Rossamund gave a wordless splutter and quickly looked out to the sodden view.
"I should have been a fulgar." Threnody spoke softly after she had secreted the vial. "They only need two treacles; did you know that? I have cartloads of potives to take. Wits need so many different treacles and alembants at so many different times it's a wonder we do anything else at all. If anyone needs a factotum, it's a wit." She glowered at the wintry garden patch, and Rossamund wondered what he was meant to say in reply. He had only rarely seen her take a sip of her many draughts: a far greater variety of red and blue and black liquors, taken far more frequently than Europe's.
"It does seem somewhat unfair…," he offered into her angry silence.
"And she gets to keep her hair."
"Well, you have kept your hair," Rossamund remarked cautiously.
Threnody looked at him acidly, as if he had made a foul and tactless jest, then out at the saturated roofs of the Low Gutter. Her expression was unfathomable. "Well, yes." She fiddled absently with a raven curl. "I have…"
Rossamund was beginning to regret coming out with her. He decided to try a different tack. "I've met a man called Mister Numps-"
Threnody cut him off before he could finish his sentence. "Of course, Mother does not think the Branden Rose is much good at all. In fact, she very much dislikes her."
It was best to remain silent.
"But really, she and my mother have a lot in common."
Rossamund waited. He could not fathom what these two women might share.
"They were at the sequestury in Fontrevault together when they were my age. The Branden Rose was set to be a calendar, you know, except that she was expelled. I grew up hearing all about her: about the scores of men that pursued her; about how she loves herself most of all. Mother says she is an embarrassment to her state, her mother and her entire lineage, that if Mother had such a proud heritage she would never carry on so." Threnody paused. "The Branden Rose was the reason I so wanted to be a fulgar," she murmured, looking sadly at her elegantly shod feet.
Between these revelations of Europe's mysterious past and Threnody's twists of mood, Rossamund could think of nothing to say. He looked dumbly out the open front of the lean-to to the dripping garden. A damp sparrow, all puffed and ruffled, was sitting atop a bare stake sunk deep in the moldy loam. It regarded him with definite, unsettling wisdom, as if it knew only too well the trials of being a boy making sense of a girl.
"So this Mister Numps is a glimner living in the Low Gutter," Rossamund tried again. "I'm going there this afternoon. You could come if you want." He immediately regretted the invitation.
Fortunately Threnody did not take him up on it, but stood and strode quickly to the doorway, tossing her hair over her shoulder. "Have you even been listening to me at all?" she demanded. "You would have to be the rudest, most ignorant boy I know!" And with that she left him.
Rossamund blinked hard, frowned, took a deep breath. Verline had been much easier and a thousand times more pleasant to be with than these bizarre, belligerent women. Rossamund might live till he was a thousand and still come no closer to understanding them. The sparrow chirped cheekily and left with a whir of wings. The young prentice could have sworn it winked at him before it vanished. Middens was a desultory affair. No one seemed to know why or when, but the Snooks had mysteriously departed Winstermill, and the new culinare-hired particularly by the Master-of-Clerks-did not possess the talent to make strict rations appetizing.The food was plain, the smells were unsavory and the company was decidedly unhappy. While Threnody and Rossamund had been outside, Smellgrove and Hapfauf's disagreement had ended in blows, and with other boys taking sides, half the prentices had earned themselves pots-and-pans. Now one side of the hall was not speaking to the other side.
Threnody ignored Rossamund utterly.
As soon as he could, Rossamund took up his salumanticum and made his way down to the Low Gutter to see Numps. After watching the man make his special seltzer he was hoping he might learn a chemical trick or two from the glimner today. He was cold and damp when he arrived but, once safe within the lantern store, he shook off his pallmain and left it and his thrice-high on a hook by the door to drip themselves dry. He was thankful to have his new scarf. One of the detractions of seltzer light was that it gave no heat, and consequently the store was often too cold.
"Hello, Mister Rossamund," the glimner chuckled. "Chill's biting my feet today." He lifted his legs to show spatterdashes buckled about his shins, his bare soles poking a little from the bottom. Numps waggled his toes on his healing foot. "Numps' frosty feet are bitten with the cold, but Mister Doctor Crispus says I can use them again."
Rossamund grinned. "Afternoon, Mister Numps. Another day for furbishing the lantern-lights?"
"Ahhh." Numps touched his handsome nose and chuckled again. He cupped his hand about his mouth and whispered loudly to no one particular, "I've got one on Mister Rossamund. He doesn't know it's not to be light-cleaning today, does he?"
For a moment Rossamund thought the glimner was actually talking to some third person. "What will we do today if we don't clean?" he asked.
The glimner just gave that merry little chortle in answer and stood.Wrapping himself in old oiled canvas and secreting a bright-limn and a small, plump satchel beneath it, Numps made to exit.
"Come along, Mister Rossamund," he said softly and stepped outside, rain swirling in from without. Putting his own dripping pallmain and hat back on, Rossamund followed, thoughts alight with puzzled wonder.
Producing the bright-limn to guide them, Numps took a left turn by the lantern store down through a riddle of narrow alleys, another left, then a right and along an ill-cobbled lane with a trickling drain that sneaked between the fortress wall and the black planking of a great storehouse. Beneath the high eaves of the store, it was more like a tunnel, and so cramped they were forced to walk sideways. Hammering rain found its way through splits and cracks to dribble from above. Rats and other nervous skitterers stared from time-gathered detritus or scurried before them, disappearing down unexpected gaps and grilles in the stonework on either side. While they went, Numps gave sweet voice to brief nonsense songs about fish and frogs at a tea party, men wooing milkmaids with whortleberry jam and some old general with a wooden leg and no army.
Creeping carefully, taking heed not to trip on the litter of planks, broken lamps, musket stocks, various tins and pots half-filled with stagnant water or worse, wire spools, wire knots, broken bottles and even a pile of unidentifiable bones, Rossamund stayed behind the glimner. Where is this place? he marveled, stepping over the remains of an older foundation, some agglomeration of brick and stone and cement. They were clearly in a forgotten precinct of Winstermill.
The tunnel-like lane ended abruptly, depositing them in a small, remote square where two other cramped lanes and their drains joined and gurgled down a large, sunken grate. As clear of debris as the lane was full, the square was surrounded on three sides by stone foundations and wooden walls and on the fourth by the works of Winstermill's battlements. Weakly illuminated through a drizzling opening between roof and wall, it felt as removed from the bustle of the fortress as any haunted, lonely spot out in the wilds. Wind and rain wailed on high, lightning crashed, but down here it was still; the bubbling waters and Numps' lilt the only tunes.
Pausing, Numps put a finger to his mouth, indicating quiet. They could have talked at volume for all anyone would have heard. Bemused, Rossamund nevertheless nodded, and clamped his lips together for emphasis. Giving him the lantern, Numps crouched by the sunken grate and reached down between its squared bars, grabbing at something on their underside. There was a slight clank and the grate sprang up slightly, splitting in two like a gate. It was an entrance. Stone stairs led down an arched tunnel into damp warmth and darkness. The water of the drains did not pour directly into the hole revealed, but was caught in a gutter about the rim and channeled into a pipe at one corner. The dark below smelled faintly familiar; the sweet salt of seltzer blended with that almost-but-not-quite neutral odor of high humidity.
Without hesitation, Numps went down, encouraging Rossamund to follow, pointing downward. Rossamund squeezed past and Numps closed the grate again and came after. "Down, down, down we go," the glimner enthused, giving Rossamund a gentle nudge.
As they went the din of wild weather above was dulled almost to silence. The prentice could hear drops dripping steadily below, and occasional soft mechanical squeaks as well echoing up the stone stairway. This stair went deeper than Rossamund expected, down into what must have been part of the structures of old Winstreslewe, the ancient bastion founded in Dido's time upon whose ruined piles Winstermill had been raised.
The stair ended in a low undercroft of indeterminate size, its slate floor crowded with square columns and arches of brick. Packed between each pillar were large, squat, square vats of blackened wood. Some vats shone clean light to the low ceiling, others a verdant grassy green and yet others showed little light at all. Together they lit the vast subfoundational space with soft effulgence like an early, misty morning. The warmth here was peculiar: the close air tepid and clinging. A tinkling music sounded in the dimness, made by the sporadic drizzle that formed in the humidity and dripped from the rough ceiling into the vats.
"What is this place?" Rossamund breathed, swinging the bright-limn about to shine on Numps' face.
The glimner grinned in lopsided delight. "This is where the bloom is made," he whispered. "Oh, where it used to be made long, long before old Numps became poor Numps. This old Numps and his old friend found these baths and we put some little bit of bloom from a broken lamp in and we kept it alive till it grew to fill one bath and then the other bath and then the other and then more baths still! I have kept them alive, all these times." Numps' smile became sentimental, even paternal. "They're my special friends-like you and Mister Sebastipole and Cinnamon. Look, go on-look inside." By the kindest pressure on Rossamund's upper arm, the glimner encouraged the prentice to peer inside a vat. "But be careful not to let the light shine in too long, and stay quiet, 'cause they like it still and dark and peaceful."
The black wooden vats had a girth of roughly twice the width of Rossamund's cot and, straining on his toes, the prentice could see that within was water or something akin to it, perhaps a little greener. In this water was row on row of trailing plant-like growths, long horizontal strands of a kind of submerged grass waving in its rippling bath.
Bloom! Rossamund realized. Native, unsprung, unprismed bloom!
To most they would have been simply a plant; just some kind of dull, underwater weed; boring old bloom: but to the prentice it was wonderful to see it growing freely, long and wild, bushy and eagerly verdant. Puncheons of the stuff were sitting in most domiciles the land over, stumpy, pruned sprigs ready to put into a bright-limn when the old had died. Here it was closer to how it might be in its native dwelling, the littoral waters of southern mares.
Rossamund stared for a long time, enjoying the deep echo of the drops, the faint trickling of the rippling water set in motion by some unseen agent, watching the elongated tendrils swaying, swaying, swaying in the green. It was a place of near-complete peace-a model of subterranean calm.
"This is wonderful…," he breathed.
Numps beamed even as he took the bright-limn from Rossamund's hand.
"Too much light," he explained, and sat down on a nest of hessian and hemp. "I come here and the bloom trickle-trickle-trickles to me and gives me sleep and kind noises."
They sat for a time, both silent in this hidden undercroft of bloom baths.
"How does the rippling in the tubs happen?" Rossamund asked at last.
Numps stood, leaned into the vat, shone the light within and said, "By the flippers flapping, of course."
Rossamund looked again and saw flat paddles waving slowly in the depths like the swimming feet of an idling duck. Numps took him farther into the undercroft, threading past many more baths than Rossamund had first reckoned. In the midst of it all Numps halted and pointed with open palm and a self-satisfied expression to a large brassbound wooden contraption. It was a pull-box, a small kind of gastrine about the size of a limber. From its flywheel a series of wheels and belts drove all the modulating paddles that set the tub water to gentle motion, squeaking occasionally in their lazy to and fro. Rossamund could see the convoluted connection of the belts all about the roof of the undercroft, one reaching down to the paddles of each vat.
"I feed it and muck it-and the bloom too, and keep it all running myself. No one else will." Numps closed his eyes like a fellow foundling reciting verse in one of Master Pin-sum's lessons at the foundlingery. "Sometimes I put a little of one of my friends into a great-lantern that's to go back out to the road, and these live and live and live much longer than the poor things they grow otherwise."
In anyone else, this claim would be discounted as pure boast, but not with Numps; not with such obvious proofs of his skill before them.
Rossamund was powerfully impressed. "What do you feed the pull-box?"
"The cuttings and prunings and dead bits from the bloom," Numps returned matter-of-factly, though a self-satisfied grin ticked at the unscarred corner of his mouth.
"What do you do with the pull-muck?"
Grin growing, clearly proud of himself, the glimner answered, "Feed it to the bloom. They reckon it's the tastiest stuff they ever have tasted.They feed the pull, the pull feeds them-on and on and on and on."
"Why aren't these used in all the lamps all the time?"
"Oh, they have their own blooms up there," Numps replied, "in tubs not so old and leaky nor hard to get to. I always have to plug the cracks and gaps in this soggy wood." He patted the side of a bath tenderly. "Besides, the master-clerker and all his clerker-chums wouldn't like a thing like this. It's him who says where the bloom comes from nowadays."
Rossamund stood and watched the entire mechanism in silent admiration, just listening to the deep soothe of the trickling, rippling waters. "You'd have to be the best seltzerman ever there was, Mister Numps!" he whispered.
"Ahh, not poor limpling-headed Numps," the glimner said bashfully, then grinned.
They sat then, side by side in the soporific warmth, the glimner and the prentice, Numps humming, Rossamund wishing heartily that he could come here again. Safe and warm and brimming with peace, it was simply the best place in the whole Half-Continent. In the soft darkness of the old forgotten bloom baths, Rossamund slept.