“And who are we waiting for, exactly?” Petra asked as they settled into a booth, facing each other across the table.
“A writer.”
“A poet?”
“Sometimes.”
Of course. Petra groaned. Ariel’s warning was proving to be useless, since practically everybody in England seemed to write poetry.
Kit rubbed the fencing calluses on his palms. “Petra, why do you think Dee hired me to teach you? Aside from my great and obvious skill?”
“You mean your skill at being full of yourself, I suppose.”
He grinned.
“It is strange,” she admitted. “Dee’s given me plenty of reasons for why he hired you. Maybe too many. He didn’t have to explain himself to me at all. I’m his prisoner. He could have hired a three-headed cow to teach me fencing and I would have had to accept it. What if he explained his decision because he didn’t want me to ask any questions? Like about whether it mattered that you used to work for Walsingham. For Dee’s . . . rival.” She said the last word carefully, as if testing it.
“Yes,” said Kit. “Go on.”
But she didn’t, because a voice behind her said, “Hello, Kit.”
Kit looked up past Petra’s head. He nodded in greeting. “Will.”
“Lying in wait?”
“For you? Of course,” Kit said.
“Then you’re buying.”
Kit grimaced and stood up to get some ale, giving his seat to the middle-aged man. Will was short and balding, with a mouth like a button. “And who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Petra.”
“That’s a Bohemian name,” Will said, and Petra thought she saw a flash of keen interest in his heavy-lidded eyes. “Have you ever been to the Bohemian seacoast?”
Petra stared. “Bohemia has no seas.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
It was fortunate that Kit arrived just then with a tankard of ale, because Petra might have said something rude. As it was, the look she shot Kit wasn’t exactly polite. Her frown said something along the lines of, And this is the man who’s supposed to help us? He’s either ignorant or crazy!
Will drank, his gaze flicking between Petra and Kit. From the slight crinkling in the corners of his eyes, Petra thought there was a smile hidden behind his tankard of ale. But when Will set it down, his face had the same bland expression as before. “Well, Kit,” he said, “what do you want to talk about?”
“Books.”
“Books?”
Petra half turned to Kit in surprise. Then she remembered what Madinia and Margaret had told her: that Robert Cotton was obsessed with his library. “Right,” she said. “Books.”
“Will rubs elbows with the nobility,” Kit explained to her, “and he knows the booksellers in London well.”
“I should,” Will said. “I give them enough of my money.”
“So he might know if Robert Cotton had a favorite bookshop.”
Now there was definitely a smile playing on the man’s lips. “The dead Robert Cotton? The one whose brains spilled out of his split skull?”
“The same.”
“Try Richard Field, at the Sign of the White Greyhound.”
“Thanks, Will. I’m in your debt.”
“You certainly are.” The man drained his tankard. “But I’ll wait to collect on my secret.”
Petra and Kit had already risen to leave when Will added, “It’s good to see you up to your old tricks again, Kit.”
Kit looked uneasy. “Let’s go,” he said to Petra.
Will watched Petra and Kit walk away. They were tall and lean, keeping the same pace, like a well-matched set of horses. When the door creaked shut behind them, Will ordered another tankard of ale, and asked the barmaid to bring him a pot of ink, a quill, and paper. He had no coins to pay for this, but he wasn’t worried. The Mermaid Tavern would let him have them on credit, and he knew he could expect payment soon from a certain individual. Will began to write a letter to him:
Dear Master Dee,
Your Bohemian pet came to see me. She’s keeping interesting company and asking very interesting questions . . .
WHEN KIT AND PETRA reached the Sign of the White Greyhound, it was nearly dusk. The shop smelled: the sharp scent of ink and leather, and the yeasty odor of paper. It was cramped, and stacked with a dark rainbow of books. Some were as large as Petra’s torso, others so small they could fit neatly in the palm of her hand. Muffled thumps came from behind a closed door at the other end of the shop.
An elderly man sat at a square-shaped desk. He didn’t bother looking up, but continued reading a manuscript.
“Are you Richard Field?” Petra asked.
“Hmm.” The man turned a scribbled page.
“Well, are you or aren’t you?”
At this, the man glanced at Petra. “What? Sorry. I’m Master Field. May I help you?”
“Did you know Robert Cotton?” Petra asked.
“Certainly. He will be missed.”
“He was a friend of yours?”
Field opened his hands and spread them. “He was a good customer.”
“Did he ever say anything about Gabriel Thorn?”
“Thorn? The councillor to the queen? No, I think not. Cotton wasn’t interested in politics. His passion was for plants and books.”
“Did he ever buy anything unusual from you?” asked Kit.
“What difference is it to you whether Cotton bought anything odd or not?”
Petra lifted her chin. “We just want to know.”
“Well . . .” said Field. “I can’t say that he ever purchased anything out of the ordinary, but he did take a special interest in the printing of a certain book.”
“Which one?” asked Kit.
“An Account of My Many Astonishing Voyages, by Gerard Mercator.”
“A travel book?” Petra’s brow furrowed. “Was Cotton planning on taking a trip?”
“Oh, no.” Field shook his head. “Definitely not. He was a shy man who liked the comfort of home. He had visitors, of course. His home is a large manor, filled with bedrooms that were only used once in a great while, when merchants came to sell him rare books and the occasional pretty object. But Cotton didn’t like to leave his house. I’m probably the only person in London he ever came to see on a regular basis.”
“You said he took an interest in the printing of the book,” Petra said. “What did you mean by that?”
Field pointed at the closed door with its thumping sounds. “I’ll show you.”
Kit and Petra followed him into a large room that was almost as noisy as the Sign of the Compass had once been. Petra felt a wave of homesickness.
Several apprentices stood by large printing presses they were slamming down onto paper. Large, ink-wet sheets were hung to dry like clothes on a line.
A towheaded boy, startled by the sudden appearance of his master, dropped the case he was carrying. Tiny black letters and punctuation marks tumbled all over the floor.
Petra and Kit stopped to help him. Kit poured the blocks he had collected back into the case, but Petra paused for a moment, considering the blackened pieces of metal in her palm.
A memory tugged at her. It was something about the way these letters looked. But the boy shoved his case at her impatiently, so she tilted her hand and let the little blocks trickle over her fingers into it.
“You’ll have to sort them all over again,” Field sternly told the apprentice, who nodded and returned to his press. Petra watched as the girl who stood next to him picked letters and punctuation marks from her own case, which contained dozens of compartments. The girl set the last few blocks into the frame, padded on ink with a soft leather ball, covered the frame with a sheet of paper, and brought the press down. Petra couldn’t see the letters, but she knew they were biting into the paper, and would leave the indentations she could feel whenever she ran a finger over a typed page in one of her father’s books.
“Is something wrong?” Kit asked
, following Petra’s gaze.
Petra shook her head. She was almost right about something, and it had to do with those blocks and the way the press closed down on its frame, like a giant mouth snapping together.
She reached into the wooden box at the girl’s side and plucked out a few metal blocks. They were all question marks. Maybe it was because she felt like she was being asked a question that she suddenly knew the answer, and understanding dawned upon her. “Black teeth?”
Kit’s eyes darted to Petra’s, and she saw that he recalled what she had told him of Ariel’s mysterious words.
“Why, yes,” Field said indulgently. “Black teeth. That’s what you’ve got in your hand. Officially, those metal blocks are called type. But in the printing business, we have a nickname for them: ‘black teeth,’ because they look a lot like what ends up on the floor after a nasty fistfight, not that I’ve ever been in one of those. Each block is just the right size of a tiny molar dyed with ink.”
Petra squeezed her hand around the blocks. She looked at Field and knew, in that way she was starting to recognize she had, that whatever he said next was going to be important.
“Cotton liked to play with the teeth,” Field said. “He was a rich man, and a knight to boot, but he wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. You asked me if Cotton ever bought anything unusual. Well, I can’t say that he did, but when he learned that I sold copies of Mercator’s travels, he did make an unusual request. He asked if he could print the title page for his own copy. Normally, I wouldn’t let a customer do such a thing, but Cotton had been coming here for years, and I’d earned plenty by him. I thought, what’s the harm? So I let him do it.”
“I want your copy of the title page,” said Petra.
“How did you know?” Field was startled. “Well, yes, indeed, there were two copies made of that page. Cotton hadn’t put enough ink on the teeth, so the first sheet came out too light. I set it aside, he made a second one, and I had that page bound into the book that he bought. But this happened months ago, in January. I haven’t the foggiest idea where I put that first pressing.”
“It’s in your desk,” Petra said clearly. Her words sounded like an order. “In the third drawer to the bottom on the right-hand side.”
Field stared at her, first with amused disbelief, and then wariness. He led them back into the shop. When he opened the drawer Petra had mentioned and saw the paper inside, he looked up in anger.
Magic. That’s what this girl had, and she’d wormed her way into his kindness with it. “Take it, then!” He snatched the printed sheet and thrust it at her. What else might this girl know about him? His mind flashed over all the bad things a person might do just by living long enough.
“Thank you,” said Petra.
“You’ll get no thanks from me! Take your nosy self and your skinny friend out of my shop!”
“But I didn’t—I’m not—I’m sorry,” Petra stammered. The paper crackled in her left hand.
“Petra.” Kit was pulling her toward the door.
When the shop door jangled behind them, Petra opened her right hand and let the black teeth fall into the mud. She looked at her palm. On her skin were three inky question marks.
23
Sutton Hoo
PETRA’S TROUSER POCKETS were starting to feel full. In her right pocket was Tomik’s Glowstone, and in the left, a broken piece of steel and a wad of paper. She pulled out the title page and unfolded it, smoothing it over the desk in her bedroom. Astrophil stepped onto the paper.
“Kit thinks it’s an ordinary title page,” said Petra. “But this is special. I just don’t know why. You’re the expert on books, Astro. I want to know your opinion.”
“Hmm.” The spider crawled over the sheet, considering the artwork. Below the title was a map of the world, and below this were the words “Printed and sold in London by R. Field at the Sign of the White Greyhound, 1598.”
Finally, Astrophil said, “There is indeed something out of place.”
“What is it?”
He walked to the very bottom of the page. “This.” He pointed one shiny leg at a letter followed by a number: N6.
“N6?” said Petra. “It can’t be a page number.”
“Correct. A title page is never numbered, and if it were, it would not make any sense to use N or 6 or both.”
Petra asked hopefully, “Do you have any idea what N6 means?”
“None whatsoever.”
WHEN PETRA opened the library door, Dee was dressed for the outdoors. He held out a cloak.
She whirled it onto her shoulders, glad to escape the library. Lately, her lessons with Dee had been tedious. Sometimes he would make Petra guess which hand he would lift in the air. He could spend a whole hour listening to Petra drone, “Left. Left. Right. Left. This is boring. Can we stop? Oh, fine! Right. Right . . .”
Petra tied the cloak. “Where are we going?”
“Sutton Hoo.”
Astrophil murmured, I wonder what we shall find there. Almost everything Ariel said has so far proven to be important. Surely Sutton Hoo will be no exception.
When they entered the courtyard, Madinia and Margaret were waiting. There was a sack slung over Madinia’s arm, and Margaret carried a large wooden box drilled with holes. It was squeaking.
“What’s in there?” asked Petra.
“Mice.” Margaret passed the box to her father, who tucked it under one arm.
“Mice?” said Petra. “For what?”
“You’ll see,” said Dee. “Madinia, would you please open the Rift?”
Madinia set the bag down and slapped her hands together as if brushing off dirt. “I love doing this.”
“How do you open a Rift, exactly?” asked Petra. “Could we go anywhere? Like to Spain?”
“No, I’ve never been to Spain, and wouldn’t want to, either. It’s dirty and hot. I can only open a Rift to a place where I’ve actually been before. But I’ve visited lots of places.” Madinia was preening, flattered by Petra’s curiosity. “Though I’d never seen Bohemia before I met you. Dad had to give me tons of instructions for how to open that Rift. You’re lucky, though, that you and Dad have got that mental-link thing, otherwise you’d be four-Gray-Men-times-helpless-you-equals-dead.
“Now watch and be amazed.” Madinia took a deep breath and thrust her fingers in front of her as if jamming them into a crack. With a twist of her shoulders, Madinia wrenched her hands apart. A line of light split the air, then vanished.
“After you,” said Dee to Petra.
She examined the space in front of them. She still saw the flagstones, and the arched gate leading to the street. “Nothing looks any different.”
“It is,” Margaret assured.
Petra, Astrophil said anxiously, why don’t you let one of them go first?
But she was already stepping forward.
One second, her foot was on stone. The next, it was on tall grass. One second, Petra heard the clattering of horses in the street. The next, birds were singing.
She was standing on a hilly field. She spun around. Petra was alone.
Astro, where are they? Had they tricked her? Was she stranded here in Sutton Hoo?
Do not panic, said Astrophil, though he sounded a little panicky.
Petra was about to lunge at the spot in the air she thought she had come from, when Dee and his daughters appeared.
Dee observed Petra, and his eyes were (yes, there was no mistaking it) mischievous. “Did you think we had abandoned you?”
“No,” she lied.
Madinia opened her sack and pulled out a clean horse blanket, which she shook out over the ground. She sat down, and Margaret joined her, unpacking bread, cheese, cold meat, and green apples.
Her stomach growling, Petra stepped toward the blanket.
Dee blocked her. “Not you.”
“But I’m hungry!”
“I am unsympathetic.”
“Here.” Margaret tossed an apple to Petra.
?
??Have fun!” Madinia leaned back against the gentle rise of a hill.
“Come, Petra,” said Dee.
“You’ll like it,” said Margaret. “We’d go with you, but we’ve been here dozens of times.”
“It’s Dad’s hobby,” Madinia added.
“But it’s just a field!”
“Is it?” Dee quietly asked.
Petra might have chucked her apple at him, but then decided that would be a waste of a good apple. She bit into it, looking around. I don’t see anything interesting, she told Astrophil. Only hills.
The spider peeked through strands of her blowing hair. True . . . but are they not rather small?
Petra chewed thoughtfully. You’re right, Astro. The swells of grass were also spread around them in a regular pattern, as if they had been made deliberately. “Is there something . . . hidden underground?”
“Buried,” said Dee.
Petra swallowed. Then she looked at the white flesh of her apple and remembered the orange-colored seed she had found by Thorn’s body. She bit again, crunching through to the core. She spat the fruit into her hand.
The seeds were brown.
“Can’t you try to eat your food properly?” said Madinia.
Petra put the fruit back in her mouth and ate it. She walked to the top of a mound. Dee strode at her side, carrying the box of mice.
“What’s buried here?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
And Petra could sense it, beneath her feet. “Metal. Gold. A lot of it.”
“Yes, and many other things as well.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
Dee paused. “When I asked Ariel for information about you, I got more than I bargained for. I knew—or as good as knew—that you were a chimera. But I was surprised by how much Ariel had to say. There is a great deal even I don’t understand. What do the heavens pressed into a ball have to do with you? Or a king of the air-swimmers? Or black teeth?”
Petra fought back a superior grin, remembering the inky blocks. She knew something he didn’t.
“But Sutton Hoo . . .” continued Dee. “This is a place I know well. For years I have come here in fair weather to unearth its secret treasures, at the queen’s command. Last autumn, I had hired diggers to excavate another one of the mounds, and they uncovered what seemed to be a doorway. But then the order came from the queen to travel without delay to Bohemia as an ambassador to Prince Rodolfo’s court. I haven’t been back to Sutton Hoo since.”