Serpents and Stairways

Chapter III - Part 3

Dinah had no idea what to do with a child—an adolescent, almost—that she had never even met before. She remembered once more how charismatic, pleasant Tamara's father seemed to her, with so much bursting color, as if straight off a Monet. What changed?

"Servantes, did you see her mother?" She asked, when they escaped the workshop.

"Haven't had the chance."

"Maybe they mentioned her? Some sort of 'go home, don't make your mother worry?'"

"I think, master and his daughter live in that same tower, miss."

Dinah frowned. She had already seen such stories and knew well what they implied. Consumption took not only Brontë's entire family, but also a good quarter of Dinah's classmates; cholera swept the Kingdoms of the Old Light in five pandemics in a row, and that's not even mentioning the floods of typhus. Everyone Dinah knew on both sides of the veil had someone who died.

Not just of sickness too—sometimes it was the cure that killed. Just a few years ago, cough lozenges still contained potassium chlorate—Berthollet's salt—with its charming habit of spontaneous combustion, and opium tinctures were used to cure headaches. Or, syphilis. Well-brought-up ladies never mention it out loud, but she had learned through seditious university tête-à-têtes that the sick used mercury ointments. So that the disease had something to compete with for the right to conclude one to their grave, no less.

And there were competitors. Lead chromate bid its time in mustard, copper arsenite—in compotes, boric acid—in milk, venetian ceruse along with mercury—in jolly candy dyes; Kitchen stoves, gas lines, and "whistling steam boilers" blew up; maids fell down the stairs; glass was stained with uranium oxide and hats were toughened with mercury nitrate—for when a gentleman wished not to wait for syphilis.

When Dinah was young, prudent women used to carry a flask of ammonia, testing wallpapers and fabrics before purchase for poison: the flawless lilac, pinks and the infamous Scheele's green were brought to their vibrancy by concentrated arsenic, which turned blue in ammonia. Such wares were produced, for example, by William Morris's company—a former second-grade pre-raphaelite, now thriving decorator. Dinah hardly remembered any of his paintings, but she did remember his wallpapers, which mother had ordered all the way from Albion, being torn off the walls in the living room.

Well. Bidding riddance to imported wallpapers was, probably, when her parents decided to export their daughter to get education abroad—her mother brought up the boarding school no more than a few weeks later, and Dinah got stuck in them for a good eight years.

"We'll figure out the girl later, alright?" Dinah said, even though she didn't even start considering, "I'm just so damn happy to see you, old man! How are you?"

"I'd rather have perished in battle than out of shame for my protégé's profanities. I'm fully fine, my lady."

Servantes took the girl by the arm—like a father or a grandpa could—and together they headed to the aerial lift to Silen, as fast as the unspoken charter of etiquette allowed. Walking could save them a good twenty minutes.

Dinah's nose twitched. The charred ruff collar and the felt hat, which once belonged to the farmer that had brought them here, were still on Servantes, now framing the automaton's reattached head the way they were intended to.

"Are you sure you want to keep that?" She asked, surprised at how easy it was to walk. She recognised the hat by the horse smell, which Servantes couldn't have known about. Wasn't this why they met each other? To help thy neighbor with oppressed or missing senses?

"Perhaps in time, I'll exchange this headdress for one more suitable for the stature of your chaperone, my lady," he answered, "but what if by chance we run into a familiar face, and I wouldn't be able to tip my hat in a welcoming gesture?"