The train’s pistons plunged, once, twice, and Mr. Jelliby was asleep.
Bartholomew had hoped he might say something, discuss their plans, or tell him more about the lady in plum, but he didn’t. Oh well. The air was warm, and the seat was plush, and so Bartholomew snuggled into it and pressed his nose against the cold window. The city swam by below in a blue-dark blur, towers and rooftops gone so quick he barely saw them. They crossed the river, chugged among the soaring black flues of the cannon foundries. Then, in the blink of an eye, the city was behind them and they were slicing through the green fields of the country. In a few minutes Bath was only an inky stain on the horizon, growing smaller with every breath.
Bartholomew looked back and felt an odd ache grow in his chest. He was leaving. Leaving all the few things he had ever known. Going who-knew-where with a gentleman who didn’t eat when there was food to be had and who shook hands with changelings. Somewhere back in that shrinking spot was Mother, asleep in an empty flat. And Hettie. . Hettie was somewhere. Not there, but somewhere.
He turned his attention to their compartment in the No. 10 to Leeds. Mr. Jelliby had bought first-class tickets just as he always did, and Bartholomew was not so far out of sorts that he didn’t notice how terribly swish everything was. Small framed paintings hung above the seats-happy, comfortable scenes of richly dressed people at tea, or outdoors, smiling vacantly into shop windows and fishponds. On the paneled walls, two lamps were mounted, each with a flame faery imprisoned inside. The one on Bartholomew’s side tapped the glass to catch his attention and began pulling its glowing face into a parade of rude expressions. Bartholomew stared at it a while. When he turned back to the window, the faery set to pounding its fists against the inside of the lamp and spitting little angry bursts of flame. Bartholomew glanced back. It promptly resumed making faces at him.
Some time later Mr. Jelliby woke up. Bartholomew dropped his head against the window and pretended to be asleep, watching the gentleman through half-closed lids. Mr. Jelliby looked at him once. Then he began unfolding his newly acquired map, spreading it leaf by leaf throughout the compartment.
Arthur Jelliby’s fingers ran across the thick white paper, bouncing as the train rumbled under him. The map was somewhat different from what he was used to. The English Isle was called “The Withering Place.” London was labeled “The Great Stink-Pile,” and North Yorkshire, “The Almost World,” but he understood it well enough. The train would take them to Leeds in Yorkshire. The coordinates on Mr. Zerubbabel’s scrap of paper were not in Leeds, though. In fact, as far as Mr. Jelliby could tell, they weren’t anywhere in particular. The spot he had marked on the map was not a city, or a hamlet, or even a single farm. It was simply empty open country.
He frowned at the map, turned it upside down, folded it up, and reopened it. He read the coordinates again, recalculated longitude and latitude. It was all no use. The place refused to move anywhere sensible.
When the train stopped in Birmingham, an elderly lady in a silver fur pelisse entered their compartment to sit down. She took one look at Bartholomew’s masked face and the pistols on Mr. Jelliby’s belt and turned around in something of a flurry, sliding the door closed behind her. No one disturbed them for the rest of the journey.
It was well past midnight when they arrived in Leeds. At the loading docks, they were able to bribe a stagecoach driver to abandon his scheduled passengers and take them as close as he could to the point Mr. Jelliby had marked on the map. No roads led within five miles of it. They would have to do some walking that night.
They left the city by moonlight. The coach was drawn by a pair of unnaturally large grasshoppers, and they ran with reckless abandon, dragging it across stones and ruts until Mr. Jelliby was afraid it would jolt to pieces. A chill wind blew through the chinks in the sides of the coach. Branches tapped against the windowpanes. Soon Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby were blue with bruises, and cold to the bone. After an hour, the stagecoach stopped. They climbed out blearily.
“Now then,” the driver said, hunching into his greatcoat and peering out at them with glinting eyes. “Here’s as close as I can get you. There’s an inn about a mile back. The Marshlight. I’ll wait for you there.”
Mr. Jelliby nodded and glanced at the surrounding country, running his hatband around and around through his fingers. “Don’t speak of us to anyone, will you? And if we’re not back by dawn you may assume that. . that we’ve found another way. Good night.”
The driver grunted and cracked his whip. The grasshoppers broke into a run and the stagecoach thundered away down the road. Bartholomew watched it go, shivering.
Mr. Jelliby consulted his compass. Then they set out across a wet green field. A thin mist hovered over the grass, soaking their trousers to the knee. Before long it began to drizzle. Bartholomew’s head buzzed with sleepiness and Mr. Jelliby was limping, but neither of them said anything. On and on they walked, through field after field, over hills and trickling brooks until there was not a muscle in their bodies that did not ache.
Mr. Jelliby heaved himself over a low stone wall, one eye still locked on the compass. “We ought to be getting there shortly,” he said, and brushed the dirt from his knees. “Wherever ‘there’ is. . ”
“There,” as it turned out, was a knot of trees in the middle of a wide empty field. It was not a forest. It might have been a forest once, when there were still forests in these parts, but all its arms and legs had been cut down, and now it was simply a great clump of oak and elm rising out of the rolling grass. Mr. Jelliby paused at its edge, staring up into the vaulting branches. Then he walked in, Bartholomew close behind him.
The air under the trees was damp, but not like in the fields. It was a musty, living damp, heavy with the smell of bark and wet earth. Moss blanketed the ground, and although the trees grew very close together, it was not difficult to walk. After no more than twenty paces, they found themselves in a small clearing. The rain rustled down, and the grass grew tall here. A heap of charred sticks sizzled under the water droplets. And in the center of the clearing, cheery and welcoming as could be, stood a round-topped wooden wagon. It was painted red, with yellow daffodils and primroses on the door and round the spokes of the wheels. Smoke curled up from a tin funnel on its roof. A single window looked out of its side, and scarlet curtains were drawn across the inside of the panes. Warm light shown through them, casting glowing squares on the grass.
Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby looked around them uncertainly. There were no monstrous contraptions here, no small graves, or black-winged sylphs whispering in the branches. What could Mr. Lickerish possibly be interested in here, that his bird should fly all this way? Bartholomew hoped, desperately hoped, that Hettie was in that painted wagon. He felt suddenly incredibly impatient.
Mr. Jelliby climbed the steps to the door at the back of the wagon and knocked twice. “Hullo!” he called, in what he hoped was a commanding voice. “Who lives here? We must speak with you!”
Something smashed inside. A quick, sharp smash, as if someone had just had a dreadful fright and let a cup or a bowl slip straight from her hands. “Oh, no. Oh no, oh no, oh no,” a frail voice cried. “Please go away. Go away. I have no money. No money anywhere.”
Mr. Jelliby glanced at Bartholomew, but he didn’t look back. He was watching the door intently.
“Madam, I assure you we do not want any money,” Mr. Jelliby said. “I received your address from one Xerxes Ya- From a mutual acquaintance. And I need to speak to you. Madam? Are you all right in there?”
A small shutter snapped open in the door, and a face appeared. Mr. Jelliby stumbled back. It was a gray, wrinkled face framed by a shower of wispy birch branches. An old faery woman.
“You’re not from the Faery Bureau Inspectors, are you?” she asked. “Or the Court of Thorns? Or the government?”
“I’m-well, I’m from England,” Mr. Jelliby answered stupidly.
The faery woman gave a nervous laugh and unbolted the door. “Oh. I’m not. Let’s get you out of the rain, then, shall we? Unless you like the rain, of course. Some folks do. It’s good for selkies, heals boils on nymphs, though I’ve never known it to do anything for- Oh!” Her hands went to her mouth when she saw Bartholomew. “Oh, the poor little Peculiar! He’s thin as a fish bone!”
Bartholomew tried to peer around the faery, into her wagon. Then he looked at her. Poor little Peculiar? There was no disgust in her voice, none of the fright of the goblin in the bazaar, or the petty evil of the peddler in Old Crow Alley. She sounded more alarmed by his resemblance to a fish than the fact that he was a changeling.
Yes, well, we don’t have to eat him with parsnips, now do we, Mr. Jelliby thought, as the faery woman ushered them into the wagon. It was tiny inside, cramped and warm, and cluttered with parchments and bottles in pretty colors. Bundles of herbs hung from the ceiling. Candles dripped in fantastical shapes down the shelves. The wagon was too small to hide anyone, and Hettie wasn’t there.
The old faery busied herself with sweeping up the shards of a pottery bowl from the floor. “Oh, such a mess,” she whined. “Don’t get many visitors, I don’t. Not good ones anyway.” Her voice was creaky and old, a bit like the faery butler’s. Friendlier, though. Perhaps too friendly for one who has just had her far-off clearing invaded by strangers.
“Madam, we’ve come on a matter of great importance,” Mr. Jelliby said.
“Have you, at that?” She tipped the shards into a cat dish. It was full of milk. “And how comes it that an old greenwitch like me can help such good sirs as you? Are you sick? Has the cholera gotten one of you? I hear he is quite busy in London now.”
Mr. Jelliby stamped the wet from his shoes and took off his hat. He? “No, not cholera. We need to speak to you about someone.”
The faery straightened, joints popping, and hurried a teakettle to the stove in the corner. “Don’t know many someones anymore. Who might it be?”
“The Lord Chancellor. John Lickerish.”
The old faery almost dropped the kettle. She wheeled around to face them. “Oh,” she whispered, eyes quivering. “Oh, I meant no harm. Whatever he’s done, whatever he’s doing, I meant no harm.”
Mr. Jelliby’s hand fell to the grip of his pistol. “We’re not here to accuse you, madam,” he said quietly. “We need your help. We have reasonable proof that you are connected to Mr. Lickerish, and we must know why. Please, we must know!”
The faery knotted her hands into her apron and began pacing to and fro, the floor of the wagon creaking with each step. “I don’t know him. Barely at all. It’s not my fault!” She stopped to face them. “You won’t take me away, will you? Not to the cities and their horrid fumes? Oh, I would perish!”
“Please, madam, calm yourself. We’re not taking you anywhere. We simply need you to tell us things. Everything.”
The faery’s eyes flicked to the pistols. She looked from Mr. Jelliby to them and back. Then she returned to the stove. Tea hissed as she poured it into blue china cups. “Everything. .” she said. “You’d be dead of old age before I was halfway through.” She brought the tea and slumped into her rocker.
Bartholomew didn’t take his cup. Hettie isn’t here. Nothing was here but a mad old faery. They should be leaving, running back across the fields to the coachman and Leeds. Not drinking tea. He tugged at Mr. Jelliby’s sleeve, opened his mouth to say something, but the faery saw him and spoke first.
“Life’s hard out here,” she said, and her voice was petulant. “Folks in the cities, they work in factories, always among the engines and the church bells and the iron. And they lose their magic. I couldn’t do that. Out here I can hold on to bits of it. Just little shreds. It’s not like home. Not really. But it’s almost there. It’s as close as I can get.” Bartholomew knew she was talking of her home in the Old Country. She must be very old indeed.
“And I need to live!” the faery woman wailed. “I’m just an old greenwitch and nobody wants my help anymore. Faeries come once in a while out of the big cities when their young ’uns cough blood, but they can’t pay much. And I had to sell poor Dolly for glue, so there was no more traveling the circuits. I need to live, you know!” A strange spark came into her eyes. “The Lord Chancellor sends me gold.”
“Does he,” Mr. Jelliby said coldly. “And did you know he’s been killing changelings? Or does he pay you so well that you don’t care? I will thank you to tell us now what this is all about. In honest words. What is the Lord Chancellor planning?”
The greenwitch looked about to cry; Bartholomew suspected it was more because of the disapproval in Mr. Jelliby’s voice than because of any of his actual words. “You don’t know?” she said. “You’re trying to stop him, aren’t you? That’s why you’re here. And you don’t even know what you’re trying to stop?”
Mr. Jelliby gulped at his tea. He didn’t know. All he had was fragments and pieces-the bird, the message, the conversation in Westminster-but they didn’t really add up to anything.
The old faery scooted her chair a little closer to him. “He is going to open another faery door, of course.”
Mr. Jelliby blinked at her from over the rim of his teacup. Bartholomew made a little sound in his throat, partway between a gasp and cough.
“You didn’t know that?” She giggled, scraped even closer. “Yes. The faery door. He’s going to open another one. Very soon, I think. Tomorrow. The last one happened by itself, see. A natural phenomenon brought about by a lot of unfortunate coincidences. There have always been cracks between the worlds. Things have always been slipping back and forth, and there are many tales of humans who have found themselves in the Old Country quite by accident. But this new door won’t be a crack. It won’t be an accident. John Lickerish is engineering it. Commanding it into existence. A massive gateway in the middle of London. In the middle of the night.”
Mr. Jelliby set down his teacup sharply. “But it’ll be carnage!” he exclaimed, aghast. “Ophelia, and Brahms, and- It’ll be Bath all over again!”
“It’ll be worse,” the faery said, and her face split into a smile then, so bright and toothy it made Mr. Jelliby’s skin crawl.
“It won’t work,” he said, looking studiously at a braid of garlic above the faery’s head. “The bells. The bells will stop it. They’re always ringing. Every five minutes. Mr. Lickerish won’t be able to get a spell in edgewise.”
“Ooh. The bells.” The faery continued to grin. “Bath had bells. Bath had iron and salt, and not a few clocks and it was still blown six miles north of the moon. Bells don’t help against magic like that. They might stop a pisky from giving you a wart or muddle a minor enchantment, but they won’t keep a faery door from opening. Not a road to the Old Country.”
“Then what do we do?” Mr. Jelliby almost shouted it. “We can’t just sit here! How do we stop it?”
“I don’t know.” She was so close now. Mr. Jelliby was certain he could smell her-flowers and smoke and sour milk. “It’s a complicated process, opening a faery door. I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it. All I know is that Mr. Lickerish needs a concoction. Plants and animal parts. I give it to him. It’s a binding potion, that concoction is. It lures a sort of faery called the penumbral sylph, can pattern whole flocks of them and make them do what someone tells them to. But I don’t know what he needs sylphs for. I’m just a tiny thread, see. A tiny thread in a great big spider’s web.” She made a scuttling motion with her fingers.
“He sends me his notes in a mechanical bird. A bird out of metal, did you ever hear of such a thing? And I do what they tell me. But those changelings. .” Her grin fell from her face, and she shrank back into her chair. She looked suddenly frightened and sad again. “I don’t know what they’re for. Poor, poor creatures. I don’t know why he’s killing them. I’ve sent nine bottles to London. A lot of little ones as well. Little bottles. So little. And. . and last I heard there had been nine deaths. You are from London, yes? I saw it from the dirt on your shoes. Perhaps he’s been trying over and over again to open that door. Nine times over. Nine times you could have died in your bed and were spared.” Her gaze turned to the window. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I didn’t, truly. And when I heard about the changelings in the river, I knew right away it was him. But, oh, don’t make me think about it. I couldn’t do anything. What could I have done?” She asked it almost pleadingly.
Bartholomew looked up from his boots. He was glaring. “What d’ you mean, what could you have done?” The greenwitch turned to him in surprise. He hadn’t spoken in hours and his voice was rough. “You could have done nothing, that’s what you could have done. You could have stopped helping him. He has my sister now, did you know that? She’s next, and it’s your fault. It’s your fault as much as anybody’s.”
The old faery stared at him a moment. The firelight danced in her eyes. When she spoke her voice was soft. “It wasn’t my fault. Oh, it wasn’t. Mr. Lickerish was the one doing the killing. All I did was stir my little pot in my little clearing. Won’t think about it. Won’t think about it!”
Mr. Jelliby started to rise. The greenwitch jerked around to face him. She smiled again. “But in the end I suppose it is my fault, isn’t it. Oh, I am sorry. Do you know? When I first learned of John Lickerish’s plan, I thought, ‘Why not?’ Why should I care what happens to London? It’s about time the faeries broke free, about time the English learned their lesson. But I changed my mind. Would you like some more tea? I decided that Mr. Lickerish was not doing it for the faeries. He’s not doing it for anyone, really. No one but himself. He says he doesn’t like walls and chains, but he really does. As long as he builds the walls and makes the chains. Because you see, when the faery door is opened he isn’t just going to let it go. He’s going to guard it like a great watchdog, and it will be his. It will always be open, but he’ll decide what goes in and what comes out.”
Bartholomew stared at her. What is wrong with her? It was as if her mind were twisting and shoving and telling itself lies. She kept gazing at Mr. Jelliby, little twitches under her eye and in her fingers, that ghastly smile on her face.
“A great many creatures will die when it opens,” she said. “Humans and faeries, all dead in their beds. Twenty thousand perished in Bath. A hundred thousand in the aftermath. Do you remember the Smiling War? Tar Hill and the Drowning Days? Of course you don’t. You’re too young, and too well fed. But I remember. Years and years after the door opened, and there was still nothing but confusion and bloodshed. It’ll all happen again. New faeries will come, and they’ll be wild and free, and they’ll dance in the guts of the people and the silly, tired, English faeries. Because the faeries who are already here won’t know what to do. They don’t remember how they once were. I think they’ll all die, don’t you? Die along with everyone else. And Mr. Lickerish will watch it all from some safe place.” She looked at Mr. Jelliby adoringly. “But you’ll stop him, won’t you. . ”
Mr. Jelliby pushed aside his teacup. “I don’t know,” he said shortly, and took from his waistcoat pocket the scrap of paper Mr. Zerubbabel had given him. “I have one more address from Mr. Lickerish’s messenger bird. The address is in London somewhere. It’s the place, isn’t it? Has he told you? I believe the messenger birds connect Mr. Lickerish to all the points of his scheme-Bath and the changelings, you. Then back to London.”
The old faery’s smile turned sly. “Oh, you are clever. So clever and tall. How did you get your hands on the Lord Chancellor’s messenger bird, hmm? If he ever finds out he’ll have you killed.”
He already tried, Mr. Jelliby thought, but he said, “Look madam, we haven’t time for nonsense. Tell us what the door looks like and where we’ll find it, and we’ll leave you be.”
“Oh, but I don’t want you to leave me be! Don’t go! I can’t tell you those things. I can’t, it would be bad, so bad. Or perhaps I could. Perhaps a little. My memories of the last one are very dim, that’s all. So dim and faraway. I woke in my bed in the crown of a tree, and. .” The greenwitch’s eyes clouded over. “Mama. Mama was packing bags. She was telling us to hurry because there was a great wonder under way by the City of Black Laughter. And I remember walking, walking. I was very young then. It seemed to me we walked a hundred nights, but it couldn’t have been long at all. And then there was a door in the air. It was like a rip in the sky and its edges were black wings flapping. Feathers fell around us. We went through it, but I don’t remember how it looked from the other side. I didn’t look back, you see. Not once. Not until it was too late. The door could have been huge or it could have been tiny. Thousands of us fit through it at a time, but it was all magic, that door; it might have been no bigger than my nose.” She wiggled her nose. “The London door could be anything. Anywhere. It could be a mouse hole or a cupboard. It could be the marble arch in Park Lane.”
She smiled, wistful, her thumb rubbing the chip in the rim of her teacup. “I want to go back, you know. To the Old Country. Home.” She looked at Bartholomew, her blue eyes faint and watery. Then she set down her cup and put her hands to her ears. “Best not to think of it. Best not. Won’t think about it! Nothing good will come of Mr. Lickerish’s plans. Not for me. Not for me, and not for anyone.”
The wagon was silent for a minute. The fire crackled inside the little stove. Outside in the trees, an owl hooted mournfully.
Then Mr. Jelliby stood. “Indeed. We’ll be leaving now. Thank you for the tea.”
The greenwitch began to speak again, stumbling out of her chair, trying to keep them a little longer, but Mr. Jelliby was already unlatching the door. He stepped out into the night. Bartholomew followed, pulling his hood down low.
Out in the clearing, Mr. Jelliby took a deep breath. He turned to Bartholomew. “Cracked as an egg, that one. Let’s be off then, if we’re to save the world.”
They trudged out of the circle of warmth from the wagon, out into the heavy damp of the wood.
“I don’t care about the world,” Bartholomew said under his breath. “All I want is Hettie.”
The old faery climbed down from her wagon and watched them go, gazing after them until long after they had been swallowed by the night.
Hours passed. She stood so still she might almost have been mistaken for a tree herself. Finally a clockwork sparrow swooped down into the clearing and alighted on the dewy grass by her feet. She scooped it up. Cradling it in her palm, she undid the brass capsule from its leg and took out a message.
Rejoice, sister, it read, in Mr. Lickerish’s familiar, spidery handwriting. Child Number Eleven is everything. Everything we hoped her to be. Prepare the potion. Make it your strongest yet and send it to the Moon. The door will not fail this time. In two days’ time, when the sun rises, she will stand tall and proud over the ruins of London, a herald to our glorious new age.
And a symbol of the fall of man.
The sun will not rise for them.
The Age of Smoke is over.
The old faery’s face split into that wide, wide grin. Slowly, she rolled the note back into the capsule. Then she took a gun from under her apron. It was new, Goblin Market-bought, one of a pair. The other was in the wagon, hidden quickly behind the stove. She raised the gun, pointing it at the place where the two figures had disappeared into the woods.
Boom, she mouthed, and giggled a little.