The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The woman blinked, transforming her native-born elegance into a fish-like gawping. It made Sylvia stand a little taller. Without her furs and title, the lady was no better than her governess.

“What?” she finally said.

“I quit. I’m leaving. I’ve had enough. I quit.” She felt like a general who’d won a battle.

“This is outrageous.”

“This is not the Middle Ages,” she said, imagining tearing that medieval tapestry to bits. “I can leave when I like.”

“But what will you do? I certainly won’t be writing you a referral after this.”

“Anything I want,” she shot back without thinking, then tilted her head, considering. “Maybe I’ll go to America. Hollywood. I’ll be a movie star.”

“You’re delusional.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“You’ll fail. And you’ll never find another position as a governess.”

“Thank God,” Sylvia said, and went to fetch her things.

SYLVIA REACHED THE stairs that led down from the children’s wing to the back door when a figure stopped her. Little Anne in her nightgown, hugging her flaxen-haired doll.

“Anne. Hello.”

“Hello.”

“And then good-bye, rather. I’m leaving.”

“I know,” the girl said. “I’ll miss you.”

“Pardon? Really?”

“You’re the best governess we’ve ever had. You listen.”

“Oh, Anne. But you understand that I have to leave.”

“Oh yes. It’s the only sane choice.”

Sylvia smiled. “There’s a good girl, Anne.”

Anne smiled, too, and wandered back to bed.

Suitcase in hand, Sylvia left through the back door and walked away from the Smythe-Hesling manor with a spring in her step.

Storage

The housekeeper watched the Smythe-Helsing children and their governess depart, then went to the parlor, to the tapestry hanging in the center of a group of portraits. Odd, faded, ambiguous, it seemed to change shape based on how one tilted one’s head when looking at it. A fascinating piece. The housekeeper took it down off its nail, rolled it up, and carried it to a downstairs room, to put with other ambiguous experiments. On the way, Lambshead removed the wig and false nose, and dispensed with the stooped posture that had transformed him.

There was nothing, he considered, like a little firsthand observation in one’s own home.

Ambrose and the Ancient

Spirits of East and West

By Garth Nix

Ambrose Farnington was not particularly well-equipped to live an ordinary life. An adventurer in the Near East before the Great War, the war itself had seen him variously engaged in clandestine and very cold operations in the mountains between Turkey and Russia; commanding an infantry battalion in France and Belgium; and then, after almost a day buried in his headquarters dugout in the company of several dead and dismembered companions, as a very fragile convalescent in a nursing home called Grandway House, in Lancashire.

Most recently, a year of fishing and walking near Fort William had assisted the recovery begun under the care of the neurasthenic specialists at Grandway, and by the early months of 1920, the former temporary Lieutenant Colonel Farnington felt that he was almost ready to reemerge into the world. The only question was in what capacity. The year in the Scottish bothy with only his fishing gear, guns, and a borrowed dog for company had also largely exhausted his ready funds, which had been stricken by his remaining parent’s ill-timed death, his father putting the capstone on a lifetime of setting a very bad example by leaving a great deal of debt fraudulently incurred in his only child’s name.

Ambrose considered the question of his finances and employment as he sorted through the very thin pile of correspondence on the end of the kitchen table he was using as a writing desk. The bothy had been lent to him with the dog, and though both belonged to Robert Cameron, a very close friend from his days at Peterhouse College in Cambridge, his continued presence there prevented the employment of bothy and dog by a gamekeeper who would usually patrol the western borders of Robert’s estate. Besides, Ambrose did not wish to remain a burden on one of the few of his friends who was still alive.

It was time to move on, but the question was: on to what and where?

“I should make an appreciation of my situation and set out my qualities and achievements, Nellie,” said Ambrose to the dog, who was lying down with her shaggy head on his left foot. Nellie raised one ear, but made no other movement, as Ambrose unscrewed his pen and set out to write on the back of a bill for a bamboo fishing rod supplied by T. H. Sowerbutt’s of London.

Jonathan Nix’s etching “Tree Spirits Rising,” honoring Dr. Lambshead’s period of interest in “bushes, bramble, herbs, and eccentric ground cover.”