The Curator, page 2
As a child, Joven had avoided cholera and other diseases. When he was a youth, the army missed him. He never married. All he ever did was work, expanding his business without connection or influence, until he had a factory and a warehouse and a gabled manor in the Hills above the Government District—a manor, in fact, that stood not too far from the ancestral estate of Minister Westhover.
The pads of Joven’s fingers were burnt nerveless from his early years, operating close to the fires with makeshift implements. He had a menacing, head-down stride that made people who weren’t even in his path jump aside at his approach. No one in his association had ever heard him say that he liked anything. If something—a design, a cup of coffee, a seat in a carriage—met his standards, he would sometimes bark, “Yeah!” but that was as close to praise as he ever came. He did seem to relish destroying flawed plates, hurling them down to shatter at the feet of his foremen, so hard that the shards sometimes rebounded and nicked his hands. At Joven’s firm the employees had nicknamed their chief the Charmer, or just the Charm, for his dearth of social graces.
Even as a boy, selling single cups and pots, Joven never gave a penny of credit or cut a bargain. Dozens of saloonkeepers and cookshop owners in the Lees maintained invisible monuments to the Charmer’s insolence. Here was the street corner, the doorway, the spot along the bar, where young Joven had stood in his muddy bare feet and stared at them with his lip out, and pointed his numb finger, and said a deal was a deal, make it or not.
Which is to say, not even his own people liked him. It did not matter that he had achieved prosperity of a kind that illiterate river rats never achieved. He was admired for his genius, and envied for his luck, but the Charmer had never been one for making friends.
* * *
The gates of Minister Westhover’s mansion opened on a cool spring morning. Four chestnut horses clomped through an ankle-deep mist and pulled the minister’s shining white carriage into the street. Joven, who had been waiting beside the fence, stepped out and whipped a plate sideways through the air. It was a replica that he had made himself of one of the plates in Westhover’s set.
Joven still possessed the form he’d honed skipping rocks from the banks of the Fair: the plate spun fast and true. It struck the carriage door and splintered a gash in the glossy white wood.
“There’s your thin materials, you chiseling fuck!” He scampered forward and snatched up the plate from where it had clattered to the cobbles. Joven waved the intact plate gleefully about his head to show the passersby—domestics, delivery boys, streetsweepers, carpenters on their way to a site. “Perfect! Not so much as a chip out of his ugly face!”
The driver of the carriage drew his horses to a halt. The currency minister opened the cracked door and peered out. The liveryman descended from the box, followed by the footman.
Joven charged at them with the plate in one hand and his other clenched in a fist but was taken off his feet by a shot from the pistol that the footman had removed from his jacket. The slug struck him in the hip and Joven fell over.
The plate dropped, this time hitting the cobbles just wrong. It broke and flopped into two clean semicircles.
“Hold him,” Westhover called from the carriage, and the liveryman and the footman went to where Joven lay and pinned his arms and shoulders to the cobbles.
A small brazier had been built into the carriage to keep the government’s chief economist warm on brisk mornings like this one. Using an engineer’s mitt, Westhover extracted a hot coal, climbed down, and approached the group.
Joven struggled, but they held him fast. The minister crouched on the street and tried to stuff the red rock into his mouth. Joven clamped his lips shut and swung his head to and fro, receiving burns on his cheeks and nose, but not letting the currency minister push the coal in. He made growling noises as he jerked his head back and forth. In the scuffle, the vapor on the ground stirred and the mist licked over their backs and limbs.
After a minute or two, Minister Westhover grunted, tossed away the coal, and flung off the smoldering mitt. He staggered up from the man prostrate on the ground.
The minister, younger by a decade than the businessman but heavy and unfit, was breathing hard. He appeared flustered. Snot clung to his blond mustache. His blue silk tie had bunched up at his throat. He patted his pockets, blinking and swallowing and dragging in breaths.
The minister’s men released Joven’s arms, and rose. The mist began to seep back into the little clearing that had been carved out by the struggle.
Joven propped himself up on an elbow and spat at Westhover’s shoes. The skin of his cheeks and nose was peeled and raw where the coal had pressed.
He was triumphant. “You can’t make me eat your shit! Burn my nose off, but I never will!”
The crowd lingering at a distance, the maids and the men with handcarts, murmured uneasily. Joven’s cry echoed what they were thinking: “You saw it! You saw it! He tried to kill me!”
Joven shoved himself after the minister, pushing crablike with his palms, apparently wanting to get close enough to do more than just spit. Blood from his hip wound smeared onto the stones, the mist dulling it to black paint. He laughed as he scrabbled toward Westhover; no one had ever heard that before, the Charmer laughing. “He thinks it’s all for him, the chiseling fuck, anything he wants to take! Break any deal! He thinks he can kill an honest craftsman in the street!”
The currency minister inhaled and pursed his lips. He rubbed his thumb over his fingertips, as if to make sure the nails were even.
Abruptly, Westhover stuck his hand in the pocket of his footman standing beside him, yanked free the pistol, and shot Joven twice in the chest.
The uncouth, uneducated, char-fingered crocker who had risen so far above his station was blown flat, dead, right there in full sight of more than thirty witnesses. A gasp of mist puffed up and slowly settled down on the corpse.
* * *
Someone in the crowd sobbed. “Murder,” someone else said, and several voices agreed. The currency minister shoved the pistol at his footman and the footman took it.
“We saw!” a woman yelled. She was seconded and thirded. A man asked, “Why did you have to do that?”
Westhover didn’t answer. He stalked back to his carriage and climbed in, slamming the cracked door shut. His men returned to the box, and they drove the carriage around and back through the open gates of the mansion, and closed them behind.
Constables arrived a few minutes later and ordered the crowd to disperse. Meanwhile, the mist had reduced Joven to a dark mound.
* * *
An inquest was held the next day and the matter was put to rest with no charges filed. The currency minister, investigators for the magistrate determined, had acted within the bounds of self-defense.
What About That Big Place There?
But as they turned onto Little Heritage they saw that the Society building had burned.
Whether it was an accident or a case of arson, it was impossible to say. In the midst of their retreat, the Home Guard and the portion of the Constabulary that had remained loyal to the Crown had set fire to parts of the city indiscriminately. The Provisional Government was only beginning to make a survey of the damage. Still, Little Heritage Street was the furthest thing from a main thoroughfare. The cause might just as likely have been a tipped candle or a fireplace spark. Her lieutenant explained these obvious things to D as they stood on the sidewalk and regarded the ruins.
The neighboring structures were undamaged. The effect was like a rotten tooth in an otherwise gleaming smile.
D ventured along the path as far as the poplar trees. The red door had been blasted clean from its hinges, and stuck at a slant in the grass of the lawn. The roof had fallen in. Mounds of scorched timbers and bricks and roof slates were visible through the empty doorway. Beneath the ash stench was a deep, muddy tang, as if the heat had been so powerful that it boiled the surrounding earth. Warmth still radiated from the wreckage, and a mist of blackish particles lingered above the remains of the structure.
The beginnings of the plan she had never allowed herself to fully believe in, that she would discover some record of her brother in the Society, some proof of the meaningfulness of his final words, disintegrated. The model sun and its planets were cinders, the writing desk where the lady in the hat had worked in her ledger reduced to sticks, the drowsy man’s place by the hearth buried under layers of debris. The Grand Hall was gone along with the rest of the building—along with Ambrose.
But she couldn’t afford to dwell in disappointment, not in her position. You could retain pictures of perfect rooms and memories of dead brothers in your head, but when you were on your own you lived on your feet. You continued forward, always, if you wanted to continue at all.
“Dora?” Her lieutenant had come up beside her. “Are you all right?”
She looped her arm through his and brought them around to start back along the path. “I’m fine. I hope no one was inside.”
“None of the spirits were injured,” Robert said. “I think we can be sure of that.”
D had not gotten the impression that the Society for Psykical Research had much to do with ghosts, but she did not quibble. In truth, she had never understood precisely what the Society was about, just that it was a place where the members undertook certain investigations and studies—and that Ambrose had, briefly, been one of them.
“That is comforting, Lieutenant. I hadn’t thought of that. Being a ghost seems melancholy, but at least you can’t be incinerated.” Since the establishment of the Volunteers she had taken to addressing him by his rank.
To the rest of his circle, the other young revolutionaries from the university, D was the whispery little maid that Bobby had shrewdly taken as a lover, a plain gray dress and bonnet who kept near the walls. They couldn’t know how it actually was between them. That was part of the fun for him, she knew.
Robert said, “And even if they were vulnerable to fire, they could have been away at the first whiff of smoke. Spirits can pass through walls or windows, or they can slip under doors. Or they can expel themselves through the mail slots, like letters in reverse. It’s up to each individual spirit.”
“Where did you learn all this?”
“My nurse.”
“She was a drunk?”
“Yes. I liked her very much.”
D told him it really didn’t matter, she had just admired the building, that was all. She didn’t want to explain about Ambrose, or about her family, and that made it easier between them anyway. Robert liked her the way he thought of her.
“I know you wanted to do your part, Dora, but there are countless other places that need looking after. We’re not even on the street with the good museums.”
They had retraced their steps to the foot of Little Heritage, where the street’s first building, a looming edifice with a foundation of pocked stone blocks, dwarfed the corner. Robert gestured to the right, north on Legate, past the embassy of the ousted government’s foremost ally. “Let’s go over to Great Heritage, and I promise we’ll find you—” He paused, and shifted his gaze to the great pile of stone blocks beside them. “Wait, though. What about that big place there?”
Something Is About to Happen
Some boys had taunted her one day many years ago. D was with her brother. She was eight. The boys were loitering outside an apothecary’s shop, and they wore smart blue school caps and uniforms and looked to be a couple of years younger than Ambrose, who was fifteen, no longer a boy at all. Her brother held D’s damp hand, while in her elbow she cradled her baby doll.
“Oh, darling, I can’t help but notice what a pretty baby you have there!” one boy howled. His hair was white-blond and, like a grown man, he had a gold watch chain that drooped from his vest pocket. In the shop window behind him, there were boards with painted pictures—a man with a bandaged head, a woman with a bulging eye, a red swollen toe shooting black lines of hurt—to communicate the variety of injuries treated by the apothecary’s pills and tonics.
“Oh, darling!” one of the others crowed, picking up after him. “It’s a baby!”
It happened that her doll was named Baby, and she did think Baby was very pretty in an ivory nightgown with a lace-trim collar. The abuse of the older, nicely dressed boys confused and embarrassed D, and she sniffled as her brother led her away.
They made cat sounds, hisses and growly screeches. Their leader kept on with his sneers. “And that must be your little wife! Well done, sir, well done!”
D wondered why her brother didn’t tell them to stop; he was bigger than them. But Ambrose didn’t even glance their way.
Instead, without pausing or twisting down to her, he whispered, “Hush now, D. They like when you cry. I would never let anyone harm you. Do you believe that?”
She said she did, but really, she wasn’t sure of anything. She had not known that there were boys in the world who would yell at you just because you were small and you had a toy that you loved. D cried harder and the tears dripped on Baby.
“Good. Now, just stay close and pay attention,” Ambrose said. “Something is about to happen.”
The boys did not follow and their voices receded as the siblings walked around the corner onto the next street. D’s brother told her to stop, and to look about herself. “Look as close as you can. See everything.”
D saw:
Handsome houses that resembled their own, three-leveled except where they were four, with stone stoops that abutted the sidewalk. The thin parallel bars of the tram tracks, splitting the middle of the cobbled avenue, and within the fenced enclosure of the tram stop, a man who had removed his boot and stood, balancing on his other foot, to use a finial to scrape something off the boot’s sole. On the far side of the avenue, a woman in a maid’s apron and bonnet walking with a basket of lettuce on her head. Farther down, the neighborhood streetsweeper shoveling horse-droppings into his wheelbarrow; the shovel blade clanged off the stone. Grackles perched on the tram wire that hung above the tracks. The cloudless gray sky.
D returned her gaze to her brother. Like the mean boys, Ambrose wore a school cap, but his was a shade of gray not much darker than the sky, and he pulled it low to the tops of his eyebrows. In the years to come, D would picture him most vividly this way, sharp nose and a clever, jutting, top-teeth smile below a visor of shadow.
“Do you see what’s happened?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“We made them disappear. It’s our special magic, D.”
She knew it wasn’t true. People couldn’t be made to vanish, no matter how much you hated them. She appreciated the fantasy for the gift it was, though, a soothing idea that belonged only to them. The fair-haired boy might have had a fancy watch chain, but he didn’t have a brother like D’s, and he would never get to see that rabbit’s grin her brother reserved just for her; and he didn’t have a sister like D he could trust and rely on no matter what.
Maybe in that way, by comparison to what D and Ambrose shared, the boys were made so small it was like they disappeared.
Mother hated it when he called her D instead of Dora, but that was part of their closeness. In her infancy, Ambrose’s tongue had tended to tangle itself in the tail of her name, and he’d settled on “D” as an alternative.
Nurse delighted in telling this story. “The young sir announced, ‘I’m not going to exhaust myself trying to say the whole thing. Why should I? She’s not so big she needs more than a letter anyway!’ ”
D could not remember thinking of herself any other way. It made her feel special, seen and noticed by him. Perhaps a letter was a little thing, but there were only twenty-six of them, and her brother had given the fourth to her.
“I love you,” she said, and he patted her shoulder and said he loved her too.
As they stood there, the maid with the lettuce basket on her head carefully stepped around them.
* * *
When they got home, Nurse had collapsed to the floor in the doorway between the back hall and the kitchen. Father was at work and Mother was somewhere else. Nurse laughed and flapped a hand at them. Nurse had a puffy, creased, jolly face; it was a face like a happy cloud. D had never heard her speak an unkind word, and if she wasn’t laughing, she always seemed to be on the verge of laughing.
“Look at this now: my legs went and sat me down! How do you like that?” Nurse chuckled some more. “Touch of something, I suppose. I’ll be all right.”
Ambrose helped her stand. “Of course you’ll be all right.” He guided her to a seat at the kitchen table. D caught a sniff of her odd, sweet smell, like the smell of the apples around the roots of an apple tree, the spoiled leaking ones that no one wanted.
D sat across from Nurse and reached out to pat her soft, damp hand. She said to Nurse what Nurse had always said to her when she didn’t feel well: “Don’t fret, darling, it’s not your Day to Sail.”
This caused Nurse to let out a hoot of delight before dropping her head into the crook of her elbow and groaning cheerfully. D patted her hand some more.
Her brother rebuttoned his coat. He’d run and fetch Nurse some tonic to settle her nerves. “Look after the patient while I’m gone, D.” The apothecary was right around the corner. He plucked the ash shovel from its hook by the stove and promised to be back soon.
* * *
A month or two later, a day came when Nurse fell sick again.
Ambrose had warned D this was likely to happen and asked her to accept the extraordinarily important responsibility of fetching him immediately if it did. It was vital that their parents not learn about Nurse’s fragile condition. This was because instead of walking directly home after school as their parents supposed, D’s brother often arrived only minutes before his mother returned from her day’s shopping and appointments. If Nurse was dismissed, her replacement might not be as tolerant of Ambrose’s tardiness.
