Free Goblin Moon by Teresa Edgerton Page B

are not to be despised
on that account—far otherwise. Like all fairies, they have an
exaggerated sense of justice. And it is just because Mistress
Sancreedi is so painstakingly scrupulous in all her dealings that I
was unwilling to confide in her now.”
    Caleb removed his cap and rubbed his grizzled head.
“We’re in too far to back out now.”
    Jenk took a watch out of a pocket in his waistcoat,
opened it up with a flick of his thumb, and stared numbly at the
time. The watch case was skull-shaped, done in white enamel, with
pansies and Spagnish lilies painted on the dial. It was one of the
few fine and fanciful things Jenk still owned; he expected to be
buried with it. “I have no desire to beggar myself a second time,
either by ill-conceived actions or by a failure of nerve. I have
considered (and really, I do not know why I should be so
reluctant—for pride is a vice I can ill afford), I have considered
writing to the Duke. His antiquarian leanings are as well-known as
his generosity. The books from the river are old, and the mysteries
they treat of even older; I believe they might serve to pique his
interest. In truth, had I not been too proud and too secretive to
accept his help before, I might be a wealthy man today.”
    Caleb grunted. “Zar-Wildungen? I thought him dead and
buried these ten years or more “
    Jenk smiled thinly. “Buried, in a manner of speaking,
but not yet dead. He lives much retired at the Wichtelberg, his
country estate, having abandoned all but the quietest and most
scholarly pursuits, for his health is not good—indeed, I believe he
must be well past ninety—while his Duchess remains in town leading
a life of fashionable excess. Yet even Marella Carleon could not
exhaust the Zar-Wildungen fortune, and if we can gain her lord’s
patronage, why then . . . we should have no difficulty meeting
Jakob’s price.”
    Jenk closed his watch, put it back in his waistcoat
pocket. “It grows late,” he said. “You may close up shop if you
wish. And when you are done you may join me in the laboratory. I
have something to show you which may prove of interest.”
     
     
    While Caleb barred the front door and shuttered the
windows, Jenk took down one of the lanthorns, went to a low door at
the back of the shop, and drew out his iron ring of keys. The door
was padlocked with an ancient brass lock. Jenk sorted through his
keys, found the one that he wanted, and opened the door.
    The airless room on the other side boasted but a
single window set high in one wall, and that was shuttered and
barred. The furnishings were sparse: a chair, a bench, a stool, and
two long tables constructed of scarred planks. A fireplace in one
corner had been bricked in to form an athenor, or alchemical
furnace, and a copper still was joined to the furnace by a bulb and
a glass pipe. The rest of Jenk’s laboratory equipment was arranged
on one of the tables: flasks and retorts; aludels, crucibles; and
balaenium, and the monstrous bronze mortar in which the alchemist
ground his herbs and his powders with a great iron pestle. On the
second table rested the long ebonwood coffin.
    Jenk hung his lanthorn from a hook in the beamed
ceiling and lifted the lid of the casket. When the coffin first
arrived, it had smelled of the river, damp and weedy, but as the
wood dried the river odor faded, to be replaced by another that was
dark and pungent, like a mixture of camphor and hemp. The odor was
not precisely unpleasant, but it was pervasive, clinging to Jenk’s
skin and to his clothes long after he left the room.
    But the body in the casket did not change, not in any
particular—as many times as he examined the corpse, Jenk was
surprised anew by the incorruptibility of the flesh, and by the
uncanny preservation of cloth, leather, and paper which pertained
to the corpse’s immediate vicinity.
    For the sake of experiment he had placed certain
items in the bottom of the coffin: a bouquet of violets, a loaf of
bread, and a bowl of