The Peculiar. Stefan Bachmann

her branches were sticking right up over the sill. Do you want to get seen?”

      She shooed them to the back of the room and bolted the door to the passage. Then she spun on them. Her eyes fell on the potbellied stove. Ash flitted out through the slats in its door.

      “Oh, would you look at that,” she said. “I asked you to empty it, Barthy. I asked you to watch out for your sister, and wind up the wash wringer. You’ve done nothing …”

      In an instant Bartholomew had all but forgotten the lady in plum. “Mother, I’m sorry I forgot about Hettie’s branches, but I found something out, and I had a very good idea, and I need to explain it to you.”

      “I don’t want to hear it,” his mother said wearily. “I want you to do as you’re told.”

      “But that’s just it, I won’t have to!” He cleared his throat, drew himself up to his full height of three and a half feet, and said, “Mother, may I please, please, please summon a domesticated faery?”

      “A what? What are you talking about, child? Who’s that in the Buddelbinsters’ yard?”

      “A domesticated faery. It means it lives in houses. I want to invite a faery servant. I’ve read about it here and here, and here it explains how to do it.” Bartholomew lifted a heap of old books from behind the stove and pushed them up under his mother’s nose. “Please, Mother?”

      “Larks and stage lights, would you look at that dress. Barthy, put those books down, I can’t see properly.”

      “Mother, a faery! For houses!”

      “Must be worth twenty pounds, and what does the silly goose do? Marches down here through all this muck. I do declare. Rusty cogs in that head and nothing but.”

      “And if I get a good one, and I’m nice to it, it would do all sorts of work for us and help pump the water and—”

      His mother wasn’t looking out the window anymore. Her eyes had gone stony-flat, and she was staring at Bartholomew.

      “—wind up the wash wringer,” he finished weakly.

      “And what if you get a bad one.” It wasn’t a question. Her voice drove up between his ribs like a shard of nasty iron. “I’ll tell you what, Bartholomew Kettle. I’ll tell you! If we’re lucky it’ll sour the milk, empty our cupboards, and run off with every shiny thing it can get its fingers on. Otherwise it’ll just throttle us in our sleep. No, child. No. Don’t you ever be inviting faeries through that door. They’re upstairs and downstairs and on the other side of the wall. They’re all around us for miles and miles, but not in here. Not again, do you understand me?”

      She looked so old all of a sudden. Her hands shook against her apron and tears shone at the corners of her eyes. Hettie, solemn and silent like a little ghost, retreated to her cupboard bed and climbed in, closing the door with the most accusing look. Bartholomew stared at his mother. She stared back. Then he turned and slammed through the door into the passageway.

      He heard her cry out after him, but he didn’t stop. Don’t get yourself noticed, don’t let them see. His bare feet were quiet on the floorboards as he fled up through the house, but he wished he could shout and stomp. He wanted a faery. More than anything else in the world.

      He had already imagined exactly how it should happen. He would set up the invitation, and the next day there would be a petal-winged pisky clinging to the top of his bedpost. It would have a foolish grin on its face, and large ears, and it wouldn’t notice at all that Bartholomew was small and ugly and different from everyone else.

      But no. Mother had to ruin everything.

      At the top of the house they lived in together with various thieves and murderers and faeries was a large and complicated attic. It ran this way and that under the sagging eaves, and when Bartholomew was little it had been filled with broken furniture and all sorts of interesting and exciting rubbish. Everything interesting and exciting had deserted it now, the rubbish having all been used as kindling during the bitter winter months or swapped for trinkets from the traveling faery peddlers. Sometimes the women crept up to hang their washing so that it could dry without being stolen, but otherwise the attic was left to the devices of the dust and the thrushes.

      And to Bartholomew. There was one part where, if he was very careful, he could squeeze through a gap between a beam and the rough stone of a chimney. Then, with much wriggling and twisting, he would arrive in a forgotten little gable. It did not belong to anyone. There was no door, and only a child could even stand up in it. It was his now.

      He had fixed it up with odds and ends that he had salvaged—a straw mat, some dry branches and strands of ivy, and a collection of broken bottles that he had strung together in a pitiful copy of a Yuletide garland he had read about. But his favorite part of the attic was the small round window, like the sort in a boat, that looked out onto Old Crow Alley and a sea of roofs. He never tired of looking through it. He could watch the whole world from there, high up and hidden away.

      Bartholomew forced himself through the gap and lay panting on the floor. It was hot under the slates of the roof. The sun hammered down outside, turning everything brittle and sharp, and after that mad rush up seventy-nine uneven steps to the tip of the house, he felt like a little loaf under the pointed gable, baking.

      As soon as he had caught his breath, he crawled to the window. He could see across the alley and the high wall, directly into the Buddelbinsters’ yard. The lady was still there, a blot of purple amid the brown rooftops and scraggly, sunburnt weeds. The sour-looking woman had opened the door again. She appeared to be listening to the lady warily, her hands clamping and unclamping the gray braid that hung over her shoulder. Then the lady in plum was slipping her something. A little purse? He couldn’t see it properly. The sour one retreated back into the house, all hunched up and greedy, like a rat that has found a scrap of meat and is determined not to share it with anyone.

      The instant the door closed, the lady in plum became a whirl of activity. She dropped to the ground, skirts pooling around her, and plucked something from inside her top hat. A small bottle caught the sunlight and glinted in her hand. She bit off the seal, uncorked it, and began dribbling its contents in a circle around her.

      Bartholomew leaned forward, squinting through the thick glass. It occurred to him that he was likely the only one who could see her now. Other eyes had been following her since the moment she stepped into the alley. He knew that. But now the lady was deep in the yard, and any other watchers in the alley would see nothing but the high and crumbling wall. The lady in plum had chosen the Buddelbinster house on purpose. She didn’t want to be seen.

      When the bottle was empty, she held it up and ground it between her fingers, letting the shards fall to the weeds. Then she rose abruptly and faced the house, looking as poised and elegant as ever.

      Several minutes passed. The door opened again, a little uncertainly. This time a child stuck his head out. It was the boy, Bartholomew’s friend. Like Hettie, his faery blood showed clear as the moon through his white, white skin. A thicket of red thistles grew from his head. His ears were long and pointed. Someone must have shoved him from behind because he came tumbling out of the door and onto the ground at the lady’s feet. He stared up at her, eyes wide.

      The lady’s back was toward Bartholomew, but he knew she was talking to the boy by the way he kept shaking his head in a small, fearful way. The boy glanced timidly back at his house. The lady took a step toward him.

      Then a great many things happened at once. Bartholomew, staring so intently, nodded forward a bit so that the tip of his nose brushed against the windowpane. And the moment it did, there was a quick, sharp movement in the yard below, and the lady reached behind her and jerked apart the coils of hair at the back of her head. Bartholomew’s blood turned to smoke in his veins. There, staring directly up at him, was another face, a tiny, brown, ugly face like a twisted root, all wrinkles and sharp teeth.

      With a muffled yelp, he scrabbled away from the window, splinters driving into his palms. It didn’t see me, it didn’t see me. It couldn’t ever have known I was here.