Chapter Thirty-Six Patrick #3
The keys compressed discordantly, the words spelled out too quickly. Patrick tried to track the letters as they were belted down but was helpless to follow along. He looked back over his shoulder to Mrs. Trunk, who was half bent over, dabbing at Theo’s side in a practiced way.
“What did she say?” Nina called, watching him.
He shook his head. “Could you, uh… go a little slower?”
Mrs. Trunk’s shoulders rose and fell on a sigh, and then the melody played again, lagging now. Partick couldn’t describe how, but he felt as if the sound mocked him, like speech slowed down for the irreparably stupid.
The notes rang out, and Patrick read them aloud. “Don’t… touch.” He grinned down at the keys, then turned to say. “Pardon me, Miss.”
John came to Patrick’s side, his tongue tucked into his cheek in the way he was prone to when deep in thought. For a moment, Patrick was waylaid by memories of him turning over the working parts of some device, his concentration fixed.
“Clever,” John said, bending to see beneath. “She had her tongue cut out or somethin’?”
Another singular note, this one a dirge. The key with the word No compressed, and John huffed a guttural laugh.
“She’s not deaf, John,” Nina called out.
Another note. Bastard.
Patrick grinned again. John chuckled. “Ain’t half-stupid, neither.”
More notes. This time spelling W-H-O-A-R-E-Y-O-U?
“Mrs. Trunk, my name is Patrick. I apologize for the intrusion.”
Mrs. Trunk simply kept on with her ministrations, hovering over Theo, blotting the antiseptic on his wound.
“Please forgive John here. His manners are trapped somewhere between his arse and his mouth.” It was a risk, Patrick knew, to speak crassly to an Artisan lady before asking her a favor, but Patrick had learned to read people.
No regular swank opened an antiques store on a cliff in Lavnonshire and piled it with Crafter treasure.
Mrs. Trunk’s eyes twinkled. Patrick knew caged laughter when he saw it. Nina rolled her eyes at Patrick, and he winked at her.
“We’re in dire need of a place to stay, Mrs. Trunk. Just for a few nights,” Nina said. “We’ll keep out of your hair. And we can pay.”
Mrs. Trunk was already nodding absently and waving off the idea of payment as though it were hardly a favor at all. More notes rang out. T-R-O-U-B-L-E-?
Patrick hid his hands in his pockets. “No trouble,” he said easily.
A run of notes followed, one key after another, so dizzyingly fast that Patrick hardly made heads or tails of it.
Nina grinned. “You’ll have to forgive them, Mrs. Trunk. They’re simple Crafters. They don’t read quickly.”
Patrick smirked.
The melody came again, this time elongated.
“Studying?” Patrick read aloud.
Theodore and Nina shared a look, his eyes popping open and his jaw slackening, lost in some memory.
“Yes,” Nina answered heavily. “We’re studying.”
Patrick wondered if Mrs. Trunk was in fact addled, or if the passing of so many years had simply blended them all together while she collected her wares and curated her piles of junk, oblivious to the turning of the earth.
Mrs. Trunk had pasted the wound and covered it in gauze. She wrapped a clean bandage around Theo’s waist, smacked his hands away when he tried to touch it.
She held out a dusty vial then, on it the words BLUFF TINCTURE reflecting light from the window.
Theo hesitated to take it.
“Drink it, Theo,” Nina said.
Like a dog greedy for the approval of his master, he did.
Without another word, Mrs. Trunk turned and began her slow progression to a slight stairwell in the back of the shop, between an overladen china cabinet and a silent grandfather clock. She indicated for them to follow.
Patrick saw John take one last glance at the piano, his finger reaching toward the keys. He was beaten to the punch by a single note.
No.
Mrs. Trunk’s upstairs apartment was much like her shop: cluttered with odd assortments of things, too cramped by far.
There was a minuscule kitchen, a tea table with two chairs, shelves of pottery and candlesticks, a boarded floor covered in a faded red rug, and a settee.
Nina helped Theo limp to it and lay down there, where he closed his eyes immediately, the dose of bluff taking effect.
He was snoring within moments, and Nina looked down at him with concern etched in her brow, her hands pressing anxiously on her hips.
“He’ll recover, won’t he?” she asked aloud. To whom, it wasn’t clear.
Mrs. Trunk showed the rest of them to two spare bedrooms piled with newspapers and books with peeling covers. There were two iron beds with lumpy mattresses per room, a skinny window that wouldn’t open, empty candlestick holders on the sill, wax gumming them to the paint.
Mrs. Trunk shuffled the girls into one room, then Patrick and his father to another, like they were schoolchildren being herded into dorms. When Patrick looked over his shoulder to watch the back of Nina disappear through the door, Mrs. Trunk put a finger to the side of his head and turned his face away, shaking her head, her messaging clear.
She gave them bowls of water and towels to clean with, brought them tea and toast. Patrick ate and drank unconsciously.
He tried to lie down but found it unbearable.
Instead, he settled for trying to open the jammed window, pressing vehemently against the hinges.
His father chuckled behind him. “Like a caged animal,” he said fondly. “You always were. You and your brothers.”
Patrick glanced over his shoulder. John was shirtless, washing his face over the bowl, his beard dripping rivulets. He looked about the room as though it was of great interest to him, and Patrick couldn’t understand how he wasn’t jumping out of his own skin.
“It’s been weeks now,” Patrick said, throwing his shoulder against the window frame. It didn’t budge. “Weeks since the attack on Kenton. Since they took all the bluff.”
“Your brothers are there, Patty,” John said. “They’ll hold down the fort just fine till you return.”
“Till we return,” Patrick corrected, pausing in his assault against the window, looking once more to his father.
John was drying his face with a towel. “Yeah,” he said. “Till we return.”
Patrick shook his head. “Gunner’s not right in his head,” he said. “He’s worse than you’d remember. I couldn’t keep him away from the hawkers. And Donny’s just a kid.”
“He’s no more a kid than you are,” John told him. “And their mother ain’t gonna let ’em go astray. She’ll kick him in the arse if need be.”
“The trades’ll be slowin’,” Patrick continued, pressing the tips of his fingers into the window crevasses until his fingers turned white and his nails protested. “If they haven’t stopped already. There’s debts, and not a lick of bluff to trade with.”
“There’s coal,” John said prosaically. “Your brothers’ll hold ’em off till the end of winter at least.”
“It won’t be enough,” Patrick argued, an ache forming behind his eyes.
“Then they’ll throw their weight around, Patty. They know the business.”
“This should concern you,” Patrick said, pinching the bridge of his nose and cinching his eyes shut to stave off the pain. “You should be worried for them. For Ma.”
“Composure, Patty,” John said, as though his son were still thirteen and trying to split lumps of stolen terranium. “Men who don’t learn it don’t make a single right choice in their lives.”
Patrick threw his shoulder into the window again, harder now. There wasn’t enough air in the room.
“Guard your temper. You fly off the handle, you might as well fold your hand.”
Patrick pushed at the window again, heard something creak.
“This is the business, Patty. It’s a hundred problems, each as urgent as the next. The only one that matters is the one in front of you.”
Patrick threw his fist into the window in desperation, and the glass splintered. His father’s hands were on his shoulders, his chest, holding him back.
“Just breathe, Pat,” he was saying. “Come on, lad. Breathe. Till the light comes, remember? Till the light comes, we keep at it. Everythin’ has a fix.”
His lungs were howling as he inhaled, his eyes shut so tightly he thought they might never open again.
“Jus’ breathe. That’s the way,” John’s voice swooped in. “Ain’t anythin’ so big we can’t handle, Patty. We find a way. We’ll get us all the bluff we’ll ever need, son. All the bluff your mother could ever need.”
Tess’s face swam on a carousel. Younger and gray as smoke. Then older, wearier. He braced himself on the windowsill, felt tiny shards of glass embed in his skin. He breathed heavily, sweat trickling into the corners of his eyes.
“Nothin’ we can do for ’em if we go back empty-handed, Patty. We find the Seam first. This is the problem in front of us.”
Patrick nodded. There was nothing to do but nod.
“I rely on you, son,” John was saying now. “I gave you this burden ’cause you were the only one who could bear it. We’re so close now—I can’t have you fallin’ apart.”
His father slapped his spine between his shoulder blades, the reverberations reaching his heart. It was a reset, a jolt of strength.
“Till the light comes, son. Say it.”
“Till the light comes.” He could barely shove the words past his lips.
“That’s it.” John mussed his hair. “Come on, now. There’s gotta be a cigarette somewhere around here.”
Patrick opened his eyes to the broken window, the glass now a web. He traced the path of a fissure with his finger, and he thought to himself, if only he could see where it would all end, where they would all fall, he would know if he could live with himself in the aftermath.
He turned to his father pulling a shirt over his head, pulling up his suspenders as though preparing for second shift in the mines. As though he might thunder down the stairs and kiss his mother on the cheek, pat Gunner’s shoulder, and pull on Donny’s nose.
“Till the light comes,” Patrick murmured to himself, searching for composure, shunting fear into his center and locking it away. “Down we go.”