The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (6 page)

If this were true
, wrote Babbage, sighing,
the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.

He suggested that Tennyson say instead:

Although,
strictly speaking
, he added,
the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line.

His train stopped once — cows on the track — and instead of reading his newspaper, he invented a scoop. A metal scoop called a cowcatcher. Soon, all over England, they were hooking them onto their steam locomotives, sweeping the cattle away.

He saw things that needed to be fixed or unlocked — the postal system, lighthouse signals, life assurance — and fixed or unlocked them. He invented codes, untangled clues, made skeleton keys. He found ways to clear paths, get through and get across.

Madeleine knew all this because she had been reading.

When they’d first got here to Cambridge, she’d started collecting facts, half joking, to help her mother practise for the quiz show.

But then she had realised, first, that Holly was serious about the quiz show and, second, that she forgot every fact Madeleine offered.

So Madeleine stopped sharing.

But she kept collecting. In her previous life, she had only ever read fantasy novels, but now she read facts and more facts: books, scientific journals, newspapers, travel magazines. It was a strange new addiction, but the
fact
was, facts took her sideways so she didn’t have to think.

Now she stood on the side of the street, astride her bike.

The statement was back, and though she scrambled for more facts, it blazed at her, and it was this:
I want to go home.

That was wrong. They never had a home, more a lifestyle. What she meant was, she wanted her dad. She wanted to fly from this place, to fly into his arms. She and her mother had fun together, sure, but
the true colour — the dazzle of colour, the firecracker sky in their life — that was her dad.

Her mother disagreed. “We don’t need him,” she said. “This is our new life.” She swooped and swerved around Madeleine’s arguments and questions. “Trust me,” she said. “It’s better like this. We hardly ever saw Dad before! He was always so busy.”

“Whereas now we get to see him all the time. Ingenious.”

At which, her mother would turn on the sewing machine.

It was up to Madeleine.

She couldn’t convince her mother to go back, so she had to make her dad come here and fetch them.

Only, how could she get through to him? She could phone or email, sure, but that would achieve nothing. His assistants would answer. He was always doing something important or distracting. When he got the message, he’d be too angry to return her calls. Even if she found a way to speak directly to him, she’d have to get through layers of his anger.

And even if she
did
calm his temper, there’d be something else. Another layer that she couldn’t figure out but knew was there. Something that always seemed to block the pathway to her father, lately — to his heart.

It was impossible.

She could never unlock, untangle, decipher, get through. She could never fly back into her father’s arms. She was trapped and they would never get home.

As soon as she let herself think this, she knew it was true, and the truth draped itself onto her shoulders, like a child who leaps at you from behind, clambers onto your back, clings to your throat —

Madeleine got off her bike.

The funny thing was, she thought now, if she’d reached into Federico’s hat that day, and drawn out Charles Babbage’s name, well, she would have held a name that could clear pathways.

But she had chosen Isaac Newton.

The gravity man.

She wanted to fly, and she had chosen the man who would bind her to the ground.

She leaned her bike against a wall and saw it again — that fine line of white along the seam of the parking meter.

She tried to pull it out with her fingertips but it was too deeply embedded. By holding two fingernails, one above and one below, she managed to grasp the edge and slowly draw it out.

It was a thin piece of paper, folded in half.

She unfolded it and read:

She laughed aloud, looking at the base of the parking meter: the split concrete.

“You’re trying to escape,” she said, then glanced around to check that nobody had seen her talking to a parking meter. The street was empty.

It was growing dark, everything turning shades of grey.

The paper in the palm of her hand made her shudder suddenly.

I am being held against my will!

What if it was real? A message from a stranger who was trapped?

Strange place to put it, though
, she thought, and smiled again.

I am being held against my will.

On the darkening path, she took paper from her backpack, and she wrote a reply to the note.

She folded it and slid it into the parking meter until it too was nothing but a fine white line.

Then she rode away.

5.

R
ain was falling fast and sharp: streetlights and parked cars cowering out there in the dusk.

Jimmy Hawthorn, Deputy Sheriff, stood at the window with a whiskey. Across the road, in the high-school grounds, Elliot Baranski was throwing a ball against a wall. Each time Elliot threw, the ball disappeared into an arc of half-light, then reappeared with a splash.

“You got a fax there?” Jimmy said, still watching through the window.

The Sheriff was at his desk; he eased back in his leather chair and reached behind him to the fax machine.

“Ah, shoot,” he said.

Jimmy watched as Hector pressed at the bandage on his right hand. Wide white bandages diagonaled across his cheeks; a smaller square was centered on his forehead.

“They keep lifting off,” Hector explained. “Taking the skin and blood with them. They all seem to be at the wrong angle — kind of angle where a bandage doesn’t stick. Worst one’s the back of the neck. Hurts like blazes when I reach around like so —”

He tried to demonstrate, and winced.

“Don’t do that on my account.” Jimmy smiled. Then his smile changed to a mild frown, and he went to speak, hesitated, and spoke: “Hector,” he said, “you read their column in today’s
Herald
? The Princess Sisters’ column?”

“It’s out already?” Hector looked around the station eagerly, and Jimmy reached for the paper and slapped it onto Hector’s desk.

The Sheriff turned to page 7, and read the column:

Hector sat back, chuckling quietly.

“They seem kind of … young, don’t they?” Jimmy ventured. “You think you might have been a little … disappointed? If we
had
got selection? If they
had
come here after all?”

“Ah, they seem young ’cause they are young. They’re just kids, Jimmy, and sweet ones at that. Don’t forget their language doesn’t do them justice, brought up like they were all over the shop. They’ve got dialect from half the provinces in their little princess heads.”

He reached for the glass on his desk and found it empty.

“Can
not
believe that Applecart burned a sweet-potato pie!” He slammed the glass back down.

Jimmy regarded him thoughtfully. Then he shifted his gaze to the shelf across the room, the one that held Hector’s collection. A souvenir album from the royal wedding; several volumes of
The History of Royal Tradition
; four or five royal teacups hanging from hooks; and a framed portrait of the royal family. In the portrait, which was a few years old, King Cetus and Queen Lyra were seated on high-backed chairs, their four children gathered around them. Prince Chyba, who had had braces on his teeth at the time, was smiling cautiously; the Princess Sisters, Ko and Jupiter, had caught each other’s eye and were giggling; and little Prince Tippett, his expression serious, was holding up a large toy frog.

Jimmy turned back to the window. “What’s the fax?” he said.

“It’s from Jagged Edge,” Hector replied, flicking through the papers. “Ha! Another one for you, Jimmy. Up for the challenge?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Hector, when are you going to stop telling the whole Kingdom they can send missing persons reports my way?”

Hector grinned. “It’s your own fault for being so good at it. Stop solving them and I’ll stop asking for them.”

He scanned the fax, breathing in through his nose — it was a sigh, or concentration. “Guy been missing six months,” he said. “Electrical engineer. Last seen heading out to work — blew the wife a kiss. She remembers that distinctly, she says. Never got to work. Colleagues say — You listening, Jimmy?”

“Who’s this, then?” Jimmy turned side-on to the window and squinted down the darkening street. Two people walked through the rain along the path; each held an umbrella in one hand and a suitcase in the other. They were walking oddly: leaning their umbrellas toward each other while their suitcases kept tilting them apart.

The Sheriff looked up.

“There’s a kid,” said Jimmy. “It’s two people with a kid. They’re holding their umbrellas together to shelter the kid.”

Hector flicked through the fax again.

“Seems he was caught up with some shady computer page, some kind of a — can’t figure out — gambling is what they mean, I think.” He turned a few more pages. “Got in over his head — they’re trying to say the loan sharks got him and he’s dead in the harbor. Just come out and say it, then!” He rustled the papers angrily, winced, and touched the bandage on his hand. His face was white.

Jimmy crossed the room. “You need a refill,” he said. “A refill and a rest. Attack from a fifth-level Gray? Most people would still be in the hospital, and here you are back at work.”

With one hand he poured whiskey for Hector; with the other he took the fax.

The Sheriff leaned back and closed his eyes.

Jimmy rested an elbow on the counter, studying the papers.

The room rustled quietly; the rain fell hard outside. Hector reached for his glass, sipped and swallowed.

Then the door to the station opened with a whoosh, a creak, and a burst of rain, umbrellas, and suitcases.

The door slammed shut. A man and a woman stood on the carpet, shivering and dripping. They were both short and plumpish, pale hair slicked down on high foreheads.

“Is it not ever raining out there like to a tantalizing foghorn!” exclaimed the woman.

So now they knew that the woman was from Olde Quainte. It is a province with curious turns of phrase, many of which make no sense.

“Call yourselves a good evening from us, will you not, as good as the owl with sooty elbow suggests, and hello, we are the family Twickleham.”

So the man was from Olde Quainte too — even more so than the woman.

A shape emerged, a little girl of maybe six, and the room seemed keen to hear what she might say.

“She doesn’t speak,” the woman stage-whispered — a whisper so loud it seemed to rattle windows.

Sadness slid over the girl’s face, and she stared at Jimmy and Hector, wide-eyed. Both the man and the woman placed their hands, gently, on her shoulders. The child’s hair was damp and tousled, fine strands springing up with static.

“The family Twickleham!” cried Hector, leaping to his feet and then stumbling a little — his right knee could hardly hold him. “Jimmy, you know who this is? It’s the Twicklehams! Here to take up the lease on Abel Baranski’s shop! Well, welcome to Bonfire! Welcome to the Farms! You
are
from Olde Quainte, of course you are! But hey now, weren’t you expected a few weeks from today?”

Hector was embracing each of the Twicklehams as he spoke.

“Indeed, and so we are early,” said the man. “I’m Bartholomew. Here’s Fleta, my good wife, and this is our little Derrin. If you will know it, we sold our house sooner than we thought. And as the golden hawthorn sheds its leaves at the scent of the wind-addled skylark, so we set off.”

“And here we be, wet through to the dandelions,” Fleta took up the story, “and nowhere to stay!”

“We thought, surely the local sheriff will tell us where the nearest inn might be. For isn’t,” and here Bartholomew paused, “isn’t a sheriff exactly like a warthog’s ingrown toenail?”

At this there was a brief, startled silence. For some reason, both the Sheriff and Jimmy looked toward the little girl; something about her silence, maybe, seemed to hold an edge of the rational.

She obliged them by shivering violently.

“What are we thinking?” cried the Sheriff.

“Come by the fire,” offered Jimmy. “We’ll get you towels and hot chocolate. And some of Hector’s famous oatmeal cookies.”

“I’ll call Alanna at the Watermelon Inn,” said Hector. “If she’s full, there’s the Bonfire Hotel, of course, but I’d recommend the Watermelon — prettiest rooms you’ll ever see, little stenciled flowers all around the skirting boards. And I can personally guarantee that Alanna does the best breakfast in this province!”

Everyone bustled, making phone calls and switching on kettles, until they were all pulling chairs around the fireplace to drink their chocolate.

The little girl, Derrin, chose a chair, seemed dissatisfied, chose another, and changed her mind again. They all watched until she had settled on one.

There was friendly quiet, everyone taking great breaths, to demonstrate to one another what good chocolate it was, then Bartholomew Twickleham turned to the Sheriff and said, with curious reverence, “Can it truly be that you have sampled
every
breakfast in the province? What a feat!”

Again, there was a loud, silent moment of confusion. As one, they recalled Hector’s guarantee that the Watermelon served the best breakfast in the province.

“Well, now,” began the Sheriff, and he paused and touched a finger to the bandage on his forehead. A pair of frown lines ran straight through it, like train tracks disappearing into heavy snow. Was the man serious, or making a joke? Or was he being snide?

“Now, we’ve arrived early as you know,” said Fleta comfortably, as if her husband had not spoken, “so the lease on the Baranski shop has not officially begun. But what do you think? Would Mrs. Baranski let us move in early? From what we’ve heard, her husband only used the shop itself, not the upstairs flat where we intend to live, so —”

“We hear it’s been vacant a year,” Mr. Twickleham interjected. “So perhaps it is ready? Much as a horsefly —”

The Sheriff interrupted. He glanced at Jimmy, and both his voice, and Jimmy’s gaze, were heavy.

“What you might not know,” he said, “but ought to know, going into the Baranski shop as you are, is that there’s a hole in this town. A hole the size of the Inland Sea.”