The Magician's Elephant

nowhere, of how one minute the notion of an elephant was inconceivable and the next the elephant was an irrefutable fact in her lap.

“Crippled,” said Madam LaVaughn in conclusion, “crippled by an elephant that came through the roof!”

The servants knew these last words so well, so intimately, that they mouthed them along with her, whispering the phrases together as if they were participating in some odd and arcane religious ceremony.

This, then, is what was taking place in the house of Madam LaVaughn that evening when there came a knock at the door, and the butler appeared beside Hans Ickman to announce that there was a policeman waiting outside and that this policeman absolutely insisted on speaking to Madam LaVaughn.

“At this hour?” said Hans Ickman.

But he followed the butler to the door, and there, indeed, stood a policeman, a short man with a ridiculously large moustache.

The policeman stepped forward and bowed and said, “Good evening. I am Leo Matienne. I serve with Her Majesty’s police force. I am not, however, here on official business. I have come instead with a most unusual personal request for Madam LaVaughn.”

“Madam LaVaughn cannot be disturbed,” said Hans Ickman. “The hour is late, and she is in pain.”

“Please,” said a small voice.

Hans Ickman saw then that there was a boy standing behind the policeman and that he held a soldier’s hat in his hand.

“It is important,” said the boy.

The manservant looked into the boy’s eyes and saw himself, young again and still capable of believing in miracles, standing on the bank of the river with his brothers, the white dog suspended in mid-air.

“Please,” said the boy.

And suddenly it came to Hans Ickman, the name of the little white dog. Rose. She was called Rose. And remembering was like fitting a piece of a puzzle into place. He felt a wonderful certainty. The impossible, he thought, the impossible is about to happen again.

He looked past the policeman and the boy and into the darkness beyond them. He saw something swirl through the air. A snowflake. And then another. And another.

“Come in,” said Hans Ickman. He swung the door wide. “You must come inside now. The snow has begun.”

It had indeed begun to snow. It was snowing over the whole of the city of Baltese.

The snow fell in the darkened alleys and on the newly repaired tiles of the opera house. It settled atop the turrets of the prison and on the roof of the Apartments Polonaise. At the home of the Countess Quintet the snow worked to outline the graceful curve of the handle on the elephant door; and at the cathedral it formed fanciful and slightly ridiculous caps for the heads of the gargoyles, who crouched together, gazing down at the city in disgust and envy.

The snow danced around the circles of light that pulsed from the lamps lining the wide boulevards of the city of Baltese. The snow fell in a curtain of white all around the bleak and unprepossessing building that was the Orphanage of the Sisters of Perpetual Light, as if it were working very hard to hide the place from view.

The snow, at last, fell.

And as it snowed, Bartok Whynn dreamed.

He dreamed of carving. He dreamed of doing the work he knew and loved: coaxing figures from stone. Only, in his dream, he did not carve gargoyles, but humans. One was a boy wearing a hat; another, a man with a moustache; and another, a woman sitting, with a man standing to attention behind her.

And each time a new person appeared beneath his hand, Bartok Whynn was astonished and deeply moved.

“You,” he said as he worked, “and you and you. And you.”

He smiled.

And because it was a dream, the people he had fashioned from stone smiled back at him.

As the snow fell, Sister Marie, who sat by the door at the Orphanage of the Sisters of Perpetual Light, dreamed too.

She dreamed that she was flying high over the world, her habit spread out on either side of her like dark wings.

She was terribly pleased, because she had always, secretly, deep within her heart, believed that she could fly. And now here she was, doing what she had long suspected she could do, and she could not deny that it was gratifying in the extreme.

Sister Marie looked down at the world below her and saw millions and millions of stars and thought, I am not flying over the earth at all. Why, I am flying higher than that. I am flying over the very tops of the stars. I am looking down at the sky.

And then she realized that no, no, it was the earth that she was flying over, and that she was looking not at the stars but at the creatures of the world, and that they were all, they were each – beggars, dogs, orphans, kings, elephants, soldiers – emitting pulses of light.

The whole of creation glowed.

Sister Marie’s heart grew large in her chest, and her heart, expanding in such a way, allowed her to fly higher and then higher still – but no matter how high she flew, she never lost sight of the glowing earth below her.

“Oh,” said Sister Marie out loud in her sleep, in her chair by the door, “how wonderful. Didn’t I know it? I did. I did. I knew it all along.”

Chapter Sixteen

Hans Ickman pushed Madam LaVaughn’s wheelchair, and Leo Matienne had hold of Peter’s hand. The four of them moved quickly through the snowy streets. They were heading to the home of the countess.

“I do not understand,” said Madam LaVaughn. “I find this all highly irregular.”

“I believe the time has come,” said Hans Ickman.

“The time? The time? The time for what?” said Madam LaVaughn. “Do not speak to me in riddles.”

“The time for you to return to the prison.”

“But it is the middle of the night, and the prison is that way,” said Madam LaVaughn, flinging a heavily bejewelled hand behind her. “The prison is in entirely the opposite direction.”

“There is something else that we must tend to first,” said Leo Matienne.

“And what is that?” said Madam LaVaughn.

“We must retrieve the elephant from the home of the countess,” said Peter, “and take her to the magician.”

“Retrieve the elephant?” said Madam LaVaughn. “Retrieve the elephant? Take the elephant to the magician? Is he mad? Is the boy mad? Is the policeman mad? Has everyone gone mad?”

“Yes,” said Hans Ickman after a long moment. “I believe that is the case. Everyone has gone a little mad.”

“Oh,” said Madam LaVaughn, “very well. I see.”

They were silent together then: the noblewoman and her servant, the policeman and the boy walking beside him. There was only the sound of the wheelchair moving through the snow and three pairs of footsteps striking the muffled cobblestones.

It was Madam LaVaughn who at last broke the silence. “Highly irregular,” she said, “but quite interesting, very interesting indeed. Why, it seems as if anything could happen, anything at all.”