Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Inge’s father didn’t mind if she played in the disintegrating parts of the manor. She sometimes slept in the old servants’ quarters, watching the moon and stars through the hole in the roof. She clambered about on the old banisters and the back staircase, jumping aside hastily as bits of them crumbled. She pretended she was the pirate captain of a great but broken ship, fighting mightily to keep it from sinking, the baby willow warblers in the rafters her stalwart crew.

But she knew better than to enter her mother’s bedroom. It was kept locked, and the only person with a key was her father. Once, just once, she’d found the door ajar and looked inside. Her father lay facedown across a cream lace bedspread, filthy with dust and age. He held his head in his hands and his broad back shook, and Inge found him somehow more terrifying this way than when he was yelling or glowering at her. She tried to creep back out, but he heard her and ran after, shouting all the while that he would flay the curiosity out of her hide. Cook took pity and hid her in the pantry cupboard. She could hear her father banging about, saying rude things to Cook, and he even kicked the cupboard next to her, hard enough to splinter the wood. Then he went away, his loud footsteps sounding flat and angry in the corridor. When Cook finally let her out, Inge was shaking so hard it took ten full minutes for her to stop. At dinner that evening, her father simply turned to her and held out his fork threateningly. Never, never, ever again, he said, and jabbed the fork into his duck so ferociously that Inge half-expected to hear it quack.

Curiosity #315: Jar of children’s teeth, prehistoric, date of origin unknown. Partially burned .

Once, when Set was the age where fiction and reality are easily confused, Pru told him about a new book she was working on. In it, Mr. Rabbit finds a secret passageway in his little rabbit house under the earth, and the secret passageway leads to a secret door, and the secret door leads to a secret room where a secret feast is spread over a secret table.

Set was sure his huge house must have a secret room somewhere. He spent hours knocking on the walls to see if they were hollow, trying to peer behind bookcases, pressing every knot in the fireplace to see if something would happen. He had wriggled behind one of the bookcases in the library when he heard footsteps, and he stilled and silenced himself. He wasn’t sure if what he was doing was punishable or not, but he didn’t care to find out; Pru was a firm believer in corporal punishment and he still feared the switch.

Set heard two sets of footsteps, one light, one heavy, and then Oliver and Cedric talking — no, arguing.

We should tell him, said Cedric. When he’s old enough to understand.

Tell him what? asked Oliver. That he was dead and now he isn’t? What can it matter to him?

It’s not right, said Cedric. And it’s my fault. You can’t come back from death, not really.

Set did, said Oliver, and he sounded as angry as Set had ever heard him.

Cedric seemed oddly cheerful. Suit yourself, he said. But it’s cruel, if you ask me, not to let him know. Not to tell him what he is.

And what is he? shouted Oliver. Set flinched as something made a loud smashing noise. One of the busts on the bookshelves? A vase?

Don’t get sore at me, said Cedric. I’m just trying to be honest, stop hiding what’s plain.

Set had no idea what they meant, but it gave him shivers and made his toes curl. It made his hollow place feel wider and emptier than ever. His knees were beginning to ache from being pressed up again the bookcase, and the dust back here was in his nose and mouth and eyes, and he hoped they would leave, soon, before he sneezed or coughed.

So am I, said Oliver, forcefully. He seemed to be walking away from the bookcase, and then the footsteps stopped. It doesn’t help for him to know, when he can’t do anything about it.

But maybe we should do something about it, said Cedric. I just thought — and then footsteps, heavy and light, heading out the door and down the hall together. Set sighed and slid out from behind the bookcase, his knees pulsing with pain and pressure. He saw the little plaster bust of King George IV that usually sat on the fireplace mantel. It was shattered in a hundred jagged pieces all over the hearth rug.

Just to be quarrelsome, Inge often asked the governess, Why do we not learn Irish?

The governess always shuddered. Because it is a heathen, filthy Roman Catholic language, she would say.

But Father is Catholic, said Inge. After Inge was born and her mother died, her father had converted to Catholicism, though no one else had. Hannah said it was because their mother had been a Catholic, and their father wanted to make sure he found her in heaven. The mustachioed governess said it was because their father was under the influence of the demon lord himself, though she said it in a whisper and never when Father was around.

Albert said it was because Father was sad and lonely, and people who are sad and lonely seek comfort in strange places. Inge didn’t know much about religion — though she said her prayers each night like she was taught and went to church on Sundays with Cook — but she didn’t see what could be comforting about it. If she had a religion, she supposed it would be the Having of Adventures. It would involve trials of wisdom and courage, with long quests for magical objects, and one would worship in far-off lands, where natives heaved spears at one another and prayed to strange gods in fiery temples. Inge’s village church was the last place in the world she’d think to Have Adventures. The church was damp and gray, and the Book of Common Prayer was boring, and the vicar was a hundred years old and asthmatic, forever coughing and wheezing his way through endless, wandering sermons. Inge sometimes wondered, sleepily, what would happen if he just dropped dead during the Eucharist. Was another ancient vicar stowed in the closet with the vestments, just in case?

But Inge’s father did a lot of things that the governess was at a loss to explain, and converting to Catholicism was just one of them. The governess could not explain why he would not let the farms to new tenants, or why he let the land lie fallow and wasted. Nor could she say why he sometimes went to Belfast, and why he always came back sorrow-eyed. She did not know why he voted against Home Rule but had an angry admiration for the Nationalists, for their blasted courage and convictions, he said. The only thing she could say — indeed took great pleasure in the saying of it — was why Inge’s father had not smiled nor laughed nor touched his youngest daughter since the night her mother died.

The jumble of Oliver’s cabinet held a few genuine treasures. The shelves were lined with gold doubloons, books plated with silver, crowns set with rubies and sapphires and emeralds. Directly under the figure of the snake, at the tail end of the cabinet, perched a meticulous jade miniature of ancient Chang An. And plenty of other goods fit for a lord lay buried under the most mundane items — a stuffed lizard with a necklace made of pearl, a medieval manuscript serving as a hiding place for a small, famous lost diamond.

But as Set grew older, his favorite object of fixation shifted from the bright shiny coins and jewels and became, instead, an egg. A fossilized egg from the moa bird, a creature extinct since the fifteenth century. Large, cream-colored, and solid as rock, it fascinated Set: a manifestation of endless possibility. He didn’t know what a moa was, but he pictured all sorts of creatures — a small dragon, perhaps, or a brightly colored bird, large as the flying dinosaurs. He was obsessed with the idea that a life could be caught out of time forever, spared the fate of the rest of its kind. He would sit before it on the footstool, and sketch the egg, the thatched nest underneath, and make lists of the creatures it might contain.