Salamander (40 page)

Lolo stood tugging at the brass door handle.

– They must be closed now, Pica said. We’ll have to come back another time.

She took hold of the handle and gave it a last tug to make her point. The door cracked open.

It seemed to her at first as if they had stepped inside a giant pocketwatch. Wherever she looked something was in motion, bobbing, spinning, whirring away with a life of its own. In an alcove to one side a tin mouse crawled through a maze of whirring gears and ticking hammers. In another niche an Arabian xebec rode a sea monster’s back over waves fashioned of revolving tin cylinders. A hooded spectre rose from
a trapdoor in the floor, and sank again. Mechanical birds sang and twittered from perches overhead.

Down the long narrow room life-sized automata swivelled and bowed and danced. A Cossack gnashing his wooden teeth and brandishing a sabre. A woodcutter and a milkmaid leaning towards each other and then away again, with each approach almost but not quite embracing. An Indian woman and child in buckskin stepping out of a dark pine forest, startling her, their painted eyes seeming to watch her as she passed.

In the centre of the room, in a great glass-sided case, stood a palace of ivory spires. Minuscule guardsmen paced the jewelled battlements. Around the walls fountains sprayed tiny jets of water over revolving statues of nymphs and nereids. A hedge maze spread in green whorls on either side of a broad marble thoroughfare. As Pica watched, her hands pressed against the glass, a gold carriage pulled by a team of six miniature white horses appeared, whirring out through the seashell gates, circled around and disappeared inside again. Pica’s wandering gaze finally came to rest on a wooden scaffolding on the palace lawn, a mounting for a toy-sized telescope into which little bending tin figures of a man, a woman, and a child were taking turns peering.

Through the double panes of distorting glass she caught sight of Lolo, blowing on his coveted whirligig, about to disappear behind a clock case. She called his name in a furtive whisper and went after him, following the puddles left by his shoes.

Further on, the shop broke up into smaller rooms and compartments on different levels, so that she found herself going up and down short flights of stairs and having to turn back and retrace her steps as she pursued the boy. She shivered
in her wet clothes and kept on, aware that she was heading generally away from the front entrance.

At last she caught up with Lolo, in a dark nook cluttered with wooden limbs hanging from the ceiling, empty metal housings stacked like discarded armour, bits and pieces of oily machinery piled on shelves. Unlike the rest of the shop, nothing here moved or made a sound.

Among these unfinished and set-aside wonders she found Lolo and saw that he had found Madame Beaufort.

The automaton sat in a velvet-curtained booth that resembled a travelling puppeteer’s stage, her name painted in spidery gold letters across the front panel. A pane of dusty glass with a window cut in it for coins separated her from prying hands, so that Pica could look both at the fortune teller’s porcelain features and her own reflection. The drunken Englishman in Canton had been right: despite Madame Beaufort’s Persian costume, there was a resemblance. The wavy auburn hair. The pale green eyes. She wondered if, when she reached the age the automaton was meant to portray, she would look out at the world with this glassy stare, the same for everyone, seeing nothing.

With a waxen hand Madame Beaufort drew Lolo’s penny across the rough wooden counter towards her, until it disappeared in the folds of her dark green satin cloak. The automaton’s eyelids slid shut, its jaw rose and fell soundlessly. A bell chimed somewhere inside, the eyes clicked open, and the hand reappeared, holding a tiny paper scroll bound with red ribbon.

– There you are, Pica said.

The boy unrolled the stiff paper. Slowly he read the inscription to himself, then solemnly tucked the scroll into his vest pocket.

– We have to go now, Pica said. Before someone catches us here.

Lolo dug in a pocket, took out a second penny and thrust it at Pica.

– My fortune? No, Lolo, Madame Beaufort has nothing to tell me.

In the glass pane of the booth she caught a reflected movement behind her, turned and glimpsed, through a hanging garden of limbs, the most life-like creation yet. Another Madame Beaufort, but an older and more convincing one. She was seated at a table under a narrow glazed window, bent over a watchmaker’s vise that held a sphere of dull metal the size of a child’s fist. Unlike the other Madame Beaufort, this automaton was clothed not in a gaudy costume but in a pale blue dress and apron. Strands of faded russet hair had slipped from under the lace cap, and as Pica watched, a hand rose to brush them back behind an ear. This was accomplished, but still a finger strayed among the strands of hair, twining them slowly round itself. It was then that Pica realized her mistake. Machines did not forget themselves like that.

With a pair of tweezers the woman plucked a small flat disk out of the top of the metal sphere and set it on the stage of a microscope. Peering through the aperture she scraped at the edge of the disk with a tiny hooked tool, the tendons in her thin hand pulsing. When she had finished she picked up the disk again with the tweezers, blew on it and inserted it gently back into the top of the sphere. She freed the sphere from the vise, twisted it in her hands and set it on the table. The sphere buzzed for a moment, gave three unevenly spaced clicks, and went silent.

The woman sighed, lifted her spectacles and rubbed her eyes.

– The shop is closed, she said. But you must be soaked. You can stay a while and dry off.

Pica shrank back, then took Lolo’s hand and stepped forward.

– The door was open, she said.

The woman turned slowly and searched her out through the intervening watch works.

– You found your brother, she finally said, taking off her spectacles and rising stiffly from her chair. Good. I heard you calling him.

– He’s not my brother, ma’am.

– Be that as it may, he shouldn’t be unattended. Things in this shop move unexpectedly. Some are dangerous. He was here alone just now …

Pica held up the paper whirligig.

– Yes, and bought this, the woman said, moving closer to take the toy from her. Is there something wrong with it?

She spun the wheel.

– No, ma’am, Pica said. It’s very clever. But I don’t really understand. How a piece of paper can have only one side.

– I know, the woman said with the trace of a smile. I never understood it either.

As she handed Lolo the whirligig, it slipped from her fingers and spun to the floor.

– We heard about you, Pica said as Lolo dived after his prize. In Canton.

– Canton? You’ve travelled a long way to get here.

– We have a ship. My father used to live in London.

Her throat tightened and she turned away. The Cabinet of
Wonders seemed to have shrunk, closed in around her, so that she had to struggle to breathe. She put her hand to her chest and felt, under her bodice, the quoin key jab against her breastbone. She turned back and saw that the woman was sitting again at the table, her hands twined together in her lap.

– What did you hear about me in Canton?

– That you answer questions.

Pica nodded towards the fortune teller.

– That she does, I mean.

The living Madame Beaufort was gazing at her with such motionless intensity that for a moment Pica thought the world had stopped. The look in the woman’s eyes was the same she had glimpsed in her father’s when she found him, frozen in time, at the top of the hatchway stairs.

– Everything in this room is a question, the woman said, not taking her eyes off Pica.

Lolo had left Pica’s side and stood nearby on tiptoe, batting at a painted wooden torso hanging from the ceiling.

Not trusting herself to speak, Pica looked at the fortune teller in her glass cage, at the limbs hanging from chains, swinging where Lolo had passed and disturbed them. She glimpsed, through a thicket of gears and levers and pendulums, the far-off ivory palace. At last her gaze came to rest on the metal sphere in the vise.

– That is a special kind of clock, the woman said. I’ve never gotten it working properly. It’s supposed to tell time by turning, like the earth.

Lolo had strayed farther away, this time in the direction of the front of the shop.

– I have to go, Pica said. My father …

She stopped, tugged the quoin out by its frayed ribbon, slipped it over her head and hung it from the curled forefinger of one of the hanging arms.

She went after Lolo and found him near the door, where she stopped for a moment and looked back the way she had come. The woman could not be seen.

At Savoy Stairs, Pica found a wherry to take her and the boy back to the
Bee
, although they had to share it with another passenger, a young woman in a mud-spattered grey cloak, marked with a livid scar down one side of her face. After a moment, Pica realized it was the woman they had passed the other day, in the tunnel on the way to Covent Garden. She leaped nimbly aboard as the boatman was already casting off. When Pica asked to be taken to the custom-house dock, the young woman said that would be fine for her as well.

Pica stood near the stern of the boat and gazed back the way they had come, even after the jutting wall of Blackfriars Stairs was obscured by the swarming river traffic. The world had grown larger, emptier. The rain had drawn off and the clouds were scudding away, their edges reddening in the sunset. From the river, the city was an exquisite crystal, washed clean of its grime and its memory, pitiless and perfect.

When they pulled up at the custom house, Pica paid the boatman, helped Lolo out and hurried with him along the quay to the ship, glancing back to see the young woman with the scar following them at a steady, determined pace. She walked faster, whispering to Lolo to do the same. By the time they reached the gangplank they were running.

Snow met them on the quarterdeck and told Pica that Flood was in the great cabin and the Turinis were tending to him.

– Someone’s behind me, Pica said breathlessly, as the scarred woman stepped onto the gangplank.

Snow raised a hand in salute.

– Lucy Teach, she said. In ahead of the pack.

Pica followed the direction of Snow’s nod and saw two more women in dark ankle-length cloaks, hurrying along the quay from the opposite direction.

– Cat Nutley. Abena Khedjou.

– You knew all the time, Pica said. You were waiting …

– For you to finish here.

There was a thump of boots on the port ladder, and the close-cropped head of another young woman appeared over the side.

– Crook-Fingered Jane, Snow said, nodding, then turned to Pica. That’s the lot then.

All four women were aboard the ship now, huddled together near the mainmast and gazing around inquisitively at the timbers and ropework. Two of them knelt on either side of the gangplank and looked up at Snow as if awaiting her order to draw it in. Lolo had already gone into the great cabin, and Pica was turning away to follow when Snow spoke again.

– Are we ready to cast off, then?

– Yes, Pica said, looking back once more at the river.

She ducked into the great cabin. Flood was stretched out on the banquette, his shirt open to the waist. Darka sat beside him, holding his wrist. Turini and the twins stood nearby, watching.

Darka looked up at her husband and drew a hand across her forehead. He mouthed words to her and she nodded.

– She says he has a fever, the carpenter said. It is not bad, but we must watch him.

Pica crossed to the banquette and knelt beside her father. Darka rose from Flood’s side and was stepping noiselessly across the room when suddenly she halted, staring at the doorway. Pica turned, and at first she thought one of Snow’s shipmates had come to speak with them. Then the cloaked woman in the doorway pulled back her hood and stepped into the candlelight.

– I followed you, the woman said, holding up the quoin key on its ribbon. There’s something I would like to give you. Again.

Pica climbed to her feet and stood beside the banquette. She saw that Turini and his family had shrunk into a corner of the room. Darka’s hand was over her mouth. The woman from the Cabinet of Wonders stepped closer and set the quoin key on the chart table. She spoke Pica’s name softly, like a question. Pica stood without moving, unable to look at the woman’s eyes, but she saw the pallor of her slender neck, the fragile shadow of the pulse beating there. Then she crossed the space between them, stepped forward into the damp rainy scent of the woman’s cloak, into her arms. She felt the woman’s uncertain embrace grow stronger as she surrendered to it, felt a trembling hand stroke her hair. Near her heart another heart beating.