The Peculiar (10 page)

He threw off his blanket and leaned over the edge of the bed, squinting. The water and the ash had dried together overnight, mixing into a sort of gray caked mud. And all through it, pockmarking it like scatterings of acorns, were tracks.

Now I've got you,
Bartholomew thought. The tracks were small, two-pronged, with a cleft in the middle. They were all around his bed, all over the floor, hundreds of them going this way and that. They led away in a dirty trail under the door.

Bartholomew was a city boy through and through. He had never climbed a tree or run in a field. He had never seen a farm, besides the ones on the coffee tins. But Mother had taken him to markets when he was small, and he knew the bottom of an animal's foot. These were the tracks of a goat. Hooves.

He saw the sheets again, curling across the Buddelbinsters' yard, the sky turning to iron, and the faery mother's face gaping against the attic window.

You won't hear a thing,
she had cried, and her voice echoed inside his head, aching, heart-rending.
The cloven hooves on the floorboards. The voices in the dark. It'll come for you and you won't hear a thing.

Trembling, he got up and followed the tracks into the other room.

CHAPTER X
The Mechanicalchemist

“A
H
, Melusine, Melusine.” Aunt Dorcas shook her head, clasped her hands over the cheap pewter brooch at her bosom, and looked ever so wistful and pitying. She spoke the name of the mysterious lady as if referring to the dearest of old friends.

Ophelia looked up from the dining room table where she was sorting through the bolts of cloth that Aunt Dorcas had brought with her in the steam-carriage. It was not so far to walk from Curzon Street to Belgrave Square, and the draper always supplied runners for larger purchases, but as Aunt Dorcas had said, “It is so terribly low to go by foot.” Never mind that she'd had to beg the fare from the Jellibys' cook.

Mr. Jelliby, who up until this point had been slumped glumly in his paisley armchair, sat up straight.
Aunt Dorcas knew. She knew of the lady in plum.

He cleared his throat. He fiddled with his shirt cuffs. Trying not to sound too interested, he asked, “And? Aunty, who is she?”

“Yes, who is she?” Ophelia echoed, a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

Aunt Dorcas smiled benevolently. “Melusine Aiofe O Baollagh,” she said, flapping her fan at her red cheeks. The fan was supposed to look like that stylish sort where a tiny pisky is mounted on a stick and forced to stir the air with its gossamer wings. But hers was not alive. It was a poor copy made from sculpted wax and cotton, and one would have to be somewhat blind to mistake it for a live faery. Aunt Dorcas didn't seem to realize it, though, and no one could ever be so hard-hearted as to tell her. “From Ireland,” she added quickly, noticing their blank looks. “The poor dear. I mean, she
was
only a merchant's daughter—tradespeople, you know—but such a
wealthy
merchant!”

Mr. Jelliby blinked. “Was?”

“She has fallen from favor.” Aunt Dorcas sighed. “It was because of her sweetheart, I think. He was the most handsome person in all the world, if the stories are to be believed. They were engaged to be married. But there was an incident. Very mysterious. No one knows any details. At any rate the family grew suspicious of him, and the two little dears eloped! She was disowned, and they were never heard from again. It's just terribly romantic.”

“Yes, terribly . . . ,” Mr. Jelliby said, leaning back in his chair thoughtfully.

Ophelia set aside a particularly fine bolt of Venetian lace, and asked, “Might I ask where you know this passionate creature from, Arthur?”

“Oh, I don't
know
her,” Mr. Jelliby said, shrugging somewhat sheepishly. “I've just
heard
of her. From some gentlemen at Westminster. Aunty, how long ago did all this happen?”

“Oh, not long. Let me see.” She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Two seconds later they popped open again and she said, “Last month! Last month I overheard Lady Swinton speaking about it whilst I was hemming up her pettico— that is, while I was visiting. ” She stole a sharp look at them both. “And then again two weeks ago from Madam Claremont, and last Tuesday at the Baroness d'Erezaby's. It's been all over the place, really. I can't imagine you haven't heard of it.”

“Yes, how strange. Well, thank you, Aunty.” Mr. Jelliby got up and bowed to her, then turned and did the same to his wife. “And good day, my dears. I'm afraid I must be off.”

With that, he hurried out of the room.

 

The other day, as soon as the old woman had sent Mr. Jelliby on his way with the mechanical bird held gingerly in a dustpan and his wounded hand well bound in a piece of Herald's pajamas, he had hurried straight back to the coffeehouse on the corner of Trafalgar Square.

Tossing the waiter a shilling so that he could sit without having to order any more unnaturally colored drinks, he laid the broken creature on the wobbly wrought-iron table and looked it over. A spring popped out from between its breastplates as it touched the tabletop. Mr. Jelliby swore silently. The bird was in ruins. Its wings hung in shards, and the black eyes, only a few hours before so keen and watchful, were now dull as coal. Shooting it out of the sky might have been an improvement.

He unclipped the capsule from around its leg and twirled it in his fingers.
There would be a hidden clasp here somewhere. . . .
He ran his nail across the surface, found it. The capsule clicked open and a loop of paper popped out. It was crisp, fine quality, an even unblemished white. He unrolled it carefully.

Send it to the Moon,
it read, in fine spidery lettering. And then, spattered with ink and underlined with a vicious slash:

Child Number Ten is coming.

Mr. Jelliby blinked at it. He read it again. He flipped it over and looked on the back side. The words were odd and unsettling, but they didn't really tell him anything. No address. No “to so-and-so with regards from such-and-such.” Nothing about the lady in plum. All that work for ten short words that may as well have been written in some Old Country faery dialect for all the sense they made to him. Why did someone have to send something to the moon? He didn't suppose the Royal Mail delivered there. And Child Number Ten? Who was—

An icy shiver trickled down Mr. Jelliby's spine despite the warmth of the day. The sounds of the Strand—the clop of horses' hooves, the shouts of the vendors, and peels of the bells of St. Martin-in-the-Fields—were all suddenly echoey and far away.

There have only been nine. . . .
Those were the faery gentleman's words; the ones he had spoken to the lady while Mr. Jelliby listened from the darkness of the cabinet. Child Number Ten was a changeling. Mr. Lickerish was going to kill another one.

Mr. Jelliby glanced around him. It was late afternoon, and the coffeehouse was well attended. Several couples sat at the street-side tables, a handful of single gentlemen as well, and one of those modern, radical women who wear bloomers and go to cafés all by themselves. And they were all staring at him. Discreetly, they thought, from behind raised fans and newspapers, over the tops of sun spectacles, and under the brims of flowered hats. But staring nonetheless. Just to see what the handsome man with the dustpan would do next.

Slowly, he turned back to the bird. For a second he wanted to run. To leave the bird and the coffeehouse, take a carriage back to Belgrave Square and drink brandy as if nothing had ever happened. Those people didn't know. Nobody knew what he knew, and nobody would care if he didn't do anything.

But somewhere in the faery slums a child was waiting to die. He couldn't drink brandy knowing that. It would make him gag. It would taste of blood and bones, and if his carriage should crash off a bridge the very next day, he didn't suppose he would feel very sorry for himself lying in the black depths of the river. He was the only one who knew what was going to happen. And so he was the only one who could do anything to stop it.

Taking a lacquered box from his coat pocket, he fitted a pair of reading glasses to his nose. He leaned down to study the bird more closely. Somewhere it should say where it was built. If he could only find it. . . . He squinted, turning the machine over in his hands. The bird felt very frail. He could feel the machinery shifting minutely under his fingertips, and for a second he was struck with the childish urge to crush it in his fist and feel how the springs and metal plates squelched out between his fingers. He didn't, of course. He had gone through far too much trouble just to smash the bird. Besides, there were words on it. He saw them now. Tiny, tiny writing etched with a red-hot stylus into the bottom of one of the metal feathers.

Mchn. Alch.
it read.

And then, in tinier letters still:
X.Y.Z.

The
Mchn. Alch.
part stood for mechanicalchemist. That much Mr. Jelliby knew. And X.Y.Z? Perhaps the initials of the shop, or the fabricator himself. But what strange initials they were. Mr. Jelliby would have to look them up in a directory when he got home. He hoped it was a manufacturer who advertised. A black-market mechanicalchemist toiling away in some hole in Limehouse would never be found, even if Mr. Jelliby searched a hundred years.

Leaving the coffeehouse, he headed up Regent Street toward Mayfair, keeping his eyes peeled for a newspost. They tended to have shop listings nailed to them, somewhere among the layers and layers of handbills that fluttered endlessly like the petals of a dirty flower—handbills for music halls and circuses, pantomimes, operas, and phantasmagorias. But when he came to one, he found only two leaflets concerning mechanicalchemists and they were both frightfully prestigious ones in Grosvenor Street without a single X, Y, or Z between them.

Mr. Jelliby took a cab back to Belgrave Square and tiptoed past the open door to the parlor. Ophelia was sitting in her favorite armchair, reading with rapt attention the latest issue of
Spidersilk and Dewdrops: A Journal of Faerie Magic
. She noticed him right away, but she didn't stop him, and he went upstairs, locked himself in his study, and fell to scouring the adverts of his gentlemen's newspapers with feverish haste. It took him all the rest of the day and much of the next morning to find what he was looking for. He forgot to come down to breakfast, forgot even to shave, and when he finally did find what he was looking for, it was something of a disappointment. The advertisement was small and plain, standing out starkly against the lavish illustrations of wigs and sardines and mechanical chambermaids. Three black lines declaring—still grandly enough for their humble looks—
Mr. Zerubbabel's Mechanical Marvels! Everything you can possibly dream of and a great many things you can't, wrought in brass and clockwork, handmade, one-of-a-kind. Long-lasting faery batteries for flawless performance. Commissions only.
Fair rates.
And then the address: Fifth floor, Number 19, Stovepipe Road, Clerkenwell.

Clerkenwell?
Mr. Jelliby set down the newspaper. Clerkenwell was not a very fashionable neighborhood. In fact, it was downright inferior. And he had certainly never heard of an establishment called “Mr. Zerubbabel's Mechanical Marvels.” One would think a gentleman of Mr. Lickerish's standing would go to the finest mechanicalchemists in London for his wares. Not
Clerkenwell.
Unless the faery did not want the finest. Unless he wanted the quietest, the quickest, and the most secret.

It was then that the doorbell had rung, Aunt Dorcas had sailed into the house, Ophelia had called him down to greet her and be polite, and he had asked his questions concerning Melusine.

But he had escaped now. He went into the hall, snatching up his coat and hat from where they sat waiting to be brushed. Then he was out, hurrying across the rain-slick cobbles.

Clerkenwell was a good distance from Belgrave Square. It would be easiest to climb the endless corkscrew stair to the elevated steam engine, he decided, and ride across London's rooftops. Better, at least, than trying to find his way through the streets. He rarely ventured into the city north of Waterloo Bridge, never beyond Ludgate Hill, and to navigate the many dirty, dangerous neighborhoods that lay between his home and Clerkenwell was not something he wanted to do that day.

When Mr. Jelliby arrived, breathless, at the top of the stair, an automaton that had no legs or eyes, that looked nothing at all like a human and yet was equipped with a curled brass moustache and top hat, held out a pincer hand to him. Mr. Jelliby put a shilling in it. The pincer hand and shilling were snatched back, folding into some hidden part of the automaton's body. Then a brass bell
tinged
inside its belly and Mr. Jelliby was handed a green stub of ticket. The automaton waved him silently onto the platform.

The steam train arrived in due time, and Mr. Jelliby sat himself down in one of the dark-paneled compartments of its passenger carriage. The train began to move. Smoke and weathervanes whirled past his window. Despite the brightness of the day, gas lamps fizzled on the walls, sucking the oxygen from the compartment. By the time he got out at King's Cross station he had a splitting headache.

Descending the stairs into the smoky, cavernous streets of Clerkenwell did little to help it. The air beneath the ramshackle tenements was vile. It filled his lungs like a bottle being stuffed with black cotton, made him gasp. At least the population looked less dangerous than the air. It was mostly women, and gnomes, and hollow-cheeked children.
No doubt the thieves and hooligans are hard at work in more prosperous parts of the city
, Mr. Jelliby thought.

Stovepipe Road, Stovepipe Road.
Heavens, were there no street signs in Clerkenwell? His eyes searched the filthy bricks, the peeling shop signs, and doorposts. He did find one, cracked and rusted, clinging by a shred of wire to the head of a lamppost, but he couldn't make out what it said. Someone had painted over it in dripping red letters:
Faeryland.

He hurried up the street, saw nothing that looked like a mechanicalchemist's, turned back when he thought no one was looking, and hurried
down
the street instead. He did this several times over before finally gathering the courage to ask directions from a toothless woman in scarlet petticoats. She pointed him to a dark alley that wormed into a mass of dilapidated buildings. He had passed that same alley at least five times already, and each time he had thought it far too suspicious-looking to risk entering.

He stepped into it. The air was close here, viscous like tar. He looked up at the houses tilting overhead, and a great drop of sooty water splashed down toward him. He stepped aside, and it slapped the ground, echoing among the buildings. There were no signs in this alley either, not even shop-boards or tavern banners. Just leaning night-black houses and broken windows. Halfway down the alley, he spotted a gin-soaked hobgoblin sprawled across a doorstep and asked for directions a second time.