The Native Star Read online

  Stanton touched Mrs. Quincy on the shoulder. The woman jerked around angrily and lifted her veil. Her elderly face was pinched and papery, and she had thin, suspicious lips.

  The instant Emily saw the old woman’s face, something strange happened. She heard chanting. Very distant, as if it were coming from outside the building somewhere, but chanting … the kind she’d heard in the Miwok village. Emily’s heart leapt unpleasantly, and she turned her head from side to side, trying to locate the sound. But as soon as she moved, the chanting was gone. She shuddered, blinked. It was probably all the cigar smoke.

  “Dreadnought Stanton?” Mrs. Quincy was saying. “For pity’s sake, I thought you were off in the mountains somewhere. Good place for you, too. Nice and cool.”

  “I have returned, ma’am.” He examined the bets she had on the table. “You’re spread rather thin.”

  “Leave the gambling to experts,” Mrs. Quincy snapped, and turned to push in another bet, very obviously for spite. The action of the game moved quickly, and within a moment, the money was swept away. With an unpleasant sniff, she rose and jerked her bead-fringed black shawl around her shoulders. She walked away from the table, leaving Stanton and Emily to follow in her wake.

  “Well, make it quick, young man. Why are you here?”

  “I have come across a very interesting anomaly,” Stanton said as they trotted to keep up. “I wanted to bring it to the Institute’s attention immediately.”

  Mrs. Quincy tossed a glare in Emily’s direction.

  “Who is she?”

  “Miss Emily Edwards. She is the anomaly.”

  Mrs. Quincy stopped short and looked Emily up and down.

  “How nice for her.”

  Mrs. Quincy gestured them to a small withdrawing cove off the main room. Sitting, she opened a black lace fan and waved it vigorously beneath her chin, muttering ill-temperedly.

  “Just when my luck was about to turn, too.” She jabbed the fan at Stanton. “Boy, this better be good, or by my dead husband’s ears I swear I’ll—”

  “Show her, Miss Edwards.”

  Emily drew the soiled kid glove from her right hand and held out her palm to Mrs. Quincy. Mrs. Quincy blinked, fan stilling. She leaned forward, her eyes wide. The arrangement of her face when astonished was particularly unattractive.

  “Unbelievable,” she whispered. She looked up at Emily, and then at Stanton.

  “I believe it’s a specimen of Native Star,” Stanton said, summarizing their adventures with admirable brevity. While he spoke, Mrs. Quincy held Emily’s hand and turned it over and again in the flickering half-light.

  “Well done, Mr. Stanton,” she murmured when Stanton had finished his précis. “Maybe you will come to something, burned and all.” Emily noticed a flicker of distaste pass over Stanton’s face when Mrs. Quincy used the word “burned.”

  “I’ll have my carriage take you back to my house.” Mrs. Quincy gestured a houseman to call for her driver. “The mysteries of this stone must be explored.”

  “That’s very generous,” Stanton said, “but won’t you come with us?”

  “I’ll be along later,” Mrs. Quincy said. “I have a few more things to see to here.” Her eyes were already drifting back to the faro tables.

  “Things to see to indeed,” Stanton muttered later as they were riding in Mrs. Quincy’s splendid barouche. “Incorrigible.”

  “What did she mean, ‘burned’?”

  “Never mind,” Stanton said sharply. “The important thing is that we’ve made it.” He stretched, leaning back against the plush seat of the carriage. “Believe it or not, it’s a load off my mind. Now, at least, I have the full structure of the Institute to help me.”

  “Help you what?”

  “Help me deal with you.” He put a great deal more emphasis on the word than Emily thought strictly necessary. She contemplated sticking her tongue out at him, but refrained. Then she, too, leaned back, enjoying the comfortable softness of the seats. “Why would anyone gamble with a Witch, anyway?”

  “Did you see how much she was losing? They line up to take her money.”

  “But she’s a Witch! Why does she let them win?”

  “Well, aside from the fact that using magic to win at cards would be cheating …” Stanton gave Emily an all-too-familiar look of reproach, “Witches and Warlocks have no advantage in casinos like that. Everyone’s got a luck charm or a money spell or a something to hamper his opponents. The mantic atmosphere gets so cluttered that everything cancels everything else out.”

  Emily glanced out the window, saw that they were passing the street preacher they’d seen earlier. She could not hear his words, but his mouth was moving vehemently.

  “Oh, and by the way,” Stanton said, “don’t call her a Witch. Most female practitioners prefer the more delicate sorcière.”

  “Everyone always just called me a Witch,” Emily said.

  Stanton did not comment.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Man Calls

  Mrs. Quincy’s house was built into the side of a steep hill. It was an imposing structure, tall and square and butter yellow, frosted on every surface with decorative scrolls and fretwork. The inside of the house, into which they were shown by a maid in starched black and white, was as fussy as the outside. The sitting room was crammed with knickknacks and whatnots, shells and painted fans and brightly colored paper umbrellas and dozens of enameled pots containing a small jungle of trailing plants.

  “Now what are we supposed to do?” Emily asked, feeling stifled by the politeness of clutter.

  “We behave like civilized people.” Stanton sank into a leather wingback with a contented sigh.

  Emily sat on a slippery horsehair couch, trying not to disarrange the embroidered pillows or the carefully draped antimacassars. Stanton took up a newspaper that bore the ornate scrolling masthead, Practitioners’ Daily, and unfolded it across his lap. A box full of cigars sat next to his chair; he took one and gave it an appreciative sniff before lighting it.

  “I thought gentlemen weren’t supposed to smoke in front of ladies,” Emily said.

  Stanton choked, coughing heartily.

  “I want to smoke a cigar, and suddenly you’re a lady?” He snapped his newspaper at her quite meaningfully. “If you wish me to refrain from smoking in your presence, Miss Edwards, you’ll have to come up with a better reason than your frail femininity.”

  With a sniff, Emily let her eyes drift aimlessly around the room. On the marble mantelpiece, lustrous purple and blue peacock feathers sprouted from an alabaster vase. Pretty, but everyone knew peacock feathers inside a house drew bad luck. Her eyes traveled over pictures of foreign lands in polished silver frames, loudly ticking clocks (who needed five clocks in one room?), and everywhere doilies. Just being in a room with all those doilies made Emily tired.

  On the wall was an important-looking picture. The frame was adorned with draped bunting and decoratively cut silver paper. The important-looking picture was of an important-looking man. Emily scrutinized him. He was stiff and unsmiling. He had wide staring eyes and looked rather crazy. At first, Emily thought that it must be the late Mr. Quincy, but then she saw that he wore the high stiff collar of a priest.

  “Who’s that?”

  Stanton did not even glance up from behind his paper. “That is a picture of Benedictus Zeno, the father of modern credomancy.”

  “A priest?”

  “Excommunicated,” Stanton said. “Rome was not pleased.”

  Emily looked at Benedictus Zeno’s face for another moment, then stood up. She went to stand directly before Stanton. With her gloved hand, she delicately folded down the top of his paper.

  “So. What’s your plan?” She peered down at him. “I mean, is Mrs. Quincy going to get this thing out of my hand, or what?”

  Stanton looked up at her.

  “That may not be within her range of abilities,” he said. “But if she will consent, I hope she will contact Professor Mirabilis and ask h
im to pay us a visit.”

  “But isn’t he all the way back in New York? That would be weeks waiting here. She didn’t seem that hospitable.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be weeks,” Stanton said. “Mrs. Quincy has a Haälbeck door.”

  “A what?”

  Stanton gestured to a door that Emily had taken, at a glance, for a closet. On closer examination, however, she realized that it was far too fancy to lead to a musty room full of mothballs. It was extravagantly inlaid from panel to frame.

  “This door?” Emily went over to it.

  “Don’t touch it!” Stanton leapt to his feet. “There’s no telling what that stone in your hand would do to Mr. Haälbeck.”

  Stepping past her, he touched the frame of the wood, closing his eyes. Under his breath, he murmured, “Greetings, Herr Haälbeck,” and then grasped the ornate wrought silver handle and opened the door. It opened onto a papered wall.

  “Locked,” he said. “Just as I expected.”

  Emily looked at him. She let out a long sigh that suggested oceans of abused patience.

  “Haälbeck doors have terminal points in many different locations. If it weren’t for the stone in your hand—and the fact that Mrs. Quincy very wisely keeps the door locked—we could walk through this one right now and be in New York. Or Chicago, or London, or Bombay, or any one of hundreds of different locations.”

  “Really?” Emily said. That did sound quite useful. “But that doesn’t explain why you were so concerned that I might do harm to whoever this Mr. Haälbeck is.”

  “Have a look at the wood of the frame,” Stanton said.

  Emily did, not quite understanding what the door frame had to do with the mysterious Mr. Haälbeck, but resigned to the fact that Stanton was going to explain it to her, probably exhaustively. The wood was a strange color—gold with a bluish tinge, like oak that had been stained with huckleberry juice.

  “It is uchawi wood. It comes from Africa. It has an extremely high capacity for storing mantic energy. Each of the Haälbeck doors is made from this wood, and the frame of each door contains a small piece of the wood in which the spirit of a German Warlock named Haälbeck resides.” Stanton pointed to a place on the upper left-hand corner of the door frame, where a small piece of old-looking wood had been inlaid as part of a pretty star pattern. “There’s the piece that contains Mr. Haälbeck.”

  Emily wrinkled her nose.

  “You’re telling me that that little piece of wood contains his whole spirit?”

  “Spirit, essence, soul, whatever you prefer to call it. And no, his spirit is not just in that little piece of wood. It’s spread out among all the other little pieces of wood that were taken from the Haälbeck timber to make Haälbeck doors.”

  Emily settled herself back onto the horsehair couch.

  “All right, what is the Haälbeck timber?”

  “The year was 1789.” Stanton clasped his hands behind his back and assumed a professorial stance. “Herr Gustav Haälbeck, a Warlock with a mercantilist bent, was determined to make his fortune by creating a teleportational portal through which items could be shipped over great distances. Traditional magical teleportation requires a very large amount of mantic energy, and he was working with a large trunk of uchawi wood, trying to find a way to make it hold enough energy to fuel a stable portal.

  “His preliminary experiments were unsuccessful. Even uchawi wood could not hold sufficient quantities of mantic energy. So Haälbeck began to experiment with the structure of the wood itself, altering it to make it more mantically attractive, so that more power could be stuffed into it, so to speak.”

  “And he succeeded?”

  “All too well. He imbued the wood with too much attractive force, which resulted in a violent and involuntary metempsychosis …” Stanton paused at the look of bewilderment on Emily’s face. “Put simply, it sucked his soul right into it, much against his will.”

  Emily stared at Stanton, wide-eyed. “His soul got sucked into the wood?”

  “Yes,” Stanton said. “And that piece of wood became known as the Haälbeck timber.”

  “How … unfortunate!”

  “Well, every cloud has a silver lining. Haälbeck’s spirit imbued the Haälbeck timber with an immense amount of power—more power than anyone has ever since been able to contain within any material. Because of this, we have the ability to make Haälbeck doors from it.”

  “And what happened to Mr. Haälbeck?”

  “Pardon?” Stanton said, even though Emily knew he’d heard the question just fine.

  “Is he alive, or dead, or what? His soul is in the wood of all these doors … what does that mean for him?”

  “He can still communicate with the people who use the doors—you heard me greet him just now. But I’m afraid that he hasn’t much to talk about. He complains about rusty hinges and badly oiled locks. The years have left him much more like a door and much less like a human.”

  Emily shuddered. “That sounds like a terrible fate for someone’s soul.”

  “There are worse ones,” Stanton said. Emily would have asked him to elaborate on that comment, but at that moment the maid, in her crisp black and white, appeared at the door to show Emily up to her room.

  “I unpacked your things from the hotel, but I’m not sure they sent everything.” The maid sounded worried. Emily peeked into the open closet where her things had been hung. Buffalo coat, wrinkled gray dress, apron, straw hat, Pap’s old pants …

  “They sent everything,” Emily said. She did wish that she’d thought to tuck a few cakes of that beautifully wrapped soap into her saddlebag.

  “Oh … good!” The maid brightened. “Well, my name is Dinah. Mrs. Quincy sent word that dinner is to be served at eight. I’ll be happy to help you dress or do your hair, if you require.”

  “I don’t think I’ll need help.”

  “That’s a shame. You have such pretty hair, I’d be pleased to do it for you,” Dinah said. “I can tell that it’s all real. So many women wear false hair these days.”

  “False hair?” Emily said.

  “Oh, yes. Lots of hair is the fashion, of course, so women without much will pay to get more. Poor girls sell their hair down at the shops on Mason Street.” Dinah eyed Emily’s hair approvingly. “You’d get a pretty penny for all that hair of yours.”

  “I think I’ll hold on to it, thanks.” Emily smiled as she pulled off her kid gloves and laid them on the bureau. Dinah reached for them with a little frown.

  “Oh, miss, what have you done to these?”

  “Rode a hundred miles on a big black horse,” Emily said. “It’s murder on the gloves.”

  “Oh,” Dinah said vaguely, as if Emily had just quoted some impenetrable scripture in Tibetan. “Well, I can clean them for you, if you’d like. Get some of the stains out, maybe …” She did not sound optimistic. Clutching the battered gloves, she paused with her hand on the doorknob.

  “If you don’t mind my saying it, miss … you certainly don’t seem like most of Mrs. Quincy’s friends. Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

  “No,” Emily said drily. “I doubt very much I’m like any of Mrs. Quincy’s friends.”

  At eight o’clock precisely, Emily was dressed and ready for dinner. Dinah had restored the kid gloves to some of their former softness by rubbing them with lanolin, but there was nothing to be done about the stains.

  “I don’t know why ladies have to wear white gloves anyway, miss. Nothing but heartache, if you catch my meaning.”

  Emily did indeed.

  Mrs. Quincy had returned at half past six, and in a foul mood, too, if the harassed look on Dinah’s face was any indication. Emily had consented to let Dinah arrange her hair, but Mrs. Quincy seemed quite put out by the fact that she was not the sole focus of Dinah’s attention. Emily had given up on her entirely and was twisting her hair up into a simple bun when Dinah finally hurried into her room.

  “I’m so sorry, miss! I can see to you properly now. Mrs. Quincy is
finished and has locked herself in the parlor.”

  Emily raised an eyebrow as the girl came to stand behind her, taking an ivory-backed brush and running it through Emily’s hair with quick neat strokes.

  “Locked herself in the parlor?”

  “Oh, she does that every night,” Dinah said. She bent closer to Emily. “I think she likes to take a dram or two.”

  Within a quarter hour, Emily was dressed and coifed. As a concession to the grandness of the home, Emily put her mother’s gold and amethyst earrings through her ears, where they winked and sparkled.

  When she came downstairs, she found that Mrs. Quincy had unlocked the doors of her sanctum to admit Stanton (the dram apparently having been drunk prior to his arrival), and the two of them were sitting in the parlor engaged in a close and heated conversation. Emily caught Stanton’s last sentence: “I honestly can’t say I understand your reluctance …” and then they parted, both frowning, as she came into the room.

  “Well, good evening, my dear Miss Edwards!” Mrs. Quincy rose, extending her hands to Emily. Her aspect was entirely changed. Though still dressed in unbroken glittering black, her brusqueness and unpleasantness had vanished, and she was now surprisingly jocund. “I trust you were able to rest a bit after your long journey? Mr. Stanton has been telling me more about your amazing adventures.”

  “I feel very rested, thank you,” Emily said.

  “What charming earbobs,” Mrs. Quincy purred, lifting her index finger to touch one of Emily’s earrings. “The purple amethysts match the dewy violet of your eyes so nicely.”

  Emily glanced at Stanton, unsure of what to make of such a comment. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.

  “Thank you,” Emily said finally, sitting down and folding her hands in her lap.

  Then, before any other words could be spoken, there was a rapping from behind the ornate Haälbeck door. Stanton gave Mrs. Quincy an inquiring glance.