The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [57]
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m no kind of lady.” We came to the bottom of the stairs and another inconspicuous door. This door wasn’t hidden or locked, and opened at my approach, like the doors of the library. I theorized about the mechanism that allowed such a slick illusion—some kind of weight-sensitive plate, rigged to a pulley system, or a motion-sensing system that triggered when our shadows passed in front of the pinhole in the wall.
We stood in the doorway, an invitation into yet another expanse of blackness. As before, I stepped forward into the dark, and someone screamed.
“Cal!” I thumped him on the arm in reflexive alarm. “Shine the lantern!”
“You’re trespassers!” the voice shrieked. A projectile from the darkness—a woman’s shoe—narrowly missed Cal’s head. “I’m not infected! Get out!”
“Whoa there, miss!” he shouted. “There’s no call to get violent!”
The other shoe flew and I ducked. “Hey!” I snapped at the voice. “Cut that out!”
Silence while the ghostly lantern beam swept the dark room beyond the door. The aether glow picked up stone floors, a vast porcelain sink and pump, an icebox of polished mahogany.
“What’s your name?” I said to the shadows. I felt confident doing so, sure that viral creatures most likely wouldn’t resort to throwing scuffed-up leather pumps at us.
“None of your beeswax!”
Considering it was my father’s house, I privately thought it was very much my beeswax, but I wasn’t about to argue with a stranger hiding in a kitchen, pelting me with footwear.
I gave the rest of the room a cursory glance while trying to discern the voice’s source. A dead fire gave its last gasp in the grate, shooting embers to leave black streaks on the hearth. A single chair sat before it, a book draped over the arm. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A banned text. A text on the Bonfire List, the compilation of all books the Proctors thought rated burning. I’d choked on the smoke as a little girl, while Conrad held my hand to keep us well clear of the mob standing around the conflagration in Banishment Square.
“Is that your book?” I said. There was a shuffle and a sniffle. I fixed on the sound—beyond the sink and before the icebox.
“You can’t pin nothing on me. That there was in the library when I came. I never read a word of it. Just like the pictures.”
I picked up my first real live heretical book and turned it over. A crocheted bookmark, the kind of thing I’d had to waste hours on in Home Life classes, nestled thick in the pages.
The book looked very ordinary—it was a cheap edition, bound in scratchy paper, and a little ink came away on my fingers when I traced the first line of the page. “ ‘The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” ’ ”
“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” I asked the shadow voice.
“It’s a mad tea party,” said the shadow. “Riddles without answer, ’less you’re a mad one too.” A pause, and the voice dipped, like it was shy of quoting the text. “The Cheshire Cat says it—‘We’re all mad here.’ ”
While she rambled, I let her voice guide me, and locked my fingers around the plump arm of the voice’s owner. The girl in my grip squealed. She didn’t sound a day over graduation age at the Academy, and terrified.
“Take your hands off! That ain’t ladylike!”
I gave her a shake. “That’s quite enough of that. Who are you?”
Copper-pot curls bounced and her chubby face flushed. “The nerve of you, playing handsy with me! Think you’d never had a lesson in manners in all your life!”
“Okay, okay,” Cal said, training the lantern on us. “Settle down, the both of you.”
“Who are you?” I ignored Cal. “Why are you in my father’s house?” My words came out with more ice coating them than I’d intended. Perhaps it was the shadows, or the book, or my throbbing shoulder. Perhaps I was simply wrung out of patience for foolish girls and their foolish games.
“I work here, don’t I!” the girl snapped. “I’m the chambermaid. Who in blue heaven are you?”
That stopped my indignation