New Decameron Fifty: Kate Heartfield (Patreon)

In a Hansom Cab at the Liberty Street Ferry Terminal

By Kate Heartfield

The message arrived as a bunch of gardenias, with no card. Eliza Padgett at twenty-nine years old was somewhat suspicious of gardenias, their petals so loosely furled, so impossibly pale. Her mother said they were a very showy flower, even when they weren’t saying anything at all. 

The arrangement that arrived at the Padgett brownstone on a morning in early June of 1875 had something unmistakable to say. It conveyed an invitation in its pattern of dark green petals and nodding white heads, all the work of an unnamed flower mage. It requested that Eliza Padgett be at the Liberty Street Ferry Terminal the next morning at eleven o’clock. 

One of the petals had fallen onto the table and Eliza picked it up, between thumb and forefinger, and held it for a long time, thinking.

Several facts disturbed the thoughts of mother and daughter that night, as their spoons clicked in their oyster soup and two trains rattled along parallel tracks in their minds. 

Liberty Street was far from Washington Square and therefore the business was of the kind that needed to be kept, as it were, sub rosa. Whatever was to be discussed was not to seen or heard by anyone of their circles. 

The fact that it was a magical message meant, of course, that it was quite safe for Eliza to go. It meant it came from one of the families that managed the use of magic in respectable ways, and almost certainly the Whitethorns, who were the most skilled with flowers. A family with a tendency to produce prodigal sons with romantic ideas, but which had as a consequence developed formidable methods for cutting off avenues of escape – escape was the word Eliza used, as she thought it over, though she reflected with a sardonic setting down of her spoon that her mother would certainly not.

All of that together led to the inescapable conclusion that the invitation to the Liberty Street Ferry Terminal must have something to do with the Benjamin Brock affair.

Benjamin Brock was one of the more promising of the Whitethorn grandchildren on the distaff side, despite the fact that his father came from an obscure family that did some vague sort of magic with ribbons, or was place settings? Eliza, who had a little Whitethorn blood herself, had danced with him at her coming out ball. For the last few years he had been the subject of mutterings among the old people, as he had passed the age at which he ought to have married and gone into business – even the business of ribbons or place settings, if that was where his talents lay. 

Instead, he had travelled a good deal more than necessary and had developed regrettable interests. 

And so some member of the Whitethorn family had summoned Eliza for an out-of-the-way meeting. Which Whitethorn? Eliza hoped it would be Maud, who was her own age and whom she liked a great deal, but it could easily be one of the older generation.

It was inevitable that the family should have intervened, at some point. Eliza allowed herself a private sigh over it, as the Padgett brougham rumbled down Broadway with her alone inside it. She was not unsympathetic to Benjamin’s desires. She knew well enough the restlessness of youth, although her own dreams were insubstantial, formless and unnamed, as she had not had the benefit of travel (Mama’s health would not allow it) and so had to be contented with looking out of windows. But when one was born into one of the old magical families, one had certain responsibilities. It couldn’t be helped. It was – not tragic, she would not use that word for the almost-pleasant pressure that held them all upright, like the laces of a well-designed corset. It did sometimes exert a little twinge, though. Like a melancholy note. Life should have melancholy notes, Eliza told herself, to make it beautiful.

As the brougham turned onto Liberty Street, Eliza took out her stylographic pen, filled with ink created to her own personal formula, and slid a card out of a silver case. She wrote the date on the card, the ink flowing purple as a bruise, and she folded one corner. As she stepped out of the brougham and into the bright morning, the driver took the card from her with a nod. The moment she was ready to return, the corner of the card would unfold itself, signalling the driver to come.

The road in front of the ferry terminal was full of carriages and noise, and the smell of rotten fruit. Eliza shaded her eyes and looked upward, at the giant clock that adorned the pediment over the terminal doors. It was three minutes to eleven.

The tops of the terminal buildings were all pointed like the tops of tents, and behind them rose the rigging of ships festooned with flags, creating a carnival atmosphere. Over Eliza’s head ran the telegraph wires, and suddenly the scene seemed less like a carnival and more like a puppet theatre. And who are the marionettes? she wondered.

She had heard of wire magic. None of the old families would have anything to do with it. But the rumours suggested that was what Benjamin Brock wanted to do with his life: to work magic with strings of copper and clicks of sound. Mama called it mechanical, which was a close cousin to vulgar. Eliza knew nothing about it, and couldn’t think why the Whitethorn family should have summoned her, unless it was perhaps her connection to the family through a great-aunt. But then most of the families were connected, one way or another.

Perhaps it was only that they wanted both the Padgett and Whitethorn families to bear some of the responsibility for what was to be done with Benjamin Brock, and for keeping it quiet. Eliza, an unmarried Padgett woman without children or in-laws, was more free than most to take care of unpleasant matters. She was unentangled.

Eliza took a few steps, dodging horse droppings, wondering where the meeting was to take place. She hoped they didn’t intend to summon her onto a ferry, and from there onto a train – she smelled gardenias. The scent dampened the warmer human smells of the street like ice riming a river. It drew her forward, questing, toward the source. Before too long she was standing at the step of an ordinary hansom cab, one in a line of them, all angled on the side of the street nearest the terminal doors.

It was empty, save a single gardenia blossom on one side of the two-person seat.

The driver seemed to take no notice of her, so she stepped up into the cab, and then suddenly there was no gardenia flower on the seat, but there was a woman.

Maud Whitethorn, dressed in white, with a single gardenia pinned into the blond hair braided and looped around the back of her head, smiled and extended her hand.

“I’m sorry about the hole-and-corner business,” Maud said, and gestured that Eliza should sit beside her. “We are invisible and inaudible to others, while we remain inside this cab. The driver will not take any custom, but he doesn’t know we’re here, either. He’s in a sort of dream of his own.”

Eliza nodded, a little exhilarated to know they were quite private despite the open front of the two-seater cab, the twitching tail of the horse, the people walking briskly in and out of the terminal.

They kissed each other’s cheeks, a little awkwardly as they were already sitting beside each other. Eliza was relieved that the smell of gardenia had faded into the background, that she could smell Maud’s own, subtler scents.

“How are you, Maud?” Eliza tried, and failed, to keep the alto rumble of significance out of her voice. She didn’t want to sound like one of the old ladies of the family. Maud, a year younger than Eliza, had broken off an engagement a few months before. 

“I’m perfectly well, and you’re a dear to ask. You must come and see me sometime and we’ll have a long talk.”

“Anything I can do to help you, I will do with my whole heart.” 

Eliza meant it as an opening to the business of the day, and Maud understood.

“You must know by now – everyone knows by now – that my cousin Benjamin has taken to dabbling with wire magic. My family has decided the time has come to make it impossible for him to continue.”

A shiver ran through Eliza’s shoulders, and she pulled her lace shawl around her. Maud was speaking of a curse. Flower magic could enact powerful, unbreakable curses, which was one reason the Whitethorn family preserved jealous control over that magic.

“I do have a little Whitethorn blood, but I should make it clear I have no talent for flowers,” Eliza said.

Despite her Mama’s frequent pronouncement that “blood will out”, magic had nothing to do with family in any biological sense. One of the most accomplished architectural mages of the Vanalstine family was adopted. It was all in the training, and Eliza had been trained as a Padgett. She knew how to use calling card magic to convey information that could not be spoken. She could not send a bouquet that would make someone’s heart leap or turn to stone. She certainly could not send a rose that would deliver a curse with it.

Maud smiled gently. “I will manage the curse myself.” 

Eliza was impressed to hear Maud say the word outright. How refreshing she was, and how sensitive. Her face was sad as she spoke the words, and then she turned her face to look out of the cab window, away from Eliza. Maud should not have been put in this position.

Eliza realized it would be uncomfortable if Maud should turn back and catch her gazing at her face in profile, so she let her gaze drop, to give Maud a moment, and then she was looking at the impossible curve of Maud’s upright waist, within white taffeta. So close that Eliza could reach out and touch that curve just there, but, it occurred to her with a prison-door clang, she never could. If Eliza had been a man, she might have danced with Maud, and rested one palm on her back, and then, perhaps, if they had danced out into a conservatory or into a quiet corner behind a screen, Eliza might have let that hand drop, might have curled her fingers about that waist, might have pulled Maud toward her. It was a silly fancy and they were too old now to twirl around together practising their steps, as they had when they were children.

Eliza looked down at her own hands and the things they could never do, while Maud turned back to her. Eliza’s face was hot, and her voice had distant thunder in it.

“It’s a shame that the older people can’t recognize that we live in a new age, that the unfamiliar sorts of magic will not disappear simply because we turn our faces away from them,” Eliza said. “I wonder if there might have been another way.”

“I have been searching for that other way,” Maud replied, gently. She rested her white-gloved hand on Eliza’s brown-gloved hand, and the tips of Maud’s fingers nearly grazed the organza of Eliza’s skirt. “I have been. The difficulty is that wire magic cannot be controlled in the old ways. It travels, by its nature. It is inherently wild. If we were to give New York’s families control over it – and that would happen if they gave Benjamin their blessing, because every blessing is control, isn’t it, with our families? If we did that, Eliza, nothing would be the same ever again, not only for us but for the world. So many things could go wrong, my dear Eliza. But your heart does you credit.”

The warmth of Maud’s hand was suddenly unbearable and Eliza withdrew her own, to pull a lash away from the corner of her eye.

“You can be sure the Padgett family will back the Whitethorns,” Eliza said, businesslike. “Of course. I suppose I make a good co-conspirator, as I have so little to lose.”

Eliza could see, out of the corner of her eye, that Maud cocked her head as she looked at her. “Will you forgive me if I am direct?”

Eliza smiled at that. “I would forgive you anything, Maud.”

“Then may I ask why you have not married?”

She took a breath, in and out, focused on the people walking back and forth as if on a stage, unaware of the audience of two within the cab. “Mama needs someone to look after her, and my brother was the one who married. Anyway, I have never had a suitor I wished to accept.”

At that, she looked at Maud with a sly smile.

Certain things may be impossible, but certain other things are not. Sometimes people do stumble and are caught, getting out of cabs, Eliza thought. On leavetaking, it would be right for her to kiss Maud’s cheek again. Some things were possible.

“Well, let me assure you I chose you for co-conspirator entirely because you are the most gifted calling-card mage I know. I will manage the curse, as I said. I am not cursing Benjamin himself – you need not look so horrified. I am cursing the magic, making sure that when – that if he attempts it, certain safeguards will come into place. I can manage all of this myself.”

“And the calling cards?” Eliza stopped, suddenly understanding. “You need to control what everyone else knows about it.”

Maud nodded. “You’ve always been so clever, Eliza.”

Eliza nearly winced but then she realized that Maud, unlike Mama, didn’t mean it as a complaint.

Maud continued: “All the older people will need to know that it has been taken care of. Everyone must know that Benjamin is back in the fold, that we trust him entirely, and they must all stop seeking details about it. We want very much for the gossip to stop, you see. I know you’ll make it very clear to everyone that the matter has been resolved.”

Eliza nodded. Calling cards could be tailored to their recipient, and were more precise, if less powerful, than flowers. Some family members would expect to know more details than others could be told. This was something she could do, to help Maud, to keep the families from tearing Benjamin apart. In time, he would come to accept whatever restrictions Maud put upon him.

Unless –

She looked at Maud, startled, and saw the crinkles at the corners of her eyes. Saw the possibility of no curse at all, of a conspiracy within a conspiracy, of something that neither of them would speak aloud, not yet, not when they had not opened enough space to say it in.

“Benjamin is clever too,” Eliza said, almost a whisper.

“Benjamin is very clever,” Maud agreed. “But the old people are distraught, and must be satisfied.”

Eliza nodded. She could already see how all of the cards should be addressed, and folded, the new printings that she would order with borders of a certain design, the lavender-water, the angle of cards on salvers, all over the city. The subtle and precise magic that would teach a dozen sprawling families what they needed to know without anyone speaking a word, and then it would be over, and a new chapter would open in New York society, a page with new scandals and new delights to be written upon it. A blank – a blank constrained at its edges but with room nonetheless within it, configurations of the old familiar alphabet that might, perhaps, open up the world like a letter unfolding in a lover’s hands.

“Did you mean it, Maud?’

“What, dear?”

“When you asked me to come and see you.”

“I have never meant anything more.”

“Then I promise to come, and I shall give you my card, so that you may hold me to it,” Eliza said. 

She pulled her pen and her card case out of her reticule, and with a hand that shook only a little, she wrote on it something she had never written before, a certain combination of innocent signs: a blot here, a flourish there, a certain crease near one edge, all of it conveying particular information to Maud alone. A calling card might be read by anyone, but it could only be fully understood by the person of the mage’s choosing.

Maud took the card, not looking at it but looking at Eliza instead, and rubbed it a little between her gloved finger and thumb as though testing the nature of it.

Eliza put her case and pen back into her reticule and closed it brusquely. “You will know when it is all done, our business, I mean,” she said. “I will leave a card about it. And then –”

“And then.”

They did not embrace on parting as they had on meeting, after all, and Eliza did not stumble. She stepped out of the hansom cab and saw that her brougham was approaching, the horse’s feet adding to the clatter and hum all around her. As she walked across the busy road, the conversation clung to her, all the things she might have said. It was a familiar feeling for Eliza but this time she wrapped the unspoken around her, let it warm her like her shawl. She looked up at the wires overhead, cutting passageways out of blue sky, and felt a moment of vertigo. The air crackled with impossibility.

********************************************

"Oyster soup," he says. "A delightful supper dish. Very elegant. And these lovely crumbly crackers to put into it."

"Nobody puts crackers in soup," Maya says. "And it's grey." She tastes her bowl of soup carefully. It's unlike anything she's ever had, but delicious, not fishy at all as she's expected, delicate, light, and with small cooked clams or oysters in it. She gives in and crumbles in the crackers, which give it more body. "Surprisingly great," she admits. "Like the story itself. I really liked them making friends. And I loved the magic. Calling cards. Wires. Flower petals. It reminded me a bit of Stevermer's The Glass Magician, they're both working in the same space, don't you think?"

"Well, the same genre, certainly. I think this one is very interesting in its femininity and the way it's twisting what that would have meant, as well as putting the magic in," he says. "It's really fun. I'm going to keep at eye out for Kate Heartfield in future. And this is an original story, specially for us."

"That's so cool," Maya says, and takes another spoonful of her soup. The cat arrives and mews, so she puts the bowl down for him to finish off the last little bit.

"Now, time for bed," he says.

They make their way to their usual places, and curl up on the opposite sides of the circulation desk. The cat pads around them then finally settles down with Maya. She feels like she has always lived in the library, always slept on the floor, always eaten things stolen from stories. She hopes she doesn't dream of the scary angels of Cooney's story, but of Heartfield's delightful calling card magic, or the enhanced animals in Shawl's story, or of the real Miranda, duchess of Milan that Schiller had shown her, or of Murphy's pterosaur. And on the thought of the pterosaur protecting the children, she falls asleep, and does not dream at all.

She wakes in the morning and drinks water and eats her muffins. He mutters and complains about the lack of coffee, but agrees that the muffins are still delicious and they were right to save them. The sun is streaming in through the high windows and it looks like another beautiful day. It is the sixth day in the library, but Maya has no idea what day of the week it is.  There is no sign of the cat this morning, he disappeared in the night and has not yet returned.

"What shall we read now?" Maya asks.

"How about this? Vivian Shaw's The Nature of Things."

"Great title,"

"Lucretius used it first," he says. "But yes, a great title."

They settle down and read.