Partway into town, I smell something like rotten meat on the wind, and Finn and I exchange glances. The island is no stranger to terrible smells – storms throw up great fish onto the beaches to rot, fishermen’s spoils go bad on warm days, a cross-eyed wind brings the smell of brine and wet things in the evening – but this is not a sea smell. Something’s died that shouldn’t have and has been left where it shouldn’t have been left. I don’t want to stop, but it could be a person, so I make Finn stand by Dove’s head as I climb up over the stone wall in the direction of the scent.
The wind is coming straight toward me – the wind manages to cut through the mist instead of pushing it out of the way – and I crumple over myself to stay warm as I step around sheep poo. All the while I am wishing that I could have sent Finn to investigate the smell, but he’s queasy and useless with blood. So I am the lucky one to discover the source, which is a pile of parts that used to be a sheep. There’s not much left but hooves, a bob of its short tail, a lump of its innards, which is what smells, and its furry skull, which is mangled and crushed around the eye socket. What’s left of the wool at the back of the neck is spray-painted blue, to mark it as one of Hammond’s flock. There isn’t much back of the neck left to be painted, though. My skin prickles with an automatic tickle of fear, though I doubt that the capall uisce responsible is anywhere near. Still – this is far inland for one of the horses to come.
I return to Finn and Dove. They’re playing a game that seems to involve him tapping Dove on the upper lip and Dove looking peevish. Finn looks up and I say, “Sheep.”
He says, “I knew it was a sheep.”
I reply, “Next time you can cast your seeing eye into the pasture before I walk through the mud.”
“You didn’t ask.”
And we start on again toward Skarmouth.
We’re headed to Dory Maud’s shop, which is called Fathom & Sons for no reason that I can imagine, as Dory has no sons and no husband for that matter. She lives with her two sisters, neither of whom are named Fathom or have sons, and she collects things year-round to sell to tourists during October and November. As a child, the chief thing I noticed about Dory was that she was always wearing a different pair of shoes, a strange and extravagant thing on the island. Now mostly what I notice about her is that she and her sisters have no last name, a strange and extravagant thing just about anywhere.
Fathom & Sons is down one of the little side streets in Skarmouth, a stone-lined track barely wide enough for Dove and her pony cart. Neither the mist nor the sun can reach inside this alley, and we shiver as Dove’s hoofsteps clatter and echo up the sides of the buildings.
Standing in the blue-morning shadows a few doors down is Jonathan Carroll, throwing pieces of biscuit at a collie. Both Carroll brothers have dark, curly hair, but one of them has a lump of uncooked dough for a brain and the other has a lump of uncooked dough for his lungs. Once, when I came into town with Mum, we ran across Brian, the one with dough for lungs, crouched by the quay, shaking and starving for air. Mum had told him to breathe all of the bad air out before he tried to get more in and then she’d left me watching him while she went to buy him a black coffee. I’d been very annoyed, because she’d promised me one of Palsson’s cinnamon twists, which sold out very quickly. I’m a bit ashamed to recall that I told Brian that if he died and kept me from my cinnamon twist, I’d spit on his grave. I don’t know if he remembers it at all, since he’d seemed very focused on breathing through a cup made of his hands. I hope he doesn’t, because my character’s improved a lot since then. Nowadays I would’ve only thought the spitting part instead of saying it to his face.
But, regardless, it’s not Brian but Jonathan who’s throwing biscuits. He looks at me and Dove and Finn and says merely, “Hi, pony,” which only confirms that he’s the one with dough for brains.
“Wait here,” I tell Finn. “Start unloading. I’ll see about the cart.”
Fathom & Sons is a narrow, dark corridor of a shop, stuffed like a Cornish hen, with odds and ends labeled with little price tags that glow like white teeth in the dim light. It always smells a little like butter browning in a pan – so, like heaven. I’m not sure how many customers actually come into the shop itself to buy things; I think most of the business is done under a tent on weekends and during the rush for the races. So both the price tags and the delicious butter smell are probably unnecessary for most of the year.
Today is no exception; I take a deep, slightly hungry breath as I open the door. Inside the shop, the sisters are fighting, as usual. I have no sooner gotten inside the doorway and into the dim clutter than Dory Maud thrusts a catalog into my hands.
“There,” she says. “That. You’d buy from that, wouldn’t you, Puck?” The sisters call me Puck instead of Kate because all three of the sisters agree that you should be called what you want to be called instead of simply falling into what you were given at birth. I don’t remember ever telling them I wanted to be called Puck instead of Kate – both of them are my names – but still, I don’t mind it.
“She’s got no money at all,” Elizabeth says dismissively from the stairs at the back of the shop. The stairs lead up to the second story, which the sisters share. I’ve never been up there and I harbor a secret wish to. I think it must be all shoes and beds. And butter.
Elizabeth continues, “Of course it’s going to look good to her.”
I glance at what Dory Maud has thrust into my hand. To my surprise, it’s a neatly printed catalog for Fathom & Sons. When I tip my hands, it falls open to a random page with stylish black-and-white illustrations of a woman in a knitted sweater and a pair of hands wearing crocheted gloves and a disembodied neck bearing one of the rock cross necklaces that tourists love. The tidy letters describe each in uncompromising detail while a banner declares SEIZE YOUR HERITAGE! STRETCH YOUR PENNY WITH FASHION THAT LASTS! It looks like a real catalog that the post boat brings, only it has all the things from the store in it. My bad mood melts away.
“This is amazing!” I say. I move slightly so the dusty antique fertility statue by the door will stop poking my shoulder with her stone fingers. She’s been for sale for a long time. “How did you do it? Look at the letters! They’re so perfect.”
“Mr. Davidge the printer did that,” Dory Maud replies, pleased, looking over my other shoulder.
“Because Dory Maud did Mr. Davidge,” Elizabeth says from the stairs. She’s still wearing her nightgown and her invented curls are two days old.
“Oh, go on back to bed,” Dory replies, without heat. I don’t want to think much on this. Dory is what Mum used to call a “strong-looking woman,” which meant that, from the back, she looked like a man, and, from the front, you preferred the back. Elizabeth is the pretty sister, with long straw-colored hair and a nose turned up by lineage and habit. No one notices what the third sister, Annie, looks like, because she’s blind.
I page through the catalog. I know that I’m being stalled but I discover that I’m rather happy to be stalled. “Are our teapots in here? Who will see this?”
“Oh, the three people who read the adverts at the very end of the Post,” Elizabeth says. She’s gone up two more stairs but is far from back in bed. “And who are willing to wait a few years for shipping.”
“The Post? On the mainland!” I exclaim. I’ve found our teapots – there is a very precise line drawing of one of the stout pots with my utilitarian thistles on the side of it, and now I can see that the illustrations are in the same hand that draws the adverts in the back of our own little Skarmouth newspaper that comes out each Wednesday. The printing says that the teapot pictured is a “representative design” and that “supplies are limited.” It also says that they are signed and numbered, which my teapots are not. It is strange to think of something of mine heading over the ocean without me. I point to the signed bit and ask, “What’s this?”