Completed Hack and Hobble

[Caspian]

17 Summer 521

Caspian has always been sure Mindy's housekeeper loathed him. The deep frown etched into her unpleasant face whenever she sees him, and all the furrows that follow are just one of many signs. And he’s not wrong, still, when she pulls him aside to ask for a favor.

Unwilling to tread any deeper into her lair, Caspian lingers in the doorway, eyeing the excessive collection of porcelain figurines on her table. They’re all of woodland creatures in varying states of frolic, and each one, for some reason, has enormous eyes and a plaster-wide smile. Do rabbits even have that many teeth? He tries to recall the last time he’d seen a rabbit, to begin with, that hadn’t already been skinned and parted for stew. What do cooks do with the heads? It’s not the same as grilling a fish and presenting the whole thing on a platter; he imagines being served an entire rabbit, from ears to tip of tail and all the whiskers in between and something about it isn’t the prettiest picture despite its barbaric honesty so he supposes that’s why –

“You’ve been working for Mindy for a while now,” the housekeeper interrupts his train of thought.

“I assume the same of you,” he replies, still unsure of where this is going.

“I know what you do for her.”

Caspian blinks, folds his arms, leans against the doorway with a jaunty tilt. His magic suit has him sporting a waterfall of ruffles at his wrists today, which has the right effect. “Well, don’t go on and tell the town. I thrive on a bit of mystery.”

But today’s sartorial triumph nor his general attitude do nothing for her, he knows, and he’s not surprised when she ignores him in favor of pressing, “I’m going to need the same.”

If she were younger – if she didn’t have vipers for eyes and, last week, if she hadn’t expressed in no uncertain terms that she would gladly replace his head for the stag mounted on the parlor wall – he might have gone after the easy euphemism and seen what he could do to make her blush. But those factors are not the present predicament, and he’s increasingly unsettled by the way some of the figurines’ eyes seem to be peering right through him.

Having the door at his back and both feet half out of it are a great comfort; so, naturally, she huffs across the room, brushes him aside, and shuts and locks it. He anchors himself to the coatrack plots his escape route around the great bustle of her skirts.

“I had a daughter some time ago,” the housekeeper says, “and I was young and foolish and knew I could never look after her the way she deserved. I’d like you to find her and – well. Tell me how she’s doing.”

Behind her, the audience of pastel-painted figurines, most with mouths half open, watch and wait for his next move. Amazing how much judgment can radiate off things that stand perfectly still.

Clearing his throat, Caspian says, “What do I for Mindy takes precedence, but – I can make it work.”

The housekeeper nods, and – she’s a bit different now, something chipped in her icy facade. She gestures at the armchairs by her knitting baskets and pours him a glass of conciliatory wine.

[Caspian]

“First off – I mean, not to put you on the spot, cue list of things you’re not supposed to ask women outright, but – how old are you? And by that I really mean, how old is this daughter?”

Mindy’s housekeeper pauses, which is a bit confusing given that this should be an answer a person should be able to provide right away. Caspian locks eyes with a ceramic –

Well, he isn’t entirely sure what it’s supposed to be. It has four limbs, which doesn’t narrow it down much, and the ears are triangular but only sort of, so he doesn’t think it anything canine, though he can’t be entirely sure. Whether he’ll get to the bottom of it before Mindy’s housekeeper finally answers the kitchen is up for debate, until the woman clears her throat and finally says, “She’ll be around your age now.”

“And what age do you think that is?”

“Old enough to be living on her own, making a decent wage from a respectable trade.”

Caspian’s eyes narrow. Is that a dig?

He’s pretty sure it’s a dig.

And he’d dig back, but –

The truth is he can’t exactly, at present, live up to those criteria himself.

So he can work with that answer, with a healthy five-year margin of error.

“Do I get to know what she looks like?” he says instead. “Or shall I just divine…?”

Sighing heavily, she bustles around the room, stoops in her many ruffles and skirts to open a nondescript drawer that had been concealed by tablecloth. In the interim, Caspian’s gaze flickers back to the ambiguous animal, whose identity he still can’t figure.

Is it a bear - ? A lopsided, sadly emaciated -

“This is Annette.”

Caspian unrolls the scrap of parchment he’s handed. Inside is a drawing of watercolor and ink, of a woman much younger than he’d expected. A mess of golden curls spill from beneath a blue bonnet, the ribbon under her chin a dusty pink. She has a delicate countenance, and the artist had given her a faraway look to her eyes, tilted her expression wistfully so that she’s looking off in the distance, past the edges of the scroll.

“She’s 16 there,” the housekeeper clarifies. “That was the last time I saw her, and it was at a distance. I asked one of those scribblers down by the pier to draw her, based on what I described. Between then and now, I’ve completely lost track of her.”

He tries to imagine her aged at least a decade older, maybe a decade and a half. Looks between the parchment and the tired woman leaning against the table of figurines.

He supposes he can see something there, something about the housekeeper’s hair, though graying, still bearing some of the girl’s golden shine.

“Do you know for certain she’s still in Zeltiva?” Caspian asks.

“I’m mostly sure. I mean – “ And here the woman visibly despairs for a second, her hyper critical exterior cracking for a second. “Well. Anything is possible.”

Yes, anything is.

The outcomes one fears, as well as those one wants.

He’d tell her this, if he liked her. But he doesn’t, and merely rolls the parchment back up and tucks it into his inner breast pocket.

“I can do it,” he says. “I mean. I’ll give it a try.”

[Caspian]

Though Caspian is of no mood to remain in this room any longer than absolutely necessary – does she make candles in here? Spit them out and chew them? Why is the air so petching heavy, like she’s running her own budget temple? – a bit of ink on paper isn’t going to be enough.

“Is there a neighborhood I ought to scour? Just, I don’t know, even a general quadrant? Well – okay, maybe not a quadrant, this city is shaped like a melted horseshoe. How far away from the shoreline do you think she lives?”

Through this he’s steadily backed toward the door. It comes sooner than he expects, the handle jamming into his spine. Reaching backwards blindly, he finds the handle, turns. Remembers that she’d locked it.

And it’s not like he’s trapped here, necessarily. But it does make this supremely awkward, being to any degree at the woman’s mercy.

“Back to questions one isn’t supposed to ask in polite company,” he goes on, as if he doesn’t have a new bruise blossoming on his lumbars, “but I think for the sake of the success of the mission, you can tell me what led to your giving her up in the first place.”

“As I said,” she replies curtly, “I was young and foolish. That’s really all you need to know.”

“How did you track her down at 16?”

At this the housekeeper fidgets, worrying her apron the same way Caspian sometimes frets with his handkerchiefs when he’s in a situation he finds intangibly unpleasant and too much of a hassle to immediately run away from.

“I kept an eye on her,” the woman finally says. “The family who took her, they were – a good sort. They had two other children of their own, and the wife was already pregnant with another. I was surprised that they wanted a fourth, but I suppose when one has the means, one might as well. They raised her right.” And at this, housekeeper raises her chin proudly. “She has a beautiful singing voice, clear as a bell. They put her in choirs; she was the leading soprano in all the temple holiday recitals. Even if I were to one day go blind – I’d know that voice, find her anywhere.”

But that voice must have gone quiet, somehow, if Caspian’s being brought in to find her.

“They dressed her so well. So tastefully. And it wasn’t anything flashy” – and here her eyes rove across Caspian’s outlandish outfit of the day. He doesn’t flinch – “but your eyes went to her every time. On a street full of women young and old, you’d see her and only her. Everything suited her, everything flowed. She’s very delicate, you’d almost be afraid she’d break. They put her in blue muslin most of all. They knew how well she could shine.”

That’s all well and good, and Caspian’s certainly not one above waxing poetic about the things one loves. But it isn’t the most practical set of details. “How tall was she at 16?” Did people grow much after that age? He isn’t the best example of bodily development. But if she did – unlikely it would be any real growth spurt. She might have just filled out.

“About as tall as yourself,” the housekeeper replies. And that dreamy look is gone, the place she had transported herself to evaporating. She’s back in her room, with Caspian and the confusing figurines and the heavy stench of smoke and perfume.

Without prompting, the housekeeper crosses the room, brushes him aside to unlock the door for him.

“That family you mentioned. Do you have their address?” Caspian says as he lingers on the threshold.

“Look in the University Quarter. The Hesthers. Her father was a professor.”

Caspian means to thank her – the perfunctory response – but she’s already turned away, peering down into the drawer where she’d hidden the parchment. Whatever she’s gazing at, it’s turned her expression melancholy and fatigued. Caspian excuses himself and shuts the door behind him, breathing deeply in relief in the clearer air.

[Caspian]

There are hundreds if not thousands of blonde women in Zeltiva. It’s not exactly what Caspian goes for, but he sees them nonetheless. Once a woman’s platinum blonde hair had blinded him so badly that he’d tripped right on the sidewalk. As he exits the house, he slips the parchment out of his pocket, unfurls it and regards it as he walks. Having it is better than nothing, but there’s too many potential variables at play. Who exactly is this artist? And most artists, he’d guess, particularly the ones who do portraits, likely make the end product significantly more attractive than the original source. Even if the artist hadn’t represented the girl in a more flattering light, this was based, by the housekeeper’s own admission, on secondhand description alone. And from a distance, she’d said. Add the housekeeper’s rosy glasses, as an estranged mother, and it’s entirely possible that in truth, the girl looks nothing like this at all.

Then add, of course, even assuming any of the drawing is accurate – that age may or may not have taken its toll.

He frowns down at the picture, nearly bumps into someone heading towards him on the same sidewalk, swivels out of the way at the last second. What usually happens over time? She might be thicker now, as a woman in her late twenties, realistically speaking. Less of a fawn, of a sylph. That blondness might not shine nearly so bright. Frankly, she might have cut her hair and that would be enough to completely throw him. For all he knows, he’s walked past this woman every day of his life since moving here, and if she so much as put all her hair up in a cap and her gaze straight ahead, he never would have glanced her way.

Sighing audibly, he rolls the parchment up again, stuffs it with unnecessary force back into his pocket.

It’s too much, chasing after this sort of phantom. Thank goodness the housekeeper had given him something he can actually work with.

And thank double goodness it’s in the same Quarter as the cottage, because while he knows he looks phenomenal today, he’s honestly a bit tuckered out and would very much like to put his feet up in his attic room.

“The Hesthers,” he mutters to himself, pivoting sharply left towards the street he knows is the most expedient path towards his destination. He turns the name over in his head, scans through his memories as if he’s flipping through the pages of a book. Had he heard that name before? In any of the intellectual salons he’d frequented, at any of the parties he’d wandered into this year? He doesn’t think so; it’s not the most remarkable name, but it isn’t ringing any bells, and he generally trusts his gut.

What would have been helpful is asking the housekeeper precisely what subject Professor Hesther teaches. He knows this; had known it even as he’d actively been trying to escape the room. Had weighed, in that moment, that his freedom was worth the detail.

It’ll be alright, he reasons. There can only be so many people by that name. And if there so happens, for some reason, to be a dozen Hesthers in academia, he’ll knock on every door.

[Caspian]

There’s a certain building that’s always stuck out to him in the University Quarter. Its contents aren’t particularly interesting, being squarely administrative, and with his not being a student, and in general someone not very invested in what goes on during business hours. But there’s an interesting mosaic pattern set into the façade that he’s always found unusually pretty, given how drab the city tends to be – subjective, of course. He’s the one with ruffles and lace pouring out of his sleeves – and it’s where he’s heading now.

It’s late afternoon and his attention is flagging, but nevertheless he jogs up the steps to the front door. Nearly trips on that very last one, but a furtive look around tells him no one’s noticed. His shoes click against the tiles in the foyer, click even louder down the hallway, and it’s a wonder no one’s poked their head out of the many doors he passes to hush him. He’s not entirely sure what he’s looking for, but he supposes he’ll know it when he sees it. Finally, he does – a young clerk sitting at an open desk, their head buried in a ledger.

They don’t look up right away when Caspian approaches; he finds this offensive, given that with how loudly his steps have been echoing through the entire floor, there’s no way they didn’t hear him coming.

“Can I help you?” he says pointedly, uninterested in standing there much longer. His voice booms in this intersection of the perpendicularly laid hallways, and were he not this irritated, he might have been made to feel guilty for it. “That’s your line,” he goes on, sticky-sweetly, leaning against the desk with some of the surplus material of his suit spilling out onto the desk. “And then you say…”

The clerk sighs heavily, shuts the ledger. Proves that he, too, can make an obnoxious amount of noise. “What can I help you with?”

How to phrase this?

He really should have thought of it, in concrete terms, on the twenty-minute walk here, or at least during the interminably long route he taken through this building.

“A directory,” he says after a good amount of hemming and hawing, which, admittedly, he’d drawn out just because it amuses him to see the nerve in the clerk’s temple twitch. “Do you have a directory? Of all the professors at the university, what they’re teaching, and where?”

“And why would you need something like that?”

Oof.

Right, that’s the next punch, the one he really should see coming.

“My sister’s thinking of enrolling. My little sister. Real, ah, bright mind. Like a petching flint spark. Or when you’re a kid and some other kid convinces you to stare right into the sun. So. You know. I’d like to know what’s on deck, who the professors are what they offer, before I pull out my wallet.”

It had occurred to Caspian, of course, to pass himself off as a student. But putting some distance between himself and the hypothetical personal enrolling, he feels, gives him enough leeway to feign not knowing the answer should he be asked a question of any academic specificity.

“What subject is she interested in?”

“Any. All. That’s what happens when you’re a savant, I think. World’s your oyster. So what I really think would be most helpful at this stage, for someone like her, is collecting all the cards and laying them out on the table and then deciding from there. You know what I mean?”

It can’t be like this information is under lock and key. Caspian knows this, and so does this petching clerk who really ought to see to the sauce stains on his collar. And think about a shave. Very begrudgingly, he reaches into one of the drawers beside him, and drops another ledger on the table.

“You’ve been a great help,” Caspian says.

“Please bring it back when you’re done,” the clerk replies, already turning back to the book before him. “And ideally in one piece.”

Caspian turns around, leans back against the desk as if he owns it, and loudly flips through the directory.