Secondhand Charm

by Julie Berry

  You are not alone.

  There was nothing I could say to that without revealing too much bitterness.

  Why did you leave the one you were fond of?

  My leviathan must consider it a wasted effort now to have brought Aidan back to life.

  “Because he is no longer fond of me.”

  Why?

  I thought of little barefoot Letty Croft, ceaseless in her questions. Why, why, why. Because of you, I thought, but wounded as I felt, I had no heart to wound anyone else.

  “Because people change their minds,” I whispered.

  “Was someone chasing you, my child?”

  An aged priest appeared at the end of my pew. I froze, realizing my leviathan was in plain sight around my neck.

  But the ancient priest, with his back stooped under his robe, took no notice. His eyes must be fading. Seeing his obvious pain at every step, I felt ashamed he should be offering to help me. “I saw you run in. You looked distressed.”

  “No, thank you, Father,” I said. “I am well. I just needed a place to rest and think.”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” he said. “Enjoy the music, and stay as long as you like.” And he shuffled slowly down the left-hand aisle toward the nave.

  I held up a hand for my leviathan to crawl onto.

  Mistress?

  “Hmm?”

  I did badly, didn’t I?

  I didn’t know how to answer this.

  I’m sorry about the trouble.

  I stroked his soft, supple back. “I’m sorry I was slow to feed you.”

  He sniffed the air. Is there any more?

  Hah. “No.”

  He paused. Too bad.

  I chuckled in spite of myself. “How bad, you scarcely realize,” I said. “I don’t know where or when either of us will eat again.”

  He flexed his long back so it made a wavelike motion. We’re near the ocean. I smell it. I will need a swim soon. Throw me in, and I can catch you a nice fish.

  I rose from my seat. “We may soon reach that depth of despair,” I told my leviathan, “but we’re not there yet. There is one last hope we can try. We’re off to see His Majesty, the king.”

  What is a king?

  I made my way out of the chapel. How did one explain a king? “It’s … he’s a man who rules other men and women. The most important person there is.” A poor definition, to be sure.

  The little serpent actually laughed. There’s no one more important than you, Mistress. Especially, no man. I told you. They’re just food.

  What kind of bloodthirsty brute was I stuck with? “You are not to eat people, no matter how they behave. Or taste. Kings are kings, and queens are queens—those are like lady kings—and I’m just a common girl from a tiny town in the provinces. I’m nobody important.”

  I elbowed my way through the crowded marketplace, keeping my sights on the castle.

  Would Mistress like to be a queen?

  I laughed, then thought of the king’s dark eyes.

  “Who wouldn’t?” I said. “But I don’t waste time thinking of things like that.”

  What would Mistress like?

  I stopped in my tracks. No one had ever asked me that before, not with such earnest sincerity. As if whatever I might like would be possible, as if whatever it was, they’d try to get it.

  “I used to think I wanted to be a physician,” I said. “I thought I was the sort of person who could heal and save others. I’ve had a bit of luck with babies and fevers in the past.”

  You are that sort of person.

  “Was that just some noble fantasy I created?” I said. “The great hero, the ministering angel? Was it an excuse to travel to University and have an adventure away from Maundley?”

  Why would you doubt you could heal sick people?

  “I’ve seen enough death to last me a long time,” I said. “I don’t have the courage to face it often. All my grand talk, and now, I want to go back to Maundley, like Priscilla.”

  My leviathan said nothing.

  “Perhaps that’s what I’ll do,” I said. “Instead of asking the king for funds to go to University, I’ll explain all that’s befallen me and ask for help to get home.”

  Still my creature brooded on my arm.

  “Excuse me, madam,” I asked a woman passing by who seemed friendly, “but can you tell me which of all these great buildings houses the Royal University?”

  “Not one building, but a dozen at least.” She pointed due east. “See those towers? They’re the corner points of the university. All the other buildings lie in between.”

  The four towers were vast and imposing. Though miles from where I stood, they dominated the eastern landscape, just as the castle dominated the western one, toward the sea.

  I let my eyes linger over the university a moment longer.

  At long last I reached the king’s castle. A paved courtyard, lined with trees, spread before it. It seemed a man-made mountain, with arching roofs and towers reaching to the clouds above. Guards in lion-emblazoned tunics crisscrossed the courtyard in measured treads, passing each other en route, their bayonets resting upon their shoulders.

  I do not think you are as sure as you say.

  I was perfecting the art of muttering to my leviathan without others noticing. If all else failed, I could take up ventriloquy next.

  “As sure of what?”

  Changing your mind. About helping sick people. And about going home.

  “Oh, you think not, do you?”

  And Mistress?

  “Yes?”

  There is no ocean near your Maundley. If there was, I would have found you.

  That full reality had not struck me before. We could not be far apart, he’d said, and whatever happened to me happened to him. I was now an exile even from my childhood home.

  Stranded in Chalcedon, with no path forward or back.

  And Mistress?

  Oh, would he never stop? “What is it?”

  I will never change my mind about you.

  Chapter 24

  “State your purpose,” snapped a stout porter at the doors.

  “I wish to see King Leopold.” My voice squeaked like a child’s.

  The porter snorted into his moustache and sneered. “Have you been invited for tea?”

  “No,” I said. “But I met the king. He gave me a school prize to attend University.”

  The porter rolled his eyes. “One of those, are you? His Majesty thinks every schoolgirl in pigtails and every schoolboy wet behind the ears is a scholar.”

  Shall I bite him, Mistress?

  “Not yet,” I muttered into my hand, feigning a cough.

  “Well, I made the trip,” I said. “And I need to speak with King Leopold. It’s an urgent matter. Bandits on the king’s highway. Shipwreck at sea.”

  “That’s a fine tale. Run along now, you hear?”

  “I wish,” I said slowly, firmly, “to see the king. I have traveled for days to see him, and I have no intention of turning back now.”

  “Well-o-well.” The doorman opened a bag and pulled out a pheasant drumstick. “Little Miss Bossy, eh?” He took a large, moist bite, greasing his whiskers. I could feel my leviathan sniffing. “Maybe you’ve been sleeping under a mushroom lately, but King Leopold’s just announced his nuptials. He ain’t sitting around waiting upon callers. There’s party after party. He’ll be celebrating right up until the wedding Saturday.”

  Curiosity overcame me. “He just announced it, and he’s getting married this Saturday?”

  The porter shrugged and took another chaw at the pheasant leg. “Love don’t keep, I guess. Sure enough won’t keep long after the wedding!” He slapped his knee with a greasy paw.

  It was hard to think with that walrus glaring down on me. Parties, a wedding, then a honeymoon … how could I wait? I’d freeze to death, or starve, long before his return.

  “Is there a place I could sit and wait, out of the cold?” I said.

  “Be off wi
th you,” he brandished the thighbone, “or I’ll throw you into vagrant’s prison.”

  A sudden inspiration saved me.

  “In that case, I wish to speak with Christopher Appleton,” I said.

  The guard opened his mouth to blast me with another rebuke, then paused. “Who?”

  “Christopher Appleton. The Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

  He took a sidelong look at me. My request had flummoxed him. He shrugged and opened the door. Before I crossed the threshold, I knelt, pretending to lace my boot, and retrieved a morsel of dropped pheasant meat for my leviathan. A regular beggar I was becoming.

  I entered the castle blinking at the change from outdoor to indoor light. The room in which I stood seemed even bigger than the castle had seemed from the outside. Grand staircases on either side of the chamber swept up to higher promenades. Banners hung underneath deeply recessed windows, admitting shafts of light onto the patterned stone floors. It must have taken an army of masons to build this place, I thought. An army of Aidans.

  Never mind him.

  People passed to and fro along a vast corridor. Where in all this cavernous space might I find Christopher Appleton?

  My leviathan wriggled and poked his tiny head out from under my collar. I fed him the gristly bit of meat. “Please,” I whispered, “swallow it quickly, before I gag.”

  He ducked back under my clothes.

  I set off along the right hallway. A serving girl in a black dress and white apron passed by, loaded down with covered platters on a tray. They smelled delicious.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Where might I find Lord Appleton?”

  She looked annoyed. “Keep on going,” she said. “The Exchequer’s down this hall, then up a set of stairs.” She took a critical look at my appearance. Did I smell like the ocean?

  At the Exchequer, stern sentries shared the servant girl’s surprise at finding a young woman coming to see Lord Appleton. After making an inquiry inside, they let me in.

  I waited in a plush antechamber for His Lordship, growing more uneasy by the minute. When the idea appeared in my head, it had seemed inspired. Lord Appleton had been so appreciative back in Maundley, calling my hands cool peeled grapes. But here in the velvet chairs outside his chambers, things took on a different hue. Through a windowed door into the inner office, I saw black-clad clerks pass slowly back and forth carrying leather-bound ledgers, for all the world like priests officiating in the temple of money. And the high priest of all this pomp was Christopher Appleton.

  At last the door opened, and a wizened older clerk frowned at me through his pince-nez. “Miss Pomeroy?” he said, as if the name were a regrettable one, then gestured for me to follow.

  I crossed the long chamber filled with clerks bent over their counting tables. They paused and watched me pass, ignoring their tidy piles of dully glinting coins.

  Only a few of those coins would solve all my immediate problems. I kept my eyes riveted on my escort’s shoulder blades, poking out through his too-small jacket, and marched on.

  We reached a door, and the elderly clerk rapped on it with his knobby knuckles.

  “The young lady is here, Your Lordship.”

  I had seen Christopher Appleton clad in a nightshirt and wet from his bath. I scarcely recognized him now. Gold buttons shone on his blue coat, and an odd velvet hat, like a maroon muffin on his head, hid his baldness.

  “Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t the little healer girl, come to see me.” He leaned back in his chair and rested his heels on his desk. His boots were blue, too, with pointy toes. “You’ve come at just the right time. Staring at numbers all day gives me a splitting headache. Why don’t you come over here and rub my temples like you did back in … what was it? Marysvale?”

  Suddenly the room felt very large.

  “Maundley,” I said.

  “That makes you pretty far away from home, doesn’t it?”

  It was a question that needed no answer.

  Lord Appleton removed his hat and tossed it on his desk. A few of the long hairs that grew around his neck and ears stood up straight.

  “Right here,” he said, rubbing the side of his head. “That’s where I need it.”

  “If it pleases Your Lordship,” I said, “I’m glad to find you in good health now, and recovered from your illness. I’ve come to beg for assistance. I journeyed to Chalcedon with the funds you provided, for the purpose of enrolling at University.”

  He put his ankles down and rose from his chair. “What would you say,” he said, “to discussing your need for assistance while we take a little carriage ride?”

  I took a step backward. He was right. I was a long, long way from home.

  “No, thank you,” I said firmly. “The money the king gave me was stolen by a bandit on the king’s highway, one who brutally killed the coach driver.”

  His eyes narrowed at this. “Where?”

  “Between Maundley and Fallardston.” I was glad we were sticking to facts and not carriage rides. “And my pendant that the king gave me was lost when the ship I took from Fallardston capsized during a storm.”

  He closed his eyes and began to chuckle. He pulled a snow white handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his eyes with it. I noticed again those soft, plump hands.

  “For a moment, you had me worried,” he said. “Bandits on the highway are a serious threat to provincial commerce. But this is obviously a delightful yarn you’ve spun to amuse me.”

  “It’s no yarn,” I said, my voice rising. “Anyone in the city can tell you about the wreck of The White Dragon yesterday, miles south of here.”

  He shrugged and tossed down his kerchief. “What do you want from me?”

  I paused. What did I want? To go home. That was what I came to request. I wanted to go home to Grandfather.

  But I still wanted to learn. And my leviathan was right. There was no ocean in Maundley.

  Would my own villagers gaze at me in horror, as the Rumsens had done? The university, once my impossible dream, now seemed like a last refuge, like the one place I might successfully hide myself as a quiet stranger with a serpent under my cowl.

  “I want what the king first gave me,” I said. “Enrollment to the university.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “This is what I tell King Leopold about women. Got their hands in your pockets, every single one of them.”

  That smug look on his face made me forget my place. “How can you say such a thing?” I cried. “I came in good faith, and was twice waylaid by misfortune. I haven’t cost the king anything other than what he freely offered me. All I want is what he promised.”

  “You’ll want to watch your tone with me,” he said. “Why should I give you anything?”

  He took a step toward me.

  Don’t worry, Mistress, my leviathan said. I won’t let him hurt you.

  A felt surge of relief. That’s right. I had a leviathan with me now. I held my head higher.

  “You should give me what I’ve asked for, if you honor the king’s promises,” I said. “Give me an introduction to the registrar at the college, and payment for room and board.”

  He took a step closer. Close to my skin, my leviathan shifted, poised and ready.

  “Kings make all sorts of promises,” he said, “but it is I who hold the purse strings.”

  A door opened. It wasn’t the door through which I’d come, but one behind His Lordship’s desk, one that seemed more private. A woman poked her head through.

  She was young and beautiful, with dark hair piled high in loops and braids, and glittering necklaces at her throat. She wore a yellow and gold gown that swept against the doorway, and she clutched a soft velvet purse. I’d never been so relieved to see another soul, for at the sight of her, Christopher Appleton scowled, resumed his seat, and dipped his quill into his inkwell.

  “Oh, you’re busy,” the woman said, noticing me. “I’ll just wait outside—”

  “No, don’t,” I cut in quickly. The
woman looked at me curiously.

  “We were just finishing,” I said. “Lord Appleton has kindly agreed to assist me.”

  The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s cheek muscle twitched. He plied his pen to his paper.

  The young woman seated herself on Lord Appleton’s desk as casually as if she were his own daughter, and aimed her smile in my direction. “Marvelous! It seems I’ve caught him in a generous frame of mind, then. I have a small request for him myself.”

  I could not understand why this woman, obviously a grand lady of some means, and perhaps even some title, would regard me as closely as she did, and speak with me so freely.

  “ ’Course you do,” Lord Appleton said. “You may have the king hoodwinked, but I see just what you are.”

  The young lady winked at me, smiling broadly.

  “And what am I?”

  “A woman,” said the Chancellor of the Exchequer. “A conniving, stealing, slit-your-throat-open-to-see-if-there’s-a-penny-in-your-gut woman.” He nodded in my direction—as if he and I were now, somehow, comrades. “Here she comes with her purse, expecting me to fill it.”

  “He’s just sour about the honeymoon ship,” the young lady said in a friendly whisper that was easily heard. She thrust out her hand prettily at me. “I’m Annalise. Has this old weasel been giving you trouble? You look distressed.”

  Before I could stammer a reply, she turned to see what Appleton was writing. “Hurry up, Lord Appleton,” she said. “I want to discuss roasted peacocks, and truffles, and the dress. And entertainers! We’ll need amusement on our voyage. What are you giving this girl, anyway?”

  “She wants to go to University,” the chancellor growled. “Get off my desk.”

  “The desk belongs to Leopold, so in a few days it will belong to me too,” she teased.

  Annalise! Of course. Why didn’t I realize? This was the princess the king was to marry.

  “University sounds thrilling,” she went on, giving me a closer look. “If I had the patience for studying, heaven knows it’d be good for me.”

  “Patience is hardly your strong suit,” Lord Appleton said.

  “But I still haven’t learned your name,” Princess Annalise said, ignoring him.