The Book Man, Chapter 60 (Revised)

60 LIZA

Rowan’s troupe was small but cheerful, despite their situation. They comprised a contortionist, two trapeze artists, a dancing bear and its trainer, two lion-tamers and their lions, four ballet dancers, six ponies, several stage hands, and Graham Chelsea, the horse-master. They sat together around a wide fire-pit, roasting the snared rabbits as they talked and laughing when the horse-master knocked the meat because he claimed it wasn’t ready yet. They were kind to Christian but did not question him or try to draw him into conversation. He was perfectly fine with that and left them late in the afternoon to fetch Liza. Her husband was still asleep.

“No one can tell me what’s wrong with him,” she said as she and Christian headed back to the troupe. “One of the Rovers took a look at him for me and gave me some thyme oil and—I don’t remember what else, but she said his leg was getting infected. So I thought that was why he was doing so badly, but she said no, it was something else. But no one’s sure what, not her or Rowan or Finn or anyone else—”

“You know Finn too?” Christian asked.

She nodded. “I ran into her by accident going fishing my first time. She was there too, showed me how to bait a hook properly and said the rest was just waiting. Not that Rowan knows. They’re not on the best of terms with each other.”

“I am well aware of that,” Christian said.

“Anyway, everyone just keeps telling me that he’s lucky to be alive at all. That everyone they’ve ever known to get attacked by a hellhound has been swallowed up right then and there, never made it out with an injury that needed caring for.” She paused and then said, “Which is not exactly a comfort.”

No indeed, Christian thought. It was the same thing Imelda had told him the night the balloon-artist had been attacked. He wasn’t sure why Conrad hadn’t been gobbled right up, but the alternative didn’t seem much better at this point.

“How did it go with—Morrow, is it?” Liza asked.

“Er,” said Christian. They fell silent; she did not ask again.

They sat a little apart from the troupe once they had been given their dinner. It was the first hot meal Christian had eaten since leaving the Book House, and he scarfed it down though the rabbit scalded the roof of his mouth. He ate his second portion more slowly, watching Liza nibble at hers. He felt that he had never really known her before, a fellow accountant, a balloon-artist’s wife. Now here she was: fishing, fitting in with a group of circus folk, traveling to an unknown world to find her husband though she’d known next to nothing about it, and—

“Where did you learn to pick locks?” he asked.

The rabbit leg paused halfway to her mouth. After a moment, she lowered it and said, “Where did that come from?”

“Sorry,” he said, blushing. He hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. “It’s just that I’ve been wondering ever since you got the gate open, that night.”

She returned to her meat, and he thought that was the end of it. Too private, he thought as his blush subsided; one ought not to ask such questions, certainly not so long after the fact.

After a long while, however, she said, “I used to break into places all the time, when I was a teenager.”

He looked at her in astonishment. “You? But you’re so respectable.”

“When I was a teenager,” she repeated. “That gate is the first lock I’ve picked in—must be—forty-odd years.”

She took another bite and then realized that he had not stopped staring at her.

“For goodness’ sakes, Christian. You can’t tell me you never did anything stupid when you were that young.”

He opened his mouth but closed it without saying anything. Liza rolled her eyes.

“No, you didn’t. Too busy reading, I imagine.”

Well, he thought, that wasn’t exactly it; he had just never liked getting in trouble and so avoided any possibility of it.

She sighed again, nibbled at her dinner. Christian, toyed with his but didn’t eat.

“The thing is,” she said, putting the rabbit leg down again, “I thought, when I married Conrad—I grew up so normal, so boring, and when I met him it seemed like life was going to be exciting. Him with his charm and his looks and his balloons. And instead I got stuck. I’m not sure when it happened, or why, or how, but somewhere down the road I turned into this dull, respectable person who barely leaves her home except to go to work and doesn’t know how to talk to people.”

She did not sound all that different from Christian himself, he thought, except that he had always been a dull, respectable person—until Conrad had knocked on his door.

“I think that’s why I came to the park that night,” she said in a stronger voice. “Everything you told me was unbelievable. But I was tired of being stuck. So when you dropped an adventure in my lap—as crazy as it sounded—how could I not at least take a chance on it?”

She fell silent for a moment. Her voice quivered when she spoke again.

“I know it makes me a terrible person to say so, but this is the best I’ve felt in a long time.”

“I don’t think it makes you a terrible person,” Christian said. “I think I understand what you mean.”

If she had said it a week ago, a quizzical frown would have creased his brow, for how could anyone feel good with the park in shambles and Minerva missing an arm and Conrad and the Fair-folk gone? He certainly wouldn’t have said, while traversing the bog and the wood on his own, that he was happy.

And yet—it was the first time in his life that he had gone anywhere remotely exciting, done anything remotely important. The first time he’d turned to himself instead of books—books had not shown him how to bandage Minerva’s arm or plant new roses or make friends with Narodnaya. It was as Conrad had told him, the last Saturday they’d made balloon-art together: a man had to stop reading about life and start living it.

Liza gave him the trace of a watery smile. Then she set her plate, stood up, and said, “I’m going to check on Conrad. You should get some rest.”

He curled up in the grass a little ways away from the fire, but it took him a long time to fall asleep. When he did, his sleep was riddled with unsettling dreams. He roamed the maze in Celadon Park, but the gas lamps had burned out and he could not find his way. Shadows flew overhead; a hellhound growled low behind him. Liza beckoned in the distance, her mouth open as if she were shouting to him, but he could not hear her. He turned and saw Minerva beside him, her lips moving wordlessly—she grabbed his hand and pulled him down a pitch-black path where all he could see was her white tunic shining before him—and then she vanished, leaving him alone in the darkness. He fell as he had through the portal, his stomach flipping, shouting for Minerva, for Liza, for Conrad, even for Rowan, but no one answered, and he tumbled alone through the blackness as if he would fall forever—

He jerked awake at the sensation of plummeting through the air. He felt as if he had slammed into the ground after a long fall; he lay in the grass for several minutes, trying to catch his breath. Rowan and her troupe were asleep now, wrapped in their cloaks around the dying embers of the fire or curled up against the lions and ponies. Liza had returned and slept restlessly beside them.

Morrow was there now as well, with a leather pack on the ground beside him and a canteen in one hand. He crouched beside the fire and stirred it up; his brown skin shone red in its glow. He had changed clothes and polished his boots, and his face and hair were clean. He looked more like the statue in the park, like what Christian had expected to find, though now that he looked at the Rover king he thought the statue’s artist had not gotten it quite right: Morrow’s nose was a little straighter, his brow a little higher in real life than it had been in stone.

In his head Christian heard Narodnaya’s voice faintly. That was some dream. Are you alright, human?

She could see into his dreams? He was not sure how he felt about such an invasion of his privacy, but he felt her drifting on the edge of his mind, waiting for an answer.

Just fine, he thought without conviction, and he got up to sit by the fire with Morrow.