by Deva Fagan
Unthinkingly, I unlaced my bodice and pulled off my tattered gown. I had no reason for modesty with Alle, and I was wearing my smalls beneath, in any case. It was only when I’d let the gown fall to the floor of the wagon that I realized the glimmering gold loops of Father’s chain of mastery were plainly visible around my waist.
“My, my, what a lovely thing,” Allessandra said. “So I was right about your father’s mastery, then? He must have great talent to have earned such a prize. That is the gift of a prince or a king.”
“The doge of Valenzia,” I said. “Please, you won’t tell Ubaldo, will you?”
She sniffed, still looking at the gold chain. “To think he has such a treasure under his nose and he doesn’t even know it.” She smiled, a trifle viciously. When she turned her gaze back on me, her expression lightened. “No, child, have no fear. Your secret is safe. But be very careful. If Ubaldo, or even Coso or Cristo, finds out that you carry such riches, he will take it like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Ubaldo always did love taking what others love best.” She passed one hand over her belly; the other hand curled at the neck of her glittering robes. For such a tall and impressive woman, she looked suddenly meek and helpless. I started to reach for her shoulder.
Ubaldo shouted from outside. “Hurry it up, woman. I’ve a crowd waiting for the dagger toss. Do I have to come in there and drag you out?”
Off she went, leaving me to study the tools of my new occupation and to wonder what old sorrow it was that troubled her.
CHAPTER
3
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, I waited in the secret compartment, my hair loose and dusted with the white powder, more of it turning my face pasty. The gauzy gown trailed down over my toes inconveniently, but I would not need to move far. Alle had made me practice opening the secret door dozens of times, blindfolded, one-handed, even backward. “Bad for business if the ghost gets stuck in the wardrobe,” she said.
The blue wagon had been fitted with bright fabric to hang over the back, and the movable steps were brought out and set at the rear. Passing up those steps and into the wagon, a patron would find Allessandra the All-Knowing seated before a low table (the trunk, covered in a glimmering black cloth). I had hung up curtains to disguise the mundane elements of our life, turning the interior of the wagon into a dark, magical den swirling with musky incense.
I listened attentively as Alle welcomed her first patron, the first person I would sham. I squashed down that thought mercilessly. Alle had told me the spirit visitations were worth an extra guilder. And she promised to make certain I had a few pennies of that, whatever Ubaldo might say. With Father still recovering, I had to do my part to earn our keep, or we’d be back on the side of the road with no donkey and no hope.
It was a man. I could hear him mumbling, but the words were muffled by the wardrobe. There was a creak as Alle opened the outer doors. “The seeing crystal,” she intoned as she took it from the cabinet. It was all part of the act, to give the patron a chance to see that the wardrobe was empty.
“Ahhh,” said the man, “and you will be able to tell me what she says?”
Then the doors closed again and it returned to mumbles.
Allessandra’s voice, however, was pitched to carry clearly even at a whisper. “It may be that she shall tell you herself, if your love is true and I have strength enough to part the veil.”
It went on for a bit, mumble, mumble, then Alle, then more mumbling. My hands grew slick. I rubbed them on the ghost dress. Then, at last: “Spirit, come forth!”
I made one silent prayer to the Saints. It wasn’t, as one might expect, asking forgiveness for the deception I was about to engage in. It was that I not get caught. I slipped through the secret panel, then closed it behind me. Flinging open the doors of the wardrobe, I wafted out.
“Maria!” the man cried, rising and holding out both hands toward me. He was tall and lean, with long arms that reached over across the chest, dangerously close. I froze. Alle hadn’t said what to do if the patrons tried to touch me. What would they say if they felt soft gauze or, worse, warm flesh, where there should be only ghostly vapor? I backed away.
“Beware,” Allessandra warned, “for the touch of the living may force the spirits of the dead to retreat once more. And your wife has come far to speak to you; there must be some important message she has to deliver.”
The man clutched his hands together. His brow was wet with perspiration. Mine was as well, for the layers of gauze were surprisingly hot in the stuffy wagon. “Maria, Maria, have you come to tell me of our child? Is she with you, in the Hall of Saints? Oh, tell me it is so.”
I was kerflummoxed enough by this to stand silent for a long moment. But Alle had been right. He was telling me exactly what he wanted to hear. I stumbled on, hoping my delay had appeared as but a dramatic pause. “It is so,” I intoned.
The man collapsed back into his seat, bowing his head in his hands and rubbing his scraggly hair. He wept. “I knew it, I knew it.”
Allessandra took charge once more. “The veil over the spirit world may part for only a short time. Your wife grows weary. She must return to her rest in the Hall of the Saints. You must bid her farewell.”
“Maria, I love you! Take care of her until I join you!” he cried, reaching out toward me once more. I evaded him, turning the motion into a slow disapparition. Swaying and waving my arms in their white wings of gauze, I carefully stepped back into the wardrobe. Alle rose and closed the doors, winking at me when her back was turned to the man. I fumbled with the secret panel and got myself hidden away as silently as possible.
Mumble, mumble, I heard the man babbling outside.
Then Alle again. “You are a fortunate man, to have a wife who loves you so dearly that she could endure this visitation.”
Then the heavy tread of the man tramping down the steps, leaving the wagon.
My heart was beating quick as a festival drum. The doors creaked open to reveal Alle holding her crystal ball and beaming at me.
“Not so hard, is it? You’re a natural.” She flashed a bright smile. “Good work. Now, get ready, there’s another waiting.”
Flushed with victory, I continued playing my part over the next several weeks, portraying dozens of dead women from village to village. I perfected a wide variety of theatrical groans, moans, and a whispery, sepulchral voice. Meanwhile, Father steadily improved, and by the time three Saints’ Days came and went, he was fully recovered.
By then Alle had already taught me much, and truth be told, I was enjoying it. I continued to play my part as the spirit in the wardrobe, but I was also learning to tell fortunes myself. She taught me the clues to look for, the hints that could tell her where a person was from, what they did, whom they loved, more than I ever would have thought possible to learn from so little. The color of the mud on their boots. The different types of calluses that revealed wheelwright, cooper, shoemaker, smith, farmer. The lines of laughter and sorrow that marked a face, and the scars of wounds and illness.
“You have a talent for it,” she told me one day. “I could tell, when you saw how I read your own past. And of course, the best fortune-teller must always know what is magic and what is not, and never begin to think that she is more than she truly is. You do not believe in magic, so that is not a danger you need fear. Now, what can you tell from this piece of cloth?”
And so it continued. I accumulated a store of information on a variety of obscure topics. I knew all the weaves of the great fabric mills throughout the land. I knew the different dyes, and which patterns were popular in which cities. I learned to identify the subtle variations in dialect, how folk from the southern principalities would lisp their S’s, and folk from Sirenza, where the streets were of water, gave each vowel sound a sharp inflection.
Father returned to work, but we remained with Ubaldo and his company. It was something like sleeping with lions, but we had no choice. He would not give us back Franca, and without her we had no wagon, and with no wagon F
ather could not work. Besides, we were eating better than we had in over a year. The hard part was convincing Ubaldo to allow us to stay.
WE HAD HALTED in the open market green at the center of the village. The blue wagon was set up as usual for Allessandra the All-Knowing. Our own was parked nearby, and I rounded up a crowd with my cries of “Shoes! Boots! Fancy footgear for a fair price!” As I mingled, I listened to the villagers and looked for calluses, stains, unsteady walks, practicing what Alle was teaching me. A woman in a red bonnet complained shrilly that her swain cared more for his coracle and fish than he did for her, and contemplated pitching him over for the baker. A man spare and pale as a winter birch said nothing, but tapped the fingers of his left hand together incessantly. I sidled closer and saw the callus on his right middle finger. A clerk, mindful still of his calculations and ledgers, even at market. Nearby, two young lads chattered excitedly about how a rogue mercenary captain had taken over Sirenza and imprisoned its king, and whether they might make good money if they joined one of the roving mercenary bands themselves.
Father made the first pair of shoes for a doughty farmwife in a hamlet outside Roltino. They were sunset orange with blue fringes, but at least (I saw with a sigh of relief) they fit. The woman went off shaking her head, peering down past her own generous girth and flinching each time she caught sight of her feet. Several other villagers who had already paid their deposits and been measured looked uneasily at one another.
Ubaldo had been glowering over the scene from a short distance, tossing his ever-present dagger with increasing vigor. He grabbed my elbow as I went by. “What’s the meaning of this? Those shoes are horrible! What sort of fool is your father to make such ugly things?”
“My father is the best shoemaker in Valenzia.”
“Hah. Well, he’s not in Valenzia now, and I’d say he’s the worst shoemaker in all the lands. They’ll run us out of town. And it’ll be your fault.” He glared at me. “I’ll leave you right back where I found you, no doubt of that, girl! And worse yet if you cost me coin.”
I had to do something. I was afraid Ubaldo was right about the villagers. They were muttering angrily as Father cut a length of violently green suede. But my work with Alle and the memory of the shoes I had sold back in Valenzia gave me an idea.
“Magic,” I said. Without looking at Ubaldo, I hurried over to the wagon, shouting all the way. “Magic boots! Get them here! Crafted with the magic of the fairies themselves, they will bring good luck and happiness to the one who wears them!” Father started, and blinked at me from under his bushy brows. He opened his mouth, but I shook my head and continued on brazenly. “Magic boots, once-in-a-lifetime chance! Get them here!”
The woman in the red bonnet, the one I’d eavesdropped on earlier, snorted at me. “Magic, hah. The only magic they have is that they’ll never be stolen. Who would want such ugly things?”
I thought quickly, running through what I had overheard earlier. “Ah, but with such shoes as these, you will surely catch the eye of that certain someone. Sailors are known to favor fancy footwear, you know. These shoes are meant for walking under the crossed boughs at a great cathedral. Surely you would be willing to pay a few guilders to have that happiness.”
Her face grew white, and she opened and closed her mouth. “How did you . . . ? They will, truly?” She gave my father a considering look. I took her arm and gently led her to Father. “Just two guilders, but what is coin, compared to your future happiness?”
Two guilders barely covered the materials, but it was better than nothing. I babbled on for a bit. When I left her, the red-capped woman was misty with dreams of a cathedral wedding and showers of blossoms. The disgruntled edge to the gossip of the crowd had been replaced by a buzz of excitement. Father was so busy I started taking down orders myself.
“Nata,” he whispered aside to me, during a lull, “whatever made you say that? You know I’ve lost the magic. They’re shoes, nothing more.”
“Shush, Papa, please. Just trust me.”
The marks I made taking down measurements were dark and sharp with my frustration. Why couldn’t he simply believe they were magic? He believed other things that weren’t true. I’d been trying so hard to make things work with Alle and Ubaldo, to keep us fed and safe. I’d already lost one comfortable life. I didn’t want to lose the hope of another. But thankfully Father heeded my warning and did not speak of it again.
When I had collected the last of the coins, I breathed a great sigh of relief. The pouch was pleasantly heavy in my hand, and would be more so when the patrons returned to collect their finished shoes and pay their balances. I wondered if it would be enough to buy back Franca. The thought that Ubaldo still possessed her irked me to no end. I did not care for being dependent on him, much as I had grown to like Alle.
There was enough, I decided, that I could spare a guilder for some fresh nut cakes, sweet and dripping with spiced honey. I could smell them from the bakery across the market grounds. Father loved sweets, and we hadn’t had any in ever so long.
Something silvery flashed through the air a hand span from my nose. A meaty, gold-ringed fist caught the knife. “You did well enough out there,” Ubaldo said, tossing the dagger dangerously close to my face once again. “But remember my warning, girl. Alle may like you, but to me you’re just a piece of baggage, you and your father both. You weigh us down, you get left at the side of the road.”
“You call this weighing you down?” I said, holding up the pouch of coin. “It’s at least as much as you made with your last performance.”
Before I could protest, Ubaldo had tweaked the pouch from my hand. “And a good start toward repaying your debt.”
“What?” I said, fury driving my voice high and shrill. “That’s ours, rightfully earned!”
“You’d have earned nothing back at the side of the North Road, eaten by wolves or murdered by bandits. Remember that it was I who took pity on you then.”
“You did nothing—”
He moved faster than I could see, clouting me across the chin with the heavy bag of coins. I staggered back, eyes smarting. I might have lunged at him then and there, but he waggled the silver blade. “Off with you, girl, you’ve work to do. Cristo needs someone to scrape the carrots. Quick now, if you want any supper.”
He swaggered away, whistling a merry tune. I sniffed, trying to clear the sob from my throat. My lip was bleeding slightly. The metallic taste soured the scent of the nut cakes, but that was just as well. There would be none tonight, nor any night to come. Not until I could find a way to outsmart Ubaldo.
I SCRAPED AND CHOPPED carrots with great vehemence that night, imagining that it was Ubaldo under my knife. I wanted to run away, back to Valenzia, back to the life I had known, where I always had a spare coin for one of Zia Rosa’s nut cakes. Where my mother would have slipped her arm around my shoulders and washed my cut lip and made me laugh with tales of the puffed-up lords and ladies who’d come to order footwear that day. But running away wouldn’t bring Mother back. And it would mean leaving the wagon and all our supplies behind, for I didn’t have a hope of stealing Franca away under Ubaldo’s watchful eye.
When I brought Father his bowl of soup, I ducked my head to cast my swollen lip in shadow. He wouldn’t have noticed it even if it was midday, though. He was thoroughly engaged in his work. I had hoped that with the encouragement of so many patrons, not to mention my little deception about the magical nature of the shoes, he might have recovered his lost artistry. Maybe then we could risk leaving behind the wagon and returning to Valenzia on the promise of future wealth. Or simply refuse to travel onward with Ubaldo when we reached the next large city. But no, these shoes were as hideous as the last.
Despair pulled at me, tightening my throat. I breathed the steam rising from the soup. I had to be calm. Father needed me to be strong, like Mother.
“You see, Papa, you haven’t lost your magic,” I said with false cheer, setting the bowl down beside his knee. He sat cross-legged
against the wagon wheel, hunched over the purple and green leather he was stitching together with a length of waxed orange floss.
Father leaned back, squinting at the shoes through his thick spectacles. They had slipped down to the very tip of his nose. He sighed and shook his head. “No, Nata, the magic was never mine. It was in the tools, and now it’s gone. The fairies have forgotten me. Look at those.”
I followed his gesture to the array of tools on the cloth beside him. My heart fell. They were crusted with bits of leather dust, paint, wax, and even rust now. “Papa, why don’t you just clean them yourself? Or let me do it. You’re the Master Shoemaker of Valenzia, don’t you remember? The doge gave you the gold chain. Surely that means something. And look at how many people wanted to buy your shoes today!”
“Because you said they were magic.”
“They are as much magic as they ever were. You just have to make them as you used to. With proper colors, and so that they match each other.”
“Hmm? You don’t like the colors? What’s wrong with them?”
I gave up. “Eat your soup, Papa—it’s getting cold. We pay dearly enough to travel with Ubaldo. Don’t waste the few crumbs he gives us.” Father was blind if he couldn’t see what was wrong with his shoes. And he hadn’t even asked me about my lip.
Allessandra, on the other hand, watched me intently when I returned to the campfire and dipped up my own bowl of noodles. Ubaldo had procured a large skin of wine (probably with the coins he’d stolen from me) and was sharing it with Coso and Cristo. The three of them had become increasingly merry as the skin grew more and more limp. But when I trod on Ubaldo’s foot accidentally, that jollity vanished like a mist in morning. “Stupid girl!” he roared. “Watch your step!” He raised one fist to swipe at me. I stood there stupidly, not having learned yet to be on guard against such sudden violence. But two things prevented that blow from falling. The drink had already slowed Ubaldo’s wits, making the motion slow and clumsy. And Allessandra pulled me back.
