The Golden Specific

by S. E. Grove

  Mrs. Clay left the kitchen, her heels clicking on the wooden floorboards.

  They waited, listening, as she opened the door, and a male voice announced itself. Moments later, Mrs. Clay reappeared, followed by a slight man in a pale gray suit.

  “Bligh!” Shadrack exclaimed, getting to his feet. “What has happened?”

  “I’m very sorry to interrupt your celebration,” Prime Minister Bligh said, taking in the half-eaten cake and the gathering at a glance, “but the matter is urgent. Broadgirdle is making his way here at this very moment. He will be attempting to persuade you to take steps to dissolve the treaties with the Indian Territories. He has some leverage to force your hand, but I do not know what it is. He does not know that I know, and he cannot know that I am here. But I had to warn you.”

  Shadrack stared at him, aghast. “Dissolve the treaties? That’s as good as declaring war.”

  Bligh shook his head. “Ignore that for the moment. What leverage might he have? What does he know about you that could hurt you? And what can we do to make it ineffective?”

  “I don’t know. I—” Shadrack ran a hand through his hair. “Nothing. Or any number of things. It depends on how dirty he is willing to get.”

  “I believe very dirty.” Bligh set his mouth in a firm line.

  There was another knock at the front door, this one loud and steady. They all stood frozen. “You must answer it,” Bligh said tersely. “It will seems suspicious otherwise.”

  Shadrack took a deep breath. “Miles, take Bligh to the map room and do not leave until I come down to find you. Sophia, Theo—upstairs. Mrs. Clay, I will wait for Broadgirdle in the study.” He quickly rolled up the map on the table.

  “Very well, Mr. Elli,” Mrs. Clay said, her voice unsteady. She left the kitchen. Bligh followed Miles out of the room in the opposite direction.

  Sophia stood rooted to the ground. “Come on,” Theo said, pulling at her hand.

  “It will be fine,” Shadrack said. He squeezed her shoulder. “Go on up. I’ll call you when this is over.”

  6

  Wren’s Roost

  February 20, 1881

  I clung to the piece of the Kestrel’s mast as the sea heaved around me, laden with the ship’s wreckage. While the sky remained dark and inscrutable, the howling of the Fellweeds had subsided, and I heard a distant call over the continuing crash of the waves: “Minna! Minna!” It was my husband. My throat rasped and raw with salt water, I shouted back as loudly as I could. Finally, he heard me. “Stay where you are and call my name!” he cried. “I’ll swim to you.”

  I called his name until my voice was shredded, until I saw a piece of debris moving toward me through the settling waters. Kneeling on a large, jagged piece of the deck, Bronson was using a broken plank as an oar. He pulled me up onto the makeshift raft carefully, and then we collapsed, exhausted, into each other’s arms.

  The relief was short-lived. Soon, the terror of being so lost on such a great expanse of water overtook us. I would have cried, but that my body and mind were too spent, and for a time I slept, or lost consciousness, or simply drifted in that vast emptiness made by the ocean at night.

  When I returned to the world, Bronson and I were still tightly wrapped around one another. The waters were as calm as I had ever seen them on the open sea, and the sky had begun to lighten. I realized that I had been roused by the sound of shouting voices, and I shook Bronson awake.

  We turned as one to look at the ship that sailed toward us: similar in size to the Kestrel, its figurehead was a mermaid with a small bird in her cupped, outstretched hands. The Roost, as the ship declared itself to be in fine, white letters, moved gently toward us, and a pair of deckhands tossed down a rope ladder. I thought for several seconds that I was imagining it. I could not believe our luck.

  From the ship’s name, its familiar aspect and equipment, and the loud cries in English of the sailors, we took it to be from New Occident. Indeed, Captain Wren, who met us on deck, confirmed that he had sailed from a remote port neither of us had heard of in Upper Massachusetts. Incredibly tall—as, indeed, was his entire crew—he had a keen blue gaze that spoke powerfully of both his competence as a captain and his curiosity as to our circumstances.

  The captain ushered us immediately into his cabin, where he provided us with clean clothes and tumblers of fresh water. He left us to bathe and compose ourselves. “I am anxious to be informed of your misadventure as soon as you are well enough to speak of it,” he said with a kind of formality, even stiffness, that I have not often observed in sea captains. “But I know you must be completely exhausted. Please rest, and then find me on deck when you are able.” We thanked him warmly for his kindness and set about following his generous instructions.

  Bronson has often claimed that I was as taken in as he was, and that neither of us observed anything unusual about Captain Wren and his crew. He argues with me that we were half ruined by the destruction of the Kestrel and the long night on the open sea, and that we could not have been alert, observant, and circumspect. But I maintain that my memory is correct, and that even from that first moment in Captain Wren’s cabin—indeed, from the very moment he welcomed us aboard the Roost—I suspected that he was not who he claimed to be.

  The clothes he had provided were too well made. It will sound absurd, but this made me uneasy from the start. They were finer and more compact than ours. I have mentioned that Wren and his crew were all tall men; they also had extraordinarily white and even teeth. They seemed too healthy, too well kept to be mariners. The items in Wren’s cabin, too, seemed unlike the objects in Captain Gibbons’s. I cannot explain how they seemed wrong to me, other than to say that while half of them seemed peculiarly new, as if they had never been used, the other half seemed entirely too old, as if unearthed in a curiosity shop. Some of the nautical charts, for example, which I glimpsed on his desk as I was drying myself, were printed on a paper so white that I had never seen the like. At the same time, the magnifying glass—identical to one owned by Gibbons, and made by a manufacturer in Boston—seemed to carry centuries of use. The wooden handle was cracked and blackened as if from a thousand Atlantic crossings. I can observe these things now, with hindsight, more clearly. At the time, I knew only that the sum total of Captain Wren’s cabin, however familiar in its form and composition, made me ill at ease; something was not quite right. I said as much to Bronson before we made our way up to the deck. “What do you make of him?” I asked.

  “Seems a good man,” Bronson said. He reached out to cup my chin. “Don’t worry, my love. We’re safe now.”

  “Yes. Yes, we’re safe.” I paused. “Does it not strike you that there is something different about him and his crew? He’s not like any man from Upper Mass I’ve ever known.”

  Bronson laughed. “True. Probably not from Upper Mass, though. He said that he had sailed from a port there, not that he was from there.” He put his arm around me. “Don’t worry yourself. If he had wanted to do us harm, he had only to leave us in the ocean.”

  I could not deny such sound logic, and my sense of unease was shortly put to rest by the captain’s friendly reception, even while many aspects of his bearing and the ship itself continued to strike me as unusual. He wanted to hear every detail of our misadventure.

  Bronson began by showing him the letter from Bruno Casavetti that had precipitated our voyage:

  December 2, 1880

  Minna and Bronson, my dear friends—

  I write to you in great need, with the most desperate of pleas.

  As you know, I departed from Boston six months ago to map the border between the Middle Roads and the Papal States. I cannot at this moment recount the details of how this objective changed along the way, so that I lost all possibility of fulfilling my purpose. My friends, something terrible has happened. In this place I thought I knew so well, I have discovered a new Age. I cannot explain how it came
to be here, but it brings with it fear, intolerance, and persecution.

  I write to you now—on smuggled paper—thanks to the kindness of a child, whom I saved from a fate that I, sadly, was unable to escape. They believed this child to be a witch, and they believe me to be some similar agent of devilry. A terrible plague that they call lapena has wreaked havoc on the region, and the people see witchery in everything and everyone. I was able to prove them wrong in the case of the girl, Rosemary, but the case against me is stronger, and I have not the advantage of being a winsome, likable child native to their Age.

  At present I am imprisoned in the town of Murtea (I have also seen it Murcia or Mursiya in some of Shadrack’s volumes—do not trust my spelling), and the judges slowly gather evidence against me. Loath as I am to call you here, I feel that you are my only hope. The child Rosemary will deliver my letter to a distant town so that through the royal mail it may reach the port and, from there, I hope, some traveler heading to Boston. I enclose a map and directions for locating her when you arrive. Protect her if you can—she is not to blame for this.

  I am sorry, my friends, to bring this misfortune into your path. My life is in your hands.

  Bruno Casavetti

  “Very serious indeed,” Wren agreed, handing the letter back. “And you decided to respond in person to his call for aid?”

  We described the voyage aboard the Kestrel and the terrible encounter with the Fellweeds. Captain Wren’s eyes lit up with something near excitement when we described the creatures that had destroyed our ship. “I have never seen a Fellweed,” he said, in a low, awed voice, “though I have heard them described.”

  “Frankly,” Bronson admitted, “we both thought it a mere fancy. I would never have believed the things existed if I had not seen them with my own eyes.”

  “I would have said the same before this morning,” Captain Wren agreed. “Although some part of me always wanted them to be real.”

  “Why should you wish such a thing?” I asked him, astonished. “The Fellweeds were merciless.”

  “Well, yes,” Wren replied, somewhat embarrassed. He wore an amber-tinted monocle on a golden chain, and whenever he was at ease he would twirl the monocle idly. Now the monocle came to an abrupt halt. “An idle curiosity, I suppose. In any case,” he went on, changing the subject, “it will be no difficulty to take you to Seville, if that was your destination.”

  “It was. Are you certain this does not make you deviate from your intended route?” Bronson asked.

  “Not in the least,” Captain Wren replied, without actually telling us what his intended route was. “We have ten days of sailing ahead of us, and I will look forward to your company during that time.” Wren’s tanned face and white, even teeth seemed to shine at the prospect. And he did, indeed, appear to savor our conversation. Over the next few days, we told him about our past journeys, and our dear Sophia, and how we had planned to take her with us on this voyage, but the dangers Bruno had written of prevented it. He had a thousand questions for us about Boston, which he justified by saying that he was from a remote and isolated part of Seminole, and that he had never visited our capital. I would have believed this explanation but for his unwillingness to talk about the area he claimed to call home and—more strikingly—what emerged as his surprising ignorance regarding New Occident in general.

  This ignorance was hard to place, as he certainly seemed to know a great deal about some aspects of life in New Occident. Yet at other moments he would ask a question or use a phrase that baffled us. Finally, on the third night aboard the Roost, my discomfort prompted me to confront him more directly. We had been telling him about our journey, some years prior, into the Indian Territories. Bronson, with his skillful pen, drew quick sketches of the people and places we had seen along the way. Captain Wren leaned in over the wooden table, quite literally on the edge of his seat. His bronzed hands clasped each other; his blue eyes were wide with interest at our description of riding through upper New York toward Six Nations City. “I have never been to Six Nations City. What is it like?” he asked eagerly.

  “A great trading city,” Bronson said, “much like Charleston or New York. People from all over the territories and New Occident live and trade there—more or less peaceably.”

  “An Eerie woman once told me that Six Nations City should more rightly be called ‘Sixty Nations City,’ given the variety of languages and peoples one finds there,” Wren remarked.

  Bronson and I glanced at one another. “That’s true,” Bronson finally said.

  “You’ve met the Eerie, then?” I asked. “Few people in New Occident ever have.”

  Captain Wren sat back. He looked flustered. “Yes, I had trade with some of the Eerie not long ago.”

  Now it was our turn to ask wondering questions. “There are many stories about them in New Occident,” Bronson said, “but little is known for certain. We hear that they are great healers who traveled all the way from the Pacific after the Great Disruption. Is that true?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Wren demurred. “Yes,” he added after a moment, “I believe so.”

  “Their territory is very difficult to reach,” I pressed him.

  “Is it?” the captain asked, with a cautious air. “We reached the Great Lakes from the north, not through New Occident, so perhaps I took an easier route.”

  Bronson and I glanced at one another again, this time with greater meaning. “The Great Lakes?” I queried. “Do you mean the Eerie Sea? No one in New Occident calls them ‘lakes,’ as far as I know.”

  Wren flushed. “Of course, I mean the Eerie Sea. It’s a local phrase—a seaman’s term. We have difficulty conceiving of those frozen expanses as a ‘sea.’ You can imagine.”

  By now, even Bronson had observed the patchy pattern of Wren’s knowledge. We had discussed it at length in private and reached no conclusion, other than to agree that whatever Wren was concealing could not be ill-intention toward us. He seemed to genuinely care for our well-being. Sensing this prompted me further to seek the cause of his sudden confusion. I fully expected that the explanation would be illuminating, not incriminating. “You seem to be very familiar with some aspects of New Occident, Captain Wren,” I said gently, “and very unfamiliar with others. How is that?”

  He sat silently for a moment, taken aback by my direct question. Then he smiled, and his white teeth gleamed. “I set sail for the first time when I was only a boy. I’ve spent most of my life at sea, and I’ve never had any formal schooling. You must excuse my ignorance. I am sure most of my secondhand knowledge is very ill-informed.”

  Bronson and I listened silently to this explanation, which I, at least, found entirely inadequate. My husband seemed more inclined to indulge Wren, not because he believed him, but because he trusted Wren’s motives. Politeness prevented me from pushing further, and so that evening we learned nothing more. I was ignoring my better instincts; I knew, then, that Captain Wren had no personal knowledge of New Occident at all. But I could not imagine what interest he had in pretending so arduously otherwise. So I remained silent, and the deception continued.

  7

  Gordon Broadgirdle, MP

  —1892, June 2: 18-Hour 11—

  Few explorers have encountered the Eerie, and yet rumors about them abound. The last documented contact took place in 1871, when an injured explorer from New York took refuge with an Eerie during a winter storm. He had slipped on the ice and injured his leg, and the Eerie came upon him some hours later. The explorer recounted spending the two-day storm in a refuge built high in the pines, south of the Eerie Sea; he claimed to wake to find his leg mended and his frostbite healed. One can only imagine how the exposure to cold must have clouded his mind.

  —From Shadrack Elli’s History of New Occident

  SOPHIA LEFT THE kitchen reluctantly, following Theo through the corridor and up to the second floor. They had reached the landing when th
ey heard a booming voice: heavy and commanding, in a tone long practiced at the podium, it crashed through the house like a wave.

  “My dear Shadrack! So sorry to surprise you like this, but I simply could not wait until tomorrow.”

  Theo froze on the landing, his hand still clasping Sophia’s. His fingers gripped hers with a sudden intensity. “Ow!” Sophia exclaimed, trying to pull away as she looked at him in surprise. “What was that for?”

  His face was blank with panic. Sophia had seen that look once before, but she could not remember when or where. Fear was so unusual in Theo that it sent a flash of sharp unease through her. “What is it?” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”

  Theo’s eyes fastened abruptly on hers. “We have to go back down,” he whispered back. “Now.”

  She stared at him. “Why?”

  “Just come.”

  Sophia hesitated, more troubled by the moment. “Shadrack told us to go upstairs.”

  “They won’t see us.”

  Theo tugged at her hand, and Sophia gave in. She thought for a moment that he was leading her back to the kitchen, but instead he opened the short door to the closet tucked beneath the stairs. He edged silently past a broom, a dustpan, and a precarious pile of hatboxes to kneel on the wooden floorboards. Then he turned to Sophia, a finger raised in warning to his lips. She stepped in after him and crouched down.

  “Take a look,” Theo whispered. He pointed to a crack in the wall.

  Sophia peered through and realized she was looking into the study—the closet was situated behind a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She pulled back. “This wasn’t here before!” she exclaimed as indignantly as whispering would allow.

  “Shhh!” Theo glared at her. “I cut the wallpaper in the study. It’s behind the shelf. Not even noticeable.” He turned back toward the wall. “What do you see?”

  Sophia shook her head, dumbfounded. “I can’t believe you cut the wallpaper. What for? There’s nothing to see in there.”