The Little Country

  No thanks.

  She creaked open the wooden chest and sneezed at the musty odor that rose from its contents. It appeared to be stacked, from top to bottom, with old journals. She took one out and flipped through the pages, pausing when she came to a familiar byline. “Tom Bawcock’s Eve in Mousehole” by William Dunthorn. The article was a brief description of the traditional festivities in Mousehole on December 23rd, when the fishermen gathered to eat “Stargazy Pie”‌—a pie made with whole fish, their heads sticking out through the crust.

  She looked through more of the journals and found brief articles by Dunthorn in each one. Most she’d already seen‌—the Gaffer had kept all of his mate’s writing that he could lay his hands on‌—but there were one or two she’d never read before, and many of them were in manuscript form as well as published.

  Well, this was a find, wasn’t it just? Wouldn’t it be perfect if down by the bottom there were manuscript pages of some uncompleted novel? Or, better yet, a completed novel, just aching to be read. . . .

  Her breath caught in her chest as her scrabbling hands came up with a leather-bound book right at the bottom of the chest.

  Be still my heart, she thought.

  There was some mildew on the cover, but it came off when she rubbed it with the sleeve of her shirt, leaving only a faint smudge. What made her breath catch, however, was the title of the book.

  The Little Country. A novel by William Dunthorn.

  Fingers trembling, she opened the book. A folded slip of paper fell out onto her lap, but she ignored it as she flipped quickly through the thick parchment pages.

  My God. It was a novel. A complete, published Dunthorn novel that she’d never heard of before.

  She turned to the copyright page, not quite taking in the phrase “published in an edition of one copy” until she’d read it a number of times.

  One copy.

  This was the only copy.

  What was it doing here?

  Slowly she put the book down on a stack of journals and manuscripts and picked up the slip of paper that had fallen to her lap.

  “My dear friend Tom,” the letter began.

  Her gaze traveled down to the signature. It was a letter from Dunthorn to her grandfather. Blinking once, she went back to the top of the page and read the letter through.

  Here is the book you promised to keep for me. Read it if you will, but remember your promise‌—it must not leave your possession. It must not be published. Not ever!! Its existence must remain secret‌—not simply the tale told in its pages, but the book itself.

  I know you think me mad sometimes, and God knows I’ve given you reason enough (a good solid bloke, am I?‌—I smile whenever I hear you describe me so), but you have my eternal gratitude if you will humour me this one last time.

  I have a sense of foreboding for this coming year‌—yes, that famous Mad Bill Dunthorn Gypsy prescience strikes again!‌—so it is with great relief that I turn over the possession of this book to you and know that it will remain safe with you.

  Godspeed, my friend. I wish there was more time.

  Janey reread the letter, then her gaze settled on the date under Dunthorn’s signature. He’d written the letter just two months before his death.

  Gypsy prescience?

  A secret book?

  Thoughtfully she folded the letter and stuck it back into the book between the front cover and endpaper. Then, sitting there in the Gaffer’s dusty attic, she turned to the first page and began to read. Within the first few paragraphs, all her troubles had melted away and she was caught in the spell of Dunthorn’s secret story.

  Life Is All Chequered

  Sometimes I feel like I’ve got my nose pressed up against the window of a bakery, only I’m the bread.

  ‌—CARRIE FlSHER, from Postcards from the Edge

  If our lives are all books,” Jodi told Denzil Gossip, “then someone’s torn a few pages from mine.”

  “Tee-ta-taw,” the old man replied in a mildly mocking tone. “Listen to her talk.”

  He was perched on a tall stool at his worktable under the eaves, tinkering with a scaled-down model of his newest flying machine. Squinting through his glasses, he adjusted the last tiny nut and bolt for the third time since Jodi had arrived at his loft that rainy afternoon. Jodi waited patiently as he broke a morsel of Burke cheese from the piece he kept in the pocket of his tweed vest for the purpose of enticing the pair of mice who would be powering the odd little craft‌—at least they would be if they could be got from their cage and into the two revolving mechanisms that looked like exercise wheels attached to either side of the machine.

  Denzil was never one to force an issue, especially not on the creatures upon which his experiments depended.

  “They’ve got to want to do it, you,” he’d explained to Jodi when she had asked why he didn’t just pick them up and put them in. “Those mice and I are partners in solving the mystery, not master and slaves.”

  The mice, wiser than many would give them credit for, ignored the bribe and stayed in their cage, peering through its open door, pink noses quivering. Jodi tried to remember which of the pair had been riding in the miniature hot-air balloon that was navigating the length of the loft when she’d dropped by one day last week. She thought it was the one with the brown spot on his left hind leg.

  “I don’t see much point in any of it,” she said.

  “What?” Denzil looked up at her. He pushed his wire rimmed glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Well, I go to sea! It’s the secret of flight, we’re speaking of here‌—the last frontier! And you want to just ignore it?”

  “Not really, I suppose,” Jodi said. “But what use is a flying machine that you have to run like a madman to keep aloft? You’d be quicker taking the train‌—and better rested to boot.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I think I left it in my other jacket. Shall I go fetch it?”

  Denzil hrumphed and went back to coaxing the mice while Jodi settled back in the fat, stuffed armchair that she’d commandeered from its spot near the hearth and dragged over to the workbench so that she could watch him go about his business in comfort.

  “Fetch it,” the parrot sitting on the back of the chair repeated. Then he walked back and forth along the top of the padded cushion, mimicking Denzil’s hrumphing sounds.

  Jodi reached back and ruffled his feathers. “Don’t you start, Noz,” she told him.

  Denzil’s loft was a curious haphazard mixture of zoo, alchemist’s laboratory, and mechanic’s workshop.

  In cages along one wall were four more mice, two white rats, a fat, black, lop-eared rabbit, a pair of green lizards, and a turtle. There was also a murky aquarium that presently held two sleepy-looking catfish; Noz’s perch, currently in use by a black-eyed crow; and an empty cage where Ollie, the pale brown rhesus monkey, was kept when he started to misbehave. At the moment Ollie was asleep on top of a bookshelf, sharing the spot with Rum, an old orange tomcat with one shredded ear.

  The workbench was vaguely divided into two sections: one side a bewildering mess of test tubes, beakers, glass pipes, a gas burner, clamps, ring stands, thermometers, jars, a set of scales, a microscope with a messy tray of slides, and other such paraphernalia; the other side where Denzil was now working presented an equally bewildering display of mechanical tools, wiring, bits of metal, clockwork mechanisms, and the like.

  The remainder of the large loft had a small sofa that doubled as a bed on the other side of the hearth, dormer windows, a twin to the armchair Jodi now occupied still in its spot by the hearth, a small kitchen area centered around a black iron stove, and bookcases wherever there was room for them, stuffed with books, folders, and loose bits of paper. Everywhere one tried to walk there were little piles of Denzil’s belongings: a heap of scrap metal by the door; a bag of feed leaning against a bookcase; a box filled with rolled-up maps in the middle of the room; little stacks of books, periodicals, and papers.

>   The room was like its owner, who invariably presented a disheveled, half-bemused face to the world, while underneath his worn and patched clothes, bird’s-nest hair and beard, and thin, pinched features was secreted a brilliant mind that never ceased to question the world around him. Jodi spent more time with him in his loft, or going on long rambles in the countryside looking for some missing ingredient for his latest experiment, than she did anywhere else in the town of Bodbury.

  His company was worth the assault on her nose that the loft always presented‌—a weird mixture of chemical odors, smells from the cages that she usually ended up cleaning, machine oil, and Denzil’s pipe. And though he always appeared totally engrossed in whatever task was at hand, he was still capable of carrying on conversations on the most diverse series of subjects. There were pauses and lags in those conversations, times when a sentence broken off one morning was completed that afternoon, but the conversations were always worthwhile.

  “What sort of pages are you missing?” he asked now.

  He put the cheese down between the mice’s cage and the flying machine and gave her another glance. Up went his hand to push back his glasses.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jodi replied. “I’m just at loose ends and I can’t seem to remember anything anymore. I suppose that happens when you get old.”

  Denzil chuckled. “And you’re so very old, you. Seventeen, is it now?”

  “Eighteen. And I feel ancient.”

  “Ancient, is it? My gar. You don’t look nearly old enough to be ancient yet. I’d give it a few more years, you.”

  He pushed the bit of cheese closer to the mice’s cage.

  “I really do need to do something,” Jodi said. “I need a Purpose in life.”

  “Come ‘pon that,” Denzil said, “I suppose you’re right. You can’t spend the whole of your life puttering around up here with me. That’s not half natural.”

  “I don’t putter. I’m your assistant. You told me so yourself.”

  “Now was that before or after we decided that it was an assistant’s duty to clean up after the animals?”

  Jodi grinned. “Before. And it was you that decided it‌—not me.”

  “Hmm.”

  Denzil picked up the morsel of cheese and popped it into his mouth. Reaching into his other pocket he took out a small wedge of Tamshire cheese and put a bit of it near the mice’s cage. Both mice regarded it with interest, but neither moved.

  “A purpose, you say?” Denzil went on. “And missing pages?”

  Jodi nodded. “Great blocks of time. Like this spring. Can my whole life be all so much the same that nothing stands out anymore? What did I do this spring?”

  “When you weren’t helping me?”

  Jodi nodded.

  “I don’t remember, you. What does Nettie say?”

  Jodi lived with her Aunt Nettie in a small apartment on the top floor of the bordello that her aunt kept at the edge of town. It was her aunt’s greatest disappointment that Jodi hadn’t followed the family tradition and taken up the “life of leisure” as the other women in their family had.

  “There’s those that like ’em scrawny and looking like a boy,” her aunt would tell her, which did little to further Jodi’s interest in the profession.

  Besides, she would tell herself, she wasn’t scrawny. Thin, perhaps; lean, even. But never scrawny. Cats were scrawny. Or children.

  It didn’t help that she was just barely five feet tall, kept her blond hair trimmed short, and went about in scruffy trousers and a shirt like some twelve-year-old boy from the Tatters‌—the poorer area of Bodbury that was little more than a series of ramshackle buildings leaning up against one another for support in a long tottery row that looked out over the Old Quay’s harbour.

  “Nettie just says that she doesn’t know what to make of me,” Jodi said. “Of course, Nettie’s always saying that.”

  “Well, if you’re asking me, my advice would be to put it from your mind for now, you.”

  “And do what? Go quietly mad?”

  “No. You could help me convince these obstinate mice to do their part in testing my machine before we all die of old age.”

  “It’s the story of my life,” Jodi said as she hoisted herself out of her chair and walked over to the workbench. “Even bloody mice get more attention.”

  “Tension,” Noz repeated from the back of the chair, spreading out his wings and hopping down to the spot Jodi had just vacated.

  “Taupin says,” Jodi went on as she made a trail of crumbled cheese from inside the mice’s cage to the flying machine, “that the world is a book that somebody’s writing and we’re all in it. That’s why I was talking about missing pages. I really do think someone’s torn some of mine out.”

  “Taupin is nothing more than a hedgerow philosopher who wouldn’t know an original thought if it came up and bit him,” Denzil said. “So what could he know?”

  “I suppose. Besides, who’d publish a book as boring as our lives?”

  “I don’t find my life boring, you,” Denzil said.

  “ ‘Course you don’t. You’ve got a Purpose.”

  “And I’ve assigned you yours‌—convince these mice that this experiment is for the betterment of mankind. And mousekind, too, of course.”

  The mice had eaten all the cheese that Jodi had put in their cage, but were venturing not a step beyond its confines.

  “Oh, bother,” she said.

  Picking them up, she put one in either exercise wheel.

  “I hope you realize that that’s coercion,” Denzil said.

  The mice began to run on their wheels. Cables connected to the wheels spun wooden cogs, which in turn spun others until the propeller at the front of the miniature machine began to turn and the machine lurched forward on the worktable.

  “That’s got it!” Denzil cried. “By gar, it’s a proper job now!”

  He lifted the machine from the table, holding it aloft until the propeller was turning at such a speed that it was a blur. Giving Jodi a grin, Denzil cocked his arm. The parrot immediately lifted from his perch on the back of the armchair and took sanctuary on the top of a bookcase. When Denzil let go, the little flying machine jerked through the air, staying aloft for half the distance of the long room until it took a nosedive.

  Jodi, already running after it, caught it just before it hit the ground. Setting the machine on the floor, she took the mice out and cradled them in her hands, making “there, there” sounds.

  “You’ve scared them half to death!” she said.

  “All in the name of science.”

  “That doesn’t change anything. They could have been hurt.”

  “Exactly, you! Which is why I was calling for volunteers‌—not coerced subjects. I wouldn’t doubt that their sulking helped weigh the machine down.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  But Denzil wasn’t paying attention to her.

  “Oh, dear,” he said, picking up the machine. “Look at this. The cogs on this gear have snapped right off.”

  Jodi sighed. This, she decided, wasn’t where she wanted to be today either. Having already been sent forth from the bordello for her long face, then having wandered up and down Market Street and skimmed pebbles over the waves on the beach for an hour, she didn’t know what she could do to fill up the rest of the hours that remained until supper.

  She replaced the mice in the cage by the wall with the others. A glance out the window showed her that though the sky was still grey, the rain had let up. The cobbles of Peter Street were slick and wet.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she announced.

  “Take Ollie with you, would you? He’s been a nuisance all morning.”

  “He seems fine now,” Jodi said, glancing at the monkey.

  Denzil shook his head. “I know him, you. He’s just storing up energy to wreak havoc in here this evening. I won’t get a stitch of work done. Go tire him out so that he’ll sleep the night away.”

  Jodi pu
t on her jacket and called Ollie down from the bookcase. He perched sleepily on her shoulder, one arm around her neck, tail wrapped around her arm.

  “If you find those pages I’ve lost,” she said when she reached the door.

  Denzil looked up from the workbench where he was fussing with the flying machine again.

  “I’ll send them straight along,” he said.

  Jodi grinned as she closed the door and started down the rickety stairs that would let her out onto Peter Street. There was a bit of a damp nip in the air, but rather than going back upstairs to fetch the trousers and sweater that the monkey wore in inclement weather‌—there was something rather too undignified about dressing animals up as people for her taste‌—she let Ollie nestle inside her jacket before she stepped out on the cobblestones and headed back in the direction of Market Street.

  The monkey snuggled against her chest, radiating as much heat as he absorbed, his small head poking out from the jacket, just below her chin. She got the odd curious stare from passersby, but most people in town knew her too well to be surprised by anything she did. Since she was often out and about with both the monkey in tow and Noz perched on her shoulder, his green feathers iridescent against the grey granite houses and cobblestoned streets, they paid little heed to one pale brown head that appeared to be poking out of her chest.

  Come one, come all, she thought as she paused to study their reflection in a store window. See the amazing two-headed woman.

  Scratching her second head under his chin, she walked on.

  2.

  Just beyond the row of weather-beaten buildings in the Tatters that faced the sea, the Old Quay of Bodbury’s harbour stretched along the shore in a mile and then some length of crumbling stone and wooden pilings. The pilings were rotting and heavily encrusted with dried salt above the waterline, barnacles below. Abandoned piers thrust seaward at right angles, planks missing, greying wood dotted with the droppings of seabirds. The air was heavy with the smell of salt and dead fish swept up against the quay.