Cedric was in the sitting room reading a book in front of the fireplace when there came a knock upon the front door. He brought his head up from the lines on the page and looked about himself.
The others were deeply engaged, so he took the liberty to answer the call. The door had no way to look through it, so he took the knob and pulled.
“Cedric, my dear fellow!”
Davian came into the foyer, announcing, “Just the lad I wanted to see!” as Cedric closed the door behind him. He shrugged off his long woolen coat and hung it on the rack.
Still sporting a bright blue necktie, Davian stepped toward the sitting room, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden frame and leaning forward to let his head into the room to observe the ones within. Cedric lingered behind.
Davian found three orphans there, but they were not what he was looking for, so he addressed them. “Afternoon, children; I do hope you’re keeping warm. Is Miss Eloise around?”
Elmer and Owen looked up from the painted marbles on the six-pointed star to spy the guest, but Friday kept her nose in her book. She spoke for them, peering over her nose:
“She’s upstairs.”
“Pity,” he said, and then realized Cedric was still in the entry. He waved his hand in an attempt to usher him inside. “Come, come, Cedric, have a seat.”
Cedric stepped past him into the room where the curtain was peeled back and despite the white-grey clouds, light poured through the window. He stood with his hands on the back of the sofa, but he did not sit.
Davian took a breath and his chest rose, and so too did the silken splash with which he’d adorned himself.
“Gird yourselves and batten down the hatches, children,” he sounded. “There’s a fair bit of snowy weather headed your way.”
“Joy of joys,” Zahra said, having slid down the stairs into the entry without so much as a peep. She moved closer, but took a place inside the doorway, where she leaned against the frame.
“I’m sure it will be no trouble at all, and you have a few hours to be ready,” he said. “But you should be ready.”
Suyon ran in then, scooting around Zahra and running toward the window, where she placed her hands on the sill and stood on her tip-toes to look up at the sky expectantly.
Davian saw her and smiled, and then looked back toward the others. “A roaring nor’easter; and she promises to be a grand one. A foot or more, perhaps two if my senses do not fool me.”
Cedric was a bit puzzled, and he asked, “…A northeaster?”
The mage had a smug look on his face. “My dear boy, this isn’t simply a contraction from the Old Kingdom or a Britishism, if you will.”
“A nor’easter,” he repeated and raised his arms, weaving them around while looking up. “—Is quite the meteorological predicament.”
He looked at Cedric sideways. “I suppose you don’t have these where you come from.”
Cedric looked at Davian, and then saw that the light in the room was becoming dim, and above their heads were clouds laden with water. Davian was looking at his magic. And the air was cold.
“When the wind comes in from the North, it’s acquired a dastardly chill.”
When Davian moved his hands through the air, the breeze surged past them and moved their hair.
He was getting theatrical, and he was enjoying himself. “But when the polar jet stream meets the warm ocean; that is to say: our warm ocean,” he said as the winds began to mix and swirl, “that is when a sort of a cyclone appears, a twisting thing full of ice and snow—”
He raised his hands to intensify the scene, and Cedric looked down at Suyon, who was watching with rapt attention as white flakes began to dance around the room.
“Sleet and hail—”
The girl’s eyes were taking it all in and her mouth was open in a sweet and unsuspecting awe, completely unfazed by the cold. She raised her arms to mimic his gesture, reaching out and toward the ceiling.
Davian, not seeing her, delivered his thesis with dramatic pause, “—And rage.”
And in an instant, the entire storm vanished. The candles returned to normal and the orange blazed in the fireplace, and the temperature returned to what it had been.
“Yes, well,” Davian said. It took a moment, but his face soon wore his usual brightness, and he turned toward the one who’d been watching.
“Can I take you for a drive, Cedric? We can go into town and procure the necessary supplies; make sure you’ve got everything you need should you become snow-bound.”
“Uh…” Cedric said.
He looked at the pile of wood on the floor and said, “Sure,” before turning back to Davian.
“Capital. Let’s get going, then. No time to waste.”
Cedric followed Davian back into the foyer. He stretched the laces and slipped his feet into his shoes, and when he was done, he saw that Davian was holding the door open and the heat was leaking away. Beyond him the antique idled at the curb, and Cedric noticed he’d left it running.
“Is that all you’re wearing?”
But Davian’s suggestion went unheard as Cedric gave another look into the house.
The last thing he saw were the worn soles of Friday’s socks as she ran up the stairs.
When Cedric opened the door of the car, Davian was walking around the elongated nose of the front and approaching the other side. There was a pair of gloves on the seat, and when Davian entered, he picked them up and slipped them on his hands before sitting down.
The gloves bore cloth on the back, off-white: woven so that holes let the skin breathe. And when Davian pulled them over his hands, there was brown leather that covered the palm and the part where his fingers would touch the wheel. It was a curious thing, and it gave Cedric pause, and he just watched the man’s hands for a while, and was quiet.
Davian engaged the motor and threw a glance through the center, and then turned his eyes back to the road.
“Fuel for the fire,” he said, composing a grocery list. “That one’s not so trivial to render from thought.”
Davian looked over again, seeking the boy in the passenger seat and inviting him to join the exercise. “…Anything else you can think of?”
Cedric’s mind was blank for a moment, and he imagined being back in the foundling home, and then the desire solidified and he spat it out before he could hesitate.
“Matches.”
But he quickly realized he’d admitted his handicap, and he looked out the window and wished he’d said nothing.
“Right,” Davian said. He was concentrating on the road, or, at least, pretending. Then he added dreamily, “Be prepared.”
Cedric’s mind was condensing like the darkening clouds above, heavy with the fear of what was to come, and the purring engine was the only noise between them.
“…If these storms are so destructive,” Cedric began after a silence, “Why don’t you make it so it doesn’t form? Or—” he thought, and hypothesized, “You could just make it go somewhere else.”
He wasn’t sure if he liked what he said, but he had to endure it.
“What, a sprightly young man such as yourself doesn’t enjoy a snow day?” Davian asked. “Are you already too old to construct a man in a cap and a carrot nose on Christmas?”
Cedric looked at the road because he didn’t want to respond.
“We can, and do, change what our corner of paradise presents us with,” Davian said. “But when you stack the deck in your favor, the victory is awfully hollow, wouldn’t you say?”
“Isn’t it better when the storm arrives on the day you hadn’t planned on leaving the house? When you get the thing you wanted wrapped with a ribbon beneath the tree without having to say a word?”
Cedric blinked, seeing that Davian’s mood had changed quickly; as if he had completely forgotten the somber moment that came before.
“My brother was home from Eton that month,” he began, and veered into backstory. “Tell me: have you ever heard the phrase ‘the heir and a spare’?”
Davian looked away from the road, and Cedric looked back.
“Yes, that’s the way it was at the Winchester estate. An heir and a spare. And I was the spare.”
Cedric looked at him again, but Davian was watching the road.
“My brother had received a dog from my father that year. Lovely little spaniel: liver and white like all the prettiest ones were. And my father handed it to him and said something about it being the biggest and best bitch in the litter.”
Cedric was still looking at Davian, as he had both hands on the wheel.
“But my brother. My brother. You know, he put up a nice face as we all knew to do, had to do. But I knew what was going on. He smiled at my father and told him ‘thank you father’ as he should have, as he’d been trained to do since we were little children.”
“He was going to call the dog Captain, he told me. He’d told me this years ago, long before he went away to school. He had dreamt of the dog for so long, and when father dropped the little red bitch in his hands—”
Davian sighed and turned left.
“I would have been happy to have a dog at all. But he wanted a boy dog. Nothing else would do.”
He paused. “I didn’t give a damn whether it was a girl dog or a boy dog. I just wanted a dog.”
The light was red, so Davian stopped, and Cedric thought he should have changed the shifter, but there was no shifter to be found.
“The dog ended up getting called Nell. And Nell was a good dog, damn good dog if I do say so myself. And she sat when she was told to sit, and she came to heel whenever my brother said come.”
“It didn’t snow much in England anymore, you see,” Davian said, derailing a bit. “You might be tempted to think, after reading too much about Ebenezer, that winters in England were always covered in a foot of powder.”
Davian used his rearview mirror.
“But that hadn’t been the case for decades. The cold times were long done, and they were the stuff of legend by the time I was a child.”
“Winters in the old houses weren’t like they are now. Fires were in the hearth in each room, and the hallways were cold. We ran from one warmth shuddering, hoping to find another beyond a frigid expanse. When we went to bed, we shut the doors and crawled beneath our blankets and hoped the coal wouldn’t go black before our eyes were closed.”
“I woke on Christmas morning, and I was cold. I opened my eyes and saw the door was open — damn! — the door was open! So I opened my mouth to call for the help, and when I stretched out my legs to get a good position—”
Cedric looked at him, then.
“I felt something pressing at my feet.”
Davian looked at him briefly, but then turned back to the road.
“It was the dog, Cedric. It was Nell, the dog, my brother’s dog.”
Cedric kept watching.
“My brother’s dog had opened the door, pulled the latch; my brother’s dog had refused him and come to me and crawled in my bed. My brother’s spaniel, trained to root out the pheasant from the grass and fetch the weasel from the hole — that was the dog I found curled up at the end of my bed to keep my foot warm.”
Davian used his mirror and moved into the left lane to the sound of the clicker.
“That was when I knew it was going to be a good day, Cedric. Sometimes, you let the weather come to you, and wisdom isn’t to refuse your good fortune.”
Cedric didn’t know quite what to say, but he said something.
“She sounds like a nice dog.”
Davian laughed a little.
“Nell was a good girl, obedient and tame. Loyal and well-bred. Quite ordinary in the best way, if a bit beautiful and easy on the eyes. That’s rather the point of them.”
Davian cut a very peculiar figure at the little grocery store in Queens. Cedric followed him, feeling ill-at-ease, feeling as if everyone there were watching them, and he thought if he turned his back they might point at them and snicker and comment that they did not belong.
But that did not happen.
Davian took a steel shopping cart and, this time still wearing the gloves, pushed it around the store while Cedric followed feeling oddly idle.
He took two bundles of firewood that had been shrink-wrapped in plastic, and the display was left bare behind him. He took items from the bakery, he took lettuces and potatoes and vegetables of several types. He ordered a large pot roast from the butcher and had it wrapped in paper, and several pounds of boneless chicken breast. When he was done filling the cart with foodstuff, they walked down the aisle that didn’t smell like the rest of them. And when he found what he wanted, he took the largest box off the shelf and gave Cedric what he had asked for.
Cedric looked down and saw they read, ‘Waterproof’.
When they got to the register, Cedric watched the man scan the items through the red light and listened to the beep… beep… beep… beep… as each passed through the laser. And the man weighed the greens and counted the onions and did not turn his attention from the task at hand.
He did not say anything until he read out the total, and Cedric held his breath at the strangeness of it all, as if this was where the circus would finally end.
“Nice to see you again, Baron; you look well. That’ll be $444.44.”
Davian smiled and removed a leather wallet from within his coat pocket. He took the gloves from his hands and licked his fingertips so that he could sort through the bills within.
And he paid with perfect change.
After a while, Cedric was left to his own devices. Owen was still in the front room but he was laying on a sofa taking a nap. His face was relaxed and his lips were askew and slightly shiny where the saliva was falling from his mouth.
Cedric took care to make little noise and sat down on the couch in front of the fireplace. The flames were low and just holding on, but even they were subject to whip to either side when the wind came over the vent.
Sometimes, when there was a particularly strong burst, a whistling could be heard from afar.
Cedric had the box he’d been given still in his hands and he turned it over and read the words printed on the label. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, being well-versed in the technique, but he looked at it anyway because he did not know what else he wanted to do.
Suyon ran in and approached the window, so Cedric raised his eyes and watched her. She looked at the white flakes falling from the sky and emphatically pointed at them and turned back to seek reaction from Eloise, who had trailed her into the room.
Eloise smiled at the girl and nodded. She added gently, “Yes, it’s snowing! Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Suyon went back to observing the weather and Eloise sat on the other end of Cedric’s couch.
“Hi,” she said with an open expression. “How are you doing?”
Cedric looked up at her. “Doing alright.”
“What do you have there?” she asked plainly.
He blushed a little and had the instinct to withdraw. “Oh,” he said, shifting his glance. “Just some… matches.”
He looked at Suyon, but it was not easy, and he felt he could not.
Eloise looked at his hands, and then at him. “Here,” she said. “May I see them? I want to show you a trick.”
He looked at her and tried to put on a good face while reluctantly handing her the large box. The contents jostled and chattered when he released his grip and gave them to her.
“It wasn’t so easy for me either—” she said. “When I first learned.”
She took her thumb and pushed the box open so that visible inside were a hundred or so thick matchsticks. She took one out and he saw that it was covered about halfway with an orange coating, and the top was dipped in black where it was intended to be used.
She used her four fingers to push the cavity closed and then she lowered the end to the side of the box with delicate care until she suddenly struck the match against the rough strip. There was a spark and a fizzing, and the thing was quickly set ablaze.
“Here,” she said, handing him the wood now alight. He accepted it and she removed another from the box.
“One of the things that helped me when I was just starting,” she said, looking at the fire he held, “Was to look at the thing I wanted, and to imagine that I was trying to capture it.”
“I looked at it, and I took it into my mind’s eye, and I really tried to understand the thing I wanted. I felt it, and watched it, and knew it, and—”
She held her new match up, but kept it distanced from his. “Once I understood what the fire was,” she said, “That was the first step to move it somewhere else.”
And Cedric watched as a small flame appeared on her stick. It made no noise; it was not violent; it was a small tiny thing that grew and grew until it was the size it should have been.
There was a shadow cast beneath her eyes by her nose, and she appeared very sweet in the low light and her lips were soft and pink and reassuring.
She closed her eyes and looked down while she shook the stick to douse the flame. “Here, I’ll get another,” she said, and started to fish in the box.
Cedric was watching her, but not the match in his hand, and there was a sudden influx of heat where the fire ate through the wood and started to burn his fingers.
“Ow!” he said, involuntarily throwing the thing from the pain. It fell on the floor, completely blackened.
“Oh, never mind,” she said, looking at the spent match. “We can try again.”
Owen was stirring, and behind him, Cedric could hear the boy bring his mouth closed to remoisten his tongue.
Eloise gave Cedric a dry match, and then she lit another, but this time she held it.
“Just quiet your mind,” she instructed. “Think of nothing but the fire. Watch how it moves, think about the shape it takes, and how sometimes it makes little crackles in the things it burns and—”
Cedric did as he was told and he watched the fire before him. He stared at it and concentrated and saw how it was round where it consumed the chemical, and sharp where the color became pale and he thought sometimes he saw it dance. But he did not understand what exactly she had meant by ‘mind’s eye’ and his thoughts flickered and he realized that if he had been asked to explain how the fire worked, he—
There was a sudden poof of breath and the match went grey and a trail of smoke drifted up into the air.
“Su!” Eloise chided. “That wasn’t very nice!”
Suyon looked at them with a simple expression; she seemed altogether quite satisfied with herself, and then she ran away, and Eloise chased her, calling into the hallway, “We were doing something! You don’t just interrupt people—”
Cedric’s eyes refocused on the room, because they had become a bit crossed from staring at the matches.
“C’mere,” Owen said, evidently having observed what had transpired. He took the box of matches and removed another. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
He sat down where Eloise had been. “It’s not really about the fire,” he said, holding the new match between the two of them. “It’s about you.”
“You look at the match, and you stare real hard,” he said, eyes intent. “And you think about everything that’s ever really pissed you off.”
There was a sizzle, and the thing lit.
“You don’t have to know anything about fire to know what it feels like inside.”
Owen’s hair was astray from where he’d been laying on the pillow. His blue eyes were wild, seeing his miracle.
He turned from Cedric then. “And when you get real good,” he said, toward the fireplace, “You can make the world feel the way you do.”
He made no gesture and the flames that had been quietly licking at the surface of the logs rose and manifested, casting a new wave of yellow and orange into the room.
He was still watching the fire, and said with resolution, “It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it.”
Eloise had Suyon gripped on her ribcage, carrying her beneath her armpits when she reentered the room. She plopped the girl on the floor and released her, and Suyon looked at the freshly dancing flames.
“I wouldn’t worry too much, Cedric,” Eloise said, turning to look at the two on the couch. “It just takes time. You’ll get it.”
But Cedric was watching Suyon, who extended her arms and straightened her elbows in a single motion. Her hands were splayed and her fingers extended and her palms turned toward the fire.
An assertive whump was sent into the room as a thick pile of snow fell from the chimney and muffled the fire. The wood was completely covered in snow as the blaze was instantly snuffed.
“Suyon!!”
Soon, the Sun was falling, and so was the snow. Cedric was not sure he wanted to eat, but he also knew he could not completely abstain, so he took one of the cranberry scones Eloise had made the day before. When he bit into the bread, the pastry was sweet because she’d coated the outside with coarse sugar granules and when the soft yellow bread collapsed in his mouth, there was a little crunch to remind him of what he was eating. The berries had taken in moisture from the dough and become round in the baking, and there were little bits of sour contrast strewn inside the treat.
And when he was done, he didn’t feel much like dinner, so he went upstairs.
The only bedroom on the second floor was Myrtle’s. Aside from that, there was a library, a study, a music room.
The music room was a curious thing, because he was not so sure that any of the orphans played instruments or sang songs. And the room was often dark and because Cedric found himself shirking from having to use the matches, he usually walked right past it.
But tonight, he saw Myrtle at the piano.
She had only one candle there, sitting atop the black instrument, a shining grand piano. And the candle, of black wax, was a squat thing, and if he did not already know it was magical, he might have thought it would extinguish and wink out before he got too close.
Cautiously, he entered the room, and Myrtle’s eyes were drooping and her neck was low and she very much looked like she might have been falling asleep.
“Myrtle?” he said, quietly. “…Are you awake?”
She opened her eyes slowly, but otherwise hardly reacted to the sound of his voice. She was not caught flat-footed; she had not been asleep at all.
“Yes, hello Cedric,” she said. “I hope you’re enjoying the snow.”
It was a strange pleasantry, and he didn’t want to say something untrue, so he looked at her and asked a question instead. “You play piano?”
She looked up at him and her eyes were weary and the candle cast a shadow that made her look very old.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t play anymore.”
Her face changed, like she was trying to smile, but also like she was thinking of something that made her terribly sad. “I used to play when I was younger, many years ago.”
Cedric looked at her, and she was mournful, and old.
“Let’s not sit in here,” she said. “It’s very dark and my eyes can’t see well in the dark.”
“Let’s recollect in the library.”
Myrtle took a seat at one end of a generous couch, and Cedric took the other. In the library, there was more light, and it was warm from a fire that lingered but would not go out.
“What was all that fuss downstairs? There was quite a lot of noise for a little while. I hope the children were being kind to you.”
Cedric thought for a moment, but what he wanted to say rang out like a bell. “Yes, everything was fine. Everyone’s very nice, just—”
He paused. “…They were trying to teach me how to make fire.”
Her eyes moved, and saw him, and let him speak.
“Well, move it, I guess, not exactly make it. I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. Seems all the rest of them can, and can do it easily. And they showed me how and said—”
“What did they say, Cedric?” she asked, and her words were simple, but direct.
Cedric went the other way. “I—” and he looked away in shame. “Myrtle, you’ve been very kind to me, and I like it here and the kids are nice, and I don’t want to go away, but—”
She listened.
“I’m not really sure I’m a mage at all. They can all do it, and they make it look so easy. And when I see what they can do, I feel somewhere, somehow, that I should be able to do it too. It doesn’t feel strange to me, it feels familiar, and I look at the fire and think I could do it if I tried hard enough, but when they put the match in my hand—”
He trailed off, and became despondent.
“Maybe you made a mistake about me,” he said. “Maybe I’m not really a mage at all.”
Myrtle did something strange then, stranger than all the magic he’d seen that day. And it made him a little warmer than the breeze rising off the ocean, or the friction that had lit a spark in the sulfur, or the color that made embers in the hearth.
She touched him on the shoulder.
“Cedric, I don’t think I’m wrong about you. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but this is one thing that I am quite sure about.”
He looked up at her.
“Be patient, Cedric. If you try to go too fast, you’re liable to miss landing right where you need to be.”
She sat back and took her hand and put it on her lap, and he saw that her face had softened, as if she was drifting somewhere else, where the smell of grass was in the air and the wind was making the green leaves rustle against themselves.
“I don’t think I’ve ever told you about how we started the school.”
“No,” Cedric said. “I don’t know.”
She closed her eyes, as if she needed to shut out this world to remember where it was that she had been.
“I was a young thing when I married for love,” she began. “Just a step out of girlhood. People will marry for all sorts of reasons. And maybe it works for them, and maybe it doesn’t. And when we’re young, we don’t always know what we’re doing. We think we’re doing one thing, and we’re actually doing another thing entirely. But I married—”
And she took a breath, “Because I knew he was the death I wanted.”
Cedric felt quite small to hear this.
“My husband had worked as a lawyer for a long time when I met him. One might say he had a silver tongue, but I wouldn’t, because sometimes things don’t sound right on the other side, and I don’t want you to think the wrong thing about him. But my husband had an effortless faculty with words and how to wield them as sword or salve as he saw fit.”
“But the years had not been easy, and he was falling ill. He couldn’t work as much as he had, and he had very little money.”
There was a little glimmer in her eye, then. “But the early times were more than worth their weight in gold.”
Cedric smiled a little bit, because she was too.
“When my father died, I decided to sell the silk business,” she said. “It was hard to get rid everything of he’d tried so hard to create, and it had sustained him since he’d come to America. But I knew I couldn’t do it.”
“I didn’t have my mother’s hand with the needle,” she lamented. “And I didn’t have my father’s gift.”
“When my mother was alive, she made the dresses. And when she died, we sold the silks. My father had a tongue that bloomed lotus flowers. He sold to the East and I sold to the Westerners who spoke in English. As soon as the supply came in, we’d bring it out and put it in the window, and when the people came in, they wanted to touch it with their hands. So when they came in, they felt it folded on the bolt, and if they liked it, they wrapped it around their bodies and admired themselves in the mirror and asked how many dollars it took to bring it home.”
“He was one of the richest men in Chinatown. And when he died, I was one of the richest women in Brooklyn and I wanted for nothing.”
Then she stopped. “Well—” she said. “Almost nothing.”
“My husband and I wanted to help the children who didn’t have a way in the world. In those days,” she recalled, “when your parents died and your aunt couldn’t or wouldn’t take you, you moved into an orphanage and you stayed there and you got fed and washed and learned your letters. And when you came of age, perhaps you became a governess, or perhaps you stayed back to take care of the little children like the older ones had taken care of you.”
“But—” she said, becoming cloudy. “Then the war happened, and I went to help those in need.”
“And when I came back, I was changed, and I wasn’t ready to take care of the children yet.”
“But I waited, and the children came to me,” she said, smiling weakly.
She placed a hand on his that had been curled on his lap. “Just you wait, Cedric. Just be patient.”
And then she withdrew, but her face was calm. “Your magic will come to you.”
“And when it does, you will be glad you waited.”
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