The Crimson Inkwell

by Kenneth A Baldwin

  “Alright…” Her voice carried a leading tone, prompting further explanation. Was it that easy to tell I was lying? I never had been good at it.

  “I just figured, since I’m here finding stories, it’d be easier for me. Save me a trip, you know?” I was trying my best to be convincing, awkward smiles and all. She paused before standing up and making her way to the front of the desk. She leaned against it casually, folding her arms and staring down at me in my chair, only air between us. She studied me for a good minute before speaking.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, “if you will tell me the truth about why.” She waited stonily for my reply. I should have known I couldn’t pull one over on her. She was basically a wiser, more mature version of myself, and I wouldn’t have believed me either. I searched for words in every part of my brain but found none. How sweet that a writer find herself betrayed by her own words.

  Maybe it was the sheer range of emotions I’d been through in the past forty-eight hours, but everything came to the surface all at once: my situation with Byron, my sister’s predicament with Jacob, my secret rendezvous with Bram, Mr. Stringham’s eviction threat, my insecurity as a writer, the death of my father, my curious yearning to keep feeling the magic from the pen, everything. Something begged me to say it all aloud to a woman who might just be willing to be a friend. Tears bubbled to my eyes and flowed freely as if I were a child. I just shook at my head at her.

  “Well, now we’re getting somewhere,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Doug's Fish and Chips

  “I CAN’T SAY I blame you,” Rebecca Turner told me. She sat across a table from me, sipping on small cup of coffee after a large lunch. We had just finished eating in a local fish and chips pub on several blocks into the east side. The place was rough and tumble, what I would usually expect from an east side pub. The floors were run down, and the thick set wood beams, like those of an old ship’s interior, held up a low ceiling. There was a framed, tattered union jack near the entrance alongside a small, modest portrait of a woman. The air smelled strongly of hot oil and fried potatoes, and it was generously warm for the season, despite the sizeable, though old, windows along the opposite wall.

  Rebecca, as she insisted I now call her, was practically a celebrity with the owner. When we had walked in, a rowdy man with a full beard and hard-working suspenders barked at her like a seal, complaining that she didn’t care a lick about him. I was shocked at how brusquely he yelled at a woman, but she gave back as brutally as she received, queuing a chorus of laughter from all the serving boys and, fortunately, from the bear of a man himself.

  “I credit Doug for my uncanny knack at keeping a handle on ol’ Sergeant Cooper,” she wryly said. As she explained this to me, Doug came around from the kitchen and put a heavy arm over her shoulders.

  “Becca, who’s your friend?” he asked, turning to me.

  “Be nice,” she replied.

  “Did she warn you that this is a grubby type of place?” he said, trying to bait her. Or perhaps he was trying to bait Rebecca.

  “She didn’t really mention where we were going at all,” I replied.

  “Best to keep it a surprise. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have come,” Rebecca countered with a gentle and affectionate slap on Doug’s beard where his cheek might have been. His face had to be in there somewhere. He laughed heartily and with enough rasp to sand down a hatchet.

  “Who are you, my wife?” he teased. He certainly was a good-humored fellow, the type of good-humored man I would never want to find on the opposite side of an argument. He went over to an occupied table by the window, which had a surprisingly good view down an open street with a glimpse of the river and, with a few words, had scared away its inhabitants. They hurriedly pushed by us to exit the pub, full of slurred grumblings about the nerve of the establishment and that their friends would hear about this brazen inexcusable rudeness, by jove.

  He waved them away nonchalantly and motioned his big hand toward the table. “Your usual spot is open, Becca.”

  “Thank you, Doug. Better bring out three orders and make sure you give the lady an extra helping of your secret sauce. It’ll be her first time.”

  The beard shifted into what I could only assume was a smile.

  “You’ll never guess what’s in it,” he said, the words sliding out deviously. His face beamed with pride though, and I determined that a man who cared this much about his humble work had to be honest and good. I wished there were more people like him on the east side, in fact. Perhaps, if there were, I wouldn’t have been so eager to get away from it.

  What followed was a veritable culinary pageant. Three troughs were brought out, each with six pieces of dark, golden-brown fried fish, chips cut up into thin matchsticks, and a bowl filled with a creamy, pink-orange mixture. Becca had jumped in without delay, and before long, I followed suit, abandoning all pretext of knife and forking. There weren’t any knives or forks on our table anyway.

  The fish was absolutely incredible, tangy with malt vinegar, and the secret sauce was worthy of Doug’s fierce pride. It tasted familiar, like I could almost count off the spices, but their names stuck on the tip of my tongue, like old forgotten acquaintances.

  As I dove deeper into the meal, Rebecca probed me with questions. Start from the top. What’s going on? How long had we been engaged? Where’d we meet? When’s the wedding? How did we manage to get into an editor/writer relationship? What’s happened to disrupt everything? How does my sister feel about him? How do I feel about him? Why not can the whole thing? Was this love or convenience? What did I mean I couldn’t distinguish? How did I feel when talking to Edward? Did I ever feel the same when talking with Byron? Would I leave Byron for Edward if it came down to it?

  “What kind of question is that?” I stammered, deeply drunk on the rich food.

  “An honest one,” she replied, wiping her hands with a napkin.

  “So how was it?” boomed the bear, towering over me and eclipsing the light. Doug’s beard was wet around the mouth from a good pint of something. Something strong by the smell of it. Regarding his size, I wondered how much alcohol he could hold. A keg? A barrel? He plopped down next to Becca across the table.

  “It was delicious, thank you,” I said, honestly.

  “The secret’s in the sauce,” he touted, touching the side of his nose with his index finger. Becca elbowed him.

  “Doug, we have a question for you,” she began. “You were married once. Love or convenience?”

  “You mean why I married?” he grunted.

  “I mean which is more important?”

  He let out a deep breath that seemed to go on for at least a minute. I watched him stroke his beard, thoughtfully, rolling the question over behind his deep-set eyes.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “My friend here finds herself in a love quandary,” Rebecca explained. “Having some experience yourself, what would you tell her? She is engaged to a man whom she clearly does not love—”

  “Rebecca!”

  “And there might be someone else.”

  She spoke about Edward, but I thought about Bram. I thought about how free I felt around him. Wasn’t that something to aspire to in marriage, the weightless, fearless feeling of being yourself? At the same time, now that Rebecca brought it up, had Edward not taken my breath at our first meeting? Did he not inspire me to be something more than I thought I believed possible? That was something to desire in a partner. He was a rock on which I could build motivation to improve myself continually.

  “I didn’t inherit this palace,” Doug said, gesturing to his pub. “You should have seen it when we first started out. It was a dump. Piss stains in the corners, pardon my language, miss. Broken benches, counter was falling off. It wasn’t much at all, but it was mine.“ He paused to take a drink from his mug.

  “When I met Melinda, she was a dream in a dress. Her family wasn’t wealthy by any real lot, but they was wealthier than me. Her parents had her fix
ed with this cobbler, who at least ran a respectable trade, they said. Truth be told, I can’t fault the man. He was a good man. Still is. I walk by his shop every now and again. He’s handsome as hell, too, in that classic sort of way. Back then, I wasn’t the gallant stallion you see before you now. Her parents were right. He could have provided a very nice life for her. She’d have had a respectable house, kids, a right nice life. He would have treated her right.”

  “So, what happened?” I asked.

  “Well, one day, he proposed to her. Poor thing, she said yes. Her family was in the other room at the time; they were all about to go out to dinner. Everyone was happy as could be. She came over to me the next morning in a fit. I could tell something was wrong right away. She sat me down on a chair, folded her arms in this way that made her look like she could take on a pit bull, and said, ‘You’re gonna lose me, Doug, unless you can whip something up really good right now. And I mean really good, because there’s not a lot wrong with him.’”

  Rebecca put a hand on his back, urging him on.

  “And I spit out this crazy idea. Right there on the spot. I told her I was going to open a pub, sell my fish and chips. I’d made ‘em for my mates and they liked ‘em. So, why not? Completely hair-brained, but she looked at me in such a way and said, ‘You promise our children won’t go hungry?’ ‘Not if they like fish and chips,’ I told her. She threw her arms around me, bathed my face in kisses, and promised me her heart forever. I’ll never know why she believed in the idea of this pub so much.”

  His eyes glistened in the lamplight as he stared into the air. I imagined he saw Melinda between the tables, from his memory, polishing glasses or talking warmly with customers. His beard curled inward near the side of his mouth. I felt a little ashamed at my assessment of the place from when I walked in.

  “What happened to her?” I asked. I knew it was a bold question, and maybe I should have asked Rebecca another time, but the reporter in me had learned not to shy away from tough questions.

  “She died,” he said, flatly. “Her and the baby.”

  Instinctively, I reached out my hand and clasped his gently over the table. We sat in silence for a long moment, he not even acknowledging our presence, until he finally turned to me and patted my hand congenially.

  “Love or convenience?” he said. “I can’t decide for you, now can I? I’ve got this pub to run.”

  He stood, gingerly grabbed our finished food trays, and whisked them off to the kitchen, patting some patrons on the back or straightening a painting along his way. I stared after him as long as I could before turning and studying the pub’s interior with new eyes. It was meticulously kept in a man’s type of way. Everything in its proper place, each table well cleaned and cared for. The pub was impressive, not because the decor was lavish (in fact, if anything, the tables and chairs were quite plain), but because it gave off a sense of immortality. The table beneath our drinks was made of sturdy oak. If it were up to Doug, I think the table would have stood there until the end of the world. It certainly would until the end of his.

  “So, am I going to be turning in those stories for you? Or will you be making amends with the fiancé and turning them in yourself?” Rebecca asked, with a know-it-all smile. I smirked at the real question she was asking, and I knew no answer I could give would be the right one. Making up with Byron wasn’t an option right now, and that also demonstrated my detachment. But, having Rebecca deliver my stories wasn’t any better. Both roads led me away from Byron. It was an unfair question to ask. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t quite that simple.

  “I’ll be happy to have you turn them in for me,” I replied. She nodded.

  “As you wish it,” she said, taking another sip of her drink. We both laughed. I felt as though I knew Rebecca much better than I should have. And, what was more surprising, she seemed to like me—not as a business acquaintance or as a participant in the social choreography where women support each other as they pursue domesticity.

  “Why are you being so kind to me?” I asked. She swilled her cup.

  “Come, now. You speak like kindness is so rare.”

  “Really, Rebecca, I don’t know what I did to—” She cut me off with a wave of the hand.

  “Something about you, I guess.” She looked at me. No. She looked past me as if someone sat right in the same air I occupied, but in a moment, it was gone. She shook her head and finished her drink with a big draught. “What are we doing here? I have deliveries to make.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Fatherly Wisdom

  I WAS HAPPY to have a friend. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a peer to talk with, apart from my sister. I had had co-workers at the factory years ago, but I wouldn’t say we had been friends. There was always an undercurrent of mistrust between us that I couldn’t explain. Then there was Mrs. Crow, but I don’t think I’d call her a friend, a caring neighbor perhaps, but not a friend.

  As the days went on, Rebecca proved herself to be a sister of circumstance, even if not by blood. She regularly made time to turn in stories to Byron on my behalf. When I tried to pay her, she simply smirked and said, “You’re buying.” Then we would head over to Doug’s and enjoy fish, chips, and wonderful stories told by the owner and some of his regulars.

  If Byron had an issue with my courier, he didn’t bring it up. Mrs. Crow said that he had come by the house a couple of times with a despondent look in his eye, but she had explained that women need time to breathe and heal sometimes. I was happy to know that he was stewing in the consequences of his behavior. Men are like puppies in that way, best to rub their nose in it a little.

  Besides, it’s not like I was pretending not to be home. I really was out of the house, enjoying a blissful few weeks. I spent a good deal of time with Bram, conjuring up more incredible stories we could write with our magical pen. My creativity had burst to life in ways I never could have dreamed. Bram said it was the magic waking up inside of me, and maybe he was right. After accepting that magic was real, the magic I had always heard about in storybooks, I began to see it more and more in my daily life. I recognized it in the dormant trees, in the constant flow of the river, in the hundreds of tinctured clouds and thousands of distant stars. The more I saw it, the more I realized that I longed for magic my entire life. Now, while Bram and I experimented with it, it became an indispensable part of my life.

  I woke up with twitching fingers, my mind racing after dreams I couldn’t remember and unbound emotional experiences. Where my jealous outbreak at Byron or my impatience with Mrs. Crow once scared me, now I felt a longing to let my true unbridled self be free more often. The hard and fast social rules of society were limitations. It felt like having some type of beautiful withdrawal. I couldn’t wait to dive back in, to feel the rush of my raw, true self.

  In my most private thoughts, I considered Bram to be the most magical and increasingly indispensable of it all.

  The pen kept working just as he had said it would. The House of Frogs story sold incredibly well. Not only was Langley’s the first paper to report on a story, but we were literally writing the events before they happened. After the House of Frogs, as promised, Bram insisted that he write the next article, mentioning something about too much magical exposure.

  He responded in true style by coming up with a story about an art heist at an estate in the country. The twist? The art was stolen by a well-trained herd of dogs that were let loose on the estate. An ode to Cyrus, he told me, scratching his dog behind the ears.

  The owners didn’t even realize the piece had been stolen until after they managed to shoo all the mongrels out of the house. Only then did they look out the second story window to see three hounds carrying the painting gently in their mouths to an unmarked carriage. Naturally, they gave chase, but they found only an empty carriage in the wood; all traces of the horses, driver, passengers, and painting were gone.

  If the House of Frogs and the bank robbery story had been successful, this Mongrel Art Thi
eves story set the city ablaze. I saw it everywhere around town and completely sold out at newsstands. To my delight, Langley’s competitors had plenty of copies of their dull headlines available for sale. The Intricacies of Choosing a Pet Bird. Parliaments’ Big Fumble. Salisbury and Gladstone At It Again. Where was the magic in any of that?

  Dawnhurst on Severn’s paper business had transformed, and I could see a sparkle in the eyes of passersby. Under their hats, they looked about the city, as though the lampposts may come to life or any stray pup they saw might be involved in organized crime. A feeling of magic was spreading, and it felt wonderful.

  Then it was my turn again, but I wanted to dive deeper. I wanted to innovate, find ways to add details and bring the stories to life even more. I thought this could be done with the addition of little non-sequiturs that might be related to the principle incident but only to an adventurous mind. My story was about a wife who went missing for three days, only to return to her husband convinced she was a cat. It was a mildly peculiar story but started to jump off the page when rumors of witchcraft in the neighborhood circulated, and neighbors reported bizarre lights in the wood a mile from their home.

  I continued to dream about my father. Sometimes, I saw him in the church like I had before; other times, we sat in the police station or even at our old home in the east side. In every dream, the curious fog blanketed our environment in abundance, giving off a bizarre feeling of unreality. I told him about my stories and their public success. He laughed and slapped his leg.

  “Now that’s the ticket,” he said. “What marvelous tales! You’ll revolutionize the community. Where do you find stories like that?”

  “I’ve fallen in with some interesting sources,” I said. Even in my dream, I didn’t tell him about the pen. I wasn’t sure what he might think of it.

  “I bet old Livingston is chuffed.”