The Book of Secrets

by Cynthia Voigt

  Max’s other letter was from a lawyer whose daughter had fallen in love with, and wanted to marry, “a handsome enough fellow, but he says he’s a Romanian count and I don’t know where his money comes from.” Could Mister Max undertake to find out something about the man? “My daughter is a silly, vain girl, natural prey to fortune hunters and I’d be tempted to just let her find out how wrong she is about this Count Wenceslas, if it wasn’t my own fortune at risk.”

  Max didn’t like the tone of that man’s voice, or the way he talked about his daughter, either. He already felt sympathetic to the girl but he asked his grandmother, “Do they have counts in Romania?”

  “I’m not sure. I can try to find out. Do you want me to?”

  “Yes, please,” he said.

  Max slept long, deep, and dreamlessly that night. When he finally woke up, he could see by the sunlight in his room that it was late in the morning and he remembered—surprised that he had forgotten them—two things. First, he had a painting puzzle to discuss with Joachim. Second, he had the mystery of Carlo’s girl, Nissa, to work on. That is to say, there were two things to be done in that day, both of which he would enjoy doing. He got out of bed feeling energetic and clever and generally cheerful.

  He drank down a glass of milk for breakfast and jammed the small notebook used by Inspector Doddle into the rear pocket of his trousers, before he put on his red beret and set his painting gear into the bicycle basket. At Joachim’s, after Max and his teacher had spent a solid hour trying out every way Joachim could think of to get the effect Max was looking for, Joachim announced, “I knew it couldn’t be done. Watercolors are the wrong medium for glass.”

  “Let’s have some lunch,” Max suggested, having realized the same thing a while back.

  “Since you refuse to learn how to use oils …,” Joachim grumbled, but there was a note of satisfaction in his voice. “It’s hopeless for you. Oils can capture glass, the look of it.”

  “Are you hungry?” Max asked. He looked down at the large golden dog, who, seeing that the two had stepped back from their easels, had gotten to her feet in hopes of a walk, or maybe a snack. “Sunny is. Aren’t you, Sunny?”

  “You mean that you are,” Joachim told him. “Go ahead and get yourself something, but I’ve just lost an hour of good light trying to help you and—See that purple cosmos blossom? Imagine it in my new style. I’ll call it June Afternoon. It would be easier to get that flimsy, papery look of the petals in watercolors. In oils it’s going to take real …” His attention returned to the important thing.

  Max went into Joachim’s kitchen, but once there he took out the little notebook to write, Painter. An artist might certainly want to travel in South America, in the mountains, and paint the magnificent skies over those peaks. An artist is a solitary kind of person and often strange, at least in comparison to the way most people behave. Most people, just for one example, do not care exactly what color a cloud is. For most people, a cloud is a white puffy cloud or a gray rain-bearing cloud, and that’s good enough. But for an artist, the many shades and tones white puts on during its long journey to black are distinct and different and (this perhaps strangest of all) endlessly interesting. Beneath Painter Max added Mountaineer and Prospector—although to go to Andesia as a prospector might get him in trouble with whoever owned the mines that were already there. He wondered if there were some gemstone he might be digging for, something you could only find one at a time and rarely, something it would be safer for a lone prospector to be looking for. Were there gemstones in those mountains? He made a note to ask Grammie to research that for him, too. Then he set about finding some lunch for himself and turned his mind to the Solutioneer’s next job.

  He would be waiting for Nissa the next morning, in Summer.

  Nissa knew how slippery waterside planks could be and she always stepped carefully, even cautiously, onto the landing. “Thank you,” she said to Carlo Coyne, without looking up into his face. He had handed her off the ferry with the easy courtesy that was one of the first things she had noticed about him. She kept her attention on her feet and her balance until she heard the little boat chugging away from the dock, and even then her glance didn’t linger on any of the bustling women in fresh white blouses or the hurrying men, many wearing the broad straw hats and red bandannas of gardeners, who moved across the plaza ahead of her. These laborers had grown more numerous with each passing day, as the establishments and homes of Summer readied themselves for the arrival of the Royal Family. They hurried right off to their various workplaces, but Nissa could linger.

  Nissa was not a daily servant. She had time for a cup of coffee at the waterfront café, seated at one of the small round tables set up on the broad stones outside its entrance, and time to read one of the newspapers the café provided for its patrons.

  Now she did notice, with alarm, that there was a workman who had not left the plaza with the others. But he was kneeling beside a bicycle, busy with some problem with the chain, it seemed. Or maybe—he rose to his feet and seemed to be fiddling with the straps that held a large white-and-black basket—it was a problem with the handlebars? It would be hard on him if he had to lose a day’s wages, Nissa thought. She hoped he could repair his bicycle and get himself to his job; she had learned how necessary even a few coins could be. Her heart trembled for him, in his trouble. He looked young, too, younger than she’d first thought. Young people, she knew, could be left defenseless and alone.

  Her heart trembled for a different reason, however, when she noticed that this laborer left Summer just behind her, wheeling his bicycle south along The Lakeview. She told herself there was nothing to fear. She might be walking unaccompanied but this road was busy with foot traffic and carriage traffic and even, sometimes, motorcar traffic, since the owners of the great houses along The Lakeview liked to have their motorcars as well as their well-matched, high-stepping pairs of carriage horses. The woman who employed Nissa—rather a foolish person, although Nissa suspected that beneath her sillinesses and her vanities and her way of clothing herself in feathers and ruffles, she had a practical head and a good heart—said frequently that the speed of a horse was the fastest she cared to go in her lifetime and if her husband wanted to charge around at twelve miles per hour, he could travel alone. Which, of course, the man did. He was a businessman. If he could get halfway around the lake in under three hours, why would he choose not to?

  Her father had often said, arriving suddenly, departing without notice, “Time is money, Nissa. Never forget that. Time is money.” And her father had not even been a businessman. Nissa had remembered everything he told her and she remembered that advice especially, now that she needed to. She was earning her living doing the one single thing she knew how to do, which was to be a lady, in order to buy herself time—time to adjust, time to think, time to find her own true self, no longer her father’s daughter.

  In her haste to get away from the man, Nissa stumbled and then took a minute to adjust the strap on one shoe, and to compose herself. It wouldn’t do to arrive at the house looking anything but calm, competent, and confident. The bicycling laborer rode on past her and she felt immediately less worried. It was just her foolishness, thinking everybody could recognize her. Moreover, why would anybody have any idea that she could be found here, at this lake, on this road, at this hour? She had allowed her nervous imagination to frighten her, that was all. Nissa settled down to enjoy the rest of the pleasant walk. After all, it was Carlo Coyne who had handed her off the ferry this morning and would hand her onto it again this evening.

  But when she saw the same laborer wobbling slowly on his bicycle back toward her, she was immediately afraid. His face was shadowed by the brim of his straw hat, as if he didn’t want to be seen. She quickened her step. It wasn’t far now to the gatehouse where the gardener’s wife would be at home.

  The man approached her and dismounted clumsily from his bicycle. He spoke with his head bowed, as if embarrassed. “Missus,” he said, “can you s
ay? I look for”—he hesitated, trying to recall something complicated—“Bin-deefa? To work,” he concluded. “You find for me?” He glanced up and she saw that he was in fact young, but then she saw his eyes and was distracted, before they were hidden again under the brim of his hat, eyes the color of the sea-stained granite blocks of a harbor jetty.

  “Oh,” Nissa said, a little confused. “Well, yes, I can.” She had relaxed, at hearing his words and seeing his eyes. “It’s there, this is the wall, there’s an entry just around the corner”—she tried to show with a gesture the curve of a road—“and a little stone gatehouse.” She pointed, then wondered, “Have they asked you to work there?”

  “Work I hope. I dig. I build stones”—he made a piling motion with his hands—“build woods”—a hammering motion—“work hard. First clean face, boots? Yes?” And he turned away from her, as if, having found out what he needed to know, he had no further interest in her, and went across to the meadow that separated the roadway from the lake water.

  That suited Nissa. She did not want to arouse anyone’s interest. She liked this lake, with green hillsides rising up around it and the wall of mountains to the north. She liked the busy city of Queensbridge, with its well-stocked library and large park, where she could sit alone and read. She had found employment with a family whose worst vices were vanity and self-indulgence and that, moreover, included at least one lively intelligence—and probably two, she guessed. Six days a week she traveled over water that, if it wasn’t her familiar restless ocean, still had the smells and sounds she had grown up with. And she was handed onto and off the ferry by a young man as sturdy and steady as the little boat his father captained.

  Nissa left The Lakeview and walked slowly up the long, graveled driveway, past the gatehouse, calling, “A good morning to you,” to the woman in the open window. She admired the tall oaks and leafy chestnut trees, the long green lawns and bright flower beds, the sparkling glass windowpanes and the welcoming doorway. As she waited for the door to be opened to her and to hear the butler’s courteous “Good morning, Miss Nissa. Mrs. Bendiff is still at breakfast,” she wondered if she should have warned that laborer that, as far as she knew, he would not be needed there.

  Max watched Nissa walk away from him, through the gateway and up the long driveway. He was dumbfounded, he was dismayed, he was distressed, disturbed, disgruntled, and entirely displeased. The Bendiffs? The Bendiffs! Nissa worked for the Bendiffs, but what job could she do there? He’d never seen her, the few times Mister Max had left a message for Pia, to ask Pia—and now the full understanding of his bad luck struck him. He was going to have to ask Pia for information, ask her for help.

  Pia would, of course, gloat. Max didn’t know if he’d be able to listen to her gloating without kicking her permanently out of his business, good riddance to bad rubbish. He rode away down The Lakeview, going home to become Mister Max in Inspector Doddle’s clothing and then ride back, to deliver his request, hoping all the way that he could listen to Pia’s gloating long enough to learn something.

  That, however, turned out to present no difficulties after all, because Pia sent an immediate response. No, she would not meet him at the ice cream shop. “No,” she wrote. “Not on your life and besides, it’s not Gabrielle’s anymore because she left already to start her job at B’s, and you’re supposed to know everything and be so smart but I guess you don’t.”

  Max did not groan aloud in front of the boy who had carried Pia’s message. The message wasn’t this boy’s fault. He just dropped a coin into the outstretched hand. Pia was treating Max as if he had no right to keep anything private from her, keep things safe from … her nosiness, he thought, from her way of pushing her opinions into his business. Because solutioneering was his business. Too bad for her, Max thought. If she thought he needed her to find things out, she was far from right. She had been useful and he wouldn’t deny that, not to her, not to anyone, but she wasn’t essential.

  Max considered how he could go about discovering more about Nissa. Carlo had told him everything he knew and Pia refused to help. His only other information source would be the young woman herself. But how could he persuade her to talk to him?

  Had he finally been set the problem he wasn’t going to be able to solve? The secret he was not going to be able to winkle out? Max hoped not, because Nissa had won his complete sympathy. He would have wanted to help her even if Carlo Coyne hadn’t hired him to discover what it was that needed doing. But all he could think of to do was to follow her again.

  And so Inspector Doddle, in his round pork-pie hat and his worn blue satin vest, plump-bellied and patient, took the afternoon ferry up to Summer and settled himself onto a bench in the square to watch rain clouds approach from the west and slowly cover the sky. Max knew the sky was not as dark as it looked through his tinted glasses, so he didn’t worry about being rained on during the long trip around the lake, back to the Queensbridge docks. Instead, he bought a newspaper and turned to the page of international news, to worry about his parents while he waited.

  There was little news from South America that day, which was not unusual since it took an earthquake or a revolution for news from those distant lands to travel so far. Max leafed through the rest of the pages, reading items about the old city and the New Town, about preparations for the royal holidays (increased ferry runs, a welcoming committee, the route the King’s procession would take from the train station to The Lakeview), about business events (the opening of B’s in less than a month, a new line of inexpensive but thoroughly stylish hats offered by Tess Tardo, the closing of a ship’s chandlery due to the decrease in the number of commercial sailing vessels), and social events (a photograph of two women wearing gauzy summer dresses and wide-brimmed summer hats, one with a fat white Z that ran like a lightning bolt down the crown to join two proud egret feathers, with a small curtain of tiny pearls hanging down from its wide brim, the other a plump gauzy affair, scattered with small flowers). Max wondered what made those two women newsworthy and he read that one of them, the one with pearls on her hat, was the wife of Hamish Bendiff, of Bendiff’s Jams and Jellies, proprietor of the eagerly anticipated new restaurant, displaying her R Zilla hat as she exchanged recipes with the wife of Lawyer Cobbles, whose head bore one of the creations of Tess Tardo, recognizable by the signature flowers, at a garden party held at the hillside villa of Lady Adelaide, Chairwoman of the Mayor’s Committee for the Benefit of the Poor and the Needy.

  So that was Pia’s mother. She looked ordinary enough to Max, light-haired and a little plump, pretending not to notice the camera that was photographing her, but placing one hand on her hat and smiling at her companion, as if at the oldest and best of friends.

  Maybe they were friends, although Pia’s mother looked as if—without the huge hat and the pretend smile—she would be a cookie-making, homework-helping kind of mother, ready to wipe your tears or applaud your tree climbing and spend hours teaching you how to jump rope or ride a bicycle or roll a hoop. In the photograph, Mrs. Bendiff looked like a person who had been given the wrong role in the wrong play, but wanted to perform it well.

  She also looked like a person who shouldn’t be the mother of a daughter like Pia, a girl who wanted to be doing only serious, important things, and to always do them her own way.

  Max was so lost in his own thoughts that he almost missed Nissa’s return to the wide plaza. The young woman went directly to the same café table she’d sat at in the morning, and did not look around. As far as he could tell, a cup was set down in front of her without her even asking for it, as for a regular customer, and in fact, the woman who owned the café joined Nissa at the little round table. Max was not close enough to hear what they said to one another in their brief conversation, but he got the impression that they were comfortable together and, since Nissa had more than half an hour to wait before the ferry was due, he guessed that this was how she ended every working day, with a cup of coffee. She took out a small book and read and did not o
nce look at him but Max got the feeling, from the angle of the back that was turned to him, that she thought someone might be watching her, and he knew, from the way she carefully stood as far from him as she could get during the ferry ride, that she had noticed him. So he bustled noisily off in his own direction when they debarked at the city dock. He didn’t want Nissa to think she was being followed.

  Also, he needed to get home to see what costumes were available to him. He should become a regular at the café, but in what role? An artist? A restaurant cook? A day laborer? City official? Who would a young woman like Nissa be most likely to trust enough to exchange a few polite words with? She was willing to talk with the café owner and she also apparently trusted Carlo. Maybe that was a clue.

  Max thought about how Nissa and Carlo had met. He imagined the scene as if it were a play he was seeing, the fearful young woman boarding the ferry and the earnest young ferryman paying his attentions to her. What was there about Carlo that would have made Nissa feel safe?

  Carlo, Max realized, had a reason to be where he was. Carlo worked on the ferry. He was supposed to be there, you’d expect him to be there, he had an identity. Carlo had a recognizable position, so he was what he seemed to be, what he said he was. He was not some secretive stranger. The same could be said of the café owner, with whom Nissa also seemed to feel comfortable. Nissa seemed uneasy about anyone who didn’t have an obvious reason to be where they were. So, if Max was going to try to talk with her, and to persuade her to talk to him, he needed a job. Or, rather, he needed to seem to have a job, since his work as the Solutioneer would probably not make her feel unnoticed, and unthreatened, and safe.

  Carlo thought that Nissa had some secret she was keeping. But Max thought that more likely the secret was keeping her. Nissa seemed to him like the canary in the cage, stalked around by cats whose sharp-clawed paws might dart at her at any moment. But what job could he have that would put him naturally into her path? How could he insinuate himself into the Bendiff household, and what work could he do there? It was really irritating that Pia had chosen this exact moment to refuse to assist him, just because he and Grammie claimed a little privacy.