. “Oh, you can't leave. Nobody can.” She began to hurry on down the steps, murmuring anxiously to herself.

“What? Wait, don't go!” Hettie chased her. “What d'you mean, nobody can?
I
can. I just need to know where a door is! Can't you answer my question?” She felt the hard little knot of anger growing in her stomach.
Stupid faeries. Stupid Piscaltine, and her stupid house.

“No!” the maid shouted over shoulder. “Ask a troll. Ask the pity-faeries when they're hungry. It will be better for you in the end.”

Hettie stopped, glaring after her. She turned in a circle on the step. Then she decided to go up and became utterly, hopelessly lost. The house was vast, and it didn't help that it was always changing. Sometimes she would step into a hallway that was being reconstructed and would discover a wall behind her where seconds before there had been a door, or that all the panels had been flipped and what had looked like a regular corridor before now looked like a deep forest of red and rust-colored mushrooms. Some passageways were only a foot wide and she had to go down them sideways, squeezing between the plaster walls. Others were decaying, sagging on their chains and swinging dangerously. She wandered until her legs ached, up staircases and along peeling galleries full of cobwebs. She didn't meet many faeries. The few she did all looked startled when they saw her and disappeared before she could come near.

When she began looking in doors she regretted it rather quickly. The rooms were mostly false and flat, made to look like drawing rooms and dining rooms. At first glance, some of them appeared to be full of faeries and Hettie shrank back in fear, but the figures were only cutouts, silhouettes that ran on tracks in the floor. It was as if Piscaltine were pretending her house was busy and alive, even though it wasn't. One door led into a room full of toys, too-large rocking horses and colorful blocks. Another opened on a room hung with nothing but bells, from little silver ones to great, big, ear-splitting ones. None of the doors led outside.

At last Hettie gave up, and finding herself a real window seat in a real wall, she curled up against the cold panes.

Outside, the sky was tarnishing like old silver, going black. It would be full night soon. She told herself she didn't want to be escaping now anyway, but she did. She wanted to be home. She wanted to be in her cupboard bed, and she wanted her doll even though it was really just a handkerchief, and she wanted Mother who was always tired and a little bit sad and who loved Hettie very much. She wanted her brother most of all—her brother who would go looking for her no matter how far away she went, who would never give up. Perhaps he was already in the Old Country, following her tracks, coming to the cottage. Finding nothing.
Nothing but blood on the snow . . .

Hettie closed her eyes. Her hand went to the pendant inside her nightgown. She held it up. The eye set into the dark metal looked alive as ever, glistening wet and bright. She stared into it, trying not to cry.

“What am I going to do?” she asked it softly. “Do you know? How am I going to get home?”

“Who are you talking to?”

Hettie flinched so hard her shoulder blades knocked together. The twins—the tall, tall pale one and the tall, tall dark one—stood directly behind her in their red dresses. She hadn't heard them approach. She might have sworn there had not been a sound in the hallway since she had climbed onto the window seat.

“Oh . . .” she said quickly, dropping the pendant back inside her nightgown. She was sitting with her back to them. She hoped they had not seen. “Nothing. No one, I mean.”

They stared at her. They looked just like dolls, Hettie thought. Not like her doll in Old Crow Alley, but like real china dolls that someone had punched the eyes out of.

“Who?” they asked again, and their heads tilted suddenly.

“No one!” She hunched up to hide the shape of the pendant under the thin fabric of her nightgown. “Who are you?”

The twins blinked at her, both at the same time. “We are Florence La Bellina.”

“Oh.” Hettie's eyes flicked from one to the other. “Well—which one's Florence and which one's La Bellina?”

“What do you mean,
which one
?” They leaned toward her, and Hettie couldn't tell if the pale one had spoken, or the dark one, or if both had spoken at once. “We, together, are Florence La Bellina. There is no
which one
.”

“Oh,” Hettie said again.
Go away. Please go away.

The pale twin lifted her hand, and Hettie saw there was something in it, a hook on the end of a long ivory handle. Florence La Bellina slipped it under Hettie's sleeve, delicately, as if touching a slug. She started to pull back the fabric. But just before the red lines were uncovered, a voice sounded from far down the hallway—

“Maud?” it echoed. “Maud, for stone's
sake
!” It was Piscaltine.

The pale twin drew back. The sleeve slipped into place. And as Hettie watched, the two women came together, linking arms and merging, until there was only one woman, one side of her face white, and the other side black, black as a lacquered box.

Florence La Bellina stared at Hettie for several heartbeats, those red-rimmed eyes bottomless and empty. Then she turned and glided away into the shadows of the house, her skirts rippling like blood in the dark.

CHAPTER VII

The Birds

A
madwoman was locked in the cell across from Pikey's. Across the dripping corridor, beyond the backs of the scratching rats and the tufts of moss, she sat hunched against the dank wall. He could hear her muttering to herself in the dark, hour after hour, whispering words that made no sense.

“We knew,” she said, and her voice grated like an old hinge. “We knew he would clip their wings and put their heads in the earth. But it
was
sad.”

Pikey scooted out of his corner and peered through the bars. The rats scattered. The woman did not look up. She sat as she always did, huddled in shadow. Her hair was lank and straggling, hanging over her face. Sometimes, when she said a word particularly loudly, the strands would fly away from her mouth. Pikey could not see her eyes, but he knew she wasn't looking at him. She wasn't looking at anyone.

“The water is black there, you know.” Her hands went to her ears, covering them. “Black and green and sharp as turpentine, and the hammers fall all the night through.”

Pikey coughed and crawled back into his corner. There was a patch of straw there, damp and black with age. High in the wall, on the level of the street, was a barred window with not even a shutter to stop the snow and the wind from blowing in. The cell was set a little way underground, and the walls were always wet. Some days, when the air in the street was not as cold, and the steam coaches were more numerous, the snow would melt and the water would flow down the stone in rivulets. Moss grew out of cracks in the stones. All Pikey could see through the window were feet, passing by in an endless, pounding parade.

“Don't let him see,” the madwoman hissed from her cell. “Don't let him see!”

Some of the feet were slopping by in filthy, broken boots like his own. Others wore fine, ebony overshoes, waxed and waterproofed and polished to mirrors. Still others were pinched into pointy, button-up ladies' boots that peeked out from skirts held up over the muck.

To amuse himself, Pikey tried to imagine what sort of faces belonged to the feet passing outside. The fine overshoes, he decided, belonged to pale, bushy-browed gentlemen with warts on their noses and gold watches in their hands, gentlemen who worked in banks and smoked cigars until their lungs turned black and they coughed up little puffs of ash. The worn boots belonged to kinder men, busy and tired, like Jem when he wasn't drunk. The dainty boots and the colorful children's shoes were good people's, sweet ladies and happy boys and girls. Those were Pikey's favorite to think about.

“And the others?”
The madwoman's voice rang out suddenly, sharp in the depths of the jail. “The others in their pretty clothes? All gone? All broken?”

Pikey shut out her cries and moved a little closer to the window. He decided to see if any of his guesses were correct. He touched the sock that hid his clouded eye, making sure it was still in place. When a particularly fine pair of green velvet boots passed by, he scurried to the base of the window and peered up.

The boots belonged to an elderly lady. She wore clothes all in green, with a hat and muffler of silver fox fur. When she saw him staring up at her through the bars, she let out a gasp and picked her way over the slush to the other side of the street.

Pikey watched her go.
Well,
he thought.
That weren't how I imagined her at all.

The others were no better. Nobody's faces seemed to match the boots they wore. The polished overshoes often belonged to perfectly normal gentlemen with beards and top hats, not coughing up ash at all. The children's shoes were usually on the feet of stiff, buttoned-up boys and girls with sickly faces. They always walked faster when they saw him staring up at them. After a while, Pikey decided he didn't like his game anymore and burrowed into the straw, laying his head on his fist. He tried to sleep, but the madwoman would not shut up.

“A tower of blood,”
she sang to a wavering, sliding tune.
“A tower of blood and a tower of bone. A tower of ash and a tower of stone. Who's at the top of them, who's in the dark? Who climbs the stairs without leaving a mark?”

 

Pikey woke cold and clammy. He didn't know how long he had been asleep, but the madwoman had stopped singing. The prison keeper was walking between the cells. He whistled as he went and rattled his billyclub against the bars.

“Dinnertime, me lovelies,” he shouted, sloshing a bowl of something gray and lumpy. “Or . . . me one lovely. So little to do with the faeries all gone. It's right desolate down 'ere!”

So little to do with all the lads out of London fighting in the war,
Pikey thought, but he didn't say anything. He sat up, shivering. He had flopped into one of the puddles while he slept, and moss was squashed all over the skin of his neck.

The prison keeper came up to Pikey's cell and pushed the bowl between the bars. It was gruel. Porridge and water and anything else that was in grabbing distance of the one who stirred it. Pikey hoped there had been a duck or a cow wandering nearby at the time, but he couldn't see any of it in the bowl. No parsnips or meat. Not even a bone.

“Looks tasty, don't it,” the prison keeper said, grinning, and Pikey snatched up the bowl and began to pour its contents down his throat. It was cold as wet plaster.

The prison keeper watched him. Pikey saw he had that look in his eye, a sad, wondering look, as if he pitied Pikey. Pikey didn't want to be pitied.

He finished the gruel and set the bowl down with a snap. “Well?” he said, looking the prison keeper square in the face. “Aren't you gonna give the batty lady any?”

The prison keeper pulled Pikey's bowl through the bars. He drummed a quick rhythm on its side with his fingernails. Then he shook his head. “She don't eat.”

Pikey scowled at him. “She don't eat. . . . Everybody eats, 'specially in jails, because you're not allowed to let us starve like when we're on the streets.”

“It's no fib!” the prison keeper said, loud and a little bit pleading, as if he couldn't bear it that Pikey didn't believe him. “The story's been all over London, all over the presses, and in the
Times
and the
Globe
and the
Morning Bugle
.” He counted the newspapers off on his fingers. “Six months she's been 'ere, since the first spriggan riots up in Leeds, and she hasn't had a bite to eat nor a drop to drink since then. Not
one
bite.” The prison keeper leaned toward Pikey. “They say the faeries are feeding her.”

Pikey snorted and pushed himself back into the cell. The prison keeper
was
fibbing. Telling him a stupid tale to cheer him up, like he was a little boy. Well, he didn't want to be cheered up. And he wasn't a little boy. “That's daft. I don't believe you.”

“It's the truth, I swear 'tis!” The prison keeper threw up his hands as if to ward off the accusation. “It's why she was put here. Everyone was saying she was a witch, always disappearing for days on end, or years, always casting spells on folk, even after the laws was passed. She's from a village in the North, and folks are keener there. Sharper-eyed and more afraid. One day they caught her conversin' with a dead tree in a dark wood and put her in an iron carriage to London, and she's been here ever since. Waiting for a trial. Like you. Only she doesn't eat. No food, no water. And she's no worse than the day she arrived, if you can believe it.”

The prison keeper wasn't smiling anymore. He clicked his nail one last time against the bowl. Then he set off down the passage.

“I
can't
believe it,” Pikey shouted after him, but the prison keeper just kept walking. Pikey slumped against the wall, staring at the hunched shape in the other cell.

She sat as she always did, huddled and shivering, muttering to herself. She sounded different now, though. As if she were crying.

“I know,” she whispered, her voice breaking, becoming a sob. “I know what they've done. But
they
don't, the poor dears. They don't know what they've started.”

Her voice echoed in the empty cells. After a bit, the sad words became harsh, then sly. The woman laughed sometimes, a high, fluttering laugh. Many hours later, when Pikey had almost dozed off again, he thought he heard other sounds from the madwoman's cell, quick footsteps and the brush of hands on stone, as if she were walking or dancing. But when he dragged himself to the bars and peered through them, she was still sitting in the gloom, whispering, her hair hanging over her eyes.

 

The next day Pikey gave up listening to the madwoman. She did nothing but cry now, anyway, wretched sobs that hurt his head. He gave up watching the shoes that shuffled by in the street. He barely looked out the window at all anymore.

She's waiting for a trial,
the prison keeper had said.
Like you,
and the very thought of it was enough to make Pikey's stomach go watery. He had known a trial was coming from the moment the leadfaces had dragged him out from under the newspapers. A pauper's court was the sort of thing all gutter boys had to face at one point or another. But regular gutter boys were never caught with heaps of gems. Regular gutter boys didn't end up with silver flatware from the finest houses in London and not a single smashed windowpane or broken lock to show for it. Regular gutter boys didn't have faery eyes.

Every day, the prison keeper came to deliver the bowl of gruel, but he wouldn't say anything useful. With a sinking feeling, Pikey began to wonder if he would have to stay here as long as the madwoman had. Months and months in the dark and damp. He might go mad himself, then. He'd be dotty as a handkerchief. At times he caught himself staring into the shadows, half hoping to see that pale hand again, the long fingers beckoning, sweeping him away to freedom.

No one came. No one he saw, at least. But the sounds in the madwoman's cell continued, footsteps and laughs and whispers, and all the while the madwoman sat in the dark and wept.

 

On Pikey's twenty-fourth day in the cell, a tremendous squawking brought his attention back to the window. What he saw made him leap to his feet and clamber up so that his face was flat against the bars.

The sky was full of birds. So many birds they seemed to darken all of London. They swarmed under the lid of clouds—crows and jackdaws, ravens, sparrows, and even swans, flowing across the city in a vast hissing flock. The street turned black as night. People screamed and threw themselves into doorways and under stopped vehicles. Gentlemen held down their top hats and scurried for cover.

As Pikey watched, a gaggle of geese waddled frantically up the street and past the prison, flapping and honking. Three leadfaces came at them, ringing their bells, forming a wall. The geese didn't stop. They seemed almost frenzied, their tiny eyes a sharp, vicious black. They arched their necks and screeched, dodging the officers. One goose bit a leadface in the leg, so hard it left a bloody gash. Then the gaggle hurried on, around the corner and northward toward the edge of the city.

In barely sixty seconds it was over. The sky returned to its still, dull gray. A single raven flew screaming across the rooftops. People began to peek from the shelter of barrels and steam coaches, their jackets grimy with soot and vinegar. Pikey dropped down from the window and plunked himself onto the floor.

Faery magic. He knew it was. Only faery magic could get a pack of geese walking that quick all on its own.

They're going north,
he thought
. They're all going north.

The faeries were calling, and the birds were answering. The war had begun.