Saturnalia by Paul Fleischman

Author:Paul Fleischman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2014-04-18T17:06:35+00:00

FIVE

SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT the snow stopped falling, at an hour known only to the watchmen. At nine the next morning a coach-and-four snorted and jangled through the whitened town, scattering pigs and persons alike, and halted abruptly before Mr. Currie’s, an event by contrast, known to nearly all of upper King Street.

Giles, Madam Phipp’s footman, hopped from the back of the coach and opened her door. A towering woman, dressed in mourning black from hood to shawl to shoes, she missed the coach’s bottom step, plunged her left foot into the snow, and proceeded to curse her footman, then the coach’s maker, then Mr. Rudd, who’d sold her on the previous day the brass-rimmed glasses affixed to her face, aids to sight that rendered the world a good deal blurrier than she recalled it.

“This way, Madam.” Giles guided her. Short, portly, ablaze in red livery, the footman opened the printer’s door for her. Though she preferred to make her own purchases, he decided to follow his mistress inside, thinking that she might need his assistance, and was informed to the contrary by means of a sharp crack on his knuckles from her brass-ribbed fan, an article she carried in all seasons for that purpose.

Upon hearing the shop’s bell, William entered and found the woman squinting about at the walls as if she weren’t sure where she was.

“I shall be giving a dinner a few days hence,” Madam Phipp mumbled hazily. She turned toward the boy, then wondered whether she wasn’t facing a stepladder instead. “To mark the end of my mourning time.”

“I see,” the apprentice replied.

Wishing she could make the same claim, the woman turned to her right toward his voice. “On the twenty-second, to be exact.”

“Yes, Madam.” William noted that the Curries’ Saturnalia would take place that same day.

Straining to determine precisely where he was, Madam Phipp suddenly suspected that the apprentice was staring at her, then was struck by the sight of a hen on a shelf. Emptied of patience with her spectacles, she angrily ridded her eyes of them, found she’d been viewing a mug filled with quills, and vowed to wear the lying, vile lenses no more than an hour a day—some other hour than this one.

“I’ll need ink for invitations!” she declared. “I’ll require paper! And more sealing wax!” As if the fog had suddenly lifted from her mind as well as her eyes, she directed a volley of orders toward William, paid for her purchases, strode out the door, and struck Giles smartly on the ear for not listening for her steps and opening it for her.

William watched her coach depart, then sold one copy of an apprenticeship contract to a humming young man whose low-brimmed black hat nearly obscured his eyes, sea-green eyes that lit in sudden surprise at the sight of William.

Returning to the printing room, the apprentice resumed receiving instruction from Mr. Currie on the craft of binding books. Mrs. Currie, behind them, was busy at setting type, Gwenne at trimming lamp wicks, and Amos at singing and inking the press.

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