The Emerald Atlas

by John Stephens

  That was when the train jerked and she woke, her head against the cold glass of the window. She felt a sharp need to see Michael and Emma, and she got up and hurried forward.

  Kate was the only one who had real memories of their mother and father; Michael’s memories, which he sometimes embroidered, were little more than vague impressions. Kate could clearly recall a beautiful woman with a soft voice and a tall man with chestnut hair. She had memories of the house they lived in, of her bedroom, a Christmas.… She could see her father sitting on her bed, reading a story, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Over the years, she had spent countless hours trying to recover more pieces of that other life; invariably, when a memory did come to her, it was unexpected. A phrase, a smell, the color of the sky would trigger something, and Kate would suddenly remember her mother cooking dinner, walking down the street while holding her father’s hand—some fragment from that time when they all used to be a family. But her clearest memory, the one that was always with her, was from the night she, Michael, and Emma were sent away. Kate could still feel her mother’s hair against her cheek, her mother’s hands fastening the locket around her neck, and hear her voice whispering that she loved her as she made Kate promise to take care of her brother and sister.

  And Kate had kept that promise. She’d looked out for her brother and sister, year after year, orphanage after orphanage, so one day, when their parents did return, she could say, “See? I did it. They’re safe.”

  She found Michael and Emma in the dining car, sitting at the counter devouring donuts and hot chocolate, which the waitress had given them for free.

  “I’ve thought of a new one,” Michael said, his face painted with a glazed-donut clown smile. “Pugwillow.”

  “Pugwillow,” Kate repeated. “Is that a name?”

  “No,” Emma said. “He just made it up.”

  “So?” Michael said. “It still could be a name.”

  One of the children’s principal activities over the past decade had been to speculate about what the P of their last name stood for. They had come up with thousands of possibilities: Peters, Paulson, Plainview, Puget, Pickett, Plukowsky, Paine, Pone, Platte, Pike, Pabst, Packard, Padamadan, Paddison, Paez, Paganelli, Page, Penguin (Emma’s longtime favorite), Pasquale, Pullman, Pershing, Peet, Pickford, Pickles, and on and on and on. The hope was that hearing the right name would jog Kate’s memory, and she would suddenly exclaim, “Yes, that’s it! That’s our name!” and they could use it as a clue to find their parents. But that had never happened.

  Kate shook her head. “Sorry, Michael.”

  “It’s okay. It’s probably not a real name anyway.”

  The waitress came and refilled the hot chocolates, and Kate asked what she could tell them about Cambridge Falls. The woman said she had never heard of the town.

  “It probably doesn’t even exist,” Emma said when the waitress had moved off. “I bet you Miss Crumley was just trying to get rid of us. She’s hoping we’ll get robbed or murdered or something.”

  “It’s very unlikely all three of us would get murdered,” Michael said, slurping down his hot chocolate. “Maybe one of us, though.”

  “Okay, you can get murdered,” Emma said.

  “No, you can get murdered.”

  “No, you—”

  “No, you—”

  They began giggling, Emma saying how a murderer seeing Michael simply wouldn’t be able to help himself, he’d just have to murder him, he might even murder him twice, and Michael replying how there was probably a whole bunch of murderers waiting for Emma to get off the train and how they’d have a lottery to see who got to do it.… Kate just let them go.

  The locket her mother had given her had the image of a rose engraved on the outside. Kate had acquired the habit of rubbing the metal case between her thumb and forefinger when she was troubled, and, over the years, the rose had been worn nearly away. Kate had tried without success to break the habit, and she rubbed the locket now as she wondered where it was that Miss Crumley was sending them.

  Westport was a small town perched on the shores of Lake Champlain. Garlands snaked up lampposts, and lights were strung over streets in preparation for Christmas. The children had no problem finding the docks, or the pier. But finding a person who had heard of Cambridge Falls was a different matter.

  “What Falls?” barked a grizzle-faced, squint-eyed man whose age looked to be somewhere between fifty and a hundred and ten.

  “Cambridge Falls,” Kate said. “It’s across the lake.”

  “Not this lake. I’d know. Sailed it all my life.”

  “I told you,” Emma grumbled. “Crummy Miss Crumley’s trying to get rid of us.”

  “Come on,” Kate said. “It’s almost time for the boat.”

  “Yeah. The boat to nowhere.”

  The pier was long and narrow and had many broken and rotted slats; it stretched out past the shelf of ice and into open water, and the children walked to the end and huddled there, pulling their coats tight and leaning together like penguins against the bitter wind blowing in across the lake.

  Kate was watching the sun. They had been traveling all day, and soon it would be dark and colder still. Despite what Emma said about Miss Crumley sending them on a wild-goose chase—and the fact that no one seemed to have heard of Cambridge Falls—Kate still believed there would be a boat. Miss Crumley’s meanness was the cruelty of pinches and hair-pulling and constant daily reminders of one’s worthlessness. Sending three children out into the middle of winter to be abandoned was beyond the scope of that petty woman. Or at least, that’s what Kate told herself.

  “Look,” Michael said.

  A thick wall of fog was rolling in over the surface of the lake.

  “It’s coming kind of fast.”

  By the time he’d finished speaking, it was upon them. The children had been sitting on their bags; now they stood, staring into the grayness. Pearls of moisture collected on their coats. Everything was silent and still.

  “This is weird,” Emma said.

  “Shhh,” Michael hissed.

  “Don’t shhh me! You—”

  “No, listen.”

  It was the sound of an engine.

  The boat materialized out of the fog, coming directly toward them. As it got close, whoever was steering reversed, then killed the engine so that the craft coasted in silently. It was a small, wide boat, the black paint on its wood hull chipped and peeling. There was only one man aboard. He deftly looped a rope over a pylon.

  “You three for Cambridge Falls?”

  The man had a thick black beard and eyes set so deep in his head as to be invisible.

  “I said, you three for Cambridge Falls?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I mean … we are.”

  “Come aboard, then. Time is pressing.”

  Afterward, the children disagreed about how long they were on the boat. Michael said half an hour, Emma was sure it was only five minutes, and Kate thought an hour at least. Maybe two. It was as if the fog played tricks not just with their vision but with their sense of time. All they knew for sure was that at a certain point, a dark shoreline rose from the fog, and, as they got closer, they could make out a dock and the waiting figure of a man.

  The boat master threw the man a rope. Kate saw that he was old and had a neat white beard, a neat if ancient brown suit, neat little hands; even his bald little skull seemed to have shed its hair to further the impression of neatness. He wasted no time welcoming the children. He took Michael’s and Emma’s bags, said, “This way, then,” and hobbled off down the dock with a practiced limp.

  Michael and Emma clambered out; Kate was about to follow when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was the boat master.

  “You be careful in that place. You watch out for your brother and sister.”

  Before she could ask what he’d meant, he’d untied the boat and was shoving off, forcing her to jump onto the dock.

  “Hurry now!” came the voice through the
fog.

  “Come on!” Emma called. “You gotta see this!”

  Kate didn’t move. She stood there watching the boat melt into the grayness, fighting the urge to call it back, gather her brother and sister, return to Baltimore, and tell Miss Crumley they would live with the Swan Lady.

  She was seized by the arm.

  “We must hurry,” the old man said. “There isn’t much time.”

  And he took her bag and hustled her down the dock to where Michael and Emma were sitting in the back of a horse-drawn cart, both of them wearing enormous grins.

  “Look.” Emma pointed. “A horse.”

  The old man helped Kate haul herself in beside her brother and sister, then leapt nimbly into the driver’s seat and snapped the reins, and with a jerk that made the children grab hold of the sides, they were off. Almost immediately, the road cut upward, and as they climbed through the thinning fog, the air once again became crisp and cold.

  They’d only been traveling for a few minutes when Michael cried out in surprise.

  Kate turned, and had Michael and Emma not been beside her and seeing the same thing, she would’ve thought she was imagining it. Rising up in front of them were the craggy peaks of a great mountain range. But how was that possible? From Westport, they had seen only rounded foothills, far off in the distance; these were real mountains, massive, stone-toothed, looming.

  Kate leaned forward, which was difficult given the pitch and how the cart was bouncing on the rutted dirt road. “Sir—”

  “Name’s Abraham, miss. Not necessary to call me ‘sir.’ ”

  “Well—”

  “You’re wondering why you didn’t see the mountains from Westport.”

  “Yes, si—Abraham.”

  “Light off the lake can be funny in the afternoon. Plays tricks on the eyes. Sit back now. We’ve an hour to go, and we’ll be hard-pressed to make it before nightfall.”

  “What happens at nightfall?” Michael asked.

  “Wolves.”

  “Wolves?”

  “Night falls. Wolves come out. Sit back now.”

  Emma muttered, “I hate Miss Crumley.”

  The higher they climbed, the more desolate and bleak the landscape became. Unlike the countryside around Westport, there were few trees here. The land was rocky, barren, wasted-looking.

  Finally, when the sun had slipped behind the mountains and the sky above was streaked with red and Kate was sure she saw wolves lurking in every shadow, the road looped over a saddle between two peaks, the old man called out, “Cambridge Falls, dead ahead,” and there, stretching away from them, was a crooked, sloping valley with a river running down its center like a vein from the mountains above. The town was nestled on the river’s near bank, and the road took them down a lane of shops and houses. More homes, separated by snaking and crumbling stone walls, dotted the hillside. But for all that, most of the windows were dark, smoke came from only a dozen chimneys, and the few people they passed hurried by with their heads down.

  “What’s wrong with this place?” Emma murmured.

  Abraham snapped the reins sharply, forcing the horse into a trot. Both road and town ended at the wide gray-green river, and the old man turned the cart along the riverbank, following a set of fresh wheel tracks in the snow.

  “Where’re the orphanage?” Michael asked.

  “Across the river.”

  “And what’s Dr. Pym like?”

  Abraham didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “Different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Just different. Anyway, he’s not around much. Miss Sallow and meself do most everything.”

  “How many children live here?” Emma asked.

  “Including you three?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three.”

  “Three? What kind of orphanage only has three kids?”

  This was a valid question and deserved an answer, but they were at that moment traveling along the edge of a gorge some hundred feet above the river—the banks had been growing steadily steeper since they’d left the town—and just as Emma asked her question, the cart slid on the icy track, skidding right up to the lip of the chasm.

  “Do we have to go so fast?” Kate asked as the children tightened their grips on the sides of the cart.

  “Look up,” Abraham said.

  The red had faded from the sky, leaving behind a bruised blue-black. Night was only moments away.

  The old man turned onto a narrow bridge. As the horse’s hooves clattered across the icy stones, the children peered down to the river rushing through the gorge below. Then they were across and Abraham was urging the horse up a winding path.

  “Almost there!”

  Kate had an awful feeling in her stomach. There was something wrong with this place. Something beyond the lack of people or trees or life.

  “Is that it?” Emma exclaimed.

  They’d rounded a hill, and there before them was the largest house the children had ever seen. It was made of black stone, the whole thing bent and crooked, its uneven rooftop spiked with chimneys. There were turrets at the corners and high, dark windows. Only a few lights burned on the ground floor. It seemed to Kate that the house squatted on the hillside like a great dark beast.

  Abraham cracked the reins again and whooped.

  Just then they heard the howl of a wolf. Others took up the cry. But the howls were far off, and the cart was even then pulling up to the house—the same house, Kate was sure, that she had seen in her dream.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The King and Queens of France

  “Still asleep, are we? The King and Queens of France need their beauty rest, is that it? Lounge all day while others work. That’s the way it’s done in Gay Paree?”

  Kate opened her eyes. Miss Sallow, the old crab-backed housekeeper and cook, was whipping open the curtains, letting in the morning. Emma groaned softly. Michael pulled the covers over his head.

  They’d been put in a bedroom on the fourth floor. Through the windows, Kate could see the village of Cambridge Falls across the river. The old woman yanked the blankets off Michael on her way out.

  “Breakfast in five minutes, Yer Majesties.”

  Since they’d arrived the night before, Miss Sallow had accused the children of acting as if they were “the King and Queens of France” a good twenty times. Where she’d gotten the idea they thought so highly of themselves was a mystery. They were barely inside the front door when she’d scuttled up, scolding them for being late.

  “Took our time getting here, didn’t we? Perhaps the young ladies and gentleman were expecting a carriage with four prancing horses, is that it? Chocolates and cake to eat on the ride?” She wore an old red sweater with holes in the elbows and men’s work shoes with no socks. Her gray hair was covered by a knitted cap. Without waiting for them to speak, she’d grabbed Kate’s and Emma’s bags.

  “I’ve made dinner. I doubt it will be up to the gourmet standards of the King and Queens of France, but it will have to do. Chop off my head if you don’t like it; I’m past caring. This way, Your Highnesses.”

  They ate at a wooden table in the kitchen. Miss Sallow shuffled around, banging pots and pans and muttering about various character flaws the children shared with the French royal family. But even so, Miss Sallow served them the best meal they’d had in years. Roast chicken, potatoes, a very small amount of green beans, warm rice pudding. If the price for eating like this was being called the King and Queens of France, then Kate, Michael, and Emma were happy to pay it.

  When they had eaten all they possibly could, Miss Sallow yelled, “Abraham!” and a few moments later, the old man limped into the kitchen.

  “So they’ve had their dinner, then,” he said, looking at the clean plates and the glazed, sated expressions on the children’s faces.

  “Oh, you’re a sharp one, Abraham,” the old woman said. “Nothing gets by you now, does it?”

  “I was just making an observation, Miss Sallow.”<
br />
  “And thank the heavens for that, for where would the rest of us be without the benefit of your keen insights? Now, do you think you could show Their Royal Highnesses to their chamber or do you have more enlightening observations you need to impart?”

  “This way, young ’uns,” Abraham said.

  He led them up four different staircases and along dark, crooked corridors. The light in his gas lamp wobbled as he limped. Emma leaned heavily on Kate, and Michael, already half asleep, walked into two different tables, one lamp, and a stuffed bear. Once in their bedroom, Abraham built up a fire large enough to burn through the night.

  “Now you listen to me,” he warned, “and don’t be wandering about these halls at night. They’ll twist you about so you can’t find your own nose and you have to cry for Miss Sallow to come get you, and then, young ’uns, you’ll have wished you’d stayed lost.”

  He started out, then paused and came back.

  “I almost forgot. I brought you this.”

  He took an old black-and-white photograph out of his pocket and handed it to Kate. It showed a wide lake and, in the distance, the chimney-peaked roofs of houses rising above the trees. She passed it to Michael, who, without opening his eyes, slid it between the pages of his notebook.

  “I took that near fifteen years ago. Remember the gorge we drove along? Used to be there was a dam on it; plugged up the river and made a lake stretching from the big house here to the village.”

  “A dam?” Michael yawned. “Why’d the town need a dam?”

  “Boring,” Emma mumbled, and rolled toward the window.

  Abraham went on, undeterred: “Why, so’s to build a canal to the lower valley. Cambridge Falls made its bones in mining, pulling ore out a’ them mountains. That’s all done with now, but time was, this was a different place—a decent place. Men had work. Folks were neighborly. There was trees covering the hillsides. Children—” He stopped himself.

  “What about the children?” Kate asked.

  And suddenly, despite her fatigue, it occurred to her that while passing through the village, they had not seen a single child.