EXCEPT NOT quite on her own. This was exactly the sort of thing she and Nialla had been hoping for.
Up in her room on the second floor, Marzana flopped onto her bed and reached for her phone. Then she stopped and drew her hand back. Might as well get everything she knew down on paper while it was still fresh. She reached for a blank book and pen she kept on her bedside table, then went to sit on a floor cushion tucked in the window nook across the room.
The window nook was an oddball addition to Hedgelock Court, the result of a previous owner having divided a larger bedroom into two smaller ones. Consequently, there was now one large room with a broad window looking over the roof of the house behind the building, and one smaller room with no windows at all and no good wall in which to put one. So that previous owner had chopped out the entire corner and replaced it with many-paned windows that met in a right angle and rose all the way from the floor up to the ceiling. From that window nook you could see a slice of the Liberty beyond the Viaduct: clusters of dissimilar buildings piled up on top of one another and lit by a bizarre mix of electricity, gas, and candlelight; a patchwork landscape of shadow and mismatched spills and pops of light that glowed as the twilit sky darkened and a handful of stars began to show.
Marzana sat cross-legged and flipped past assorted failed attempts at writing a journal page each night or recording her dreams in the morning, all of which had fizzled out after about a week. When she came to a blank page, she recorded what she could remember of the text of the ransom note first: Your daughter is safe. The price to have her back is 1000000. We will give instructions on Saturday. You will have one day. After that, she wrote down everything she remembered Emmett telling her parents; then she started listing the stuff she wished she knew. With each new query, she got more irritated with herself. Emmett had invited her to ask questions. If she’d only thought of these then, she might actually have gotten answers.
She paused and looked gloomily over the list. It was going to be hard to get this information without being able to interview the people involved. Plus Emmett’s detective friend had presumably already looked into all of these things.
This was the wrong tack to take. She shook her head and turned the page. What approach could she take that the adults hadn’t already covered? Marzana thought for a moment and realized she was pinning her hopes on the long shot that nobody else really believed: that Peony might be here, in the Liberty. So focus on that, she told herself. If that premise is true, then what questions does it raise?
She started writing without hesitation. This was easier.
She tapped the eraser end of her pencil on the top edge of the notebook three times, then added another bullet and wrote in all capitals:
Marzana snapped the notebook shut hastily as an authoritative knock sounded on her door. Honora’s knock. “Come in,” she called.
Honora strolled in, walking the rolling walk she’d never quite managed to lose even after thirty years as a landlubber. “Begging your pardon, miss, but I made some cider for the ladies and thought you might not turn your nose up at a cup or so.”
Honora and the ladies typically had somewhat more potent sustaining beverages while playing bridge, but not even bridge night was enough to make Honora break the tradition of bringing a cup of cider—hot in the colder months, lukewarm in the warmer—to the daughter of her former captain. “Thank you, Honora,” Marzana said, reaching up to accept the cup.
“What about a story tonight?” Honora asked, folding her hands behind her back. “Or would you rather get back to your writing?” She nodded at the notebook in Marzana’s lap.
Marzana sat up straighter, her heart knocking against her ribs. The kidnapping had entirely pushed the evening’s other meaningful event from her mind: the letter from Hannah Jones.
Marzana wasn’t the only one who felt for the families who reached out in search of their relatives’ pasts. Honora felt it too, though she did her best not to let it show. The former Lancet crew members who’d come to the Liberty of Gammerbund still kept in touch, sometimes even still worked together, because the Liberty afforded protections that didn’t exist outside its walls. But everyone else had had to sever ties. Honora certainly understood all this, but she also clearly felt the pain of it.
The former captain’s steward would never, under any circumstances, have protested any decision her commander made; Honora’s loyalty to Marzana’s mother was absolute. Except on days when letters came. On those days, Honora protested in secret. For every letter the captain refused to answer, she told Marzana a story.
“Do you have time?” Marzana asked. “What would the ladies say? Aren’t they waiting?” Please have time. Please have time. Please.
Honora snorted. “Amy Ileck cheated worse than an Eel Street powder merchant in the last rubber,” she said disdainfully.
Marzana snickered; Mrs. Ileck was one of the matrons at Mary-mead, and she was an absolute terror. So she also cheated at cards. Marzana filed that away for later use.
“And Henny Unwin was her partner and said nothing,” Honora continued, looking like she wanted to spit. “But for all that, if Lula had played even halfway decent, we’d still have won, because Amy’s idea of cheating is, in a word, dumb. So to hell with the covey of ’em. They can wait.”
Marzana set her journal aside and turned to face the old lady, not daring to believe her luck. “Yes, please, then.”
Honora grunted her assent and sat at the edge of the bed, thinking. “I’ve told you about the time with the truffles, have I?”
“I don’t think so.” Marzana wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned back against the window. There was no “think” about it. There had been twelve letters, and therefore twelve stories. Marzana had spent the night after each one had been told repeating it to herself until she had committed it to memory. There had been nothing about truffles so far.
Honora snickered. “It was a transport commission,” she said, crossing one bony ankle over her knee. “We was to take the barky out of city waters to meet a boat offshore, take possession of a cargo of white truffles, and bring it in to a warehouse in Shantytown. And weren’t we all pleased about it! It was time-sensitive, of course. Food jobs mostly always was. And o’ course at that time Deacon and Morvengarde had a blockade up in the waters just off Nagspeake, so there was that complicating things.” Deacon and Morvengarde again, up to more of the shenanigans that made smuggling such a big a part of Nagspeake’s past and present, was almost always the villain when Honora told a story.
“So Captain V.”—to Honora, Marzana’s mother would always be Captain V.—“negotiated a bonus, which it was that if we managed to run the blockade, in addition to our payment, we got a nice cut of the cargo itself. We were to have two twenty-pound bags if we managed the job without incident.
“Now, there was a bit of a mystery about the contract, on account of it had come thirdhand through a broker who wasn’t known for being clear about details, and owing to that it was anybody’s guess as to whether we were to be carrying white chocolates or white fungus. Mostly we figured it was chocolates, because two twenty-pound bags of the other sort of white truffles would’ve been worth enough to retire on. Still, a nice treat of fancy-pants chocolates wouldn’t have gone amiss, and the payment for the job was high enough to start with. So out goes us to meet the ship.
“And of course there was the blockade.” She flashed out three fingers, each tattooed to show the underlying bone. “A triplicity of Morvengarde ships patrolling out past the battery.” Honora waved her hand. “But luck was with us, and that night there was buckets on buckets coming down from on high like a blessing, a good whip of wind to spin it every which way, and a fog-wreath curling around everything for good measure. Them blockadeers hadn’t a chance, not with Holy John and Saint Ben up in the heavens—the crosstrees, you get me—”
“I get you.”
“Best lookouts for a storm, they were,” Honora said nostalgically. “And it was Miss Meg at the tiller, who could take a schooner within a biscuit-toss of a wall of rocks and not break the tiniest bead of sweat or mess up that bright pink lipstick she always wore. So with a minimum of adventures, there’s us pulling up alongside the ship out there in the Atlantic in all that blow.”
She raised a single finger on which the bone tattoo was further decorated with scrimshaw as delicate as filigree, and her voice dropped a note or two. “But there’s something amiss, and we can all of us hear it. And even as we’re fending off the side of the ship, every man jack among us is crossing ourselves or scratching on the stays or whatever the hell we can reach to scratch on and those down on deck afraid to look up in case there’s corposants or worse up in the rigging. Because it’s a din as can only come from hell or beyond: screams and shrieks and noises like the cries of the damned as the torture comes on. And yet, there’s the crew of the hell ship there, tossing us ropes and waving and calling through the wet like they ain’t floating in a tub full of nightmare hullabaloo.
“So we does what we does, making fast and preparing to take charge of whatever it is this cursed ship’s carrying in her belly and just praying it ain’t a bunch of souls in bags. And the situation being what it is—the night, the noises, the all-of-it—it’s your mother who goes up first, and I go up alongside with Tumbler Fletchwood and the Nicks—Nick Jones and Nick Larven and Nick Nackatory, that was—and we say our hellos, except for Tumbler, who’s alternating psalms and snippets of apocalyptic poems under his breath for luck and can’t be bothered with pleasantries. Meantime, we look around all syrup-ticious-like. And it’s a shipshape deck and no mistake, but there’s no cargo in view, just a wide-open hatch amidships and a line ready to bring something up out of it and those screeches pouring up and out like the reverse of all the wind and rain coming down. ‘Heave!’ shouts the bosun’s mate, and round goes the winch, and with those screams still shredding up the night, up comes a sling with the first bit of our cargo.” She leveled her sharp eyes at Marzana. “And what do you think it was?”
An expectant hush stretched between them. Marzana considered for a moment, figured out a pretty good idea, then debated whether or not it would spoil the effect if she guessed correctly.
Probably. She shook her head. “Not a clue.”
Honora sat back in satisfaction. “Pig,” she announced with a grin. “Cutest little monster you’ve ever seen. Only about yea big”—she held her hands about two feet apart—“but squealing like it had a complaint to lodge with the devil. And Captain V. goes over and looks into the hold, then leans back and says just ‘Ah.’ Then she sighs and folds her arms and looks up at that pig in the sling. So Nick Jones and Nick Nack and Larven and Tumbler and me, we go and look too. And it’s all pigs. All these little white pigs. White truffle-hunting pigs.”
“About twenty pounds each?” Marzana hazarded.
Honora tapped her finger to the side of her nose. “You have it.” She scratched her head. “We never did figure out why they were contraband. There’s no truffle hunting to be done in Nagspeake. But we did the job we was contracted for, and at the end of it, we got our bonus. Not two twenty-pound sacks of fungus nor two twenty-pound sacks of chocolates, but two twenty-pound sacks of pork still on their trotters.” She cackled in delight. “We called them Anthony and Francis, which was a very literate joke to do with ham that Tumbler explained to me once but which I’ve forgotten, and they was ship’s pets aboard the Lancet right up until the very end. I believe they lived out their retirement on a farm someplace in the States.” Her voice softened. “Wherever it was Nick Jones retired to, I think it was.”
She clapped her hands on her knees, the universal Honora signal that either a story had come to its conclusion or she was about to stand up, or both. Marzana applauded. “Thank you, Honora.”
“Pleasure, miss.” Honora nodded once, then stood, adding grimly, “Now I’d better see about the ladies.” From the sound of it, she might well have been talking about prisoners in a brig rather than card players in a cupboard. It was just remotely possible that Honora had locked them in while she was gone.
When she was alone again, Marzana picked up her journal. She set it on her knees and leaned her arms on the flat surface as she looked out over her own private slice of the Liberty.
Honora had told the truffle story as if it had been a grand joke, but even though Marzana had gotten only twelve—thirteen, now—stories, she understood that it was what Honora had left out that really made the tale work. Pink-lipsticked Meg, the pilot and her mother’s first mate, had to be able to take a schooner within a biscuit-toss of rocks because the back way out of Nagspeake by water was almost impossible to navigate under the best of circumstances unless you knew exactly what you were doing, never mind in a storm heavy enough to provide cover for running a blockade—a thing that, Marzana happened to know, didn’t miraculously become easy just because it was raining, merely possible. The Lancet had had no crow’s-nests, so those two lookouts up in the crosstrees had been out there standing on the yards with nothing but their own balance and whatever rigging they could hold on to in order to keep them in place as the ship tossed and heaved and the weather battered them, and they’d still been able to keep watch. Just getting to the punch line alive would’ve been an adventure. Then they had to get back home.
And they had. They always had.
It was this kind of thing that the writers of the out-of-town letters her mother always marked “Return to Sender” were looking for. Hannah Jones, related somehow to the Nick Jones who’d been a member of that boarding party—Hannah, who might even have met the pigs Anthony and Francis without ever suspecting that they, too, had adventures in their past. Jessie Colporter, whose letter last month had come in a fancy blue envelope from Key West, Florida. Somebody named Moth Fletchwood, who’d written three times last year before he’d finally taken the hint and who was presumably related to the Tumbler from this most recent story, the one who recited poems for good luck and had given the pigs their “very literate” names. Marzana had thought about writing back to them herself: It’s not you. She doesn’t tell me anything either. I have to get all my stories from Honora Catharping.
“And nothing ever happens here,” Marzana said quietly. She looked down at the journal’s marbled cover, visible between her wrists. Well, right now something was happening. She grabbed her phone from the bedside table and dialed Nialla, twisting the cord around her finger as she waited.
Three rings, then, “Hello?”
“Nye. It’s Mars. I don’t want to say much now, but I think I have something.”
“Something like what? A cough? A fever? A knot in your back?”
“Something like an adventure.” Marzana paused, listening for sounds in the hall. “But I think I’d better tell you at school. Someone might hear.”
“You call me just to tell me you have something like that to tell me but you can’t tell me until tomorrow?” Nialla demanded, exasperated. “Why would you do that? What kind of person does that?”
Marzana grinned. “Meet you in the usual place.”
“Bite me. Fine.” Nialla hung up, but Marzana could hear the smile in her words even through the phone.