8. Sam Amanuensis #2
I pushed him a few blocks northward to the Common, where coaches with their drivers waited by the perimeter.
Lifting his eyebrows a little in surprise, he approached the coach that was first in line and climbed aboard.
To the driver’s question regarding the destination, Maxwell hesitated.
He looked forward, left, and right until I gave him a nudge of encouragement. “Southward,” he said.
This was more difficult than guiding a man on foot, and after Maxwell requested several short stops in order to “reconsider” the route, I began to worry that the driver would end by chucking him into the road.
But once we made our way out of Salem to the long thoroughfare southward, we were on better footing.
I flooded Maxwell with reassurance. “This way,” he called to the driver, relieved. “Keep going!”
I was leading Maxwell to the Lynn Woods. Not to the Manse itself, for a lone constable could do nothing, as yet, to confront the Cisneros Society. But he needed to see evidence of the Society’s crimes.
Thursday’s gathering at the Manse had ended, close to dawn the next morning, with predictably abhorrent results.
The creation of the moths had tipped the party early toward unbridled excess, and it had only grown worse from there.
Possibly the twenty crates of champagne imbibed did not help.
Hubert Pye, a shipping magnate who every week moved many tons of sugar from the islands to the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, had expended a small fortune winning the auction for the privilege of donning the Cisneros Steel.
Lacking any creativity whatsoever, Pye had copied the moth maneuver and turned all the fish in the Embalmer’s pond into mermaids.
This had led to a spectacle both comical and tragic, for the twenty-five mermaids didn’t fit in the pond once they’d been transformed, and the assistance of a hundred aged, inebriated men in formal wear was not sufficient to prevent the poor creatures from flopping helplessly on the flagstones, desperately seeking water.
In a rare display of sympathy—or perhaps he merely wished to show off—the Embalmer had transformed them back into fish, but it was too late. All but one expired.
The moths hadn’t fared much better. Some survived the lavish attentions bestowed upon them by the guests and were transformed back into moths by the Embalmer at the end of the evening.
Two tried to escape by fluttering up toward the chandeliers, where their wings and hair were terribly burned by the candlelight.
And one, a clever little insect with mottled wings, dashed out into the night when the men went outside for the mermaid debacle.
She had rushed into the woods beyond the Manse and disappeared into the darkness, finding a tentative, uncertain freedom in her new form.
If the Embalmer noticed her disappearance, he hadn’t troubled himself about it.
But I had. After the party ended in a trail of departing carriages, I followed the trail of the little moth into the woods.
She’d found shelter in the branches of a great oak tree, and there she shivered with cold, clinging to the branch with pitiful single-mindedness. The moth fairy would not last long.
Now, after a long drive, Maxwell’s coach arrived at the edge of the Lynn Woods.
With my guidance, he led the driver to an easterly entrance that avoided the Manse’s boundaries on the northern side.
The carriage continued until the dirt road became too rugged, and I impressed upon Maxwell an unmistakable sense of satisfaction.
He called to the driver, thanked him for indulging his idiosyncrasies, and asked him to wait.
Then he alighted and paused for my instructions.
We had settled much earlier that summer on a simple method for way-finding.
I avoided the stronger emotions of excitement, fear, and apprehension; as attuned as he was to subtle suggestions, I could simply guide him with a sense of niggling curiosity.
And so, letting this instinct propel him, he stepped off the path and into the woods.
Here the pine trees grew thickly, and an occasional fallen tree blocked the way.
Maxwell stepped carefully over the rust-colored needles, edging around the taller trees and toward a rocky outcropping.
As I urged him toward the moss-covered flank of the rocks, I pressed a note of caution upon him.
“Your warning is noted,” he said quietly.
Then he came around the corner and found her.
The moth fairy had found the sole oak tree in this part of the wood and taken refuge in it, but without greater protections from the enchanter who had made her, she had expired before the day was out.
Now she lay in a bed of oak leaves and pine needles, curled up on her side as if sleeping, arms wrapped loosely around her folded knees.
Her pale, mottled wings fanned outward, and her hair had fallen over her body like a paltry blanket.
A pale, yellowish web clung to her limbs in thin tendrils; already a gorge-spider had found her and begun to make its web.
“Spirits below,” Maxwell whispered, crouching down beside the figure. “Enchantment of bone.” He remained there for several minutes, observing every detail of the fallen moth fairy. Then he did something he had never done before. He asked me a question. “Are there more?”
I hesitated. “Yes” would mean there were more now, and that wasn’t true.
Maxwell adjusted quickly; he tried again. “Did the enchanter who made this creature make more like her?”
Now I sent him a strong rush of affirmation.
He shook his head, dismayed. “Many more?”
I affirmed the point again.
He rose to his feet slowly. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
“You were right to bring me.” He took his truncheon out from the inner pocket of his coat and made a circle in the air.
The brown oak leaves all around her drifted upward, swirling gently, until they made a loose, protective wall around the fallen fairy. Now she would be safe from passersby.
We had taken a step together: a perilous step. From that moment on, my connection with Maxwell would not be the same.