[Closed] With Fresh Eyes

[Clark Cooke]

A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

late morning of the 19th of loshis, 2720

R
enata worked her little fingers around the apricot, barely large enough to fit. Her large dark eyes were fixed on it. He was still holding it with his fingertips, just the barest brush, because it wouldn’t do if the little miss dropped it. This one had a fine, velvety skin, only worn smooth in places; it hadn’t been a good spring for them, Miss Kemp had said, but enough had survived. He thought it was a very precious thing, and to bring it back to West-and-Long all bruised would have been a terrible shame.

There was a tiny smile on her face, but her lips puckered when she couldn’t hold it. She started to dig her fingers in, and he shook his head.

Renata was silent. He shifted her in his arms, trying to take the apricot back. The little miss wasn’t ready to let go. She stared at the apricot, which made a tiny orange reflection in both of her eyes.

He was smiling a little smile too. “Your hand’ll be big enough to hold it,” he said, real quiet, intent, “someday.” Tess had told him to talk more with her. He wasn’t much good at talking, but she seemed to like it. She let go, and he put the apricot in his basket with the other fruit and vegetables he had carefully picked out.

“Mr. Cooke?” He barely heard. “Mr. Cooke.”

Clark looked up from Renata, then down. “Um.” Behind the stall, across boxes of fruit – colors and shapes and textures he could’ve shown the little miss all day – Miss Kemp bustled about. She was looking at him now; he looked down, studying the bumpy, glossy skin of a very fine orange. Miss Kemp was a fair little lady, with a big pile of hair the color of wheat, just starting to run grey like Claudia’s.

He didn’t know much about her other than when he came with Claudia on the eight, they’d get to talking, and you just about couldn’t get them to stop. They talked about all sorts of things, Clark reckoned, but he never knew what to say.

“I said, she’s growin’ like a weed, Mr. Cooke,” Miss Kemp insisted, her wiry back straight. “You ought to bring her by more, an’ I said so to Claudia last eight. I ain’t seen her since she was in her swaddlin’ clothes. Oh, she’ll be a right beauty, won’t you, Miss Renata?”

Renata’s attention had turned to Miss Kemp now. Clark looked at her instead of Miss Kemp, because in the corner of his eye he could see that Miss Kemp was frowning. Miss Kemp was frowning deeper the more Renata watched, silent.

She was beautiful. It was a blustery sort of day, and they had put her in her new red coat that they had got her at the start of Bethas, with the wool they had bought from Miss Weaver last fall and saved up to have made. It was very warm, but Tess had worried it would not be warm enough, so she had got him to put her little gloves on her. She kept taking them off. Her black curls were braided up all pretty, like Tess knew how to do, with her favorite yellow ribbon.

“Thank you, Miss Kemp,” he mumbled, looking down again.

“Gettin’ almost too big to carry,” she said cheerfully, with that edge Clark knew. “Well. Good day t’ you, Mr. Cooke. Mrs. Potts! And Kat, Lady bless, it’s been an age…”

Clark moved uneasily out of the way of a chattering woman, feeling very large. But Renata looked up at him. “Let’s go an’ look for fiddlehead ferns,” he almost whispered. She smiled. It was true that she was getting big, and so Clark eased her down. She held one of his fingers, and they went along.

It was crowded market day for all the wind’s bluster. They were at the waterfront edge of West-and-Long, and gulls dotted the clouded blue sky. He kept Renata close, and he watched the shoes and the bottoms of coats, with sometimes a peep of lace or fraying trouser-hems underneath.

He had stopped at another stall – Mr. Avery was there today, with fresh-pressed olive oil – when he felt Renata’s small hand tug at the hem of his coat. He ran a hand over her braids, gentle though he did not turn. He was still looking at the bottles when he felt another tug, more insistent, and a small gasp of excitement. When he turned this time, the little miss was gone. His heart dropped through him and then jumped up to his throat, lodged there.

“Little miss,” he said, then: “Little miss!”

He caught the eye of a woman in a grey wool coat. She looked alarmed, if he was any judge. He did not much care. She gasped, and there were other gasps too, when he waded through without his usual care. He caught more eyes, eyes he did not want to catch. Even with his head above the crowd he couldn’t see someone moving at the level of trouser hems and lasses’ skirts.

He caught sight of her yellow ribbon then. They were on the docks and he could smell the sea and hear the shouts of men like him on their shifts. The creak of boxes and the ruffling of sails. For a heart-stopping second he imagined a heavy box falling on her, or her tumbling over the edge and into the sea with a splash.

He near shoved a man out of the way. It wasn’t hard. “Renata,” he said, louder and rougher than he meant to. The crowd was thinning, and he thought he saw her again, but when he hit the solid, awful woobley of a field, he froze.

[Chrysanthe Palmifer]

Late Morning, 19 Loshis, 2720
A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

Chrysanthe would have been rather embarrassed to admit it, but she had spent the entire ascent and descent of the trip from Vienda to the Rose with her new camera spectra clutched tightly in her lap. It was encased in leather, and the bag had a rather fine soft lining as well, and nonetheless Chrysanthe had been rather inordinately concerned that a bump in their flight path should knock it against the wall, and do some damage to the small, sensitive machine.

It had been, by far, the most expensive purchase Chrysanthe had ever made, unless one thought to count one’s education at Brunnhold. If so, Brunnhold had been more expensive, though she had not paid for it directly, and certainly not with a demand draft from her own, precious savings account, certainly not with the careful tallies and shills she had scraped together into concords over the last two years, shorn from the edges of rent for her small room and board at the edges of Uptown, for clothing, for gifts, and, however rarely, for entertainment.

At the room Pargeter & Sons had rented for her in the Rose, Chrysanthe had tucked the camera spectra away, carefully, deep in her luggage. She had arrived rather early in the morning, and had, after a quick bath to refresh herself, gone straight to work. She had thought about the camera spectra not at all in the days between, for she had left her room in the dawn hours and returned after dark, and had little time to do more than eat and sleep between the exigencies of work.

On the nine, she had woken early and lay in the darkness of her bed a little while, her mind busy thinking through all which she could achieve that day. The factory still ran on the nine, and though strictly speaking her presence was not required, she had worked the majority of nines since she started at Pargeter & Sons.

Where had it gotten her?

Chrysanthe liked her work; she was good at it, and it was interesting and fulfilling. Glass, she felt rather strongly, was important; it mattered, and so did the work she did as a glass engineer. There were innovations to be made; the process could be improved, she was sure of it, and she was enthusiastic about continuing to do her own work on that front. She liked it; it paid well; it made use of her skills.

And yet, Chrysanthe had thought, lying there, looking over at the gleam of pale gray light through the edges of her curtains.

Instead, she had taken one of the books she had brought with her, curled up against the headboard with a pillow at her back, and let herself indulge in reading a little while. In time, she had gotten up, washed and bathed, and gone downstairs for rather a late breakfast; all the eggs had been gone, but there was toast and porridge that might have been at its best an hour earlier.

Afterwards, she had come back upstairs, dressed in one of her plainer brown skirt suits, the sort she might have worn to work, and settled the strap of her camera spectra bag over her shoulder, and the camera spectra itself against her neck.

The Waterfront, Chrysanthe felt, was everywhere she had meant to be just then. It was busy and bustling; the market teemed with life. Ships bobbed in the harbor, boats streaming in and out of them. There were all sorts of familiar fruits and vegetables, and others which were much stranger; she knew some of those from Gior, and she had a pleasant – if brief – encounter with one of the Gioran vendors, a human who had looked at her with wide and frankly terrified eyes when Chrysanthe had approached them, and in time had softened into something resembling conversation.

“May I take a spectragram of you?” Chrysanthe had asked, looking at the tall, pale-skinned human with their array of oddly shaped and textured vegetables, the neat cloth which wove behind them, and all the bustling of the port around. The word for spectragram she had not known in Gioran, and so she had substituted the Estuan, and used the verb she thought should fit best, holding up the camera from its strap around her neck.

The Gioran had agreed; Chrysanthe had eased back, carefully, such as she could, to a sort of diagonal angle where squinting through the lens assured her she would get the whole of the stand, but where not so many people came through.

“Hold still, please?” Chrysanthe had asked, squinting through the lens. She inhaled, deeply, and recited the spell she had carefully memorized from the grim which came with the camera; she felt her field stir around her, and the spell took hold and well; light flashed, and she held very still and steady, until she felt the air around her relax.

She lowered the camera, and the vendor stared at her.

“Thank you,” Chrysanthe said, smiling.

Someone came up from the other side then, and he turned away, quite promptly, and did not look at her again.

Chrysanthe felt a warmth against her leg, then; she glanced down to see a small serious looking girl, with loads of dark hair braided and tied up with a yellow ribbon, one chubby fist buried in her skirt. A small finger pointed at the camera.

Chrysanthe smiled, really quite brightly; she was not quite anathema in this market, but she had noticed rather a lack of galdori, and certainly she did not quite seem to be – well – welcomed. She was not precisely unused to it, after so long spent working in a factory in the Dives. “It’s called a camera spectra,” Chrysanthe explained, crouching down, adjusting her skirts to fall over her legs. She held it out to the little girl. “What’s your name, little one?”

The small girl stared down at it, very intently, and did not answer; her tiny bare fingers reached out, stroking the mix of metal and wood that made up the case, curling over the edges of it. Chrysanthe turned it around, obediently, letting her explore; she had become, she felt, rather inured to the endless curiosity of small children, owing to long exposure to Phileander over the last few years.

She felt a vague prickle of unease – surely even human children weren’t sent to wander such markets alone – but most of her attention was taken up with keeping the camera from any damage or unwonted stickiness – a great problem, she knew, for small peoples of this age.

“One looks through this part here,” Chrysanthe explained, showing the viewfinder to the little girl. Her small face crinkled in a frown as she studied it, solemnly.

Rolls

Spell for photograph: Sidekick
BOTToday at 12:53 PM
@moralhazard: 1d6 = (4) = 4

[Clark Cooke]

A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

late morning of the 19th of loshis, 2720

F
or one moment a cold fear gripped him. He’d spent the last two years now in West-and-Long, helping to run the house and keeping out of the way of such folk; they never themselves had gollies stay. Though he saw them on the docks and sometimes felt the edge of a proper woobley, he answered mostly to other men and the occasional Mugrobi passive. They didn’t want much to do with him, anyway, and that was all right. He didn’t have a problem with their kind, he told himself. He thought creepingly of Dentis and then resolved to stop thinking of it.

For a moment the field was all he could feel. He wanted to say, Renata, but his voice died in his throat. The golly was saying something, but he couldn’t focus on what.

Renata was there: when Clark could see, Renata was all he could see. She was standing still in her red coat with her yellow ribbons in her hair. She was looking down at something he couldn’t see over the golly’s shoulder, and she was reaching out her other hand.

The golly was kneeling with her fine but plain brown skirt spread out over her knees. Underneath her matching brown hat, he could see her hair, which was not red but very pale and wispy. It reminded him of Miss Linetti’s, which was always slipping out of its braids and breezing every which way. The reminder felt strange with that woobly pressed against his skin. It was cut shorter than golly ladies’ usually were, the tips of it just swaying above her shoulders.

The crowd was not bustling here. Nobody was shoving around them or huffing in the way that people do, when you are making trouble for them. The southerners’ stalls were bustling, all thick with bright strange things, and he could hear them with their funny up-and-down accents. There were looks now and then for the golly and Renata, crouched in the midst.

He made himself take a step deeper into that field. It washed over his skin proper now, raising the hairs on the backs of his arms. His jaw wanted to tighten, and he relaxed it. He couldn’t relax his shoulders, drawn up almost to his ears. People were looking at him too now. He felt large and terribly small all at once.

Renata was silent as always, and so absorbed she didn’t see him. He almost smiled, but it couldn’t push its way past the deep frown on his face. Whatever it was, the golly was turning it over patiently, letting the little miss touch it and look at it. He saw smooth wood and a flash of metal, and something that might have been glass, and he felt a tug of fear.

He had never seen such things as gollies used to cast, though he’d heard of them. Circles with strange crystal balls in them. They had once got in a shipment of such things. The golly in charge – one of the few Anaxi he had had to deal with on the docks – had shouted down old Benson for dropping one so fierce you could feel the heat coming off him.

This one looked more like a clerk than any terrible sorceress. Like the lawyer Claudia had gone to about old Lorenzo’s things the summer before last, all plain smart wool and neat hair. But you never knew, and you never knew what a golly would do if a golly was angry.

“... one looks through this part here,” the golly lady was saying, and Renata was frowning intently. Down at the thing in her hands, running her little fingers over it.

“Renata,” he grunted, a little hoarse. The little miss looked up for the first time, her lips coming together softly. “Uh. Ma’am,” he grunted, swallowing. “Sorry about – sorry, ma’am. Renata,” he said more firmly, and one of Renata’s little hands balled in the fabric of the golly’s skirt.

[Chrysanthe Palmifer]

Late Morning, 19 Loshis, 2720
A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

It was, Chrysanthe thought admiringly, a very nice machine.

She had, of course, brought it over to show Amaryllis when she’d gone for St. Grumbles; Phileander had, like the little stinkbug he was, wanted not just to touch it as this quiet little girl did, but to hold it and use it himself, never mind that he couldn’t, yet. They had compromised – Chrysanthe had yielded – and she had let him press the button for a spec of Amaryllis, sitting in one of her lovely sitting room chairs and smiling at the both of them, all her hair bound up in braids.

Her somewhat-late gift to Amaryllis for St. Grumbles had been – once Phileander was sated, and she had repeatedly explained to him the importance of holding still – several snaps of Phileander, one sitting on Amaryllis’s knee, one standing solemnly and gazing at the camera, and another smiling, with his little train clutched in his hand. Amaryllis had cried when Chrysanthe had brought the specs back, developed carefully from the film in the dark room space the merchant who sold her the camera had recommended, and Chrysanthe did not think she could blame pregnancy hormones, not quite.

All the same, while she felt quite sure that Amaryllis appreciated the results of the camera spectra, that was not quite the same as admiring the camera spectra itself. It was lovely, all polished and neat, a self-contained little machine with only a few words of monite required to operate it. She doubted very much that the little human girl standing so close to her understood it in the least, but she could appreciate her admiration anyway.

“Just here,” Chrysanthe said, thinking the little girl might bend over to look at it. Instead, a chubby little finger landed solidly on the viewfinder, pressing firmly and leaving behind a smudge of finger oils, tiny whorls running along the glass. Her lips twitched in a little smile; nothing, Chrysanthe thought, which couldn’t be wiped away.

Renata, came a hoarse voice, high despite its raspy tones. Chrysanthe glanced up with the little girl; there was rather a large man standing there, looking intently down at the two of them, made all the taller by the fact that she was crouched alongside – little Renata, Chrysanthe supposed. One hand was wrapped rather intently around a basket of fruit and vegetables; the other, which must have been equally large, was shoved into his pocket.

Chrysanthe was not quite sure what she felt. Fear, she thought, would not have been an inappropriate sort of emotion – he was very large, with a wicked sort of scar running aloud the edge of his face, and a frown which was carved even deeper into the whole of it. He was, she thought, the very picture one had in mind when reading about the bad sort of human in tally dreadfuls.

On the other hand, she had worked with quite a few such large humans; Pargeter & Sons employed more than a few men with the muscles it took to shovel coal, to move machines, to handle all such tasks which asked for raw physical strength. They varied, Chrysanthe had found, as galdori did; some were dull, quite good for the task asked of them and little more, and others were thoroughly sharp. They could not, naturally, understand the inner workings of the machines, but they knew how it operated as a general rule, and sometimes she found they could make rather impressive leaps of deduction from said observations.

At the moment, his gaze was very intent on what must have been his daughter; she was standing very close to Chrysanthe, still, her fist balled in Chrysanthe’s skirt. Chrysanthe smiled at her, and stood, carefully, because afraid or not, she didn’t quite wish to be so far below the man. Standing did not make it so much better, but she liked every inch of her height, and preferred to hold to it.

She had found, Chrysanthe thought, that a firm but friendly tone was best. This was not, naturally, the factory floor, but it seemed all the same. “Good morning,” Chrysanthe said, politely. “There’s nothing to apologize for; your – daughter? – was just interested in my camera spectra, I think,” she held it lightly in both hands still, now – however incidentally – out of Renata’s reach at waist height. A small hand came up and curled around her sleeve, tugging insistently. Chrysanthe smiled back down at Renata, and lowered the camera a little so Renata, on her tiptoes, could go back to examining it.

“She’s a lovely girl,” Chrysanthe added, cheerfully, splitting her attention as best as she could between the mechanical device and its small admirer, and the very large man looking on. “How old is she?” She smiled back at the man once more.

[Clark Cooke]

A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

late morning of the 19th of loshis, 2720

C
lark stayed very still in the midst of all that woobley, because he didn’t know what else to do.

If the little miss had done anything wrong, he couldn’t see any sign of it. The golly turned and looked when Renata did, and Clark met her eyes for the fraction of a second. They were very blue, a sharp sort of blue like a clear winter sky, with softly arced brows a color darker than her hair; they’d a soft fringe of lashes, and she wasn’t wearing none of the stuff ladies liked to, her eyelids bare; they were the shape of almonds, and the pupils were very small with how bright it was, small and cold –

He looked down abruptly. But he didn’t look at the ground, not at his feet nor at her hems nor at his fruits and vegetables in his basket. He was clenching the handle fair tight in his hand. He looked at Renata instead, at her big dark eyes so much like Tess’.

He could see now he wasn’t looking that the galdor was smiling. A fair wide sort of smile on her thin face, all angles, like most of them were. He could see now she wasn’t very old; she was just a lass. When she got to her feet, the wind stirred the wispy edges of her hair above her shoulders. Renata hung stubbornly onto her skirt.

She didn’t look at her papa for long. She was wholly absorbed in the thing in the golly’s hands, which she was holding up just out of reach. He looked at it now too: something about it looked familiar. A small oblong box, polished smooth wood and metal that sparked in the morning light, with a funny sort of hole that gleamed inside with glass. It looked like it might’ve opened up.

“Good morning,” he mumbled awkwardly, a little too soon on the heels of the golly lass, his fist tightening on the basket. His knuckles were white; he relaxed them, swallowing tightly.

She talked like Miss Anderson, Clark thought, the fair nice woman Tess had wanted them to meet about the little miss’ education. Education was a new enough topic to him; he had thought maybe Claudia or Tess would want to teach her her letters, when the time came, but he supposed with the inn getting busier somebody like Miss Anderson was a good idea. He didn’t know how such things were done, but Miss Anderson had shown up one evening all quiet-like, smart-dressed, and she had sat at the kitchen table with him and Tess and Claudia talking over the expense, and what she called ‘the risks and precautions’. (Clark had once or twice before wondered what it would be like, the little miss growing up reading and him barely able to write a sentence, but he tried not to think about it.)

The tone this golly took was a little like Miss Anderson. He didn’t know why he thought that. Not like the gollies down at the docks spitting orders. Friendly, and easy enough, but firm. Not looking-down, or at least not looking down her nose. But firm.

He nodded slightly, still frowning, at the word daughter. Camera spectra, she said, and he looked at it again as she lowered it down, smiling at Renata. For the first time, he smiled a little too, dimpling his cheek. The little miss was wobbling on her tip toes with her little hand still in the golly’s skirt.

“Oh. Uh. She turns two in Roalis, ma’am.” He was still smiling just a little. There was a pause; he was utterly absorbed in watching Renata. He couldn’t even worry what she might think: he was used to it, Ain’t she quiet-like for two? but he was so full up with warmth.

“Uh,” he said uncertainly, “she’s Renata, ma’am, and I’m Clark Cooke. Sorry. Uh,” and he bowed deep, taking his other hand out of his pocket for politeness’ sake. “Camera – spectra,” he repeated. Didn't look like them as took pictures. His brow furrowed.

He almost apologized again for presuming to say so. But she didn’t seem bothered by the little miss putting her hands on it, and Renata sure was interested, biting her lip now with concentration.

[Chrysanthe Palmifer]

Late Morning, 19 Loshis, 2720
A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

Before Phileander, Chrysanthe would not have said she knew much of children or parents either. She had grown up largely without other children; Amaryllis, five years older, had been her primary companion, at least until she had gone off to Brunnhold and Chrysanthe had been left behind. There had been a host of cousins and various other relations, but few her own age, and some of those – a few male cousins in particular – had been rather awful, as playmates went, at least for the little girl Chrysanthe had been.

The problem with parents had been related, although distinct. Chrysanthe thought perhaps she might have gotten along well enough with her parents – in some ways, she had, as there had been nothing like arguments between them. They had not been interested enough for that, and their lack of interest had engendered a similar lack in her. Likely subjects in which she would have cared to put her will against theirs would have arisen. Chrysanthe found it hard to believe her dilettante father and mother would have approved of her choice in career, both the fact of her having a career and also the nature of it. Likely – judging by Amaryllis’s prompt engagement at nineteen – they might well not have approved of her unmarried state. Their deaths had put an end to such concerns, but they had not in the least helped Chrysanthe understand how a parent was meant to behave.

Of course, she had Amaryllis.

Chrysanthe had never asked her sister quite how it was she had known how to be a sister. She wouldn’t have used the term instinctive, although most of her earliest memories were of Amaryllis, and she couldn’t think how a girl of seven or eight should have known how to behave without at least some credit to instinct. Later on, she had met the families of various classmates, and come to know a little more of what it meant to be a parent (or, indeed, a child) although always from the outside looking in, and rarely with a truly young child. Nonetheless, all her lack of experience aside, Chrysanthe had only to look at Amaryllis with Phileander to know something of parenting.

Such lessons had served her well with the humans in the factory. There was, of course, rarely time for anything like conversation, but Chrysanthe had found discussion of family generally unobjectionable, though with exceptions. She had not thought, with this rather enormous man’s careful attention to the small human buried in her skirt, that this would be one of those exceptions, and she was pleased to have been right.

Two, Chrysanthe thought, looking down. She didn’t quite frown; it was somewhere shy of that. Of course, by age two, Phileander had had command of a number words, which he had deployed with great aplomb to considerable appreciation. He had even used many of them correctly, and had learned how to piece them together into phrases, or even something resembling sentences. Even when none of his words had applied to a given situation, he had still found – almost always – something to say.

Well, Chrysanthe thought, naturally it would be a bit different. She really knew so very little of children at this age. Renata was very dear, all dark hair and wide eyes, and still solemnly intent on her camera.

She had done one thing right, at least; Renata’s father was smiling. It did a good deal to alleviate the rather dour look on his face; there was a dimple in his cheek. No one, Chrysanthe felt, could look menacing with a dimple in their cheek.

“I’m Chrysanthe Palmifer,” Chrysanthe said with a polite smile. She bowed as well; the motion brought the camera down a little more, and Renata lunged for it, both hands closing over it this time. Chrysanthe laughed and crouched down rather than fully straighten up.

“Do you like cameras?” She asked Renata, smiling. Renata glanced up at her, then back down at the camera, intently.

“Has she seen anything like it before?” Chrysanthe asked Clark, glancing back up. It was hard to describe what he was doing any way other than looming, but somehow it wasn’t quite so intimidating as it had been before. She smiled at him, still holding the camera very firmly in her hands, even as small fingers explored curious and intent over metal, wood and glass.

[Clark Cooke]

A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

late morning of the 19th of loshis, 2720

H
e couldn’t tell how the golly was looking at the little miss; he’d never been much good at judging expressions. He kept looking at the thing in her hands – the camera spectra, she had said – and at Renata, her dark eyes fixed upwards.

Criss-anthy Palmifer, she introduced herself. He wasn’t so sure about that first name, but Palmifer sounded golly through and through. Whatever had been on her face, she was smiling now, far as he could tell in the corner of his eye. She bowed, and before he could step forward or stop her, catch her up in his arms or do anything at all, the little miss was reaching out both arms and grasping hands for the thing. The Ever must’ve favored those little hands this time: they got a good grip on the thing’s case.

He didn’t know what he thought would happen. If she couldn’t hold onto an apricot, she certainly couldn’t hold onto a – onto a – camera obscura. And it looked like there were glass bits in there, and all he could imagine was them dropping and cracking and shattering, and all that woobley in the air going as hot as fire. Fields couldn’t burn you, Clark knew, but they could get hot enough you could feel it on your skin like standing too close to a fire, and sometimes you caught a little anger, too, and that was the worst part of all. He had been around them a couple of times, as a boy. He didn’t like to think about it.

He didn’t know what he would’ve done for Renata. No, he knew. It wouldn’t’ve mattered, none of it, without her. He wasn’t sure he would’ve fought for anybody, but he’d fight for the little miss, least enough to get her away from something like that.

But Miss Palmifer was laughing. It was a nice sound; it reminded him almost of the way Miss Linetti laughed. She dropped into a funny kind of almost-crouch, awkward with the little miss so invested in reaching over her for the camera obscura.

Renata didn’t answer, of course. She looked up briefly, meeting Miss Palmifer’s eye with no less intensity than she had ever met anybody’s. Clark thought the answer was fair apparent in the way she was tracing every bit of gleaming metal and polished wood, her little tongue half-out with concentration.

He wondered if Miss Palmifer would ask again; most folk did. Most folk did with him, too, if he didn’t answer the first time and they cared enough. But he guessed the answer was obvious to Miss Palmifer too, because she was still smiling, letting Renata put her hands and her big dark eyes all over the strange thing, and she didn’t ask again.

He was looking at Miss Palmifer’s face again when she looked up. It was easier, when they weren’t looking at you, and he’d been curious; she was a golly, after all, and he didn’t see a lot of those, much less smiling and laughing all nice with his lass. His eyes flicked back down sharp when she looked up at him, thankfully before he could look too hard or see too much.

“No,” he mumbled. “Ma’am.”

He ought to leave it there. Tell Miss Palmifer he had to get going. Mr. Marcus wouldn’t be at market all day, and they might miss out on the fiddleheads. But the little miss looked so happy, and he got to thinking about Impressions.

He looked at Miss Palmifer, dubious, but mostly he looked at the little miss, and he couldn’t help another little smile. He came closer, a couple of steps, and then he crouched down with a grunt. Renata looked over at him, then looked back at the camera spectra. “I ain’t either. Um.” He was wearing a hat, and he took it off in one big hand, putting it in the basket which he had set to one side. His hair was tied back neat-like, and he’d just had a shave that morning. “What’s it do, Miss Palmifer?”

He had thought the little miss might benefit from hearing about it as well as touching it, but he immediately regretted the question. If it was just for magic, Miss Palmifer couldn’t tell him, and gollies didn’t always take well to being asked about magic. But if she hadn’t wanted to be asked, why had she brought it up, and why was she showing the little miss in the first place? He had almost apologized, but he set his jaw, resolute.

[Chrysanthe Palmifer]

Late Morning, 19 Loshis, 2720
A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

Clark came in a little closer, slowly, a few steps. Mr. Clarke, Chrysanthe thought, or at least so she would have called him if he had been one of the workers at Pargeter & Sons. Mr. Cooke, if he had been a foreman, of course. She did her best to learn the names of the humans who worked the factory floor, at least those she interacted with on a regular basis. She had never quite held with the practice of addressing a man of Clark’s size and age as boy. Naturally, he was not and never would be a galdor, but neither was he a boy; she could not like the imprecision of it, to say nothing of how demeaning it was. It always reminded her of being called girlie, or other such endearments which, in their purported kindness, reduced her to something less than she was.

All that aside, Clark was, Chrysanthe felt, tall almost to the point of unpleasantness, although she allowed as there was little he could do about it. He crouched down with a grunt, and a cracking noise that Chrysanthe thought must have come from his back, his gaze still fixed on his daughter. He took off his hat, then, in an oddly polite sort of way.

Chrysanthe smiled at Clark when he asked himself about the camera. She managed to shift a little; Renata was sort of between her legs at this point, a wholly odd and uncomfortable position. The little girl was rather warm, and the firm wool of her coat pressed solidly against Chrysanthe’s own skirt. At this close distance, she couldn’t help but see that it was a fine, neat coat – impressive, Chrysanthe thought with a little smile, thinking of Phileander’s determination, then and now, to fling himself into every mud puddle, spiderweb and anything else which could be construed as messy.

Now, carefully, Renata was tracing her fingers over all the edges she could find, not only the edges of the box, but the seams between the metal and wood. She found the place where it opened for the roll of film, and wriggled the tips of her fingers into it. She gave a sudden and startlingly firm tug, but Chrysanthe did not have a nephew for nothing, and had not lowered her guard in the least. The camera did not open, thankfully; Chrysanthe hated to think what the exposure would have done to her film.

“It takes specs,” Chrysanthe answered, smiling at Clark. She looked down at Renata once more, who was studying the camera with impressively sustained enthusiasm. “It’s a smaller, more modern model,” Chrysanthe said, rather pleased; she had done a good deal of looking at craft catalogues the weeks before she’d purchased it, and was very confident in the quality of the model and pleased with the size and heft, “with a much shorter exposure time.”

Chrysanthe went on. “If you’d like,” she said, looking up at Clark and then down at Renata, “I could take a spec of your daughter,” she smiled at the little girl. “She’d need to stay a bit still for a few moments – there’d be a bright flash, but nothing harmful.” She glanced back up at Clark, smiling politely still. He had an awkward habit of ducking eye contact; it really made it rather had to have a conversation. Renata tugged at the camera once more, and Chrysanthe smiled at her.

“This is where one presses the button to take a spec,” Chrysanthe explained, turning the camera towards Renata. Renata promptly pressed the button; her face lit up, and she did so again and again, as if enjoying the little click, the way the button jumped back up against her finger. Luckily without priming or spellcasting, Chrysanthe thought, the button didn’t do any harm.

“If you’ve an address where you can be reached,” Chrysanthe added over the quiet, almost rhythmic clicking, thinking to sweeten the offer in light of the uncertain frown on Clark’s face, “I’d be happy to bring you the specs once they’re developed.”

[Clark Cooke]

A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

late morning of the 19th of loshis, 2720

T
here was a picture of Lorenzo Goretti sitting on the mantle over the hearth. He looked at it sometimes still; they all did. Claudia had kept it in the attic room for years, until Lorenzo had died. Then she had taken it down and put it squarely in the sitting room over the fire. Some mornings Tess and Claudia and all the rest of them kissed it before they went about their work, like they did living folk, a peck on each cheek, which he had never really got used to. One evening, when he knew she had thought everyone else asleep, he had caught Claudia sitting downstairs talking to it, even though they all knew Lorenzo had gone back to Vita and it was nothing but a spectrogram.

He knew it was so because he could look at the old man’s eyes. He had never been able to, when Lorenzo was still alive. They had had so many lines and folds, the skin underneath his bushy bushy eyebrows flecked with stray, soft white hairs, the whites around his black eyes veined and bluish. Red-rimmed, wet where lid touched eye. Striking, because he looked at you without looking away. It had made Clark very uncomfortable for a long time.

In the picture he had looked like a kindly old man from a storybook. Even his eyes. He was sitting in a tall chair in some studio somewhere Clark couldn’t picture the other side of, with light coming in from places Clark couldn’t see. He was sitting with his hands on his knees, those gnarled hands Clark remembered holding his, warm and textured.

But he thought Tess was happy to have it. It meant a lot to her, and had meant more since Lorenzo died. She said they had saved up a lot of money and had it taken by a very nice tsat gentleman half a decade ago – before Clark had come – in case something ever happened to Lorenzo. He had asked her why, and she had said she never wanted to forget how Papa looked.

Clark never forgot how anybody looked.

Miss Palmifer was smiling something like she was proud. The little miss had given a mighty jerk on part of the case, a part as looked like it might come off; he had almost reached out to stop her, but Miss Palmifer seemed like she knew what she was doing. He wondered if she had a little sister or niece or some such. He thought probably so; their kind had big families, folk said, even if they didn’t stay as close to them as his kind did.

He nodded, taking it in. More he was watching the little miss take it in. He was almost smiling for a little while, wondering how much Renata would remember. More than she let on, he thought. More than anybody knew. Maybe when the little miss wasn’t so little, these little camera spectras would be all over the Harbor.

He was frowning again when Miss Palmifer went on. She was smiling up at him, and then down at Renata. He watched uncertainly as the little miss began pressing the button. He tightened at first, the muscles in his back aching, but then relaxed; it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Though he had known it took some sort of magic to make it work; he had heard so.

It was at address that his frown deepened even more. He tried to picture it, Miss Palmifer knocking on the Gorettis’ door and Tess answering. He thought of that strange tone in her voice when even he asked about certain things. But then he thought of Lorenzo’s picture, and Tess kissing it every morning.

“If it ain’t no trouble, ma’am,” he mumbled uncertainly.

Click, click, click, the little miss was sounding out. He shut his eyes for a moment, listening to the rhythm. He rocked a little on his haunches, back and forth, then opened his eyes.

“What, uh,” he started. “We don’t have much, ma’am,” he added, inclining his head. “But I reckon my wife’d like it. A picture of the little miss.” Renata kept clicking the button.

[Chrysanthe Palmifer]

Late Morning, 19 Loshis, 2720
A Market at the Edge of the Waterfront

It was permission, Chrysanthe thought, absurdly pleased, and she thought grudging wouldn’t have been a bad word for it, although it wasn’t quite right either. Skittish, maybe, like some of the horses she remembered from girlhood. Not their own, of course, though her father had occasionally waxed rhapsodic about the moa stables he had remembered from childhood, and Chrysanthe had read a good deal of books about girls and boys who loved moa, horses, and all manner of other beasts.

But by the time she had been born in the house in Reedlyn, the stables had been long since gone.

One of the farmers bordering the woods near the manor, however, had had horses. Amaryllis has taken Chrysanthe to visit the pasture more than once, and they had passed hours leaning over the fence, braiding daisy chains and watching the horses. Chrysanthe wasn’t sure she had ever braided a daisy chain for herself, but she remembered warmly watching Amaryllis do so. She remembered, too, when she had finally been old enough to make one herself and gift it to Amaryllis, and how delighted Amaryllis had been. She didn’t remember whether it had been messy, though it must have, made by her small chubby hands, thumbnails too short to drive through the stems; Amaryllis had admired it as if each flower were a jewel.

It was the horses she thought of though, and the large ones who had slunk away from the hands of attending grooms, stamping their hooves and huffing heavy breaths through large nostrils: not grudging, but skittish.

Click, click, click, went Renata’s finger on the button. There was a longer pause, then a slower press, which resulted in much less noise; Renata frowned and resumed her faster pace.

“It’s no trouble at all,” Chrysanthe said, friendly and firm. ”I may have to take a few tries, you understand,” she wasn’t quite sure if she should say she was new to it; she tried to edge around it. “I should think of the spec as repayment,” Chrysanthe went on, determinedly, “for the practice.”

At some point, Chrysanthe thought, she would have to stop spending endlessly on dark room time and chemicals, but she didn’t much like the idea of portrait photography, and she was rather fuzzy on other ways one could make money with a camera spectra. She didn’t have the least idea what one would generally charge for such a service, and she had the feeling Clark would flee if pressed. For the time being, she had set aside a certain amount monthly to spend on it, carved carefully from her budget, and the gifts for Amaryllis had not nearly used it up.

For a moment she thought wistfully of a house of her own, somewhere big enough for a proper dark room. It wouldn’t take much; they really didn’t need to be very large.

“Renata,” Chrysanthe said, smiling down at the little girl - she had lost interest in the button and was tugging at the seams between the metal and the wood once more - “I would like to use this machine to take a spectragram of you.” She thought of how she had explained to Phileander - she forged on. “That means you shall need to stand very still for a little while, and the later I’ll bring you something like what you see in the mirror.”

On reflection, Chrysanthe wasn’t sure Phileander had understood either; Amaryllis had been rather instrumental. She glanced up at Clark for assistance, still smiling, not relaxing even a fraction in her tight hold on the camera. “Could you help me explain, Mr. Clark?”