Chapter 4
Mercury, Tacey, the Padmores, and several of the resident ghosts gathered in the drawing room after supper that evening.
“Do your ghosts all participate in the evening’s entertainments?” Mr. Padmore asked doubtfully.
“Any who choose to participate do so,” Mercury said. “This is their home as much as mine.”
That seemed to give him something to ponder.
“It is their home,” the Other Hand said, hovering behind Mr. Padmore. “Of course, it is more permanently yours since they will come and go when traded. Then again, some might be here for years, which gives them a stronger claim.”
“Whether they have been here ten minutes or ten years, they are shown the same consideration.” Mercury wanted the Other Hand, who was likely soon to join the household, to know he would not be relegated to second-class status here simply because he was newly arrived.
“How many ghosts do you have here?” Mrs. Padmore asked.
“A lot.” Mercury offered the vague answer with a friendly smile.
He didn’t want her to feel any rebuke in his response, but he had worked hard to keep his exact number a secret, even while he was still at the orphanage.
His true number was so rare a thing, a number claimed only by him as far as he’d been able to learn, that he’d had no hope of escaping the orphanage unless he kept it a secret.
He had. And he still guarded that secret fiercely.
“Will we get to meet them all?” Mrs. Padmore looked hopeful.
“Likely not. Several of them are bashful.” While that was true, it was not such an impediment that it, alone, would keep the Padmores from meeting all his ghosts. Mercury was preventing it, and on purpose. Hiding the number of attachments he had helped to hide his identity.
She seemed satisfied with that answer, but Mr. Padmore appeared increasingly curious.
Tacey came to the rescue. “What shall we do to entertain ourselves this evening?”
“We could enjoy readings of poetry,” Mrs. Padmore suggested.
A few of the ghosts seemed a little interested in that.
“Or cards,” Weeping William suggested. “I do enjoy playing cards.” He sniffled against an apparent wave of emotion.
“What about a musical evening?” Mr. Padmore asked.
Immediate objections arose from the gathered ghosts, with many of their eyes darting between Mercury and Signora Bellona. Mercury managed to keep his amusement from spreading into a full grin. The ghosts would think he meant to encourage a performance, which would lead to panic.
“A game would be delightful.” Tacey managed to make the suggestion with the right amount of casualness and insistence. “Perhaps ‘Yes and No’?”
“Excellent,” Mrs. Padmore said.
Mr. Padmore nodded his agreement and did actually look pleased with the idea.
Mercury certainly was. Parlor games were an excellent way to learn about his clients and the ghosts they brought with them.
As people lost themselves in playing a game, their defenses tended to lower a bit, and more of their true selves tiptoed into view.
“I’ll go first.” Testy Tolver floated to the front of the group.
He looked them all over with his usual expression of thinly veiled disdain.
He wasn’t generally unkind to anyone, ghost or person, but feeling himself a bit above his company was one of his Integral traits.
“I have decided on the thing you are meant to guess, so begin your questions.”
“Is the thing living?” Mr. Padmore asked.
“No.”
“Was it once living?” Mr. Padmore continued.
“No.”
“Could it one day be living?” Apparently Mr. Padmore intended to monopolize the questioning.
“No.”
“Is the thing in this room?” Tacey managed to get a question in.
“Yes.” Testy Tolver looked over them all with one ghostly eyebrow arched a little.
“Are any of us touching it?” the Other Hand asked, but continued on before he could be given an answer.
“Of course, it might be a better approach to ask if no one is touching the thing. Except, there are likely more things that no one is touching, so a yes to my first question would eliminate more options. Then again, a no to the second question would do the same. I—”
“Are any of us touching the thing?” the Cream Canary asked, a hint of sorely tried patience in her repetition of the question.
“No.” Testy’s gaze slid to the Quiet Queen and the two of them sighed in perfect synchrony and almost complete silence.
The Queen seldom spoke, but not out of bashfulness.
She simply kept her thoughts to herself, though those thoughts were usually clear in her expression.
In that moment, her expression was screaming “this game is not as entertaining as I was promised it would be.” The Queen could be a little arrogant, but she was actually an overall pleasant addition to the household.
“Is the thing we are attempting to guess something that has been spoken of tonight?” the Cream Canary asked.
“Yes.” Testy looked begrudgingly impressed.
Granny Grey, hovering behind the sofa Tacey sat on, perked up. “Is it playing cards?”
“It is,” Testy said. “Well done.”
It was Mr. Padmore’s turn to look impressed. He even smiled a little at Granny. Mercury hadn’t yet seen the man smile, though he didn’t think Mr. Padmore was actually an unhappy person. Some people were simply very reserved and business-like.
“That was indeed well done, Granny Grey.” Mrs. Padmore was prone to near constant smiles, which Mercury felt certain were entirely sincere. “Do you wish to take a turn thinking of something?”
“Oh, no.” Granny shook her head. “I far prefer guessing.”
“Guessing is enjoyable,” the Other Hand said. “But so is thinking of the thing being guessed. Of course, one can enjoy both. Then again, always doing the guessing might grow tedious. Still, if one doesn’t enjoy being the thinker of things, that might not be enjoyable.”
Mercury was beginning to understand why Mr. Padmore’s ghost had the name he had.
“I will think of the next thing.” The Cream Canary moved swiftly to the middle of the room. Her demeanor spoke of embarrassment and apology. “You can begin your guessing.”
“Is the thing you are thinking of alive?” Mr. Padmore took the same approach as before.
“No, it is not.”
“Has it ever been?” Gary the Green asked.
“No, it hasn’t.” The Cream Canary turned in Mercury’s direction and her eyes, seemingly by accident, settled on him. She grew suddenly very still, very studying.
“Is something the matter?” he asked gently.
“I—I know you.” She said it almost as a question.
He didn’t remember meeting her before. “You have not been to Aventine Manor in the time I have lived here. Did our paths cross in London when I have been there in the past?”
“I—I don’t—” She looked increasingly confused but no less convinced. “I know you.”
Apprehension tiptoed over him. Though her tone wasn’t sinister, her declaration left him nervous. Few things did.
“I know about you.” The slight alteration of her declaration allowed him to breathe again.
“I am well known,” Mercury acknowledged. “The kingdom’s foremost ghost broker.”
The Cream Canary didn’t look convinced that was the right explanation, yet she didn’t argue further.
“I heard him spoken of all over London before I came here,” Weeping William said. “He is well-regarded and . . . and . . .” He began to cry, which wasn’t surprising. “And we are so fortunate to be here with him.”
The Quiet Queen gave a single, regal nod. Granny Grey smiled at Mercury. He hoped all of his ghosts were at least content being at Aventine Manor. Some of them had Integral traits that put “happy” a little out of reach.
He watched those who were gathered in the drawing room as the evening wore on, watching for any signs of displeasure. He didn’t see any. Even the Cream Canary, who continued to watch him with curiosity long after the group correctly guessed “pianoforte” and her turn ended, seemed comfortable.
Everyone was at ease.
Except Mercury.
The house was dark and quiet. Mercury lit a candle in anticipation of a journey he’d made many times before.
None of his ghosts ever accompanied him on this particular trek; the ghost at the end of it preferred it that way.
The Scholar was more than simply reserved or shy or prone to keeping to himself.
He more or less required that he be left alone.
Mercury didn’t mind. Indeed, he valued the Scholar’s intelligence and insights so much that he had gone to great lengths to secure for him a hidden and unknown room precisely to his liking in a quiet wing of Aventine Manor.
It was to that room—a filled-to-bursting library at the top of a winding staircase—that Mercury retreated that night, his thoughts heavy and concerned. He knocked lightly at the door.
“You’re always welcome, Mercury.” The Scholar answered his knocks with that exact sentence every time.
Mercury stepped inside. The very intellectual ghost sat in his usual spot behind his dust-covered desk, spectacles on his thin nose.
“’Tis two visits in less than a month you’ve made to my library,” the Scholar said.
“Complaining?” Mercury asked with a little smile.
“Curious,” the Scholar countered. “What’s brought you up the stairs this time, lad?”
Mercury sat in the only other chair in the room, the one he used every time he visited with the Scholar. “Is it possible for ghosts to know things about people they have never met?”
In actuality, Mercury knew it was possible because Granny Grey had proven it true already.
Before she had arrived at Aventine Manor with Tacey a month earlier, he had never met either the ghost or the lady to whom she was attached.
But he wasn’t yet ready to reveal the threat Granny posed or the history she could reveal, even to a ghost he trusted as much as the Scholar.
What Mercury actually hoped to discover was how a ghost could know things about a person they had never met. And what could be done about it.
The Scholar adjusted his phantasmal spectacles, then waved his hand in the direction of one of his stacks of books.
They lifted off the ground and one very near the middle of the stack floated toward him.
The remaining books restacked neatly. The floating book set itself on the desk in front of the Scholar.
Another few waves of his hand opened the book and flipped the pages.
The flipping paused, and the Scholar bent over and read out loud.
“Phantomic Memory.” He glanced at Mercury over his spectacles, before resuming his reading.
“Centuries of anecdotal evidence indicate that ghosts can, at times, be in possession of information for which there is no explanation. They possess memories that do not belong to them, neither can those memories be explained by the people to whom they have previously been attached. The reason for the existence of these misplaced memories has yet to be understood, but it is a phenomenon that cannot be denied.”
“So it can happen,” Mercury summarized, “but no one knows why, neither does it seem possible to predict when it will happen.”
The Scholar maintained his bent-over posture at his desk, still watching Mercury very patiently. “There is more, if you are interested.”
“Please.” He motioned for the specter to continue.
“The ghosts, themselves, do not seem to know how these memories are obtained. When in company with those the information is about, the specter suddenly realizes they are in possession of knowledge of which they were not aware before. These memories can be vague or detailed, but it appears that the longer the ghost is in company with said person the more likely they are to ‘remember’ more particulars.”
That was not good news at all. If the Cream Canary was in possession of a Phantomic Memory of him, then the longer the Padmores were at Aventine Manor, the more she might be able to reveal about him.
That had proven true about Granny Grey. When she had first arrived with Tacey, she’d vaguely known that Mercury Raine was not his actual name, but had seemed to know little else.
By the time she’d been at Aventine Manor for a couple of weeks, she knew that he was an orphan and that the name he’d been called at the orphanage was also not his given name.
She had remembered things she had no reason to know.
“Does the passage indicate whether these magical memories fade once a ghost has left the company of the one about whom they are remembering?”
The Scholar shook his head. “What I read comprised the entirety of the passage.”
Mercury rubbed at his mouth as he thought.
The Padmores would likely be at Aventine Manor for another ten days.
If the Cream Canary’s declaration that she “knew about” him was something more than having heard his name or reputation, then she would likely remember more details in that week and a half.
And there was a chance she wouldn’t forget it after she left.
Mrs. Padmore had said she suspected her ghostly attachment was a genius.
It didn’t take a genius to piece together that an orphan pretending not to be an orphan was hiding something.
Granny Grey had warned him there were other ghosts who knew pieces of the puzzle of his past and that he needed to find them.
Perhaps this was why. As his business brought them to his house, they would start to remember.
“The truth has a way of becoming known,” Granny Gray had said.
Soon enough, everything he was trying to keep hidden would be revealed.
That significantly complicated his situation with the Padmores. They had come to trade the Other Hand. But he couldn’t let them leave with the Cream Canary.