When Miss Metella arrived, Neverfell took one look at her and then tried to hide under the soapsuds. Miss Metella was an elderly, apple-cheeked woman with a calming voice, the effect being spoilt only by the fact that she wore two skin-pink silken eye patches, each with a picture of a wide, blue eye embroidered on to it.
She was obviously a perfumier, for all perfumiers had their eyes removed when they became apprentices. Perfumiers were notorious for disliking cheesemakers, whose reek offended perfumiers’ elegant noses, and who also had an annoying knack of noticing the use of Perfume when others did not. However, her air of calm and commonsense eventually lured Neverfell out.
‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ she beamed, adding the tiniest drop from a pipette into Neverfell’s bath. ‘We’re both friends of the Childersin family, so we’ve got nothing to quarrel about.’
It was a very different Neverfell that confronted herself in a mirror seven hours later. Indeed, it took several minutes of flapping her arms like a penguin to convince her that she really was regarding her own reflection. The new Neverfell had softly glossy dark red hair that hung to her shoulders, and wore a simple green dress with white fur trim at the collar and cuffs. She had crochet gloves ornamented with small bobbles that her fingers itched to twiddle. Her green boots were fur-lined as well. Her face looked flushed beneath its freckles, surprised and gleeful.
She had just started to experiment, pinching and pulling at her face to make it do things, when she noticed Zouelle in the reflection behind her. To her surprise, the older girl pushed forward and folded the mirror shut with a click.
‘Miss Howlick should not have given you that,’ Zouelle said, a little tartly. ‘I will have to speak to her about it.’
‘What? Why not?’ Neverfell stared nonplussed at the closed mirror.
‘Your face will spoil if you keep staring at it like that. Anyway, if you can remember what you just saw, you do not really need a mirror any more, do you?’ Zouelle’s tone was confident and big-sisterly again. Her smile was even.
‘What’s wrong?’ Just for a moment Neverfell felt as if there were an invisible wire pulled to razor tautness between her and the other girl, humming tension into the room. If she blundered towards it, it might snap or cut her, and yet she half wished it would, so that she knew where it was. ‘Is it something I did?’
‘What did you tell the Enquiry?’ Zouelle was still wearing her warm and confidential Face, but the eyes no longer matched it, frantically scanning Neverfell’s own features. ‘Uncle Maxim says you didn’t tell them anything. That isn’t true, is it?’
‘But it is! I mean . . . I told them bits of your plan, but I didn’t say who was in it except me. I never told them about you.’
‘That makes no sense.’ Zouelle kept slipping Face between her confidential smile and a look of polite concern as if uncertain what to use. ‘Of course you told them. Why wouldn’t you tell them?’
Neverfell stared at her. ‘They would have put you in a cage like mine! I couldn’t let them do that! After all, you were just trying to help me, weren’t you? You’re my friend!’
It was Zouelle’s turn to stare. At least that seemed to be what her eyes were doing. The rest of her face was still politely concerned. And then she looked away, and gave an utterly charming little laugh.
‘That’s right,’ she said in her usual tone. ‘I’m your friend. And I’m going to look after you, Neverfell. Uncle has asked me to help you with everything. What to wear, how to talk, how to act in good company. My uncle has . . . great plans for you.’
Neverfell’s spirits skyrocketed again. ‘So everything’s all right?’
‘Yes, Neverfell. Everything’s fine.’
Of course it was. Neverfell was just being nervous and stupid. She could see that now. Zouelle did not resist Neverfell’s hug, but there was something stiff about the way she returned it, and her hands felt cold.
The Morning Room
Drained, dizzy and bone-tired after the events of the day, Neverfell was shown to a beautiful little room in the Childersin townhouse, and told it was hers. She loved it, then spent eight hours failing to sleep in it. The small four-poster bed had soft golden covers and strokeable curtains, but she was used to her rough hammock, and the flat mattress left her squirming. The air smelt of dried violets instead of slumbering cheeses, and all the soft sounds around her were wrong. Besides this, the day had stuffed her head so full of new thoughts and sights that it hurt, and now her mind whirled and whirled and would not shut down.
Then there was the cockerel-shaped clock on her dressing table. It had a weird face where the numbers only went up to twelve, and its tick was loud and unfamiliar, but worst of all it did not chime. Every time it struck the hour she would be startled alert by the lack of chime. In the end she got up, sat down with the cockerel and did what she always did when she was ‘out of clock’, and needed to calm her mind.
At some point she must have fallen asleep at the dressing table, since when a sharp rap at the door woke her she was lolling across its surface, her cheek pressed against a heap of cogs. She started awake and staggered to the door to find Zouelle waiting for her in a white dress.
‘You’re not dressed! Didn’t your cockerel wake you an hour ago?’ Zouelle peered past Neverfell, and her gaze lighted upon a gleaming, half-dismantled shape, its beaked head missing and several of its cogs scattered across the table doilies. ‘Neverfell! Did you take the cockerel-clock to pieces?’
‘I was fixing it!’ stammered Neverfell. ‘I wanted to make it chime! They said everything in here was mine, so I thought nobody would mind—’
‘You can’t just take things apart! Everything in this room is yours to use, if you use them the right way, but you can’t just do whatever you like with them.’ Zouelle took a deep breath and stroked one hand over her hair. ‘Never mind, Neverfell. Get dressed quickly, or we’ll be late for breakfast.’
Having dressed and rejoined Zouelle in the corridor, Neverfell was somewhat surprised to find the whole family also in the process of rising.
‘Why is everybody getting up at the same time?’ whispered Neverfell. ‘Surely you don’t all keep the same clock? Don’t you sleep different shifts so somebody is always awake?’ It seemed a very strange and impractical way of doing things.
Zouelle shook her head. ‘We always eat breakfast together in the Morning Room,’ she answered. ‘Uncle Maxim insists upon it – he is a great believer in family, and says that we should all sit down together for at least one meal each day. Apparently people do that in the overground, and now he is determined that we will do the same. Uncle Maxim has quite the passion for the overground. He even has us living by overground clocks.’
She gestured to the wall, and Neverfell realized that they were passing another outlandish twelve-hour clock, like her cockerel. It looked quite bare and bald with so few numbers painted on its face.
‘But . . . then . . . aren’t your clocks telling totally different times from everybody else’s nearly all the time?’ asked Neverfell, feeling that her life was about to get very confusing.
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Zouelle. ‘But one simply does not say no to Uncle Maxim, and he is usually right about everything. We started living by overground time back when I was seven, and do you know something? Nobody in the family has been out of clock since.’
Neverfell wondered if that was why the Childersins all seemed so gleamingly healthy and full of life. You could spot people who spent a lot of their time out of clock. They were quite often overweight, soapily pale and unhealthy-looking. The Childersins, on the contrary, all appeared to be clear-skinned, clear-eyed and alert.
It soon became clear that the Morning Room was not even part of the main house. Instead the whole family had to walk through a back door and along a private tunnel for half an hour. It was bizarre to watch the extended Childersin clan strolling out resolutely, the ladies carrying paradribbles, the tasselled umbrellas that protected one from cave drips, and the babes pushed al
ong in silken carriages. They were a particularly tall and statuesque family, and it made for an impressive parade. The servants following after them with steaming urns and silver trays of croissants looked stunted in comparison.
‘Uncle Maxim found a room he liked in another district,’ Zouelle explained in an undertone. ‘Refreshing atmosphere, he said. So he walled it in and had a passage built to it from our house. That’s always the way it is. When he finds something that pleases him, he just buys it, and the rest of us adapt.’
‘Is that what he did with me?’ whispered Neverfell. Zouelle did not seem to hear.
The Morning Room was a fine square room with a walnutwood table in the middle. In an alcove, two bronze clockwork birds sang jerkily, twisting their heads to and fro. In the centre of the ceiling was set a large glass orb, clearly some kind of lantern, and it was from this that the room’s light poured. However, instead of the usual yellow or greenish light, this was blue-white.
The blueness made Neverfell feel shocked and alive, as if she had been rinsed out with crystal cold water. She did not know why. The Childersins however seemed to think nothing of it, and all settled themselves around the table. Seeing the whole family all at once, Neverfell was again struck by how much brighter, healthier, taller and more elegant they seemed than anybody else she had ever met. For once, at least, she did not feel too lanky and overgrown.
‘Ah, Neverfell.’ Maxim Childersin beckoned to her, and to her relief, Neverfell found that she was to be seated between Maxim Childersin and Zouelle. ‘Everybody, this is Neverfell. Please treat her gently. After all, I have only just bought her, and she was very expensive.’
Meals had always been something Neverfell gobbled alone between tasks. Now suddenly there seemed to be rules. Even the eggs sat up in little china cups, and people made a point of tapping their way in through the tops instead of just peeling off the murky shells. Neverfell watched everybody else with a sort of awe, breaking bread in her lap and sneaking pieces into her mouth like a thief. They even seemed to know when to laugh, how to laugh and when to stop, and every witticism was met by a gust of perfectly synchronized mirth, which everybody except Neverfell ceased at exactly the same instant. To her relief, though, they did not spend the whole meal staring at her, sparing her only occasional, smiling glances.
‘Zouelle – are those your parents?’ whispered Neverfell, casting a glance at the two adults sitting on the blonde girl’s other side.
‘No, that is one of my uncles and his wife,’ Zouelle whispered back. ‘My parents were devoured by a corked bottle of Sardonny when I was two years old.’ She sounded so unconcerned and offhand that Neverfell hesitated to offer condolences for fear of sounding silly.
The family gossiped quietly, mostly about the most recent thefts of the infamous and anonymous Kleptomancer. As usual they were daring, incomprehensible and appeared designed to cause as much annoyance as possible. His last act had been to purloin a great waterwheel powered by one of the underground rivers. It had been discovered later on its side in an abandoned quarry cave, with a giant tablecloth across it and seventeen places set for dinner.
Neverfell could not concentrate on the brilliant tinkle of conversation. The blue got in the way. The blue wanted to tell her about wild, wide spaces beyond the numb place in her mind. She reached for her cup, but the gleam on the porcelain made her blink, and just for a moment her mind filled with the image of an expanse of water so bright that it seemed to be seething with diamonds. She could almost see it. She wanted to see it.
Water! She needed water. There was some in a big jug, just within reach. And . . . there! A bowl. Tipping out its cargo of pears and apples only took a moment. Fill it up with water. No, still not quite right. But if she splashed the water around, made the surface sparkle . . .
‘Neverfell,’ hissed Zouelle between motionless lips, ‘what are you doing?’
Neverfell slowly withdrew her fingers from the great bowl. Everybody was staring at her. Some of them now had damp flecks on their shirt fronts.
‘I . . .’ Neverfell looked abashed at her wet fingers. ‘There’s water. Lots of water. As far as I can . . . water right to the edge of . . . with light on it. Bright light. Blue light, like . . .’ She looked up at the glass bulb in the ceiling. ‘I . . . it’s like the blue I keep remembering.’
She sat down slowly, and silently thanked the Childersins from her heart when they hesitantly resumed their conversations. After a moment or two, however, she realized that Maxim Childersin was still observing her, quite motionless, his spoon halfway through decapitating his egg.
‘“The blue I keep remembering,”’ he repeated softly, then laid down his spoon, greasy with blue yolk. ‘I dislike inconsistencies, Neverfell. The last time we spoke about your memory, you told me that you remembered nothing of your earliest years.’ There was a hint of something new in his voice, something that could become hardness if it chose.
‘But I don’t really remember anything!’ Neverfell exclaimed hastily. ‘Just tiny pieces, sometimes. Feelings. And I don’t even know if they’re real memories or things I made up. It’s like when you wake up and can’t remember the dream, but there’s still something in your head.’
‘What kind of something?’
Neverfell shrugged. ‘A sort of a . . . smear, a feeling you can’t put into words. I can’t remember anything properly, but sometimes I know when things are wrong. Like your birds over there.’ She glanced over at the bronze birds with their jerking beaks. ‘They’re wrong. They sing like beautiful music boxes, and real birds don’t. I just know that.’
‘Interesting.’ Master Childersin’s scrutiny was becoming somewhat unnerving.
‘And . . . there’s something that I thought might be a memory. Or it might not.’ Hesitantly, Neverfell related the Stackfalter Sturton vision of the bluebell wood, then trailed off, gnawing her lip. ‘Master Childersin, I wanted to ask something. How do you know if True Wine has been used to make you forget things? Is there a way you can tell?’
‘Yes, Neverfell. There are certain signs.’ Maxim Childersin folded his napkin. ‘I think this is a subject that merits a long and private discussion. Come to my study after breakfast.’
‘Look at the paintings, Neverfell.’ Settling his angular form in the large damask armchair in his study, Childersin folded his arms and observed her. ‘Tell me what you feel when you look at them. Tell me if they stir your memories.’
Neverfell walked slowly around the room, running her fingers over the curls and whorls of the gilded picture frames that covered every inch of the walls. Half the paintings were detailed and realistic pictures of luscious-looking grapevines. There were no fresh grapes in Caverna, of course, but Neverfell had encountered enough pictures of them to recognize what these must be. The other half were landscapes. Above sleek and ragged horizons glowed dozens of painted skies, some marked with a pale, flaky blob for a sun. Neverfell had never seen so many overground landscapes in one place.
‘Where are all these places?’ Neverfell peered into the nearest landscape.
‘They are mine,’ answered Childersin. ‘My overground vineyards in Vronkoti, Chateau Bellamaire and a dozen other countries besides.’
‘What’s this one?’ The small picture before her showed yellow hills, dusty and wild under their fleece of grey cloud.
‘My estate in Tadaraca,’ answered Childersin, walking over to join her. ‘Does it look familiar?’
‘No, but I feel like I should know what those are.’ She pointed hesitantly to a V-shape of dots in the painted sky. The almost-knowing was an ache. She shrugged, then looked up at Childersin. ‘What are they?’
‘I have no idea.’ Childersin smiled down at her bafflement. ‘I have never seen the sky, Neverfell. I have never left Caverna. Why do you think I must hire the very best artists to paint my vineyards and grapes?’
He gestured towards a beautifully rendered picture of a vine heavy with pale gold grapes. These fruit looked real enough to pluck, some
dusky with shadow, some honey-bright with the sun, cold lights in the dewdrops that beaded the leaves.
‘It looks like I could crawl right into it and eat them,’ Neverfell thought aloud.
‘Please don’t try.’ Childersin laughed, then sighed with every sign of true wistfulness. ‘Overground vintners can wander down to their vineyards, pinch their grapes for plumpness, smell them ripening in the sun. Alas, I have to work from pictures, detailed reports, maps, soil samples, raisins and send thousands of minute instructions back to the vineyards.’
‘But you’re so powerful! If you really wanted to go there, couldn’t you arrange something?’
‘Nobody is permitted to leave Caverna, particularly those who are masters of their Craft, and for excellent reasons. Our trade secrets must be protected. If overgrounders learned how to make True Delicacies the way we do, then we would lose our power in the world, and camel trains would no longer trudge the deserts to bring us provisions.’ Childersin shook his head, and gave Neverfell a small and complicated smile. ‘And even if I could leave Caverna for a time I would not do so. Too dangerous. The games of Court are fast and subtle, and if I was absent even for a little while I would miss moves in the game. I would probably return to find my family murdered, strangers living in this house and my cellars in the hands of my rivals.
‘And what then? My power base would be broken, and one of the other vintner families would find ways to take over my vineyards and distant castles. Seeing my estates at Tadaraca would mean losing them . . . and everything else.’
‘But what’s the point of owning them if you never see them?’ burst out Neverfell. She blinked, and for a moment it seemed to her the V of painted freckles was flickering slightly, wavering in formation.
‘What’s the point of seeing them if I don’t own them?’ was Childersin’s rejoinder.
Neverfell barely heard him, her gaze still entranced by the painted images of a world that was lost to her. ‘Master Childersin, could you bring my memory back? Wine can help people remember things, can’t it?’