A Novel (12 page)

They said nothing.

I took a step in, but the nun grasped my wrist.

“I see no reason to disturb their studies,” she said.

I hesitated, taking in their blank, hollow faces, the buckets of cleaning supplies and brooms propped beside each cabinet, and asked, “What are they reading?”

“Something improving,” said the nun with chill pride. “Devotional texts, moral pamphlets, studies on the value of cleanliness and labor.”

Not knowing what to say, I just nodded. I had never thought that hopelessness might have an aroma, but if it did, that was what the still, silent air of the room smelled of: hospital sterility and despair.

The nun showed me out, and I had to resist the impulse to hold the door open, to tell the children to run. But then I was being steered into the nursery, an identical room: white, unadorned, and silent, containing eight cagelike cribs. Another nun sat with a book on one of the curiously high stools. She considered us as we entered, bowing fractionally to her sister before returning her eyes to her reading.

“They are all sleeping,” I said, trying to sound impressed.

“It is nap time,” said the nun at my elbow, as if this were obvious. “Every day at this time.”

“That's very … disciplined,” I said.

“They need structure in their lives,” said the nun. “Most of them are here because their mothers had none of their own—something you might want to pass on to your
friend.
”

As I left the room, I thought that it smelled less like a hospital and more like a morgue, as if it were a place where spirit came to die. Clutching the basket to my breast with a new and tortured sense of desperation, I walked quickly down the hallway and out.

*   *   *

PAUSING ONLY TO PICK
up a bottle of sheep's milk from the Holymound market, I returned to the Martel Court via the labyrinth that was Old Town, a complex of rough, sand-colored stone and spiraling minarets that had been all there was of Bar-Selehm before the whites came. I pulled my hair back, slipped my arms through the handles of the basket, hitching it up onto my back, and climbed up to the shuttered chamber above the clock mechanism, comfortable in the knowledge that I was invisible up there in the smog. But as I withdraw one arm from the handles to work the louvers, the basket shifted and swung, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment, I glanced down into the face of the sleeping child, suspended by a wicker band over eighty feet of nothing but hard, shattering stone.

I clambered inside, my heart racing as if I had been chased over rooftops by Morlak's gang.

Inside, hanging from a high buttress by its hind legs, was one of the large fox-headed fruit bats that called the city home. It watched me with black, glassy eyes and ruffled its rubbery wings. For a long moment, I just sat there looking at it, and eventually—comfortable that we were no threat to each other—it tucked its head and went to sleep.

What have you done? What are you going to do?

All my excitement about working for Willinghouse, of championing Berrit's memory and serving as an agent of justice, lay exposed as vain and idiotic in the awful frailty of the sleeping child.

I made the place as safe and accommodating as possible: checked for spiders, flushed the roosting bat out of the shuttered hatch, and lay the baby down in her blankets, my worn-out habbit snuggled next to her—horrified by the scale of my own stupidity. For a long minute I watched her, and when she seemed calm, I left.

The child was safer there than on the streets with me. The day was ending, and every footpad in the city would be on the watch for a Lani steeplejack who had offended Mr. Morlak of Seventh Street.…

Forcing myself to focus on the investigation, I scaled the back of the public library on Winckley Street, waiting in the shadow of a great stone griffin for the newspaper girl's arrival on the corner below. She dropped from a wagon moments later and set to unloading two pallets of evening papers. I was down, money in hand, in time to be her first customer of the night.

She gave me a curious look but said nothing and handed me the paper. The headline said that the Grappoli ambassador had made a formal protest about the insinuation that his government was in any way associated with the theft of the Beacon. In response, a small crowd had chanted insults outside the embassy till a unit of dragoons dispersed them.

“You can read these as well as sell them?” I asked.

The Mahweni girl bristled. “Every letter,” she returned. “You?”

“Ever heard of Josiah Willinghouse?” I asked.

The question seemed to catch her off guard, but she nodded.

I pocketed my change but left a sixpenny bit on her crate.

She eyed it questioningly and, when I inclined my head a fraction, palmed it. “What do you want to know?” the girl asked, still cautious.

“Anything,” I said. “I expect you read a lot, selling papers all day. I don't know how much you remember—”

“All of it,” she said.

The boast annoyed me. She caught the look on my face and pushed the coin back across the crate toward me.

I sighed and shoved it back. “Fine,” I said. “You know anything about Willinghouse or not?”

She considered me for a moment, but she wasn't trying to remember. She was deciding whether to speak. When she did, it came out in an unbroken stream without inflection, and though it was the same voice she always used, her eyes went blank. It felt oddly like someone was speaking through her.

“The Right Honorable Josiah Willinghouse, twenty-four, Brevard party representative for Bar-Selehm Northeast, sits on the Shadow Trade and Industry Committee. Appointed seven months ago. Elected to Parliament three months before that. Currently the youngest serving member. Educated at Ashland University College, Ntuzu, and Smithfield Preparatory School, like his father before him. Son of the late Jeremiah Willinghouse, also member of Parliament for Bar-Selehm Northeast, mining magnate, and Lady Tabitha Farnsworth, also deceased. Josiah Willinghouse's first parliamentary speech concerned water restrictions at the time of drought and their impact on Mahweni farmers in his district. His motion, which was seconded by Stefan Von Strahden, was denied in a vote along party lines.”

A shiver ran down my spine. “How do you do that?” I asked, all my wary hostility swallowed up by awe.

The girl blinked and suddenly was herself again, though she too had shed her hostility. “I don't know,” she said, embarrassed by the inadequacy of the remark. “I just remember what I read.”

“It's extraordinary,” I said.

She flushed and looked away, but there was a flicker of satisfaction in her eyes that she couldn't conceal.

“What's your interest in Willinghouse?” she asked. “Or do you just like handsome politicians?”

“Hardly handsome,” I scoffed a little too quickly, so that the girl raised an eyebrow.

“All right,” she said. “Anything else you want to know about?”

“Yes,” I said on impulse. “Ansveld. The luxorite merchant who died.”

“What about him?” she asked, wary again.

“Where did he work?”

“Mr. Thomas Ansveld of Ansveld and Sons Quality Luxorite Emporium, Twenty-two Crommerty Street, Bar-Selehm,” she said automatically and without inflection.

I marveled again. “Have you always been able to do that?” I asked.

“As long as I can remember,” she said. “My father taught me to read, but it was years before I knew that what I could do was … not usual.”

“It's a gift,” I said, smiling.

The girl looked less sure of that, and a trace of her former stiffness returned. “You'd think so, wouldn't you?” she said.

“I mean it. You shouldn't be selling papers. You should be a reporter.”

Something complex flashed through her face, a bright and incandescent joy quickly doused and smothered. “Right,” she said. “Now, if you don't mind, I have customers.”

*   *   *

I HADN'T LEARNED MUCH,
but it felt like a start, and I returned to the Martel Court exhilarated. That feeling was dashed as soon as I climbed up to the louvered shutters of the room above the clock. The baby was crying again. I could hear it like a siren in the air, an awful, accusatory keening.

She calmed a little when I picked her up, but began again when she tried to nuzzle at my breast and found no sustenance. I whispered to her and pushed the habbit into her tiny hands, but nothing helped. She needed her mother, and though she was clearly ravenous, she would not take the milk I had bought earlier.

How often does a newborn feed?

I had no idea.

You can't do this. You don't know where to start.

Reading to her did not help at all, so I put her in the tool satchel along with the habbit and everything I owned, save my books, and made the descent from the clock tower to the street.

On my way to the Atembe underground station, the baby's screaming drawing every eye my way, I thought of the blank high windows and implacable iron gates of the Pancaris orphanage.

Leave her on the steps now, and all this goes away. The nuns will raise her. The nuns know what they are doing.

But I didn't. There was no principled decision, no careful thought process or moral choice. I just didn't because I knew what the place was. I should never have gone. It had wasted time I could have spent doing my new job, and now leaving the child there would be harder. I tried to soothe her, but she wouldn't stop crying. Even without the hostile stares of my fellow passengers, it was a terrible thing to be responsible for that awful, frantic bawling. I let my hair fall in front of my face and kept my eyes down.

At Rahvey's house, I was greeted with outrage and incredulity at my lateness and incompetence, so I fled to the temple graveyard till the feeding was done. The child had quieted the moment Rahvey pressed it to her breast, and the silence bellowed the extent of my failure.

As night fell, however, I grew scared of the cemetery's silence and its deep shadows, and when the hippos began roaring, I couldn't stand it any longer and returned to Rahvey's hut.

Sinchon wasn't pleased. “The baby is feeding,” he said, as if I had no other business being there.

“Again?” I asked.

“Babies are always hungry,” said Sinchon, staring off toward the river, where a family of warthogs was trotting by, their tails in the air. “Always.”

I wrapped myself in a threadbare blanket and slept on their porch for a few hours till Rahvey had performed yet another feeding. I took the child without a word and made my way back into the city, realizing once more that a part of me was hunting for the missing Beacon in the darkness of the rooftops and chimneys.

 

CHAPTER

11

AT FIRST LIGHT I
made the baby as safe and comfortable as possible, then with almost paralyzing reluctance, left her sleeping. She did not cry when I crawled out through the shutter, but her silence rang in my head like an accusation.

I double-checked the address against what the newspaper girl had given me and considered the photograph above Ansveld's obituary. He looked austere and professional, half his face lost in carefully groomed but slightly ridiculous side whiskers.

I had never been inside any of the luxorite vendors' shops on Crommerty Street but I knew the area, having spent a week rigging scaffolding for the roofers on Trimble Avenue the previous summer. A colony of green storks nested along the ridgeline.

It was a wealthy district. Externally, the shops all looked the same—cream-colored stone with formal, expensive trim—and dark inside: all wood paneling and merchandise in glass cases. They were the sort of stores where only certain kinds of people were welcome.

I was not one of them. I brushed the worst of the dirt from my clothes and tried to smooth my hair.

As soon as the bell over the door tinkled, a man looked up from his place behind the counter and gave me an inquisitorial stare. He was perhaps thirty, a pair of the heavily smoked goggles luxorite traders always used pushed back on his forehead. He had a pen in his hand that he held suspended above his notebook, as if caught composing poetry. A vast typewriter sat on the counter, and he had to lean round it to see me.

“We're not hiring, thank you,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” I said, taking an awkward step into the shop, “I'm not looking for employment.”

His brow wrinkled.

I pressed on. “I wondered if you could tell me a little about Mr. Ansveld,” I said.

His face darkened, and he got quickly to his feet. “I've told you reporter types before—” he began.

“I'm not press,” I said.

“And you're not police,” he returned, staring me down.

“I'm here in my capacity as a private investigator serving a prominent client—”

He did not allow me to finish the sentence. “Out!” he said, his voice rising and his face flushing. “You think my family's tragedy is entertainment? You think I want to discuss my father's doings with guttersnipes and vagrants?”

“I am neither a—” I began, but he was coming toward me now, his anger reaching a rapid boil. I moved for the door, but he kept coming, faster now.

“I said get out!” he yelled.

I ducked out of the shop, and he followed, slamming the door shut as soon as I was through it. When I turned, muttering explanations and apologies, he snatched the blind down and stalked back into the dark recesses of the shop. I considered the name above the door, carefully painted in gold cursive on a glossy black background.
ANSVELD AND SONS.

My father's doings …

I sighed, cursing my clumsiness, and considered the street, with its white ladies in crinolines and its suited men on their way to work. I felt conspicuous, outclassed, and stupid.