Anoko via Wikimedia Commons; modified
for other chapters, see Table of Contents
The house always smelled like birthdays.
How the candle had been lit was not important. Wide and short, they lined the halls and decorated writing desks. Clusters were found suspended above the dining room table and more still at the corners of the bathtub. They reflected a symphony in mirrors and they stood alone at the ends of passageways. The flames were not left to burn unattended when the children went on to a different room so that was always the first thing that needed doing when they moved into the doorways. The little orphans could invoke flame by throwing their wrist or snapping their fingers and Myrtle left a wake in white billowing around her wherever she walked.
The candles burned everywhere, but he was still cold.
The next evening, the headmistress knocked on his door. She told him he’d find new clothes in the dawnrise; his chest of drawers perhaps stuffed full. Things he needed, things for which he would never ask. He could take what suited him, she claimed, and she would find a place for the rest.
“There’s no such thing as bad weather—” she had begun, her tired eyes half-lidded as something went unsaid.
Then she left the room.
Darkness did not relent and neither did the cold. He dabbled in fantasy, feeling as if these walls had been placed in haste too many awkward years after the first cornerstone had been laid. No hundred-year wall could this well keep in the inky silence.
Autumn was falling, more quickly every night, and with the blackness came the wind. But now there was a jacket on the hook, and a bathrobe that was soft and downy and caught on his cheek when he put it on in the mornings. It had a long strap he could tie twice and could keep them all out — so he entered the hallway.
There were pictures on the walls, scores, and their eyes, paired and lone, came down upon him. Where there were no eyes to be found, there were glass-like windows, and clouds, and sunbeams that were choked by the churning dust before they could reach the ground. The oil had long ago caught the little particles in their tarry grasp, and the only way to exorcise the smell was to wipe away the paint.
He didn’t know where the solvent was, knowing it was not his business, so he kept going.
He hadn’t thought much of the little brass bells waiting at the base of the candelabra until Elmer had caught him in reflex using his breath to extinguish the light.
The boy had gasped, gulping oxygen before an unseen guillotine.
“Ceddie, never!”
He seized the frame from Cedric’s hand, who did not flinch.
“Don’t let the Matron catch you doing that. It’s bad luck. She’ll have kittens. Never, never ever—”
His eyes were glossy, and the amber glow covered part of the brown and part of the white.
“You should use the snuffer. Always always use the snuffer.”
So he did. But it still smelled like birthdays.
The matter of the enchanted foundling home did not rise all at once. Rather, it gossiped when the outside whistled in the windowpanes. It skittered as cats’ claws upon the wood floor. It wove through the air like the smell of baking when nothing else could be heard.
Cedric noticed little things at first. Sometimes, feeling listless and underemployed, he spent his time carelessly, staring at wax dripping and falling down hot upon the tablecloth. It would spread for a moment, and then the weave scolded its pride, and it would stop, consider its fate, and turn opaque. When another drop fell in pattern, they might both become translucent together for a brief second, only to soon solidify again in the icy air.
In the morning, the evidence was always gone.
Cedric did not have a clock in his room. By the time he rose, breakfast had been put back in the cupboard for another day. A stolen pastry enabled him to avoid lunch, and sometimes he found a cookie untouched on a plate in the sitting room.
But when the dinner bell rang through the house and the many feet went toward its beckoning —
He found even he, in this state, could not feign as though he had heard nothing.
Myrtle always sat at the far end of the table and Cedric had felt banished from his only source of familiarity in the din. But the old woman was entirely absorbed in the care of Suyon, by far the youngest of the orphans. When he looked down the table to spy the orphan matron, more sinew than flesh, dicing the girl’s vegetables, he felt ridiculous in his need and he kept quiet.
A place had been made for Cedric to sit to the right of Eloise, who functioned as a sort of assistant to the elder. She sat at the end of the table closest to the door. Her face was often quite still and serious when she listened to Myrtle’s distilled wisdoms, but when she looked upon the little ones, her eyes softened and she smiled.
Eloise had dark eyes and dark lashes and she always spoke gently.
“We don’t serve meat on Fridays,” she said that night, leaning over to offer a whispered aside. “But that doesn’t mean you’ll leave the table hungry.”
When bowls were passed to Cedric, he began by taking too much, perhaps thinking himself polite, and perhaps not understanding his own appetite.
It felt a quiet sin to leave things uneaten.
“Matron, can we go out this year?”
Where Suyon sat to the left of the headmistress, Friday Perkins sat to the right. But each night she left an empty seat between.
“I do not think it wise—” Myrtle took a carafe from the center of the table. “—the lot of you impersonating beggars and rapping your little knuckles upon foreign doors.”
Her judgment fell as a blade. “…Behaving as Ordinary children.”
Myrtle poured water into a glass meant for Suyon, eyes cast toward Friday. “What could you possibly want that they could offer to you? Truffles and sweetmeat? A—”
She stopped for a moment, and then her voice was scornful. “Lollypop?”
She set the carafe in its place. “You may have those things at home.”
“Zahra will go with us,” Friday pleaded, looking toward the young woman to her right and then back to the headmistress. “Matron, please; this day only comes once a year.”
Myrtle was unmoved.
“Small mercies.”
Friday looked down, quite deflated, and scraped some lentils around her plate.
Myrtle let the table percolate, a quiet shame seeping in the empty spaces.
They sat in silence for a while, and only Suyon, too young to know better, let her glass clink against the porcelain.
Myrtle grimaced at the ballooning quiet and lifted her head to address Zahra, yielding to the pressure like aged timber.
“You’ll go with them, then?”
Cedric found Zahra rather intense, and he observed the present interaction between the headmistress and her charge through the periphery of his attention. Though he sat across from the sixteen-year-old, their paths rarely crossed over anything but the salt shaker.
Zahra looked at Friday and blinked laconically before turning back to the headmistress and speaking with laborious resignation.
“If that’s your will.”
Mealtime concluded with a cascade of partings by way of paths carved long before Cedric’s arrival.
Friday left first, always leaving a crumpled napkin on her plate while the seat sat ajar. Elmer followed soon after, a methodical boy who took little and asked for less, restoring his chair beneath the edge of the table.
Myrtle took Suyon then, sometimes lifting her from underneath her arms and sometimes holding her hand as she clumsily unfolded her legs. Zahra followed them as a shadow, even if she was bound to part ways.
Eloise always lingered to the last, when the only noise that remained was the wood cracking and falling split upon the glowing embers beneath.
“Cedric—” she said as he rose.
“Can I find you in the library later?” Her eyes reflected an unsteady light. “I wanted to talk to you about something after I clean this up.”
The flickering crashed against the glass and refracted, but it was still orange. The seats were empty and the bowls were not. Cedric spoke without thinking.
“I’ll help.”
Eloise, candelabra in one hand, led the two of them upstairs to the library. Without lessons looming over their heads, the children avoided the library after dark. The fireplace was warm, but the books were cold.
Cedric was afraid to disturb the dust on the shelves. He sat in here alone sometimes and listened to the children’s laughter, effervescent, echoing through the hallways and off the pictures hung on nails.
The books watched him, and often he thought he smelled turpentine, and he was sure the house kept no secrets.
“Do you like puzzles?”
Cedric turned his head toward her.
“When Veronica left, she didn’t take her collection with her. She and I used to work them together. They’re still in here, if I remember correctly.”
Cedric heard the fire snap, and he looked at it, and then back to her.
“Might be a bit dark to work a puzzle, I suppose. But you’re welcome to peel back the curtains and try in the morning.”
His focus was scattered, and he thought his mouth was dry. “Maybe. Thanks.”
“Do you mind if we sit somewhere else?” Her request was delicate, and he was ill-accustomed to questions. They left him naked.
“I’ll get some tea if you want. The fire’s a little much for me right now. I’ll burn up.”
He followed her and they sat on a long couch, backs toward the fire, with a generous emptiness between, and she took in breath. Her inhalation left the air starved.
“On Sunday—” she began cautiously, eyes speaking more than she said. “Owen’s coming back.”
Cedric suspected the place-setting and listened.
“Owen’s a sweet kid, but he needs routine. When things change, he struggles. And when he struggles—”
She took her eyes away.
“Sometimes things get broken.”
Eloise joined her hands and let her fingers touch.
“He wasn’t happy when the Matron told us she was going to take on another student. We thought Suyon would be the last. We thought our class was complete.”
She looked into her memories. “Owen wasn’t well while the Matron was overseas. He was lost for a while, withdrawn; surly and argumentative. He was afraid she would never come back. He was afraid she’d abandon him, like what had happened before.”
Eloise drew Cedric to lend his eyes.
“He minds me when he must, but I’ve never been what he needed.”
She looked away.
“He used to stay in your room. The Matron usually has the little ones keep together until they’re not afraid of the dark, until they’re ready to be on their own, but—”
She didn’t finish her thought.
“He made himself quite clear. He didn’t want another boy in the house; he was happy with the way things were.”
She shifted, and moved her legs.
“So he was sent away until you got settled. He’s one of the few of us who has a little family left.”
Cedric wondered about the rest of them.
“I don’t know how he’s going to be when he gets back. I hope things are going to be okay, but—”
“I just don’t know.”
On Saturday morning, Myrtle was nowhere to be found.
Cedric realized her absence when, after a croissant and a glass of water, he approached the sitting room and ran into Eloise fetching paper for little Suyon. Zahra and Elmer were there too, and the curtain had been drawn back to let the faintest bit of sunshine trickle into the room.
Cedric sat down on the sofa with the lion’s feet and listened to nothing. He sat still for a moment, and then Eloise came back and laid several thick sheets of cream paper on the table. Suyon looked at her and then dumped her crayon box on the paper so that all the crayons rolled and several fell on the floor so she bent over to pick one up and it was purple and she gave it to Cedric.
A sequence of knuckles knocked on the door so Eloise went to answer it while Cedric looked at the paper on the table.
The paper had little bits of speckles throughout so it wasn’t entirely blank. Suyon was picking up the crayons.
“Greetings, greetings,” rang Davian’s voice, spreading through the room from the open doorway.
“I thought I’d pay my respects; wish a very merry and happy Halloween to those who celebrate.”
He stepped forward into the room and deposited a newspaper in front of Zahra, who was still buried in yesterday’s woes.
“I hope I’m not spoiling anything by telling you there’s nothing good to read today,” he said to the young lady behind the screen.
She peered at him from above the folded divide, responding with the acerbic retort, “There never is.”
Davian turned back to Eloise, and Cedric watched him.
“So, you find yourself in charge, Miss Eloise?”
“The Matron has gone to fetch Owen. She’ll return tomorrow.” Eloise and Cedric looked at Suyon, who had pushed her crayons together so that their diverse lengths were clear, launching from an unseen base.
“Ah, yes,” he replied of Myrtle. “I’m sure not until the late afternoon at least.”
Zahra turned a page of the newspaper.
“Cedric, may I steal you for a moment? The Greeks make a fine cup of coffee and when I’m in the neighborhood I never miss an opportunity to partake.”
Once he’d stepped inside the house, Cedric wasn’t entirely sure he’d since left. It had probably been a week. Or more.
Davian insisted, looking at the young man and adding genially, “It’s my treat.”
The Marscapone Foundling Home was set several blocks from any so-called businesses. Although the Sun was hidden behind a thick coat of cloud-cover, the sky was bright grey and Cedric found it alien.
He squinted his eyes and pressed on. Davian walked quickly and he couldn’t afford to get left behind.
“How are you making out? Settling in nicely?”
Davian did not shirk when another passed him on the sidewalk, letting them avoid him. “Myrtle runs a tight ship. It’s a good place for you.”
His timbre changed as he looked diagonally, almost at Cedric, almost not. “You’ll learn a lot there.”
They kept walking.
“Anything goes wrong, you need a breath of fresh air, you’re sick of the smell of Play-Doh, you have my number. And the “N” goes right into Manhattan. Transfer at 42nd Street—”
“I don’t think she has a telephone.”
Davian laughed. “Oh, she has a telephone, I guarantee you that. Catch her in her cups and she may tell you how she still turns letters into the rotary.”
“Someday you won’t need it,” he said warmly. “But for now, you can dial me from anywhere, whenever the need strikes you.”
Cedric kept his eyes open, searching the ground for discarded silver. He felt uneasy at the prospect of making an inquiry to the old crone.
He preferred to have a quarter in his pocket.
Moe’s had a name that was ill-fitting. When it was said, the word simply poured from the mouth, a heavy thing that curled upward at the edges and sunk to the bottom of the bowl as an overstuffed dumpling.
It was the bitter marriage of sweet and sour, rhyme and reason, expectation—
and Chaos.
Davian ordered a coffee with a flourish of Italian, chattering excitedly while Cedric let his eyes wander over the menagerie of bread-stuff behind the glass. Many were glazed or decorated with sliced almonds, and all of them looked too pretty to eat.
“You won’t be disappointed with anything,” Davian insisted over Cedric’s shoulder. “Although I’m quite partial to the chocolate; can’t help myself.”
Cedric tried to read one of the little placards, but his French led him astray and he tripped when the letters didn’t do what he expected. He didn’t know what the man had meant, but he had heard something else entirely.
“Coffee?” Davian asked.
“Sure,” Cedric replied without thinking. “Plain; no sugar.”
At a table by the window, Cedric watched the wind intensify and catch the bottoms of people’s raincoats.
Only a ring of dark brown remained of Davian’s espresso. Cedric had found his own quite strong and quite hot, so he’d removed the lid to release the steam, but it was still near half-full.
He wondered if the children would still go out for trick-or-treating.
“I want to do you a favor, Cedric. I’ve talked it over with Myrtle, and she’s skeptical, but she’ll go along with it if you’re in agreement.”
Cedric took a sip of the liquid in his cup, and it was potable.
“You’re supposed to show in court on Monday.”
He’d let it slip from his mind, just one side of his mind, while on the other it had rumbled as an approaching thundercloud.
“Yeah,” Cedric said, enduring, wondering how the days had slipped away.
“Well, I want you to know,” Davian said with great magnanimity. “I think it’s all a right mistake.”
Cedric looked up.
“The Mortals waste their time crafting rules and regulations to curtail the pleasures they can’t understand, to press their ill-formed moralities upon others. It’s frivolous nonsense. Let them have their libations and small joys, let them make their little lives feel worth the trouble, let them forget the fields in which they toil, if only for a moment.”
Cedric thought he agreed, but he felt scrutinized, so he remained quiet.
“I studied the law for a while,” he continued. “And I know how these things go. There’s a protocol, and so long as one falls in line, one can get out unscathed.”
“You show up, you look dejected and apologetic, and you swear you’ll never do it again. The judge slaps his cutesy little rubber stamp on your plea and you go on your way.”
“Proper waste of an afternoon,” he added dismissively.
Cedric did not know what to say.
“Conditional discharge is what you’re staring down.” Davian explained. “Couple weeks of raking leaves, painting fences, maybe—”
He lightened his tone. “—Erasing graffiti.”
Cedric watched him move, and in the man’s animation, he wondered if the caffeine had hit his blood.
“I told Myrtle: What’s the damn point? Why must he humiliate himself again? We got him out, let’s just be done with this!”
“You deserve better than that, Cedric,” he said, lowering his voice but maintaining his conviction. “I’ll spare you the Latin, but suffice it to say that an unjust law is no law at all.”
Cedric heard and let Davian continue.
“Illusions like these: a lawyer, feather in his cap, striding into the courtroom with his client bent low, heavy with guilt—”
He was smiling a little, letting his imagination get the better of him. “When you simply confirm their expectations, paltry as they may be—”
“That,” he explained, “Is when the magic practically falls from your hands: when you become the shepherd among sheep. They expect to see Cedric there, escorted by his legal counsel, and they expect him to seem glum and repentant. They expect him to sit down and shut up and refrain from speaking lest he’s spoken to.”
“The puppetry will be a trifle—” he claimed, showing his white teeth as he rhapsodized. “—the merest bagatelle for one who knows what he’s about.”
Cedric was uncertain, and he was quiet. He did not want to don a stranger’s tie and present himself downtown, and he had reservations about Davian’s gift, but he wasn’t sure what he stood to gain.
“Tell me what I’ll have you say then,” Davian asked, getting theatrical. “When I have you turn your back to the crowd and face the judge alone. When he says his mercy is conditional, yes, conditional upon your dutiful compliance. Conditional that you’ll never do it again, so long as you shall live. Only then, he’ll say without saying, will I turn you out free.”
Davian left an emptiness that hesitated, and then he asked again.
“What will I have you say?”
Cedric had been listening, but the words were lost for the lines between. He had not remained in the little coffee shop in Astoria. He had let himself drift, and in that drifting he was indeed in front of the desk of the judge, just as Davian had invoked, and behind him bored the unwelcome eyes, seeing and unseeing; hundreds counted by the pair, and they seared his flesh with their looking.
He remembered Davian sitting across from him and the smell of coffee was all around and he recalled where he was supposed to be.
“Yes, your honor.”
“Well, how do I look?”
Friday Perkins was covered head to toe by a stark white sheet. She had apparently roped Elmer in on her scheme, and the two of them stood before Zahra, parading their costumes in the sitting room. They had each cut four holes into their getup, two large ones for their arms, two small ones for their eyes.
“Dreadful.”
Zahra paused, and resumed her studied indifference as they turned around, pulling the cloth to billow and twist around their obscured forms. “You know the Matron’s going to be furious to find that you disfigured the linens.”
She added, wryly, “I hope you know how to sew.”
Friday could not be dislodged from her perch, her enthusiasm forming a suit of armor. “I can fix it, just you watch.”
Zahra folded her arms, unimpressed. “I won’t hold my breath. Besides—”
But even she could not maintain her icy demeanor forever. “Aren’t you missing something?”
Elmer, hidden beneath the sheet, still managed to wear his confusion plain. “What are we missing?”
Friday intercepted the missive and exclaimed, “…Candy!” and the two of them barely made it from the room, scampering haphazardly and only just managing to avoid stepping on their shrouds.
The sound of the girl’s command, “Get your pillowcase!” could just be heard fading from earshot. “That’ll do perfect!”
Zahra sighed dramatically and sat on the far side of the room, picking up the Business section and continuing the farcical pantomime that she was merely part of the woodwork.
Cedric was sitting on the two-seater placed in front of the fireplace, observing within himself a slight weariness that longed to return to sleep. He let his eyes close and he was listening to the logs crack and the fire ripple and lash against the brick—
“Cedric?”
Zahra’s voice broke the silence, and his eyes fluttered open.
“Could you take a look at the fire; throw another on if it needs it?”
Cedric leaned forward. “Sure.”
Eloise came into the room, then, and he knew her by the rhythm of her footsteps without looking.
“You’ve got him in the heat?”
Targeted, Cedric heard Zahra lower her newspaper.
She responded plainly, “It’s a good skill to have. And he’ll need it in this mausoleum.”
Cedric was poking the fire. Some of the logs had split and came apart as he touched them.
Eloise sighed, and turned her face toward Cedric. “Just—”
“Don’t burn yourself, okay?”
He laughed a little.
“I’ll try.”
Cedric stood up then as if he’d just risen from a dream. On the mantel were several pictures he’d not yet noticed. The fireplace was set on its own foundation, and so too the ledge above was just such that he had to look up to see what had caught his eye.
Eloise stepped over.
“Looking at the family photos?”
Zahra threw her commentary through her paper. “Funny we never make it up there.”
“We’re in the yearbook,” Eloise added brightly.
Zahra was not consoled. “You’re in the yearbook.”
Eloise had to come closer, and she stood straight and pointed at a photograph devoid of color.
“That one’s her father—”
“—And her aunt. They came to America just before the turn of the century.”
Myrtle’s father had a frown that would turn stone to gravel.
“She’s never displayed her mother. I don’t think there were ever any pictures of her before she died.”
“Is this—
Cedric heard a door slam upstairs.
“—Myrtle?”
Eloise reached up and took the picture from the mantel and held it so they both could see.
“Yes, just after getting married.”
The resemblance was there, but the picture had faded and the surface was damaged. And still, her black hair was thick and shiny and her cheeks were round and her dress was white and she didn’t look so—
“He’s a cripple,” Friday’s voice rose unexpected from behind them. “That’s why he’s the one sitting.”
“Friday!” Eloise turned and scolded the girl. “That’s not a nice thing to say!”
Friday shrugged. “Sometimes the truth ain’t nice.”
“You still—”
“Marrying the Matron for her money; that’s not nice.”
It was hard to take Friday seriously when she had a white sheet over her head. But from her point-of-view, nothing had changed.
“She should have kept her name.”
Eloise was flustered.
“If you’re going to go, then go!”
Zahra, as if she’d been caught in the flurry, followed the two children from the room, and not a word was said before the sound of the front door, heavy upon its hinges, slapped closed in finality.
Cedric imagined that Eloise breathed a sigh of relief, but he doubted his conviction, knowing she would never show such a sentiment plainly.
“Mister—” she began, returning. “Mr. Marscapone.”
Cedric looked away from her skin to glean the man, quiet and unmoving within the ink.
“Vincent,” she said, carefully. “Though she does not oft speak his name anymore. Not since he passed.”
Out of the corner of his vision, her mouth moved, slowly, impeding on the silence of memory.
“He used to come and take our pictures. In any room of the house we preferred, and all the while, he’d set up his equipment and ask questions about our studies and whether we were being treated well and whether we liked it here—”
Cedric looked at Eloise.
“And I was sure he was truly hearing us.”
The candles burned, but he was still cold.