Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (16 page)

‘So they’ll know who we are,’ Mrs Smani murmured. ‘The uniform tells them. Dark blue apron and cap, that’s the wet nurse. Cap with ribbons, that’s the layette seamstress.’ They had just emerged into the hallway and turned toward the green baize door when the door opposite Mary Ann’s popped open again and Fanetta’s head appeared. She was wearing a cap very much like Mrs Smani’s except that the ribbons were deep blue.

‘Where are you going!’ she demanded.

‘Down to see if we can get something to eat,’ Mary Ann replied.

‘Oh, my, no, no. You’d be finished off in a minute. Don’t dare go that way. There’ll be Cattermunes and their cousins all over out there. See!’ She stood back, gesturing them to come through and look out her window. From here they could see another court of Cattermune’s House, far below them, with carriages arriving and departing and a great clutter of figures walking among the formal gardens of clipped yew and black cypresses and peonies as dark as clotted gore.

‘Then they haven’t eaten yet?’

‘Oh, my, no. No, not until ten or eleven, or even midnight. They’re night people, are the Cattermunes. If you want to wander about, the time to do it is very early in the morning, about dawn, and for a few hours after that. Then the Cattermunes are all asleep.’

‘But I am hungry,’ said Mary Ann plaintively. ‘I really am.’

‘So am I,’ confided Fanetta. ‘We can go down. Just not the way you were going.’

She went down the hallway away from the green baize door, leading them around a turn and into a dismal cul-de-sac hung with tapestries. Behind one of these she found a knob, twisted it to reveal a black space, which she entered, calling, ‘Follow me!’

‘What about a light?’ objected Mary Ann.

‘I’ve got one,’ came the answer as a gleam of matchlight showed from the black pit. ‘I keep candles and matches down here on a kind of ledge thing. The housekeeper gives me candles to replace the ones burned in the nursery, and I always bring the stub ends down here …’ The voice drifted away. Mary Ann and Mrs Smani hurried to follow it, the hidden door swinging shut behind them.

There was a seemingly endless flight of stairs, with odd little corridors which corkscrewed away from it through the walls of the place. ‘You can get to almost every room in the Cattermune’s House through the walls,’ murmured Fanetta. ‘Or, at the very least, you can look and listen through spy holes. They’ve forgotten about these ways. Nobody uses them anymore except us.’

‘Us?’

‘Us mouslings. Us little people. If you’re smart, you’ll learn your way around. Sometimes a Cattermune takes after one of us for no reason. If we’re lucky, we can get into the walls before we get caught.’

‘And then?’

‘Then sometimes I get out of Cattermune’s House for a while, you know. Even though I know I’ll probably just come back later. I go to Frab Junction or Mother’s Smithy for a time …’

Mary Ann frowned. Frab Junction. Surely she remembered something about that. And Mother’s Smithy. She rubbed her head, as though the memory only needed stimulation to emerge, fully fledged. She lost it as Fanetta went on.

‘Chances are, the Cattermunes’ll have forgotten about it by the time I get back …’ Her voice faded away and the light flickered on before them, down and down, and around, and down once more. Here and there were spy holes extending through the mighty walls into rooms which were evidently in use for light came through, and the sounds of voices. ‘Kitchens are next level down,’ said Fanetta. ‘Remember that. From the end of the nursery hall, it’s straight down the stairway to the kitchens. Do you know anyone there?’

‘Green,’ replied Mrs Smani. ‘A kind of under-butler, perhaps?’

‘Footman,’ suggested Fanetta. ‘Well, when we go in, stay out of the way of the cooks, that’s all. Most of them have been here a long, long time, and they don’t take to newcomers. They don’t take to anybody much, and that’s the truth.’

She found a knob similar to the one at the top of the stairs and twisted it counterclockwise, making a loud click. The hidden door swung open into a short corridor off an enormous, stone-floored kitchen filled with scurrying people in white coats and flat white caps, others in slightly taller headgear, and a few in towering hats topped with fabric puffs like billows of cream. The room reeked of roasted meats and baking breads, steam from kettles seethed over the monstrous iron stoves, heat beat like a desert wind from the doors of opened ovens where brobdingnagian pies sweltered, their tops bubbling with juices. Everywhere was the scurry and chop of cooklets fleeting like sheep before the advance of the mighty cooks.

‘First course,’ cried a stentorian voice from the doorway. ‘The guests are seated.’

‘Send up the seethed snivel,’ shouted a tall cook, waving an enormous ladle. ‘Go!’ Five cooklets staggered out the doorway under an enormous laden platter, headed toward a barely visible immensity of stairs.

At the foot of the stairs the cooks were surrounded by a crowd of footmen and harried on their way with sharp cries of ‘Mind the step,’ ‘Sharp left here,’ and ‘Hold up your end, you fool.’

‘Quick now,’ bellowed a cook, ‘dabble fish into the poacher. Cravvle and Journ! Start chopping twelve cups of parsley.’

‘I think we can sneak around here to the staff dining room,’ whispered Fanetta. ‘Don’t, for Moomaw’s sake, get in their way.’

The three women, staying as close to the wall as possible, slipped a quarter way round the huge kitchen and through a narrow door into a shabby, low-ceilinged room furnished only with long, scarred tables and dilapidated straight chairs. At one of the tables a group leaned confidentially toward one another in quiet talk. At another, a liveried servant slept, face hidden in pillowing arms. ‘Those’re the staff cooks,’ Fanetta whispered, pointing at the group. ‘They’re the ones that feed us. There’ll be something over there on the buffet. There’s always bread and cheese and something to drink.’ They scurried to the buffet and found not only the promised bread and cheese but also half an enormous meat pie and a bowl of slightly wilted salad.

‘Not that they eat salad,’ Fanetta murmured. ‘The Cattermunes, I mean. But some of their guests fancy it, so there’s usually some about.’

‘Do all these people know about the passages in the walls?’ Mary Ann asked.

‘Oh, no. Well, they know there
are
passages in the walls, but not
where
they are. There’s only a few of us know where all of the passages are. Groff. And me. And some of the housemaids. We’re the only ones that’ve been around long enough.’

‘Why have you been here so long?’

‘Because … I’ve been everywhere in the game, at least once, and there’s nothing left for me but junctions. Except The End, of course, but I’m not ready for that yet.’ She jutted her chin at them and glared, a mouse glare. ‘That’s the rules, and even the Cattermune has to obey the rules! Even the Cattermune can’t go anywhere he’s been before except junctions!’

Mary Ann and Mrs Smani shared glances. When Fanetta spoke of junctions, they suddenly remembered something about junctions though they had not thought of them until that moment. ‘Which is the best junction?’

‘Well, for me, this one is. I know my way about. I’m so unimportant, it isn’t likely any of the Cattermunes will get offended at me. Sometimes there isn’t anyone in the nursery but me, the young ones grow up so fast. Even when there aren’t any young ones there, someone has to keep the place clean. I’ve got a fairly comfortable room, and the food isn’t bad. Sometimes it’s kind of interesting, too, what you can see and hear through the walls.’

‘Dear and valuable young woman, tell us about the other junctions,’ said a male voice. They looked up to see that Green, who had been asleep at another table, had joined them, still rubbing his eyes. ‘Now that you speak of junctions, I seem to remember such places. Tell us about Seldom.’

‘There’s not much to tell. There’s a corral for horses and a well for water and a cave with some supplies of food and firewood. There’s a haystack. And a privy. And once in a while a stagecoach comes through. There’s a desert all around, nothing but lizards and cactus.’

‘How about Snivel’s Island?’

‘Oh, the snivels are worse than G’nop. They’ve got such teeth, and they’re everywhere. You can’t lie down without one of them trying to chew on you. You can climb a tree and stay away from the big ones, like the one they had for dinner tonight, but the little ones can climb anything. Oh, no, no, you wouldn’t want to go to Snivel’s Island.’

‘How about Last Chance What?’ asked Mary Ann.

‘It’s in the bottom of a well full of spiders,’ she replied. ‘And Mother’s Smithy is so hot, and such hard work all the time, and no sleep with that hammer going night and day. Then there’s the Forever junction! Be very careful leaving here if you’re going on the main gameline. Don’t throw a two, whatever you do!’

‘Isn’t there any way out of a Forever?’

‘No. Land on a Forever, and you’re gone and that’s it! But, it’s easy enough to stay out of them. Just concentrate on which way you’re going and don’t throw a wrong number!’

‘What about Usable Chasm?’ Mrs Smani asked.

‘If you’ve got wings, that’s just the place. For the rest of us, it’s cling to the side and pray. It’s got no top, at least no top anybody knows about, and I’ve never been to the bottom. Last time I had to chew out a place flat enough to roll the dice!’

‘And Moebius Siding?’ Green asked in a bemused voice. ‘What about that?’

‘Like a roller coaster. Around and around and around, with no end and no beginning to it, every office you go to they send you someplace else, and just when you think you’ve got somewhere, they send you back right where you started. And no place to sit down and nothing to eat, and the drinking fountains don’t work and there’s a line a mile long waiting to get into the rest rooms … if they aren’t out of order.’

‘That reminds me of someplace I’ve been before,’ mused Mary Ann. ‘I wonder if I’ve been to Moebius?’

‘You’d remember if you had.’

A clamor in the corridor made them look up to see the under-cooks struggling back to the kitchen under the weight of the great platter, empty now except for a litter of bones and a broad, toothy skull, its jaws propped open with another skull, one that looked very human.

‘Well, it looks like they’ve finished with the seethed snivel,’ Fanetta remarked. ‘They’ve even eaten the meat off the binker’s head in its jaws.’

‘Binker’s head?’ Mrs Smani faltered.

‘Game. Prey. You know, what the Cattermunes hunt, out there, in the wilds. That’s what they hunt, binkers.’

‘That thing is a
human
skull.’

‘Shhh!’ hissed Fanetta. ‘Never say that. Never for a minute say that. That was a binker, that was. Never mind what it might have been before. It was a binker, and that’s all there is to it.’ Her face was very white, and she was trembling uncontrollably. ‘Don’t, don’t say that other thing. Don’t ever.’

‘Shhh,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I won’t say it. Calm down.’ She cast a quick glance at Green’s face, seeing there a quiet, calculating look more frightening in its rigorous calm than was Fanetta’s hysteria.

‘Ahh,’ he said softly, ‘if the Cattermunes are … ah … displeased, I presume those they are displeased with are or … shall we say become … binkers?’

Fanetta did not reply, but neither did she contradict him. She merely shivered, glancing the way the cooks had gone. ‘They only eat binkers when it’s just family and cousins,’ she said. ‘When there are guests, like the Grisl Queen, they don’t. At least not whole. In pies, mostly.’

‘You mean …’ Green’s eyes strayed to the leftover pie on the buffet. ‘You mean …’

‘Most likely.’ She shivered again. ‘You don’t see anybody down here eating it, do you?’

‘I did,’ he remarked faintly. ‘I did.’

The others watched his retreating back. ‘I suppose he’ll be sick,’ said Mrs Smani. ‘I would be in his place.’

‘Stick with the bread and cheese,’ recommended Fanetta. ‘It’s safest.’

They waited for Green’s return which happened coincidentally with the conclusion of dessert. Under-cooks, bearing trays of pastries and fruit, stopped off in the staff dining room to offer leftovers to those present. Gratefully, Mary Ann and Mrs Smani stocked up on apples and pears and bunches of red grapes, borrowing a basket from the kitchen to carry the harvest in.

‘Lovely companions, I have a feeling, wrenched up from Moomaw knows what depth of former existence,’ said Green from his huddle at the end of the table, ‘that there is something we should be attending to here at Cattermune’s House.’

‘That’s strange,’ said Mary Ann. ‘So have I.’

‘Well of course,’ remarked Fanetta. ‘You’ll both have plenty to attend to, just getting your jobs done, and I don’t envy either one of you, let me tell you.’

‘More than that,’ the man said, sighing. ‘More than that. Not something I’m supposed to do as part of being
here
. Something I was supposed to do when I
came
here.’

‘I’ve had that feeling,’ said Fanetta. ‘It usually goes away if I have a hot bath and some sleep.’

‘Hot bath,’ breathed Mary Ann.

‘Sleep,’ whispered Mrs Smani. ‘Oh, yes, please.’

‘Something we should be doing,’ mused Green. ‘Maybe it will come to me tomorrow.’

The three women made their way back through the kitchen to the hidden door in the paneling, then up the endless stairs to the door behind the tapestry, with Mary Ann carrying Mrs Smani the last few flights. In the nursery hallway, the lanterns were alight. Mary Ann left the hall door ajar as she put the little old woman on her bed, covering her with a blanket, then closed it behind her and opened the door into her own room. The dress she had taken off was lying across the bed. As she went to hang it up, something in the pocket knocked on the door of the armoire. She fished it out. A gold matchbox.