Chapter 9 – Meggie Reads
“Don’t ask where the rest of this book is!” It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. “All books continue in the beyond …”
– Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
When all was quiet in Elinor’s house, and the garden was bright in the moonlight, Meggie put on the dress that Resa had made for her. Several months ago, she had asked her mother what kind of clothes women wore in the Inkworld. “Which women?” Resa had inquired. “Farmers’ wives?
Strolling players? Princes’ daughters? Maidservants?”
“What did you wear?” Meggie asked, and Resa had gone into the nearest town with Darius and bought some dress material there: plain, coarsely woven red fabric. Then she had asked Elinor to bring the old sewing machine up from the cellar. “That’s the sort of dress I wore when I was living in Capricorn’s fortress as a maid,” her hands had said, putting the finished dress over Meggie’s head. “It would have been too fine for a peasant woman, but it was just about good enough for a rich man’s servant, and Mortola was very keen that we shouldn’t be much worse dressed than the prince’s maids – even if we only served a gang of fire-raisers.”
Meggie stood in front of her wardrobe mirror and examined herself in the dull glass. She looked strange to herself. And she’d be a stranger in the Inkworld, too; a dress alone couldn’t alter that.
A stranger, just as Dustfinger was here, she thought – and she remembered the unhappiness in his eyes. Nonsense, she told herself crossly, pushing back her smooth hair. I’m not planning to spend ten years there.
The sleeves of the dress were already a little too short, and it was stretched tight over her breasts, too. “Good heavens, Meggie!” Elinor had exclaimed when she realized, for the first time, that they weren’t as flat as the cover of a book anymore. “Well, I imagine your Pippi Longstocking days are over now!”
They hadn’t found anything suitable for Farid to wear, not in the attic or in the trunks of clothes down in the cellar that smelled of mothballs and cigar smoke, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Who cares? If it works we’ll start out in the forest,” he said. “No one will be interested in my jeans there, and as soon as we come to a village or town I’ll steal myself something to wear!”
Everything always seemed so simple to him. He couldn’t understand that Meggie felt guilty because of Mo and Resa any more than he understood her anxiety to find the right clothes. When she confessed that she could hardly look Mo and her mother in the eye after deciding to go with him, he had just asked “Why?” looking at her blankly. “You’re thirteen! Surely they’d be marrying you off to someone quite soon anyway?” “Marrying me off?” Meggie had felt the blood rise to her face. But how could she talk about such things to a boy out of a story in the Thousand and One Nights, where all women were servants or slave girls – or lived in a harem? “Anyway,”
added Farid, kindly ignoring the fact that she was still blushing, “you’re not intending to stay very long, are you?” No, she wasn’t. She wanted to taste and smell and feel the Inkworld, see fairies and princes – and then come home again to Mo and Resa, Elinor and Darius. There was just one problem: The words Orpheus had written might take her into Dustfinger’s story, but they couldn’t bring her back. Only one person could write her back again – Fenoglio, the inventor of the world she wanted to visit, the creator of glass men and blue-skinned fairies, of Dustfinger and Basta, too. Yes, only Fenoglio could help her to return. Every time Meggie thought of that, her courage drained away and she felt like canceling the whole plan, striking out those three little words she had added to what Orpheus had written: ” . . and the girl. ”