The Whatnot (12 page)

“Well— He will!” said Bartholomew. “I'm sure he will, but only once we've—”

A commotion cut him off, a din out on the thoroughfare. Pikey could no longer hear the rustle of the faeries. All he could hear was the
snap-snap-snap
of something large coming across the metal plates. Several things. And shouting.

Slowly he inched around the pipe. Six leadfaces were in the street, standing on great, jointed stilts, iron blunderbusses against their shoulders. They were turning circles, scanning the rooftops, peering into blackened windows. A dozen goggled guards swirled below them, pointing and gesturing with their pikes. Pointing toward the alley.

Pikey rapped Bartholomew's shoulder. “They've found us, Barth. We've got to go.”

“Just tell us the way,” Bartholomew hissed at the faun, gesturing Pikey to wait. “We'll help you! We'll get you out, but we
need
to know where a door is!”

The guards were moving, straight toward them.

The leech-faery blinked. “A door? A door in? I—”

The leadfaces burst into the alley. Their voices echoed, their stilts throwing grotesque shadows up the walls.

“Barth?” Pikey whispered.

Bartholomew stayed deathly calm. The leadfaces had almost reached the pipe. They spotted the faun. In the last instant Bartholomew raised his hand and a plume of blue powder flew from it. It enveloped them. And then Bartholomew pinned Pikey against the wall, his arm like iron. They crouched, very, very still.

The faun shrieked and began scrabbling away, its hooves scratching sparks. It tried to pull itself up the rivets in the wall at the end of the alley, but the leadfaces leaped off their stilts, right onto the faun, smashing it to the ground. It let out a tortured wail and twisted away, crawling back to where Pikey and Bartholomew hid. But it couldn't see them. They had turned to air.

The faun searched, eyes dark and desperate. Pikey sat stock-still, hardly daring to breathe. The faun's face was right in front of his. He could smell its rotting organs, see every line in its dead white skin.

“Edith Hutcherson,” it whispered, as the guards swarmed around it and gripped it. “Find Edith Hutcherson. She knows the way to the Sly King.
She's been there
.”

And then the guards were dragging it off, and its hooves were sliding in the grease, and its eyes were fixed on them until it had disappeared into the thoroughfare.

CHAPTER XII

The Masquerade

A
FTER the incident in Piscaltine's chair room, all the clocks in the house pointed their hands to the Hour of Wrath, and that was where they stayed for the next twelve nights.

Hettie hardly dared leave her closet anymore. Pity-faeries prowled the upstairs almost always now. She heard them howling and snuffling along the passageways, sometimes right in front of her door. She heard the shrieks of the servants, the chittering of the reconstructionists as they swung away in their harnesses. But the pity-faeries were the least of her troubles. Florence La Bellina hadn't left Yearn-by-the-Woods with the other Belusites. She was still in the house. And she was following Hettie. Every time Hettie stole down the ladders and pulleys into the lower house, she spotted them. Sometimes it was the pale half, sometimes the dark one, sometimes both together. Hettie would be on her way back from the lavatory, or from the kitchens with a mushy fistful of cake, and then she would glimpse Florence, and Florence would glimpse her, and in an instant the Belusite would be after her. She would slide out of the dark and follow, gliding fast as anything. Hettie would have to climb and crawl and run with all her might to lose her, but every time Florence came a little closer, a little closer to Hettie's hiding place in the attic.

Hettie sat on her bed and stared at the door. It was bolted with its flimsy bolt and then wedged closed with a chair. She had barred it with several locks, too, that she had built for herself out of spoons and cooking utensils. They wouldn't stop anyone, but they made her feel a little better.

A whirring sounded from the hall. Then a
click.
Then the grandfather clock's bell echoed along the walls. Hettie waited, listening.
Two strikes for the Hour of Mirth, three for the Hour of Wrath.
She waited. The sound faded away. The hallway became silent again.
One strike for the Hour of Melancholy.
Oh no. . . .

She got up, sat back down, patting her hands nervously on her knees. The clock rang according to Piscaltine's mood, so that the reconstructionists and all the other servants could prepare the house to suit her. The Hour of Melancholy always, always meant Piscaltine wanted Hettie. But Hettie didn't want to see the faery lady again. She never did, ever again. Perhaps she could just ignore it. Perhaps Piscaltine didn't
really
want to see her, and the clock was simply ringing, and Piscaltine was being melancholy without any desire for Hettie's presence at all.

Bong
went the clock again.

Hettie leaped to her feet. The bell reverberated in the passage, long and solemn, and all over the house the other grandfather clocks answered. There could be no mistake. Piscaltine was waiting.

Hettie slipped out of her room. No pity-faeries, but there were other sorts about, more than she had ever seen this high up in the house. They darted in front of her, in doors, out other doors farther down, carrying pails of dust and jugs of water and armfuls of paint shavings. The masquerade must be nearing.

Hettie pushed past a wart-faced goblin carrying a birdcage full of small blue eggs, and started down the stairs.
Five steps, skip one, onward.
The wood creaked noisily.

She came to the ladder, began to descend. What did Piscaltine
want
? The faery lady wouldn't have forgiven Hettie. She would still be sulking, and she would want to pinch Hettie and call her names. Hettie gritted her teeth. She hated Piscaltine. She hated that Piscaltine could keep her locked up even though the faery was nothing but a weakling and a bully.

She reached the bottom of the ladder and glanced about. The ladder ended in the Dragonfly Wing tonight, the part of the house that looked like the palace of that French king who, Barthy had told her once, had gotten his head chopped off by anarchists. The reconstructionists were forgetting about not letting her near the outside. A long, window-lined gallery extended into the gloom, real windows, facing out. She rushed down the gallery. She passed Snell, the moth-winged faery, but she didn't wave at it this time, or even look at it. And then she caught sight of something through one of the panes. Something outside. Something that had not been there before.

She skidded to a halt. The window looked onto the field and the wet green woods. A mist lay over the grass, just as it had when Hettie had first emerged with Piscaltine's riding party. The sky was the color of dishwater, the trees dense and drooping, weighted under their foliage. The whole world outside looked damp and lush and distinctly unpleasant. But there was something else, too.

She leaned forward, squinting through the thick, water-streaked panes.

A solitary statue stood just inside the shadow of the trees. It was carved of gray stone. A hood hid its face. It was too far away for Hettie to see any other details, and yet she felt sure its eyes were fixed on the house. Watching. She shivered and turned away. She had passed that same window once before, very shortly after she had arrived. She remembered looking out at the trees and wondering how far they stretched and whether the horse-people's tracks were still there for her to follow. There hadn't been a statue standing at the forest's edge.

She started down the gallery again. The statue might have been put up for the masquerade. Perhaps the faeries had built it to greet the guests as they arrived. But then why was it facing the house? And why did it look so dreary?

She crossed to the other side of the gallery, away from the row of windows. Best not think about it. She had been here years, she felt. So, so long. She had seen worse things.

She came to the end of the gallery and swung down a rope onto the Innard Stairs.

 

“Maud, my sweetkin,” Piscaltine said as Hettie hurried into the chair room. Hettie's insides went cold at the sight of her, but she did not slow down.
Don't
be afraid
, she thought.
Don't let her see.

The faery looked frightful. Her face was powdered and painted. Her lips were a ruby heart, and she had put on a vast gown and curled wig. In her hands was the mask. “Come to me, sweetkin. Quickly.”

Hettie bobbed a curtsey, not meeting Piscaltine's gaze.

“I won't need you for long. I simply want you to do something for me,” she said, and her voice was sweet and dark as blackberry wine.

“What is it?” Hettie asked, and curtseyed again. Curtsying wasn't something faeries did, but Piscaltine had laughed when she had done it the first time, so she did it all the time now. When faeries laughed they were less inclined to kill her.

But Piscaltine did not laugh today. She did not even wave Hettie to the footstool the way she usually did and pretend to dote on her and stroke her branches while tearing off the little nodes on the end of the twigs until Hettie cried. She gazed at Hettie coldly, and said, “The masquerade begins at moondown. It will be a glorious masquerade with dancing and feasting and phantasm shows. And a gentleman. At my masquerade there is going to be a gentleman. He will be wearing a sea-green suit and a mask like a tortoise. I want you to steal something from him.”

Hettie's heart lurched into her throat. She felt her skin prickling, going cold. She tried to stammer something, but the faery lady raised a hand, cutting her off.

“Now, now. Don't fret. This gentleman is of no consequence. A lowly noble I once slapped during a game of cards. Only it was a most unsatisfactory slap, not nearly hard enough for the occasion, and so I'm going to have you steal something from him to . . . how shall we say it . . . even the odds. All you must do is bring me the thing hanging around his neck.” The faery lady tapped a finger against the mask in her hands. “I will even give you this to wear again. Since it makes you so very, very beautiful.” Piscaltine tittered. “No one will recognize you. No one will even suspect. And if you can do it, if you can steal this one thing for me, I will let you go. I will let you leave my house if that is what you want. I will let you go home.”

Hettie gasped. She wanted to cry and laugh, both at once.
Home.
Piscaltine would let her go. Let her be free again. She could go back to the cottage, and Bartholomew would be waiting for her there, and maybe Mother, too.

Piscaltine held out her hand, the mask dangling from one silk ribbon.

Hettie took it quickly. “I'll do it,” she said. “I'll do anything if you'll let me leave. I'll—I'll do anything.”

The faery lady looked at Hettie curiously from beneath her wig. “You know . . .” she said, very softly. “All I wanted was that you would be my friend. That isn't very much to ask, is it? Doesn't everyone in the Smoke Lands have a friend? Doesn't everyone have someone?” She smiled pitifully and looked away. “I wanted a little person who would be mine, because no one else is. Life is so lonely when one lives as long as we do, in such a horrible, horrible house. But you never wanted to be my friend. You never, ever did.”

Neither of them moved. The silence felt huge and hollow in the great room.

Then Hettie said, “I have to go home, Piscaltine. I can't be your friend. But someone else might be. Someone else, later.”

The faery's face emptied like a bucket. She sat up straight. “Until this evening, my sweetkin,” she said. “I will be on pins and needles to see you.”

Hettie's fingers tightened around the mask.

“Yes, milady.” She began to back away. “Until this evening.”

 

Hettie watched the guests arrive from a little window above a lavatory on the third floor of the Dragonfly Wing. They came out of the woods in twos and threes, an endless long line of faeries. Some rode sharp-faced horse-people, some went on foot, and all of them held little white lamps in their hands, like a drop of starlight. They made a glowing worm, uncurling out of the dark of the woods. Eventually a coach appeared, black and ornately wrought, flanked by four vicious, green-plated grasshoppers. After that the line went on unbroken.

Hettie watched until only a few stragglers were left coming across the field with their white lights. Then she wiped her eyes on the hem of her nightgown and climbed down from the window. She didn't know why she had been crying. She had been thinking of Old Crow Alley again. She had been thinking of Mother and Bartholomew. She hadn't thought of home in forever.

She stole out of the lavatory. The house was dark and still. Even the reconstruction faeries were silent behind the walls. The masquerade would be starting soon. Perhaps it already had.

She hurried down a narrow, wood-lined corridor.
Be brave now,
she told herself
,
clutching the mask to her chest.
No one will recognize you. No one will see who you really are.

She passed a clock. The hands had moved sometime while she had been hiding. They pointed to the Hour of Mirth now, the grinning face. It looked suddenly horrible to her, fat-lipped and hungry. She ran on. She did not look out the windows as she passed them, but if she had, she would have seen that there were two statues now, standing just inside the woods, watching the house. Two statues where before there had only been one.

At a mirror she paused and took the pendant from inside her nightgown. It was warm, as always. She paused a moment, just holding it. She took a deep breath. Then she let go and held up the mask. The blue feathers around its edge glimmered. She set the mask on her nose and tied the ribbons behind her head.

No sound preceded Florence La Bellina's arrival. Hettie felt a presence in the corridor, a weight in the air. And then the doll-woman swished past behind her. Hettie whirled, heart hammering. The Belusite did not stop. She glided on down the corridor, her skirts a vivid tear in the darkness.

Hadn't she seen?
Hettie stared after her.
Hadn't she even noticed?

As if in response, Florence turned slightly, looking back over her shoulder. Her black-and-white face gleamed, hard and smooth. She stared at Hettie a moment, those empty, empty eyes like two drain holes. Then she swept on, peering up staircases and into doorways.

She's looking for me,
Hettie thought. She turned back to the mirror. And gasped again at the beautiful apparition in the glass. Florence
had
seen. But not Hettie. The figure in the mirror stood so tall, its copper curls glinting, its black gown buttoned all the way up its neck. Its cheekbones high and perfect. Its eyes were like storm clouds.

No one would recognize her. Not in a hundred years. And all at once the woods and the cottage and the road home were so close she could feel them. Even if the guests did catch her stealing from the faery gentleman, she could simply take off the mask and hide and no one would even suspect her. They would be looking for an exquisite beauty with copper curls. Not her. Not the ugly little Whatnot. She would find the gentleman and steal his treasure. . . . And Piscaltine would let her go.

Hettie set off toward the Mildew Wing. It was the part of the house that looked like a huge old fortress, and it was where the masquerade was going to be held. Her gown whispered along the edges of the corridor as she went. The clocks grinned at her from the walls. The mirrors showed a tall lady, all in black.

Oh,
she thought.
I'll show you, Piscaltine. I'll show you what I can do.

She passed into the Glass Wing, where everything was lit and glittering like ice. The floor was strewn with ivy vines and hawthorn branches, making a pathway toward the Mildew Wing. Banners in peach and blue and gold hung from the ceiling. She followed them until she came to a high, pitted black door.

The masquerade was being held in the Hall of Crepuscular Hankerings. Hettie had only seen it once before, its huge wall panels propped up in storage. The panels had looked unremarkable then, old stone with strange grooves in them, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle all out of order.