Magic Under Glass Read online

  We reached my quarters, and even as she pinned up the hem of the dress, she prickled me with words. “I’m not sure what the master is thinking, putting you in pink—pink does not do with skin like yours.”

  I joined Mr. Parry in the tower—not the top of the tower, which must have been shut off like the rest of the upper stories, but the second floor, a small circular room with three huge windows overlooking the woods. A table already bore a spread of food: thin soup, more crusty bread, and some kind of drink in a silver pitcher. A footman waited in the shadows, in the invisible way of servants. Mr. Parry was standing, waiting for me to arrive before he took his seat. The footman pulled out a chair for me.

  I smoothed my skirts underneath me and took the heavy, carved chair.

  “A pity it rains,” Mr. Parry said, pouring himself the drink: something red and bubbly. “I suppose the gardens had to wait.”

  He held the pitcher over my glass and I nodded. “Yes, sir. I don’t mind. I explored the house, the library—I spent ages reading.” I felt I was reciting a script. “The sun might have set without my notice.” I hoped I was making proper conversation. I’d never shared a table with a gentleman before, unless you counted the days when I was a wee thing on my mother’s lap.

  I lifted my glass. The drink tasted of cherries and spice and sparkled in my nose.

  “So, you’ve been enjoying the house? It needs new furniture in nearly every room, but when my wife died . . .”

  “So young,” I said, searching for the appropriate words for such a tragic circumstance. Granden’s warning flitted across my mind, but Hollin looked too sad to be a murderer . . . didn’t he?

  “The sickness struck her very fast. Very like the same sickness that took my mother to an early grave.” He forced a weak smile. “The Parry family doesn’t have the best luck, I suppose.”

  “It could happen to anyone.” I was tempted to burden him with tales of my own family, but even men who liked educated women didn’t like to hear them complain. “Were you close to your mother?”

  “Mother and my uncle Simalt. Father’s older brother. He was an art collector who traveled the world, more lighthearted than my father. I think my mother wished she’d married the other Parry, and I wanted to grow up to be him.” He managed a smile. “Father was never too happy about that. But I suppose it doesn’t matter. They’re all gone now.” He shrugged. “And you, Nimira? You came to Lorinar alone, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you still write home?”

  The first footman took our soup bowls away while another brought the main course; chicken swimming in a golden sauce with prunes. I poked one with my fork. “No. The letters travel so slowly.” I had meant to write home as soon as I had good news. I supposed I finally had good news, but would it count after four years of silence? Home felt distant as a dream, and I didn’t like to speak of it. I yearned to see the mist shrouding the Shai mountains, to taste the juicy yellow flesh of mangos, to smell the toasting spices that anticipated a delicious meal. I missed the pageantry of court, the swirling colors of the dancer’s costumes, and the way everyone said I took after my mother. No one in Lorinar would ever know my mother.

  You must be Mamira’s daughter. Visitors to court would know me without introduction, having seen my mother dance, we looked so alike.

  “Would you go home now if you could?” Mr. Parry asked.

  “Sometimes I consider it. To marry, that is.” I wasn’t sure I should talk to him about marriage. “Though if I went home to marry, I’d probably end up a farmer’s wife, and I’d rather have my freedom and my art . . . even if it means living on pennies.”

  “Is it such a terrible fate, marrying a farmer?”

  “Oh, not for some. I just wasn’t raised to it. And it really is a dirty business, tending goats and scrubbing laundry in rivers and all that sort of thing.”

  “You must be very committed to your art, to give up your homeland to pursue it.”

  “Nothing else makes me so happy.”

  “Even that disgraceful show you were in? How did you end up working there?”

  “It’s hard to find work anymore, sir. Back home, I’d heard that trouser girls made a great deal of money here, but when I got off the boat, everyone said that day has passed.”

  He nodded a little. “True. Like everything else, what the rich liked yesterday is what the poor will like tomorrow.” Mr. Parry’s eyes gleamed in the soft light. “I see a similarity between us, Nimira. We’ve each been thwarted from the life we should have been born to. Is it too late for us, then?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” I hoped it wasn’t too late for me, of course, but I didn’t understand exactly what he meant.

  “Maybe it isn’t.” The gleam in his eyes blossomed to a spark.

  My heart pounded.

  He lowered his eyes and pulled bits of meat from the bone with his fork. “The rain is slowing. Tomorrow might be sunny yet.”

  I let my breath go. Not yet.

  5

  The next morning, I skipped my usual routine of stretching and dance exercises, with apologies to my mother. I was anxious to look upon the automaton again, but I sat patiently while Linza helped me into a day dress of striped white and blue taffeta and then dressed my hair.

  I didn’t quite understand why I was drawn to the automaton; perhaps it was simply the beauty of his clothes and the piano, or perhaps it was the whisper of fairy magic that clung to him. I only knew that I itched to try winding him with my own hand.

  The curtains stood open behind him. The morning sun lent a warm light to his frozen form, bringing out the colors of his clothing. My key would release him. I would let him play.

  His clothes concealed the winding mechanism—his vest had a full front, but no back. Pins secured it to a shirt of fine white linen, which had an open slit down the back from neck to waist, displaying the clockwork man’s innards. I could see the heart of him, a golden drum stacked with rings of metal, each cut with grooves. Surrounding the drum was a tangle of thin metal rods, tiny jointed pieces, and wheels and gears, some silver and some with a duller, brassy sheen, all constructed with great delicacy. Although I knew nothing of the workings of automatons, I had never seen a machine that came so close to art, and I started to run my fingers along the metal parts, only to snatch my hand away in surprise; I had not expected them to feel warm.

  I recalled Linza’s warning: Wait and see.

  In the center of his back was a small golden plate from which the keyhole beckoned between two screws. The plate was stamped with a few lines of tiny letters, in a script I couldn’t read—the maker’s mark, I guessed.

  I slid the key into the hole with a satisfying click.

  It almost seemed to turn itself. I needed only give the gentlest nudge for it to make a revolution at first, but it grew more taut as I went, and finally it wouldn’t budge. I pulled the key out and stepped back, reaching for the song sheets as he ground to life.

  I riffled through them, waiting to hear a note.

  No note came.

  I looked up. The automaton’s hands waved back and forth over the pianoforte but didn’t touch a key.

  Was he broken? Had I broken him? My heart scurried to a faster rhythm. I came around to see him from the front. His eyes swung up to meet mine, and they stayed there for a long moment. I didn’t move. Not the slightest breath left me.

  His eyes lowered to the keys. His hands jerked, as if they fought to defy their nature. They began to play, slowly and deliberately, a simple tune that sounded more and more familiar as it went. A child’s song I’d heard sung in the streets of Lorinar . . .

  “The alphabet?” I whispered. “I don’t remember you playing that . . .”

  He stopped halfway through the melody. His eyes rose again.

  “Mmm.” A grunt came from his throat, while his mouth stayed shut in a closed-lip smile.

  I shrieked, colliding with a table as I stepped back. His eyes followed me. He was haunte
d. All the other girls had been right!

  My lips trembled so badly I could hardly speak. “Y—you spoke!”

  “Mmm.”

  Now my hands trembled, too. All of me trembled. I went to the door.

  All the other girls . . .

  And Mr. Parry had sent them away. He hadn’t believed any of them. He wouldn’t believe me. The automaton must have never come alive for him.

  I had even said to Mr. Parry and Linza both that an automaton couldn’t hurt me. Of course, this was before I saw the thing jerk his hands around, before I had heard the anxious grunt escape those sealed lips.

  The automaton was silent now. He sat erect, eyes swiveled toward me, hands fixed over the keys. His mechanism still clicked, and he should have had to play, but he didn’t.

  I took a deep breath and held my hands tight behind me.

  I had to bite back my fear and keep this quiet from Mr. Parry. He’d send me away like the rest. I’d have to start over again. I’d have nothing.

  An automaton couldn’t hurt me, after all. Could he? I smoothed my hands over my skirt again and again, trying to stop their shaking. Oh, heaven protect me.

  “Are you trying to talk to me?” I said in a whisper. My voice wouldn’t go any louder if I wished it.

  “Mmm.”

  “But . . . you can’t speak?”

  “Mmm.” He began to play the tune again, and he kept grunting, sounding urgent.

  He was responding to my questions. There really was something intelligent peering out at me from those eyes.

  “You’re trying to tell me you want to communicate through the piano?”

  “Mmm.”

  I thought for a moment “You want to play the letters of the alphabet?”

  “Mmm.” He touched the piano key farthest to the left and hummed the note that matched A. Then he moved to the next, touched the key, and hummed the note for B.

  I nodded in understanding, although my anxious head bobbed so fast I must have looked like a marionette. “You mean to press the first key for A, and the next key for B, and so on?”

  “Mmm, mmm!”

  “I—I’ll need some paper. Can you wait here?”

  “Mmm.”

  I left the room and started to dash down the hall, but then forced my steps to slow. I must not show my fear or my surprise to anyone else in the house. I didn’t want Mr. Parry to think I was just another silly girl running from the automaton he didn’t believe was haunted.

  I wondered what he wanted to tell me.

  The library would surely have pen and paper, but I hoped to find some tucked away without encountering Mr. Parry. I passed my bedroom, and another bedroom, somber and dusty, before coming upon a small study. Just the thing I needed, yet I had a certain reluctance to enter the room.

  Taxidermy lined the walls—the heads of boar, gazelle, leopard—even a unicorn. Bad luck to kill unicorns, at least we thought so back home, although this one wasn’t pretty like the unicorns in books. It was smaller than I expected, almost goatlike. The glass eyes had an accusing stare.

  I glanced over the bookshelf beneath the row of mounted heads. My eyes took in a few titles—On Hunting the Gryffon; Common Remedies for Balancing the Physical Temperament; Mastery of Man: the Perils of Sorcery and the Summoning of Demons—before turning my attention to the room’s most curious décor.

  In front of the window stood a writing desk, and on top of that, a dome of glass, covered in a film of dust. I brushed it off with my sleeve, revealing little wax garden fairies, posed on branches and preserved flowers, eerie in their realism.

  I leaned in closer, disturbed but curious.

  My stomach dropped, and every hair on my arms rose. Suddenly, I knew—these fairies weren’t wax; they were taxidermy, too. Even though they were only garden fairies, with black bug eyes and smooth silvery bodies that reminded me of frogs’, with no relation to the great fairies that so resembled humans, I trembled to see their tiny toes and fingers, pinned carefully to their forked brown twig forever. Thousands of tiny scales on their wings still shimmered softly in the light, but their little faces were dull; their poses too stiff for a living creature.

  I turned away from the glass dome, feeling twisted inside.

  The desk was free of paper or any evidence of recent use. This must have been his father’s study.

  What did most people keep close? Pictures and mementoes of people they loved, icons of their religion. I wondered what sort of man Mr. Parry’s father had been, that he had wished to keep the fairies within sight of his desk. It was clear he had little respect for magical creatures. Perhaps he enjoyed seeing them imprisoned.

  I threw open the top drawer, finding blank paper and a nubby pencil, keeping my eyes down, down, anything not to look at those fairies again. As I hurried from the room, Mr. Parry was just rounding the corner.

  “Nimira,” he said, taking in the papers in my hand. “Why, you should have told me you needed stationery. I thought you’d be outside enjoying the sunshine.”

  I was greatly relieved he assumed I was writing letters, as I’d forgotten every possible use for pencil and paper besides communicating with living automatons. “Oh—oh, yes. I do very much want to enjoy the sunshine, I just thought . . . well, I promised Polly I’d let her know how I was.”

  “I wondered if—that is, it’s such a lovely day . . .” He clasped his hands behind his back. “If you’d like to take a picnic to the lawn.”

  “A picnic! Oh, but”—But what? I couldn’t tell him about the automaton—“but that would be lovely.”

  “I thought you were the sort of girl for picnics. I’ve already asked my butler to bring it out to us. Let’s go.” He took the pencil and paper from my hands and set them aside on some useless hall furniture. I hoped I could play my part while the poor automaton wound down, still waiting for my return.

  Mr. Parry and I walked outside to the gardens. A symmetrical path led around the flowers and trimmed bushes. The rains of recent days had left the plants lush with life. I brought my hand over my brow to shield my eyes from the sunshine. My nose filled with the fragrance of moist grass, living soil, and blooming flowers, from great pink roses to tiny white blossoms. Bees rushed by about their business while butterflies drifted on languid wings.

  “Do you like the gardens?” he asked.

  “I love all gardens,” I said. “Even the humblest garden is welcome when you live in the city.”

  “What were your court gardens like, in Tassim?”

  I struggled to remember details I could give him. The gardens of my childhood had dimmed to dreams of water playing over stones, twisting trees, serene expanses of grass. “They were full of mysteries and secrets, like . . . like poems turned into landscapes.”

  “‘Poems turned into landscapes,’” he murmured with a slight smile. “And what of Vestenveld’s gardens? Do you see poems in them?”

  “Your gardens are like your country’s poetry. Very frilly and organized.”

  We walked underneath a bower crawling with vines, to a spread of lawn scattered with shadows where the servants had already left a blanket and basket. The music of the wind shuddering through the copse of trees before moved me deep within. I had always found the sound rather mournful. The garden lay behind us, and from here the bees were a haze above the bright clusters of flowers. Beyond, the house stood sentry, with its many arches and chimneys and windows. The automaton rested behind one of those windows . . . could he see me? Did he think I’d betrayed him?

  Mr. Parry sat on the blanket, carefully, like he didn’t quite know how to sit on the ground. When he saw me sit, tucking my feet under me, he made a face.

  “What is it?” I smiled.

  “You just—look very foreign, in that pose. Very beguiling.”

  “Oh.” I had been hoping he found me charming, or at least pleasant company, but “beguiling” was almost too much.

  His lashes, so much darker than his hair, lowered. “I apologize, I’ve let my tongue run
away from me.” His eyes kept rising to me as he turned to the pitcher. “Lemonade?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  He poured. I unpacked plates and cutlery from the basket. A dragonfly zipped by, glistening jewel green. If life could always be like this, I should hardly complain. We filled our plates with sandwiches, cold potatoes dressed in vinegar, and sugared berries.

  I wondered if the automaton had wound down yet. If he was alive, where had he come from? Had he always been alive? Was he a man trapped in an automaton’s body, or a ghost who haunted it?

  I noticed Mr. Parry also looked to the house. We both turned to each other. His expression was odd.

  “So, you found my father’s study,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you I wanted paper.”

  He leaned back on an elbow and took a bite of sandwich. “Not at all. I only would have warned you. That room terrified me as a child. I had nightmares in which that unicorn would chase me.”

  “Why do you keep it, then?”

  “Superstition, I suppose. My father took a lot of pride in his trophies. I’d rather have the unicorn than my father’s ghost.”

  I couldn’t tell whether he was teasing or not. “Your father really killed a unicorn?”

  “So he said.” Mr. Parry looked at the sky, blue and nearly cloudless now. “Did you have sorcerers in Tassim?”

  “Of course. The healer Abraja and his apprentice, and a very old prophet, although few of his prophesies amounted to much. I used to hide from him—he had a stump instead of a left hand, and he spit when he talked.”

  “You don’t have fairies in Tassim, do you?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”

  “Yes, I thought so. They’re all over here now.” He sounded displeased.

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Oh, the same place my people came from, I suppose. The Old World. My mother said that when she was a little girl back in Salcy, fairies still lived in the great forests, and in the forests and hidden places all over the continent, but I think they’ve all been killed or come here by now.”

  “Are fairies much trouble?” I asked.