Page 89 of The Phoenix Bride
“Unhappiness comes, invited or no. The fire alone is proof enough of that. But I think what you’ve taught me, Cecilia, is that happiness needs to be searched for. We’ve got to take it, when it’s offered. We can’t wait for it to arrive.”
I throw my arms around him. Into his shoulder, I mumble, “Thank you.”
He returns the embrace. “That’s all right.”
“I am sorry I am sad. I don’t mean to be ungrateful.”
“You aren’t ungrateful. Far from it.” He pats my shoulder. “Hm. How to comfort you? Let me show you one more thing. I think you will like it.”
And so we leave the music room and go through the corridor, up a set of steps—and another, and another—until we are in an attic of some sort. The room has many windows, angled toward the sky.
Sam points at a strange device that has been set up pointing toward the windows, a sort of metal tube on a tall tripod. “That’s a telescope,” he says proudly. “I have just learned how to use it. Come look, through this end.”
Dubious, I approach, and crouch to peer through the lens. I see only blackness.
“I don’t think it works,” I say.
“Oh.” He runs forward and starts fiddling with one of the rings around the tube. “Perhaps now?”
I look again. The moon peers back, radiant, enormous; I gasp in astonishment.
“I can see the moon,” I say.
“Marvelous. How does it look?”
“Extraordinary.”
“I know!” Sam exclaims. “I could hardly believe it when I first saw it. Isn’t it perfect?”
“Not really,” I reply. “It isn’t perfect. It is covered in craters. And it isn’t full, either, see? It is waning. Nearly a sphere, but not quite.”
“Imperfect, then. But beautiful, all the same.”
I say, “Like a barroco.”
“What’s that?”
“A pearl. One that’s better for its imperfection.”
“Like us,” he says.
I smile. “Like us.”
Our house is gone. The blaze’s furthest point was two streets beyond ours.
Jan, also homeless, pools his resources together with mine to lease a small, three-room flat in Mile End. Rents are exceptionally high—of course, they must be, when half the housing in the city is gone—but the flat is owned by Sara’s cousin, and his charity allows us both the rooms and the small patch of garden behind the building, which is drowning in weeds and rotting roots. I go there sometimes, considering planting something new; but the task seems so monumental, the chances of failure so high, that I keep my seeds in their packages and start making medicines using purchased ingredients. I am forced to let Elizabeth Askwith go, but when I try to give her the pay for her final month, she refuses it. “Once you have a household again, David Mendes,” she tells me, “you know where to find me.”
A week after we move in, Jan and I return to the city center to walk through the wreckage. We are accompanied by a roving crowd: looters, the dispossessed, and those—like us—whosurvey for curiosity’s sake. The remains of a charred, massive building dominate this section of the city. We pause to look up at it.
I ask, “That was the shopping gallery, no?”
“Lord, yes, it was. It is hardly recognizable now.” Jan shakes his head. “Do you remember the time the beadles refused you entry? Now no one can enter at all. There is some satisfaction in that, I suppose.”
“It is a shame. It was a beautiful building.”
“Ah, buildings can be remade.” He loops an arm about my shoulders and steers me away from the remains of the gallery. His ankle has healed well, and his limp is nearly imperceptible. “But retribution,” he says. “That, surely, is eternal. An eye for an eye, is that not what the Good Book says? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
I kick a chunk of wood blocking our path, gone black and brittle in the flames. It skids away. “Suffering for sinners, without salvation for their victims. Little satisfaction in that.”
