The Book of Secrets

by Cynthia Voigt

  Max could say yes, he had.

  “Did you know that I’ve got a book on South America’s more recent history?”

  Max shook his head, no, he hadn’t. One look at her face and he grew worried. “What have you learned?”

  “Not much about Andesia. There’s never much about it, it’s so tiny and remote and unimportant and—until they found the copper and silver—poor. It used to be no more than a few villages and one larger town, a total population in the whole country of about two thousand people. That was what they guessed, from the villages they could get to with horses. It’s mostly hills and mountains, one plateau.”

  “How did they live?” Max wondered.

  “The way most of the natives still do. Many of the men work in the mines. The rest cultivate whatever bits of land they can, no matter how small, and they have learned how to terrace the lower hillsides. The main food crop is maize; there are squashes and yams. Goats are a luxury, for milk and cheese and meat. There are chickens, of course, a few small herds of alpacas, for wool … It’s a hard life, even without the mines. The Andesians don’t live to be very old.”

  Max tried to imagine his parents in such a place: his flamboyant father, who liked to go out among crowds of people and declaim on any topic that interested him; his imaginative mother, who loved to listen, to read, or tell stories and make quiet fun of the many fools who came her way. His parents were accustomed to dressing well and living well and, especially, eating well. They were accustomed to being comfortable. Now he was even more worried. “They live in houses, don’t they?”

  “Pretty grand houses—well, the families who own the mines do—and the royal family has a palace. The natives live in what would probably more accurately be called one-room huts, close together in that one town. Apapa is the name of it, it’s the capital, the royal palace is there. But, Max?”

  Her voice warned him to look right into her eyes. It was her eyes that told him there was some bad news coming.

  “The Kings of Andesia?” she said, in that same, questioning, unhappy tone of voice. “It’s only been about fifty years that there has been a royal house, and in that time?”

  Max waited.

  “There have been twelve kings. Your father is the thirteenth.”

  “I’m not superstitious,” Max said quickly.

  “And that includes the recent four years of civil war, when the royal family fled to Bogotá and there was no king, so it’s actually twelve kings in forty-six years. And, Max? Not one of those twelve kings died in bed with his boots off.”

  With no question at all in his voice, Max asked, “What have they gotten themselves into.”

  “Their children, either,” Grammie finished. “Sometimes a wife escaped.”

  Then they were silent for a long time, and neither of them moved, not to eat or drink, and neither looked at the other, as if each wanted to protect the other from thoughts that swarmed like wasps in each of their heads.

  Finally, “What are we going to do, Grammie?” Max asked. For the first time in a long time, since just after he’d understood that his parents had disappeared from his life, he felt like a child.

  But Grammie was asking him, at the very same time, “Max? What are we going to do?”

  On Monday afternoon, when Frank Worthy looked up from his reading to greet Nissa with a casual “Good afternoon,” she answered him. “And to you,” she said, not hesitating on her way to her usual table, where she opened a copy of the Queensbridge Gazette and started to read.

  Max had already returned to his book.

  The café owner, when she brought him his coffee, had obviously decided to find out about him. “You’re quite the regular,” she observed.

  “For the time being,” Max answered pleasantly. Frank Worthy was not a chatterer. He responded frankly to questions but didn’t volunteer information about himself. He let other people ask the questions.

  “A salesman, are you?” She indicated the suitcase at his feet.

  Max nodded.

  “You’re new to the area,” she told him.

  Max agreed.

  “New to the work?”

  “That, too,” Max said.

  “I only say that because you’re so young. What are you selling?” she wondered.

  Max was ready for this question. In fact, he’d hoped to be asked because Nissa was listening and she would know from his answer that he had a place in the world. Which wasn’t a lie. He did have a place in the world, just not the one he wanted to convince her he had. He lifted his case onto the table and opened it, then began talking about the crispness of the crackers, the sweet fruitiness of the jams. “Everybody knows that Bendiff’s products are of the highest quality,” he told her as he closed it again.

  The café owner agreed. “Are you asking me to place an order?”

  Max answered her in just the way a confident person would. “If you want to try some, you’ll ask me. Why should I pester you about it? No, I’m here to enjoy your excellent coffee and the fine afternoon, not to sell goods.”

  “Also,” the woman observed, “the usual Bendiff representative was here just two weeks ago. You aren’t their usual salesman.”

  “No, I’m not,” Max agreed, with an untroubled smile.

  “What are you, then?” asked the woman, now a little suspicious.

  “I’m new, as green as they come,” Max told her, with the candidness that won Frank Worthy the trust of everyone he met. “I have the idea of selling not to the shops, or to businesses like hotels or this café, but to boardinghouses and the big homes along the lake, places where they feed a lot of people. I’m not trying to oust the regular representative.”

  She relaxed and looked over her shoulder at Nissa to say, “That might be a good idea. It might just be a good idea. It’s original, I’ll say that.”

  Max said nothing. She went back to the customers waiting inside the café. Seeing that Nissa’s eyes were on him, Max smiled and nodded and returned to his reading. Later he followed her onto The Water Rat and stood near to her, but did not try to talk. For her part, she did not seem disturbed by his presence and nodded a smiling farewell to him at the docks.

  It was on Tuesday that Nissa first spoke because, as Max had guessed, just like Adorable Arabella, Nissa preferred not to be chased after and crowded up against with unasked-for admiration. Like Arabella, if you did not pursue her, she became interested in you. On that Tuesday afternoon, Max was already at his usual table and reading his usual book when Nissa arrived at her usual hour. The day had grown hot with steady July sunshine, and Nissa had taken off her jacket and gloves during her walk. She approached the table where Max sat and he, as if he were surprised, as if he had been unexpectedly distracted from an involving activity, looked up to see her.

  “You always read that same book,” she observed. Her voice was soft and low, her smile hesitant, unsure about staying on her face. She was like a fawn, Max thought, or a sleeping kitten, or the first tender green shoots in a garden. She was something you needed to be careful with.

  He answered her just as his father would have, or his mother, or his grandmother for that matter, as if the one word were explanation enough. “It’s Shakespeare.”

  She nodded. She understood.

  Max stood up to introduce himself. “Frank Worthy.” He kept the tinted glasses on but removed his hat. He had become Frank Worthy, and never thought for a moment that she might recognize him as anyone else.

  She couldn’t in all politeness now refuse him her name. “Nissa,” she said.

  “Will you join me?” Frank Worthy asked, pulling out a chair.

  Instead of answering the question, to accept or decline his invitation, she observed, “In Midsummer Night’s Dream, that father … the father would rather have his daughter locked away in a convent, or even put to death, than marry a man he hasn’t chosen. What do fathers want of their daughters?”

  “Obedience,” Max answered. This same question had been discussed at the
dinner table in his house, and his parents had been in agreement about it. His father had turned to Max to say, “It’s lucky for you we live in modern times with wiser parents,” and his mother had added, “Wiser children help.” It was one of their usual conversations, with his parents contentedly contradicting one another, each looking to have the final and the wittiest word.

  Nissa said, “I agree. Obedience, and blind devotion, too.” Then she did sit down with Max. “Have you read the play before?”

  Max could say, in complete honesty, “Many times.” When he wasn’t dashing about the stage as Peaseblossom or Mustardseed, or standing at respectful attention as one of the courtiers, Max had the job of cuing the actors.

  Nissa looked up to wave a greeting to the café owner, then turned her attention back to Max. “I’ve seen it, too, in the theater.”

  “In Queensbridge?” Max wondered. Could this be a problem?

  “No, in an entirely different place. In an entirely different life, but doesn’t it strike you as a cynical idea that only magic can straighten things out? For the young couples, I mean. Because,” she explained a little sadly, as if she did not wish to disillusion him, “we live in a world where there is no magic. So that the wrongs we do, the errors we make … they can’t be corrected. Those whom we wound will remain wounded.” Her voice grew entirely sad as she told him, “Those whom we have lost remain lost. Those whom we have thrown away are not to be found again.”

  The café owner, setting Nissa’s cup on the table, had something different on her mind. “You heard what this young fellow said, didn’t you? Why don’t you tell your employers they should talk to him? Or the cook, all those big houses have cooks, and you work in one of those houses, don’t you?”

  “Oh,” Nissa said, “I can’t ask them to do that. Besides, it wouldn’t be any use.”

  “Why not?” The woman pressed her point. “Why not help someone who’s starting off in the world, making his own way?”

  Nissa shook her head and didn’t answer, but her cheeks grew rosy.

  “Well I’ve mentioned you to a couple of my customers,” the café owner told Max. “Jilly at the Waterside Boardinghouse, for one, and she wants you to call on her.”

  “Thank you,” Max said. He didn’t know what he would do about that. This was help he could well do without. “You’re very kind,” he said, because she was.

  “Most people want to give others a helping hand, if it’s within their powers,” the owner announced, giving Nissa a look.

  “You don’t understand,” Nissa said.

  “Jilly suggested that you talk to the cook at the palace. He’s already arrived, to get everything ready, because if the palace orders from you, you’ll be a made man.”

  It wasn’t the right time for Max to take out his little notebook and jot down Import/Export Salesman. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

  “I work for Mrs. Bendiff,” Nissa admitted, speaking reluctantly but also a little crossly.

  That changed everything. The café owner’s expression acknowledged it, and so did her voice when she complained, “You never said. How was I to know?”

  Nissa gave a helpless shrug of the shoulders.

  “You never talk about yourself, so probably I shouldn’t be surprised. So. Will the Bendiffs be taking you to dine at this fancy new restaurant he’s opened? If you need a companion, you might ask me and I wouldn’t say no. Or this young man here, who looks perfectly presentable even if I’ve never seen him without his tinted glasses so he could be a squinter. And everyone knows about squinters.”

  Max laughed as Frank Worthy, all confidence and curiosity. “What is it that everybody knows?”

  “They’re a bad lot, every man jack of them,” the woman announced, and turned away to answer a summons from inside the café.

  Max said, “I don’t squint.” He was smiling, sharing the joke with Nissa.

  “Why do you wear them?”

  “It’s my eyes,” he said, as if that explained everything, and went on quickly to tell her that tomorrow, Wednesday, would be his last day in Summer, or any of the lakeside villages. “I might have better luck in Porthaven.”

  “Don’t you live in Queensbridge?”

  “I don’t live anywhere,” Max lied easily, confident that when everybody thinks you are honest, you can get away with one untruth. “Or, I live everywhere, wherever I land at the end of the day. It’s the advantage of living alone. It’s a lucky thing for me that there’s at least one advantage to being alone in the world,” he added carelessly.

  “You’re alone in the world?” she asked.

  It was time for the ferry and they rose from the table together and walked together across the plaza and down to the dock. “I am,” Max said, and it was almost true. “Although I’d have chosen differently.”

  She looked sharply up into his face. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” she asked as they parted to go their separate ways on the ferry.

  Nissa sat down without hesitation at the table where Max waited, late on Wednesday afternoon, and started talking right away. “How did you come to be alone? May I ask?”

  “Yes, of course, but I won’t answer,” said Max, who had been hoping for this very question. “Except to say suddenly, unexpectedly, unhappily. The pillars on which my home stood—I’m not speaking literally,” he explained.

  “I know what you mean,” she assured him.

  “—were cut out from under me.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, which she did not shed. Tears of sympathy? he wondered. Or tears at a memory? “Betrayed,” she murmured, and her hands gripped each other hard, on her lap, and she seemed to hunch over the table, as if hoping not to be noticed, or looked at. “Abandoned.”

  “Left behind,” Max corrected. He leaned forward and saw how she drew back, now almost huddling in the chair. His brain buzzed with an idea and his voice could ring with truthfulness as he went on. “They sailed off,” he said—and saw shock stiffen her shoulders, and continued, “I thought I knew where they were going and I thought I would be with them.”

  Nissa sat silent, almost as if she could no longer speak. Max remembered where he had seen such a pose before, such hunched shoulders, such a bowed neck. In A Miser Made Miserable, when the rich man (played by William Starling) had lost everything and his poor neighbor came to offer what he could, sympathy and half a loaf of bread, shame at his own poverty had kept the formerly rich man silent, huddled in his chair before the small fire, like a schoolboy who has wet himself in front of everyone, or that Captain Trevelyn’s daughter from the Miss Koala, or a butcher caught with his finger on the scale. Shame feared being seen, and named, and tried to stay hidden away in its darkness. Max remembered the Miser and he understood: This was shame he was looking at, and Max had guessed the source of Nissa’s shame. He pitied her.

  She looked at Max, and looked away, and looked at him again, and Max understood also that she wanted to speak, wanted to tell her story, and could not bear to. His own secret case was simpler. It was the safety of others that silenced him, not shame that smothered.

  It seemed that Nissa had decided to take him a little into her confidence. “I guessed that we were alike, you and I. I felt there was something in common between us. I thought—I thought you were someone I could talk to.”

  Nissa was deciding to trust him at the very time when Max was starting to understand that, really, there was no need for her to speak. He thought he knew her name, now, and whose daughter she was.

  “Because you were always reading, and it was Shakespeare,” she explained, and then she smiled. When she smiled, her wide, smoky green eyes shone with tears. “I was raised with books, and music, and fine pictures, statues, museums, and if I did not have those memories now, and books to read, if I did not have the city library—Do you know the city library?”

  Max nodded, but could not find any words in his mouth. Trevelyn, that was her name, Nissa Trevelyn. He would bet his father’s fortune on it.


  “Perhaps,” she suggested, “we might meet sometime? I often read in the park.”

  Max shook his head. Ideas, guesses, possibilities were shooting around in his brain, like firecrackers shooting up into the sky to explode into showers of light against the darkness. He was being the Solutioneer and Frank Worthy at the same time, which was not easy. The Solutioneer was thinking of Colly, someone else whose hopes had been destroyed by parents and—this was the most useful thing to Mister Max at the moment—who minded that his education had been derailed.

  But Max was also, at that time, at that table, in that company, Frank Worthy—whose understanding of people was subtle, and deep, and delicate. Only Frank Worthy had understood Arabella. Only he had guessed that she wanted the very thing everyone denied her, that is, the pleasure of desiring something perhaps unattainable, the delicious pleasures of dreaming and hoping and longing. Thus it was that Frank Worthy had won the young woman’s heart. Nissa’s was an entirely different case, but as Frank Worthy, Max understood what Max Starling would never have guessed—that Nissa lived in the prison of her secret, and were someone to unlock the door for her, and fling it open, or bend the bars apart with his superior strength so that she could flee, as soon as she came to rest she would build a prison around herself again. Nissa was going to have to free herself, to find, or manufacture, her own key. It was Frank Worthy who knew what to say to her.

  He told her, “I don’t think we will meet again. I’m going away, remember? To Porthaven.”

  “The sea calls you?” she asked. “Maybe it’s the sea that makes the likeness I sense between us.” This idea interested her and distracted her from the burden of shame that bent her down, and thus, lightened it.

  Max said, “But I would like to ask you … I’ve made a friend in the old city, a boy, who would like to talk with someone who knows about books. I’d like to tell him he could come here, to the café, some afternoon, and that you could tell him what is good to read, if a boy wants to learn to be an educated man, and make his way in the world even if his circumstances have been determined to keep him down.”