The Magic Spoon

No-one really knows Mister Claypole’s first name. If you asked anyone who works under him in the theatre, any of his managers of patrons or whores, they might scratch their heads and speculate.  George?  Andrew?  Donald?  For some reason they will all give you the names of saints, and they will all forget to ask him if they are right.  It’s been so long since Claypole has had anyone use his name that when he reads old love letters from his first and second wives (which he does instead of attending church), he always sees it with a tiny bit of surprise.

—

Madlan Goring will someday be a staunch, respectable woman.  She will have steely grey hair and speak sternly to her servants, and she will be adored and only a little resented by her children.  And scandal will not touch her, and gossip will roll from her, because she will have pride.  Pride is your backbone, her father told her.  And as she pulls her laces loose, as she watches her petticoat crumple to the floor and hears the gasp from the bed behind her, her back straitens.   She keeps pride in her backbone, and compromises everything else.

—

When they were little, Lowri and her brother Daffydd found a cave.  A little pregnant ewe led them to it, and it was just big enough to crawl inside, and it was nice and cool that blistering summer.  And now they’re in London with it’s bewildering strangeness, still looking for a place to hide.  All they have to crawl inside is one another.

—

There are men in Gianni’s camp that had never heard the word ‘Giacomo’ before they knew him.  He uses it daily, to excuse himself or to protest his sincerity, or any of the thousand things that beg for his pontification.   And to be a fool is a great and heavy thing, but it’s better than being a sinner.

—

There was a plague that went through London, and Emm still remembers the twisted faces, the crowded graves, the plague masks in some dark corner of her mind. Very little matters to her nowadays, she finds it hard to convert her indifference into reform.  Lime and sand and the dead cover her in her nightmares, and the panting bodies of two brothers in her dreams.

—

Knives and forks have been the fashion for how long now?  But old and tried works best; Jim Holly still eats with his fingers and his knife.  His teeth are sharp, his eyes are sharper, and his mind has a jagged, brutal edge.   His knife is the only thing he carries, and the only thing he makes up stories about.

Lindsey is a stage magician, at least he was.  Now, he’s starting to suspect he may be a conduit for infernal secrets, but hasn’t let himself think about that enough to be properly alarmed.  Before, he was a proper sort, if somewhat scattered.    And sometimes he is that again, if he leaves his jacket (and what’s in his jacket pocket) on the train.   Of course, his jacket pocket always finds its way back to him, sooner or later.

—

You’ll see Valentine skulking in shadows, or perhaps as a dark shape moving between drops of rain at night.  He doesn’t show himself much, trusting whispered secrets in sleeping ears to achieve his purposes.  But soon, soon.  Soon you’ll see Valentine walking down the Evil Quarter Mile, without a care in the world again.  Wise men would caution not to meet his eye.

—

Redjack Ryan is missing a tooth.  A canine.  The left one. Or was it the right?  Doesn’t matter, what matters are the stories of how and why and what happened after.   The stories are important, are fascinating, give the lie to anything that might be hidden by that grin.

—

Watches must be wound just right.  Not enough, and they won’t keep time.  Too much, and their tightness weakens the springs. Or at least that’s what J.Q. Fiddich thinks, when he winds his ornate watch every night.  It has many functions (stars, calender, compass…), but never does seem to set exactly to the time on the high church tower.  He thinks this might be a metaphor for life, and keeps his watch well polished just in case.

Desire is a strange thing. Time can sharpen, dull, and twist desire, but want never dies. In three millenia of life, this is the only lesson Lucky Welles has ever learned.

—

Euphemia Horbruth is grand, imposing, out-sized. Her favorite niece has always, she thinks, been the contrast to her – small somehow, retiring, a pretty wallflower with a pretty smile. “But,” she’ll say to her ex-husbands, “There’s a tart in there somewhere, mark my words. I just hope it’s her husband that finds it.”

Clock lives inside his Engine. His Engine lives inside a large warehouse with thick stone walls, but Clock doesn’t live in the warehouse. He sleeps under the timekeeper and he reads the morning paper under the database wheels, and he sometimes lays across a board set over the large system of pedals that control various functions and systems, and sketches a woman with charcoal pencils on scrap paper. The woman is always the same woman, though she looks different every time. He does nothing with these sketches except to fold them carefully, and hide them in his Engine’s heart.

—

Payne loves needles more than anything else. The pinch, the pain, the blood. It clears her head, and it makes the world separate for a moment into neat little slivers. And she likes it that way. People, people who would be better off not speculating, like to say she loves drugs and tattoos and pain. But she wouldn’t notice any of that, if they weren’t all delivered on the cold, uncaring, perfect promise of a needle.

—

Sam is in a punk band.  It’s called Dead Kitties, and the one before that was called Armistice.  He’s the bassist for Dead Kitties, and he writes all the songs.  Nobody knows that though, because he’s the sort of bassist that stands at the back of the stage and watches their singer Lab Rat get all the free drinks and their guitarist Davey – even though he’s Welsh – get all the girls.  But it’s copacetic, because after the show Nika’ll probably launch herself at him and scream “YOU WERE SO AWESOME!” into his ear.