The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [86]
September touched the face of the pearly clock. She picked it up, marveling at it. She was so tired. All she wanted was to sleep, and wake up to steaming cocoa, and then sleep again. If Saturday and Ell were safe, she could sleep. She tried not to think about Gleam. It would be wonderful, really, to live in Fairyland forever. Isn’t that what anyone would wish for? Isn’t that what she herself had wished for, so often? To fly and leap and know magic and eat Gagana’s Eggs and meet fairies? September closed her eyes. She saw her mother there, on the backs of her eyelids. Crying, on the edge of her bed. Because she had not left a note. Had not even waved goodbye.
When she opened them again, her eyes fell on the little brass plaque: September. Furtively, so that the Marquess might miss her doing it, she glanced at the other plaques. They said things like: Gregory Antonio Bellanca and Harriet Marie Seagraves and Diana Penelope Kincaid. But hers just said: September. And didn’t it look a little tacked-on? Was there, possibly, just the shadow of something else behind it? September bent her head and picked at the bottom corner of the plaque with her thumb.
“What are you doing?” The Marquess said sharply.
September ignored her. The plaque gave a little--she pried it out with her fingernails. It clattered to the floor. Behind it was a much older plaque, gone green with verdigris. It read:
Maud Elizabeth Smythe
“True names,” said September wonderingly. “These are all true names. Like, when your parents call you to dinner and you don’t come and they call again but you still don’t come, and they call you by all your names together, and then, of course, you have to come, and right quick. Because true names have power, like Lye said. But I never told anyone my true name. The Green Wind told me not to. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I do now.” September looked up. Iago watched her with his round, calm eyes. He flicked his gaze toward the Marquess and September knew, all of the sudden, she knew it, though she could not say, not exactly, how she could possibly have known. “This is your clock!” she cried, brandishing it. “And it’s stopped!”
The Marquess’s hair went black with rage. Her face flushed and Iago growled under his breath. But finally, she gave out a long sigh and simply took off her hat. She lay it gently on the gable of a cuckoo clock. She ran her hands through her hair--it faded to a plain, dull blonde. She ran her hands over her dress--it became a grey farmer’s daughter’s dress, with old, yellow lace at the collar.
“I dreamed about you!” cried September.
“We are alike, I said. It would break your heart, September, how alike we are. This is what I looked like, when I was eleven, and lived on my father’s farm. We grew more tomatoes than any other farm in Ontario. Just acres of them. But we weren’t rich. My father drank most anything we earned. My mother was a seamstress--she took in all the mending from the neighbors. She died when I was eight, and I took up the mending after that, so that I could eat some and have a Sunday dress after the harvest was in and the whiskey-house closed down. I always smelled like tomatoes. And then, one day, when I couldn’t bear the mules and the chores and the horrid, horrid tomatoes any longer, I hid in the attic until my father gave up looking for me and went to work the fields with his hands. I had a splendid day up there, rooting around among all the old things my mother had left behind, and her mother before that. Of course, you can imagine what happened. There was an old armoire, covered in a dropcloth. I pulled down the cloth, and when I opened the door of the