Lowe thought the stuff in the bottle was camphor, which was a substance he knew well, since Lowe had a passion for fireworks, and some fireworks call for it as an ingredient. And while no one else particularly cared how the bottle worked so long as it did, Lowe became obsessed with figuring out whether he was right, and if he was, how camphor could not only make fireworks more brilliant but also foretell a storm. The steward, who had the good sense to be wary of seven-year-olds toying with treasured glass objects, took to hiding the storm bottle. But you couldn’t conceal things from Lowe for long. He was observant and curious, and he was small and light enough to climb anywhere. Nothing was safe. But the steward kept trying, finding new places to hide the bottle, only for Lowe to locate it anyway and then be caught because he could never quite get around to putting the bottle back before the steward returned from wherever he’d gone. This went on and on.
And then came the day the Fate put in for a brief stop at Valletta, which is a port town on the island of Malta. That very morning, Lowe came sprinting into Melusine’s little cabin as she was preparing to go ashore, a look of panic on his face and two bits of broken glass in his hands. “What do we do?” he whispered.
Melusine gasped. “You didn’t.”
Lowe brightened. “I know what was in it now, at least. I was right. There was water and alcohol and camphor. I could make him another one.”
Melusine looked down at the remnants of the beautiful Venetian glass bottle. “He’ll know, Lowe.”
“I’ll make him a better one,” Lowe insisted. “You find a bottle. I’ll get what goes in it.”
He dropped the broken glass on Melusine’s tiny table and darted out again, leaving her to wonder how he’d managed so quickly and efficiently to make her an accessory to his crimes in addition to ruining her chances for going into Valletta that morning.
If they had anything going for them, it was that they had some time. A third of the hands had already gone ashore, and Melusine had seen the steward and the cook row away from the Fate with the purser. They had to replenish the ship’s stores, and they wouldn’t be back for hours. The surgeon had left with them too, which was convenient because Melusine thought he might have a bottle among his medicines that would do, even if it wouldn’t be as pretty as the broken one.
She found a suitable flask and emptied it, glancing briefly at the label and hoping paregoric wasn’t anything particularly important. Then she hurried back to her own cabin, nodding at the hands who tapped their foreheads in salute as she passed and trying to come up with a likely answer to give to the shipmate who would inevitably notice that she’d just come out of the surgeon’s quarters and want to know was she feeling all right. Miraculously, however, no one stopped her.
In her cabin, she found Lowe waiting with two mugs sitting before him on her table. “There’s a problem,” he said. “We have no camphor, on account of I made that nice bunch of exploding stars, and that was about the same time Cook wanted camphor when he was practicing that lovely dessert he learned from that ship’s cook from Goa, and then the surgeon took the last bit to make up some of that pear-gory stuff he uses when someone’s belly goes off. We shall have to improvise.” He took a jar from one pocket, handling it with unusual reverence. “Hard snow,” he said.
“Hard snow?” Melusine repeated warily. “Is there such a thing? Is it to do with fireworks?”
“There is, but no, not for fireworks. And I haven’t made it exactly in the proper way—really it’s not the sort of thing you can just whip up in the powder magazine, but we don’t have time to refine the stuff. Still, it has a bit of mercury in it, which is also in the ship’s barometer, and the barometer does nearly the same thing as the storm bottle did. And it sounds like how the camphor crystals looked, so I thought it might do.”
He took the surgeon’s bottle and poured in the contents of the two mugs, which turned out to be water and rum, and then tipped in a spoonful of the stuff called hard snow, which was syrupy and vaguely metallic. He corked the surgeon’s bottle, and Melusine helped him seal it with wax. At last they sat back and considered their handiwork. It didn’t look like much: just a round, wide-mouthed medicine vial—nothing at all like the narrow and graceful Venetian storm bottle—with a lump of thickish stuff at the bottom and watery grog filling the rest of the bottle up to the top.
They stared at it for a moment. Nothing happened, of course. They kept watching. “How will we know if it works?” Lowe asked, twisting the end of his braided pigtail.
Melusine, who couldn’t imagine how it possibly could, shrugged. “This is your commission, Lowe. I haven’t got the foggiest idea.” And then something stopped her cold.
The thickish stuff in the bottle was moving. And not settling down to the bottom the way, say, stray tea leaves or grounds of coffee might do. No, it was hard to see—it was happening slowly—but Lowe’s hard snow was climbing up the walls of the bottle.
“What does that mean?” Melusine and Lowe asked each other at the same time, both jabbing index fingers at the bottle.
And then the wooden world around them rocked under their feet. It was a small motion, but the Fate had been Melusine’s home for most of her
