It was my most precious possession for ten years. Until I turned seventeen, and found The Ten Thousand Doors.
The Leather-Bound Door
I wouldn’t have found it if it weren’t for the bird.
I was heading down to the kitchen to steal evening coffee from Mrs. Purtram, the cook, when I heard a twittering, thrashing sound and paused halfway down the second staircase. I waited until it happened again: the rushing silence of beating wings and a hollow thudding. Silence.
I followed the sound to the second-floor parlor, labeled the Pharaoh Room, where Mr. Locke’s extensive Egyptian collection was housed: red and blue caskets, marble urns with wings for handles, tiny golden ankhs on leather strings, carved stone columns orphaned from their temples. The whole room had a yellowy-gold glow to it, even in the almost-dark of a summer evening.
The sound came from the southern corner of the room, where my blue treasure chest still stood. It rattled on its plinth.
After I’d found my pocket diary I hadn’t been able to help circling back around to the chest every now and then and peering into its dusty-smelling depths. Around Christmas, a cut-paper puppet appeared with little wooden sticks affixed to each of her limbs. The following summer there was a tiny music box that played a Russian-sounding waltz, and then a little brown doll beaded in bright colors, and then an illustrated French edition of The Jungle Book.
I never asked him directly, but I was certain they were gifts from Mr. Locke. They tended to show up right when I needed them most, when my father had forgotten another birthday or missed another holiday. I could almost feel his awkward hand on my shoulder, offering silent comfort.
It seemed extremely unlikely, however, that he would intentionally hide a bird in the box. I lifted the lid, not quite believing it, and a gray-and-gold something exploded up at me as if fired from a small cannon and ricocheted around the parlor. It was a delicate, ruffled-looking bird with a marmalade-colored head and spindly legs. (I tried to look it up, later, but it didn’t look like any of the birds in Mr. Audubon’s book.)
I was turning away, letting the lid of the chest fall—when I realized there was something else still inside.
A book. A smallish, leather-bound book with scuffed corners and with dented imprints where the gold-stamped title had been partially scraped off: THE TEN THOU OORS. I riffled the pages with one thumb.
Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books—those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles—understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn’t about reading the words; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.
This one smelled unlike any book I’d ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. Damp seaside evenings and sweat-slick noontimes beneath palm fronds. It smelled as if it had been in the mail for longer than any one parcel could be, circling the world for years and accumulating layers of smells like a tramp wearing too many clothes.
It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page.
But I’m stumbling ahead of myself. Stories are supposed to be told in order, with beginnings and middles and ends. I’m no scholar, but I know that much.
I spent the years after the blue Door doing what most willful, temerarious girls must do: becoming less so.
In the fall of 1903 I was nine and the world was tasting the word modern on its tongue. A pair of brothers in the Carolinas were experimenting enthusiastically with their flying machines; our new president had just advised us to speak softly but carry big sticks, which apparently meant we ought to invade Panama; and bright red hair was briefly popular, until women started reporting dizziness and hair loss and Miss Valentine’s Hair Potion was revealed to be little more than red rat poison. My father was somewhere in northern Europe (my postcard showed snowy mountains and a pair of children dressed like Hansel and Gretel; the back said Happy belated birthday), and Mr. Locke finally trusted me enough to take me on another trip.
My behavior since the Kentucky incident had been impeccable: I didn’t torment Mr. Stirling or disturb Mr. Locke’s collections; I obeyed all Wilda’s rules, even the really stupid ones about folding your collars straight after ironing; I didn’t play on the grounds with “lice-ridden urchins just off the boat,” but merely watched Samuel driving the grocery cart from the third-story window of my father’s study. He still snuck story papers to me whenever he could finagle them past Mrs. Purtram, their corners dog-eared to his favorite pages, and I returned them rolled tight in the empty milk bottles, with all the best and most bloodthirsty lines circled.
He always looked up as he left, always stared long enough for me to know he’d seen me, and raised a hand. Sometimes, if Wilda wasn’t looking and I was feeling daring, I touched my fingertips to the windowpane in return.
Mostly I spent my time conjugating Latin verbs and doing sums beneath the watery eye of my tutor. I sat through my weekly lessons with Mr. Locke, nodding politely while he lectured about stocks, regulatory boards that didn’t know what was what, his youthful studies in England, and the three best varieties of scotch. I practiced deportment with the senior housekeeper and learned how to smile politely at every guest and client who came to call. “Aren’t you a darling little thing,” they simpered. “And so well-spoken!” They patted my hair as if I were a well-trained lapdog.
Sometimes I was so lonely I thought I might wither into ash and drift away on the next errant breeze.
Sometimes I felt like an item in Mr. Locke’s collection labeled January Scaller, 57 inches, bronze; purpose unknown.
So when he invited me to accompany him to London—on the condition that I was willing to listen to every word he said as if they were God’s own commandments—I said yes so enthusiastically that even Mr. Stirling jumped.
Half my stories and dime novels were set in London, so I was confident in my expectations: dim, foggy streets populated by urchins and nefarious men in bowler hats; black-stained buildings that loomed in a satisfyingly gloomy way over one’s head; silent rows of gray houses. Oliver Twist mixed with Jack the Ripper, with perhaps a dash of Sara Crewe.
Maybe parts of London are really like that, but the city I saw in 1903 was almost exactly the opposite: loud, bright, and bustling. As soon as we stepped off the London and North Western Railway car at Euston station we were nearly stampeded by a group of schoolchildren in matching navy outfits; a man in an emerald turban bowed politely as he passed; a dark-skinned family was arguing in their own language; a red-and-gold poster on the station wall advertised Dr. Goodfellow’s Genuine Human Zoo, featuring Pygmies, Zulu Warriors, Indian Chiefs, and Slave Girls of the East!
“We’re already in a damned human zoo,” Locke grouched, and dispatched Mr. Stirling to find a cab to take us directly to the head offices of the Royal Rubber Company. The porters crammed Mr. Locke’s luggage into the back of the cab, and Stirling and I dragged it up the white marble steps of the company offices.
Mr. Locke and Mr. Stirling vanished into the dim hallways with a number of important-looking men in black suits, and I was instructed to sit on a narrow-backed chair in the lobby and not bother anyone or make any noise or touch anything. I contemplated the mural on the opposite wall, which showed a kneeling African handing Britannia a basket of rubber vines. The African wore a rather slavish, starry-eyed expression.
I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly uni
que specimen” is lonely, it turns out.
One of the secretaries was watching me with narrow-eyed eagerness. You know the type: one of those squat white ladies with thin lips who apparently live their entire lives longing for the chance to rap someone’s knuckles with a ruler. I declined to give her the opportunity. I jumped up, pretending to hear Mr. Locke calling for me, and skittered down the hall after him.
The door was cracked. Oily lamplight oozed out, and men’s voices made soft, hungry echoes against oak paneling. I inched close enough to see inside: there were eight or nine mustached men surrounding a long table piled high with all of Locke’s luggage. The black cases were opened, and crumpled newspapers and straw were strewn everywhere. Locke himself stood at the head of the table, holding something I couldn’t see.
“A very valuable find indeed, gentlemen, all the way from Siam, containing what I’m told is powdered scale of some kind—quite potent—”
The men listened with unseemly eagerness in their faces, their spines curving toward Mr. Locke as if magnetically compelled. There was something odd about them—a kind of collective not-quite-right-ness, as if they weren’t men at all but other kinds of creatures stuffed into black-buttoned suits.
I realized I recognized one of them. I’d seen him at the Society party last July, slinking around the edges of the parlor with darting, yellowy eyes. He was a fidgety man, with a ferrety face and hair redder than even Miss Valentine’s Hair Potion could manufacture. He was leaning toward Locke just like everyone else—but then his nostrils flared, like a dog getting a scent it doesn’t much like.
I know people can’t smell disobedient little girls spying on them, really I do. And how much trouble would I really have gotten in, just for looking? But there was something secretive about the meeting, something illicit, and the man was tilting his head upward as if trying to catch a strange scent and track it—
I flitted away from the door and crept back to my chair in the lobby. For the following hour I kept my eyes on the tile floor, ankles neatly crossed, and ignored the sighing, huffing sounds from the secretary.
Nine-year-olds don’t know much, but they aren’t stupid; I’d guessed before now that all my father’s artifacts and treasures didn’t end up displayed in Locke House. Apparently some of them were shipped across the Atlantic and auctioned off in stuffy boardrooms. I pictured some poor clay tablet or manuscript, stolen from its rightful home and sent circling the globe, forlorn and alone, only to end up labeled and displayed for people who didn’t even know what it said. Then I reminded myself that that was more or less what happened in Locke House itself, anyway, and didn’t Mr. Locke always say it was an act of “criminal cowardice” to leave opportunities unpursued?
I decided another part of being a good girl was probably keeping your mouth shut about certain things.
I didn’t say anything at all to Mr. Locke or Mr. Stirling when they emerged, or during the cab ride to our hotel, or when Mr. Locke abruptly announced that he felt like a little shopping and directed the cab to Knightsbridge instead.
We walked into a department store roughly the size of an independent nation, all marble and glass. White-toothed attendants were posted like smiling soldiers at every counter.
One of them skittered toward us across the shining floor and trilled, “Welcome, sir! How may I help you? And what a darling little girl!” Her smile was blinding, but her eyes interrogated my skin, my hair, my eyes. If I were a coat she would have turned me inside out and checked my tag for my manufacturer. “Wherever did you find her?”
Mr. Locke caught my hand and tucked it protectively under his arm. “This is my… daughter. Adopted, of course. Between you and I, you’re looking at the last living member of the Hawaiian royal family.” And because of the confident boom of Mr. Locke’s voice and the moneyed look of his suit coat, or maybe because she’d never met an actual Hawaiian, the woman believed him. I watched her suspicion vanish, replaced by fascinated admiration.
“Oh, how exceptional! We have some lovely turbans from Lahore—quite exotic, they would look so thrilling with that hair of hers—or perhaps she’d like to look at our parasols? To protect against the summer sun?”
Mr. Locke looked down at me, appraisingly. “A book, I think. Any one she likes. She’s proven herself a very good girl.” Then he smiled at me, an expression detectable only by the slight bending of his mustache.
I glowed; I had been weighed, and found worthy.
In the early summer of 1906 I was almost twelve. The RMS Lusitania had just launched as the largest ship in the world (Mr. Locke promised we’d get tickets soon); the newspapers were still full of grainy pictures of the wreckage in San Francisco after that awful earthquake; and I’d used my allowance to buy a subscription to Outing magazine just so I could read Jack London’s new novel every week. Mr. Locke was away on business without me, and my father was, for once, home.
He was supposed to have left the day before to join Mr. Fawcett’s expedition to Brazil, but there was some delay with documents getting stamped by the proper authorities and delicate instruments that required careful shipping—I didn’t care. I only cared that he was home.
We ate breakfast together in the kitchens, seated at a big scarred table marked with grease spots and burns. He’d brought one of his field notebooks to review, and ate his eggs and toast with a tiny V creasing his eyebrows. I didn’t mind; I had the latest installment of White Fang. We disappeared into our separate worlds, together but apart, and it was so peaceful and right-feeling that I found myself pretending that it happened every morning. That we were a regular little family, that Locke House was our house and this table was our kitchen table.
Except I guess if we were a regular family there would be a mother at the table with us. Maybe she’d be reading, too. Maybe she’d look up at me over the spine of her book and her eyes would crinkle, just so, and she would brush the toast crumbs from my father’s scrubby beard.
It’s stupid to think things like that. It just gives you this hollow, achy feeling between your ribs, like you’re homesick even though you’re already home, and you can’t read your magazine anymore because the words are all warped and watery-looking.
My father gathered his plate and coffee cup and stood, notebook wedged beneath his arm. His eyes were distant behind the little gold-rimmed spectacles he wore for reading. He turned to leave.
“Wait.” I gulped the word out and he blinked at me like a startled owl. “I was wondering if—could I help you? With your work?”
I watched him start to say no, saw his head begin a regretful shake, but then he looked at me. Whatever he saw in my face—the damp shine of almost-tears in my eyes, the hollow aching—made him draw a sharp breath.
“Of course, January.” His accent rolled over my name like a ship at sea; I reveled in the sound of it.
We spent the day down in the endless cellars of Locke House, where all the uncategorized or unlabeled or broken items in Mr. Locke’s collections were stored in straw-stuffed crates. My father sat with a stack of notebooks, muttering and scribbling and occasionally directing me to type out little labels on his shiny black typewriter. I pretended I was Ali Baba in the Cave of Wonders, or a knight stalking through a dragon’s hoard, or just a girl with a father.
“Ah, the lamp, yes. Put that over with the carpet and the necklace, please. Don’t rub it, whatever you do—although—what could it hurt?” I wasn’t sure he was speaking to me until he waved me closer. “Bring it here.”
I handed him the bronze lump I’d dug out of a crate labeled TURKESTAN. It didn’t look much like a lamp; it looked more like a small, misshapen bird, with a long spout for a beak and strange symbols carved along its wings. Father stroked one finger along those symbols, gently, and oily white steam began to spool from the spout. The steam rose, coiling and writhing like a pale snake, making shapes almost like words in the air.
My father’s hand swept the smoke away and I blinked. “How—there must be some kind of wick in th
ere, and a spark. How does it work?”
He tucked the lamp back into its crate, a little half smile curling his mouth. He shrugged at me, and the half smile stretched wider, a glint of something like merriment behind his spectacles.
And maybe because he smiled so very rarely, or because it had been such a perfect day, I said something stupid. “Can I go with you?” He tilted his head, smile retreating. “When you go to Brazil. Or the place after that. Will you take me with you?”
It was one of those things you want so much it burns, so you keep it deep in the center of yourself like a banked coal. But—oh, to escape the hotel lobbies and department stores and neat-buttoned traveling coats—to dive like a fish into the thrumming stream of the world, swimming at my father’s side—
“No.” Cold, harsh. Final.
“I’m a good traveler, ask Mr. Locke! I don’t interrupt, or touch things I oughtn’t, or speak to anyone, or wander off—”
Father’s brow crinkled into that puzzled V again. “Then why should you want to travel in the first place?” He shook his head. “The answer is no, January. It is far too dangerous.”
Embarrassment and anger crept up my neck in hot prickles. I didn’t say anything because then I would cry and everything would be even worse.
“Listen. I find valuable and unique things, yes? For Mr. Locke and his Society friends?” I didn’t nod. “Well, they are not the only, ah, interested parties, it seems. There are others—I don’t know who—” I heard him swallow. “You are safer here. This is a proper place for a young girl to grow up.” That last part came out with such a rehearsed, echoey sound that I knew it was a direct quote from Mr. Locke.
I nodded, eyes on the straw-strewn floor. “Yes, sir.”
“But—I will take you with me, one day. I promise.”
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 3
