Grimm's School for the Erratically Gifted: Chapter 10

Now what?

Edmund thought about it all the way back to his room. He thought about it all the way into his bed. He thought about it all night, and when he woke the next morning his notes in the night had been nothing more than Leeta’s name, written over and over and over again.

The first thing he did, upon reading this maelstrom of monikers, was pull out his notebook.

Dear Diary, I saw her again yesterday.
I haven’t seen her in years. She has been largely absent from my conscious thoughts. But there she was, standing in front of me, dressed as a Raven.¹
I put no store in superstition, but I cannot avoid the truth that my Family’s crest is a Raven, and to see her again, dressed in what amounts to my adopted family’s livery has filled my heart with fear hope uncertainty.
I feel strange feelings, and my thoughts are consumed with her, pulling towards her like iron-filings to a magnet.

The emotion in Edmund’s chest was overwhelming. He had never felt anything like it, and he didn’t know what it was.

Leeta.

Edmund was not inexperienced with obsession. To be of a mind possessed was natural for him when discovering a new book to read, a puzzle to solve, or when wandering the lyric pathways of a new poem as it coalesced in his mind; and he recognized the familiar patterns, the way that his brain skipped off whatever he tried to focus on, the way that the most dissimilar things brought thoughts of Leeta to mind.

What was disconcerting for Edmund was his complete lack of direction. Why was he obsessed with Leeta? Her mere presence had been enough to through his normally structured and mechanical mind into disarray, but for all the time he spent ruminating on her sudden reintroduction into his life, he didn’t have a single plan for what to do about it.

Would he ever even see her again?

Was he glad to see her? Scared? Angry? All at once? It had been over ten years since they had seen each other. There was so much to talk about. He could talk to her; that in itself was something worth telling her.

Deep in the recesses of his mind, the cold gaze of the Moulde Family shook its head at him. He wasn’t thinking properly. He didn’t need to speak with Leeta, he needed to graduate. He needed to stay friends with the Teapots. He needed to avoid the Downstreeters. He needed to discover something revolutionary.

But…

Leeta was part of his past. Edmund had resolved long ago — beneath Haggard Hill, staring at the burnt ashes and bones of the First Matron ever to lead the Moulde Family — that he would never dishonor his past.

Maybe he did need to talk to her.

Edmund was not one for whom vacillation came naturally. While he became famous for his penchant for changing his mind in the face of new information — A curious eccentricity in his era — never in the whole of his life had he been so resolved of so many different courses of action in so little a span of time.

At first, he was certain he would never see Leeta again; after all, she was the Raven Ressurectionist and was like to kill him, as Rippers were wont to do. Then, he knew he had to fight her single-handedly in some public square and save Grimm’s from the scandalous industry of corpse-trading. Then, they were destined to become erstwhile companions, trading letters with much the same regularity that he and Junapa did. Then, he needed to protect her from the cruel glances and cold shoulders of high-society through lessons in elocution, proper dress, and perhaps a bath.

It took another week of decisive indecision before Edmund finally took action; a week which saw him moving through his life like an automaton, doing his school work and studying his notes from both his classes and the Dilettante Trust. He didn’t write a single letter to the Teapots, or even to Junapa.²

Finally he was certain. He didn’t know why, as one might know they are hungry from the subsidence of their stomach, but he knew it all the same. Reasons be damned, he would speak to Leeta again.

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With the clarity of thought that an obsessive mindset brings, Edmund knew where Leeta was.

Every city had a Graveyard. They had to. Not because it was hygienic,³ nor because it was pragmatic.⁴

No, if Edmund were forced to guess, he would agree with Sir Travis Eiderdown IV, in his Efficacies of Mores Mortuous: A city is like a living thing, with streets as bones, plumbing as veins, and buildings as organs. Somehow, the inhabitants of a city knew that, as the gallbladder produced the melancholic black bile, so the Graveyard produced a location for humanity to express and experience the depressed, morose, and nostalgic emotions.

Memento Mori. It was important for a healthy mind, body, soul, and apparently city.

Edmund ran his hands over a nearby gravestone, the pangs of homesickness creeping into his heart like gnarled tree-limbs. Here and there, a statuesque head-stone reminded him of the rows of granite statuary that lined the paths in the Moulde’s hedge maze. The stone skull that topped the gate to the graveyard reminded Edmund of the skull of Orpha Moulde, the first Matron of the Family, that rested safely on his desk at home.

He didn’t mind the homesickness. Something felt right, sitting there among the tombstones, listening to the mournful wail of the evening winds through the gnarled trees. In the distance, the croaking of crows and ravens echoed over the city buildings. Rats and similar vermin scurried between the shadows, avoiding the owlish gaze of death.

Edmund waited patiently. Leeta would show up eventually.

It took a week and four days after Leeta had hit Edmund in the stomach for his plan to bear fruit. It was close to ten o’ clock. Her arrival was heralded by a flicker of lantern-light blossoming in the distance, down the road towards the center of town. The light grew, slowly, as a dark shadow pulled a small cart towards the graveyard gates.

Soon enough, the distant shadow grew arms and legs, then a hat and a plague-mask. The glint of glass flickering where her eyes should be. She paused at the graveyard gates only briefly before the hollow creak of the rusty gate echoed across the dark hill. When the wrought-iron gate was shut behind her, she grabbed a shovel from the cart and darted like a black cockroach through the gray tombstones of the night.

Edmund stood up from his hiding-place and moved through the gravestones until he reached her, where she was inspecting a slim gravestone from behind.

He could have said hello. He could have excused himself. He could have apologized for intruding. Instead, he said the one thing that was on his mind.

“Leeta.”

In a whirlwind of leather and dirt, the sharp end of the spade was suddenly pointing at Edmund’s nose, glinting in the lantern-light. Edmund fought the urge to take a step back.

The leather beak darted back and forth, scanning the shadows for other interlopers and betraying Leeta’s suspicions. She wouldn’t see anyone else, of course, Edmund came alone. Come to that, there wasn’t anyone he could have brought, much less anyone who would have agreed to come.

Edmund considered speaking, but Leeta had the shovel, so he deferred to her.

For a moment, there was silence. Then: “You want another kick, do you?” Her voice was deeper, huskier, aged like whiskey in rain-barrels in dirty alleyways. Edmund could tell her fighting spirit had been honed through years of practice and painful correction.

“No,” Edmund admitted.

“They send you? I ain’t going back.”

Edmund shook his head. After so long, he hadn’t imagined she would.

“I mean it. You come to take me back, I’ll send you back. in pieces.”

Edmund swallowed. This wasn’t going the way he had wanted, much less expected. He needed to put her at ease; let her know he wasn’t going to do anything she didn’t want him to.

He gave her a broad smile. There. That should do it.

After a moment, the spade moved closer. “What do you want?”

“I…” Edmund paused. Why did he want to speak with her? He had hoped a clear reason would have revealed itself by now, but though all his planning on how to speak with Leeta, he had forgotten to think of one.

“I have you propose,” he said.

There was a pause, then the spade dipped. “What?”

Edmund blinked. Just what he said. Hadn’t he been clear? What had he said? Had he used the wrong words? Her spade had dipped, so she must have been confused. Off balance. He needed to steady her, ground her in the conversation, make her sure of herself. She needed security. Confidence. Status.

“Forgive me for my clumsy tongue,” Edmund said, bowing a proper number of degrees. “How have you been keeping yourself?”

“Bloody hell…” The spade lifted again. “You mad?”

Stupid fool! Why did he think treating her like a Lady would make the conversation any easier? She obviously held no truck with upper-class etiquette; she might not even know any of it. She didn’t need to feel secure, she had a shovel! No, there was no benefit to elevating her beyond a station where she was comfortable. She needed to be met on equal footing. As a peer.

“No,” Edmund snapped. “I’m not mad. And don’t kick me again, or I’ll kick back.” He raised his fists in a demonstrable promise.

The shovel-blade stuck in the ground. “You are mad.”

“No, I’m…”

Edmund bit down on his words. What was going on? Why wasn’t he thinking properly?

Why was his brain full of images from the Orphanage, a time in his life he had tried to forget about? Why did memories of a young Leeta spitting dirt out of her mouth, grinning as she jumped off of the wooden fence, and leaning against ragged walls assail him so? Why was he envisioning the steady march of time that changed the face of that young girl to the almost-woman he had seen in the alley? Why was the fact that this was someone he had known before he was a Moulde so enticing to him?

He had no idea, so he simply stood with the shovel-blade pointing at his chest.

After a few minutes, the shovel slowly descended to the earth. Leeta took a step forward, the black raven’s beak every inch as threatening as the iron spade. “How do you know my name?”

Edmund’s tongue loosened in delight at having a clear answer. “We were at the orphanage together. Mrs. Mapleberry’s.”

The beak cocked to one side. Then, “Don’t remember you. Which one are you, then?”

“Edmund. Edmund Moulde.”

The beak slowly dipped to the side. Then it jerked up again. “The weird one? Always sitting and reading, never talked to nobody?”

Something wide and wonderful happened in Edmund’s stomach. After more than half a decade, Leeta hadn’t forgotten about him. “That was me.”

“Prove it.”

Edmund had never had to prove who he was, and every possible proof he could think of was easily procured by a clever scoundrel. He thought for a moment more before deciding that if he couldn’t prove he was Edmund, he could prove he knew who she was.

“First you were adopted by a farming family, you came back after two weeks. Then there were the Lettes, they only kept you for a month. A young woman adopted you for five days; she had black hair in a bun, but I never heard her name. You said she had seven cats.” He paused. “The last ones who adopted you were the Wickes.⁵”

In an instant, the blade of the shovel was back to Edmund’s throat. “I said I ain’t going back.”

“I don’t want to take you back,” Edmund said.

“Then why are you here?”

“I…” Edmund’s mouth hung open for a moment, “…just had to see you again.”

For minutes, neither of them moved as the chill wind of the graveyard drifted around them. The faint yellow glow of Leeta’s lamp flickering in her mask’s glass lenses.

Finally, just as Edmund’s heart couldn’t bear it any longer, Leeta pulled off her broad-brimmed hat, along with the long-nosed mask. The same shock of red hair fell to her shoulders, the same piercing eyes flickered in the night. The same strong mouth and stern cheeks. The same curving neck and solid chin.

Her gaze was the picture of amazement. After a moment, she opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. “You saying you fancy me?”

“No!” Edmund gasped. Of course he didn’t. He had read hundreds of poems about love; it was passionate and fiery, or romantic and airy. It was divine and effervescent. It was the deepest nadir and the highest apex. It was far more suited to someone like Lady Tinbottom. It wasn’t…wasn’t…

It wasn’t whatever this was. This was…was…

Something else!

“No,” he cleared his throat. “I just wanted to talk.”

“Okay, you done that. Now push off.”

“I’d like to stay.”

“What’s in it for me?”

Edmund blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You want to stay, I want you to leave. If I let you stay, what will you give me?”

As a Moulde, Edmund’s first instinct was to ask how Leeta planned to enforce her desired isolation, but a simple glance to her hands’ grip on the shovel explained better than any words could.

Instead, Edmund thought for a moment, his tongue frozen to the roof of his mouth. Finally, it thawed with a moment of inspiration. “I could pay you.”

“Don’t need money.”

Edmund’s head sank. What else did he have? Lots of things, true, but nothing he could give.

Leeta looked Edmund up and down. “You were in that school. You a student there?”

“Yes.”

“You learn anything?”

“Quite a lot,” he admitted. He wasn’t sure it was what he was supposed to be learning, but she hadn’t asked him about that, so he didn’t clarify.

“Like what?”

Edmund rubbed the back of his leg with his foot. He wanted to tell her about chemistry and physics and electro-biology. He wanted to describe the beauty of hydrodynamics and the intricacies of thermo-mathematics. He wanted to talk and never stop talking, so long as she was listening.

“Lots of things,” he said instead.

Leeta’s gaze scrutinized his face.

“Right,” she said at last. “You don’t tell anyone you seen me, and bring me something you’ve learned. Some formula, or a machine or something. You do that, and next time I’ll let you stay and watch.”

Edmund wanted to say thank-you, but Leeta turned away too fast. “Now push off,” she said, kicking the blade of the shovel into the ground, “I’ve got a body to dig up.” A damp clod of loam flipped into the air and landed with a soft plop where Edmund would have been standing, had he not obeyed her command almost immediately.

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Edmund spent the next week like an artist in his storeroom, sorting through his countless papers, letters, treatises, and theories. He needed to find the perfect piece of information, something that would impress Leeta and make it clear he was more than capable of providing quality discoveries in return for her time.

In the end, in lieu of impressing Leeta with the quality of his education, he opted instead for quantity. After pouring through all the paper in his room and cross-referencing his notebooks along with the Dilettante Trust, he filled an entire notebook with detailed notes on everything from Absurd Taxonomies to Impractical Chemistries. It held poems, machines, formulas, theories, and profound insights. It even had several diagrams of varying degrees of precision, detailing no less than seven new inventions of his own, three of which he was even proud of.

Every day after, he returned to the Graveyard in hopes that he would see Leeta’s lantern bobbing down the road towards him.

As the weeks dragged on, the season finally shifted from dark and ominous Autumn to pale and shivering Winter. The first snows fell in late November. Edmund could barely tear his gaze away from the light snowflakes whipping through the air like bullets. Before long, winter snow blanketed the entire city, turning the journey to the Graveyard from a pleasant evening darting from shadow to shadow through the streets, into a tiring slog over crunching ice and fretting over the footprints he was leaving behind.

The Graveyard gate was lit by a pair of gas-lamps set atop the flanking posts. The gravestones were capped with snow, black teeth rising from white gums. Everything looked colder. Paler. More dead, which was quite an amazing feat for a graveyard.

Edmund had never seen white snow before; the snows of Brackenburg were always a dark gray, tinted by the black soot that clung to the clouds like lint. Here, the snows were bone-white. There was something beautiful and something horrible about it. Edmund paused to stare at the panorama, his brain sorting through meters and similes as poem after poem leapt through his mind.

A far louder part of his brain fretted that he couldn’t see Leeta anywhere.

Then, the snows shifted and she was there in front of him, her black leather outfit dusted white. A single icicle had begun to form on the tip of her plague-mask’s beak.

“Back again, eh? What did you bring?”

Edmund reached into his pocket and produced his notebook. Surely there would be something inside she could use. Flipping through the pages, Edmund held out the notebook for her to see.

“A frank assessment of verb agreement when embracing the English Metaphor.” Her mask faced Edmund again. “What use is that?”

Edmund’s jaw dropped. What use was it? Never mind that he had cracked Ruthfjord’s Conundrum,⁶ he had also discovered a whole new use for predicate nominatives! What use was it?

No, it wasn’t her fault. Not everyone could be a poet, and she likely didn’t have the time to read much, what with digging up dead people. Edmund flipped to another page.

“A conclusion reached on the matter of the Hungarian Decline, post King Otto… Are you mad?”

“It explains everything,” Edmund protested. “The famine, the trials, even the sudden re-emergence of the House of Wisegráde in the local —”

“What’s this?” Leeta’s leather finger jabbed at the page.

Edmund looked, and winced. “Nothing important.”

“That’s a battery, isn’t it?” Leeta leaned closer, taking the book from Edmund’s hands.

Edmund squirmed; he had hoped Leeta wouldn’t notice the small doodle at the bottom of the page. It had been a fairly obvious change in design, he wouldn’t have bothered writing it down if he hadn’t been letting his mind wander.

“And instead of earthenware, you’re using Plaster of Paris? Hmm…Incanamus’s Aqueous Zinc…You have to mix the plaster with water…”

“This one’s better!” Edmund burst out, grabbing the notebook and flipping to the back.

“What’s this, then?” she asked.

“It’s a sewing machine.”

“Really?” Leeta stared at Edmund’s design more closely. “But it’s so small! It could fit on a table!”

“Using Stautman’s refining process,” Edmund explained, “the steam-valve for the engine could be no bigger than a nail. That means the engine itself could be reduced in size, and it would only take the addition of these gears here to increase the torque and force of the needle. Imagine how many could fit in a single factory.”

Leeta stared at him. “Or,” she said after a moment, “Imagine how many houses could fit just one.”

Edmund didn’t understand what she meant by that, but she was at least impressed by something far more impressive than his own fumbling mistakes. Leeta snatched the notebook and stared for a few moments before looking back at Edmund. “I can take this?”

For not the last time in their relationship, Edmund was confused by her question. Knowledge couldn’t be taken, as far as he knew. It could be shared, which was of course frowned upon by Grimm’s, and so he naturally assumed that was what she had meant to say.

So he nodded.

The raven-mask eyes stared deep into Edmund for only a moment before Leeta tucked the notebook into her black-leather suit. “Well, come on if you’re going to.”

Edmund followed Leeta for a few steps before he saw the faint glow of a lantern resting on a gravestone. When they got close enough, he saw too the shovel stuck out of the dirt behind the grave.

For several minutes, Edmund watched Leeta work as she dug the hole deeper into the ground. Before long she had stepped into the hole, casually throwing the dirt off to the side, spreading black earth over the white snow. Edmund watched as she dug at the soft earth with the passion and fervor saved for those who had found their purpose in life and the will to pursue it in spite of a world content to forever step over them.

It was everything Edmund had ever wanted for himself.

“You just going to stare at me?”

Edmund shrugged. He hadn’t any other plans.

“You do fancy me.”

Edmund’s face flushed red. He did not love Leeta. He knew that for certain. He simply…wanted to be around her. It wasn’t some mixture of chemicals in his brain, there was nothing more natural, more reasonable, than him sitting and watching Leeta work. He wasn’t positive exactly what it was, if not love, but he didn’t concern himself too much with the problem.

Leeta heaved a sigh, and returned to her digging. “So, you ran away from Mrs. Mapleberry, eh? How long did that take?”

“I was adopted,” Edmund corrected her. “When I was eight.”

“No fooling? Who by?”

“Matron Mander Moulde of Moulde Hall.”

“Never heard of her.”

“The Mouldes are a very important family.”

“If you say so.”

“The Mouldes do,” Edmund shrugged, “and they’re important. They’re one of the Nine Founding Families of Brackenburg.”

“Fine.”

Edmund shifted his weight from foot to foot as he stared at Leeta’s back. Now that the silence had been broken, he felt the need to fill it.

“You’re digging from behind the grave.”

“Well spotted.”

“You pull the body out through the top of the coffin, and no one notices because the grave-dirt isn’t disturbed, and no one looks behind the grave-stone.”

“No one ever looks behind the stone. Sounds like a clever way to not be noticed, doesn’t it?”

Something uncomfortable began to make itself known behind Edmund’s eyes. “People have noticed you.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard. Call me the Raven Ressurectionist, do they?” Leeta hoisted the shovel into the air again. “The Ghost of the Graveyard?”

“Some think you’re a Ripper.”

“Ha!” Leeta snorted from behind her mask. “Is that what they’re saying? Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Why hasn’t anyone stopped you?”

“Oh, they’ve tried.” Leeta huffed. “Already had the police come up here peeking between the grave-markers, and town gawkers of all types; kids, old women, drunkards…hell, the Church even sent a couple Quiet Priests.”

“Quiet Priests?”

“Just a harmless couple of old men from the Order of Quiet Dead. Exorcists. Spent every night for a week showing up and saying their little chants. They were nice enough; seemed eager enough to just talk.” She paused. “It’s nice to talk.”

Edmund frowned. “If the Ripper keeps killing, it could get worse.”

“I’m good at hiding.” A dark tone flashed through her voice for a heartbeat. “I got real good.”

Edmund’s heart swelled. So had he! They had so much in common.

“Why were you interested in my battery?”

Leeta looked up. “You going to do anything with them?”

“No,” Edmund shrugged.

“Well then…you won’t mind if I tweak your design a bit?”

Edmund blinked. She wasn’t a scientist, she was a grave-digger. What sort of tweaking could she do? “It’s a complicated design, I don’t —”

“No,” Leeta shook her head. “It’s dirt simple. You’ve already done most of it, I just want to take the next step.”

There was no next step. Edmund’s brain began to burn. “What next step is that?”

“Well,” she pulled out his notebook, “the Plaster is porous, so that’s good, but you need to mix it with water and then let it set, right? And you’re using Aqueous Zinc, so why don’t you mix the plaster with the zinc? Get the measure right, and the top could be a paste. Use enough of it, and you could make a cap out of it. No more barrels full of acid spilling everywhere. You’d have a…a dry-cell battery. But what do I know, I’m no genius.”

It was as if she had drawn back a curtain in his mind. Suddenly, where before he had seen a wall, an end to his thinking, now a whole new tree of ideas branched before him.

How had she done that?

A loud thud punctuated Leeta’s spade sticking in the ground as she paused, leaning on the handle to catch her breath. After a moment, she pointed. “What the hell is that?”

Edmund blinked, and then looked down at his chest. “It’s a perfume-harness filled with my own peppermint-vinegar tincture.” It was common equipment among the doctors and morticians who worked among the sick and the dead. “It’s so I don’t get sick.”

“If you say so,” Leeta shrugged before returning to the hole. “Won’t work.”

“Of course it will,” Edmund blinked. “It keeps away the miasma that causes disease. I’ve read a dozen books on the subject.”

“Oh, well, if you’ve read books,” Leeta mumbled through her mask. “All I know is I’ve been doing this work for five years, and I get sick just as much as anyone else.”

Edmund opened his mouth to protest, and then closed it again. “Then why do you wear a plague-mask if not to keep out the miasma?”

“Because the bodies bloody reek,” Leeta snorted.

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