THE GRAY CUP

By the afternoon of her second day Tamsin had decided that the Winter Garden was the only room in Vandermere Hall that had not been taught to lie.

It stood at the end of the east wing, a vast glass pavilion shaped like a ship's hull, with ribs of white-painted iron arching overhead and a floor of black and ivory tiles. Rain ran down the panes in long silver threads. Inside, the air was warm and wet and thick with the smell of loam, citrus, and crushed leaves, and the sound of hidden water trickled from a fountain behind a screen of tree ferns. There were orange trees in tubs, camellias heavy with pink blossoms, orchids hanging from the rafters like captive butterflies, and long beds of ferns that had been clipped into obedient green cushions. It was the first place she had found in the whole enormous house where the air did not feel as if it were watching her.

"Mrs. Halloway says I'm not allowed in here without Nurse," Lila said from the doorway, in the small careful voice of a child reciting a rule she had never been allowed to question.

"Mrs. Halloway told me this morning that I may use any room on the schoolroom floor and any room that the Princess's welfare requires," Tamsin said, setting a trowel and a paper packet of seeds on a bench. "I believe a child's welfare requires at least one hour in a place where something is growing, and I intend to defend that interpretation in front of anyone who cares to argue with it. Come and sit down beside me, and don't worry about your skirt."

The Princess crossed the tiles one cautious step at a time, as though the floor might be hot. She sat on the very edge of the bench, with her ankles crossed and her hands in her lap, and looked at the packet of seeds as if it were a dish she suspected had been poisoned.

"What are they?" she asked.

"Calendula, which most people call pot marigold, and which you'll find in every kitchen garden in the Hollows." Tamsin tipped a few of the small curled seeds into her palm. They looked like tiny brown commas. "It heals cuts and calms fevers, and it's also stubborn enough to grow in a coal bucket, which is one reason I like it. I'd like you to plant six of them, one at a time, in this tray of soil, and the only rule is that you have to use your fingers."

Lila stared at the tray. It was a plain wooden box filled with dark, crumbling earth, and she looked at it the way another child might look at the edge of a cliff.

"I'm not supposed to touch the ground," she said. "It makes me sick."

"Who told you that?"

"It was Nurse Crowe who told me so, and Cousin Delphine says the same." The Princess's gaze dropped to her knees. "They say plants have little spores in them, and that people like me can't breathe near them. That's why I only have the dollhouse flowers, the ones made of wax."

Tamsin kept her face calm with an effort that she felt in her molars. "That sounds like a great deal of trouble to go to for a child's health," she said. "I'd like to try something, if you're willing. We'll start with one seed, and if you feel the slightest bit unwell, I'll stop at once and take the blame myself. Will you let me show you?"

The silence lasted long enough for a fat drop of rain to slide down a pane and drop out of sight. Then Lila gave a tiny nod, and Tamsin took her hand.

It was a cold hand, small and bony, and it trembled in hers like a captured bird. Tamsin guided it down into the soil, pressed one finger into the damp earth to make a hole, and let the girl drop a seed in with the other hand. They covered it together, patting the soil gently flat. Nothing at all happened to her. The Princess drew a shaky breath, as if she had been holding it since the age of eight, and then looked up at Tamsin with eyes full of astonished relief.

"It doesn't hurt," she whispered.

"Of course it doesn't. The earth has been keeping an eye on you for a very long time, Your Highness, and it has no complaints."

By the time they had planted all six seeds, Lila had dirt under her fingernails and a smear across her cheek, and she was humming a tuneless little tune under her breath. Tamsin was in the middle of drawing a map of the tray in her notebook when she noticed that the nearest seedling, the one in the corner of the tray that had been planted last, had already pushed up a pale green loop of stem. As she watched, the loop uncurled, turned, and bent in a deliberate arc toward the girl's hand, like a flower following the sun.

Lila did not see it, since she was busy brushing soil from her skirt. Tamsin looked at the seedling, and at the child, and then very calmly closed her notebook over the page.

"We'll water them tomorrow," she said, with a steadiness that cost her something. "Seeds always grow better when they're allowed to rest."

…

Nurse Beatrice Crowe came at four o'clock.

She was a stout, tired woman of forty-five in a starched white apron, with a gray braid pinned tightly around her head and a pair of anxious brown eyes that never seemed to settle on any one thing for longer than a second. She carried a silver tray on which stood a glass of water and a small brown bottle with a glass stopper, and she moved with the careful, over-bright efficiency of a person who has been told what to do so many times that she has stopped asking why.

"It's time for Her Highness's tonic," she announced from the garden path, and then stopped short at the sight of the soil on the Princess's hands. "Oh, Your Highness, look at your hands, and Miss Reed, I do hope you didn't let her touch the soil..."

"She touched a little earth, Nurse Crowe, and she is entirely well," Tamsin said. "Perhaps you'll be so kind as to tell me what's in the bottle."

"It's a restorative, miss. Dr. Pell prescribed it for her constitution." The nurse poured a spoonful into the glass and held it out, and Lila took it without a word. She drank it with the glazed obedience of a child who has done the same thing a thousand times, and made a small face when she swallowed. "She has it three times a day, and it has done wonders for her nerves. There's no cause for you to worry."

Tamsin was not worried. She was something colder than worried. When the nurse leaned close to wipe the Princess's mouth with a napkin, a drop of the tonic fell from the lip of the glass onto the black and white tiles, and Tamsin bent down as though to pick up her pencil and caught the smell of it from six inches away.

It was bitter, the way silverweed was bitter, a harsh, green, ashy smell like a dead hearth. Underneath it, thin and sharp as a splinter, ran a second note that she recognized from the oldest pharmacopeias in the Ashby library, and that she had never expected to smell anywhere outside a book. It was the smell of a cold coin held in the mouth. It was the smell of quicksilver.

She knew exactly what the old texts said about silverweed steeped with quicksilver. They said it was a dampener, used in the early centuries to quiet the spirit of Bloodroot in those who had been judged too dangerous to be left free.

Her hand did not shake as she took the handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it against the spilled drop. She folded the cloth with great care into a small square and tucked it into her pocket, and when she straightened, she found Nurse Crowe watching her with an expression of such naked terror that for a moment Tamsin forgot what she had meant to say.

"Is something wrong, miss?" the nurse asked, in a thin voice.

"Nothing at all," Tamsin said. "I only dropped my pencil."

…

The lower kitchen of Vandermere Hall was a long vaulted cave in the basement, full of copper pots and the smell of onions and brown gravy. A dozen servants sat at the scrubbed oak table with their elbows out, ladling stew into their mouths, and the clatter of spoons fell off sharply as she came down the stairs.

Tamsin had been warned about the kitchen. She had not been warned about the quality of the silence, which was a deliberate, well-rehearsed silence that moved through the room from face to face like a wave. She walked past the long table to the scullery shelf, where a row of white china cups hung from hooks, and in the lowest corner, tucked behind a bucket, she found a single plain gray tin mug with a dent in its side.

The cook, a red-armed woman with flour on her cheek, ladled stew into a bowl and thumped it down at the far end of the table, well away from the others. Tamsin took the seat she had been given at the far end. The broth was thick with turnips and potatoes and tasted so violently of salt that her tongue curled. She took a second spoonful with the same expression she would have worn for a perfectly seasoned dish, and when she raised her eyes, she found the whole table watching her with the shining anticipation of people waiting for a dog to sneeze.

"Is it to your liking, miss?" asked one of the maids, a freckled girl with bright cheeks. "Cook says she wasn't sure how Hollow folk like their meat."

"I find it very instructive," said Tamsin. "I've always wondered how much salt a person could add to a stew before the stew gave up. I believe we've found the limit."

A footman at the end of the table snorted into his sleeve, and Mrs. Halloway's cook slammed down a ladle. The maid giggled, then stopped, as Tamsin turned her gray-blue eyes upon her and held them there. She did not glare or scowl. She simply looked at the girl with steady and undisguised interest, the way one looks at an interesting insect on a leaf, and went on looking until the girl flushed and found something to examine in her lap.

One by one she did the same to the footman, the second maid, and the boot boy, who slid off his bench entirely to polish a pan at the sink. Then she took a long, slow drink from the gray tin cup. The water inside was lukewarm and tasted of iron, and she swallowed it with every appearance of pleasure.

"A very good cup," she remarked to no one in particular. "It's so reassuring to know where one stands."

…

She was crossing the main stair hall on her way back to the schoolroom, with her head full of silverweed and quicksilver, when a small avalanche of paper came down the steps in front of her.

A round, soft, rumpled man in a plum-colored waistcoat had been descending the great staircase with his arms full of folders, and a cup of tea balanced on top of the pile. At the sight of her he stopped short, tripped over his own shoe, and sent the cup flying in a graceful arc that ended with a splash on the marble. Folders skidded across the floor. A book bounced down three steps and landed at Tamsin's feet with a smack.

"Oh, dear me, I do beg your pardon," the man said, hurrying down the stairs with his spectacles slipping to the end of his nose. "I am the clumsiest creature ever to be entrusted with a teapot. Pray do not step in it, my dear, it's an Assam and it stains most fearfully."

Tamsin bent and picked up the fallen book. It was a slim leather-bound volume with a cracked spine, and the title stamped on the front in tarnished gilt read Pharmacopoeia of the Hollows, Third Edition. She turned it over once in her hands, and her heart gave a small sharp thump of recognition, since she had been searching for exactly this edition for three years.

"Thank you, miss," said the man, taking the book gently from her fingers with a mop of white hair falling into his eyes. "Ambrose Finch, Archivist to the Imperial Household, at your service. I believe we have not been introduced, but I have heard a great deal about you from the footmen, most of it unflattering to them."

"My name is Tamsin Reed, and I'm the new tutor."

"Yes, I rather thought you might be." Finch knelt, with a groan of the knees, to gather the scattered folders, and as he did so he said in a very low voice, almost to himself, "The Archive is open to staff, Miss Reed. All the staff, including the ones who drink from gray cups."

He did not look up. He went on collecting papers, murmuring about the terrible fate of the carpet, and when she looked down at him he glanced up through the smeared lenses of his spectacles, quite mild and quite blank, as though he had said nothing out of the ordinary at all.

"Perhaps I might visit sometime this week," she said carefully.

"I'm sure the Archive would be delighted." He rose with his armful of folders and gave her a beaming, absent-minded smile. "It has been so very long since anyone read the books for their own sake."

…

That evening, when Lila had been put to bed with a story and a glass of milk, and the gas lamps along the servants' passage had been turned low, Tamsin climbed the narrow back stair to her room with a tired ache behind her eyes. She had spent two hours studying the handkerchief in the light of her lamp, and she was no closer to a decision about what to do with it. If she accused the Princess's own physician of dosing a child with a suppressant for Bloodroot, she would be dismissed within the hour and perhaps arrested before dinner. If she said nothing, the girl would drink the same spoonful tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

She was about to turn the key in her lock when she saw the paper.

It lay on the bare boards just inside the door, a single folded sheet that someone must have slid beneath it while she was out. She picked it up and held it to the lamp. The paper was good quality, cream laid stock, much finer than anything used in the servants' wing, and the handwriting on the outside said only Miss Reed in a hurried, uneven scrawl.

She opened it. There were six words inside, written in the same shaking hand, pressed so hard into the paper that the pen had torn the fibers.

Leave before the first frost.

Tamsin read it three times. Then she went to the window and looked out at the laundry yard, where a lamp burned in the washhouse and the cobbles shone with rain, and she noticed for the first time how clear the sky was beyond the chimney pots, and how bright and cold the stars looked.

It was the first week of November, and the first frost was due any night.