Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Oliver found him at it one afternoon, and unlocked the Cabinet for him. He lifted the egg, put it into Set’s outstretched hands. Humans overhunted them, he told Set. They looked like emus, or kiwi. Do you know what those are? Set shook his head, no. I’ll show you, said Oliver, and he went off to the library, left Set holding the egg. Set was certain he felt it moving about. It made him nervous. He was sure he would drop it and a dragon would fly out.

Oliver came back with an important-looking book bound in red leather. He thumbed through until he found a faded illustration of a strange bird. Thick-legged, gray-brown, long-necked, incapable of flight — thoroughly disappointing, as far as Set was concerned. He handed the egg back to Oliver, no longer interested in its lost potential. Oliver laughed. You’re unhappy, he said. I’ve ruined your object for you.

Set nodded, close to tears. What was the point of dreaming up new dragons now?

Oliver smiled, and knelt beside Set. You know, it’s taken me many years to collect all of these things. It is a part of me now, the best part, perhaps. Oliver’s beard quivered, and Set remembered being very little and watching that little triangle dance upon his brother’s chin like a sail in the wind. Just like all of his siblings, Oliver seemed changeless.

Why did you? asked Set. It was the right question. Oliver’s beard dipped and he showed a rare, shy smile to his small brother.

Because of the mystery, said Oliver. I find an object — it’s a blank, or nearly one. And then — and then I have the pleasure, the exquisite pleasure, of finding the object out. What it is, where it’s from, when it’s from, what it does, or says, or was. Who might have loved it, and lost it, you see? What it meant to someone or something, long or near ago.

Am I a mystery? asked Set. Do I belong with the spirits?

Oliver shifted in surprise, then smiled. He kissed the top of Set’s head. This is your world, too, he told Set. You belong here. Set was not so sure about that. He loved the cabinet, but he also loved motorcars and moving pictures and the momentum of modern life. Why don’t you go to museums, like Cedric? he asked. Why keep these things here?

Oliver laughed. This is more than a museum, he said. These cabinets are live things, can’t you feel it? These aren’t Ced’s dead relics, dug up and put on display for the learned. These are the things that matter to me; this is the strange wide world, right here, and he gestured at the long wall of cabinets. Well, the unfinished world, anyway. As much of it as I could fit into Mother’s parlor without her scolding, he said, and unfolded himself from the floor in an elegant gesture.

Set had made a list once, of all the things he knew about Oliver. He rolled it up like a parchment and tied a blue silk ribbon around it and gave it to Desmond for his birthday. To Set’s surprise, the big man began to weep when he read it, fat tears landing on the page and smearing the careful ink.

It’s the best present anyone has ever given me, Desmond told him. Desmond put Set on his lap while he and Oliver sang the happy birthday song, and Oliver gave Desmond a silver pocket watch, and Desmond kissed Oliver and ruffled his pretty black hair. You’re so good to me, he said. What a damned waste.

Why a waste? asked Set later, alone with Pru. Why doesn’t Oliver marry Desmond?

Pru’s face went as red as Desmond’s, and she shook her head. You don’t understand anything at all, she said.

Things About Oliver

Mustache that dances

White teeth

Quite small

Curiosity cabinet is for mysteries

Calls Pru “Mother”

Has a pony

The pony is named Maria

Loves Desmond

Loves paintings of battles

And ladies singing loud

On the nights the wind howled fiercest through the manor, making the windowpanes shudder and the spiders scurry back into the wainscoting, Inge left her drafty bedroom to wander the wild grounds. On these nights, everything seemed to quicken and jump, jittery and glimmering in the savage moonlight. These were heathen nights, full of half-magic. On these nights, Inge was on the lookout for a faerie circle or a forgotten spell, or perhaps a doorway to someplace else entirely.

One of these nights, when she must have been about ten or eleven — old enough to be brave, young enough to be foolish — Inge had climbed out onto the roof to watch the stars light the shivering grass. She saw, so close it was like a small fire, a star plummet to earth just outside the village. She held her breath until it was down, then raced to find it.

She scoured the ground for any fading light until — yes, there , just outside the old blacksmith’s barn, a small flickering lump in the overgrown grass. The damp was already killing it. She put a scratch down the paint on the side of the barn to mark the spot, then ran to the house to find a jar. But by the time she was back, the little star’s light had gone out for good.

Curiosity #798: Ballet shoes, circa mid-eighteenth century. Worn by Marie Camargo of the Paris Opera Ballet; first non-heeled ballet shoes in the history of the dance .

Of all the women his elusive father maintained boisterous and public affairs with, Set liked the principal ballerina of the Ballets Russes the best. His father took him to see her dance in Prince Igor , elbowing Set each time her skirt flared high over her shiny pink thighs. She was very kind to Set afterward, tousling his hair and smiling a dimpled smile for him. She smelled like melted sugar and rose petals. And she gave him gifts: candies from Paris and furs from Moscow, little wooden dolls from the Ukraine that nestled inside one another like a puzzle. He sat in the corner of her dressing room and released the dolls, one by one, while his father whispered something to the ballerina that made her laugh. Set was in awe of this ability that adults seemed to possess — the creation of mirth in another human being. His father wasn’t good for much else, as Pru wryly observed from time to time, but at this, he excelled. He could pull a coin from behind a child’s ear, or tell jokes that even Cedric fell about laughing over, or make a pretty ballerina shake with helpless giggles. In the carriage on the way home, his father turned to Set and asked him what he thought of the dancer.

She seems like a very generous lady, said Set, after careful consideration. His father liked this response.

She is, he said. She is full of generosity. And — Set thought he winked, but it may have just been sunlight hitting his father’s monocle — she’s soft in just the right spots.

It wasn’t until Set was almost a young man that he realized she was his mother.

Or rather, his almost-mother, as he came to think of her. After all, Cedric said, it was hardly genetics alone that made one a parent, and in Set’s case (and Cedric’s, and Constance’s, and Oliver’s) genetics had failed rather spectacularly or at least had been a one-sided affair at best. It was widely understood (but never spoken of) that Pru was uninterested in the business of having children, though she was very much interested in the business of raising them. She was a children’s book author, and as such she had very firm ideas about the way to bring up useful adults. Her books were the sort of moral tales disguised as anthropomorphic animal stories that were so fashionable then, and whenever one of her children behaved badly they were forced to learn the appropriate tale by heart. Osmosis through story. Pru had similar ideas about genetic inheritance; she had hoped her children would be artists, musicians, dancers — but none of them showed the slightest leaning toward their birth mothers’ talents.