From his inner pocket, he produced a crumpled sheet of paper, a letter writ in fine script with violet ink. It trembled between his fingers, but he would not let it loose despite the difficulty this afforded Hewell as he tried his best to read its fevered passages, succeeding only in snatches.
…a party of four shall advance north from the Serpent’s Lair… at the dungeon’s threshold, await instructions, for the winding stair is certainly entrapped… regarding encounters at the Green Monkey’s Tomb, take three cups of jade tea and consult the Augury of Night…
“Poetry?” Hewell ventured.
“Poetry? It is conspiracy! A cabal within this very house. Unbeknownst to Lord Pellapon, but dependent on his oblivious nature.”
At that moment, the door swung open and Lord Pellapon himself looked in. “Gentlemen! There you are. Mr. Hewell, I trust your investigations proceed apace. The postal courier dawdles in the hall. It is most unseemly. I will lose Tilly over such irregularities. Mr. Deakins, you mentioned developments?”
“Not as such yet, no,” Deakins said to Pellapon. “We have some increasingly tangible suppositions at the moment. But soon, very soon, I believe we shall have concrete results to lay before you, Hewell and I.”
“Glad to hear it, very glad.”
“We shall meet later, to confer,” the detective said quietly to Hewell. “I expect to have more proof by tonight, and perhaps the culprits themselves in hand. I may need your assistance. For now, betray nothing and trust no one. We will play the hand we’re dealt, and play it as two fellows well versed in bluffing.”
“You have my full confidence and you will receive whatever cooperation you need,” Hewell assured him, although he had seen no evidence whatsoever that Deakins understood even the basic principles of bluffing.
Toby waited at the bottom of the steps, visibly anxious not to fall behind with their deliveries. Hewell’s agitation suddenly became a match for the boy’s, a nervous nausea rising from the pit of his belly as if his heart were one of the dozen leeches in Dr. Merryweather’s celebrated Tempest Prognosticator, desperately throwing itself toward the minuscule hammer that sounded a warning bell. He dispelled much of the slimy dread by walking vigorously, so that by the end of the hornbeam drive he was feeling less oppressed; but the sense of an oncoming storm was still with him.
“Are you unwell, sir?” Toby inquired.
“Well enough, lad. Let’s get this over with.”
The Ghost Queen rose later than she had intended, given the importance of the day. The Terrors had left word of their successful delivery, so the first piece was in place. But Spectralia remained in grave danger and she must not lower her guard until the emergency had passed. She was still not entirely sure of its nature.
Although she had read the Concatenated Motivations to her subjects in a voice of supreme confidence and authority, in truth the compiled results of the Weaver’s carding were exceedingly vague and she had taken numerous liberties in her interpretation, erring always on the side of offering reassurance. The tabulations could only be precise in addressing dilemmas that admitted to bifurcation. “Shall I respond to my suitor? Yes or No? Which fork of this road should I take? Right or Left? Should I climb to the attic or descend to the cellar?” With dice, and especially her ivory Ptolemaic of twenty facets, she could select from a much wider set of possible paths. But she had not yet discovered a foolproof way to reduce all life’s questions to such a rubric. The card technique she had devised—based on the work of Jacques “Digesting Duck” Vaucanson, coupled with her own method of mechanical compilation—allowed another approach to analysis, but it was still more suited to fabricated situations than to the tangled weft and warp presented by reality.
Fortunately, she had founded Spectralia with a poet’s sensibility, which she leaned upon in times of uncertainty. Even when a course could be determined by rolling dice, the path beyond the first few steps must be elaborated if not improvised—spelled out and developed in detail. In this, her muse had served her well.
Each day began with an hour of historiography, the fabric of Spectralia spun in careful script in the pages of her minuscule books. When the work of word-spinning and world-weaving was done, the Terrors took the volume to be thread-bound and placed alongside the myriad others that made up an ongoing illuminated history of the Kingdom. Ordinarily she would then spend the rest of the morning deciding the fates of her subjects—all those who acknowledged her dominion within the square borders of Spectralia—but today contained more urgent business. It had rained in the night and the woods would be ideal for a harvest. She called the Terrors to equip an expedition.
The day was brisk; the wind from the sea made her shrink into her wraps. The wheels of her conveyance juddered unpleasantly over every twist of root or rocky stub. Deep in the shade of the Pellapon Woods, they pushed her to and fro until she spied the purple caps and yellow veil of the ghost mushroom, growing in a fairy circle at the base of a blasted oak. The caps stained her gloves as she gathered three of the dozen or so that grew in the mold, and then the Terrors wheeled her back to her alchemical lab. Belladonna berries and other elements waited in tincture, but it was the ghost caps that exerted the key influence and she prized them for their freshness. In a mortar she made a grainy purple paste thinned with spirits and various liquors, then blended this with the other tinctures.
She set aside most of the violet solution as ink for the next special printing of Ghost Pennies, but a small flask she extended to the Terrors. Four hands reached for the purple vial, but she held it back a moment.
“You are Protector Princesses,” she said emphatically, to impress them with the gravity of their errand. “Behave like such for once. Cook will admit you and identify the portion to receive Our sacrament.”
Thus the affairs of the Kingdom kept her busy until well past nightfall.
No sooner had Toby returned from one circuit of the district than they arrived back at the office to discover the next mound of missives waiting. Merricott cheerily handed them over, and Toby accepted his new assignment with a buoyant optimism that Hewell found exhausting, as it appeared to indicate that the lad thought he would soon come to the end of the work—an impossibility, given that the mail would never cease to flow. As a senior of the postal system, it behooved him to show no sign of impatience or fatigue, but Toby’s unstinting enthusiasm proved difficult to match. After a time, Hewell fell into a daze, following along without much attention to the particulars. He had long since memorized their route on the postal map he carried and felt he could have taken over Toby’s duties with little trouble.
It was not until sometime after nightfall that the day’s final delivery was made and they returned to the post office one last time. Merricott had long since removed himself homeward, to dinner and to bed. Toby shared a light repast of bread and cheese they had collected on the final approach. These sat poorly with the earlier meal of crab apples they had picked along the road and eaten as they walked.
Hewell made no mention of the night mail and prayed that Toby would not mention it, either. He wished to be done with this day, if only it might be done with him.
As they finished their meal, Toby said quietly, “I feel that I can trust you, sir. More, She has hinted that I can.”
“She?”