by Heidi Heilig
It had been years since I’d last bothered trying to insist. I dug into the stew myself, more slowly this time. It was very good: huge chunks of white lobster in a broth rich with butter. Rotgut loved to eat well, and it showed in his cooking.
“So,” I asked. “How did it go? On a scale of one to treason?”
Kashmir barked a laugh, but Slate waved a dismissive hand. I pursed my lips. “I was worried about you,” I said to my father. He didn’t respond. “Worried you’d get shot.”
He folded his arms and glared off toward the blackness of the open sea. “We weren’t shot.”
“Yes, indeed, I see that now.”
“Thank you for your concern,” he said, stalking off to his room.
“You know we’d be stuck here if you died,” I called after him.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You wouldn’t be stuck,” he said, seeming to speak to the teak of the door. “You would find a way, Nixie. If you really wanted to escape.”
He shut the door behind him, and Blake’s words came back to me. “Why would I? This is home.” I shook them out of my head and slid down to sit against the bulwark, setting my half-empty bowl on my knees, suddenly uncomfortably full. “Ugh.”
“Today put him in a foul mood,” Kashmir said.
“I put him in a foul mood,” I corrected, leaving myself wide open, but Kash didn’t even seem to notice.
“Then today made it worse.” He tipped his own bowl and scraped the bottom with his spoon. Then he sat beside me and took my bowl from my hands.
“What happened?”
He made a face. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yeah. Shoot.”
“Ha ha. Well. We’ve encountered a few obstacles, the biggest one the weight of the gold. There’s no way to carry it away without help. Or at least a couple of draft horses. There’s also the Royal Hawaiian Guard to consider. It’s only fifty local boys in nice uniforms, but all it takes is one lucky shot. Slate was talking about hiring mercenaries, but—”
“Ugh, not really?”
Kashmir shrugged. “He didn’t seem happy about it.”
“Where would he find them? The map ends a hundred miles out to sea. How would we get back here? And can you imagine having mercenaries aboard? Or, God, unleashing them here?”
“I don’t know, amira. It’s a last resort. He doesn’t want any bloodshed.”
“Well, then, he shouldn’t be considering piracy.”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
I scoffed. “If I did, I wouldn’t share them with the captain.”
“Pourquois non?” he said. “It will never actually happen. You and I will get the map first. But in the meantime, you could get back in his good graces if you would just promise to try to help him.”
I made a face. “That’s dishonest.”
“Heaven forefend you lie so you can steal. He’s thinking of giving you the evening watch on the night of the ball.” My jaw dropped, and Kashmir shrugged. “I told you. He’s in a foul mood.”
“But I have to be there!”
“I’m sure I can manage without you, amira.”
“No, I mean . . . I’m expected.” It felt like a confession. “Mr. Hart asked me to come.”
“He asked all of us to come.”
“No, I mean, he asked again later. After the hike.”
Kashmir’s spoon stopped in midair. “After the what?”
“I was trying to reconnoiter, like you! Only I didn’t have much success.”
“You were trying . . .” His brow furrowed like he was trying to picture it. “Amira . . . what exactly did you say to him? Tell me you didn’t tip our hand!”
“I don’t think so. We did talk about maps, but it was a part of a previous conversation—”
“You mentioned the map? The map we want to steal? The map his father is using to barter for treason?”
“It wasn’t like that! And he might not be on their side, at any rate. When we were at the waterfall, he was going on about paradise. . . .” I trailed off. Kashmir was shaking his head as though in awe. My cheeks went hot.
“Next time, amira,” he said at last, “leave the reconnoitering to me.”
“Understood.” I dropped my chin, letting my hair fall over my face.
We were quiet for a while as he scraped the bottom of his bowl with the spoon. “You’d met the boy before.”
“In Chinatown, yes.”
“By luck or by design, do you think?”
“Oh, luck. Definitely.”
He arched one eyebrow. “His or yours?”
I cocked my head at him. “Kashmir. Are you jealous?” I teased. He didn’t laugh, though; his expression didn’t change at all. An odd fluttering flew into my throat, and I swallowed it down. “What? Do you think he’s in on the plot?”
“Oh, no, nothing so grand! But there’s more than one reason to spy on a pretty girl.” Kashmir stood up, taking the bowls, then he flashed me his teeth. “I told you you looked like a hussy.”
“Takes one to know one,” I called as he went below, but my heart wasn’t in it. And that night when I changed clothes, I found myself staring into the mirror and wondering what Blake saw when he looked at me.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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The next few days were busy.
The captain had accepted my offer of help with a huge grin and a bear hug, but it left a sour taste in my mouth—and not only because it went against what I had told him before. Ever since the hike, Mr. D’s request had seemed particularly odious. But Slate and Kashmir were away from the ship for long hours of the day and night, and the captain didn’t have time to ask me whether or not I’d made any progress on the challenges inherent in the theft.
I ended up having to pitch in on his watches, which we’d started keeping strictly since Mr. D’s visit, but instead of studying the maps, I spent my time reading the paper. The majority of the articles were depressing items about Princess Pauahi evincing the Victorian obsession with death: her funeral was to be held on the second of November, her husband was sick with grief.. But alongside those morbid tidbits, other stories stood out.
The king had been busy of late. Aside from the funeral of his cousin, he’d been planning a jubilee to commemorate Hawaii’s Independence Day, the anniversary of the day the Kingdom of Hawaii was recognized as a sovereign nation by the crowned heads of Europe. The celebration would begin on November 28 and continue through the weekend, and would feature performances of the scandalous hula and concerts by the Royal Hawaiian Band. There would also be a parade and fireworks “suitable for a nation twenty times the size of Hawaii,” the paper noted, in what seemed to me like a sniffy tone.
Kalakaua was also dealing with a bill proposing to return to the practice of issuing opium licenses so proprietors might sell the drug. It was offered as a way to raise revenue, but the king declined in fear of the effect it might have on his beleaguered people, some of whom already struggled with alcohol. Auntie Joss might prefer the bill ratified, and Kalakaua might have to do it, were he to find the treasury in deficit.
But when I read two more mentions in the paper—one, the census reporting that, although the native population was in decline, the overall population of the islands was growing, and the other, an anonymous letter to the editor calling for “a closer alliance” with America—I saw the political landscape come into view. Kalakaua’s kingdom was being overwhelmed by foreign interests.
I gathered this intelligence, but I had no one to tell. Kashmir disappeared with Slate every morning to go into town and returned only late at night, spending the days before the ball preparing to give Mr. D his answer.
But I too had preparations to make, so on Thursday afternoon, I managed to finish my chores early and wheedle Bee into giving me a few hours of freedom so I could stop by to visit the Mercier sisters. They were ple
ased to see me, although perhaps less pleased than they might have been to see both me and Kashmir. Emily asked after him as she fussed with the bustle on the dress.
“He’s in town. Doing . . . errands.” I watched our reflection in the long oval mirror; I did not look like myself.
“He’s very dashing,” Emily said. “And quite young. Is he really your tutor?” Nan’s eyes cut to her sister; she made a small noise of protest at the question, but her mouth was full of pins.
“Yes,” I said airily. “Did you know his people invented the zero?”
The jacket needed to be taken in at the waist, but the dress fit perfectly. I paid the remainder of the balance and asked that they have everything delivered to the ship when they were finished. In the rich silks and ribbons, would I pass for a society girl among Blake’s father’s important friends?
On the way back to the ship, I crossed Queen Street. Remembering the conversation I’d had with Blake, I took a detour south to Richards. I walked up and down the block twice before I saw it—there, on the second-floor windows of a white stucco building, the gold lettering on the glass: A. SUTFIN & CO, SINCE 1887.
The door was unlocked, so I showed myself in, up the narrow stairs, to a lived-in studio with a checked oak floor, well lit by southern windows and gas jets. The walls of this front room, obviously a converted parlor, were lined with wide, deep shelves, each holding a single sheet of paper: maps in their various stages of completion. There was a drafting desk by the windows where a man, perhaps thirty years old, although already starting to bald, sat drawing. I knocked on the half-open door, and he started at the sound, his gold-wire spectacles slipping down his nose. He thumbed them up in a peculiar gesture.
“Oh, hello, how do you do? Ah.” He peered at me closely. I was probably not one of his typical visitors. “How may I help you, miss?”“Mr. Sutfin? You make maps?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, gesturing toward the shelves on the wall, as if to prove it. “Yes, I do.”
“I’m wondering about one in particular. A map of the island. You must have finished it very recently . . .” I frowned—what day had we arrived? “On October 24? But you dated it 1868.”
“Oh, yes, those maps! What about them?”
“There was more than one?”
“Yes, I did three. The commission was for half a dozen maps, but the client canceled the last three a few days ago. And thank goodness,” he added. “He wanted each one drawn by hand. I told him it would be faster to have an engraving made of the first, but he wouldn’t hear of it. The whole affair was very time-consuming. If you are here to commission a map, I must tell you, it will be at least eight months before I can get to it.”
“Your client. What was his name?”
“I—Miss, may I ask you why the questions?”
“We . . . my father purchased one of them, and I wondered why they were backdated.”
“It was part of the commission. I’m sorry I can’t say more. I’m not trying to be secretive, but I don’t know why it was important, only that it was required. But I assure you, the map is accurate in all other respects!”
“Of course,” I said, assuaging his concern for his reputation. “One more question—your other map of 1868. The one of downtown, that you signed as Blake Hart?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The one of the . . . ah . . . the bars?”
“Miss . . . I don’t . . . May I—”
“Forgive my intrusion,” I said quickly, seeing the truth on his face. It may have been too much to hope for, that the other map was as verifiably fake as the one that had brought us here. That would have been too easy. “Thank you for your time.” I hurried down the stairs before he could start to ask me any questions.
Three copies. What had happened to the other two? Lost over time, I suppose. Or perhaps they would come up someday, at another auction. The one we’d bought was pristine; whoever had kept it must have had instructions to preserve it perfectly. At least I knew, now, if any of the other Sutfin maps ever turned up, we could write them off.
I paused on the street corner, and my hand went to the pearl at my throat. Surely Mr. D had been the person to commission the maps, which meant he knew more about Navigation than I had imagined. In fact, he’d reached across more than a century to find us. The gall. He must have had Joss’s help from the start. Was he waiting by the docks the day after Sutfin turned over each map? I yanked the pendant back and forth on its chain. I only had an hour left before Bee expected me back, so I hurried toward Chinatown.
Joss greeted me by name as I entered her shop. I don’t know how she identified me without my having said a word, but I wasn’t in the mood to ask. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeming impressed.
I went all oars in the water, ramming speed. “Sutfin. Your idea or Mr. D’s?”
“You needn’t thank me,” she said smoothly.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Your father would.” She leaned down to rummage under her counter. “How else would he be able to get the map he really wants?”
I frowned. “If that was your goal, you could have made sure it was as well preserved as the others.”
“You arrived the day Mr. Sutfin finished his third map,” she replied. “The first two were clearly lost. Good thing we could make more than one. How could we guarantee the safety of the other map, so rare and so valuable, across so much time?”
I ground my teeth, but she had a point.
She straightened up, and in her turmeric-stained hands was a pile of papers: a selection of maps. “But you might thank me for these,” she said as she spread them on the rough wooden countertop. “If we can come to an arrangement for them.”
My desire overcame my pride embarrassingly quickly, and I bent my head to sort through the maps. My irritation returned. Her collection contained some worthless pages cut from an atlas (the Cape of Good Hope, the Canary Islands, Eastern Europe), a torn Japanese whale migration chart from the 1750s, and a hymnal with all the pages ripped out but one. Only mildly curious as to which hymn had been left behind, I opened the cover and saw that the single page inside was loose, and that it was no hymn.
“What’s this?” I said, barely above a whisper. The page, folded in quarters, was so delicate I was afraid a strong breath would cause it to disintegrate. The hymnal covers had been used to protect it.
“Very old, that map. Very valuable. It’s from the Qin dynasty. Shows the lost tomb of the first emperor. He was buried with all the riches of his empire, and his tomb is guarded by warriors of clay brought to life to watch over an eternity under the earth.”
She spoke to me as though I were a gawking country girl—I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d thrown in a mummy’s curse—but I’d heard of the tomb of Emperor Qin and his terra-cotta warriors. Sima Qian, the first Chinese historian, had written about the tomb, and a few of the warriors in one of the antechambers been rediscovered in the 1970s by Chinese farmers, although the main portion of the fantastical tomb had not yet been opened.
Still.
“You’re saying this map is nearly two thousand years old?” Skepticism practically dripped from each word; after all, she couldn’t see my expression.
“That was when it was drawn,” she said carefully. “But it does not seem to have aged two thousand years. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Very. When did you acquire it?”
“Back when I could see. It came from a dying woman. She had no more need of it.”
I chewed on my lip for another minute. It was highly unlikely this map was authentic, but there was something compelling about it. “How much?”
She clasped her hands together eagerly. “Would you like some tea?”
I declined the tea, but I did end up with the map, and at one third her starting price, but four times my own. She was an excellent bargainer, but she seemed proud of my effort. In fact, if the map was genuine, she had let me off lightly.
As for the other map she’d b
rokered, I might as well ask, though I might not trust her answers. “The map my father wants,” I said as I counted out the coins. “The one of the Happy House.”
“Hapai Hale,” she corrected. “What of it?”
“Was it actually inked in 1868?”
She lifted one shoulder. “Too bad Mr. Hart was drowned, or you could ask him yourself.”
I cocked my head. “What do you mean, ‘was drowned’?”
“In the bay,” she said.
“What I mean is—”
“Very tragic,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “A great loss. Blake Hart spent many hours entertaining us. He was a favorite of the ladies. He did indeed draw the map. If your mother was here, she could tell you. Of course, if she were still here, you wouldn’t need his map.”
I made a face, although she couldn’t see it, and left the shop with the map she’d sold me and the bitter taste in my mouth she’d thrown in free.
As I hurried back to the ship, I thought of a question I hadn’t asked. Just past the docks, the wharf rats were lounging on the esplanade, and I stopped in front of one of the half-grown boys. “Want a nickel?”
He stood up straight and held out his hand. It was plump, and his fingernails were exceptionally clean. Half a world away in London, a street urchin his age would be black with soot or muck from head to toe from scraping a living picking rags. These boys might dive for pennies tossed into the Pacific, but the sea was full of fish and the mountains were full of fruit. I smiled at him. “What does hapai mean?”
His eyes got big, and the other boys tittered. He looked at them for help, and one of his compatriots stood, crossing his arms over his skinny chest. “It’s delicate,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, but I looked at him blankly. “You know,” he continued, standing up and sauntering toward me. “Expecting? Swelling? Poisoned?” He held out his own hand.
I took a nickel from my bag and held it up so it caught the afternoon light. He opened his mouth, paused, then spoke the taboo word. “Pregnant!” He snatched the nickel and ran, ducking his head and laughing.
