“Was this peddler a villain?” Tesserian asked thoughtfully. He glanced at Maisie. “What do you say, miss? Was the peddler a villain?”
Maisie considered. “I think—”
Mrs. Haypotten tsked as she bustled over with the teapot to refill Tesserian’s cup. “Sending a child into that sort of danger? Certainly he was.” She patted Maisie on the shoulder and bustled off again in a flurry of blue polka-dotted crepe. Maisie, whose face was safely hidden from standing adults by virtue of her being seated on the floor, rolled her eyes.
“You see?” Masseter shook his head and took one of the little cigars from his pocket. “Villains, even when they’re not villains,” he said, plucking a spill from a vase of long paper matches that stood on the mantel, matches that Sorcha had fashioned so that they looked not like sticks of twisted newspaper but like tall, thin, sculpted paper flowers.
“No smoking in here,” Mrs. Haypotten said briskly as she left the room to refill the empty teapot. Masseter glanced sharply at Sangwin, who tossed the end of his cigar out the window.
“They’re not always villains,” Amalgam said mildly. “I can think of plenty of tales where they’re not.”
“You can.” Masseter deposited the flower-shaped spill back in its vase, then dropped into an empty chair beside the fire. “You sift stories for a living. But can anyone else?” He looked around the room. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Silence fell. Captain Frost came back, his shoes and beard wet from the rain, and took up his cup, and still no one could think of a tale in which the peddlers were not the villains.
At length, in the chair in the corner, Madame Grisaille spoke from the depths of her wrap. Her voice gravelly as ever, she inquired, “Can you think of one, Mr. Masseter?”
Masseter closed his eye and pressed a finger in the space over his nose between it and the patch. “I am a peddler of a kind,” he observed, “and I’ve heard it said that every man believes himself to be the hero of his own tale. So perhaps this is a more difficult question than I thought when I first asked it.”
Reever Colophon had been sitting in one of the three high-backed chairs before the fire with his legs thrown out long and careless before him. “I know one,” he said, stretching his arms overhead. “I’ll tell the next tale, if you like, and you lot can say if the peddlers are the villains in it or not.”
THREE
THE WHALEBONE SPRING
The First Twin’s Tale
THERE WAS A PORT TOWN that crouched between a bay and a hill; you may have heard of it.
If you have, understand that this was long before the days of the pirates who in later times became the runners of rotgut whiskey and Cuban cigars, endangered butterflies and irises that bloomed in illicit colors. It was before the ancestors of men like John Deadlock and Carrick Bend, who for a while turned smuggling into a way to rebel during one of the city’s darkest times. These were earlier, more innocent days, and the port was a small and simple place that relied on ships and traveling merchants for news of the world over the hill and beyond the bay.
One morning at the opening of market season, a Yankee peddler came to town on a wagon drawn by a black nag. He stopped in the square, unhitched the pony, and with a few jerks of a crowbar and a few swings of a hammer, converted the wagon into a stall. He began to set out his wares: sundials and water clocks, chronometers and pocket watches, mantel clocks, candle clocks, tide clocks. Clocks that announced the hours with chimes, with internal pin-cylinder music boxes, with ingenious wooden figurines that clacked tiny rosewood claves or rang miniature glass bell trees. Last of all he hung out a shingle that read ALPHONSUS LUNG, CLOCKMAKER.
The next morning, another Yankee peddler arrived in a wagon, this one drawn by a long-eared mule. He, too, drove into the market square, and with a few adjustments, he turned the wagon into a stall selling tin: tin pans, tin soldiers, tin whistles and flutes and pipes, tin lanterns and flatware, even tin fences that unfolded like a row of figures cut from creased paper. His shingle read CASSITERIDES BONE, TINSMITH.
The day after that, a third Yankee peddler drove a wagon drawn by a pied pony into the square and set up his stall under a shingle that announced him as IGNIS BLISTER, PYROTECHNICIAN. He filled his shelves with things that flared and flamed and burst: candles, fireworks, fusees, black powder, flash powder, rushlights, repeating matches and friction matches and foxfire torches.
The fourth Yankee peddler to arrive drove a pair of tall red horses, and in his wagon he carried three ebony coffers wrapped in bands of brass. They seemed the sorts of chests that could hold only treasure, or saints’ relics, or the heads of kings. The fourth peddler took one coffer down carefully, and the curious citizens jostled and pushed for a glimpse within as he lifted the lid.
Inside, there was only paper.
The first three Yankee peddlers scoffed. The fourth fixed them with a faint smile as he unpacked sheaves of paper that had been stitched into pamphlets. “You laugh, brothers. What do you sell?”
The first Yankee peddler nodded up at his shingle. “Clocks and watches, brother. I am called Lung.”
“Tinware,” sniffed the second, clipping patterns into a lantern with a pair of shears. “My name is Bone.”
The third lit a cigar with a cedar match that flared green. “Blister,” he said. “Infernal devices and sources of light.”
The fourth Yankee peddler tipped his hat to the other three and went on laying his pamphlets out upon the counter of his stall. “And I am Drogam
