234. Absent Candle

234. Absent Candle

I followed my laughing, chattering cousins through the woods,  till we got to a brick  cottage with a large and long rectangular wooden building next to it. These were Uncle Brightfire’s  home away from home and his smithy. Before we got there, the air was already full of the odour of faux meat being roasted, and now I could see this came from a large barbecue loaded with faux suasages and steaks and a big grill for seafood, prawns and lobsters and scallops and even pearl oysters, all faux, of course, but of the highest quality. Attending the barbecue was Uncle Brighhtfire himself.

“Pearl is always tired of cooking all day, so I prepare dinner. She brings dessert with her, though, prepared by my ******* grandma-in-law. You know that old frump Granny Milksops, don’t you?”

“And Pearl too,” I nodded.

“It’s a wonder the bloody old witch doesn’t poison the desserts she sends here. She doesn’t like me, and that’s an understatement. Pearl almost stopped being her favorite granddaughter when she told her ******gran she was going to marry me one way or another. With or without her ****** blessing. Pearl thinks Milksops has grudingly accepted me, but I know better. The *******day that hag prepares a dessert meant only for me will be the *******day I ******* die. So far I suppose I’m safe because she doesn’t want to risk poisoning her great-grandkids.”

I didn’t ask why Granny Milksops didn’t want Pearl to marry Uncle Brightfire.  I supposed it would be rude to. But I guess he sort of  told me anyway.

“She would have preferred for Pearl to hook  Gen, of course, because he pretends to be tame around old foggies. But he was taken since he was born. Abducted by that scheming matchmaker, Aunt Cybela. That indecent blue fairy set her evil eye  on him for her insipid daughter since she first saw him in wet diapers. Milksops would have prefered any of my brothers to me,  or even Fishfin the fish cook, though she loathed the man because he took sips right out of the bottles of her sherries and cooking wines when he had no need to. Our wine cellar was always open. He could have taken bottles from there for himself. Or he could have used a glass. So ******* unsanitary, Fishfin. Ah, the Milksops would have preferred even anyone *******else for the matter, because  only I used to dry her moist plumcakes and burn her toast black when I sneaked into the kitchen. Because I like my food charred! Not to worry. Yours won’t be tonight.” He turned the lobsters and the prawns drenched in luxuriously golden olive oil, male and female garlic and thick salt all over and added, “My kids would kill me if I burnt their dinners. They don’t like to eat ashes. They take after their *******great gran. Can you believe it?” He extracted a fat pearl from one of the oysters and said to his wife, "Look Pearl, another one for you. One that almost got away." And he tossed the pearl gently into a little clay bowl that already held about two dozen others.  

Speaking of kids, my cousins had already turned themselves back into the unlit version of themselves. There were six of them there, Ember and Noon, Lambert and Dagobert and Iggy and Beacon. They looked like normal kids now, only all ruddy and flushed and even feverish and each smelling a little of a different kind of burning wood or herb. I detected rosemary, lemongrass,  eucalyptus, cedar, fir or sandalwood  when one or another of them came near me.

“Toffee cheesecake!” I heard a female voice say. Pearl had just arrived and she was telling her kids what she had brought with her for dessert.

“You left Candy with her blooming gran again?” asked Uncle Brightfire. “****! She should have come to have dinner with her cousin.”

“Ah, she’s very little and won’t be missed much. You’ll be spared her crying,” said Pearl.

Uncle Brightfire shrugged and shook his head. “That kid is going to learn to hate me,” he muttered to me. “I never get to see her.”

“Candle is our baby sister,” explained Iggy.

“I know her,” I said. I had seen the little fairy in the Gentlerains’ kitchen. She was a cute baby who made lots of cooing noises as she flew giddily about with her gossamer wings and a cookie cutter or a whisk longer than her arm in her little blandishing hand.

“She’s not much like us.”

“Hush!” said Noon. “She’s still little!”

“All she can light is matches. I could have gone up in a blaze that would have burnt this forest down the very day I was born.”

“Hush! Dad won’t say it outright, but he thinks it’s Ember who is best at handling fire, not you. He once called her a daughter of Brigid, and he begins to smile when he sees the quality of her work at the smithy, though he tries to pretend he has no favourites.”

“Candy can’t shake gold!” contributed Lamb.

“Hush!” said Noon again. “She’ll do that when she’s ready. She’s not even one year old and she has made this lovely cheesecake.”

“I have never seen a more beautiful one,” I said. That was true, and I have seen a good many cheesecakes.

“Well, that’s lucky, because one has to be good at something if one can’t shake gold,” said Dago.

“Hush!” said Noon. “What isn’t lucky is to speak of gold.”

Shaking gold means that these kids only had to shake themselves for gold pieces to fall from their armpits and ears when they wanted them to.

Pearl’s attitude was what I most noticed that evening, aside from Candle’s toffee cheesecake being scrumptious as well as outstandingly nice to look at and Uncle Brightfire’s secret  barbecue sauces being really good. I didn’t know Pearl well, so I couldn’t tell if she was always the way she was that night or not, but I had to ask myself that, because her behaviour seemed to me rather strange. When Uncle Brightfire was around, she looked very cheerful and sounded very jolly. But when she was out of his sight, she looked  nervous and worried and even miserable. And every now and again she would look up at the moon as if she expected to find something change there. I had never noticed her being strange in any way when she was at Uncle Gen and Aunt Mabel's.

Uncle Brightfire formed a half-orb over and around us and that kept snow that began to fall off us. There was a hole at the top of it where the smoke from the barbecue and a large bonfire all headed steadily and through which it vanished into the night. We had dinner at a long wooden table that walked out of the cottage by itself with all the dishes and glasses and napkins and spoons, forks and knives  and everything we needed already on it. All these utensils were made of paper or wood, and Uncle Brightfire joked about a blacksmith's knives being made of wood. Once we were done eating, Pearl pulled at a corner of the paper tablecloth and wrapped everything on the table in that and cast the resulting bundle into the bonfire. After dinner, we sat cosily round the bonfire and the kids said they would give a concert to entertain me and began to dance and sing and play olingoglorias and white pipes, metal pandrums and make'emdeafs. While they were singing and chortling and leaping about the fire like wild wraiths, I studied Pearl, who was sitting by my side, watching her face change from happy to miserable and back again. Then I felt something scratch my ear.

“Ask her!” buzzed the Leafy Vinny’s tiny, but deep and now quivering voice into my ear.

And I turned to Pearl and whispered very, very softly into her own ear, “Can I be of help?”

She turned and looked at me as if she had never seen me before. I thought she had misunderstood me and was about to slap me for being impertinent. But what she did was murmur, “Maybe.”

And the next chance she got, she clasped my shoulder and said, “Mabelle’s kitchen, tomorrow morning. At ten, and come in through the back door.  Your aunt will never even notice you are there, and your uncle  will have left to chase monsters or whatever he does away from home.”

I was asking myself what sort of a mess I was now in when my cousins asked me if I could sing or dance or do anything like that.

“This one is sure to play the harp,” said Dagobert.

“No, but you’ve made me want to, and I’ll find myself a teacher as soon as I can,” I said, thinking of Michael O’Toora, who is a grand harper. “If I had a violin, maybe I could remember something I once learned to play.”

They produced a violin and instead of interrogating Vinny to learn what Pearl’s problem was about, I found myself playing Amapola, the poppy song.

I don’t want to end this chapter without answering those of you who are asking what on earth an olingogloria is. This happens to be a mechanical but most deceptively lifelike bird that resembles the roses of Alexandria in that it is red at night and white by day. It emits the sound olingo repeatedly and musically  and now and again it resounds as if it has chirped gloria. I know this sounds weird, but this bird sings these sounds in a literrally enchanting manner. Listening to it can make you feel like you have gained bliss and reached ecstasy. White pipes are made from prehistoric bones and sound more like ancestral whistling than anything else and metal pandrums are a cross between a covered cauldron and a tambourine and you can play them with your hands or climb up on them and play them tap dancing with your feet. As for make'emdeafs, originally used in warfare, these are drums that put blasting cannons to shame and are each worth ten, a hundred, or a thousand normal drums depending on how crazy the manufacturer is. They are not something one really wants to have close by, or even far off.