Greenglass House (17 page)

Negret was torn. On one hand, it might be interesting to tag along under the pretext of helping out. On the other hand, he had a feeling his parents might prefer him out of the way. Plus, he realized as he looked around the living room that Mr. Vinge seemed to have gone upstairs too. Apart from Mrs. Caraway doing the dishes and Lizzie assembling baking ingredients in the kitchen, only he and Sirin and Georgie Moselle were left on the main floor.

Negret touched the keys in his pocket for luck, then gave Sirin a meaningful look and the two of them went over to where Georgie was sitting on the hearth. She was so deep in thought that Negret had to clear his throat before she noticed he and Sirin were there.

“Hey.” Georgie scooted over to make room, and Sirin sat beside her. Negret perched on the coffee table. “So this is probably a bit more excitement than usual, huh?”

“You can say that again,” Sirin muttered.

“A little bit, yeah,” Negret agreed. “I guess this means you didn't get to set up your camera this morning.”

Georgie smiled weakly. “No, I set it up. That was before I noticed the notebook was missing.”

“My folks are hoping it turns up—that it was just lost, not stolen.”

“I know, Milo. I hope they're right.”

“Well, we—” Sirin kicked him in the knee and Negret corrected himself. “I thought maybe I'd see if I could help try and find it. I'm good at finding things.”

Georgie looked at him closely, and for a moment he wondered if she thought maybe he'd taken her notebook. If he had, saying he'd found the things he'd stolen would be an easy way to turn them back in. He tried to keep his face neutral.

“All right,” she said at last. “What do you need to know?”

Negret hesitated. “Well—I mean . . . what does it look like, I guess?”

“It's about this big.” She held up her hands and indicated a rectangle about the shape of a paperback book. “It's thin, like this.” She made a pinching gesture with her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “In fact, you might have seen it the day I arrived, when the perfume bottle broke and you helped me clean up my things.”

“Was there anything special about it?” Negret asked casually.

“Well, obviously it was special to me,” Georgie replied. “I made all kinds of notes in it that I'd rather not lose. But if you mean can I think of any reason anyone else would find it special . . . then yes, I suppose I can. And I guess it doesn't hurt to tell you,” she added, more to herself. “Yes, I suppose it hardly matters now.” But then she just sat quietly for a moment.

“What, then, for crying out loud?” Sirin demanded.

Georgie gave a resigned sigh. “The notes I had made were about this house,” she said. “And about someone I thought might be connected to it.”

“Ha!”
Sirin erupted.

Negret's jaw dropped. “You're kidding!”

“Nope. But more than that I can't tell you,” Georgie said, getting to her feet as the group that had gone to search Mrs. Hereward's room returned to the main floor. “I'm afraid I haven't worked out the connection yet.”

“Georgie,” Mr. Pine called, “shall we see if we have any luck in your room?”

“Why not.” Georgie didn't sound as if she thought they were going to have any luck. Negret didn't figure they would, either. From the look on Mrs. Hereward's face, it was clear her bag had not magically turned up.

“You two go on ahead,” Mrs. Pine said, heading for the kitchen. “I'm just going to fix Mrs. Hereward some fresh tea. I'll catch up with you.”

“Well,” Negret whispered once all the adults had left the room, “
that
was interesting. Georgie's missing thing has to do with the house too. Just like Mrs. Hereward's bag!”

“I'm still not convinced her story has anything to do with the house-bag connection,” Sirin muttered. “But I'm willing to have my mind changed. And now's your chance.”

They waited until they heard the whistle of the teakettle in the kitchen, and then kept on waiting until they heard Mrs. Pine's feet trotting up the stairs. Then Negret and Sirin joined Mrs. Hereward at the dining room table.

Her hand shook as she stirred a spoonful of sugar into one of Mrs. Pine's thin blue teacups. Milo's mother almost never used them. They were old and brittle, and they had been her grandmother's. She usually only got them out when she said she needed cheering up, and if anyone needed cheering up now, Mrs. Hereward did.

Negret slid onto the bench opposite the old lady. “Hi, Mrs. Hereward.”

She jumped, nearly knocking over her tea with her spoon. “Oh, Milo. Hello.”

“Sorry to scare you. I guess your bag didn't turn up yet, did it?”

She shook her head. “No, I'm afraid the
thief
hasn't
returned
it.”

“Er. About that.” Negret leaned across the table and motioned for her to do the same. She gave him a dubious look, but after a moment she leaned down close enough for him to whisper. “We're—I mean, I'm pretty good at finding things. I thought maybe I could look around and see what I can turn up. Maybe I can find your bag.”

“What makes you think so?” she whispered back.

“Well, the thief would be a fool to hide it in his or her room, right? Eventually someone's going to suggest searching the rooms. Which means the best place to hide it would be someplace else in the house, and I bet I know all the good hiding places.”

An expression of guarded hope crossed Mrs. Hereward's face. “Well, Milo, I'd be ever so grateful if you did. I suppose there's no harm in your looking around. It's your house, after all.”

“Exactly!” Negret scratched his head. “The bag that went—that was stolen . . . it was your knitting bag, right? I was wondering why anyone would take it. Was it really valuable or old or something?”

“Well . . . well, yes, I suppose it's very old. Perhaps someone just assumed that since it was an antique, it must be worth something.” Her reasoning made sense, but now she sounded a little evasive. Time to try his charisma, maybe.
Irresistible Blandishment. Irresistible Blandishment
 . . . He touched the keys again for a little extra fortitude.

“I noticed it last night when you brought it downstairs,” Negret said. “I liked it because I thought the picture looked like my house. Can you tell me anything about it? Anything might help.”

“How would knowing about the bag help you to find it if you're just going to be looking for likely hiding places?”

“I don't know,” Negret admitted. “But it seems like, if you're looking for something, the more you know about it, the better your chances are of finding it.”

Mrs. Hereward pursed her lips. Then she smiled. “That's a very good argument, young man.” She lifted her cup. “And I suppose there's no ignoring the fact that I'm not doing so well looking on my own. Maybe because I just don't know enough about this house.”

Sirin, who had somehow managed to crawl under the table to listen, poked Negret in the knee. Now they were getting somewhere.

Mrs. Hereward sipped her tea. She was obviously thinking hard. Negret glanced around. Lizzie was in the kitchen baking something that was sending delicious aromas of nutmeg and clove and cinnamon and vanilla throughout the house, and she was making enough noise in the process that if they spoke quietly, there was no reason to think she'd overhear. Dr. Gowervine was still outside on the porch smoking his pipe, and Clem was still running the stairs, so they pretty much had the whole floor to themselves. For the moment, anyway.

“I inherited the bag,” Mrs. Hereward said at last, very, very softly, “from my mother, who had inherited it from her grandmother, who had inherited it from hers. That woman, my great-great-great-grandmother, was the daughter of the woman for whom this house was built.”

Negret blinked. “This house was built for someone in your family?”

She smiled sadly. “Yes, although neither that woman nor anyone else of her line lived here for long. There was tragedy in the family. The bag—they would've called it a ditty bag back then—was made for a girl who was meant to live in the house, before it became clear that she never would. But she kept the bag and used it, and much later, she passed it on.”

“Did you come to stay here because of that connection to the house?” This made perfect sense. Milo would have happily planned a trip around visiting a house if it meant learning something about his birth family, even hundreds of years back.

“Yes . . . and no.” Mrs. Hereward curled her fingers around her cup and tapped her ring thoughtfully against the blue china surface. Then she sighed. “I suppose this will sound ridiculous to you, but according to another ancestral story, before the house was abandoned by the girl and her family, a peddler came to the door and the girl bought one of the relics of Julian Roamer.”

“What's a relic?” Negret asked. It was a word he'd heard before, but he couldn't quite remember what it meant. “Isn't it a religious thing?”

“A precious thing related to someone holy,” Sirin said from under the table. “Usually an object of puissance.”

“Well, it can be,” Mrs. Hereward agreed. “A relic is a
trace
of something—something that survives or remains to remind us of something that once was. That's why some religious articles are called relics. They remind us of saints or martyrs. But anything can be a relic.”

He thought back to
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book,
to the passage in the story in which the orphaned girl Nell had used a special bone to call forth the dark stranger who'd helped her stop the rising waters:

“There is a sort of magic called orphan magic . . . There is one bone in a cat that may call me, but it must be separated from the others to do its work. It has potential when it is connected to the rest, but when it is sundered away, its potential becomes
power.

Maybe, Negret thought, when the man had been talking about
orphan magic,
he'd been referring to something like a relic.

“So . . . so you think not only that Julian Roamer was a real person, but that his wishy things were real things, and that one might be hidden in the house?” As he said this, Negret realized that in the story in the book, not only was the bone a relic, but so was the girl who'd used it.

Could
I
be a relic?
he wondered.
Could I perhaps have some sort of orphan magic in me?

“I suppose it sounds a bit fantastic,” Mrs. Hereward admitted. Her face had gone pink again. “But . . . well, there you go. You probably think I'm just a silly old lady, but I got it in my head that it would be a bit of an adventure to look for Julian's relic, so here I am.”

She stopped talking for a moment as Clem appeared on the stairs, reached the bottom, and did a neat about-face to start back up.
How can she stay that quiet even when she's running?
Negret wondered.

“Sillier yet,” Mrs. Hereward continued when Clem had disappeared upstairs again, “I had no clues to follow except for the stories and the bag, and even the bag didn't really give me anything concrete to work with. But it's the only thing I own from those ancestors to link them to this house, and now it's gone.”

To Negret's surprise, it didn't sound silly at all. It sounded as if perhaps, despite her hair-trigger temper and her constant tea drinking and the differences in their ages, Mrs. Hereward might actually be a sort of kindred spirit. They were both adventurers, after all, and they both wished for a link to their ancestry; Mrs. Hereward just seemed to have gotten stuck with a negative charisma score.

“I don't think it sounds silly,” he said. “So what did you think you were looking for? His shoes?”

“His knife,” Mrs. Hereward said, sounding a bit relieved. “I don't really know, actually. I always thought the girl who supposedly bought the relic from the peddler would've found a knife most useful; she grew up aboard a sailing ship sometime around the War of 1812, and while sailors didn't always wear shoes, they always needed a good knife.” She looked up, hopeful. “Does that sound like anything you might ever have seen around the inn?”

“Not really. But then, I've never looked for anything like that before.”

The old woman smiled. She reached across the table and patted Negret's hand. “Well, that's all right, young man. If you manage to find my bag, I'll be most grateful. I appreciate your looking.”

 

“You don't mind adding this to our campaign, do you?” Negret asked as he and Sirin headed up the stairs. “Looking for the missing things, I mean.”

“Not at all,” Sirin replied. “Sometimes in a game you get rewards or find smaller treasures that help lead you to the big one. In Odd Trails, they're called
plums
.” They paused on the second-floor landing. “Mr. Vinge's and Mrs. Hereward's rooms are on the third floor and Georgie Moselle's is on the fourth, right? What do you say we have a look on those floors?”

“Sure. You know what's interesting?” Negret reflected. “The girl who supposedly bought the relic grew up on a ship. That gives us two clues that have some kind of nautical connection; the girl the ditty bag belonged to and the missing chart.”

“That chart paper looked awfully old, too,” Sirin added. “Do you think it's from around the same time as the bag?”

“Well, Mrs. Hereward didn't mention anything about a chart, and I feel like if it was hers, if it had anything to do with her or to do with the relic, she'd have told us. I think she was being really honest about everything just now, don't you?”

“I guess.”

“Then there's the gate on the bag, and the gate watermark. And the gates in the windows.” Negret stopped on the landing and scratched his head again as he looked up at the green-upon-pale-green window with the iron gate worked into its design. “There must be a real gate like this somewhere on the grounds. It doesn't make sense otherwise, all these things connecting this house and that gate.”