The Ten Thousand Doors of January(8)

Maybe parts of London are really like that, but the city I saw in 1903 was almost exactly the opposite: loud, bright, and bustling. As soon as we stepped off the London and North Western Railway car at Euston station we were nearly stampeded by a group of schoolchildren in matching navy outfits; a man in an emerald turban bowed politely as he passed; a dark-skinned family was arguing in their own language; a red-and-gold poster on the station wall advertised Dr. Goodfellow’s Genuine Human Zoo, featuring Pygmies, Zulu Warriors, Indian Chiefs, and Slave Girls of the East!

“We’re already in a damned human zoo,” Locke grouched, and dispatched Mr. Stirling to find a cab to take us directly to the head offices of the Royal Rubber Company. The porters crammed Mr. Locke’s luggage into the back of the cab, and Stirling and I dragged it up the white marble steps of the company offices.

Mr. Locke and Mr. Stirling vanished into the dim hallways with a number of important-looking men in black suits, and I was instructed to sit on a narrow-backed chair in the lobby and not bother anyone or make any noise or touch anything. I contemplated the mural on the opposite wall, which showed a kneeling African handing Britannia a basket of rubber vines. The African wore a rather slavish, starry-eyed expression.

I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.

One of the secretaries was watching me with narrow-eyed eagerness. You know the type: one of those squat white ladies with thin lips who apparently live their entire lives longing for the chance to rap someone’s knuckles with a ruler. I declined to give her the opportunity. I jumped up, pretending to hear Mr. Locke calling for me, and skittered down the hall after him.

The door was cracked. Oily lamplight oozed out, and men’s voices made soft, hungry echoes against oak paneling. I inched close enough to see inside: there were eight or nine mustached men surrounding a long table piled high with all of Locke’s luggage. The black cases were opened, and crumpled newspapers and straw were strewn everywhere. Locke himself stood at the head of the table, holding something I couldn’t see.

“A very valuable find indeed, gentlemen, all the way from Siam, containing what I’m told is powdered scale of some kind—quite potent—”

The men listened with unseemly eagerness in their faces, their spines curving toward Mr. Locke as if magnetically compelled. There was something odd about them—a kind of collective not-quite-right-ness, as if they weren’t men at all but other kinds of creatures stuffed into black-buttoned suits.

I realized I recognized one of them. I’d seen him at the Society party last July, slinking around the edges of the parlor with darting, yellowy eyes. He was a fidgety man, with a ferrety face and hair redder than even Miss Valentine’s Hair Potion could manufacture. He was leaning toward Locke just like everyone else—but then his nostrils flared, like a dog getting a scent it doesn’t much like.

I know people can’t smell disobedient little girls spying on them, really I do. And how much trouble would I really have gotten in, just for looking? But there was something secretive about the meeting, something illicit, and the man was tilting his head upward as if trying to catch a strange scent and track it—

I flitted away from the door and crept back to my chair in the lobby. For the following hour I kept my eyes on the tile floor, ankles neatly crossed, and ignored the sighing, huffing sounds from the secretary.

Nine-year-olds don’t know much, but they aren’t stupid; I’d guessed before now that all my father’s artifacts and treasures didn’t end up displayed in Locke House. Apparently some of them were shipped across the Atlantic and auctioned off in stuffy boardrooms. I pictured some poor clay tablet or manuscript, stolen from its rightful home and sent circling the globe, forlorn and alone, only to end up labeled and displayed for people who didn’t even know what it said. Then I reminded myself that that was more or less what happened in Locke House itself, anyway, and didn’t Mr. Locke always say it was an act of “criminal cowardice” to leave opportunities unpursued?

I decided another part of being a good girl was probably keeping your mouth shut about certain things.

I didn’t say anything at all to Mr. Locke or Mr. Stirling when they emerged, or during the cab ride to our hotel, or when Mr. Locke abruptly announced that he felt like a little shopping and directed the cab to Knightsbridge instead.

We walked into a department store roughly the size of an independent nation, all marble and glass. White-toothed attendants were posted like smiling soldiers at every counter.

One of them skittered toward us across the shining floor and trilled, “Welcome, sir! How may I help you? And what a darling little girl!” Her smile was blinding, but her eyes interrogated my skin, my hair, my eyes. If I were a coat she would have turned me inside out and checked my tag for my manufacturer. “Wherever did you find her?”

Mr. Locke caught my hand and tucked it protectively under his arm. “This is my… daughter. Adopted, of course. Between you and I, you’re looking at the last living member of the Hawaiian royal family.” And because of the confident boom of Mr. Locke’s voice and the moneyed look of his suit coat, or maybe because she’d never met an actual Hawaiian, the woman believed him. I watched her suspicion vanish, replaced by fascinated admiration.