The Cabinet of Earths (4 page)

It was just so difficult to keep herself focused on what Cousin Louise was saying. Maya was trying very hard, and still her mind was straining at the leash, like Boofer on a walk, whenever a squirrel would come dancing across the road.

“—The inverse of autism, Maya,” Cousin Louise was saying. “I myself am opaque, for some reason. Their eyes cannot see me. Yes, that's it: The world is autistic with respect to me. There! Pay this waiter, and we will go.”

She stood up, almost too suddenly. Maya blinked.

“Yes, come along!” she said to Maya. “Because I think you are right: If not the falling church, then what can it have been? You will look him up in the phone book, if he is still alive, and we will go ask him those very questions. Come! We are going to find this uncle, you and I, this
Henri de Fourcroy
.”

Chapter 5
The Cabinet of Earths

T
hey found him tucked away down an alley off the old rue du Four, in the very center of Paris.
Henri-Pierre de Fourcroy
, it said on the mailbox at the street door.
Second courtyard, ground floor.

“You can say that you're a cousin, visiting from America,” said Cousin Louise, as they followed the passage back into the hush and the shade. “True enough, yes? Tell him that.”

The second courtyard was small and crooked, the cobblestones very rough underfoot and the walls rising up all around them slightly green with age and dampness, as if, with another few days of rain, they might just sprout right out in a thick layer of moss.

And along the back wall, the lower section of one of the buildings sprawled out into the courtyard itself, a fantastic construction of wood and windows that looked like something James might love—the perfect tree house—though here it hugged the ground, far from anything even resembling a tree.

“Here it is,” said Cousin Louise, who had been examining the courtyard's various doors, and as she spoke, the door itself squeaked open. A man's wrinkled head peered out at them, all worry and suspicion. His hair was thin, tufty, and gray, and his eyes a shy and watery color.

“Oui?
he said, in a voice made slightly crackly by age. “Who are you? I take no more deliveries, you understand! Not from Them!”

Cousin Louise stepped very slightly to one side, her sign that Maya should do the speaking for them. As usual, Maya had to let go of a slight feeling of irritation—of put-upon-ness—before she could get down to the hard work of stringing French words together.

“Bonjour, monsieur
,” she began, a safe way to buy some time. “I don't know who Them are—” (She knew right away that she had messed up the grammar; a faint click of disapproval came from the general area of Cousin Louise, on her left.) “—But I am Maya Davidson, from California. And I think we are cousins.”

Somewhere above their heads a pigeon added some mournful comment of its own:
Oo, oo. Ooo-oo
. . . .

“‘Cousins,' you say?” said the old man, in a wondering sort of way. “I have no cousins.”

“Not a
close
cousin,” said Maya, wondering how one really said any of this in proper French. “Distant. Far away. My grandmother was French.”

“Oh?” said the old man. He looked rather puzzled. “Well, what was her name?”

“Anne-Sophie,” said Maya. “Anne-Sophie Miller.”

“But I have no Millers in my family,” said the old man (and of course in his mouth it sounded like this:
“Meellaihr”
). “I'm afraid you must be mistaken,
mademoiselle
.”

“She means
Lavirotte
,” said Cousin Louise, in her bland, gray voice. The old man looked up at her, almost in alarm, and then looked away again.

“Lavirotte,” he said. “Ah.”

Of course, that was right. Maya felt foolish all over again. The French grandmother had had a different name before she married Maya's American grandfather and moved away.

“But then—” he said, and peered at them with, if anything, renewed suspicion. “You are sent by the
Société
, after all? I told you very plain, did I not? ‘No deliveries,' I said. I still say it. I am done with all that.”

“What Society?” said Maya. “Deliveries of what?”

“BOTTLES,” said the old man, a deep frown furrowing the lower half of his wrinkled face.

Maya felt a giggle bubbling up in her throat, but the old man seemed so very earnest about it all that she worked very hard to keep the giggle under wraps.

“I promise we don't have any bottles, Monsieur Fourcroy,” she said. “Really, truly.”

“Not sent—you're quite sure—by the Society
—
?”

“No!”

“
—
of Philosophical Chemistry?”

The bubble of laughter inside Maya vanished just like that. Evaporated. Popped.
The Society of Philosophical
C
hemistry!
The same Society that had given her father all that money so he could bring them along to France? And paid for their apartment? And had a rather riveting young director who lived in a house with a salamander on the door? Was there any corner of Paris free of them?

All she could do was shake her head, while that trickle of surprise danced up and down her spine. But the old man seemed not to notice. In fact, he was already stepping back to hold the door open for them.

“Well, come in, then, I suppose,” he said. His face had softened, all at once, into the shy ghost of a smile, a curious smile. It made him look almost like a boy, for all that his skin was so wrinkled and his hair so sparse. “My grandmother was a Lavirotte, yes, when she was a girl.”

There was an odd vestibule just beyond the door, with a couple of old winter coats hanging on pegs and a weather-beaten umbrella propped up in the corner.

And through the doorway to the left, again another world: rows of large windows (for this was the earthbound tree house, seen from the inside) letting in the light of late afternoon, and rough workbenches covered with tools and materials, and everywhere boxes, the most extraordinary boxes, filled with tiny chairs and people in strange costumes and animals and books the size of a thumbnail and cups and mirrors and things Maya could think of no name for.

“Oh!” she said aloud, her eyes and mind entirely amazed. “Dollhouses!”

She had never cared very much for dolls, exactly, but miniature things she had always, always loved. Once, long ago, her mother had taken her to a museum filled with dollhouses, and Maya had stood in front of those miraculous tiny rooms and felt herself falling into them, everything about her ordinary life unsettled for a moment, magic slanting into her world like an odd beam of light. And here were perhaps more of those dollhouse rooms than any museum could hold. There were extra shelves built into the walls to hold them; even the workbenches and counters overflowed with boxes. A hundred different universes in a single human-sized room.

“Mais non,”
said the old man, full of pride. “Not dollhouses! Sets!”

“Sets?” said Maya.

“Why, yes!” said the old man. “I am a
décorateur
for the theater. These are scenes from the opera,
mademoiselle
. Not dollhouses.”

“You make sets for operas?” said Maya.

Operas were such large things: large people singing large arias in extremely large and velvety halls. It was hard to imagine all that largeness coming out of the little boxes hidden away in this back-courtyard room.

“For one particular opera,” said the old man. “
The Chemical Brothers
. My life's work, you understand: the tragic tale of the Fourcroys. How that curse settled on them, on us, long ago. See? I have been all morning making sheep.”

And it was true: One of the worktables was covered with fluffy little sheep in various poses. The box next to them had a waiting green felt field unfurled across it, a tiny man in a small but elegant suit of gold cloth gesturing toward all that green as if saying, “All very well. But where are my
moutons
?”

“An opera about sheep?” said Maya.

“Ah,
non
,” said the old man. “One brief rustic scene. That man there, observing his sheep? He was the one we killed, we Fourcroys. The great man of science, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. You have heard of him?”

No, Maya had not.

“The construction of the table of chemical elements? The theory of the conservation of matter? The battle against alchemy and superstition?”

Maya shook her head.

The old man looked distressed.

“The guinea pig in the ice calorimeter?” he said, in a smaller voice. “You've heard, perhaps, of the guinea pig?”

In the next box, two itty-bitty men were indeed placing a tiny fluff ball of a guinea pig into the strangest apparatus, a kind of miniature double tub with blocks of plastic ice between the inner and outer walls.

“Slow-burning fires in us,” said the old man, so close to her ear that Maya jumped. But he was just peering over her shoulder. “That's what they learned from the guinea pig. The year 1780, my dear. They measured the little furnace in him by the ice he melted. We are all little furnaces! Oh, yes! But the great chemist Lavoisier was the first to measure it properly. He was a true scientist, he was!”

“Very nice,” said Maya politely, but really she was thinking that an opera about chemistry might not be very entertaining to sit through. Even assuming you liked operas at all.

“The great Lavoisier,” said the old man, oblivious. “Father of modern chemistry. And we—we!—killed him. It is very sad, but true. All explained in the third act, you know, of
The Chemical Brothers.
Over here, dear girl. Come see!”

More boxes. A courtroom scene, with judges hanging over their benches to waggle their cotton fingers at a small man with bound hands. Another figure stood to the side and turned his back. And in the next box, a sad line of men, their heads bowed, waiting for death beneath a miniature guillotine.

“There they are,” said the old man, almost whispering in his enthusiasm, as if not to disturb the little characters in their boxes. “The great Lavoisier, condemned by the Revolution in 1794—and his fellow chemist, his brother in spirit, Antoine-François de Fourcroy, who turned away from him, you see—who betrayed him!—and let him go to his death. Oh! Here they sing both at once, but very different songs. The most terrible moment in the whole opera,
mademoiselle
. But beautiful, oh, my dear one—beautiful indeed.”

“Fourcroy?” said Maya. “Like you?”

“My great-great-great-great-grandfather, yes,” said the old man, adjusting the crook in the tail of a tiny cat curled up beneath the scaffold. “A traitor, I'm afraid, to the ideals of both science and friendship. An ambitious man. Preferred power, in the end, to the pure gaze of science. We carry that betrayal in our bones, his descendants. Cursed to repeat it. I speak too plainly, perhaps.”

“Not in the least,” said Cousin Louise, from a few feet away.

“Oh, right!” said Maya, suddenly remembering again why they were here, in this workshop full of small worlds in boxes. “Excuse me,
monsieur
, but could I ask you a question? Not about chemistry or opera, though. About 1964.”

He stopped and blinked at her.

“It's my Cousin Louise,” said Maya, gesturing back toward the dull shadow of Louise behind them. “She lost her family in 1964. In Italy. A church fell down on them. Do you remember this? And then an uncle offered to take her, Henri de Fourcroy. But that's you, isn't it? Did you try to adopt my Cousin Louise?”

He was so lost he looked for a moment like a guinea pig must look, when it has spent ten long hours shivering in an ice calorimeter.

“Adopt?” he said. “Italy?”

“No, Maya,” said Cousin Louise, moving forward from her place in the shadows. “I'm sure, having seen him. He is not the one.”

And at that moment a tea kettle started to wail in an adjoining room.

“My tea,” said the old man. “Excuse me. Would you like—”

“Yes, please,” said Maya. She said this because Cousin Louise was about to insist that they leave, and they could not leave, not with this old Fourcroy, nobody's uncle after all, looking so lost and confused and forlorn. A shred of stubbornness had come to the surface just then, in Maya, and she was not going to leave until she had done what she could to put things at least somewhat right.

In fact, she was so intent on not letting Cousin Louise drag her away too soon that she followed the old man right out of his workshop through a door in the back wall, Cousin Louise trailing behind. The rooms on the other side of the door were old but ordinary rooms, very bare after the clutter of the workshop out in front, pictures on the wall, an antique table and chairs, a carpet on the floor, and in the corner—

“Oh!” said Maya. Maybe, in fact, she said nothing aloud at all, just stood stock still and stared, while the old man shuffled on ahead into his ancient kitchen.

In the corner of the room was a glass-fronted cabinet, the glass very old and ripply, thicker slightly at the bottom of the panes than at the top, and within that cabinet—

Bottles and vases, stoppered jars. Glass within glass, and in each of those glasses, a different vivid color of earth: reds, russets, browns. Glass bottles of earth on glass shelves in the glass cabinet. Around the bases of the bottles were odd shards of rock, with what looked like fossils peeping out, and broken stones that held crystal caves in them or that might have been meteorites that fell long ago from the sky, they seemed so old and black and alien.

The bronze frame of the cabinet, which seemed to contain all of these marvels with the grace of a goblet holding some fine and transparent wine, was itself a wonder, a flowing ornament twining around all that rippling glass, a phoenix arching around one low corner, and there, staring down at her from the upper right—

“Don't touch! Don't touch!” cried the old man, almost dropping the tray holding the teacups.

—was a salamander.

All at once the world went very still. She was floating; she was underwater: All the room's sound was replaced by a throbbing hum, light streaking slowly away from everything it touched. She stretched one hand out (the air was as thick as syrup; her arm moved with the slow grace of an aquatic plant) and tried to say something, but her voice was gone, too.

The bronze salamander looked at her and smiled.

Maya
, it said.

In their bottles, the earths glimmered and pulsed. Maya tried to blink, but her eyelids were very slow and stupid.

Maya.

The cabinet itself was calling to her.

Maya.

And then, all in a rush, the air was air again, and time was running at its normal pace, and Cousin Louise was saying something in her spectacularly ordinary voice.