The Crimson Skew (3 page)

“Who is Maxine?” Wren and Sophia asked at the same time.

“Yes, Maxine,” Calixta murmured. “That is actually a good idea.”

Burr sat back with a satisfied air. “Of course it is. I am only surprised you admit it.” He turned to Sophia. “Maxine Bisset. In New Orleans. We have known her for years—utterly reliable. A bit of a fortune-teller, which is why my sister turns up her nose, but she also runs the best correspondence—”

There was a shout from the other end of the mansion. Everyone at the breakfast table fell silent and waited, listening; they heard the anxious clatter of running feet, and then Millie's voice calling, “Captain Morris! Captain Morris!”

Calixta stood up just as Millie reached the room, breathless. “What has happened?”

“Tomás has seen horsemen,” she panted, “coming this way along the road.”

“And what of it?”

“He was out repairing the gate. And brought this.” She handed Calixta a long, thin sheet of paper, looking rather the worse for wear from exposure to the elements. “They have been posted everywhere the last two weeks. But we thought nothing of it until now.” The group gathered around Calixta, who swore under her breath.

A fair drawing of Richard Wren occupied the center of the flyer. Around it were written the terms:

Reward: 2000 pieces silver

for the capture and conveyance

to authorities in Tortuga

of outlaw Richard Wren

“Why did you not tell me of this last night?” Calixta demanded.

“I'm sorry, Captain Morris.” Millie wrung her hands. “We didn't think. I only heard you call him ‘Richard,' and it didn't occur to me—”

“How many horsemen?”

“At least thirty, Tomás said.”

“Too many,” Calixta said quietly.

“It is the League.” Wren's face had gone ashen as he realized the Australian forces from which he had fled were so closely in pursuit. “They must be searching for me everywhere on the Atlantic, for they have no way of knowing I am here.” Everyone looked at him in silence. “The safest thing would be for me to turn myself in.”

“Absolutely not!” cried Calixta.

“Two thousand pieces of silver are terribly tempting,” Burr conceded, “and they would jingle most cheerfully in a little wooden trunk, devised especially for silver pieces, which we could shake now and then to remind ourselves—”

“Burr,” Calixta cut in, rolling her eyes.

“Only jesting!” Burr smiled. “Of course we cannot give you up—absurd. But we must leave, and soon.” He pointed at the tall windows. “I can see them cresting the hill, and they will be here in minutes. Though the staff are disconcertingly adept with sword and dagger, I think my sister would prefer to keep such confrontations out of the house. Very bad for the upholstery.”

Calixta gave him a smile full of warmth. “You can be so thoughtful, Burr.” Then she put her hands on her hips. “To the
Swan
, then.”

“To the
Swan
!” her brother agreed. “Friends, you have three minutes to pack.”

There was a moment's pause, and then everyone raced from the room.

S
OPHIA FELT GRATEFUL,
as she counted the seconds aloud to keep track of them, that her shabby belongings were still piled at the foot of her bed where she had left them the night before. With no time at all to change out of the extravagant fuchsia dress, she pulled on her boots, stuffed her clothes into her pack and her books into her satchel, and threw each over a shoulder. She dashed out of the peaceful little bedroom, peaceful no longer, and rushed down the stairs to the breakfast room.

Burr had miraculously found time to exchange his silk morning robe for the trousers, white shirt, boots, and sword
belt that he usually wore. Wren carried his rucksack, Goldenrod carried next to nothing, and Errol promptly reached for Sophia's pack when she entered the room. “Let me take that, miting,” he said.

“Calixta!” Burr shouted.

“Coming, coming,” came the unconcerned reply.

“She will be trying to stuff every gown she has into a trunk,” Burr grumbled. “Dearest,” he shouted up the stairs, “why don't you leave everything here and buy some new things in New Orleans?”

The sound of drawers being frenziedly opened and shut suddenly stopped. Calixta appeared at the head of the stairs wearing her same lemon-colored dress and an elaborate sword belt. “An inspired suggestion,” she said.

“I'm glad you think so. And,” Burr added, “since our front door, which I am rather fond of, will be smashed to pieces at any moment if we do not leave, could I suggest we depart immediately?”

As Calixta pattered quickly down the stairs, Burr led the group to the rear of the house. Seneca clung to Errol's shoulder. The glass doors stood open, and the five hurried down the marble steps, along the white stone path, and across the lawn.

“Millie has already alerted the crew,” Calixta said to her brother, keeping pace. “They will be lifting the anchor as we speak.”

Sophia did not turn to see the horsemen as they reached the mansion, but she heard them shouting when they spotted their quarry. The horses' hooves pounded the lawn, and Sophia
strained against the long, billowing dress, feeling it rip at the seams as she pushed herself to run faster. The pirates, Wren, and Goldenrod had already reached the dock. As the crew shouted encouragement, she raced after them and ran up the gangplank. Errol followed her with a leap, and the plank was hauled aboard in a single motion. A sudden jolt carried them away as the sails caught the wind. Some of the horsemen had reached the dock; they reined in violently, the horses wheeling perilously at the edge. More than one man drew his pistol, but every one held his weapon in the air.

“Why don't they shoot?” Sophia asked, gasping for breath.

“They cannot sink the
Swan
with mere pistols,” Errol replied, only slightly less winded. “And they know we have cannon.” Seneca cried overhead and circled toward them, landing with a flutter on Errol's arm.

Sophia sank to the deck with a groan. “I was so glad to be rid of the seasickness,” she said. “And here we are again.”

“I know, miting. I know.” Errol briefly rested a hand on her shoulder. “But it will be a short journey. And then you will be back on dry land for good. Try to lose track of time a little. We will be there before you realize it.”

• • •

T
HEY HAD ALREADY
known that Richard Wren was a fugitive. What they did not know was the lengths to which the League of Encephalon Ages would go in order to find him. Wren had once been a vital member of the League, believing in its mission to protect early Ages from the destructive knowledge of
future Ages. Now he was forced to flee from the very organization he had once served.

On the first night of their long Atlantic journey, Wren had explained how he found himself in such a predicament. They were gathered in Calixta's cabin—Burr idling with a deck of cards, Calixta cleaning her pistol, Errol mending his cape, and Goldenrod listening along with Sophia. Despite her unrelenting seasickness, Sophia was mesmerized.

“As you've read in your mother's diary,” Wren began, indicating the pages that he had copied for Sophia, “I met Minna and Bronson in February of 1881. I left them safe and sound in Seville, and then I returned with the
Roost
to Australia. Soon after our arrival, my crew and I were arrested.” He gave a wry smile. “There were many charges, but they all pertained to how I had broken the law in assisting your parents. The watch I gave them was the greatest breach. I soon found myself serving a very long prison sentence. Ten years, to be exact. Most of my crew were let off, fortunately.”

“How did they know—how could they know—about any of it?” asked Sophia.

Wren waved his hand dismissively. “The League has ways of knowing these things—many things. Sometimes it seems they know all things.”

“An informer?” Calixta's pistol lay disassembled before her on a canvas cloth, and she looked up at Wren with a shrewd look as she polished the handle.

“My crew are beyond reproach,” he said. “No—it is nothing like what you can imagine. Let me put it briefly so you can
understand what I am up against.” He enumerated the points on his fingers. “Each Age has its reigning wisdom. For the Papal States, which we leave behind, it is religion. It organizes and directs all forms of knowledge. In New Occident, where your uncle's mapmaking is so prized, Sophia, it is science. Before the Disruption, the ruling wisdom in Australia, too, was science. But once we joined with future Ages, we were caught in their sway, and the future Ages are dominated by the Ars—the arts.”

His listeners waited. The cards in Burr's hands rasped and rustled as he shuffled them from one hand to another. When he spoke, his voice was perplexed. “As in . . . painting? And music?”

“Those are certainly artistic forms.” Burr gestured around the cabin, filled with paintings of Hispaniola that Calixta had acquired and curated with care. A girl splitting coconuts hung by the door; a battle at sea dominated the wall above a rack of rolled maps; and a breaking storm at sunset hung across from it. Each brought a spot of lightness to the dark wood walls. “And they have more power than people generally recognize. Each of these canvases is transporting in a way that you may not immediately realize. It is why Calixta liked them in the first place, no doubt—each had an undeniable influence.”

Calixta looked up from her work. “Of course they do.”

Wren gave her a nod. “I'm glad you agree. But it is the impulse of the Ars—the intuitive, interpretive, imaginative faculties, the ‘Three Eyes,' as they are called—that really lie at their foundation. They can be channeled into painting and music,
theater and sculpture, as they are in your Ages, but they can also be channeled into reading and understanding and shaping the world itself. Human minds. Cities. Societies. Landscapes.”

“I don't understand,” Errol said flatly. The cape he was holding lay in his lap, his mending forgotten.

“It is almost unimaginable unless you have seen what the Ars can do, just as the world seen through a microscope is unimaginable unless you have seen what one can do.”

“What is a microscope?” Errol asked.

Wren smiled. “I am making this too complicated. Errol, how would you communicate the purpose of the True Cross to someone who had never heard of it? Sophia, how would you explain the workings of modern medicine? The Ars are like this: a system of meaning and thought with so many centuries behind it that you must be fully immersed to understand it. And being fully immersed, you have trouble explaining the assumptions—they seem obvious to you. You understand them without knowing how.”

“Is this the secret that the League is keeping?” Sophia asked. “The Ars?” She did not entirely understand Wren's explanation, either, but she understood his saying that the Ars might be incomprehensible from a distance. Memory maps were like that—impossible to imagine until one had immersed oneself in the memories. Perhaps the Ars were similar: an entire world springing into being, a world that could not be described, only experienced.

“No, no.” Wren shook his head. “That—that I will tell you
another time. I merely mention the Ars so you understand how I was accused and sentenced so easily. While I was out on the ocean they knew nothing, but once I returned and was in their hands . . . everything was revealed to them. I did not even know that your parents had called me with the watch, Sophia, because I was serving my sentence already. By the time I found out—when I was released, only a few months ago—it was far too late. Still, I felt keenly my promise to help them and my failure in keeping it. I communicated with Cassia—Remorse—in New Occident, and we made a plan. Your extraction was not originally what we intended, Goldenrod, but when we learned of your circumstances, Cassia improvised.”

“But if they punished you before for helping my parents,” Sophia said, “surely they would not let you help me now.”

Wren looked down at his hands. “You are quite right. I can never return to Australia. I left knowing I would be a fugitive for the rest of my days.”

Sophia looked at him wide-eyed, shocked at how much this near-stranger had lost for the sake of her and her parents. She thought of the pins that had dotted Shadrack's map in the underground map room—the pins tracking possible sightings of Minna and Bronson after their disappearance.
To think,
she realized,
that each of those pins could be someone like Richard Wren. Someone not just catching a glimpse of Minna and Bronson, but helping them—at great cost.

“And will the League give pursuit?” asked Calixta.

“Perhaps. But I suspect they have more important matters to attend to. I am a very small fish in their ocean. Most likely
they will cast a rather loose net, hoping it will catch me some time. I have done everything possible to ensure they will not.”

• • •

I
T SEEMED NOW
that Wren had been very wrong. Or perhaps, Sophia reasoned, two thousand pieces of silver were a loose net for the League: they advertised a reward and waited for the pirates and smugglers and merchants of the Indies to do their work for them. But it did not seem that they had decided to forget about Richard Wren—not yet.

On the four-day journey to New Orleans, Wren set out to change his appearance. Since the flyer had showed him long-haired and bearded, he shaved his face and head. After that, Calixta painted his face, arms, and hands with a lasting ink, drawing the elaborate swirls and patterned lines typical of the Indies tattoos.

The
Swan
approached the harbor at midday, and its passengers had their first glimpse of the weather that had plagued New Occident for weeks. A bank of yellowish clouds lay piled like cotton batting to the edges of the horizon. “I have never seen clouds of that kind,” Goldenrod murmured.

“What makes them yellow?” asked Sophia.

Goldenrod shook her head. “I do not know. Perhaps dust?” She frowned. “They seem so still.” The clouds hung low and heavy over the docks; even with the breeze from the ocean, the air felt packed and stale.

Calixta's enthusiasm was not dampened by the foul weather. As soon as they had dropped anchor, she left the
Swan
in the hands of the skeleton crew that had manned it and hurried to secure two coaches. “Before we go to Maxine's,” Calixta announced, “I must purchase a few things in the shops.”

Burr groaned.

“It was your idea!” Calixta protested.

“I only said that to persuade you to leave.”

“Well, it was very sound advice, and I intend to take it. Sophia rides with me.”

“I don't need anything.” Sophia had changed back into her worn travel clothes at the first possible moment, and she had no desire to find herself trapped once more in an elaborate silk cocoon, no matter how fashionable it might be.

Calixta eyed Sophia's footwear meaningfully. “What about new boots?”

Sophia looked down. One of the laces was torn and knotted in several places. The heels were worn down by half-moons. “Well,” she admitted, “maybe new boots wouldn't be bad. If we're going to be traveling north for so long.”

“Excellent!” Calixta bustled Sophia into the waiting coach and waved merrily to the others. “We'll see you at Maxine's in a couple of hours. Maybe a little more,” she amended.