*
Charlie was right: I’d never encountered Plato before, and he was a good distraction. If I’d never met a person of the air, it would certainly have caused me to look oddly at the first ones I did encounter. I would have to ask Trumbull if anyone had ever tried to put his ideas about “justice” into practice.
When Spector returned I rifled through his paper sacks, and at last pulled out a bag of flour and a jar of honey.
“Would you like to eat with us?” I asked him. The newly stocked kitchen made me feel generous. “I can’t imagine you want to break bread with those people either.”
“Want, no.” He unpacked a box of pierogi, which hadn’t been on the list but inspired a pang of nostalgia anyway—I’d never found them on the West Coast. From the look on his face, that had been Spector’s motivation as well. He put them on the counter. “For later—I miss New York. It’ll go easier for all of us if I don’t act fazed by this afternoon. We’ll all be very polite to each other, and then I’ll go back to the guest rooms and drink scotch. Thank god Barlow’s got his people in a hotel; I don’t have to deal with them once dinner’s over.”
After he left we continued to sort groceries. Growing up, a winter meal would involve a great deal of salt cod and tinned sardines, and potatoes and apples from the cold cellar. Spector had found all those things, but also frozen whitefish fillets, neatly packaged chicken, and a bag of peas frozen out of their shells that could be boiled in five minutes. And dried herbs, flour, sugar, oil—even butter, usually a rarity since Mama Rei hated it and I always assumed it a costly luxury.
Neko hefted the whitefish. “Do you want to use this, or can I?”
I thought mournfully of holiday stew, probably too salty for anyone but Caleb—I knew Neko didn’t like it. “You go ahead. I want to make honeyed saltcakes. Caleb, do you remember how they go?”
“Do you? I remember how to follow directions, and how to lick the spoon.”
“I do. And how to give directions.” Cookbooks, I reminded myself, were another thing useless to Miskatonic that they’d have hidden in their stacks. I wasn’t sure I remembered a single title, though. Mother’s collection I knew by their colors, or by stains on much-used pages.
Charlie settled into a kitchen chair and read Plato, while the three of us rinsed dusty mixing bowls and squabbled over counter space. I sifted the flour, measured out honey and salt by eye, and tried to decide among the abundance of fats for shortening. Oil would probably work best, but I wasn’t sure it would taste right without a little rendered chicken fat.
Outside, someone pounded the door knocker. I spun, clutching a wooden spoon. Neko froze in place. Caleb took a step toward the arch to the dining room, but hesitated.
Charlie put a finger in his book. “There are probably plenty of people who want to visit Professor Trumbull. Right?”
“Right.” I stalked to the front hall. I am a Marsh. I have every right to be here. Nevertheless I opened the door cautiously, ready to slam it shut if our company were unwelcome.
Instead it was Audrey, who looked nonplussed at my expression. “This is the place, right? You haven’t all been replaced by mad twins?”
I laughed and let her in. “No, this is the right place. We’re just on edge.”
“How did you get in?” asked Caleb. “Didn’t they want to know what business a girl had alone on campus? Or do they not care about that?”
“Who’s ‘they’? I climbed the oak by the east wall, same as always when I don’t have company or a class for an excuse. There’s another at Hall that I use to get off campus when I don’t want to beg for a note. You don’t think they let us innocent young things wander around loose, do you?”
“Ah, you missed the soldiers then,” he said. I herded everyone back into the kitchen, where I could bury my fingers in dough while we explained the events of the afternoon. Audrey was suitably impressed and disturbed.
“How is Mr. Price?” I asked belatedly. “And Miss Ward?”
She sobered further. “Leroy will recover, they say. He’ll miss the start of classes, and he’ll have a scar. Sally has decided that he’s a hero instead of an idiot, but I don’t think she’s going to do anything stupid.”
“I’m glad he’ll be okay. Chulzh’th will be glad too.”
After a couple of hours’ bustle and carefully neutral conversation, we had a motley meal: chicken fried with rice and eggs, spiced fish, boiled potatoes with bits of apple and sage, and the saltcakes smelling of safety and home.
I considered the wisdom of intruding on Trumbull’s studies, but she came into the dining room before I reached a decision. Many of the serving dishes probably hadn’t seen light since her arrival, and she looked them over as if observing a slightly distasteful foreign custom.
“You needn’t have any if it bothers you,” I said in some annoyance.
“It’s no worse a way of taking in energy than any other, I suppose.”
The others accepted their helpings with more enthusiasm. Whatever the faults of the day, it had given us all a good appetite. Caleb bit into a saltcake and smiled, eyes closed. “These were an excellent thought.”
“They’re good,” agreed Audrey. “I wouldn’t have expected the sweet and the salt to go together.”
Neko tried some. She murmured half-hearted appreciation, but it was clear that she and I still had very different ideas about what constituted appropriate amounts of salt.
“It’s a kind of record,” I said to Trumbull. “These foods, they’re all memories, even if they’re harder for a stranger to read than a diary. A honeyed saltcake, the actual thing itself, tells you more about what holidays felt like in Innsmouth than the words of any story or ritual.”
“That I know.” She nibbled the edge of one. I could see her discomfort in the exaggerated way her lips peeled back from her teeth, in how attending to her food seemed to reduce rather than increase her pleasure in it.
I took another bite, closed my eyes, tasted a picnic during the Rites of Dagon, eaten swiftly with a summer thunderstorm threatening.
“Do you have holidays?” Audrey spooned out another helping of rice and cocked her head at Trumbull.
“Of course. Although we don’t usually attend to the flicker of solar orbits. Some celebrations mark changes in the Archives; those we carry from world to world. Others observe the rhythms of this planet while we abide here. Great Equinoxes, for example—the people of the water also keep those, of course.”
I nodded, then explained for the rest of the table: “Earth’s orbit around the sun changes slowly, so the equinoxes and solstices move around the year. A Great Equinox is how long it takes them to come back to the same place. It’s a little longer every cycle, but the current one will take a bit under 26,000 years.”