The Cabinet of Earths

by Anne Nesbet

  He stopped and blinked at her.

  “It’s my Cousin Louise,” said Maya, gesturing back toward the dull shadow of Louise behind them. “She lost her family in 1964. In Italy. A church fell down on them. Do you remember this? And then an uncle offered to take her, Henri de Fourcroy. But that’s you, isn’t it? Did you try to adopt my Cousin Louise?”

  He was so lost he looked for a moment like a guinea pig must look, when it has spent ten long hours shivering in an ice calorimeter.

  “Adopt?” he said. “Italy?”

  “No, Maya,” said Cousin Louise, moving forward from her place in the shadows. “I’m sure, having seen him. He is not the one.”

  And at that moment a tea kettle started to wail in an adjoining room.

  “My tea,” said the old man. “Excuse me. Would you like—”

  “Yes, please,” said Maya. She said this because Cousin Louise was about to insist that they leave, and they could not leave, not with this old Fourcroy, nobody’s uncle after all, looking so lost and confused and forlorn. A shred of stubbornness had come to the surface just then, in Maya, and she was not going to leave until she had done what she could to put things at least somewhat right.

  In fact, she was so intent on not letting Cousin Louise drag her away too soon that she followed the old man right out of his workshop through a door in the back wall, Cousin Louise trailing behind. The rooms on the other side of the door were old but ordinary rooms, very bare after the clutter of the workshop out in front, pictures on the wall, an antique table and chairs, a carpet on the floor, and in the corner—

  “Oh!” said Maya. Maybe, in fact, she said nothing aloud at all, just stood stock still and stared, while the old man shuffled on ahead into his ancient kitchen.

  In the corner of the room was a glass-fronted cabinet, the glass very old and ripply, thicker slightly at the bottom of the panes than at the top, and within that cabinet—

  Bottles and vases, stoppered jars. Glass within glass, and in each of those glasses, a different vivid color of earth: reds, russets, browns. Glass bottles of earth on glass shelves in the glass cabinet. Around the bases of the bottles were odd shards of rock, with what looked like fossils peeping out, and broken stones that held crystal caves in them or that might have been meteorites that fell long ago from the sky, they seemed so old and black and alien.

  The bronze frame of the cabinet, which seemed to contain all of these marvels with the grace of a goblet holding some fine and transparent wine, was itself a wonder, a flowing ornament twining around all that rippling glass, a phoenix arching around one low corner, and there, staring down at her from the upper right—

  “Don’t touch! Don’t touch!” cried the old man, almost dropping the tray holding the teacups.

  —was a salamander.

  All at once the world went very still. She was floating; she was underwater: All the room’s sound was replaced by a throbbing hum, light streaking slowly away from everything it touched. She stretched one hand out (the air was as thick as syrup; her arm moved with the slow grace of an aquatic plant) and tried to say something, but her voice was gone, too.

  The bronze salamander looked at her and smiled.

  Maya, it said.

  In their bottles, the earths glimmered and pulsed. Maya tried to blink, but her eyelids were very slow and stupid.

  Maya.

  The cabinet itself was calling to her.

  Maya.

  And then, all in a rush, the air was air again, and time was running at its normal pace, and Cousin Louise was saying something in her spectacularly ordinary voice.

  “—But glass is also a liquid, I’ve heard,” said Cousin Louise, as she took the tea tray from the tremulous arms of Henri-Pierre de Fourcroy. “Given time, it flows, however hard it may seem to be.”

  The old man made a strangled sound behind Maya’s back. But Cousin Louise stood still, with the tray, as impassive as ever. Maya hardly knew what to say or where to look. Her skin was prickling all over with embarrassment and discomfort and some other, less describable feeling, as if the cabinet itself had somehow reached out and marked her. A tingle of electricity in the air.

  “Oh!” she said, stepping back quickly. “I’m sorry! But what is it? What’s in it? It looks like sand in those bottles. Or earth.”

  “Yes,” said the old man, plucking at her sleeve with one trembling hand. “The Cabinet of Earths. And I am its Keeper, since ever so long. Don’t touch. Not to be touched. Come away, now, please, mademoiselle. Come away, please.”

  But I didn’t touch it, thought Maya in confusion as the old man led her away. I’m sure I didn’t. It touched me.

  So they retreated into his workshop once more, and Cousin Louise poured them all cups of slightly musty tea.

  At first they were silent, the only sound in that cluttered, marvelous room the faint and unsteady click of the old man’s spoon against the rim of his teacup. Maya’s thoughts were one big mishmash of glass cabinets and salamanders and churches falling down and little fluffy sheep waiting to take their places on a green felt field.

  The old man had dropped his spoon and was staring at Maya, as if his mind had just now finished working some very complicated calculation, and had come up with “this girl right before you” as the answer; Cousin Louise, having served the tea, was looking in no particular direction at all.

  Maya took another bitter gulp of tea and set down her cup.

  “Monsieur Fourcroy,” she said. “What—”

  But she found she could not ask about the Cabinet, not out here in the light, not with Cousin Louise taking delicate sips of tea just a few feet away. Maya’s mouth would not form the words, and then her breath refused to bring them to life.

  “I don’t know what it means!” said the old man, a deeper note (awe?) now running through his voice. “I’m not sure! But I think—”

  He leaned closer.

  “I think it knows: It is time for a change. I have been here nearly seventy years. I am tired! I do not take deliveries! Not anymore! And you, my dear, are a true Lavirotte. An only child, I hope? If I may be so bold as to inquire.”

  Maya choked very slightly on her tea.

  “I’ve got a little brother,” she said, puzzled. “He’s five. Why?”

  “Oh!” said the old man. His face sagged a little, almost as if he had taken a blow. “Then be careful. It runs in the family, you know: Brother eats brother. It’s a tangled family, ours. There’s danger there.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Maya, by way of understatement.

  “Why should you? You are young, and I’ve been sitting here all my life, making sense of it all. My grandmother, you see, was a Lavirotte, ma fille. Like you.”

  He paused to examine Maya’s face for a moment, as if it had just now come properly into his view.

  “Very like you! Ah, no wonder, then, that the Cabinet wants you. That you came to us, after all this time. I was trying to explain—”

  Cousin Louise sniffed. But quick as Maya whipped her head around to look, she could surprise no ghost of emotion on that face, not even impatience.

  “She had one brother. You must be the children of that brother, you, ma fille, and—and—”

  He had forgotten Cousin Louise’s name, of course; a weak gesture in her direction, and then he went galloping back to his family trees.

  “Well, now, the Lavirottes! They have always been, more or less, amphibious. Yes. They can live in anything: water, air, fire. Yes, yes, like the little salamanders. Citizens of more worlds than one, you know. Guardians and keepers. And those are the Lavirottes, my dear. They walk in magic, my grandmother used to say. Do you see things, little cousin, that others do not see? That’s the Lavirotte in you, seeing.”

  He smiled at Maya and then tapped his chest with a bony finger.

  “But my grandmother married a Fourcroy. And they are always hungry, aren’t they? For good and for ill. They call themselves scientists, but they killed Lavoisier. And then they cla
im to be his heirs! They want power; they eat it up. Science and magic—nothing wrong with them, one at a time, as you might say. But tangle them together for the sake of power—”

  He shook his head slowly and sighed. There was the tiniest of pauses, and then he looked up at Maya with a wistful expression on his wrinkled face.

  “You’ve really never heard of Lavoisier?”

  “My father’s a scientist,” said Maya, so as not to be too discouraging. “He might know about him.”

  “And your mother a Lavirotte!” said the old man, widening his eyes. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! More tangle!”

  He did look awfully worried.

  At that point Cousin Louise made an ambiguous noise, startling to anyone who, like Maya, had forgotten she was in the room.

  “Well, we’ve certainly taken up a great deal of your time,” said Cousin Louise, rising from the worktable where she had just finished her tea. “If I may ask, then: You already lived here in 1964?”

  The old man looked at her, confused again.

  “You were younger then,” said Cousin Louise. “But you were not my uncle. I’m quite sure of that now.”

  “Quite young,” he said. “But working here already, yes. So much younger even than you, mademoiselle, when it chose me. Oh, I’ve never lived anywhere else, non. I can’t leave the—”

  And he gave a meaningful nod toward the back room, where the Cabinet was.

  “You see how it is,” he said. “I don’t even go outside much, mademoiselle. To the store on the corner! Yes! That far and no more.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Maya, and she was. This kind, scattered old man brought out something protective in her. There was some part of him that was so like a child, with his fantastic boxes and his shy smile; he might be slightly crazy, or even more than slightly, but she liked him, all the same.

  “Thank you for the tea,” she said. Cousin Louise was already moving toward the door. “It was kind of you.”

  “My little cousin from America!” he said, and smiled at her with his gentle eyes. “You will come back again, I hope. You will surely come back. Be prudent; be careful; take care! And now, good-bye!”

  He leaned forward a bit to whisper to her: “I must return to my sheep.”

  The door closed.

  They stood, Maya and Cousin Louise, in the twilight of the courtyard for a moment, hardly knowing what to say.

  It was Cousin Louise who first took a brisk breath and started walking back down the alley, back toward Paris and the everyday.

  “So that’s that, then,” she said. “Definitely not the one. A useless detour, no relevance to anything else.”

  But Maya remembered the strange smile of the salamander—and knew that, for her, something in the world had irrevocably changed.

  Chapter 6

  The Evil Tower

  Maya was putting the glasses away in the kitchen a few days later, when a glancing ray of light twinkled off the rim of a cup and reminded her of something.

  “Hey, Dad,” she said. “Is it really true that glass is a liquid?”

  “Aha!” said her father, looking up from his book. “Glass! Now that’s a truly interesting subject. Fixed, like a solid, but disordered, like fluids. Some say—”

  It was always a little risky, asking Maya’s father questions about science.

  “Not the super-long version, right, Dad?” said Maya. “It was just something Cousin Louise said the other day. And even the glass in the windows here, you know. It does look a little bit like something flowing.”

  “Well,” he said. “If I recall correctly, people argued for years and years that the reason some stained-glass windows were thicker at the bottom than at the top was because the glass was slowly flowing downhill with time.”

  It was the old man’s strange cabinet that came immediately to Maya’s mind, with its thick ripples and waves. That was what Cousin Louise had been looking at when she said that odd thing about flowing glass. So Cousin Louise had been right?

  “Nonsense, of course,” said Maya’s father. “Old wives’ tale.”

  And then he went on to say more about viscosity and crystalline structures, but Maya’s mind was elsewhere—she was standing again before that cabinet, and watching the shimmering earths in their bottles. There was something hypnotic about that image, like a mad doctor’s swinging watch in a bad old film. And yet that was the part of the visit to the crazy old cousin de Fourcroy that she had been unable to say anything about, when she was telling her parents the story.

  Sets for an opera about a long-ago scientist (and his sheep and his guinea pig)! Her parents had enjoyed that, it’s true. And her father had definitely heard of Lavoisier.

  “Father of modern chemistry!” he said. “Didn’t know he’d lost his head, though. Very famous guy. Conservation of matter, right, Maya?”

  Maya’s father had a disconcerting way of assuming you’d been listening very hard in every science class you ever had.

  “Um,” said Maya. “Sure.”

  “Just means nothing goes totally poof,” said her father. “A pretty basic idea, you’d think, but the consequences—”

  “Poor old man,” said Maya’s mother, accidentally interrupting. But she was obviously thinking of Henri-Pierre de Fourcroy, and not of the poor headless Lavoisier. And then she had to pause for a moment to cough.

  That was when Maya’s father surprised them all. He

  had been rummaging around in his pockets, looking through his wallet. Now he held up a little card and waved it in the air like a flag.

  “Aha!” he said, looking very pleased with himself indeed. “Sure enough: Fourcroy! Now, how about that?”

  “How about what?” said Maya’s mother. “What’s that thing you’re brandishing about?”

  A business card, very simply engraved:

  HENRI DE FOURCROY, DIRECTOR

  SOCIETY OF PHILOSOPHICAL CHEMISTRY

  Maya’s stomach took a strange, slow ride toward her toes.

  “You remember him,” said Maya’s father. “He came to see us, that very first day.”

  “Oh, yes, with the sunglasses,” said her mother. “Attractive young man. And so he’s another Fourcroy! I guess they must be everywhere. Maya?”

  Sometimes an unexpected surprise can have a sort of narrowing effect on the universe, like a funnel. Maya was peering down this funnel at that name, and her mind was running in feverish little circles: Fourcroy! The Society! That cabinet! Fourcroy!

  “But why didn’t you tell me he was a Fourcroy?” she said to her dad.

  “Good golly,” said her father. “Was it important? I forgot all about it myself.”

  “Maybe we’re even related to him,” said her mother, giving Maya a reassuring pat on the arm. “You did say we’re related somehow to the other one, the old fellow, didn’t you? Here, let’s see what we can do—”

  She had been working on a drawing, so her sketchbook was right there at hand. That was what Maya’s mother was like: always a project underway. Even back when she was very sick, she had kept a notebook near her bed all the time, in case a picture got into her head and wouldn’t leave.

  So now Maya and her mother scribbled out a rough family tree, with lots of question marks hanging from its branches. In the end they figured that this old Fourcroy was maybe their second cousin, twice removed. Nothing closer than that, even if his grandmother had been a Lavirotte. For the other Fourcroy, the young fellow from the Société, there was no obvious spot on the branches anywhere.

  It wasn’t a very bushy tree. The American shoot went as far as James and Maya, but there were no first cousins around to thicken things for them.

  And a great branching of the French side came to a forlorn end in Cousin Louise.

  “That family almost died out twice, you know,” said Maya’s mother. “Before the church fell on them, there was the war. They were deported, you know.”

  Only Louise’s mother had survived the war. And then she had had a church fall on top
of her! Life was definitely not fair.

  “Do you want to keep this, Maya?” asked her mother, and she tore out the page from her sketchbook with a quick swipe of the hand.

  From the sketchbook another picture stared up at them: a fountain, sketched lightly in blue pencil and now only about half inked in. Sad cherubs hoisting a banner: Amandine, 1954; Laurent, 1955. . . .

  “That’s the Fountain of Lost Children,” said Maya. “By that café.”

  “Yes,” said her mother. “Odd things from the neighborhood; that’s my theme this year. Did you know that was all some big mistake?”

  “Mistake?”

  “I went inside the café to ask about it. You know I do like to ask about things.”

  She smiled at Maya, one of her quick, dancing smiles. And Maya smiled back.

  “Anyway, turns out there was about a decade where children were disappearing, or so they thought, and lots of hue and cry and fuss, and some benevolent association collected money for that fountain—‘adorably hideous!’ said the man in the café; they seem quite fond of it there, in a way—and then after it was set up, it turned out the children weren’t exactly missing, after all! Can you imagine? Oh, they’d each wandered off, the way children do, for an afternoon or something, or been misplaced in a store for an hour by their aunties, and been reported as lost, but once you looked more closely into the thing, it turned out they’d all pretty much wandered home.”

  “How could everyone have been so wrong?” said Maya.

  “Mass hysteria,” suggested her father. “Very common. Happens all the time.”

  Somehow Maya did not think that eight whole children could be rumored to have been lost or abducted or misplaced for a whole decade without anybody noticing they had actually been perfectly fine all along. But her mother shrugged.

  “Some of them, the families had moved away. Others apparently had problems of some kind. Weren’t in regular schools anymore. Maybe the parents were ashamed. Anyway, the kids had slipped out of the records, one way or another. These things do happen.”