The Book of Speculation

4

Hermelius Peabody’s back was pressed against a wall shelf while his throat was half crushed by the forearm of a surprisingly strong Russian crone. His initial response to Madame Ryzhkova’s request had been negative, but he was rapidly becoming amenable to her position.

“An apprentice?” He coughed. “Madame, Amos is the most profitable Wild Boy I’ve encountered, not to mention that he is without speech. How precisely would you work with him?”

Ryzhkova made a noise that fell between snarl and squawk. “We will work well. The cards say it will be so.”

When Peabody protested, Madame Ryzhkova muttered a stream of Russian that sounded murderous. He’d always been somewhat frightened of her. She had simply appeared one day in New York City as he’d staggered from an inn on the East River wharves. She’d stuck her hand out of an alleyway, addressed him by his proper name, and said she would travel with him because the cards had decreed it. Though Peabody did not trust her, he couldn’t turn away someone with such a pronounced sense of theatricality. Within hours of installing her in a wagon, she’d transformed it into an exotic room of fabric, cushions, and scents that made the head spin. He was certain she knew her way around poisons; she’d once slipped a powder into his food after he’d refused to advance her wages toward a bolt of silk. “You cannot purchase what you have not yet earned,” he’d said. She’d smiled, and at eight o’clock sharp his guts had twisted, curling him up like a pill bug. The next three days were spent sweating in his wagon, shaking, until Ryzhkova appeared.

“Fortunate for you I know how to take pain away,” she’d said, shoving a handful of bitter ashes in his mouth. By sunset he was recovered. Peabody was no fool; Ryzhkova received her advance that very night.

Not three hours after Ryzhkova backed him against the wall, Peabody told Amos the way of it.

“My boy, it is time for you to move on to better things.” He beamed at Amos, who sat on a footstool. Amos shifted nervously and turned his palm upward in question.

“Have no fear; you’ve not done anything wrong, Amos. You were in fact the best Wild Boy I’ve ever had. Therein lies the problem, you see?”

Amos did not.

“You are no longer a boy. To keep you a Wild Boy is to chain your potential.” Peabody ran a hand through his beard in thought. “You’ll find I’ve devised a most exciting opportunity. Madame Ryzhkova’s taken a shine to you. I believe she has need for an apprentice.”

Amos knew some of what Madame Ryzhkova did; her cards told tales people paid handsomely to hear. But there was an insurmountable obstacle to the arrangement: apprentices spoke. He put his hand across his lips and shook his head.

Peabody gently took Amos’s hand from his mouth. “It will be of no concern. I thought upon it and began to understand her reasoning: you will be a lure. I can think of few things more intriguing than a mute fortune-teller. Unspoken futures. You and she will find the way of it. Profits, my boy, just think of it! An abundance of profits.” Peabody slapped his small desk, jostling the inkwell. He tried mightily to ignore the look of terror that crept across his protégé’s face. “Come, now. Change is a wondrous thing. It was change that brought you to me.”

Amos looked at the cushion where he spent his nights, wondering if that would change as well.

“I could never tell you to leave,” Peabody said. “You may stay here as long as you wish. I would like that.”

The transition was noted by a line in Peabody’s book: 19 June 1794. Wild Boy promoted to Apprentice Seer.

When Amos approached Madame Ryzhkova’s wagon, she opened the door before he knocked. Her hair was pulled back from her forehead by a dark green scarf knotted at the base of her skull. She smiled broadly; he could not remember ever having seen her smile. He blinked.

“Amos. Come in. I have much to show you and we are already behind.” She waved, and Amos observed her swollen, twisted thumb, how it turned sharply and bent away from the rest of her hand, and part of him latched on to this. He followed the crooked little woman into her lair and away from what he’d known.

Her wagon was surprisingly spare. There hung from its walls a few small paintings — swarthy men and an angelic young woman.

“My family,” she said, noting the direction of his gaze. “Father,” she pointed to a thickly bearded face. “Brothers.” Two younger men with Ryzhkova’s intense stare. “Katerina, my daughter,” she gestured to the young woman. “My beautiful Katya.”

The rest of the wagon held little beauty. Madame Ryzhkova slept on a rough mattress atop a traveling trunk. He imagined such a bed left her bones aching.

As if reading his thoughts, Ryzhkova said, “The seer is a blade. Too much softness dulls the mind. Silks and curtains are for guests.” He must have jumped because she laughed, a sound like wind through grass. “Peabody, he likes too much comfort. Yes, it is good you came here before he made you dull. Now, sit. Listen.”

Where Peabody’s face was full, Madame Ryzhkova’s was hollow, the skin pleated and rumpled. Her nose stood perpendicular to itself, a large protuberance turning its tip sharply downward. Her hair stuck out from beneath her scarf, iron wires pointing in all directions. Amos found her eyes fascinating; dark gray in color, he’d seen their like only in animals — the color of goats’ eyes before they rammed.

She pulled an empty crate into the center of the wagon floor and motioned for Amos to sit beside it. On it she placed a lacquered black box adorned with pictures in brilliant oranges and reds, each outlined with gold. Amos was drawn to a caged bird whose long tail feathers curled around the box’s edge.

“The firebird,” Ryzhkova said. “You like him, yes? You’ll like even better what is inside.”

She opened the box and revealed what looked to be a deck of playing cards. The back of each card was inked a distinctive deep orange. “Watch. Listen,” she said and tugged at an earlobe. She set the box on the floor and began turning the cards face up. Each flip of paper revealed a masterpiece — the tall figure of a woman holding a single sharp sword, the sun beating down on a field, a hand holding a star, all in meticulous detail. The old woman touched them with reverence.

When the crate was covered in cards she said, “I will tell you their names and you will learn their faces, how and where we set them. In this way we speak.” She pointed to the pictures and explained them just as Peabody had once explained people. “Fool is fool because of blind happiness. He does not see misfortune.” The card depicted a young man about to merrily walk off a cliff. “Pride before the fall. He is like a child. Like you.” Ryzhkova smiled. He looked away from her cracked, yellowed teeth to the card and the little dog that pulled at the Fool’s curled shoe.

“Dog means many things. Protector, enemy. It depends.” She talked for hours as her bent hands drew lines and crosses over the symbols. Deep in the night, she patted the crate and chuckled at Amos. “You listen well. We will make good work. I see you yawn. The tired mind does not hear well. To bed with you.” With a light kick to his shin, she shooed him from the wagon. “Tomorrow you will come again and I will teach.”

Ryzhkova instructed after shows, by candlelight. Rich red and blue fabrics were left hanging if she was tired, making Amos’s classroom a gentle chamber for watching, listening, and on occasion vanishing. Ryzhkova’s rhythmic speech lulled him until he became part of the cards, falling into them and letting his body disappear. When this happened, she pounded her boot on the floor and shouted a single guttural word. Once he reappeared she smiled, slapped his hand, and started anew.

Amos began to learn. He grew to love the Fool, saturated with yellow and orange — he liked the dog, how it at the last moment pulled its master to safety. He became accustomed to Ryzhkova’s voice; it reminded him of wind in trees and the days when he had run through forests. Over time he found that even when not in her presence her voice vibrated through him. On evenings between towns he watched Ryzhkova lay cards — a cross with a line down the side. Two cards set across each other, then one above and one below, one to the left and its mirror on the right. Four cards down the side. What was to come, what would affect it, what ruled at the moment, and the question’s outcome. She did readings for unvoiced queries, answering blank nothings.

“Chariot,” she said, and turned a card up on the makeshift table. A man on a throne, pulled by animals with human heads. Amos shifted, uncomfortable at the sight of the uncanny animal men. “Conquest and journey. Triumph. See? Man ruling over beast.” She rubbed her knuckles through his hair and clucked at him as if he were her child. “Paired with this card, makes much good.” She set another card at its side. “World, see?” She raised an arm as though gesturing to the sky. “Not the woman in center but all around the woman, yes?” He nodded, eyes focused on the dancing woman’s bare form and her knowing expression.

Before and after lessons Ryzhkova cleared the wagon with a smoldering bushel of herbs that stank of horse sweat. “Smudge,” she coughed. “This is how to clear with fire, how you keep cards clear. Clean.” She wrote words in the air with smoke plumes. “It is not the cards that tell the future as much as the person holding them. Me, you, whoever asks the question.” She tapped the herbs against the wagon’s door, sending embers and ash tumbling. “People touch the cards, leave themselves behind. Dreams. Hope. All trapped inside the cards.” When the room became oppressive she threw the door open and let in the night air. “You. Me. We have no need for dreams from others. Sometimes bad thoughts, bad ideas, get caught in them. You and I, we clear them. Clean, good cards.” She tossed the burned herbs to a blackened spot on the floor and snuffed the embers with a boot heel. She patted his head and the boy and the animal inside him smiled.

She taught him how to bind his hair, giving him one of her silks, a beautiful cloth covered with complex purple and gold patterns. She first twisted his hair into a coil, then folded the silk around it and wound it about his head.

“Good for appearance.”

His scalp ached, but in time the pain eased, and the effect was dramatic. He was transformed from a nut-brown boy easily mistaken for a savage into an elegant, foreign young man. Ryzhkova clapped in praise of her efforts. “Now you look a proper young man of fate and destiny.” Under her watchful crinkling eyes he felt himself changing. Inexplicably he began to think of the little house and the brown-haired woman who had smelled so familiar.

* * *

Amos was a solitary creature. Too many eyes on him at once made him itch, and meals with the troupe were like being trapped in a game with unknown rules. He liked to while away rainy mornings paging through Peabody’s book, tracing his fingers over sketches. When Ryzhkova was too tired to teach and shooed him from her wagon he spent his evenings with the small horse, a lovely animal called Sugar Nip, who was ruddy brown, but for a white blaze down her muzzle. She was perfect, except in that she was one eighth the size of what she should be and did not seem to know it. She snorted and stamped as well as any of the cart horses, but was quiet when Amos sat with her. When he hunkered in the straw and pressed his forehead to hers, he felt a warm calm. He enjoyed the quiet that came from combing her forelock, and snatched carrots and apples for her, tucking them deep into the pockets of his britches.

Three days after Ryzhkova bound his hair, she waved him off after a complex lesson on reversed cards. “To bed, boy. You make me weary.”

Amos made his way to the wagon Sugar Nip shared with the animal known as llama. He dug through his pocket, searching for a radish he’d kept for her. He was running his hand around it when he walked into Benno. Startled, he gasped.

Benno laughed. “Did I surprise you, Amos? I’d thought that difficult to do.” He leaned against the wagon, stretching so that inside his striped pantaloons his knees appeared to bend backward.

Amos shrugged then nodded. From time to time he’d sat beside Benno at meals and watched him perform, but he knew little about him other than that he was friendly, and seemed well liked among the women.

“Melina spied you leaving Madame Ryzhkova’s wagon,” he continued. Benno said the juggler’s name with an approximation of a smile, as his scar held half his mouth fixed.

Amos warmed at the mention of Melina. He’d watched her too, from across a campfire and through the curtains of the Wild Boy cage as she kept spoons and knives, eggs and pins spinning in flight. She had curling red hair, a sweet face, and a supple way of moving.

“She claimed Madame had worked a change upon you. I quite agree.” Benno tugged at his own brown hair, tied neatly with a piece of black ribbon. “Perhaps if I pull my hair up rather than down, Melina will look at me, too. Do you think?”

Amos’s brows drew together and Benno chuckled. “Worry not. I laugh at myself, not you, my friend. Madame Ryzhkova has afforded you the opportunity to show you are fine of face, whereas I…” He shrugged and touched his scar.

Amos looked at the corded skin, how it made a perpetual grimace, then took Benno by the arm and led him into Sugar Nip’s wagon. He gave Benno the radish to feed her and shared with him the simple peace that came from stroking the little horse’s nose.

They passed an hour in silence, after which Benno said, “I had thought you merely interesting. I was mistaken. You are a friend.”

He clapped Benno lightly on the back, as Peabody had done with him.

* * *

Ryzhkova began teaching Amos how to behave with her clients — most of whom were women. “History is a man,” she said. “Future is a woman; that is why they come.” When women came in, their skirts filled the front half of the wagon with yards of fabric; thick with sage smoke, tallow, and the warmth of three bodies, the space became a dreamlike sanctum. Amos noticed that people stammered when first speaking to Ryzhkova. He’d once felt that unease; Ryzhkova could be terrifying, but he’d learned that she was soft, too. She touched their hands during readings, a reassurance here, an encouragement there.

She urged specificity in questions and excruciating detail. “Truth brings more truth, yes?” Men asked mostly about their businesses, future harvests, or the identity of the fellow who stole a pig. Nearly all the women asked Madame Ryzhkova about love. Amos liked these readings best because Ryzhkova cooed, petted, and praised them. He pictured Melina’s round cheeks, her quick hands, and wondered if she dreamt about love.

Once the women left, Ryzhkova cursed their idiocy. “Can she not see the man is sleeping with other man’s wife? You see this card? Look, look.” She jabbed a finger at the Ace of Cups, which sat firmly in the position ruling the present. “See the water?” Streams of water spilled from a cup held aloft by a mystical hand. “Information. Communication. Rivers of lies he tells.” She laughed.

Amos enjoyed seeing her face move from sweet and kind to disgusted, all of which melted into tired laughter.

Months passed with Amos learning, listening, and at last turning cards for Ryzhkova, clearing them with herb smoke, and taking them from and returning them to their fascinating box. He ate meals with Benno, stole glances at Melina, and spent nights listening to Peabody tut over his books or the occasional correspondence he received from Zachary. Peabody remarked that Amos had begun to smile more. Amos shrugged.

“You’ve grown into your skin,” Peabody said, peering over the top of a letter.

Amos nodded, but he felt empty, like he’d stretched but his insides had remained small. His dreams were scented with curing tobacco.

A year into Amos’s apprenticeship the menagerie stopped on the banks of the Schuylkill as they ventured toward Philadelphia. The fog off the water hung heavy. Amos had been sitting on the hinged steps to Peabody’s wagon, watching Nat haul water from the river in sloshing buckets, when Ryzhkova’s gnarled hands curled around his and pulled him toward her wagon. Her knuckles crushed his fingers and he thought of chicken bones scattered around the fire after a meal.

“Come. It is time to learn who you are,” she said. Amos could do little but follow. From across the wide circle of wagons, he caught Benno’s eye. The acrobat winked. “I will read your cards, and after you’ll be an apprentice no longer.”

They had of late acquired two small stools in Croton, but Ryzhkova’s stare told him to sit on the floor. She tapped his shoulder and urged him down. “More grounded.” She patted the boards. “Good for cards.”

She had draped the walls and ceiling with cloth as she would for their clients, but the portraits looked out from between the folds of fabric. She gestured to the paintings. “It is good for them to watch. I paint them from memory. Except Katerina. My Katya sat for me.” Each portrait was illuminated with gold. “When my hand was steady, before the fingers bent.”

Her eyes trapped him as she began the ritual of cleansing. She produced a bushel of herbs from an unseen apron pocket, lit them with a candle, and began making symbols in smoke.

“Today, you,” she said. “To tell others what will be is to become part of fate.” The popping of hips and back preceded her sitting. She winced, folded her legs, and faced him. He realized the cart must be uncomfortable for a woman of her years. “You must know your own fate to read the cards, so not to mix your tale with others’. You see?”

She smacked a card to the floor. The Page of Pentacles, a young man, dark in skin and hair, holding a single star, would represent Amos in the reading. “Smart, eh? Like you. Stubborn. Scared. Young body, old mind.” She tapped the center of his forehead with a sharp fingernail before turning another card. She moved so quickly Amos could barely follow.

“Queen of Cups. Much water. Change. She dreams, yes? Rules over you.” A fair-skinned woman, dark haired, light eyed. Ryzhkova’s crooked fingers danced and twitched as she spoke. The wagon began to feel small, as though it could not contain them and his body might burst through it. Something was happening. Ryzhkova turned over a card and blanched. A dark card. Lightning cut across its background.

Her stooped spine jolted straight. Her eyes rolled back, unseeing. Amos reached for her and she clamped down on his wrist. A flat, strange voice flowed from her.

“Water comes, strangling what it touches as if made flesh. Father, mother, all will wither. You will wear and break until there is nothing. For you it will be as water cuts stone.”

A whisper crawled up Amos’s neck. He snatched his hand from Ryzhkova. She shrieked.

He jumped, feet skittering on the floor, then leaned in to look at the reading. Ryzhkova quickly covered the cards and cleared them away, muttering in a language that was a hypnotic mix of thumping and lilting. She folded the deck into a scarf and stuffed it back into the box, then closed her eyes and breathed. Amos could not say how much time passed before she moved again, before she said, “Strong future. Much change. Beware of women.”

She departed, leaving him alone in the wagon.

A month passed. Ryzhkova made no mention of the reading, though she took to asking him to spend more time with her at the close of day. He did not pry.

In summer the roads through New Jersey flooded and the wagons became mired, slowing northward travel to the promised prosperity of the Hudson River Valley. Days of backbreaking pulling, pushing, and digging wore on the troupe. Amos and Benno were too tired to stand straight, and even Nat’s strength was exhausted. By the time they reached the Hudson, Amos was unable keep his eyes open to study cards.

When his head drooped, Ryzhkova brushed his muddy cheek. “I would paint you,” she whispered. “I would put your face with my family.”

That night, Amos tried to sleep in Peabody’s wagon but could not. His legs ached with restlessness and his mattress stuck him no matter which way he turned — odd, as it had not bothered him before. Racing thoughts plagued him, of the reading Ryzhkova had done, the seer’s hands moving the cards around, of the dark one he’d seen only briefly. Its image refused to take shape. He’d sat through countless readings and had never seen Ryzhkova have such a spell. Perhaps she was ill. The thought troubled him. He opened the wagon door, silencing the hinge with his palm so as not to disturb Peabody. Peabody talked to himself, sketching and scrawling as he murmured the occasional comment about “impossible roadways.” Amos smiled despite his disquiet.

Outside the sky flickered with heat lightning and balmy air made his limbs slow. He heard the snapping of a fire that others tended and watched their shadows trip from the flames, Susanna’s cracking and twisting as she practiced contortions.

From the woods came movement.

A volley of electricity lit the night a bright purple, illuminating the campground with the harshness of midday. Were it not for the flash, he would not have seen the girl stumble from the trees, drenched, shivering, clothed in a nightdress that clung to her legs, dirty and sodden. She wore no shoes. Her feet were bloodied, and her black hair hung to her waist, riddled with knots and leaves. She was a convergence of angles and curves, light and dark. His feet hit the ground noiselessly as he moved toward her.

* * *

Peabody watched Amos leave the wagon and run toward the woods. He gazed in the direction the young man traveled and his eyes widened. Between fog, lightning, and moonlight, the girl looked utterly impossible. Had he not been a skeptical man well versed in fantastical embellishment, he would have thought her a wood sprite. He observed Amos running and could not help but smile. 20th May 1796. Hudson, past Croton. Spring lightning storm brings excellent potential and a woman of unsurpassed, most ethereal beauty. He snuffed the candle he’d been working by and stood by the door to the wagon in hopeful observation. “Yes, dear boy, bring her to us.”

* * *

From her doorway, Madame Ryzhkova saw the girl’s pallid complexion, the ink-dark hair, that she was soaked to the bone. The storm was dry and the river lay in the other direction. Through the dirt, her skin shimmered as if made of water. No woman, no girl, looked as such. The girl was something Ryzhkova had not seen in long years, not since her father had gone missing. She’d left everything she’d known to flee from it. She would not say its name. To name such things was to give them power, and yet it was impossible to stop her mind from whispering.