The children were led by the bullfighter who, unlike the other driver, stepped down from his perch and took their satchels.
“Where is this school?” asked Jasper, as the bullfighter coachman opened the carriage door.
“Yes,” said the coachman, who closed the door behind them.
Jasper did not ask anything else.
Once the carriage began to move, Rosie waddled out to the street and waved them away with her hankie. Lucy climbed up to the back window and waved until Rosie was out of sight. Then Lucy slid down into her seat and clung to Jasper’s arm.
Jasper looked down at his sister and gave her the most forced smile he had ever had to muster in his life. He looked out of the window so she wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes.
Jasper was startled awake. He was in the carriage with Lucy who, asleep, had been drooling from the corner of her mouth onto Jasper’s shirt, which was wet where the drool had pooled.
For a moment, Jasper could not remember where he was. For a moment, he thought everything had been a dream—the move, the boat, the train, the house, Rosie, the men in black—and he was in a carriage with his parents.
But then, he blinked, and it all came back to him in a giant leap. It was real.
Outside, the city had become more countryside, and the other carriage was no longer following. He wondered when they had separated and why there had been two when it had only been Lucy and himself.
Without warning, the carriage turned. Jasper caught sight of a rusted old gate ahead, standing in front of a long drive through fields and an orchard. There was an old sign, half hidden by a willow tree. The hinges on one side were broken, having rusted away. The sign said “Sole Manner Farm.” It may have even said “Sole Manner Farm School” at one time, but it was impossible to tell because that part of the sign had broken away and what looked like an “S” may just have been an impression on the wood. And there was some other kind of writing on the sign, too, or perhaps it was the only remains of a pattern running along the bottom edge.
Whatever it said didn’t matter to Jasper when he saw the farmhouse at the far side of the field. Lucy stirred.
“I think we’re here,” Jasper said, allowing his sister to wake of her own accord.
“Where’s here?” asked Lucy with a yawn. “Are we lost?”
“I think it’s the school,” Jasper said, “or the farm. I think we’re on a farm, but we’ve definitely come on purpose. I doubt we’re lost.”
Lucy clambered up to see through the window.
“It’s lovely,” she said, admiring the orchard and watching the birds drift on the breeze.
Jasper saw the birds, too, and the fields, and he understood what Lucy was seeing.
“It is lovely,” he said. And it was.
“Lovely” was an excellent description. The smell of apples yet to ripen and late berries at the end of their season filled the carriage. Lucy pulled down a window so they could breathe in the fresh air. There were none of the dirty smells of the city. Here, you could fill your lungs without smelling smokestacks or tanneries or glue factories. Here, there was nothing but air to breathe.
As they pulled up to the farmhouse, Jasper could see that there was a classroom. The farmhouse had a second building, and Jasper guessed that was where they would sleep. Farther back, he could see this place really was a farm, a working farm, with a barn, a henhouse, acres of green, a potting shed, and an old silo that had fallen into rubble,
Lucy pointed and gasped. Jasper followed the line of her finger. There, standing in the doorway of what was clearly the schoolhouse, was a very lovely young woman.
“She’s beautiful,” Lucy said, practically breathing the words instead of speaking them.
Whether she was beautiful or not, Jasper could not tell, but the woman’s smile made him agree. It was a smile that said everything was going to be all right. Jasper wished he could believe it.
The woman approached the carriage, and her smile broadened as she saw little Lucy struggling to keep her eyes above the bottom of the window ledge.
“You’re like a princess,” Lucy said.
“Well, thank you, sweet angel. I’m so glad you’ve come,” said the woman. “And this is your brother? Welcome. I’m Miss Brett. I’m your teacher.” Her fair hair was pulled back into a braid, but several strands had escaped and framed her face as they fell. She had eyes the color of the darkening summer sky.
She did not wait for the coachman to open the door. Instead, the coachman threw her an indistinct look and went to fetch the baggage.
Jasper and Lucy stepped down from the carriage with Miss Brett holding their hands. Once they were down, Miss Brett knelt to meet Lucy’s gaze, eye to eye.
“I’m Lucy,” said Lucy.
“I’m Jasper,” Jasper said.
“Yes you are,” said Miss Brett, smiling, standing now and guiding the children to the schoolhouse. “We’ve been waiting for you...”
The classroom was marvelous to behold. There were microscopes and telescopes and, on one table, all manner of test tubes, burettes, and burners. On opposite corners of the ceiling, there were also paper flowers and a great paper sun and moon. There were shelves of books and rows of puzzles.
And also there, in that room, were two children around Jasper’s age.
At a desk, looking over a set of blueprints and comparing them to sketches in a notebook, was a girl the likes of whom Jasper had never before seen. The moment he saw her, he understood fully how beauty could take your breath away. He had seen portraits and photographs of beautiful women and girls, but never in his life had he seen one in real life. The girl had warm skin that looked not as if the sun had darkened it, but as if the sun had entered it. Her hair, almost a dark red with wisps of gold, was long, down below her waist, plaited into one thick braid.
As Jasper approached, the girl looked up from what she was doing. Her eyes were the greenest green, but at the same time, the goldest gold. Jasper reached out his hand automatically and tried to speak.
“I... me... I... my—”
The beautiful girl did not take his hand. Instead, she opened up that beautiful mouth of hers and, in a sultry voice that carried with it an essence of an Indian accent, she said, “Are you an idiot? What is this? Are there more of them? And this one doesn’t even know how to talk.”
Stung by her bite, Jasper was stunned and shaken. He looked down at his hand as if it was a traitor.
“I can speak,” he said, his voice squeaking. “My name is Jasper, and Lucy there is my sister.”
“Well, you should know your ruddy name, Jasper,” she said, pointing to a folded paper on one of the five desks. It said “JASPER.” “You’ve got some help now, so you can practice saying it. Now don’t disturb me.”
“Faye,” Miss Brett said, Lucy still at her side, “I told you that all the classmates were arriving today. Why don’t you go fetch the lovely biscuits we made this morning?” There was no scolding in her voice.
Her face lighting up, Faye ran across the classroom, opened the door on the far side of the room, and rushed through it.
“Faye arrived this morning,” Miss Brett said, “as did Wallace.”
The small boy sat at a desk on the far side of the room. He was writing in a small notebook.
“Hello,” Jasper said as he approached the desk, cautiously. Did this one bite, too?
“Hello,” the boy responded shyly. He extended a hand, as Jasper had done to Faye.
“I’m Jasper,” said Jasper, taking the hand gladly. “How long have you been here?”
“I arrived about an hour—no, two hours ago,” Wallace said, taking a look at the clock on the wall of the classroom.
“I helped Miss Brett make these, as I was the first to arrive,” said Faye, returning to the room with a tray of biscuits.
Jasper grabbed a biscuit and took a bite. “These are delicious, Faye,” he said, smiling at her.
Faye looked up, then blushed. “Well, I... well, don’t
eat them all.” To Jasper’s disappointment, the sulk seemed to take over Faye once again, so he walked back over to Wallace, who had returned to his seat after taking a biscuit.
“Are there only five students?” Jasper saw there were only five desks and, so far, four children. Wallace’s desk was dead center, Jasper and Faye in front, and Lucy and someone named “NOAH” in back.
“He should be coming, too. Today, like the rest of us,” said Wallace. “That’s what Miss Brett said.”
“Does Miss Brett run the school? Is she the headmistress?” Jasper asked, finishing his biscuit.
“Well, I suppose,” Wallace said. “She lives here in the farmhouse, as will we, I imagine. She seems very pleasant to me. She’s certainly the nicest teacher I’ve ever come across. Well, except my mother.”
“Your mother is a teacher?”
“Um, well... she taught me. But Miss Brett seems very capable. She really is very, very nice. So far, this is all I’ve been able to conclude. Anything else would be guesswork.” Wallace looked up at Jasper through his thick glasses.
Jasper smiled and felt that, for the first time, he was speaking to a child who would have no interest in torturing him, no desire in hurting Lucy, and no reason to resent either of them for their intelligence. He looked at what Wallace was writing. It seemed to be an equation of sorts.
“Would you like to see my calculations on this chemical variant?” said Wallace. “I think I’ve worked out a kink in the design of this polymer. I’m trying to complete it and test it before... well, I only have a few weeks. Would you like to see?” Jasper leaned over as Wallace began to explain.
Lucy was still having trouble looking at anything but Miss Brett.
“Well, come on, Lucy, let’s bring your bag into your room, and then I’ll show you the kitchen,” Miss Brett said.
“Can I sleep with you, Miss Brett?” asked Lucy. “I’m very cozy, or so I’ve heard.”
“I’m sure you are,” Miss Brett said, trying to keep her smile from turning into a laugh. “But you’ll be sharing the big bed with Faye. Her bags are already in the room.”
After Miss Brett led Lucy to the white room, where Lucy placed her bag on the bed, she took Lucy by the hand and led her into the kitchen.
“Do you like butter biscuits?” said Miss Brett. “We have a batch about to come out of the oven, and we’ll need to put another batch in. I like to butter the top of each biscuit before I put them in to bake. Did your mother ever make butter biscuits?”
“Make them? You mean in the laboratory?” Lucy said, confused. “Butter biscuits sound like something lovely to eat. I thought they were something to eat.”
“Yes, they are, sweet angel,” Miss Brett said. “I meant did your mother ever bake them... in the kitchen... in an oven?”
“No, Mummy doesn’t know what an oven is,” Lucy said. “Hortensia the cook did everything in the kitchen.”
“I see,” Miss Brett said, smiling. “You’ll learn all about kitchens while you’re with me. Then you can teach your mother when...”
But Miss Brett did not know when.
“Everyone keeps saying ‘when,’” said Lucy. “I suppose that is much better than ‘if,’ and if it was ‘if,’ I would be so sad I would be crying, but I’m not crying, Miss Brett, because I am a big girl and I would only cry if the ‘if’ was bigger than the ‘when’ and the ‘when’ went away and there was only an ‘if’ and I thought Mummy and Daddy were gone forever and I... I... I...”
Lucy began to cry, and Miss Brett folded her into her arms and sat with her until the sobs eased into a tiny snoring noise. Then she picked up Lucy and brought her to the bedroom she had selected for her own. As she placed the little girl on the bed, she decided to wait until Lucy awoke to make another batch of biscuits. Miss Brett returned to the classroom, where she worried she might be needed to prevent Faye from biting the head off any of the new arrivals. She made sure to leave the door open between the kitchen and the classroom. The biscuits already in the oven needed only a few more minutes.
“Look, Miss Brett,” Wallace said, pointing through the window at the dirt road on the far side of the field. “A black carriage is approaching. Do you think it’s Noah?”
“I do believe it is, Wallace,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Let’s greet our new classmate.”
Miss Brett stepped outside as the carriage pulled up. A lanky boy carrying a violin case stepped out of the carriage. Miss Brett escorted him into the classroom. He got as far as the door before Jasper and Wallace appeared to show him in.
Leaving them to their greetings, Miss Brett moved toward the kitchen. She had to take the biscuits out of the oven and she wanted to check on Lucy, but then she glanced over at Faye, who was writing in her notebook, ignoring the others gathering at the door.
Miss Brett walked over to Faye and placed her hand on Faye’s shoulder. “Faye? Come join us, won’t you?”
“You don’t need me over there. You’ve got the others.” Faye’s face felt hot, but she refused to look up at Miss Brett.
“But I won’t have you,” Miss Brett said gently.
“It’s already too crowded,” grumbled Faye. She didn’t look up—she couldn’t. In a few short hours, Faye had lost her place as the one and only.
“Want to help me with the biscuits?” Miss Brett said.
Faye shook her head, and Miss Brett walked away. Faye snapped her pencil in half, then bent under her desk to retrieve the fallen piece. She wanted nothing more than to run and run and run all the way home, back to the world she knew, back to her perfect home and perfect garden and perfect life.
FAYE’S ABSOLUTELY PERFECT LIFE
OR
LITTLE MARMELO FINDS AN OVEN
Faye may have spoken in an Indian-tinged upper-class English accent, but she was only half-Indian by birth—the other half was American. She had lived her whole life in India, had traveled through most of it, and spoke many of India’s twenty-some languages. Her Hindi, as well as her Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, and Punjabi, was flawless, like everything else about her—as perfect as she imagined her life to be.
Faye’s father, Rajesh Vigyanveta, was born in New Delhi, but went to college in America. It was there that he met Faye’s mother, Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn was from America—Ohio, originally. While Faye’s father, on leave from Cambridge, was becoming a star at Harvard, Gwendolyn studied at the Annex, the new college, where women could study using Harvard University facilities. Since Harvard instructors taught there, study groups were formed, and Faye’s parents fell in love over a pile of textbooks. By the time they left so her father could finish his studies at Cambridge, they were famous.
Although they had had offers from every university in the world, the Vigyanveta family moved to New Delhi several years before Faye was born. Her mother wanted to live abroad, and her father wanted to go back home. Faye’s father accepted a post as head of science at St. Stephen’s College, teaching chemistry and physics. He had been urged to take the job by Dr. Samuel Allnut, with whom he had studied at Cambridge. Faye’s mother was hired as chief chemist for a large British company.
And soon, Faye Vidya Vigyanveta was born.
Two things about Faye were quite clear early in her life. First, she was, without a doubt, a striking beauty. She was always tall for her age, long and lean, with her father’s olive skin and her mother’s apple-green eyes. She looked like she might have stepped out of a painting or sculpture. She was not only considered beautiful, but exotic, her bright green eyes and dark auburn hair standing out in any New Delhi crowd, her beautiful dark skin setting her apart within her mother’s family.
She might have embraced such attention. It might have made her feel like a queen. However, at thirteen, beauty was wholly unimportant to Faye. It had never been important, except when it got in the way. In fact, at an early age, she had found it terribly annoying when people pinched her cheeks, gawked, or otherwise displayed untoward interest in her appearance. As far ba
ck as she could remember, she resented the fact that people were impressed with something that was not her own doing. She didn’t create her beauty. She was merely stuck with it.
The second thing evident from a very early age (and this was the one that actually mattered to her) was that Faye had a brilliant mind. And she had an extraordinary knack for building things. It was amazing what she could build—mechanical things, engineering things, architectural things. She was—and she would be the first to admit it—a genius. From her earliest moments, Faye loved to experiment with devices. She loved to make things with gears and pulleys and springs. When she was three and a half, she took parts from her father’s bicycle and built an electric fan.
(By coincidence, seven thousand kilometers away in London, a boy named Jasper Modest had done the same thing from parts of his toy boat.)
At the time, Faye had been given full reign of the family laboratory. This did not sit well with her father’s assistants, but they never complained or fussed, for two reasons: One, it was an honor to be chosen as an assistant to Professor Vigyanveta, and two, there was a long line of would-be assistants waiting to replace those who chose to complain about conditions.
That said, there were reasons why the young lads working in the laboratory felt disgruntled. A woman, let alone a little girl, was an odd and unwanted sight in a science lab, and this particular girl was arrogant and annoying. After all, her mother was not only a scientist, but also an American, and everyone knew what those Americans were like. Still, they put up with the fact that a gorgeous little girl was measurably more intelligent than all of them put together.
At the age of six, Faye created a contraption that had many gears and pulleys and springs, all attached to an assortment of different-sized hooks. (The myriad items that were sacrificed for this invention are too numerous to be mentioned individually, but their loss in the name of science is duly noted.) The invention could pick up beakers and move them around the laboratory by the mere touch of a lever. Admittedly, this particular invention was not one of Faye’s most successful. Her parents had been quite encouraging before they knew the quantity of things that would be cannibalized for the creation. After several mishaps in which lab assistants were hauled around the room at the end of assorted hooks and a rather nasty explosion that was the result of improperly combined chemicals tipped accidentally from a flying beaker, the Vigyanvetas had to lay out a new set of rules.
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