In the light of day, however—even at sunset—Masseter was ordinary. Today, after Haypotten popped into the public bar to announce supper and popped out again, the traveling merchant offered a pocket box of small cigars to the other two men sharing the room: Phineas Amalgam, a freckled and salt-and-red-pepper-haired neighbor of the Haypottens who’d come the day the rain had started just to borrow a box of matches and had wound up stuck there along with the travelers; and an artisan printmaker called Gregory Sangwin with darker gray hair and skin the color of a wash of good walnut ink on fine Creswick paper, an acquaintance of Amalgam’s who had come to stay at the inn on his recommendation.
Sangwin’s usual work was printing delicate, detailed pictures and illustrations from carved wooden blocks, and he amused himself by crafting small animals out of wood that found their way to Maisie every night at dinner. This had become a joint effort between himself and Sorcha, who saved all the smallish bits of firewood she came across and passed them to Mr. Sangwin, who, once he’d magicked them into beasts and birds with his inlaid whittling knife, passed them back to the maid. At supper the creatures turned up on Maisie’s plate, in her napkin, even in her soup on the day Mr. Sangwin had turned a longish splinter into a swimming dragon.
Today the printmaker squinted through his pince-nez at a tiny seabird with outstretched wings that he was busy carving from a scrap of pearwood. Maisie’s animal, a river otter, already sat finished beside his cup. The bird was meant as a thank-you to his co-conspirator. He looked up, blinked, and accepted one of Masseter’s cigars. “Thanks.”
“Albatross?” Masseter guessed.
Sangwin nodded. “For the maid. She’s a good sport, passing along the little girl’s critters.” The cigar temporarily forgotten, he lifted the bird, squinted at it, and touched the point of his knife to a tiny hole in one wing to cut away a nearly invisible splinter. “Perhaps Mrs. Haypotten will have a spare bit of ribbon it can hang from.”
Phineas Amalgam stood staring down at a small card house that Al Tesserian had built on one of the bar tables the night before and that was somehow still standing. He accepted a cigar but tucked it in his vest pocket rather than lighting it. “I’ll go ask her, shall I?”
“Good of you, Mr. A.,” said Sangwin.
“Think nothing of it,” Amalgam said. “Sorcha’s a good egg. Known her since she was a tot.” He nodded his thanks to Masseter and left the parlor. Later, as they all drifted into the dining room, he passed a length of blue velvet ribbon to Sangwin.
Mrs. Haypotten, bustling through a moment later, paused to squeeze the printmaker’s elbow and murmur, “So kind.” And as everyone else was smiling at Maisie’s delight at discovering the river otter peeking out of a bread roll, Sangwin tucked the albatross on its ribbon into the maid’s hand.
After supper, as they had done every other night, the guests moved into the parlor for coffee and tea beside one of Sorcha’s well-kept fires. It was Phineas Amalgam who, on the evening of that seventh day of floods, suggested the stories.
“In more civilized places, when travelers find themselves sharing a fire and a bottle of wine, they sometimes choose to share something of themselves, too,” Phin told them as he settled into his favorite chair, one of three that stood before the hearth. “And then, wonder of wonders, no strangers remain. Only companions, sharing a hearth and a bottle.”
Mr. Haypotten, laying out the coffee on the sideboard, winked at his wife, who held the teapot. Amalgam, a folklorist, made his living collecting tales and putting them into books, so perhaps the innkeeper was thinking that his neighbor’s suggestion had a bit of self-service to it. And it might have been that he was right. Still, it was a way to pass the time.
The wind and rain rattled the windowpanes and the French doors as the folks gathered in the parlor looked from one to the next: the young girl in her embroidered silk stole; the twin gentlemen with the tattooed faces; the gaunt woman with her nervous gloved hands constantly moving; the other woman, gaunter still and hidden beneath two layers of voluminous shawls, whose red-brown skin showed in small flashes when her wraps did not quite move along with her. The gambler in his old porkpie hat, building a castle on the floor before the fire with a pocketful of dice and at least six decks of cards, not counting the strays planted here and there about his person. The captain, lurking by the sideboard, where he’d stowed the half-hour glass and was itching to turn it but was also thinking it would be rude to interrupt Amalgam or get in the way of the Haypottens as they worked. The printmaker, smoking Masseter’s cigar by one of the windows overlooking the river. The young man with
