Plum Duff, page 6
I concluded my journey with Mrs. Buchance’s house, knocking on the door before opening it to find it as full of life as it usually was.
The front hall, in fact, was full of miscellaneous children—my half- and step-sisters, their various cousins—not one but two excited dogs, and what appeared to be a professional man, who was trying to browbeat Mrs. Buchance into paying for something she almost certainly didn’t need to pay for.
“Oh—Jemis—“ Mrs. Buchance said as I entered the chaos. She smiled wanly at me as she bounced the baby. “It’s good to see you.”
One of my sisters let out an ear-piercing squeal. Lauren, I was fairly sure. Sela was the one to fling herself at me. “Jemis!”
“Careful now,” I said, swinging the basket out of the way as she tackled my knees. She was followed by one of the dogs and two of the small boys.
“Lord St-Noire,” the businessman said, his smile ingratiating.
I decided not to correct him, since I disliked his oily demeanour. “Yes?”
“Mr. Highdar was just telling me about—what was it, again, Mr. Highdar?”
“It’s Highdoor,” he said, his smile slipping briefly until he was able to fix it again with an excessive display of teeth. I hid my own smile. Mrs. Buchance did not need much assistance to see off an importunate lawyer. Still, there was no point in wasting time in kicking him out.
“Mr. Highdoor,” I said firmly, “I’m sure Mrs. Buchance will consider your offer carefully and discuss it with her advisors before she makes any decisions.” I shooed the dog and the small boy holding onto its collar to one side so I could open the door and gesture at the man to leave.
“The offer is only valid if Mrs. Buchance signs right now,” Mr. Highdoor protested. “I couldn’t live with myself if she missed such a splendid opportunity because I didn’t take the time to explain it fully. There are other people interested in the investment, you know.”
I glanced at Mrs. Buchance, who shook her head in a sharp negation.
I smiled at Mr. Highdoor. “I’m sure that we all much appreciate your diligence, even if it does seem rather last-minute to come argue the opportunity the day it must be taken. I seem to recall learning that investments should be made with caution, research, and diligent background work. If you leave your folder of documents, I should be glad to go over them with Mrs. Buchance—you never know, perhaps I might be interested in the investment myself.”
I held out my hand, but I could see that Mr. Highdoor was not going to relinquish the leather briefcase he was clutching.
“No? In that case, good afternoon, Mr. Highdoor.”
He scuttled out. I shut the door, and Mrs. Buchance heaved a great sigh. Lamissa, the baby in her arms, imitated her and then grinned toothlessly around when the rest of us, children included, all laughed in response.
“Oh, Jemis, I am glad you’re back.” She handed me the baby in exchange for my basket, which contained a few treats for her and my sisters—most of my acquisitions for them would come as Winterturn gifts—and smiled more genuinely at me.
“He just wouldn’t leave,” she admitted. “I was about to start getting snippy.”
I grinned. “I thought you were doing just fine.”
Lauren tugged at my coat, but when I looked down she was just examining the buttons with intrigued curiosity. I left her to it after checking that her fingers were not excessively mucky.
Sela said, “Are you here to go gathering greens with us? Please say yes, Jemis! I don’t want to go without you!”
Mrs. Buchance said, “It’s not Winterturn yet, Sela. If you ask nicely, perhaps Jemis will be willing on the Lady’s Day.”
“Please, Jemis, please?” Sela asked, staring at me with exaggeratedly wide eyes.
I had always loved the whole process of gathering the greenery on the Lady’s Day. It was a tradition my mother had been very keen on.
“Certainly,” I said, winning a grateful smile from Mrs. Buchance; though I then realized I would probably end up with all the miscellaneous small boys as well.
Perhaps my father would be willing to come with us. Or Mr. Dart. Ballory would be a great distraction.
The children were all chatting excitably about what they liked best about gathering Winterturn greenery—I would apparently supply sweet buns and hot spiced cider at some point, or so Sela confidently declared—when I finally managed to ask Mrs. Buchance when the next Embroidery Circle meeting would be held.
“We’ll likely have one in a few days’ time.” Mrs. Buchance regarded me with a sudden curiosity. “Did you want to come, Jemis?—Not that that’s a problem,” she added hastily. “I was not aware you were an aficionado of the fibre arts, that’s all.”
I hesitated, realizing for the first time that going to the actual meeting meant I would need to find some handicraft to do at it, and in the little moment of silence, heard a scratch on the door.
I hesitated again, then opened the door. We all looked out, to find the two-tailed fox standing there, her ears forward and her eyes focused on mine, too-alert and too-aware to be either animal or human.
The children all fell silent in astonishment. The two dogs cowered back behind the boys, tails tucked between their legs and bellies flat on the ground.
The fox looked at Mrs. Buchance, and then at the baby in my hands, and then at me.
“Beware the false friend,” she stated, and this time simply vanished.
CHAPTER SIX
Miraculously, the rest of the day was quiet. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.
I puttered around, hanging up the new clothes from Master Boring and stacking the tins of tea neatly in the small cupboard that passed for my pantry.
Mrs. Etaris had kindly lit my stove while I was out. It was much smaller than the one in the store down below, and served as my primary heat and cooking surface. I liked it because it not only heated the room much better than an open fireplace, but it was also safe to leave unattended when, for instance, I was interrupted in my late-evening nap over a book about the curious habits of foxes by a commotion downstairs.
I had learned nothing of the folklore but the mundane was nevertheless fascinating.
I slung on my new coat and hastened downstairs in my slippers. My boots were by the door, drying out after an afternoon delivering parcels and gossiping.
There was a unicorn foal in the middle of the bookstore, nudging curiously at the stove door with her horn.
“Ballory,” I said, more than a little puzzled. Then, louder: “Mr. Dart? Perry? Peregrine?”
No answer. Ballory continued to nudge at the stove door.
“It’s hot,” I informed her. She scraped her horn across the glass front, which made a deeply unfortunate screeching noise. I shuddered atavistically. “Please don’t.”
She paused momentarily, then shifted her head so the horn was scraping down the channel between glass and iron frame. This made a marginally better noise.
“Thank you,” I muttered. “And where is your Mr. Dart?”
No answer.
This was a sacred and beautiful magical being, eulogized in song and story across all of Northwest Oriole.
This was a creature, I reminded myself, that had been closed in a box in the middle of a maze of stuff in Master Boring’s house.
Ballory continued to scrape at the channel with a singular focus.
“Is there a reason you’re doing that?” I asked, not expecting an answer, which was just as well as I didn’t receive one.
“Look,” I tried, “I really did want to go to sleep at some point tonight.”
Ballory paused to roll one limpid eye at me. It shone a warm red-gold in the reflected glimmer of coals from the stove, and was rather mesmerizing.
I cast around for something that might answer the question. “Do you want me to add another log to the fire?” I reached down for a stick, only to find that the unicorn had disappeared when I glanced aside.
I stopped there, looking around at the dim room. There was no sign of the door having opened or shut; no snow on the carpet. The fading hint of flowers might have been from the potpourri Mrs. Etaris kept behind the stove.
I blinked, but there continued to be nothing. I went to the door, but it was securely latched and bolted; so was the back door. There was nothing in the other rooms on the main floor, not even the cupboard under the stairs.
Eventually I gave up and returned to bed, deeply bewildered but increasingly sleepy.
In the morning, when I went down to light the stove in the bookstore, I saw a strange rune or sigil carved in silver over the glass door. It glimmered and then faded even as I watched.
My life hadn’t been this prone to oddities before I went to Morrowlea, surely.
Perhaps it is best to back up to the rest of the afternoon.
The uncanny fox uttered her warning and disappeared. All the miscellaneous children started talking at once, and were eventually persuaded by Mrs. Buchance to go play in the back garden with the dogs. This left her, the baby, and me; we went for a cup of tea.
I explained the three encounters with the fox.
Mrs. Buchance, who was not much given to fey imaginings, nodded but seemed to have little to add.
“It’s very odd,” she said at length.
We could agree on that, at any rate.
“You could tell everyone at the next Embroidery Circle meeting, if you like,” she suggested.
I did indeed like, and said so with what I hoped was gratifying rather than embarrassing enthusiasm. Mrs. Buchance was smiling brightly by the end of my effusions, which was a good thing, at any rate.
“How are you, Jemis?” she asked suddenly, after pouring me the lemon balm tea to which she was partial. She passed me a plate of plain shortbread to go with it, which I took gratefully. I’d eaten a goodly lunch but nevertheless found myself unaccountably hungry.
“Very well, thank you,” I replied. I did not have a message for the second Mrs. Buchance from the afterlife. I felt no uneasiness over this: it was clear, at some deep level, that there had been necessary limits to the messages I could be given. What the necessity was was unfathomable, but it was so.
“You are looking …” She trailed off. I remembered the odd light in the Wild Saint’s eyes, and smiled at her with what I hoped was a more normal expression. “Very well,” she concluded, with a faint air of confusion. “Your trip to Orio City was successful, I take it?”
“In the end, yes.” This seemed to be a good moment to offer her the item she’d asked me to acquire for her, a kind of metal mould for making small cakes in the Taran style. “I don’t think I’ll be going to Tara for another degree. The city didn’t agree with me.”
“Did you still want to leave?”
I glanced up at her question. She was smiling at me with a slightly anxious expression.
The second Mrs. Buchance, Miss Eleanor Inglesides that was, was only five years older than I. She’d been hired as a nursemaid for my sisters when my mother had died, and by the spring of the year following was my stepfather’s second wife, with a baby of her own coming soon after.
It was only that morning that my father had expressed his love of Ragnor Bella, and I had not been sure, for a moment, whether it was not my own thought spoken aloud.
“Not as much, no,” I admitted. “I don’t seem to need to leave for either adventure or fortune, after all!”
“There’s always the question of romance.”
I shook my head. “Do you remember my friend from Morrowlea, Violet Redshanks?”
Mrs. Buchance was perhaps the only person I knew who hadn’t immediately clocked Redshanks as a false name from its use in Fitzroy Angursell’s Aurora. The poem and all the songs derived from it were equally banned, but that hadn’t stopped very many people from contriving to know them. Mrs. Buchance’s brother, the town baker, was certainly most familiar with them.
“How could I forget?” She laughed. “I thought she seemed a trifle dangerous … Do be careful, Jemis.”
“She’s said I might write to her,” I confided, ignoring this. Violet was nowhere near the danger my previous amour had been. Violet had told me she was dangerous; Lark had beguiled, bespelled, drugged, and imprisoned me.
“She is very beautiful and seemed a woman of great character,” Mrs. Buchance said with due consideration.
“She is so smart,” I said. “We both read Classics. Violet studied the ancient epics. She even learned Old Oriolan so she could read The Knight and the Unicorn and The Lady and the Dark.”
Mrs. Buchance made an amused, agreeing sort of noise, and I continued to rhapsodize on Violet for a few moments before she finally laughed and told me to continue on with my errands, as it was time to feed the baby.
I went out smiling, retrieved hat and basket from the front hall, and continued on my way. Even as I delivered nutmegs and awls to Mrs. Kulifeld and grains of paradise to Fogerty the Fish, I found my mind circling back to my first comment about what Violet had read at Morrowlea.
I’d forgotten about Violet studying Old Oriolan, the language of Northwest Oriole from before the coming of the Empire.
I’d forgotten I’d even known the name of that language, let alone a handful of words in it, courtesy of Violet explaining place- and surnames that derived from the ancient tongue.
The Knight and the Unicorn had been translated early into Shaian, and was well known as a minor local masterpiece of early Fifth Calligraphic, as that period was called after the dominant court style of the time. The poem, a long narrative epic with definite allegorical overtones as beloved by pre-Astandalan Northwest Oriolese poets, told the story of the first Sir Peregrine and his finding of the Unicorn.
The Lady and the Dark, on the other hand, had suffered in one of the occasional bouts of censorship of regional culture, when the imperial governors felt that some sort of folk religion or movement was proving politically destabilizing. In one such period of foment, all the Shaian translations of The Lady and the Dark had been destroyed.
I knew a handful of lines from the poem because it was frequently quoted in Alinorel literature written in Shaian between the coming of the Empire and the destruction of the manuscripts.
I was so caught up in my thoughts that I nearly passed a few regular customers at the bookstore without greeting them, and remedied it with a bow and a smile before heading into the milliner to see if she might have any hats that were not entirely feminine in style.
“Well, Mr. Greenwing,” Mrs. Ayden said, pursing her lips as she regarded my unusual coat. “What happened to your tricorner?”
It seemed excessive to explain that in the course of escaping from Orio Prison I’d lost it in a faery islet between Orio City and the hunting lodge of the King of Lind at some moment between dying and being miraculously resurrected.
“I lost it, alas,” I said. “Can you assist me, or will I have to go to Temby?”
Yelton was closer, but since I’d been escaping from their gaol on my last visit to that town, I rather thought I’d avoid it for a few more weeks at least.
Mrs. Ayden looked down my long swinging coat. She nibbled at her lip. I waited patiently.
“I do have a hat I made years ago,” she said slowly, and then, without further comment, turned around and disappeared into the back room.
There had been no one else in the shop when I entered (a crucial part of my entering, if I may be entirely frank), so I sat down on one of the tufted pink velveteen chairs apparently there for the purpose and considered the state of the world, or at least that portion of it involving me.
Apart from how much I was missing a hat—hopefully to be remedied with something not entirely terrible by the good efforts of Mrs. Ayden, as clearly I was going to have to buy it now that she’d gone to, what was it?—nearly a quarter-hour of effort to find it, and there was as of yet no sign of her return—
I forced my thoughts back to the question of my circumstances. I was most confused by the magical talking fox, deeply pleased to be home, and entirely disinclined to leaving Ragnor Bella to go up to Fillering Pool for Hal’s coming-of-age ball on Winterturn Twelfthnight.
I couldn’t see any way out of attending, more was the pity.
I would have to tell my father about the invitation. Hal had asked me to bring him and Mr. Dart along, though none of us had been able to come up with a practicable way to draw Mrs. Etaris as well. She would have had to make preparations weeks ago to attend the fair Hal was hosting.
My eye travelled around the room thoughtfully. It was a decidedly feminine sort of place, full of pale colours—pastels were all the rage in Ragnor Bella, no doubt derived in some arcane way from Lark’s love of icy blue—Violet had been wearing a deep green when I saw her at Lark’s court, green and purple to show she was on the Lady’s side.
Violet was the Lady of Alinor’s daughter.
I considered a bonnet of pale golden straw tied with a pale pink ribbon. Not the sort of thing to appeal to Violet at all.
Did she get tired of the colour puns? I seemed to recall she had, at Morrowlea. “Purple is more of a lordly colour,” she’d told me, as we dyed cloth one messy summer afternoon. “I much prefer the Lady’s green.”
—And where was Mrs. Ayden? This was taking far longer than I’d anticipated. I didn’t have anywhere particular to be, now that I’d finished all my deliveries bar the ones to the Woods Noirell, but I was ready to go home and investigate my own acquisitions a little.
There were spindles full of ribbons, silk, grosgrain, cotton, satin, sateen, velvet. There were baskets of yarn, as the milliner’s shop served also as a sort of place to buy cloth and yarn and other needments for both sewing and other fibre handicrafts.
There were bolts of cloth, mostly the pale sorts one used for lining bonnets. Straw hats by the score in different stages of completion. Mrs. Ayden had several forms on a table in the room, round balls on stands to stand in for human heads. They displayed three entirely different sorts of hats: two were variations on the straw bonnets familiar from the past several years, one was a marginally more daring exercise inclining in the direction Violet’s had been, when she came to Ragnor Bella earlier in the autumn.
