The Peculiar

“Well, what d’you suppose he is! Mummy locks the door every night, and the hobgoblin downstairs bolts the door to the alley, but the raggedy man still gets in. He puts his finger into the keyholes, see, and the locks spring open, just like that.” Hettie wasn’t playing with her doll anymore. She was sitting very still, staring at Bartholomew. “I don’t like him, Barthy. I don’t like the way he watches me, all bent over, and I don’t like his songs. Last night I fell asleep while he sang, and I had the most frightfullest dream.” Her black eyes were glistening, wet.

“It’s all right,” Bartholomew said gently, crawling next to her and putting his arm around her. “It was only a nightmare. You know I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Hettie buried her head in his shirt. “It didn’t feel like a nightmare, Barthy. It felt real. I dreamed I was lying all alone in the passage outside our door, and someone had nailed my branches to the floorboards. I called and called for Mummy and you, but no one heard. The house was empty. And then I saw that all the spiders were scurrying out of the walls, and the birds and bats were flying out, too. I couldn’t see what they were running from, but I heard it, coming up through the house toward me with such an awful squeaking and chattering. I turned my head and asked a beetle that was racing by what everyone was running from. The beetle said, ‘The Rat King. The Rat King is coming.’ And then it ran on and left me there.” Hettie took a breath. “You know the raggedy man goes to your room afterward. After he’s sang to me.”

Bartholomew shivered. He hadn’t known that. He waited for her to say more, but she only closed her eyes and nestled against him. He sat looking down at her for a few minutes. Then he too curled up, and pulling his old blanket around them both, tried to sleep.

It was very late by the time the sounds of departure came from the other room. The voices became firm and businesslike in farewell, the flat door slammed, and the treads groaned as Mrs. Skinner tramped back downstairs. For a few minutes Bartholomew was afraid Mother would forget to unlock the door and he would have to wait even longer to put his plan into action. But once Mrs. Skinner’s footsteps had echoed down Old Crow Alley and another door had slammed in the night, Mother came and looked in on them.

Hettie had fallen asleep in Bartholomew’s lap. She was rolled up in a ball. Her twiggy hair was all that showed, and it looked as if a clump of shrubbery had sprouted out of her clothes. Bartholomew pretended to be asleep, too. He heard Mother take a few steps into the room. He made his breathing low and regular, and wondered what sort of expression was on her face.

After a moment she lifted Hettie up in her arms and carried her out.

No sooner had the door closed than Bartholomew was moving, crouching on the cold floor next to the wall. He mustn’t drift off. He mustn’t be too comfortable. He had a faery to catch. Wrapping his arms around his knees, he waited for everything to go quiet in the other room.

It took an age. The bells of Bath tolled five minutes after five minutes, shouts echoed in the alleys nearby, and still he heard Mother in the kitchen, creaking over the floorboards, stowing the blackberry cordial in its cobwebby corner, wiping the tea mugs, and crushing leaves and flower petals for tomorrow’s washing. Sometime later he heard her blow out the lamp. Then her first soft snores. Bartholomew pulled himself up and crept into the kitchen.

The weather was good, but Mother still had to build fires in the potbellied stove to boil water for washing. There was always a good heap of ashes in the coal scuttle. Bartholomew tiptoed across the room and heaved up the scuttle, careful not to make a sound. It was too heavy for him. He only managed a few steps before he had to set it down again. He took a handful of the fine ash and began tossing it on the floor. He put a lot in front of Hettie’s cupboard. Then he wrestled the scuttle back to his room and did the same around his own cot. When there was a heavy layer of ash on the floor, he filled the dipper from the drinking bucket, and walking backward, dribbled water over it all. He heard it splash in the darkness, and trickle, and when he leaned down to touch the mixture it stuck firmly to his fingers. That would do. Leaving the dipper by the door so that he would not have to disturb the carpet of sludge, he climbed into bed.

He was fast asleep when the lock to the flat clicked open.

The light from the windows was dull as an old pot when Bartholomew woke. The house was quiet.

He sat up straight. The ash. If Mother saw the mess it would mean more than just a box to the ears. It would mean an immediate trip to the hack doctor in the court behind the Bag o’ Nails public house, and any number of prods and nasty ingestions. There mustn’t be a flake left by the time she woke up.

He threw off his blanket and leaned over the edge of the bed, squinting. The water and the ash had dried together overnight, mixing into a sort of gray caked mud. And all through it, pockmarking it like scatterings of acorns, were tracks.

Now I’ve got you, Bartholomew thought. The tracks were small, two-pronged, with a cleft in the middle. They were all around his bed, all over the floor, hundreds of them going this way and that. They led away in a dirty trail under the door.

Bartholomew was a city boy through and through. He had never climbed a tree or run in a field. He had never seen a farm, besides the ones on the coffee tins. But Mother had taken him to markets when he was small, and he knew the bottom of an animal’s foot. These were the tracks of a goat. Hooves.

He saw the sheets again, curling across the Buddelbinsters’ yard, the sky turning to iron, and the faery mother’s face gaping against the attic window.

You won’t hear a thing, she had cried, and her voice echoed inside his head, aching, heart-rending. The cloven hooves on the floorboards. The voices in the dark. It’ll come for you and you won’t hear a thing.

Trembling, he got up and followed the tracks into the other room.

CHAPTER X

The Mechanicalchemist

“Ah, Melusine, Melusine.” Aunt Dorcas shook her head, clasped her hands over the cheap pewter brooch at her bosom, and looked ever so wistful and pitying. She spoke the name of the mysterious lady as if referring to the dearest of old friends.

Ophelia looked up from the dining room table where she was sorting through the bolts of cloth that Aunt Dorcas had brought with her in the steam-carriage. It was not so far to walk from Curzon Street to Belgrave Square, and the draper always supplied runners for larger purchases, but as Aunt Dorcas had said, “It is so terribly low to go by foot.” Never mind that she’d had to beg the fare from the Jellibys’ cook.

Mr. Jelliby, who up until this point had been slumped glumly in his paisley armchair, sat up straight. Aunt Dorcas knew. She knew of the lady in plum.

He cleared his throat. He fiddled with his shirt cuffs. Trying not to sound too interested, he asked, “And? Aunty, who is she?”

“Yes, who is she?” Ophelia echoed, a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

Aunt Dorcas smiled benevolently. “Melusine Aiofe O Baollagh,” she said, flapping her fan at her red cheeks. The fan was supposed to look like that stylish sort where a tiny pisky is mounted on a stick and forced to stir the air with its gossamer wings. But hers was not alive. It was a poor copy made from sculpted wax and cotton, and one would have to be somewhat blind to mistake it for a live faery. Aunt Dorcas didn’t seem to realize it, though, and no one could ever be so hard-hearted as to tell her. “From Ireland,” she added quickly, noticing their blank looks. “The poor dear. I mean, she was only a merchant’s daughter-tradespeople, you know-but such a wealthy merchant!”

Mr. Jelliby blinked. “Was?”

“She has fallen from favor.” Aunt Dorcas sighed. “It was because of her sweetheart, I think. He was the most handsome person in all the world, if the stories are to be believed. They were engaged to be married. But there was an incident. Very mysterious. No one knows any details. At any rate the family grew suspicious of him, and the two little dears eloped! She was disowned, and they were never heard from again. It’s just terribly romantic.”

“Yes, terribly. .,” Mr. Jelliby said, leaning back in his chair thoughtfully.

Ophelia set aside a particularly fine bolt of Venetian lace, and asked, “Might I ask where you know this passionate creature from, Arthur?”