The Ten Thousand Doors of January(14)

Mr. Havemeyer was a tall, attenuated creature with skin so white I could see blue veins threading his wrists, disappearing beneath those pretentious leather gloves men wear to remind everyone they have a motorcar.

He waved a gold-tipped cane and spoke without looking at me. “Yes, of course. Wasn’t sure I could get away, what with the strike, but I got a shipment of coolies in at the last second, thank God.”

“Mr. Havemeyer is in the sugar business,” Mr. Locke explained. “Spends half the year on some godforsaken island in the Caribbean.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad. It suits me.” His eyes slid to Jane and me and his mouth curled into a smile-shaped sneer. “You ought to send this pair down to visit, if you ever grow bored with them. I’m always in need of more warm bodies.”

My whole body went chill and stiff as porcelain. I don’t know why—even growing up in Mr. Locke’s wealthy shadow, it was hardly the first time somebody had sneered at me. Perhaps it was the casual hunger burning like an underground coal seam in Havemeyer’s voice, or the sound of Jane’s indrawn breath beside me. Or perhaps young girls are like camels, and there are only so many straws they can carry before they break.

All I knew was that I was suddenly shaking and cold and Bad was leaping to his feet like a gargoyle come to terrible life, teeth flashing, and there was perhaps a moment when I could have grabbed his collar but couldn’t quite make myself move—and then Mr. Havemeyer was screaming in high-pitched fury and Locke was swearing and Bad was snarling around a mouthful of Mr. Havemeyer’s leg—and then there was another sound, low and rolling, so incongruous I almost didn’t believe it—

It was Jane. She was laughing.

In the end, things could have been much worse. Mr. Havemeyer received seventeen stitches and four shots of absinthe and was carted back to his hotel; Bad was confined to my room “for all of recorded time,” which lasted the three weeks until Mr. Locke left on a business trip to Montreal; and I was subjected to a several-hour lecture on the nature of guests, good manners, and power.

“Power, my dear, has a language. It has a geography, a currency, and—I’m sorry—a color. This is not something you may take personally or object to; it is simply a fact of the world, and the sooner you accustom yourself to it, the better.” Mr. Locke’s eyes were pitying; I slunk out of his office feeling small and bruised.

The next day Jane disappeared for an hour or two and returned bearing gifts: a large ham hock for Bad and the newest issue of The Argosy All-Story Weekly for me. She perched at the end of Wilda’s stiff, narrow bed.

I meant to say Thank you, but what came out was, “Why are you being so nice to me?”

She smiled, revealing a slim, mischievous gap between her front teeth. “Because I like you. And I do not like bullies.”

After that, our fates were more or less sealed (a phrase that always makes me picture a weary old Fate tucking our futures into an envelope and pressing her wax seal over us): Jane Irimu and I became something like friends.

For two years we lived in the secret margins of Locke House, in its attics and forgotten storerooms and untended gardens. We scurried around the edges of high society like spies or mice, staying mostly in the shadows, noticed only sporadically by Locke or his assorted minions and guests. There was still something confined about her, something tense and waiting, but now at least it felt as if we shared the same cage.

I didn’t think of the future much, and if I did it was with a child’s desire for vague, far-flung adventures, and a child’s certainty that everything would remain as it always had been. It did, mostly.

Until the day before my seventeenth birthday. Until I found the leather-bound book in the chest.


“Miss Scaller.”

I was still standing in the Pharaoh Room, still holding the leather-bound book in my palm. Bad was growing bored, issuing periodic sighs and huffs. Mr. Stirling’s toneless voice startled both of us.

“Oh—I didn’t—good evening.” I spun to face him with the book tucked behind my back. There wasn’t any particular reason to hide a scuffed-up novel from Mr. Stirling, except that there was something vital and wondrous about it, and Mr. Stirling was more or less the human opposite of vitality and wonder. He blinked at me, eyes flicking to the open chest on its plinth, then inclined his head infinitesimally.

“Mr. Locke requests your attendance in his office.” He paused, and something flitted darkly across his face. It might have been fear, if Mr. Stirling had been physically capable of any expression beyond attentive blandness. “At once.”

I followed him from the Pharaoh Room with Bad’s claws click-clicking at my heels. I tucked The Ten Thousand Doors in my skirts, where it rested warm and solid against my hip. Like a shield, I thought, and then wondered why the idea was so comforting.

Mr. Locke’s office smelled as it always had, of cigar smoke and fine leather and the sorts of liquors that are kept in crystal decanters on the sideboard, and Mr. Locke looked as he always did: squarish and neat, seeming to reject the aging process as a waste of valuable time. He’d had the same respectable dusting of white hairs at his temples my entire life; the last time I’d seen him, my father’s hair had turned almost entirely ashen.

Mr. Locke looked up from a stack of stained, weathered-looking envelopes as I entered. His eyes were gravestone-gray and serious, focused on me in a way they rarely were. “That will do, Stirling.” I heard the valet retreat from the room, the brassy click of the door latch. Something fluttered in my chest, like bird wings against my ribs.