The Best of Deep Magic- Anthology One

by Jeff Wheeler

  “You are quite right, Mr. Foulweather, you are right. My home was once a paragon amongst brughs, a paradise, with intricately woven carpets, ornate tapestries, brocaded sofas; commodes, armoires, and chiffoniers of ebony, walnut, and oak; glasses of crystal, services (both dinner and tea) of silver and gold—Oh! Mr. Foulweather, it would have melted your heart.”

  “And human servants, I’d warrant, too?”

  “Oh yes! Butlers, footmen, cooks, maids of almost every variety, ostlers, gardeners, hall boys—I had to part with them all, each and every one. All long dead now, though, of course. Now my house is served by nothing more than a troupe of diligent house spiders, who, in all fairness, do keep away the flies. Cobwebs and dust, sir! That is what decorates my brugh now.”

  “But what happened, Mr. Greenteeth?” Loosestrife asked.

  “Relatives!” came the grave reply. “Accursed relatives descending on us like rats! And dependents, and second cousins, and third cousins, and uncles and aunts, and many of them twice or three times removed! They ate and spent and borrowed me out of house and home, sir. Why, I had to sell everything to pay off my creditors.”

  “Mr Greenteeth. I am most sympathetic,” said Loosestrife.

  “Thank you, Mr. Foulweather. Your sympathies are kindly received. Now, if you could lighten my burden by taking my daughter as your bride, you would indeed be doing me a great service. I cannot promise much of a dowry, but if you truly desire the books that you wish to borrow, I may be able to make a permanent exception of them.”

  Loosestrife considered this for a moment. He had not bargained on leaving Mr. Greenteeth’s house with a bride as well as books, but as he was going up in the world, he could not stay a bachelor forever—it simply wasn’t done. If he was to have a fashionable house with a fashionable servant and all manner of fashionable rooms and table settings and dinner sets and tea services and curtains made from expensive cloth, then it would only be fitting that he had a wife as well.

  “Very well, sir,” he said at last. “I accept your offer with glee.”

  “Wonderful! Wonderful! Ah, here is my rather modest library, and your new bride reclines within.”

  Mr. Greenteeth opened the library door and stepped aside to let us enter.

  On one of the room’s threadbare armchairs sat a pretty young woman with an enormous pouf of midnight-black hair that smouldered with the multicoloured iridescence of opals.

  “May I help you?” said the lady.

  “Good evening, Miss Greenteeth. My name is Loosestrife Foulweather and I am here to request some of your books, and it has recently been agreed, your hand in marriage.”

  “Oh, erm, no thank you,” she said, and turned her head back to the book she was reading.

  Loosestrife looked at Mr. Greenteeth, who shrugged and rolled his eyes, so he returned his gaze to the lady and once again cleared his throat. “Miss Greenteeth—Marjory—may I call you Marjory?”

  Marjory ignored him.

  “Marjory,” he continued regardless, “your father and I have come to an agreement that you should be my wife, and in return he will grant me permanent leave to borrow some of the books in your library. Is that not agreeable to you?”

  “Not particularly.” said Marjory, not looking up from her book.

  Loosestrife looked at Mr. Greenteeth again, who this time took the hint and piped up: “Marjory, dear, you must do as your father wills.”

  “I will do no such thing,” said Marjory. “A woman should be able to choose whom she marries, if and when she sees fit to do so.”

  “Oh, such reason! That’s what I get for allowing you to indulge yourself with all those dreary human books.”

  “If I am to marry this comparative stranger, father dear, then there must be some advantage to it. As far as I see, my books are here; they are my pleasure, so here I shall remain.”

  “Ah, but Marjory,” said Loosestrife. “I see you have a fondness for human books, yes?”

  Marjory nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “You have a fondness for humans, then. But have you ever actually seen a human, Marjory?”

  Marjory looked up briefly. “Only when I was a girl,” she said, and returned her gaze to her book. “Before father sold them all. I barely remember them.”

  “Well, then. If you come with me, you shall see a real human servant. I have, you see, made quite some progress in constructing one myself. Would you like to see it?”

  Marjory’s eyes did not leave her book, but she began to bite her lip, and a faint quiver could be detected in her lower jaw. After what she must have considered an adequate pause, Marjory raised her head and said:

  “Very well, then, I do believe I should like to see that.”

  * * *

  “Behold, my dear,” said Loosestrife when the formalities of marriage had been dealt with, and Marjory and her books had been installed in the house, “our human servant!”

  “It doesn’t look very human,” said Marjory, looking at the strange and ungainly mass of lumps that lay on the tulipwood commode in Loosetrife’s back parlour.

  “My dear, that is because you haven’t seen a human since you were a little girl. Your memory of them is rather fuzzy I imagine.”

  “But I have seen illustrations,” she said.

  “Pedantically accurate renderings no doubt, devoid of the most basic fanciful embellishments.”

  Marjory gave a dissatisfied humph and began to prod at the lump of inanimate matter with an elegant finger.

  “Now, now, my dear,” said Loosestrife. “Do you not have any wifely duties to perform? Making . . . erm . . . tea? . . . or darning something, perhaps?”

  Never having had a wife before, my dear friend had little idea of what duties were expected of them.

  “No,” came the curt reply, “I do not.”

  Loosestrife began to protest, but Marjory continued: “What exactly are you going to do with my books?” she asked. “You can’t teach this lump to read, surely. It can’t even open its eyes.”

  “We shall imbue him with an anima! Wife, fetch my cauldron!”

  “Fetch it yourself.”

  Loosestrife blanched. “. . . Very well.” He fetched the cauldron from its cupboard, placed it on a tripod so as to avoid scorching the carpet, and reluctant to risk asking any more of his wife, requested that I proceed with providing the heat—a task that I confess to thoroughly enjoying—whereby I commenced hurling my finest and most vehement insults at the pot until it very nearly boiled over with rage.

  “Easy now, Tobias,” he said. “Perhaps you could temper your insults just a modicum, lest the sensitive fellow explode. There are also,” he added, “ladies present.” To which Marjory responded with an insult of her own that set the poor fellow’s ear’s smoking.

  After he had doused them in cold water, and checked that my insults were keeping the pot at the optimum temperature, Loosestrife opened the great chest of books provided by Mr. Greenteeth and picked out a series of leather-bound tomes: “Aristotle’s Organon.” He nodded and dropped it into the cauldron. “Euclid’s Elements, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by a Mr. John Locke, and—aha!—Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, for, I think, practical purposes.”

  The cauldron began to simmer gently. “Now, where is my distilling apparatus?” he said. “Excuse me, my dear, while I go look in the cellar.”

  Loosestrife left the room once again, leaving Marjory and myself alone in the room. I, having effused enough foul language at the cauldron to keep it bubbling for several hours, and knowing full well that my capacity for small talk with young ladies is somewhat nonexistent, retreated to the mantelpiece above the small fireplace, where I soon fell into contemplation, cradling my pipe.

  Marjory, on the other hand, looked altogether vexed. A frown had taken residence upon her forehead and lay there like a stubborn cat. “Why, you can’t have Locke without Hume, and what about Rousseau and Kant? They’ve been omitted altogether! And Mr. Spinoza too. And w
hy Aristotle but no Plato? Euclid without Newton, too, is an omission.” She began to rummage around in the chest, pulling out book after book. “Oh! And here we have Paine, Hobbes, Montesquieu! They must all go in.”

  When Loosestrife returned with his distilling apparatus, he found the chest all but empty.

  “Dearest,” he said, with a forced smile, “where have all the books gone?”

  “Oh, I added them to the mixture,” she said. “It’s far better this way.”

  “I see,” replied Loosestrife, scratching his head. “I do fear, however, that this human will be too reasonable by far.” The viscous liquid in the pot belched as if in agreement. It had turned from a thin, watery yellow to a deep and profound gold.

  “Oh, do stop being such a stuffy old bore!” said Marjory. “Where is your sense of adventure!”

  “Here, here,” I said, not out of any particular desire for adventure, but it is always necessary for one’s opinion to be heard; it prevents one from being mistaken for a piece of furniture.

  “Come now, Husband,” Marjory said, patting him on the shoulder tenderly. “Is the anima ready? It looks wonderful!”

  Loosestrife did not quite know what had gone wrong. His new bride was far more involved than he’d imagined, and his human servant was soon to be a savant rather than a loyal worker. Indeed, he was rapidly learning that being married was a lot more trouble than he’d imagined. But he supposed it was simply the price of going up in the world.

  “Well, my dear, it needs distilling, which will take a few hours. But, perhaps I can convince the apparatus to hurry the process along.”

  “Would you, my love?” said Marjory. “It would please me ever so much.”

  Loosestrife blushed. “Very well,” he said, and began to set up the copper still, bribing it with promises of honey brandy and dew liquor in the very near future. He decanted the liquid from the cauldron, which looked far more potent than he’d expected, into the flask, and in the blink of an eye, it had evaporated, condensed, and fallen, drop by golden drop, into the collection bottle.

  Loosestrife took the bottle and proffered it: “Would you, my darling, care to do the honours?”

  “Why, my dear friend, certainly!” I said, rising from my chair and tapping out my pipe (I believe, in hindsight, that I may have misread the situation).

  “I think he means me, Tobias.”

  “Madam,” I replied, not willing to be gotten the better of, “you may be Loosestrife’s wife, but I have been decorating his house for decades. This honour must surely go to me.”

  We turned to Loosestrife, both of us with severely affronted faces.

  But Loosestrife merely sighed, saying, “I do not like this going up in the world one bit.”

  * * *

  Slowly the creature sat upright, its eyes shining with the lancing light of a summer dawn, which faded, soon enough, to the bright amber of sun-baked wheat. It coughed, emitting a twitter of birdsong as it did so, flexed its muscles with a squeak, and set its feet gingerly on the ground.

  “Careful now, my dear Loosestrife,” I said, eyeing the creature with a mixture of suspicion and awe, “it may bite.”

  “Nonsense!” he replied, and proceeded to clear his throat before addressing the creature in a loud and commanding voice: “Good morning, servant. My name is Loosestrife Foulweather, your master and, I flatter myself, your creator . . .” The creature blinked, but did not speak, unable, it seemed, to comprehend.

  Marjory, without taking her eyes off the creature, leaned over to her husband. “Can it understand you? Why does it not speak?”

  “Leave it to me, my dear,” he said, patting her on the shoulder. “It would do you good, man, to address the lady of the house and I as Master and Mistress. I am all for quiet servants, but a mute one who cannot even utter the most basic formalities is quite out of the question! Come now. Speak up.”

  But the creature still did not answer. Instead, something behind Loosestrife was engaging its attention.

  “What? What is it? Is there something behind me? Is Tobias doing something amusing behind my back?”

  But the creature was not looking at me either, and after a moment, it pushed past all three of us and became very interested in Loosestrife’s walnut games table.

  “What is it, man? Have you never seen a games table before?” said Loosestrife, wrinkling his brow in frustration.

  I pointed out (with the utmost discretion, of course) that the creature had likely not seen a games table before, or indeed, any table, as it had but moments before come into animation.

  “Yes, well—ahem—I suppose not. Now listen here—”

  The human turned suddenly and looked at Loosestrife with its eyes of summer wheat and said with a twitter, “This is not right. This table has no legs! How is it standing? The laws of gravity clearly state that it should fall to the ground!”

  Loosestrife pressed his hand to his forehead. “The table, you utterly reasonable human, stands on my orders. It needs no legs to do so.”

  The human ran now to the walls. “And the walls, the cornices, the lintels, the door posts . . . they defy the geometry of Euclid!”

  “The walls do as they’re told. I find them more aesthetically pleasing when they are thus contorted.”

  “And this cauldron. It remains red-hot, with no source of heat? The laws of thermodynamics declare this to be impossible!”

  “By oak and ash and thorn, I have never encountered anyone as frustratingly obtuse as you! The cauldron remains hot because Tobias here hurled enough insults at it to keep it fuming for several hours. Do you know nothing, man?”

  “I know only reason, sir,” said the servant.

  “Useless! Utterly useless!” he said, throwing up his hands. “He understands nothing, Tobias. Nothing! We shall have to destroy him and start again. Where’s my cheese knife?”

  Marjory, however, would have none of it. “Husband,” she said, “if I may interject.”

  Loosestrife was busy searching for his cheese knife, but he nodded that she should continue.

  “If indeed this servant is to be but a symbol of your going up in the world, then surely it matters not that his domestic skills be lacking. Surely the more logical he is, the more impressive he will be to your guests. Why, you now own the most reasonable servant ever to serve in Faerie! Surely you wouldn’t want to hack at that accolade with your cheese knife!”

  “Well, no, I suppose not. Yes . . . yes. Jolly good point, my dear. Obtuse! You shall remain in my service, for now at least. Perhaps there is something to be said for this reason of yours after all, my dear.”

  * * *

  Over the next several days, owing most certainly to the presence of such a reasonable creature as Loosestrife’s new human servant, the brugh and its contents, which had once been so grandiose a work of fancy, began in many ways to change. Loosestrife found, to his great consternation, that his snuff box quickly ran out of snuff, even though he had expressly forbidden it to be empty. He found that the pillars of his house began to creak and groan, as if they could not abide the strain of their whimsical contortions. The fireplaces became cold and sooty, coming to realise just how unreasonable it was to be expected to provide warmth without sufficient fuel and kindling. Only the bluebells in the garden continued to defy Obtuse the servant’s inscrutable logic, pealing as usual each morning, and providing my dear friend with his only comfort. Even Loosestrife’s horse (a gregarious rabicano stallion named Claptrap) stopped speaking to him, for Obtuse had explicated in no uncertain terms that a horse’s anatomy did not allow for such a sophisticated expression of so wide a range of phonemes. All in all, and despite his wife’s protestations, Loosestrife was quite dissatisfied indeed with his new servant. He was of half a mind to cancel the grand ball he had arranged to show off his new status as a man who had gone up in the world, having invited several prominent faeries of excellent breeding and station: the aforementioned Tom Thistletop, of course, several lords and ladies, and even the Duk
e of Long Wind, who, though his conversation was known to be tedious in the extreme, was nonetheless (as it was often noted in the society papers) descended from King Auberon himself. In the end, of course, the desire to prove his social buoyancy in the presence of such fey and fair warmed any cold feet that may have troubled him.

  When the guests arrived several days later, however, the house was almost unrecognisable by any respectable Faerie standard. The walls were straight, the beams of the roof were arranged all in a structurally sound criss-cross arrangement. The tables had legs, or else lay supine on the floor. The fireplaces were filled with coal, the clocks on the wall all ran at the same time, the mirrors reflected only what was put in front of them—even the cutlery no longer did as it was told, and had become complacent and lazy, needing to be operated entirely by hand. It was by far the most reasonable house that anyone in Faerie had ever seen.

  Loosestrife had planned on converting the cosy little morning room at the front of the house into a majestic high-ceilinged ballroom, with lambent parquet flooring, marble columns, and several enormous chandeliers, but Obtuse had laboured the point that the dimensions and volumes of reality would not allow for such a thing, and the room had retained its original size, with little if any room for dancing. It was so poky in fact that the Countess de Winter’s voluminous gown of frost not only knocked over rather a lot of Loosestrife’s china ornaments (which in order to impress Obtuse insisted on smashing when they hit the floor) but also began to melt in the heat from the fireplace.

  “Now listen here,” Loosestrife said after sneaking out to the serving pantry to scold his frustratingly scrupulous servant, “I want no more of your incessant reasonability tonight—you must be somewhat reasonable, of course, otherwise they will not believe you to be human, but please do your best not to be so pedantically logical. You have quite ruined my house, I have several very important guests in attendance, and I shall be very much displeased if you make this evening even a modicum less successful than it ought to be.”

  At that moment, Marjory appeared at the door to the pantry.