He forced his own hand not to reach for her clenched fist or smooth back the fallen curl, but instead to lie still on the arm of his chair. “I don’t care. It would be yours.”
A beat, then two; then Jessamy tore her eyes away from him and pushed her hair back into order. “Someone else,” she said abruptly, and took her coffee back to the table in the corner.
The room exhaled. Reever closed his eyes, opened them again.
From the chair by the glass cabinet, his brother spoke up. “I’ve thought of another one, Masseter. A story where the peddler isn’t the villain.”
“O rarest of lore,” Masseter said archly. “Would you share it?”
“I will. And as it happens, it’s doubly rare, being a story in which—well. Let me just tell it.” Negret smiled at Maisie, who, truth be told, was still feeling a bit unsettled by Reever’s tale. “I think you might like this one.”
FOUR
THE DEVIL AND THE SCAVENGER
The Second Twin’s Tale
IF YOU BEAT THE DEVIL, you can win your heart’s desire. Everyone knows that, and some foolish folks probably think they could do it, too. But the Devil is a master gambler, and he makes his living off that sort of fool. It takes arrogance to dream of challenging him, but arrogance rarely helps anyone win, and the Devil, who is not usually arrogant, almost never loses.
Still, it’s happened, though it’s a rare and peculiar thing when it does. This is the tale of one of those occurrences, when the Devil got the worse of a deal. And this encounter was special right off the bat because it isn’t often the Devil encounters something he wants. Usually, deals with the Devil begin with someone wanting something from him. Folks don’t have much—other than their souls—to tempt the Devil. Not usually.
On the road between two remote towns, the Devil was walking alone at twilight when he came to a crossing of ways. And there, stopped under the fingerpost, was a scavenger’s wagon.
Now, the scavengers in this part of the country had a certain reputation, and as the Devil approached for a closer look at the rag-and-bone fellow peering up at the signs with a frown, he was reminded of stories he’d heard. It was said that the scavengers in these parts were all descended from one or another of the legendary Yankee peddlers of old. It was said they could work near-magical feats with the things they collected, and if they could not make a thing they needed from what they had or could find, they simply changed their minds about needing that thing. And while you might think someone whose work is picking through cast-off things and rubbish would be considered the lowest of the low, the way I understand it is that among the chapmen of those parts—the many sorts of itinerant peddlers on the roads and in the towns—the scavengers were first in precedence, and therefore in any gathering of peddlers, the scavengers were honored most highly.
As the Devil strolled nearer, it occurred to him that this scavenger was a bit on the small side. Then, as the Devil’s shadow fell across the ground before the stranger and announced his diabolic presence, the small figure turned, and the Devil noticed two things. First, the scavenger had eyes the silver-gray of half-dollars or the full moon on the right kind of night. Second, the scavenger was small because it was a child—and not only a child, but also a girl.
The girl and the Devil greeted each other the way solitary strangers do: friendly, but wary-like. Well, the Devil wasn’t precisely wary; you don’t have to be wary when you’re the Devil. But he was curious.
“Lost?” he asked.
“Nope,” the girl said easily, “just deciding. You?”
“Nope,” the Devil replied, “just intrigued.” And he admitted that he had never encountered one of the famous scavengers of these parts.
“Well, then.” The child beamed, trotted past the stamping mule at the front of her wagon, and began to turn a crank on the side, near the front wheel. The crank was nearly as big as she was, and as she rotated it, the side of the wagon unfolded creakily, gaping wide like the lid of a music box until the whole thing had converted itself into an open-fronted shop topped by a patchwork awning.
The scavenger leaned on the crank and waved at the shop front. “Be my guest,” she invited in a voice that whistled slightly as she spoke. The Devil tapped the brim of his hat, climbed a set of stairs made from bolted-together pieces of mismatched metal, and took a look around.
Most everything was in a drawer or a chest or a box. There was a trunk of colorful rag scraps and another of white ones. There was a crate of furry dead critters that were probably waiting to be skinned and rendered down, and another of critters with scales. There was a chest of paper fragments: wallpaper, newspaper, printed broadsides and used postcards, torn crepe paper crowns from expended Christmas crackers. A wooden cask of teaspoons sat under a shelf full of the jars of flitting goldfish the scavengers traded to children for household oddments. And hanging from the ceiling on threadbare lengths of faded satin ribbon were a dozen or so clocks of all sorts: cuckoo clocks and pocket watches and spring-wound tin alarm clocks, all ticking together: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
There were other things, of course, but the Devil was vaguely disappointed. It was more or less the same bunch of stuff scavengers everywhere carried. Even the clocks; the fact that they were so perfectly synchronized was a little unsettling, but they all looked like perfectly ordinary
