Wonders of the Invisible World (18 page)

“But what about Lady Death?” the young woman whispered, mesmerized by the card. “Who will die?”

“In this arc,” Merle explained glibly, “Lady Death signifies protection. She guards against misfortune, malice, bad influences. Rain follows her. A little stormy weather will hamper the lovers, but that is natural in the course of true love. In the end the Fool, who signifies the wisdom of innocence, will guide your heart to achieve its innermost dreams.”

The young woman, whose mouth was hanging by now, closed it with a click of teeth. She sighed and began to smile; the faces behind her brightened. “So he will love me in spite of everything.”

“So the cards have shown,” Merle answered solemnly, sweeping them together and palming the coin at the same time. She wondered briefly what obstacles the cards had missed. The rival lover? The deluded husband? The betrayed wife? Lack of money to wed? Mismatched circumstances: she a seamstress, he a noble who had admired too closely the shape of her lips? Merle had a hunch that, under other eyes, the cards would have suggested a darker, more ambiguous future. But the young woman had paid for hope, and Merle had earned her pay.

You see? she told Ansel silently as the women went back into the rain. I have a profession, too. Soon, with these strange cards, I’ll even have a reputation. Then I can afford to be honest.

Ansel came to her that night as she knew he would. In spite of himself, she guessed wryly, taking note of his dour, reluctant expression. But she knew tricks to make him smile, others to make him laugh, which he did at last, though he sobered up too soon after that.

“You’ve learned a few things on the street since I saw you last,” he commented, rolling onto his back in her meager bed, and stroking her hair as she laid her cheek on his chest.

“Knowledge is free,” she said contentedly.

“Is it?”

“At least I don’t have to steal it. Don’t—” she pleaded as he opened his mouth. “Don’t go back to glowering at me. You like what I learned.”

She felt him draw breath, but he didn’t lecture. He didn’t say anything, just smoothed her hair, drew it out across his chest to watch it gleam in the candlelight, onyx dark, raven dark, true black without a trace of color in it. He laughed a little, gently, as at a memory.

“You’re growing so beautiful... All I could see of that the few months ago I met you was in your eyes. You were such a scrawny girl, all bones and sharp edges, and those huge eyes, the color of a mist that I wanted to walk through to see what I would find.”

“And what did you find?”

He was silent again; she listened drowsily to his heartbeat. “Someone like me,” he said finally. “Which was fine until I started not liking what I was... So I made myself into someone more to my liking.”

Within the little cave he had made of her hair, her eyes opened. She felt a sudden, odd hollow inside her. As though he had tricked her, taken something from her that she didn’t know she had until he showed her.

“So now you like me less,” she said softly, and pulled herself over him until they were eye to eye in the dark fall of her hair. “But I’m going to make myself respectable with my cards.”

“You stole them.”

She laughed. “From some old biddy lying dead drunk in an alley. Besides, I’ll hardly be the first to turn myself respectable with stolen goods. I didn’t rob a bank, after all. They’re only cards.”

“Are they?” He eased out from under her and sat up, reaching for his trousers. “I’ve got to go. I’m stealing time, myself, from my job.”

“Come tomorrow?”

He gave her a wide-eyed, almost startled look, as though she’d suggested leaping off a roof together, or rifling through his employer’s house.

“I don’t know.” His face disappeared under his shirt. “I doubt that I’ll have time.” He reappeared. “You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“What word didn’t I hear?” she demanded. “Tell me.”

But he was withdrawing again, going away from her, even before he left the wagon.

She sighed, sitting on her pallet, naked and alone but for the raven, feeling again that strange hollow where something should have been but wasn’t any longer.

“You’ll come back,” she whispered and reached abruptly for the cards in their stained silk to find him in her future. She shuffled them and dealt the arc: Old Woman, Spider, Rain, the Masked Lovers, Lady Death...

She gave a cry and flung the deck down. Candlelight glided across the Old Woman’s raddled face; she seemed to smile up at Merle.

You stole a poor old woman’s only means to earn a coin, the smile said. You stole her hope. And now you want to twist her cards, make them lie to you, show you how lovable you still are...

The raven rustled on its perch, made a sound like a soft chuckle. Merle gathered the cards together with icy, trembling fingers, wanting to cry, she felt, but not remembering how to start. She pulled on clothes, flung her cloak around her, and splashed barefoot into the rain, not sure where to find the old woman, only certain that until she returned the cards she could not change her future of webs and rain and fools and the Old Woman’s knowing eyes.

J
ack
O’L
antern

Jenny Newland sat under the tree in her costume, waiting for the painter to summon her. Not far from her, in the sunlight, one of the village girls sneezed lavishly and drew the back of her wrist under her nose. A boy poked her; she demanded aggrievedly, “Well, what do you want me to do? Wipe me nose on me costume?” Jenny shifted her eyes; her clasped fingers tightened; her spine straightened. They were all dressed alike, the half-dozen young people around the tree, in what looked like tablecloths the innocuous pastels of tea cakes.

“Togas?” her father had suggested dubiously at the sight. “And Grecian robes for the young ladies? Pink, though? And pistachio...?” His voice had trailed away; at home, he would have gone off to consult his library. Here, amid the pretty thickets and pastures outside the village of Farnham, he could only watch and wonder.

He had commissioned the renowned painter Joshua Ryme to do a commemorative painting for Sarah’s wedding. Naturally, she couldn’t wear her bridal gown before the wedding; it was with the seamstress, having five hundred seed pearls attached to it by the frail, undernourished fingers of a dozen orphans who never saw the light of day. Such was the opinion of Sylvester Newland, who claimed the sibling territory midway between Sarah, seventeen, and Jenny, thirteen. It was a lot of leeway, those four years between child and adult, and he roamed obnoxiously in it, scattering his thoughts at will for no other reason than that he was allowed to have them.

“Men must make their way in the world,” her mother had said gently when Jenny first complained about Sylvester’s rackety ways. “Women must help and encourage them, and provide them with a peaceful haven from their daily struggle to make the world a better place.”

Jenny, who had been struggling with a darning needle and wool and one of Sylvester’s socks, stabbed herself and breathed incredulously, “For this I have left school?”

“Your governess will see that you receive the proper education to provide you with understanding and sympathy for your husband’s work and conversation.” Her mother’s voice was still mild, but she spoke in that firm, sweet manner that would remain unshaken by all argument, like a great stone rising implacably out of buffeting waves, sea life clinging safely to every corner of it. “Besides, women are not strong, as you will find out soon enough. Their bodies are subject to the powerful forces of their natures.” She hesitated; Jenny was silent, having heard rumors of the secret lives of women, and wondering if her mother would go into detail. She did, finally, but in such a delicate fashion that Jenny was left totally bewildered. Women were oysters carrying the pearls of life; their husbands opened them and poured into them the water of life, after which the pearls...turned into babies?

Later, after one of the pearls of life had finally irritated her inner oyster enough to draw blood, and she found herself on a daybed hugging a hot water bag, she began to realize what her mother had meant about powerful forces of nature. Sarah, tactfully quiet and kind, put a cup of tea on the table beside her.

“Thank you,” Jenny said mournfully. “I think the oysters are clamping themselves shut inside me.”

Sarah’s solemn expression quivered away; she sat on the daybed beside Jenny. “Oh, did you get the oyster speech, too?”

She had grown amazingly stately overnight, it seemed to Jenny, with her lovely gowns and her fair hair coiled and scalloped like cream on an éclair. Sarah’s skin was perfect ivory; her own was blotched and dotted with strange eruptions. Her hair, straight as a horse’s tail and so heavy it flopped out of all but the toothiest pins, was neither ruddy chestnut nor true black, but some unromantic shade in between.

Reading Jenny’s mind, which she did often, Sarah patted her hands. “Don’t fret. You’ll grow into yourself. And you have a fine start: your pale gray eyes with that dark hair will become stunning soon enough.”

“For what?” Jenny asked intensely, searching her sister’s face. The sudden luminousness of her beauty must partially be explained by Mr. Everett Woolidge, who had already spoken to Sarah’s father, and was impatiently awaiting Sarah’s eighteenth birthday. “Is love only about oysters and the water of life? What exactly was Mama trying to say?”

Sarah’s smile had gone; she answered slowly, “I’m not sure yet, myself, though I’m very sure it has nothing to do with oysters.”

“When you find out, will you tell me?”

“I promise. I’ll take notes as it happens.” Still a line tugged at her tranquil brows; she was not seeing Jenny, but the shadow of Mr. Woolidge, doing who knew what to her on her wedding bed. Then she added, reading Jenny’s mind again, “There’s nothing to fear, Mama says. You just lie still and think of the garden.”

“The garden?”

“Something pleasant.”

“That’s all it took to make Sylvester? She must have been thinking about the plumbing, or boiled cabbage.”

Sarah’s smile flashed again; she ducked her head, looking guilty for a moment, as though she’d been caught giggling in the schoolroom. “Very likely.” She pushed a strand of hair out of Jenny’s face. “You should drink your tea; it’ll soothe the pain.”

Jenny stared up at her, fingers clenched, her whole body clenched, something tight and hot behind her eyes. “I’ll miss you,” she whispered. “Oh, I will miss you so. Sylvester just talks at me, and Mama—Mama cares only about him and Papa. You are the only one I can laugh with.”

“I know.” Sarah’s voice, too, sounded husky, ragged. “Everett—he is kind and good, and of course ardent. But I’ve known you all your life. I can say things to you that I could never say to Mama—or even to Everett—” She paused, that faraway look again in her eyes, as though she were trying to see her own future. “I hope he and I will learn to talk to one another...Mama would say it’s childish of me to want what I think to be in any way important to him; that’s something I must grow out of, when I’m married.”

“Talk to me,” Jenny begged her. “Anytime. About anything.”

Sarah nodded, caressing Jenny’s hair again. “I’ll send for you.”

“Why must he take you so far away? Why?”

“It’s only a half day on the train. And very pretty, Farnham is. We’ll have long rides together, you and I, and walks, and country fairs. You’ll see.”

And Jenny did: the village where Mr. Woolidge had inherited his country home was charming, full of centuries-old cottages with thick stone walls, and hairy thatched roofs, and tiny windows set, with no order whatsoever, all anyhow in the walls. The artist, Mr. Ryme, had a summer house there as well. Jenny could see it on a distant knoll from where she sat under the chestnut tree. It was of butter-yellow stone with white trim, and the windows were where you expected them to be. But still it looked old, with its dark, crumbling garden wall, and the ancient twisted apple trees inside, and the wooden gate, open for so long it had grown into the earth. The artist’s daughter Alexa was under the tree as well, along with four comely village children and Jenny. The village children with their rough voices and unkempt hair would have horrified Mama. Fortunately she had not come, due to undisclosed circumstances that Jenny suspected had to do with oysters and pearls. Sylvester was away at school; Mr. Ryme would add their faces to the painting later. The governess, Miss Lake, had accompanied Jenny, with some staunch idea of keeping up with her lessons. But in the mellow country air, she had relaxed and grown vague. She sat knitting under a willow, light and shadow dappling her thin, freckled face and angular body as the willow leaves swayed around her in the breeze.