“Longer than you, poor beast.”
“I am not a beast.”
“We are all beasts. Lyons. Baers. Lams. Sophias.”
“Where’s your house, then?”
“You are within it.”
“You live in the park?”
Cascavel says nothing. He gestures around them as though that answers all.
“Do you know Mr. Semengelof? You look like him. You move like him too.”
“We are acquainted,” Cascavel allows.
“So you know my husband too, then.”
“Oh, him I know very well indeed.”
“You work together?”
Cascavel smiles. The moon is on his teeth. “No,” he says, and a seed of laughter floats in the word.
“This is a very unsatisfactory conversation,” Sophia snaps.
“What an absolutely illuminating choice of words, Sophia. You have found yourself precisely at the point without trying at all. Allow me to ask you two questions, and when I have done it, if you still find me an … unsatisfactory companion, I shall guide you back your house immediately, entirely undiscovered by the local authorities, and we shall both continue on in our perfect lives in this perfect place as though we had never met and no single second of this night had ever occurred. Agreed?”
“Yes,” Sophia says, as though she has fallen asleep and all her dreams abandoned her. “Yes.”
The dark crowds so close around Cascavel’s face. Shadows drawn to him, to be near him. But she wants to know his questions. She wants to have his answers.
“All right, little one. All right. The first one is easy.” He tucks a stray lock of hair away from her face round her ear, such a curiously paternal thing. “What are you clutching so in your left hand?”
Sophia looks down. Her fingers are balled into a red fist, a grip so tight they’ve gone numb. She opens them, the electric prickle of life returning to the pad of her thumb.
She is desperately holding on to the little crooked ancient finger bone. She must have taken it in the moment of her breaking, reflexively, instinctively, the way she lied about the window. Sophia presses her soft lips together. She begins to cry as simply and miserably as the first weeping of the world.
“It should be inside someone and it’s not,” she sobs helplessly.
“I see,” Cascavel says with real comfort in the margins of his voice. “I see.”
He nods his head as if he expected it, but still hoped for some other outcome. Sophia studies his face. He looks so sad for her, the way Mrs. Palfrey looked at the amphitheater.
“Are you ready for my second question, sweet girl?”
Sophia nods wretchedly, turning the bone over and over in her hand.
Cascavel takes her chin in both his hands and kisses her forehead with so much love it feels like the mark of his lips must have left her brow stained with gold. A love that beggars sensation.
“Are you happy, Sophia?”
“NO,” she screams in his face, and there is so much relief in that one syllable that she almost faints clear away.
Cascavel chuckles kindly. “Well, thank the good Lord on his janky old throne, who could expect you to be? Feel better now?”
Sophia gawks at him through her tears. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
Cascavel clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Because you were made without the ability to be dissatisfied, Sophia. After the last disaster, it seemed a prudent move. And we care about you. Everyone here cares more about what happens to you than you can possibly imagine. So they ask, because as long as the answer is yes, you are safe. But the answer is not yes anymore, is it, poor poppet?”
“But I have to be happy. Everything here is perfect.” Sophia swallows what feels like a ball of knives in her throat. She knows the truth. She just has to say it. “Except me.”
“Don’t even think it, Sophie, my girl! Except him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, that’s what Mrs. Palfrey said. She tried her mightiest to help you, but she’s only an old nag in the end. Bigger guns were required.” Cascavel straightens himself, crosses and recrosses his long dark limbs. “The bastard of it is, Sophie, I’m going to need you to say it yourself. You’ve got to say it out loud or I can’t do a thing for you. I would be a kinder soul to leave you in peace knowing nothing, so if we’re to set sail together on this vile little voyage, it’s you who must call for the ark.” He laughs at his own little joke. “So to speak.”