Enter throught the front of Horace Muffin’s store
Enter throught the front of Horace Muffin’s store. The door is wide and welcoming, and open every day of the week when Horace is in town, which recently is almost always. Thread you way into the Emporium, through tables stacked with this and that useful thing or odd and desirable bit of whimsy, and past free standing shelves packed tightly carrying a wealth of something other. You will pass the counter used by Horace and a trustworthy employee or two for measuring, counting, ordering, and graciously accepting coinage for the empire or any trading partner with a mint. Do not pause to speak, although you would enjoy the conversation, as would any of the rarely very busy group who would, you may be certain prefer to talk and not to clean and dust and tidy up the goods.
Instead, continue to your left and toward the rear of the salesroom where you will find a staircase to the second floor. There things are less intended for display and more for an organized abeyance of their journey. Re-cased and -crated goods for which some need will come in time paused stacked in order well protected against the chance of dust or mishap for as long as needs to be.
From here, another set of steps, somewhat more narrow, leads upward yet again to Horace Muffin’s attic. In his first years as a merchant, Horace lived in this apartment, in these neat rooms above the store. In the front an open parlor overlooking Scofflaw’s heart, the Square with its constant busyness of travelling and loitering, Market at the week’s end, trollies passing from the northwest going to the southeast and from the northeast going round the square a circle and a half before continuing to the southwest. The cars passed round the circle of the town’s four Laws, from square to square and rarely meeting when they ran on time, though now and then required to find a siding, each driver keeping score of just how often he had been the one to wait while someone else went hurrying along his appointed route.
With windows on the alleyway behind the shop, and ample bedroom and a small but not cramped kitchen were spared the noise and looked down onto ________’s large and well-kept garden, walled as if it were a northern city orchard of espalliered tender fruits, when in fact it held entirely a carpet of native flowers, stalk and bush and vine.
The central attic room, which might have been by previous store families a nursery and playroom for two or three, never filled its role for Horace Muffin. Instead, it served to house his overflow, both as storage for the goods intended to be sold some day and for his own diverse accumulations.
Horace himself now lived in some degree of splendor on a hill above the town, between the South Law and the more exclusive North, trending somewhat toward the eastern slope with its more modest garden homes and neatly cultivated plots of this or that special favorite green or dainty fruit. He enjoyed his twice daily walk, even when the weather drove most people to remain in doors or resort to some sort of dry conveyance. Nothing less than a typhoon would prevent him from coming in to work, though on occasion he would remain at the Emporium where his rooms were always neatly kept in order and no less clean than when his still-mourned wife had kept their home there.
Windows front and rear wide to catch the breezes, and deep to keep the shade, combined with pocket doors wide and open to allow air’s free movement made the attic rooms as comfortable as any place in town to pass the day. And they were cooled, not as some might have you think by magic, but by good insulation and superb design.
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On the morning of what would have been the Autumn Equinox if seasons in the islands carried weight as in the temperate south and very distant north, Horace Muffin, Proprietor, had left the workings of the store to _____ and ______. A dependable pair. The owner was to be found, if necessary to discuss something confidential, in the attic, able at last to indulge himself and visit the crate of books which had arrived now going on to ten days past. Such pleasures were not to be taken lightly, and not to be rushed. Business had had first place for long enough, but all the orders from that shipment had been taken care of, and everything for a while was in its proper place. The time was ripe for books.
In addition to his enjoyable unpacking, Horace had another, less expected purpose for his attic time. An unanticipated companion had settled into his parlor, with packages and diversions of her own, and as he inspected books ordered months and even years before, he could stroll into the other room to show his friend the new addition and explain the volume’s provenance or how he’d learned about the author, or some minutae on the binding or the type.
She, in her turn, had gone so far as to bestir herself to make a pot of tea for them both, and had offered him a mug before drifting back to her own papers. And if the tea had been steeped overlong, and left to cool to tepid, barely hot at all, then he would sip the bitter brew in the spirit it was given. Horace did, however, find himself wondering when she would get around to explaining where she’d been hiding ever since her return to town, on the same ship that had brought his books. And it did seem odd that she, however welcome, seemed set to settle down here in his parlor. She had already had him moving furniture around to more nearly suit her taste and needs.
Trailing after her into his parlor, Horace was considering how he might phrase politely a suggestion that she open up and spill the beans.
Mug in hand, she perched on the window’s sill, a comfortable seat from many hours of contemplating there himself. Dressed in that mannish manner she most often chose for travelling away from the population centers of the coast, she might have been a truant boy returning to his schoolroom by the same route he had used to leave. Seh had acted more demanding roles than that in the years they had been friends. Something made him wonder if she were about to retire one of her characters for good.
She stared out the window and down into the square, intently as if something there had caught her more than passing interest, and when at last she spoke it was as a tired and rather sad young woman Horace had not seen for half a dozen years. The whore Wanda the Swan might never see the light again, and the same thing might be happening to his old friend the most illustrious of the Empire’s poets. A disturbing possibility.
