by Julie Berry
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” said the shop’s owner.
“Likewise,” my father replied. “Say, are those scarab beetles I just saw?”
Scarab beetles. What could be the secret to their appeal?
I wandered around the shop and spoke a few words to Morris. He even let me stroke his feathers, along his side. The heavenly softness of him took me by surprise. He seemed like such a large and fearsome bird, but underneath my touch, he felt as light as air. Still, he’d protected me, in a way, not long ago, though I couldn’t explain how. I just knew he had.
Mr. Poindexter returned to my side after a bit, while Father pored over antiquities with a magnifying glass.
“Thank you for bringing your father here,” he said. “Much obliged.”
“It’s not why I came,” I told him. “I came to correct a misconception, and to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
“Is that so?” Mr. Poindexter’s muttonchop whiskers couldn’t hide his wide smile. “You have my attention.”
“Good.” I reached into my pocket once more. Only one sardine tin there now. Only one, and I’d know it blindfolded.
“You said,” I began, “that you couldn’t bring on an apprentice like Tommy if he didn’t understand the difference between fanciful nonsense and reality. Is that right?”
“Something to that effect,” said Mr. Poindexter. “I’m not heartless, whatever you might think. They boy needs treatment. Medicine, maybe. A proper mother’s care.”
I leaned closer to Mr. Poindexter. “But what if every word he said was true?”
The Oddity Shop proprietor blew out his breath, then began to chuckle. “That’s rather a stretch, don’t you think?”
“Not at all.” I shook my head. “What if I could prove to you that it wasn’t fanciful nonsense? That I really do have a djinni?”
His eyes narrowed. “Can you prove it?”
“If I could,” I said, “you’d have to believe Tommy is honest and in his sound mind. Wouldn’t you?”
He nodded. “I suppose I would.”
“Would you bring him on as an apprentice?” I asked.
“No child should be in a place like that dismal, unhealthy orphanage,” he mused. Then he stroked his whiskers. “How do you know,” he asked, “that I wouldn’t steal your djinni from you, if you proved to me you really had one?”
Drat! He’d dodged my question.
“I don’t know you wouldn’t steal it,” I said. “But I don’t believe you would.”
He smiled.
“You said, on the day I met you, that you would pay a small fortune for a real djinni of the lamp,” I said. “Is that still true?”
“Oh ho,” he said. “Now we get to the ‘offer I can’t refuse’ part of the deal.”
“Is it still true?” I repeated.
He pursed his lips. “Well,” he said, drawing out the syllable, “I would, but only if I knew without a doubt that I was getting a real djinni of the lamp.” He chuckled. “But I can’t imagine anyone ever parting with one of those, if they had it. Not for any price. Why would they?”
Why would they, indeed?
Perhaps, to make sure that Mermeros’s dire prophecy never came true, that gold lust never tore their soul apart.
Or perhaps, because some dreams coming true are more important than others.
“Here’s my offer, Mr. Poindexter,” I said. “I’ll prove to you that I have a djinni, and you’ll agree that Tom’s not a liar or deluded.”
Mr. Poindexter nodded. “Fair enough.”
I realized my father had left off looking at antiquities and now stood nearby.
“Then,” I said, “I’ll give you the djinni, and you’ll be its new master, if you take Tommy on as an apprentice, and treat him right, and make sure he never has to live in that wretched Industrial School anymore, and that he never wastes away his life in those dangerous mills. Working dawn till dusk. Breathing all that fluff.”
Mr. Poindexter shoved his thumbs into the pockets of his vest. “You’d do that?” he said. “You’d give up your djinni for your friend?”
I gulped. “I would.”
Mr. Poindexter and my father exchanged a look.
“One other thing,” I said. “You mustn’t ever let Tommy know that I made this bargain with you.”
Mr. Siegfried Poindexter nodded.
“That’s my price,” I told him. “Say some stranger sold it to you. I don’t want him feeling like he owes me anything.”
“All right, Miss Maeve,” said the proprietor of the Oddity Shop. “I accept your price. But first, you must prove your djinni is real.”
My hands were trembly, and my stomach weak, as I pulled the sardine tin—the real sardine tin—from my pocket for the last time. At the sight of it, my father shook his head in dismay, but I ignored him. I fitted the key to the tab and cranked it back.
Out poured the cloud of sulfurous fumes. Out slithered the serpentine form of the rascal himself, swelling and stretching his dark-green muscles underneath his scaly chest. His white eyebrows and mustaches wobbled as his own personal whirlwind raged around him.
One more wish, I thought. There’s my djinni. I hold the vessel, and I’m still owed one more wish. I could claim it right now.
But that was not what I’d come to do.
“By jingo, would you look at that,” whispered Mr. Poindexter.
“Who? Who?” called Morris.
Mermeros noted the owl’s presence, and his eyes narrowed. Interesting. Good old Morris. He’d saved me once before. Perhaps he’d be a good-luck charm to carry me through this moment.
My father goggled at the djinni. He held my shoulders protectively, but he couldn’t even find words.
Mermeros, on the other fin, had no shortage of them.
“You!” he bellowed. “Stinking, sniveling, slinking little girl-spawn! My father’s ancient curse is nothing to the curse of having to cope with you as my master! Oh, the shame, the shame! Girls and children, playthings and nonsense! Give me a mighty man of valor, and I’ll make the world his empire to command. I’ll—”
“Is he always like this?” Mr. Poindexter asked.
I nodded. “Pretty much. You get used to it.”
Mermeros’s great green head swiveled sharply to where Mr. Poindexter stood gaping at him.
“Are you a mighty man of valor?”
Mr. Poindexter’s tongue seemed to have gone dry. “Well, I… That is to say…”
“Quick,” said Mermeros urgently, “bind the girl in chains and lock her away. Then you’ll be my master!”
“See here,” my father said indignantly. “Let’s have no talk of chains.”
“Actually,” Mr. Poindexter said, “the girl has made a bargain with me, and given you to me. So I will be your master now. We don’t need to lock her away.”
The whirlwind halted abruptly. Mermeros sank in midair. His mighty limbs fell slack.
“She gave me away?” His voice was low, deep as the dark sea. “She valued my colossal might so little as to bargain with a mortal for worthless rubbish in return for my power to command?”
I wanted to laugh. But even this great brute, this great fishy egotist, had feelings, too, I supposed. And I’d wounded them.
“Oh, Mermeros,” I teased. “It’s nothing personal. You’ve grown on me, you know that? We could almost be pals. If I had to have a djinni, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather it was than you.”
Mermeros’s fishy lips puckered in disgust. “‘If I had to have a djinni…!’ Pals! Has such idiocy ever been spoken by a mortal?”
He turned to me. In his hand, he conjured another swirling orb, white and gleaming. Me, playing cricket. A team of girls playing cricket. Teams upon teams, and leagues, stretching across all England. Across the Queen’s empire! Around the world!
In his other hand, other images swelled to life. Mountains, jungles, rivers, fjords, deserts, riverboats, glaciers, forests, cities, palaces, monuments, and wonders. The whole earth unrolling before me like a tapestry, and in each scene, a young woman, dressed for travel, equipped for exploration, fearlessly striding across every magnificent mile.
Me. Just a little bit older, taller, wiser, braver. Me, someday, exploring the world.
“You have one more wish, little mistress,” Mermeros said softly. Where had this polite djinni been earlier?
One more wish.
“You have one more?” Both men, Mr. Poindexter and my father, spoke at once.
I nodded.
“Use it, Maeve!” urged my father.
Morris’s golden eyes blinked at me. That owl was wiser than even owls were said to be. I’d swear it.
I closed my eyes. I saw an image of my own, needing no magic to paint before my mind’s eye. The wondrous, scrolling earth, once more, and Mr. Poindexter striding along those miles, with Tommy at his side. Breathing clean, healthy air, finding oddities, and seeing the world’s wonders.
Summoning Mermeros to make a wish of his own. Maybe I’d be invited to join the adventure.
“Go on, make the last wish,” added Mr. Poindexter. “I don’t mind.”
I took one last breath, and I made my firm decision. Again.
“You should mind,” I told the proprietor of the Oddity Shop. “He’s trying to trick me. I could use my last wish, but if I did, Mermeros would vanish, this sardine tin would be empty, and he’d reappear somewhere else, in some other vessel, at some future time. Perhaps a century or more down the road.”
Mr. Poindexter looked puzzled. “But then—”
I didn’t want to hear him say it. “But then, the deal we’ve made is worth it to me.” To my great embarrassment, some little tears pricked my eyes. I clamped my eyes shut and willed them away. “I’ll just have to find my own way to form a cricket league for girls. And travel the world. Nobody said you have to have magic for that.”
I snatched Mermeros’s tin from the floor and cranked it back shut. A howling green Mermeros disappeared into it, bawling curses at me all the way.
“Au revoir, Mermeros,” I whispered to him as the tin sucked him in. “You were wrong about me. Remember that.”
I handed the tin to Mr. Poindexter. “You promise to make Tommy your apprentice?”
Mr. Poindexter’s smile was hard to read. “Actually, I don’t.”
I wanted to tackle him and snatch back my tin. “I trusted you!” I cried. “You promised!”
“Is this how you conduct your business, sir?” demanded my father. “Reneging on your promises?”
Mr. Poindexter held up a hand of surrender. He went behind his counter and pulled out a sheaf of long papers.
“I told you, Maeve, that when Tommy insisted he’d flown across Europe and Asia Minor with a magical djinni, that I began to be very concerned about taking him on as an apprentice. I felt he needed help I couldn’t offer him. Yes? You remember this?”
I nodded, though my fists were clenched. “You told me. So, what?”
“So,” he said, pushing the papers toward me, “before I became hesitant about his, well, sanity, this is what I proposed doing with Tommy.”
I turned the papers around, and my father and I studied them together.
“Application for Adoption of an Orphan,” read the title across the top, in careful script. “Adoptive Father. Name, occupation, address,” and so on.
My fists uncurled. I leaned against my father’s side, and together we looked up at Mr. Poindexter, who blushed.
“I’m…not the marrying kind, I daresay,” he said apologetically. “But I always did hope to have a son.” He smiled. “Your friend Tom is a remarkable young man. He’s quite won me over.”
I was so happy, it made me dizzy. “Oh, he’s all right, once you get to know him,” I said. “Just don’t leave that sardine tin lying around where he can easily find it.”
Chapter 38
I was expelled that very day from Miss Salamanca’s School for Upright Young Ladies for leaving the property without permission, skipping classes, reporting an intruder to my bedroom when there wasn’t one, breaking into Darvill House, sassing Mr. Treazleton, socking Theresa Treazleton in the eye, and, I suppose, just generally being myself. I can’t pretend that I was surprised.
I never breathed a word about Sarah Trippin escorting me on my illegal errand. She works in the school kitchens still, under the friendly eye of Miss Plumley, and I’ll daresay the students there are eating much better and more happily than we did during the reign of La Gruboil.
Polydora wasn’t available to come fetch me home from school. She had, apparently, a choir rehearsal to attend. I never knew Polly considered herself musical, but I later learned that Constable Hopewood was a noted local baritone. I could put two and two together easily enough to figure that one out.
It was Father who came and fetched me home, that same night, after work ended. Miss Salamanca had sent a telegram home, and I suppose Mother must’ve asked Aunt Vera to telephone the bank. We rode to St. Pancras and boarded a train.
“Tell me, Maeve,” he asked me, once the conductor had punched our tickets, “how did you find your djinni?”
I glanced around me on the train, but saw no ginger-whiskered man this time, nor anyone else paying us the slightest attention. So I told him the entire story. He asked me in particular to tell him about the visions Mermeros had shown me, there in the Oddity Shop—cricket leagues and traveling the world. I did so, and braced myself for a lecture on the impropriety of either goal for a respectable young lady. None came.
“A cricket league for girls,” he repeated. “A cricket league for girls…”
When we returned home, my mother assailed me in the front entryway, ready to flay me alive for being expelled from school. Father helped me off with my coat, and waited for Mother to pause for breath. When he could get a word in edgewise, he said, simply, “Maeve is better off without that school.” And that was the end of that.
But I wasn’t sure I was better off.
Days dragged like lead weights around my ankles. I missed Alice. I missed Tommy. I missed commotion and bustle and even the thrill of getting into trouble. It’s possible, though not certain, that I even missed learning. I could only conclude that I really was a hopeless case. If I didn’t become a famous world cricketer, I’d probably end up a criminal.
These and other cheery thoughts were all I had to occupy my time. That, and finishing Nicholas Nickleby. (Alice, by post, promised to mail me her copy of Oliver Twist.)
Preparations for Evangeline’s wedding had reached a fever pitch, so Mother, Evangeline, and Deborah were no company at all, not that they ever had been much, to tell the truth. Polydora, bless her, was a dear as always, but her thoughts were elsewhere, probably hovering somewhere in the vicinity of the Luton police bureau. I was happy for her. But one dull day dragged on after another, and the cold and wet January made it hard for me to leave the house. I thought I might quietly disintegrate into dust, and no one would notice.
Until one Saturday afternoon.
I sat in the parlor, under Mother’s orders, but buried my nose in Oliver Twist for my own pleasure. We heard the sound of the bell, and Jenkins’s footsteps as she went to answer it. Moments later she appeared in the parlor doorway.
“A Mr. and Mrs. Bromley, madam, sir, here to see you, and their granddaughter, too, a Miss Alice.”
She bowed and showed them in. Mother and Father sat up in their seats and smoothed out their clothing. Mother hid her reading glasses while Deborah stuffed her fashion magazine under a seat cushion.
Alice came in before her grandparents, and I hugged her before I remembered I ought to introduce her all around. My parents welcomed the Bromleys cordially, a
nd soon they all sat down over cups of tea and a plate of biscuits and cheese.
“You’re so kind to welcome this unexpected visit,” began the genteel and fragile Mrs. Bromley.
Daddy protested that the honor was all theirs, etc. Finally, after what seemed like a prolonged competition to see who could be the politest, Mr. and Mrs. Bromley managed to state their purpose.
“We’ve always been supporters of Miss Salamanca’s school,” said Mrs. Bromley.
“Because our daughter spent happy years there before her marriage,” added Mr. Bromley.
“Back when it was run by the present Miss Salamanca’s aunt,” Mrs. Bromley said. “And so, when our son and his wife passed, leaving Alice in our care—”
“—naturally, we thought of that dear old school, and no other, for our precious girl.” Mr. Bromley beamed at Alice.
“Alice is our son’s daughter,” explained Mrs. Bromley. “He and his dear wife succumbed to the influenza when Alice was very young.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” murmured my mother.
“How dreadful,” my father added.
“Thank you kindly.” Mrs. Bromley went on. “I only mean to say, that is, I mean, our daughter, Alice’s aunt, is alive and well, but Alice’s parents are not. Which is why we’re her guardians.”
“I see,” Daddy said.
“Crystal clear,” added Mother.
The elder Bromleys exchanged a look, then nodded to each other.
“But we have come to the conclusion—” Mrs. Bromley began.
Mr. Bromley chimed in. “…that tradition alone should not enslave the young.”
“And so,” went on Mrs. Bromley, “we have decided that for Alice’s good she should leave the school. She hasn’t been happy there.”
Mr. Bromley nodded. “Quite right. Aside from her friendship with your charming Maeve, of course.”
“Our charming Maeve,” repeated my mother, as waking slowly from an odd dream.
Mrs. Bromley took up the baton. “Alice will leave the school and be privately instructed at home, with excellent tutors.”
Mother smiled on cue. “How very suitable.”
