by Sam Gayton
Old Mr. Pity retreated inside the Bargaining Bess, and the hat started to laugh.
“Ma?” whispered Lettie. “Is that you?”
“Of course it is. Well, it’s my head, anyway. What did you think of my acting skills back there?”
Lettie smiled for the first time since Noah had left. “I knew it was you! Poor Mr. Pity, he was lost for words!”
“Oh, he’ll have his hat back soon. But I couldn’t very well explain the truth to him, could I? Now carry me careful as you can. My legs are due any minute . . . can you see them?”
Lettie turned and laughed to see a pair of boots hopping up Vinegar Street toward her. She had her family back. It was the strangest family in Albion—maybe in all the world—but it was hers.
And once Lettie had taught Da how to wash up, and Ma how to make a good soup, things would be wonderful.
“Let’s go home, Ma.”
Lettie held her parents in her arms and laughed all the way to the White Horse Inn. She was battered, bruised, and utterly exhausted, but somehow lighter. She wasn’t lonely anymore.
The White Horse Inn was silent and empty: no rugs, no armchairs, no stove. Da had never showed at the Clam Before the Storm to pay his gambling debts, so Mr. Sleech the bailiff had come.
“It’s horrible,” said Lettie. “He even took the last rug.”
“Just think of it as a blank slate,” said Ma.
Then Lettie heard something: a faint coo.
“Periwinkle!” she cried. “Oh, Periwinkle, I’m back!”
She rushed into the kitchen, and there he was, sitting in his favorite spot, with his beak a little more cracked and his feathers a darker gray. Lettie smiled.
“Have I got a story to tell you, Peri!”
The Great Experiment Begins
In the weeks that followed there were lots more arrivals, and one departure worth telling of.
Ma’s hands fell into a pair of feathered gloves on Tuesday. The rest of her tumbled in on an easterly breeze, and she was all back together by Friday. The first thing she did was take old Mr. Pity back his hat. Then she took Da in her hands and uncorked him. Lettie gasped.
“Don’t worry, Lettie. I’ve not taken his head off,” she said. “I just need to empty out all the gastromajus inside him.”
Then she tipped all the beer and pink alchemical inside Da down the drain.
“Now we just have to wait,” she said.
It happened a few hours later, by the hearth. Lettie came down the stairs to the sound of him snoring by the fire. He looked exactly the same as always—buttoned-up shirt, bow tie, and orange socks. And, just like Ma had promised, he did still have his head attached; only now among his red curls, Da had a bald patch.
“It’s like the top of my hair just popped off,” he said.
“It’s exactly like that,” laughed Lettie. Then she kissed him and called him Da and took his hand to show him Ma, who was waiting in boots and feathered gloves.
“First things first,” said Ma. “You’ve been a bad father.”
Da stared at his socks. “Can I ever make it up to you, Lettie?”
“Yes,” said Lettie, hugging him.
Then she and Ma laughed, adding: “But do it quickly!”
The next arrival was a silent one. It happened at night. It came from the sky.
Snow came from the cloud, to dust the roofs of Barter white. People came out of their houses to stare at the snow. Children poked out their tongues to taste it.
When Lettie woke in the morning, Barter had changed. It had been wiped clean. Everywhere lay covered in snow. Billions and trillions of flakes had fallen, and were still falling.
“Look at that!” Lettie breathed onto her window. “It’s white, pure white. It’s like the ugly duckling turned into a swan.”
She ran outside, cramming her arms into her coat as she went. The whole town was silent. Climbing down the ladder, she jumped the last rungs, and the snow made a crunch under her feet she would never forget. She smiled.
“And not a stone in sight,” said Ma above her.
Lettie turned, laughing. Then she scooped up a handful of snow and threw it at Ma with all her might. There, on Vinegar Street, the world’s first snowball fight began.
The last arrival happened on Barter beach, just after a storm. Da was picking through the flotsam for kindling when he found it. He heaved it onto the seafront and dragged it up Vinegar Street all by himself. It took him hours to roll it up the road, through the snow. As soon as he got to the well, he shouted for help.
Lettie’s telescope had already spotted them from the kitchen window. “Da found him!” she yelled at a startled Periwinkle. “He found him, he found him, he found him!”
In minutes, Ma devised a pulley system from a few old ropes, three nails, and a tea towel, and they hoisted the clam inside. Lettie helped lift Blüstav up onto the table; Ma teased open his jaws with a feather and spoon, and all three of them emptied out the gastromajus that was still swilling around inside his shell.
“He’ll change back soon,” said Lettie. “We should leave a message for when he does.”
“I know exactly what to write,” said Ma.
And on a scrap of paper, she scribbled out:
A RECIPE FOR SNOW
A never-before-seen meteorological phenomenon
“You can’t give him the recipe!” Lettie protested. “He’ll just go back to tricking people!”
“I don’t think so, Lettie,” said Ma. “Snow is going to spread. We’re going to take it to every place we can. You’ll see. Soon, people will think it has fallen since the beginning of the world.”
“Then why are you giving him the recipe?”
Ma put down the pen and folded the note beside Blüstav. “Because a recipe is only a guide, Lettie. If he can actually make snow, then he’ll have no need for greed. He’ll have found his imagination at last.”
“Come on,” said Da. “Pick up Periwinkle and let’s go outside. There’s something you need to see, Lettie.”
They left Blüstav and crunched into the snow. It wasn’t falling anymore. Lettie looked up. The sky was clearing and the cloud was moving east.
“We have to follow, don’t we?” said Lettie.
Ma nodded. “Now the snow will start to melt. The stones around here won’t be covered for long.”
“But how will we survive?” said Lettie. “We’ve got no money, we’ve got no house, nothing.”
“We’ll go from village to town to city,” said Da. “We’ll follow the snow cloud. Who knows where we’ll go?”
“Wherever the wind blows,” Ma said.
“And where will that be?” said Da, getting excited. “Edenborg? Madri? Prais? Kiln?”
“It will be a great adventure!” said Ma. “The four of us are going to try and become a family.”
“No!” said Lettie. “It won’t be a great adventure, not one bit.”
Her parents looked at their daughter with worried expressions.
“What will it be then?” said Da.
Lettie tightened her shoelaces, buttoned her coat, and perched Periwinkle on her shoulder.
“It will be a great experiment,” she said, starting down the road.
Epilogue: Once, in Baveria
Once, at the bottom of a valley in Baveria, stood a tiny tavern selling beds by the night, beer by the glass, and garlic sausages by the plateful. Through the valley ran a wind so fast it could carry the hairs from your head and the fingers from your hands. There were nights sometimes when the cold was so still and deep that it swallowed the tavern up the way a well can swallow a dropped stone. It was on a night such as this they arrived.
The young boy who owned the tavern was called Yann, and he was clearing away the supper plates when a family came in through the door. There were four of them: a man with red hair and a bow tie; a woman with goggles over her eyes, a scarf over her mouth, and a woolly hat over her head; a fat gray pigeon; and a girl with wide, wonderful eyes.
The whole t
avern went silent.
Then the girl spoke. “I’ve something magic to give you all.”
“What is it?” asked Yann.
“It’s called snow,” said the girl.
“What is snow?”
“It’ll fall soon, and you’ll see,” she said. “It falls as we arrive and vanishes as we leave.”
“But what does snow do?”
The girl with wonderful eyes smiled at that question, as if it had been asked many times before.
“It makes winter beautiful,” she said.
Everyone around the tavern muttered and stared. Yann bit his lip. To be able to turn this cold, gray winter into something beautiful was magic indeed. But how much did this magic cost? As if sensing his question, the girl spoke: “All I ask for in return are two beds to sleep in, breakfast in the morning, and a little dish of carrot peel for my pigeon.”
Yann looked at each of the villagers, wondering if they wanted to say yes as much as he did.
They consented with grave nods, so he smiled at the strangers and shook their hands (and wing), each in turn.
“Thank you,” said the girl. “We’ll sign the ledger.”
“Wait just a minute,” said Yann. “Where is this snow, then?”
The girl smiled, raising her finger, and pointed to the window.
Yann and the villagers crowded around the glass. They wiped the condensation away and all of them—every single one—let out a gasp. Outside, the snow was falling, and it was white and silent as the angels.
Yann had never been so speechless. He and the villagers stared out the window. Looking at the snow. Looking at the snow. Then he said to the girl, “But what is your name?”
Yann turned away from the window, but she and her family had already crept discreetly away to their beds. So he rushed to the ledger and looked at what the girl had written, in blue ink.
She hadn’t signed her name at all.
It just said, Snow Merchant.
Acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful to the following alchemists, who poured so many wonderful ingredients into the pages of this book:
Julia Green, Steve Voake, and the writers at Bath Spa University added reams of comments, tons of suggestions, and packet after packet of biscuits. Then Janine Amos gave it all a good stir. My agent Becky Bagnell kept things bubbling away. Finally, Eloise King and Charlie Sheppard at Andersen Press pulled it out of the cauldron when it was ready. And Mum, as ever, sorted out the mess I made.
Thank you all.
Sam Gayton grew up in Kent with a cat called Archibald, a dog called Ruby, a bunch of humans, and a ghost called Kevin. He spent his days playing with Lego and making comics with his friend Loo Loo.
Nowadays, Sam still loves Lego and comics. But he also loves drinking tea (milk, no sugar), eating pizza (pepperoni, extra cheese), and wondering how long he would survive a zombie apocalypse (probably about fourteen minutes).
Poly Bernatene was born in 1972 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has been drawing ever since. He graduated from Buenos Aires’s art school, where he developed a great interest in managing different techniques in his work, which has always been based on experimentation and diversity. Poly’s work is constantly changing and developing as he looks for new ways to tell stories. He has worked in advertisement, animation, and comics. During the last fifteen years, he established an exciting career as a professional illustrator, having published more than sixty children’s books in eleven countries.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Sam Gayton
Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Poly Bernatene
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Anderson Press Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-4814-4769-0 (hardcover)
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