And then I pick up my skirts and hurry to meet O’Neill. “You’ve grown taller,” I say as he regains his footing and brushes the dirt from his tan trousers and brightly embroidered vest.
“Scarff tells me that he absolutely will not buy me another pair of trousers till next spring, even if they’re at my knees come New Year’s Day,” the blond young man says, laughing. He embraces me before I can object. Not that I would have, truly. He smells of spices and strong soap, like Christmas morning come early. “There now,” he says. “Now I am made welcome.”
Osbert leaps the garden gate and tackles O’Neill, licking his face with a forked and silvery tongue.
“Ha!” Maren says. “Now you are made welcome, indeed!” She puts a hand over her mouth and giggles. The webbing between her fingers extends almost to her knuckles, a pale, translucent green.
“Osbert! Get off me, you behemoth!” O’Neill does not laugh with Maren. His eyes are fixed on her affected hand.
Noticing, Maren slips her hands into the pockets of her skirt. “What are you staring at, peddler boy?” Her teasing is accompanied by the batting of eyelashes, a blatant attempt to distract O’Neill from what he has seen.
With a scowl, O’Neill pushes Osbert aside—and it is no small feat to move an agitated hundred-pound wyvern. He stands up, filthy and frowning. “Show me your hands, Maren.”
“No.” Her lower lip protrudes in an unusually charming pout.
He grabs at her arm and tries to pull her hand from its hiding place. She lets out a shriek.
“What is all this?” a voice booms, silencing everything, right down to the last bird in the hedges. Scarff approaches like a slow-moving thundercloud, his typically jolly expression absent from his bushy-bearded face. “O’Neill! Have I brought you up to accost young ladies and thereby cause them to rent the air with tones befitting a tribe of banshees?”
“Not at all, sir.” O’Neill steps away from Maren and stands as straight and solemn as a soldier.
Scarff taps O’Neill’s elbow with his ebony walking stick. “What have you to say to the lady?”
“I beg your pardon, Maren,” O’Neill says crisply.
“Now, boy, since you are remembering your manners, perhaps you could show the ladies our recent acquisitions. The Turkish collection would certainly spark their interest.” Finally, a smile blooms between Scarff’s fluffy mustache and beard. “How we have missed you, dearest girls!” He lays a hand on one of my cheeks and one of Maren’s and sighs like a king over his treasure hoard. “In all my days, in all this wide world, never have I seen such lovely girls. Except for one.”
“Auntie Verity,” Maren volunteers.
“Intelligent as well as beautiful, so you are.” His laugh is a low rumble.
“Enough of your blather,” Auntie says from behind her beau. “Come now, Ezra, and have tea with me while the children look at the wares.”
He bows to us. “Your most humble servant.” Arm in arm, Scarff and Auntie walk toward the cottage, their footsteps perfectly aligned.
“Come,” O’Neill says.
All of our troubles and disputes vanish as we enter the caravan.
“Be lit,” O’Neill commands as he turns the brass knob on the lantern suspended in the center of the room. An intense golden light floods every corner. I squint until the light fades to a more comfortable glow.
The caravan is magnificent. From hooks and pegs hang glass beads and strings of pearls, pendants of gold and enamelwork, chains of silver, and belts of leather as soft as a kitten’s belly. Spoons carved from wood, plain and sturdy. Fishing lures and lutes, lamps and baskets. Dazzling ornaments and common kitchen knives. Shelves of bottled spices and stoppered glass vials (filled by Auntie and me last spring) holding curatives. At the far end, the curtained bed stands in tapestried glory, its fat feather mattress covered with a crazy quilt of velvet and silks.
As always, O’Neill mocks our wide-eyed amazement. To him, it is simply home and work. To us, it is beautiful and wild and exciting.
“Here,” he says, pulling a richly lacquered chest out from beneath the sumptuous bed. He turns a key and the lid springs open. “We met a prince of the Ottoman Empire last month. He had been visiting a cousin in Philadelphia. He fell in love with the cousin’s kitchen girl. He said she had eyes like stars and skin as fair as goat’s milk. He sold us everything he’d brought from his faraway palaces so that he could buy her a little house beside the sea. His soul, he said, belonged to his bride, and he needed no other treasure but her.”
“Oh! How romantic!” Maren declares.
“Wait until she loses her looks and her cheer after bearing him a dozen rowdy sons. How romantic that will be, sister,” I say.
Maren and I sit on the Persian-carpeted floor and await O’Neill’s presentation. For he is a natural showman, and relishes any opportunity to perform.
He peers into the trunk with a devilish grin, humming what must be a Turkish melody, slowly rifling through the contents. Suddenly, with a flourish, he presents us with a pair of pointy-toed, yellow silk slippers. “Behold! The shoes of Prince Asil, great prince of Anatolia, skilled in music, hunting, and the wooing of ladies both dark and fair! Note the rubies on the toes.”
“Lovely,” Maren says, taking one of the shoes from him. She removes a leather slipper and slips her foot into the prince’s shoe. “What do you think?”
“They match your eyes, my lady,” O’Neill says roguishly.
Maren smacks his arm. “You’ll have yellow eyes if you do not mind yourself. Yellow, purple, black, and blue!”
One by one, O’Neill presents the prince’s treasures. He sets them on the floor around us. We marvel at the copper coffee set, the bejeweled dagger, the brass candleholders, the embroidered robes, the jewelry box with the tiny silver turtle inside.
“Anatolia. I will never see such a place,” Maren says. There is no regret in her words.
“I will take you to Anatolia,” O’Neill says, “when we are twenty and no one can tell us what to do or where to go. I will take you both. We will see London and Paris. We will camp in deserts and on mountaintops, and float upon the Dead Sea waters. We will ride elephants and camels and eat strange dishes and drink strange wines. I will douse you in the perfumes of the Orient, and cover you with silken saris, and pierce your noses with diamonds, and pierce your ears with pearls.”
Maren and I exchange a look.
“Keeping secrets, are you?” O’Neill asks. “From your best friend in the world? Your almost-brother?”
Biting her lip, Maren removes one royal shoe and stretches her foot toward O’Neill. “See for yourself.” She fans her odd toes, showing webbing that belongs on the foot of a frog, not the foot of a young lady.
He grabs her foot. “It is nothing,” he says. “I have seen worse things cured. I once saw a pig-headed man transformed into an ordinary banker. And on a Tuesday, no less.”