The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet Page A

really planning to take cookies to the purple-eyed Fourcroy in the Salamander House? All right, then; why not.
    James carried the tin of cookies; Maya sagged along behind, worrying about their mother. And Cousin Louise walked in their shadow, and her thoughts, if she had any, were inscrutable.
    At the entrance to the Salamander House, however, Maya felt a papery hand tighten itself around her arm.
    â€œFamiliar,” said Cousin Louise. She was looking up at the door, the building, the carvings crawling everywhere. “Look at her, for instance!”
    It was the young woman whose head looked out over the street from the top of the door. The expression on her stone face was sad and wise, somehow; she hardly seemed to notice the fox draped around her neck.
    â€œIt’s a Maya statue,” said James proudly. “See?”
    â€œStrange,” said Cousin Louise in a thoughtful voice. “ Et là , the little salamander on the door. I have seen it before, I think.”
    Maya opened her mouth to point out that a similar salamander had looked out at them from the frame of the Cabinet of Earths, but the words refused to be spoken out loud. She had to close her mouth with the faintest little pop, like the noise a fish makes when it smacks its lips underwater. So instead she stepped up to the sill and typed in the code for the door: 1901.
    â€œWhat if he’s not home?” said James. “Will we leave the cookies here anyway, if the uncle-cousin’s not home?”
    The door opened with a little click. James slipped under Maya’s arm and into the hallway beyond, but Cousin Louise stayed still for a moment longer, looking up at the building and thinking something over. Her vague, inexpressive eyes seemed almost—but perhaps it was just a trick of the light—clouded with doubt.
    â€œAre you coming in?” said Maya, as politely as she could manage. She could already hear James looking noisily for the right button on the intercom inside. “F!” James was saying. “F! Like Forest!”
    â€œCaution,” said Cousin Louise under her breath. “Caution.”
    But she came in all the same.

Chapter 9
Hot Chocolate and Anbar
    T hey tiptoed up the stairs to the fourth floor and right into an argument.
    â€œBe reasonable,” a man was saying to the purple-eyed Fourcroy. “You know she can’t go on without it. She feels like she’s dying, she says. Only the anbar really perks her up anymore. It is the only miracle she has left, now that time looms so very large before her.”
    Henri de Fourcroy looked slightly bored. His eyes wandered away from the man at his door and caught sight of James and Maya coming up the stairs, Cousin Louise trudging along behind them.
    â€œAh, but monsieur!” he said, his beautiful eyes brightening. “As you can see, my guests have arrived! Perhaps another day?”
    And then he managed in one flowing gesture to usher James and Maya (and Cousin Louise behind them) into his entrance hall—and leave the complaining man outside on the landing behind the door.
    â€œWe brought you cookies,” said James, holding the tin out in front of him. “We baked them ourselves.”
    â€œHow kind of you,” said their cousin-uncle. “How unnecessarily thoughtful!”
    Maya was feeling rather unsettled, for some reason, and Cousin Louise lowered herself into a chair by the door.
    â€œThat’s our babysitter today,” said James, leaning toward the cousin-uncle in a confiding sort of way. “Our mother would have come, but she’s sick.”
    The purple-eyed Fourcroy clicked his tongue against his palate in a sympathetic way.
    â€œCome on in, come on in,” he said, and he led them down the hall to the living room.
    Cousin Louise just stayed where she was, a human-sized shadow in a chair, but the younger Fourcroy took no notice of her. He was quite engrossed in his conversation with James, and