We had something called ‘mail’ in Gaithersburg. Three or four times a year a senegalois would ride up from the gridpoint with letters and packages, and deliver them around to the people they were supposed to go to. Most of the houses in Gaithersburg had little boxes out the front, stood up on poles, for the senegalois to put the letters and packages in. When he had emptied his saddlebags the senegalois would go to M. Tran’s shop, and leave anything he had for people who didn’t have boxes set up in front of their houses. Then he would see if there were any packages or letters to be taken the other way and he would carry them back down to the gridpoint and then to wherever. You could send them anywhere, anywhere at all.

You would think something like that would be too complicated to work, but it did. Old Mrs. Heath wrote a letter once to her cousin on New Georgia, and next time the senegalois came up to Gaithersburg he brought a letter all the way back from Mrs. Heath’s cousin, and you could tell from what was written in it that she’d read Mrs. Heath’s letter that she sent. You had to pay M. Tran to have your letters or packages sent off- it cost a lot, and the heavier the package, the more it cost- but it didn’t cost anything to get mail from somewhere else.  We never left any mail with M. Tran, because Pa lost track of his kin a long time ago and Ma’s kin all live around Gaithersburg so far as we know. We never got any mail, either.

I had to explain about the mail because of what happened a week before Christmas that started all the trouble. I was riding back from M. Tran’s shop with some things and I happened to be going past the Brice House just as the senegalois was coming by the other way on his bicycle, and I saw him put a package in the box outside. I thought of saying something, but I didn’t. I should have said ‘nobody lives there anymore’, and then the senegalois would have said ‘merci’ and put the package back in his saddlebags and taken it off to wherever. But I didn’t say anything. The senegalois kept on going toward M. Tran’s shop, and I kept going up the other way with flour and salt and nails for Ma. The next day the senegalois went back down to the gridpoint, and since I didn’t tell anybody, that meant I was the only one in Gaithersburg who knew there was a package in the box outside the Brice House.

Now I should explain about the Brice House. The Brice House was the second or third biggest house in Gaithersburg, and had been built Before for a man who had come to Gaithersburg to get rich when it was still that kind of place.  Since Ma was a little younger than I am now a man named Mr Brice had lived there: he wasn’t any kind of relation of the man that built the house, and when he moved in it had been sitting empty a long time and nearly falling down, but he fixed it all up. He made his living doing bits of carpentry like that, and also fixing what engines we had in Gaithersburg. He was devilish clever with those things. There were odd things about Mr Brice that seem a lot more odd now that I have been to more places than Gaithersburg. We were all coloured folk in Gaithersburg except for two families of white folk, and M Tran and his family, and Mr Brice. M Tran’s people were called yellow, but Mr Brice really was yellow, like the label on a rum bottle. He had blue eyes, and was as bald as an egg.  People said that Mr Brice didn’t look any older than he had when he first came to Gaithersburg, but we figured that was just the way of his kind of people, like M Tran’s people seem to go straight from being boys to wrinkled old men without anything in between.

Mr Brice was the sort of person who doesn’t go around making small talk. He didn’t smile much so as you’d notice, but he didn’t scowl either, or get angry. He was never rude, and pleasant enough if you talked to him, but he would always get out of talking quick and go on with what he was doing.  Not that I ever used to talk to him much- I guess I was a little afraid of him. He had a nice voice to listen to, though, a bit like the preacher’s.

Anyhow, at the end of September Mr Brice had caught the bird quinsy and died. Reverend Darke buried him, and gave away some of his things that he had left instructions to give away, and then two men and a cart came up from Elm River and took the rest of his things away. Pa got a handsaw from Mr Brice when he was dead, and Ma got some spoons and a tin of sugar. Theo got one of his old hammers, and Dan got a framed picture of the New Jerusalem that used to hang in Mr Brice’s shed.

So now that I have explained about the mail and about Mr Brice you know what I mean when I say what I should have said, and maybe why I didn’t say it.

Did you ever have the feeling that if you did one tiny thing different one day, your life would be completely different forever? You should, because if you did, it would be. You just can never tell what that tiny thing is. Christmas day I didn’t get anything much. I won’t say I didn’t get anything, since that wouldn’t be true, but Dan and Theo got better than me. Then when the afternoon was beginning to wear on Ma sent me out to take Mrs. Kent something she had forgotten at our house that morning after the service.

It happened I rode by the Brice House, and it happened it was all quiet when I was going by, so I thought to myself ‘I’ll just stop here and see if that package is still in Mr Brice’s box’. So I stopped Japheth, opened the lid of the box and shut it again. The package was still there. I stood there a minute, feeling that everyone was watching me, though I couldn’t see anyone, and also like I needed to pee. You know what it is like when you know what you are going to do is wrong, but you also know that you are going to do it anyway. Don’t be a wicked thief, Persephone Grainger, I told myself, but this just made me feel that it would be exciting to be a wicked thief.  I was in a contrary mood, and wanted to do something wicked.

I opened the lid of the box again, picked up Mr Brice’s package, and quickly put it in my pack without looking at it.  The package was heavier than I thought it would be, and as I rode on to the Kents’ I tried to reckon how much it would cost to send a package like that from M. Tran’s shop. A hundred francs? Two hundred? More than I could make in a whole summer running errands, that was certain. Someone must have thought it was important to send it to Mr. Brice.

On the way back from the Kents I stopped off at a place where I was sure nobody could see me, and took a closer look at Mr. Brice’s package. It was about the size of a brick, and about as heavy as it would have if it was full of salt, and was all done up in thick brown paper. In one corner were pasted little bits of paper with numbers on them and pictures of an angry-looking woman who was the Empress. You sometimes got these bits of paper on mail that came from far places, I knew. There were a lot of them, which meant it had cost a lot to mail the package here, just as I thought. Mr Brice’s name and where he lived were written on it in straggly writing, straggly enough that I would have been embarrassed to write like that: ‘M A. Brice, Gaitersburg, WeiB-See Provinz, Mirepoix.’ There wasn’t anything written on it to say who had sent it or where from. Whoever they were, they weren’t all that great at spelling, either. I looked around again, to make sure nobody else was there- even though I knew there wouldn’t be.

Then I sat down by the side of the stream, sitting the package on my lap. Mr Brice was dead, I said to myself, and he didn’t leave instructions for you to have any of his things, even though he left instructions for Pa and Ma and Dan and Theo to have some of his things. And Dan and Theo got decent things for Christmas, and I only got shoes that pinched and sent on errands. Yes, I said to myself, but that still doesn’t mean you should open his package. That would be wicked. Then I told myself, I can just have a look at it , and then take it to M Tran’s shop and say I noticed it outside the Brice House. I wouldn’t be a thief unless I mean never to give it back where it belongs, and I didn’t mean to do that. That’s what I told myself.

The paper was hard to tear, and I had to start a hole in it with my teeth. There were two or three layers of the stuff, and inside it was a bundle wrapped up tight in the most lovely silky cloth I’d ever seen, the colour of the pearl handle on Ma’s comb, all shiny and almost too bright to look at, but soft like baby’s skin. I couldn’t see any weave to it, like it was some sort of leather rather than cloth. I piled this wrapping cloth up on my lap as I unrolled it so it wouldn’t touch the ground, but it didn’t seem to make any difference- a corner of it dropped in the dirt before I got up, and not a speck of the dirt stuck to it, I swear. Wrapped up inside the cloth were three things: a bell, a book, and a candle. The book was only small, and printed in a language I didn’t recognise, and somebody has scribbled on most of the edges of the pages, and some places in between, in another language I didn’t recognise. The bell was just a bell-shaped piece of metal without a clapper, only small, but very very heavy, and was so shiny and silvery it made the cloth look dull. I turned it over and over, at first trying to figure out what it was, and then just because it felt nice to turn over and over. It felt warmer and softer than metal things usually do. The third thing really wasn’t a candle: I know that a bell, a book, and a candle are supposed to be what the Papists use to banish ghosts, and thought I would say that. It was a silvery thing shaped a bit like a candle, but wider than usual, and was as light as the bell was heavy. This was because it was hollow. It had two halves that slid together so you could hardly see the join, and inside there were a lot of papers all rolled up, typed things in the language that was scribbled in the book. Some of them had official-looking seals on, and there was a strange burnt smell to them. It was a pleasant enough smell, and I brought the roll of papers right up to my face to take it in. The first other world I ever smelled, that was, though I didn’t find out what world it was until much later. There were dates on some of the papers, and they were all thirty or forty years ago.

So those were the things somebody had sent Mr Brice, not knowing he was dead. I looked at them for a long time, and was none the wiser for it.  I half thought that I would take them to M Tran’s shop, but I half thought I wouldn’t. I told myself, he won’t know who sent them to Mr Brice, no more than I know, so he would just have to give them to the senegalois if he didn’t keep them himself, and if the senegalois didn’t keep them to himself they would just be passed on to an Inspector, or some Officer of the Empire, and they would keep them. It may as well be me keeping them as an Officer of the Empire, I told myself, and then I told myself again, Yes, but you shouldn’t be a wicked thief, Persephone Grainger. That didn’t help at all. I wrapped the three things back in the cloth, and wrapped bits and shreds of the paper that was left around the bundle, and rode back home. I kept everything in my satchel until it got dark, and then I snuck out and  put the bundle and every shred of paper from the package under the loose board in the henhouse.

The nights on Mirepoix are really too long for sleeping, as the days are too long for staying awake, so I had a lot of time to lay there and think. Before June I would have told Leonta, but in June the bird quinsy had come through for the first time and taken her Ma, and since then she hadn’t been able to keep secrets. She took things you said badly even if you didn’t mean them that way, and if you asked her not to tell something, she would tell it the next time she lost her temper with you.  I didn’t have any other friends to speak of. My brothers were three and four years older than me, and I didn’t dream of telling them or my parents.