Julia Vanishes (5 page)

“The way your eyes moved as you looked at the paper,” she says, “it looked as if you were reading. It's quite all right, you know. Reading is nothing to be ashamed of!”

Of course not. But it would be highly unusual in a housemaid, and I do not wish to appear in any way unusual.

“I wish I could, ma'am,” I say softly. “I just like the way the words look.”

She smiles a chilly little smile and begins to eat, which signals the others to begin also. Frederick is giving me a rather pitying look, I think. I step back against the wall. I don't need to disappear for them to forget all about me.

In the afternoon Florence is to assist Mrs. Freeley at the market, leaving Chloe and me alone together. Florence is terribly anxious, as if Chloe and I can't manage to clean up the scullery, fill the lamps, and ready the hearths on our own, but she is also proud to be doing something so important as watching Mrs. Freeley select fish and fowl and fruit from the market. Perhaps she will be allowed to carry the basket, lucky girl. In any case, I am glad to have some time with Chloe. She lost her entire family to Scourge and was taken in by Florence's family, so although they are cousins, they have grown up more like sisters. She and Florence came to work here together two years ago. In general, she does, and no doubt thinks, whatever Florence tells her to. Unlike Florence, though, she is pliable, and not averse to gossip.

“How long has Mr. Darius been staying here?” I ask her once we're upstairs, filling the lamps in the bedrooms.

“Oh, weeks,” says Chloe, eyes widening. Which is not terribly specific, but then weeks are not months, nor days, and the timing of it strikes me.

“He came not long before the last maid left, then?” I say. “What was her name? Clarisa?”

“Yes, Clarisa Fenn. She'd worked here for ages. She was ever so nice.” Then she looks uncertain, as if maybe Clarisa was not nice after all or, I suspect, not approved of by Florence.

“Wasn't it quite sudden, her leaving?” I say.

Chloe nods, eyes wide and shining. She wants to tell me, I can see. I just need to push her a little more.

“It wasn't because of those…
sounds
in the cellar, was it?” I ask, with a perhaps too theatrical shudder.

Chloe looks as if she might topple over from excitement. “She was scared,” she whispers.

I lower my voice, widen my eyes: “You've heard it too?”

She nods wildly. “Clarisa thought…well, she thought it was a demon!” She looks sheepish at this.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Demons aren't real,” she says hastily, as if I'm going to report her for having folklorish beliefs. “Clarisa is Lorian, though.”

I'm right, then, that Florence likely disapproved of her. Lorians are the oldest sect that worship the Nameless One and still have the most folklorish elements in their religious practice. They used to portray the Nameless One as a white stag, until the Crown declared it blasphemy, twenty odd years ago. The year before I was born, angry Lorians joined forces with folklore practitioners and element worshippers and all those that opposed the Crown for other reasons. The goal was to oust the childless King Zey in favor of his half brother, a Lorian by marriage, but it was a short-lived revolution. The king's brother was hung, along with his wife and children, and the revolutionary forces were slaughtered. It gets called the Lorian Uprising, but the Crown claimed the whole thing was orchestrated by a power-hungry coven of witches. The Spira City of my childhood was still reeling from the aftermath, and there is plenty of ill feeling left, to say the least. The first thing Florence asked me when I was hired on was “What religion are you?”

“Rainist,” I answered promptly.

I'm not, but the king is Rainist, and it is the only unassailable answer. When I declared myself so, Florence gave a stern little nod of approval and Chloe looked relieved. Most people in the Twist go to the big Baltist temple, where there is lots of music and dancing and round honey cakes after service. I'd never go to a Rainist temple, where they all wear white and kneel, praying in silence for hours, and seem to be constantly fasting. In any case, Lorians must tread carefully these days. The white stag has disappeared from their temples, and talk of demons is imprudent at best.

“Do you know why she thought such a thing?” I ask.

“She saw something,” says Chloe. “We all heard a noise on the landing one night. A sort of…grunting noise. Clarisa got up to see, and then she was screaming and screaming and everybody was up, and Mrs. Och told us to go back to bed, and that everything was fine. But Clarisa left the next day. She was a wreck, and all she said was,
I saw it.
”

This is maddening. “But what did she see?” I press her.

“I don't know!” says Chloe, delighted with our conversation. I swallow my sigh of frustration and file away the name Clarisa Fenn. It shouldn't be difficult to find her.

“Mrs. Och is very kind,” I say, changing tack as Chloe piles wood in Frederick's fireplace.

“Oh yes,” she says.

I'm not sure how to follow this in a way that will get Chloe to open up about Mrs. Och but am interrupted, anyway, by Frederick coming in.

“Excuse us,” I say. “We're nearly done here.”

“Not at all,” he says, with that startled look he always seems to have, as if you've just walked in on him in the privy. “I was looking for you, in fact. Would you mind helping me for a moment in the library?”

“Both of us?” I ask, because he's just looking at me.

“No, just you, Ella,” he says, and I get a little chill. Have I left some evidence of snooping? I follow him down the stairs to the library, a large book-lined room with comfortable chairs and a fireplace full of barely glowing embers.

He seems oddly nervous. I look up at him expectantly.

“At lunch…you said you wished you could read.”

“Yes,” I say.

“I could teach you, if you like,” he blurts. “It seems a shame not to…well, I can't imagine not being able to read.”

He looks abashed then, like he might have offended me, but I understand the sentiment and am rather touched by it. My mind moves quickly. I don't need to add pretended illiteracy during reading lessons to my lengthy list of tasks here.

“I've not much time,” I say.

“I'll tell Florence I need your help sorting the books,” he says. “Just a short time each day would be enough to get a start.”

That settles it. If it will give me a break from housework, I'm delighted. And who knows where a greater intimacy with Frederick might lead? He is the professor's assistant, and it could be very useful indeed to be friends with him.

“Thank you,” I say, breaking out my best smile for him. “I can't begin to…It's very generous of you, sir. I've always longed to be able to read.”

He flushes, and smiles back.

“Do call me Frederick,” he says.

H
ere is what I have learned over the past couple of days: First, inside the black case Professor Baranyi keeps hidden in the secret compartment behind his forbidden books are two vials of liquid, one amber, one clear, and five darts with hollow centers, along with the ingenious little handheld crossbow. Second, Mr. Darius's room in the cellar is bolted
from the outside.
In other words, he is not keeping people out; somebody else is locking him in. The wooden door has been replaced by a steel one, and there is also a very sturdy key lock. A pick might do for it in the hands of an expert, but I am no expert and have not managed to open the door in spite of two attempts. Third, Frederick is an appallingly bad teacher. It is a very good thing I already know how to read or I would be making no progress at all, and while I consider myself a reasonably good actress, pretending to fumble through the alphabet is a trying sort of performance. Frederick, however, is delighted with my progress and declares we will be reading the classics in no time. Florence is highly suspicious of my new task “sorting books” for Frederick but dares not challenge him. She probably thinks we're having an affair.

Midweek, we are all abruptly given the afternoon off.

“I have a visitor,” Mrs. Och tells us. “We will require privacy.”

This is extremely interesting, and I have no intention of leaving the house, except that Florence is dogging me everywhere in a disturbingly friendly way, right into my coat and boots.

“There's to be a Cleansing at the river, in front of the parliament buildings,” she tells me in a whisper at the doorway, as if I didn't know.

Chloe is bundled up next to her, eyes wide and frightened.

“Come with us,” says Florence.

She needs to work on her invitation style. I'm tempted to reply tartly that she can't give me orders if we have the afternoon off and I have other plans. But the two of them look so pale and eager that it's almost pathetic, and the truth is, I never miss a Cleansing. The prospect of missing this one had me feeling an uncomfortable kind of irritation that I can't explain and don't care to think on too deeply.

“Have you ever been to a Cleansing?” I ask.

Chloe shakes her head vigorously. Florence hesitates, not wanting to admit to any gap in her experience. Then she says, “My duties keep me far too busy to attend such events.”

“It's not much to see,” I tell them. “A few ragged witches get tossed in the river. Sometimes, if you're lucky, there's a bit of a scuffle. But it always ends up the same. Witches in the river.”

Florence nods solemnly and then says, “Mrs. Och gave me some money to buy us hot buns.”

She's resorting to bribery. They both seem to desperately want me along. I decide I'll go for a bit, then lose them and come back on my own.

“All right,” I say, and I can see how relieved they both are. I feel something like relief myself—some loosening inside. “But honestly, I think you'll be disappointed.”

There is already a crowd along the river when we arrive, crossing Molinda Bridge to the Plateau, where the parliament buildings squat, stubbornly practical, next to the palace grounds. The palace itself is hidden behind thick walls, but from Mount Heriot you can see the tips of its elegant spires.

The sky is clear, but the wind has winter in its fingers. I notice that Chloe's and Florence's boots are nearly worn through, and their coats have seen many winters. While my clothes are nothing to brag about, at least my coat was new a little more than a year ago, purchased off a job at a wealthy collector's home, and I get boots whenever I need them. The lesson for housemaids of Spira City being: Crime pays. Florence buys three hot buns for us at a stall on the bridge and then I lead them to the narrow steps that take us down from the road to the low path hugging the river.

“Won't we have a better view above?” asks Florence, following me and nibbling at her bun. I want to tell her to eat it while it's hot. Really, I want to snatch it out of her pale little hands and eat it myself. I've already finished mine.

“It gets too crowded up there,” I say. “Have you any money left?”

She is startlingly passive now that we're off her turf. The bustle of the city is my domain, and although she has no reason to know this, it's as if she senses it, and suddenly I am the one in charge. She holds out a few pennies, almost apologetically.

I take them and wave down a man smoking in a little rowboat.

“Three pennies?” he says with a raised eyebrow.

“And the charming company of three girls,” I say with a wink.

He laughs a bit sadly at that but lets us on.

“Is this safe?” asks Chloe.

“Of course it is,” snaps Florence, white-faced.

Before long, the low path and the road above are packed with bodies and the river is full of little boats like ours, anyone with a vessel making what pennies he can by giving spectators a better view. I flirt halfheartedly with our man so he doesn't decide to throw us off for someone offering more, but he is uninterested, tossing his cigarette into the water and withdrawing into himself.

“I'd like to see that Marianne Deneuve drowned!” Florence pipes up. “The vile beast!”

“Those poor children,” agrees Chloe.

“What children?” I ask.

It seems that the story going around is that Marianne Deneuve cursed her lover
and
his wife and children with long monkey tails before fleeing Spira City. I give a snort, and Florence looks appalled.

“It's not funny in the least!” she cries. “Their lives are completely
ruined.
”

They go back and forth about how awful it is and what a fool he was and what a monster she is, and I do my best not to pitch myself into the water out of sheer boredom with their conversation. At last the long government barge pulls into view and everybody begins to shout and throw things into the river. I wish I'd remembered to bring an umbrella to shield us from the rotting fruit and debris raining down.

“What are they doing?” screams Chloe, panicked. Florence is gripping her hands together in her lap, her nostrils working, as if
she
were about to be tossed into the river.

“They're just excited,” I say. “Trust me, we're safer out here.”

It's true, sometimes the crowd goes a bit wild, and people have been killed in the crush and stampede. Our man rows us lazily around so that we can see the witches standing in a row on the deck of the barge. They have silver chains around their ankles, wrists, and necks, supposedly to impede their magic. A witch cannot cast a spell unless she writes it down, but witches are nevertheless preternaturally strong, and a superstitious fear of them makes their captors bind them in silver. There are eight of them today, and no children, thank the Nameless. Only one of them looks a proper witch—an old crone with a wicked face and bony hands like claws that grip the silver binding her. There is a giantess too, fair-haired and hideous, towering over the guards. A plump, dark witch sobs and sinks to her knees again and again, but the guards behind her keep forcing her back up. The rest of them mostly look like the kind of women you'd find selling silks or bangles at markets in the Twist. I find it interesting how convicted witches seem to come mostly from the lower classes, though now and again a rich girl just learning to write reveals her power and gets turned in by her parents or her governess. One year, the wife of a wealthy banker was drowned as a witch, and the excitement of it rippled through the city for days, but that sort of thing is rare.

“More guards than usual,” I say, frowning, for they line the entire deck, dressed in their royal white and blue, rifles at the ready.

A moment later a slender man in a fur-collared black coat steps out of the cabin and climbs up onto the platform at the stern of the boat. The crowd roars—an ambiguous response, it seems to me. I've never seen him in person before, but I recognize him from likenesses in the newspaper: This is Agoston Horthy, the prime minister, and arguably the most powerful man in Frayne, for old King Zey reportedly spends his days in prayer and fasting and has little to do with affairs of state anymore. No wonder there are so many guards.

When King Zey came to the throne, nearly half a century ago, he outlawed element worship, potion making, palmistry, wish writing, elemental charms, tattooing and any other form of writing on the skin, even the old songs and stories—but still those practices flourished in secret for a time. Then Agoston Horthy came to power. For twenty years now he has been the king's bloodhound, a young man from a landowning family, handpicked by the aging king himself, nosing out all hidden corners where the old ways still hung on. Soldiers have destroyed the last of the shrines to the elements, and there aren't many folklore practitioners left, even in the Twist. Those who love him claim that he used to work the fields side by side with the farmers on his land and that he holds the common people close to his heart. Others remember only his ruthlessness in crushing the Lorian Uprising and the stern line he has hewed to since then. In my lifetime, the king has been a vague, holy figure, growing older and vaguer and, by all accounts, holier, behind the palace walls, while Agoston Horthy has emerged as the terrible, unswerving captain of the ship of state.

In person, he does not look nearly as formidable as his likenesses would have him. He is thin and small, with a lined, doggish face, pouches under his eyes, and gray in his hair. His coat is worn at the shoulders, and the fur collar is rather shabby. In fact, he looks like a weary grocer, but that impression is erased as soon as he speaks.

“Like you, I am here to bear witness,” he says in a thunderous baritone. The crowd falls silent. “For the glory of the Nameless One and the safety of Frayne, we do not tolerate unnatural magics within our borders. Helmed by our great king Zey, Frayne is a holy nation, a nation that thrives on the hard work and honest faith of its people, a nation that rejects false worship and evil magics. We have led the way, and the rest of the New Porian kingdoms have followed. It is our duty to show the world what a holy nation looks like, but more than that, it is our duty to keep our children safe, to protect one another and be true to one another and to the Nameless One. I am here to witness the blessed waters of the river Syne wash away the poison that threatens us all, that threatens our children: this dark magic, the terrible power of the witch.” He pauses and then leans forward and says: “I derive no pleasure from death, from killing. But what would you do, you mothers and fathers, to protect your dear children? Would you not do whatever was required? Would you not murder those that threaten them, and think it just?
You,
the honest Fraynish people, are my only children, and without qualm I shall put to death all those that wish you harm.”

Wild applause follows. I'm worried Florence is going to fall overboard, she's clapping so hard. It is a masterful bit of oration, delivered with every appearance of absolute sincerity. Whatever resentment common people may feel about his stamping out the old folklorish ways, the prime minister's implacable pursuit of witches has earned him widespread admiration, and it is said that no country in the world is less disrupted by magic than Frayne.

Agoston Horthy bows his head, clasps his hands before his chin, closes his eyes. I think there are tears on his cheeks, but it is difficult to tell from here. A Rainist holy, all in white, speaks a blessing, while his devoted lights the torch to prove that these are witches. There is one witch with brown hair, a bit younger than the rest, keeping very still, although she is next to the witch who keeps sobbing and collapsing. I watch her as the Rainist holy gives the order and his devoted lays the flaming torch on the bare arm of each witch, one at a time.

A couple of them scream and pretend to burn, and the crowd laughs. The devoted holds the torch to them for longer to show the crowd that they do not burn. The crowd shouts and stamps. I think I hear an odd sound from Chloe, or maybe from Florence, but I am too busy watching the young brown-haired witch. She doesn't move when the torch touches her. She shuts her eyes.