Sweep

by Jonathan Auxier

No “once upon a time.”

  No “happily ever after.”

  And yet, here in this dusty crawl space, she held a miracle in her hands. A miracle with eyes and a heartbeat and a crumbly gray body.

  How many times had she almost thrown the Sweep’s gift away? “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why now? After five years, why today?”

  The thing was no longer looking at Nan. It craned its body to take in the space beyond. Its gaze moved from one thing to another—rafter, window, cobweb, the collapsed chimney.

  “Did you do that?” Nan said, pointing to the crumbled bricks.

  The thing looked up at her. And then it nodded.

  “You . . . can understand me?” she said.

  The thing nodded again. It screwed its body into her palm. Its eyes tightened in concentration. Nan saw a thin crack appear along the bottom of its face—long and uneven, like a scar.

  “You have a mouth,” Nan said, her own mouth breaking into a smile.

  The thing opened its mouth. It made a rasping sound like two bricks being dragged against each other. It was a hollow, mewling cry that seemed to move through Nan’s ears straight into her bones. It was not a beautiful sound.

  The thing had not spoken any real words, but Nan felt very much that it had just told her something about the fire. “Is that so?” she said. “You must have been very frightened.”

  The thing nodded gravely.

  It rolled itself off her hand and spoke as it moved around the crawl space. Again, she felt she somehow understood. The thing was telling her about what had happened inside the chimney.

  “You must be very tired,” Nan said when it had finished its story. “It’s not every day someone is born.”

  The thing nodded.

  Nan sat back on her heels. What did soot creatures eat? Did they wear clothes? How was she meant to care for it? “I suppose we should start by giving you a proper name,” she said. “I can’t very well keep calling you my char.”

  The thing made a noise that sounded very much like agreement.

  “All right, then.” Nan tapped her chin. “The best sort of name tells folks who you really are.” The Sweep had believed that. That’s why he and Nan both had the name Sparrow—because they nested under the eaves, like little birds. “So first let’s figure out who you are.”

  The thing nodded.

  “Let me think,” Nan said. She lay down on her stomach and stared at the creature in front of her. It smelled like crackling embers on a cold day. Its surface was soft as a bed of ashes. It was as dark as fresh coal. “Maybe your name can be about how you’re made of burned-up things,” she said. “We could call you Sootly.”

  The thing wrinkled its face.

  “Ashkin?”

  The thing made a retching sound.

  “Emberton?”

  The thing glared at her. It screwed up its face, and a gust of flames burst from its body.

  “Ow!” Nan cried, pulling back. “You nearly took off my nose.” The thing gave a sort of harumph and rolled away from her, burning a trail of char in the floorboards. “I’m trying the best I can,” Nan called. “You don’t have to be rude.” But the thing would have no more of it.

  Nan scratched the back of her neck. It was clear that the thing didn’t want a silly name. She supposed this made sense. She thought of how it made her feel when Roger called her Cinderella. She thought about what she had called the thing before it had come to life. “What about a real person name, but with the word ‘char’ in it?” she said. “Maybe . . . Charlemagne? Or Charles . . . or just Charlie?”

  The thing turned toward her.

  “Charlie?” Nan said again. “Do you like that name?”

  The thing opened its mouth and made a sort of croaking sound. “Kkrraaa-rreeeee . . .” It sounded nothing like “Charlie.”

  Nan smiled. “I like it, too.”

  FRUITCAKE

  Nan and Charlie stayed up through the night. They were both too excited to sleep. After a little exploring, Nan found an ancient tin of fruitcake beneath a loose floorboard—no doubt stashed there by some long-ago student who hadn’t wanted to share with her classmates. The cake was stale and far too sweet . . . and the best thing Nan had ever eaten. Charlie nibbled at the edge of some burned bricks.

  Nan found they were able to converse about basic things with little trouble. Charlie could not speak, exactly, but the sounds he uttered made a sort of sense to her. She told him all about what he was: How she had first found him on the rooftop all those years before. How she carried him in her pocket. How he warmed her on the coldest nights in Crudd’s coal bin. And, finally, how she woke in the crawl space to find him alive and watching over her.

  Charlie listened to every word with unblinking eyes. When she had finished, he made her tell it again.

  Nan decided it was the fire that had made Charlie come to life. As though all these years he had been a piece of kindling, waiting for his spark. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t gotten me out of there.” But she did know. She had seen it before. Masons would come and pull apart the bricks and drag out a tiny charred body, and no one would ever speak of her again.

  She wondered if the Sweep had really known what Charlie was. He must have. Perhaps he had thought that Nan would burn it straightaway for warmth? But she hadn’t. Instead, she had kept it.

  A pink light crept over the crest of the porthole window. Charlie jumped back and hid behind Nan’s leg. “It’s fine,” Nan said. “It’s only daybreak.”

  Charlie made a sound like a question.

  “You’ll want to see this.” The window was decorative, and had no latch. She wiped grime from the glass with her sleeve and set Charlie on the sill. Outside, the sun woke over the whole East End. She could actually see it erasing the shadows, street by street, until it broke from the horizon and flooded the space with golden light.

  Nan watched Charlie watching his first sunrise. His eyes were impossibly wide.

  “It’s like Heaven itself is offering us a gift,” she whispered.

  The first sounds of morning had begun: bells and carts and the cries of eager sweeps. Far in the distance, she could make out Crudd’s house, hidden in the shadow of St. Florian’s Church. “See that tower there?” she said, pointing. “That’s home.”

  “Hhooommm?” Charlie said, trying his best to repeat her word.

  Nan tried to think of a fitting explanation. “Home is a safe place to put your things so burglars can’t touch them.”

  Charlie nodded, and then hopped off the sill and rolled into Nan’s pocket. The place she had kept him for five years. “Hhooommm,” he said.

  Nan took him back out again. “I’ll take my pocket with me, don’t worry.” She looked back toward the East End. Toward Crudd’s house. Worry fluttered into her gut. She could only imagine what Roger had told Crudd about the fire—that Nan had started it herself, maybe even on purpose. Even without Roger, it was bad. A chimney fire was expensive and embarrassing. Crudd would not be happy.

  Nan heard voices echoing up from the house below as the cook and the servants began their day. There were shouts from the street, and then—

  “Brooms up!”

  The voice was so close it made Nan jump back. Footsteps echoed directly above them. “Someone’s on the roof,” she said.

  Charlie turned toward her. “Rrroooo—?”

  “Shh!” Nan crawled back from the window.

  There were more footsteps. “Nothing down this one,” a voice echoed down through the flue. It was Shilling-Tom.

  “I’m tellin’ you, she’s dead!” called a raspy voice. That was Whittles. “The fire burned the whole stack to rubble. Me and Tom were up and down twice yesterday. It was all we could do to keep it from catching the house.”

  An icy voice echoed up from somewhere below. “If she’s dead, then there will be a body. Look again.”

  Nan felt a clench of panic. “It’s Crudd.” In that moment, hea
ring his voice, she knew she could never go back to him.

  A door slammed downstairs, and Nan heard tense voices. It sounded as if Crudd was arguing with some other men—inspectors from the Board of Works. “And why not fine the school for keeping filthy chimneys?” Crudd snapped. “The whole thing is a ruse to allow the girl to escape her legal obligation to me. You will not get one farthing from me unless I see the body!”

  There were shouts of alarm. She heard sounds of footsteps climbing a staircase to the attic. “Nan Sparrow!” his voice roared directly beneath her. “I know you’re hiding!”

  Nan dropped to her knees and started to push bricks atop the trapdoor in the floor. “He’s coming,” she whispered. “We have to get out of here!”

  The bricks jumped as Crudd pounded against the other side of the door. “Nan!” his voice boomed. “Show yourself!”

  Nan could feel Charlie shaking in her palm. She looked around, panic-stricken. There were no other doors. The chimney was being watched. She scrambled to the window at the end of the crawl space. She wrapped her fist in the tatters of her sleeve and broke the glass.

  More shouts as the trapdoor shuddered again. “Unhand me!” Crudd shouted, apparently pulling himself free from the inspectors.

  Nan dragged herself through the round window and spilled out onto the roof. Sharp glass cut her shin, but she bit her tongue to stop from crying aloud.

  She heard a crash as the trapdoor broke open and Crudd climbed into the crawl space. “Nan!” he bellowed.

  Nan pressed herself against the roof, hiding from Crudd’s view. Had he seen her? She could hear him inside, rifling through the rubble.

  “Nan?” a small voice said beside her.

  It was Newt, standing at an uncapped chimney, clutching a rope in his tiny hand. His face was pale, even beneath the grime. “They . . . they said you were dead . . .”

  Nan stared at him, eyes wide, imploring. “I am.”

  She took a step back and dropped from the gable.

  THE HOUSE OF ONE HUNDRED CHIMNEYS

  Nan stumbled between two wagons on her way past Euston Station. Her body was weak and trembling. Blood was running from her shin and she thought she might have turned her ankle when she dropped down from the rainspout. Growlers and omnibuses crossed in every direction—the whole city was a confusing swirl of hooves and wheels and shouts. The September fog meant she could scarcely see twenty paces in front of her. She didn’t know where she was going. She only knew she needed to get off the street before Crudd found her.

  She hoped, desperately, that Newt wouldn’t tell what he’d seen.

  A hulking train rumbled out of the station, shaking the ground. Nan glanced behind her shoulder before slipping into a mews that cut into Bloomsbury. She remembered Charlie in her pocket. He was probably terrified. She lifted him out. “That was a narrow escape,” she said. “I hope I didn’t scrape you when I squeezed through that window.”

  Charlie stared at the narrow alleyway. Empty stables ran along one side; on the other, doors to servants’ apartments. “Hhooommm?”

  Nan shook her head. “Not here. But we do need a safe place to hide.” She thought she might be able to find lodging at a doss-house in the Old Nichol. Or maybe get work in a factory along the river. But Crudd would surely search in all of those places. Besides, she wasn’t sure she could make it that far in her current state. The longer she was in the streets, the more certain she would be spotted. “We need to go somewhere close by,” she said, scanning the rooftops. “Somewhere no sweep or climber will ever think to look.”

  And that was how she found herself standing before the House of One Hundred Chimneys.

  The door was barred, and all of the windows were shuttered and locked. Nan thought her best way in would be one of the chimneys. The stacks were tall and decrepit. Most climbers wouldn’t have risked scaling them without rope, for fear of breaking their necks. But Charlie needed a home, and so Nan climbed.

  The inside of the stack was choked with spiderwebs and rats’ nests and goodness knows what else. But these were old chimneys, built for the burning of wood, not coal, which meant that the walls were at least free of hard soot. Nan could feel Charlie shivering. And so she sang to him, the way the Sweep had sung to her.

  She slowly made her way down until she reached a hearth. “Here we are,” she said, and drew Charlie from her pocket. She thought they were in a servant’s bedroom—though it was hard to tell for sure. The windows were boarded up, and there were gray tarpaulins covering the furniture.

  Nan set Charlie on the floor. She felt her way across the room until she found a wooden chair. She turned it upside down and broke off one of the legs. She tore a strip from a tarpaulin and tied it around one end. “We have a torch. We just need a match.”

  Charlie made an excited sound and then scrunched up his face in intense concentration. After a moment, a thin trail of smoke began to waft up from his body. A tiny flame appeared just above his right eye.

  “Perfect!” Nan lit her torch, which filled the room with flickering orange light. Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust. “It’s like snow,” she whispered. She didn’t know why she whispered.

  Charlie sneezed and rolled backward. “Sssnnnoo?” he said, righting himself.

  Nan wasn’t sure she could explain snow. “I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise,” she said. “You’ll just have to see it for yourself.”

  They walked down the narrow stairs, guided by their torch. Each step issued an angry creak. “That’s just the house saying hello,” Nan said.

  Charlie tried to say “hello” back.

  The house was enormous. Each room led to another room and another and another. Nan made a practice of watching her own footprints in the dust to make sure she wouldn’t become too lost. By her count, there were fourteen bedrooms, three parlors, a drawing room, a smallish ballroom, one giant study filled with books and another filled with maps—not to mention a labyrinth of hallways and staircases and closet passages.

  Nan told Charlie, “They say this old house belonged to a famous captain and explorer who died at sea. It’s been haunted ever since.”

  Charlie made a questioning sound.

  And so Nan explained ghosts to him. But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t make him understand the concept of death. Finally she gave up. He would learn about death in time. Everyone did.

  At last came time for sleep. Nan told Charlie he could sleep in any room he wanted. He picked Nan’s pocket. After all that ghost talk, she supposed she couldn’t blame him.

  Nan chose the grandest bedroom for herself. She thought it must have been where the captain slept. It had a fireplace large enough for her to stand in. The closet was bigger than Wilkie Crudd’s entire coal bin. A chandelier fashioned from an old ship’s wheel hung from above. But none of that compared to the bed. The bed had four tall wooden posts that nearly touched the ceiling.

  In all her life, Nan had never touched a bed. Not with the Sweep, not with Crudd. Her only beds had been rooftops and stoops and open fields and coal bins.

  She approached the captain’s bed and pressed a hand on the embroidered duvet, leaving a dark print. The duvet was stiff and covered in dust. She coughed and pulled it onto the floor. The sheets beneath glowed white in the darkness. Nan wasn’t sure how to get into the bed, which was nearly as high as her chin. She decided that that was what the posts on the corners were for. She climbed the post and then set an uncertain foot on the mattress. She fell over at once.

  Nan had fallen many times in her life. To her, falling meant hurting herself. But when she fell on the bed, she did not get hurt. Instead, she felt herself engulfed by softness. Was this what sleep felt like for rich people? “It’s like lying on a cloud,” she said.

  Charlie did not ask her about clouds. He had rolled out of her pocket and was jumping up and down on the mattress. It looked like fun, so Nan tried jumping, too.

  They jumped for probably an hour.

  Finally
, exhausted and elated, Nan flopped back down. “We should sleep now,” she said.

  She drew a cover over her body and put her head on a pillow. Charlie rolled beside her and tucked himself in close.

  Within moments, she was asleep.

  A ROOM FOR EVERYTHING

  Nan spent the first few weeks in constant fear of discovery by Crudd or the police. But she soon discovered that the rest of London had little interest in the House of One Hundred Chimneys. Still, she was careful to keep the shutters closed and never to approach from the street, entering instead from a turret window on the top floor.

  As days wore on, the House of One Hundred Chimneys became a true home for Nan and Charlie. Their first task had been to dust and scrub every inch. Nan discovered she didn’t mind the work so long as Charlie was there to keep her company. Together they inventoried all the interesting artifacts that the captain had brought home from his travels—spears and shrunken heads and treasure maps and arrowheads and sextants and clay pipes and pressed flowers and insect husks and even a real cannon. (Nan tried to shoot Charlie from the cannon, but it didn’t work.)

  It is a quiet marvel to watch another person grow up before your eyes. With each passing hour, Charlie seemed to be changing more into himself.

  After an unfortunate incident in which Nan’s pillowcase caught fire in the middle of the night, Charlie had been made to sleep in a pile of loose soot in the fireplace. Every morning the pile of soot would be a bit smaller and Charlie would be a bit bigger.

  Charlie seemed to acquire language with remarkable ease. Individual words soon gave way to little broken sentences of two or three words strung together. Nan was exceedingly grateful for this. She had always disliked babies for their inability to plainly say what they needed. “Babies just cry and cry and make you guess what’s the matter,” she said. “But you can just come out and tell me.”

  Nan figured the more words Charlie heard, the faster he would learn. So she made a habit of narrating everything that she did. “I am trying on this suit of armor,” she might say. Or “I have a bit of watercress stuck between my teeth, and so I’m using this rusty cutlass to pick it out.” Or “I am making a pincushion in the shape of Toby Squall.”