The Ten Thousand Doors of January(7)

The sound came from the southern corner of the room, where my blue treasure chest still stood. It rattled on its plinth.

After I’d found my pocket diary I hadn’t been able to help circling back around to the chest every now and then and peering into its dusty-smelling depths. Around Christmas, a cut-paper puppet appeared with little wooden sticks affixed to each of her limbs. The following summer there was a tiny music box that played a Russian-sounding waltz, and then a little brown doll beaded in bright colors, and then an illustrated French edition of The Jungle Book.

I never asked him directly, but I was certain they were gifts from Mr. Locke. They tended to show up right when I needed them most, when my father had forgotten another birthday or missed another holiday. I could almost feel his awkward hand on my shoulder, offering silent comfort.

It seemed extremely unlikely, however, that he would intentionally hide a bird in the box. I lifted the lid, not quite believing it, and a gray-and-gold something exploded up at me as if fired from a small cannon and ricocheted around the parlor. It was a delicate, ruffled-looking bird with a marmalade-colored head and spindly legs. (I tried to look it up, later, but it didn’t look like any of the birds in Mr. Audubon’s book.)

I was turning away, letting the lid of the chest fall—when I realized there was something else still inside.

A book. A smallish, leather-bound book with scuffed corners and with dented imprints where the gold-stamped title had been partially scraped off: THE TEN THOU OORS. I riffled the pages with one thumb.

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books—those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles—understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn’t about reading the words; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

This one smelled unlike any book I’d ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. Damp seaside evenings and sweat-slick noontimes beneath palm fronds. It smelled as if it had been in the mail for longer than any one parcel could be, circling the world for years and accumulating layers of smells like a tramp wearing too many clothes.

It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page.

But I’m stumbling ahead of myself. Stories are supposed to be told in order, with beginnings and middles and ends. I’m no scholar, but I know that much.


I spent the years after the blue Door doing what most willful, temerarious girls must do: becoming less so.

In the fall of 1903 I was nine and the world was tasting the word modern on its tongue. A pair of brothers in the Carolinas were experimenting enthusiastically with their flying machines; our new president had just advised us to speak softly but carry big sticks, which apparently meant we ought to invade Panama; and bright red hair was briefly popular, until women started reporting dizziness and hair loss and Miss Valentine’s Hair Potion was revealed to be little more than red rat poison. My father was somewhere in northern Europe (my postcard showed snowy mountains and a pair of children dressed like Hansel and Gretel; the back said Happy belated birthday), and Mr. Locke finally trusted me enough to take me on another trip.

My behavior since the Kentucky incident had been impeccable: I didn’t torment Mr. Stirling or disturb Mr. Locke’s collections; I obeyed all Wilda’s rules, even the really stupid ones about folding your collars straight after ironing; I didn’t play on the grounds with “lice-ridden urchins just off the boat,” but merely watched Samuel driving the grocery cart from the third-story window of my father’s study. He still snuck story papers to me whenever he could finagle them past Mrs. Purtram, their corners dog-eared to his favorite pages, and I returned them rolled tight in the empty milk bottles, with all the best and most bloodthirsty lines circled.

He always looked up as he left, always stared long enough for me to know he’d seen me, and raised a hand. Sometimes, if Wilda wasn’t looking and I was feeling daring, I touched my fingertips to the windowpane in return.

Mostly I spent my time conjugating Latin verbs and doing sums beneath the watery eye of my tutor. I sat through my weekly lessons with Mr. Locke, nodding politely while he lectured about stocks, regulatory boards that didn’t know what was what, his youthful studies in England, and the three best varieties of scotch. I practiced deportment with the senior housekeeper and learned how to smile politely at every guest and client who came to call. “Aren’t you a darling little thing,” they simpered. “And so well-spoken!” They patted my hair as if I were a well-trained lapdog.

Sometimes I was so lonely I thought I might wither into ash and drift away on the next errant breeze.

Sometimes I felt like an item in Mr. Locke’s collection labeled January Scaller, 57 inches, bronze; purpose unknown.

So when he invited me to accompany him to London—on the condition that I was willing to listen to every word he said as if they were God’s own commandments—I said yes so enthusiastically that even Mr. Stirling jumped.

Half my stories and dime novels were set in London, so I was confident in my expectations: dim, foggy streets populated by urchins and nefarious men in bowler hats; black-stained buildings that loomed in a satisfyingly gloomy way over one’s head; silent rows of gray houses. Oliver Twist mixed with Jack the Ripper, with perhaps a dash of Sara Crewe.