The Ten Thousand Doors of January(12)

I think Bad deserves most of the credit, really. If you could have manifested Wilda’s darkest nightmares into a physical being, it would have looked very much like a yellow-eyed puppy with overlarge paws, a surfeit of fine brown hairs, and no respect at all for nursemaids. She’d thrown a predictably impressive fit when she first found him in my bedroom, and dragged me up to Locke’s office still in my nightgown.

“Good God, woman, do stop shrieking, I haven’t had my coffee. Now, what’s all this? I thought I was perfectly clear last night.” Mr. Locke had fixed me with that look, ice-edged and moon-pale. “I won’t have it in the house.”

I felt my will shivering and warping, weakening under his gaze—but I thought of those words hidden in the back of Kipling: She and her dog were inseparable. I tightened my arms around Bad and met Mr. Locke’s eyes, my jaw set.

A second passed, and then another. Sweat prickled at the back of my neck, as if I were lifting some immensely heavy object, and then Mr. Locke laughed. “Keep it, if it matters so much to you.”

After that, Miss Wilda seemed to fade from our lives like newsprint left out in the sun. She simply couldn’t compete with Bad, who grew at an alarming pace. With me, he remained adoring and puppyish, sleeping flopped across my legs and cramming himself into my lap long past the time he could actually fit—but his attitude toward the rest of the human population was frankly dangerous. Within six months he’d successfully driven Wilda out of our room and exiled her to the serving staff’s quarters; by eight months he and I had most of the third floor to ourselves.

I last saw Wilda scurrying across the broad lawn, peering back at the third-floor window of my room with the hunted expression of a general fleeing a losing battlefield. I hugged Bad so hard he yelped, and we spent the afternoon splashing along the lakeshore, giddy with freedom.

Now, lying with my head against his sun-warmed ribs, I heard the crunch and putter of a car coming down the drive.

The drive of Locke House is a long, winding thing lined with stately oaks. The cab was just pulling away as Bad and I circled around the front of the house. A strange woman was striding toward the great red stone steps, head high.

My first thought was that an African queen had been trying to visit President Taft in D.C. but found herself misdirected and arrived at Locke House by mistake. It wasn’t that she was dressed especially grandly—a beige traveling coat with a neat row of black-shined buttons, a single leather valise, scandalously short hair—or that she looked particularly haughty. It was something in the unbending line of her shoulders, or the way she looked up at all the grandeur of Locke House without the slightest flicker of either admiration or intimidation.

She saw us and came to a halt before mounting the front steps, apparently waiting. We circled close, my hand on Bad’s collar in case he got one of his unfortunate impulses.

“You must be January.” Her accent was foreign and rhythmic. “Julian told me to look for a girl with wild hair and a mean dog.” She extended her hand and I shook it. Calluses knotted her palm like a topographical map of a foreign country.

It was lucky that Mr. Locke stepped out the front door at that moment, heading for his newly shined Buick Model 10, because my mouth had fallen open and seemed unlikely to close itself again. Mr. Locke made it halfway down the stairs before he saw us. “January, how many times have I told you to leash that deranged animal—who in the name of God is this?” His thoughts on courtesy evidently did not apply to strange colored women who materialized on his doorstep.

“I am Miss Jane Irimu. Mr. Julian Scaller has commissioned me to be a companion to his daughter, paid from his own funds at a rate of five dollars a week. He indicated that you might be generous enough to supply room and board. I believe this letter explains my situation clearly.” She extended a stained and ratty envelope to Mr. Locke. He ripped it open and read with an expression of deepest suspicion. A few exclamations escaped him: “His daughter’s welfare, is it?” and “He has employed—?”

He snapped the letter shut. “You expect me to believe that Julian shipped a nursemaid halfway across the world for his daughter? Who is nearly grown, I might add?”

Miss Irimu’s face lay in a series of wind-smooth planes, nearly architectural in their perfection, which seemed unlikely ever to be disturbed by the mobility of either smile or scowl. “I was in an unfortunate situation. As I believe the letter explains.”

“A bit of charity work, is it? Julian always was too softhearted for his own good.” Mr. Locke slapped his driving gloves against his palm and huffed at us. “Very well, Miss Whatsit. Far be it from me to step between a father and his daughter. I’ll be damned if I’m filling up one of my good guest rooms, though—show her up to your room, January. She can take Wilda’s old bed.” And he strode off, shaking his head.

The silence that followed his departure was shy and slinking, as if it wanted to be awkward but didn’t quite dare beneath Miss Irimu’s steady eye.

“Uh.” I swallowed. “This is Bad. Sindbad, I mean.” I’d wanted to name him after a great explorer, but none of them seemed to fit. Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Stanley were obvious choices (Mr. Locke so admired them he even had Stanley’s own revolver on display in his office, a narrow-nosed Enfield that he cleaned and oiled on a weekly basis), but they made me think of that shriveled African arm in its glass case. Magellan was too long, Drake too boring, Columbus too bumbling; in the end I’d named him after the only explorer who rendered the world stranger and more wondrous with each voyage.