This Monstrous Thing(11)
“A book. And a letter.”
“What did she have to say?”
I didn’t want to admit I’d lost it, so I said, “Just a hello. Nothing important.”
“Is that the first time she’s written to you?” When I nodded, Mum made a soft humming noise with her lips pursed. “She was such a strange creature, wasn’t she? Always running around with you two.”
“Oliver and I weren’t that strange.”
Her mouth twitched. “I meant . . . well, there are rules about that sort of thing. About a young woman being out on her own with two lads. Though that never seemed to bother her. She was so contrary.”
“Mistress Mary, quite contrary,” I said without thinking, then laughed. It was what Oliver and I used to call her—I had forgotten until I heard myself say it. Mistress Mary, quite contrary, like the nursery rhyme, because Mary seemed not only to ignore the rules everyone else lived by—like ladies don’t drink beer in pubs, they don’t say exactly what they think about clockwork rights, they don’t go gallivanting around Geneva with Shadow Boys—but to make a display of how much she didn’t care to follow them.
Maybe it was the book from Mary, or maybe it was seeing Oliver, or maybe it was both those things squashed together in one day, but all at once I remembered standing at the top of one of the grassy foothills with the pair of them, the sky above us gray and rumbling with a storm. Oliver was saying we were going to race down to the tumbled pine tree on the lakeshore where we launched our rowboat when we didn’t have money to use the docks.
“Wait a moment,” Mary interrupted, and bent down like she was going to take off her shoes, but suddenly she was hiking her skirts up around her waist, so high I could see her stockings up to her knees. All the blood left my head so fast I nearly fainted, and I turned away on reflex, though I would have been happy to keep staring. Next to me, Oliver was looking pointedly up at the sky, but when he caught my eye, we both started to laugh.
“What?” Mary demanded. “Running properly in skirts is a nightmare.”
We looked at each other again, then chorused, “Mistress Mary, quite contrary.”
“Oh, don’t pretend like a lady’s legs are the most shocking thing you’ve ever seen, Shadow Boys.” She swatted at us, and we dodged in the same direction and smashed shoulders, which just made us laugh harder. Mary took advantage of our hysterics and shouted, “Ready, go!” Then she took off down the slope without looking back.
Oliver shoved me off him with a shout and started to run, and I took off after. The tall grass was still sparkling with that morning’s rain, and it whacked sharp and wet against my shins. I was faster than Oliver—always had been—and I had passed him before the ground began to slope in earnest. He made a grab for the back of my shirt to slow me down, but I skated away. “Dammit, Alasdair,” he shouted, and though he tried to sound cross that I was winning, a laugh shattered inside it.
I passed Mary as well and slammed into the tree ahead of both of them. Clutching at the stitch in my side, I turned back and watched them hurtle toward me, Mary with her skirts flapping around her knees and her hair coming loose as the wind grabbed at it, Oliver just behind her, his steps so high that each one seemed a leap.
And in that moment I remember a very clear and sudden certainty that there was no one in the whole world that I needed but them.
“How long has it been since Miss Godwin left Geneva?” Mum asked, and I had to blink hard to clear that overcast sunshine from my mind.
“Two years,” I said. Same as Oliver.
We didn’t say much over supper. Father was eating at top speed, and I swore I could feel him making mental lists of everything that needed to be in order before the morning. Then he put down his fork and looked across the table at me. “I spoke to Morand before he left today.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “He said he offered you a job.”
Mum looked up as well. “Alasdair?”
I tore a piece of bread in half and traced the rim of my plate with it. “Not really. He just said he could use a Shadow Boy in Ornex. I think he meant it more for you than me.”
“He said he’d be pleased to have you, if I could spare you.”
“Can you? I thought you needed my help here.”
“We could manage. It would be good for you to get out of Geneva for a while.” He was watching me with the same tight scrutiny he used on mechanical limbs, but I just shrugged. Father blew out a taut sigh and pushed his spectacles back onto the top of his head. “Well, what do you want, Alasdair? We can’t seem to interest you in anything lately.”
“Bronson,” Mum said, his name a verbal step between us.
Father swiped the corner of his mouth with his thumb, eyes still on me. “You’re nearly eighteen,” he said. “Time to start making a life for yourself.”
“Alasdair,” Mum said from my other side, “why don’t you want to go?”
I tossed my napkin on the table. “I just don’t,” I said, and my chair clattered against the floor as I stood. “I’m going to start packing things up for the market,” I added, then headed for the door before either of them could protest.
Downstairs in the shop, I sat on the counter and shifted doll furniture from the back shelf into the straw-lined crates Father had prepared, and I thought about the offer from Morand. Father had seemed so keen on me taking it that I didn’t dare tell him how suffocated I felt when I imagined working at a boardinghouse in a tiny French town. I didn’t want to be a shop boy forever, not to him or to Morand. I thought of Ingolstadt again and the spot it held inside me, a spot hollowed out and smooth from running my fingers over it again and again. That stupid dream I just couldn’t let go.