The Girl from Everywhere (The Girl from Everywhere #1)(46)

Three copies. What had happened to the other two? Lost over time, I suppose. Or perhaps they would come up someday, at another auction. The one we’d bought was pristine; whoever had kept it must have had instructions to preserve it perfectly. At least I knew, now, if any of the other Sutfin maps ever turned up, we could write them off.

I paused on the street corner, and my hand went to the pearl at my throat. Surely Mr. D had been the person to commission the maps, which meant he knew more about Navigation than I had imagined. In fact, he’d reached across more than a century to find us. The gall. He must have had Joss’s help from the start. Was he waiting by the docks the day after Sutfin turned over each map? I yanked the pendant back and forth on its chain. I only had an hour left before Bee expected me back, so I hurried toward Chinatown.

Joss greeted me by name as I entered her shop. I don’t know how she identified me without my having said a word, but I wasn’t in the mood to ask. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeming impressed.

I went all oars in the water, ramming speed. “Sutfin. Your idea or Mr. D’s?”

“You needn’t thank me,” she said smoothly.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Your father would.” She leaned down to rummage under her counter. “How else would he be able to get the map he really wants?”

I frowned. “If that was your goal, you could have made sure it was as well preserved as the others.”

“You arrived the day Mr. Sutfin finished his third map,” she replied. “The first two were clearly lost. Good thing we could make more than one. How could we guarantee the safety of the other map, so rare and so valuable, across so much time?”

I ground my teeth, but she had a point.

She straightened up, and in her turmeric-stained hands was a pile of papers: a selection of maps. “But you might thank me for these,” she said as she spread them on the rough wooden countertop. “If we can come to an arrangement for them.”

My desire overcame my pride embarrassingly quickly, and I bent my head to sort through the maps. My irritation returned. Her collection contained some worthless pages cut from an atlas (the Cape of Good Hope, the Canary Islands, Eastern Europe), a torn Japanese whale migration chart from the 1750s, and a hymnal with all the pages ripped out but one. Only mildly curious as to which hymn had been left behind, I opened the cover and saw that the single page inside was loose, and that it was no hymn.

“What’s this?” I said, barely above a whisper. The page, folded in quarters, was so delicate I was afraid a strong breath would cause it to disintegrate. The hymnal covers had been used to protect it.

“Very old, that map. Very valuable. It’s from the Qin dynasty. Shows the lost tomb of the first emperor. He was buried with all the riches of his empire, and his tomb is guarded by warriors of clay brought to life to watch over an eternity under the earth.”

She spoke to me as though I were a gawking country girl—I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d thrown in a mummy’s curse—but I’d heard of the tomb of Emperor Qin and his terra-cotta warriors. Sima Qian, the first Chinese historian, had written about the tomb, and a few of the warriors in one of the antechambers been rediscovered in the 1970s by Chinese farmers, although the main portion of the fantastical tomb had not yet been opened.

Still.

“You’re saying this map is nearly two thousand years old?” Skepticism practically dripped from each word; after all, she couldn’t see my expression.

“That was when it was drawn,” she said carefully. “But it does not seem to have aged two thousand years. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Very. When did you acquire it?”

“Back when I could see. It came from a dying woman. She had no more need of it.”

I chewed on my lip for another minute. It was highly unlikely this map was authentic, but there was something compelling about it. “How much?”

She clasped her hands together eagerly. “Would you like some tea?”

I declined the tea, but I did end up with the map, and at one third her starting price, but four times my own. She was an excellent bargainer, but she seemed proud of my effort. In fact, if the map was genuine, she had let me off lightly.

As for the other map she’d brokered, I might as well ask, though I might not trust her answers. “The map my father wants,” I said as I counted out the coins. “The one of the Happy House.”

“Hapai Hale,” she corrected. “What of it?”

“Was it actually inked in 1868?”

She lifted one shoulder. “Too bad Mr. Hart was drowned, or you could ask him yourself.”

I cocked my head. “What do you mean, ‘was drowned’?”

“In the bay,” she said.

“What I mean is—”

“Very tragic,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “A great loss. Blake Hart spent many hours entertaining us. He was a favorite of the ladies. He did indeed draw the map. If your mother was here, she could tell you. Of course, if she were still here, you wouldn’t need his map.”

I made a face, although she couldn’t see it, and left the shop with the map she’d sold me and the bitter taste in my mouth she’d thrown in free.

As I hurried back to the ship, I thought of a question I hadn’t asked. Just past the docks, the wharf rats were lounging on the esplanade, and I stopped in front of one of the half-grown boys. “Want a nickel?”