Part 28: The Age of the Top Hat

(I drew this using pencil on a bit of paper - Chaiga T. Cheska)
~~~

Being an account of one junior librarian’s unplanned elevation to fashion, a building’s discovery of a small, distant world’s taste in tailoring, and the evening on which five colleagues, one hamster, and the Autocurator acquired considerably more buttons than anyone had requested

Compiled by Bramwell Corin, who did not request a pencil behind his ear, has no memory of agreeing to rolled sleeves, and would like both noted as having arrived without his consent

We had been three days recovering from the business at the river market, still moored in the same slow bend of the Emaris, the willows trailing their leaves through water gone green and lazy with high summer, when Pip’s waistcoat made its first independent decision. I want it understood, before I go any further, that I noticed. I simply did not think it worth remarking upon, the waistcoat having already shown, on the very night we acquired it, a talent for behaving as though it had opinions of its own. One grows, seven months into this employment, rather practised at not remarking on things that would once have alarmed me considerably.

The decision, when it came, was a modest one. Pip had been reshelving the Regional Almanacs, a task he approached with the same grim thoroughness he brought to anything involving a stepladder. I happened to glance up from my ledger somewhere in the middle of the afternoon to find that his collar, which that morning had been a perfectly ordinary one, had acquired a small, neat fold at each point, none of which I recalled from breakfast.

I did not say anything. Experience has taught me that remarking on minor changes in this building only hastens the major ones.

By half past three, the fold had become a proper starched wing, the sort I associate with old portraits of scholars who took themselves very seriously indeed, and the waistcoat’s fourteen pockets had discreetly multiplied to something closer to twenty, most of them decorative, none of them present that morning, as far as I could establish. I said nothing. I have found that the correct response to a garment quietly improving itself is to let it get on with it.

It was the tails that finally undid my composure. I do not know at what point that afternoon Pip’s plain, well-cut jacket acquired tails, a good foot of the same dark cloth falling in two neat panels behind him, because I was not watching closely enough, being occupied with a delivery of maritime charts that had arrived, as these things do, in the wrong order and upside down. I looked up to find Pip crossing the reading room with an armful of returns, tails swaying gently behind him with each step, quite unaware of them himself. Only when he passed the looking glass we keep by the coat stand, purely so staff may check themselves for feathers, moss, or minor injury before greeting the public, did he stop walking altogether.

Pip’s Account

I did NOT know I was wearing a top hat!!! I want that stated plainly, first thing, before anyone suggests I noticed and said nothing, because how is a person supposed to notice a hat arriving on their own head? Nobody checks their own head halfway through an afternoon’s shelving. I certainly don’t.

I caught sight of myself in the coat-stand mirror and very nearly dropped an armful of Regional Almanacs on my own feet.

It was a GOOD hat, though. Tall, black, with the same odd, faint sheen along the brim that the jacket had carried since the night we bought it. The tails swung properly when I turned, the way they are supposed to in pictures. I stood there in front of that mirror for ages, turning this way and that, thinking, well, I do look rather dashing, actually. I’m allowed to say that. You’ll understand why once you hear the rest of the day.

Bramwell did not agree.

Bramwell’s Log

I did not say the boy looked ridiculous, whatever he claims afterwards. What I said, and I stand by every word, was, “Pip, you are nineteen years old and a junior member of this staff, and I do not believe a top hat falls within the sensible clothing Mistress Spine had in mind.”

He said, and this is a genuine quotation, “It’s got pockets, Bramwell. Look, there’s even a little one inside the hat itself. That’s practical, that is.”

I could not immediately spot the flaw in this reasoning, which troubled me more than the hat did.

Pip’s Account

I’d only just decided I liked the hat when Pemberton decided she liked it even more.

She’d been dozing on the windowsill most of the afternoon, the way she does when it’s warm and there’s nothing worth investigating. I don’t know exactly when she clocked that a top hat makes a brilliant roost, but she did, and by four o’clock I had a chicken asleep on my head.

I said, “Pemberton, no.” She did not move.

I said, “Pemberton, this is a hat, not a nesting box,” which I thought was fair enough. She opened one eye, gave me a look of pure contempt, as if I’d said something painfully obvious, then closed it again.

Bramwell found this hilarious. I would like it on the record that I did not find it so.

Bramwell’s Log

I laughed. I am not going to pretend otherwise, though I briefly tried to disguise it as a cough, which fooled nobody, least of all Pemberton, who looked at me over the brim with precisely the contempt she’d shown Pip a moment before, extending it generously to cover the whole room.

Pip attempted, with as much dignity as anyone can manage whilst reaching up to dislodge a chicken from his own head, to persuade her to go elsewhere. He tried gentle coaxing. He tried a biscuit, offered at arm’s length, which she regarded with the scorn Pemberton reserves for bribery she considers beneath her. He tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, taking the hat off altogether, which only resulted in Pemberton relocating, mid-air, in a startled flurry of feathers, to the returns trolley, whereupon she glared at him for the whole time it took him to put the hat back on, then returned to it immediately, settled with the finality of someone making a point, and went straight back to sleep.

Pip gave up, and did so with good grace, all things considered, returning to his shelving with a small, put-upon sigh and a chicken now dozing at a jaunty angle, which, I will admit, rather suited the whole ensemble. He kept at it for the rest of the afternoon, Pemberton offering, every so often, a soft, sleepy murmur whenever he moved too quickly for her liking. I confess I found the sight considerably more endearing than I let on at the time.

It was some time after this that I noticed the Library had gone quiet in the particular way it does when its attention has settled on something and shows no sign of shifting, a stillness I have learnt to take seriously. I looked up to find every window on the eastern side angled, with what I can only call focused interest, towards Pip, his hat, and his chicken. I felt, through the floor, the low, considering hum I associate with the Library working something out to its own satisfaction.

It went inward to consult itself, as it does, disappearing into its own holdings as it had over the Amentine business, and I thought little more of it until Thaddeus, an hour or so later, appeared at my elbow with a note.

“It has found a new subject. I do not think we are going to enjoy this.”

He was, as usual, correct.

Pip’s Account

By teatime, an entirely new wing had appeared where the Local Ordinances used to be, with a sign overhead in the Library’s own looping hand that read FASHIONS OF A DISTANT WORLD, and beneath it, in smaller letters, clearly added after it had thought about it a bit more: The Victorian Era, England, Planet Earth.

I had never heard of any of those places, and I said so.

Bramwell hadn’t either. He just pretended he was choosing not to comment, which is what he always does when he doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t know something, especially not in front of a building.

There were shelves and shelves of it. Books about starched collars and the moral implications of buttons, books about people wearing entire skirts made of metal hoops for reasons I genuinely cannot explain, one called On the Peculiar English Custom of Dressing for Dinner Regardless of Whether Dinner Is Actually Occurring, and another, A Compendium of Hats and What They Are Attempting to Say About Their Wearer, which I read for AGES. It had loads to say about top hats, most of it flattering, which I felt proved Pemberton right about the whole roost thing.

Bramwell’s Log

I do not know precisely how to characterise what happened next, except to say that the Library, having discovered a whole distant world’s approach to dressing itself, appeared to develop the sort of instant, wholehearted enthusiasm I associate with a child handed the run of a costume chest, which is, I suppose, a fair description of what it is, in its own way, seven months into an existence that shows no sign whatsoever of arriving anywhere near maturity.

It wanted, quite plainly, to dress the rest of us.

I said, addressing the ceiling as is our custom, that this would not be necessary, that Pip’s hat had been an accident of circumstance rather than an invitation, and that the remaining staff were perfectly content with their current attire.

A book fell at my feet. I Have Already Decided. Do Try to Keep Up.

I had no time to argue the point further, because at that moment the broom cupboard beside the reading room door opened of its own accord, and Lyria, passing at that exact moment with an armful of returns, vanished into it with a small, surprised sound and the thump of someone whose books had just gone in a considerably different direction from the rest of her.

Pip’s Account

We heard Lyria before we saw her, which is saying something, because Lyria doesn’t usually make a sound. There was a rustling, papery commotion from behind the cupboard door, and Bramwell and I just stood there, listening, both wondering whether we should help her.

When the door opened again, Lyria stepped out in a dress made of paper and parchment, layer upon layer of petticoats in slightly different shades of cream, and it rustled as she moved, like a hundred pages turning at once. She looked incredible. She did a slow turn right there in the corridor, her skirt swishing out around her, and then she started dancing, and I didn’t even need Bramwell to translate that one. Anyone could have told you what that meant.

Bramwell translated anyway, out of habit.

“She says,” he told me, “that she has never owned anything that has moved with her quite this well before.”

I thought that was really lovely, actually. The Library seemed to agree, because every window along that corridor opened at once, just a crack, which I’ve worked out by now means it’s pleased with itself.

Bramwell’s Log

I would like it stated, for the record, that I attempted to leave. I got as far as the reading room door before the corridor seemed to lean, very slightly, in my direction, the floorboards tilting with the particular purposefulness I have learnt to distrust. I found myself walking, against every instinct I possess, towards the very cupboard I had just watched consume Lyria.

I went in still protesting. I came out with rolled shirtsleeves, a waistcoat of dark, worn leather, which I am fairly certain was once the cover of several ledgers, and a pencil, which I had not been carrying, lodged behind my right ear.

I was, at first, affronted. I said so, at some length, to the ceiling, on the grounds that a senior member of staff ought not to be ambushed in a cupboard and dressed like something out of a scholar’s daydream without so much as a by-your-leave. I used the word unprofessional twice.

Then I put my hand in one of the waistcoat’s pockets, purely to check its contents, and found it exactly the right size for my notebook, snugly, as though the pocket had been measured for it, which, I suppose, it had been.

I stopped being affronted rather sooner than I had intended.

Pip’s Account

I told Bramwell it suited him. I meant it properly, as a genuine compliment. The rolled sleeves and the pencil behind the ear made him look like someone who actually gets things done, rather than someone perpetually arguing with a building, which, let’s be honest, is how he usually looks.

He gave me a look I couldn’t quite place. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Bramwell’s Log

I checked his face twice. I will own that. Since I am attempting honesty rather than flattery in this account, I ought to explain why, though I do so with some reluctance, the explanation reflects rather better on Pip than it does on me.

Last week, crossing the reading room with my attention considerably more on an incoming delivery than on where I was putting my feet, I caught the base of the ladder on which Pip happened to be standing. He did not fall, thanks to a belt loop that, with quite spectacular good fortune, caught on the shelf hook as he went past it, and there he remained, upside down, held entirely by the waist of his britches, for what felt, to both of us, considerably longer than it in fact was.

His britches did not share the belt loop’s commitment to the arrangement. By the time I had got him down, a touring party of six ladies visiting from Lower Hollowmere, none of them under seventy, had enjoyed an uninterrupted view of Pip’s left buttock for rather longer than good manners generally allow. One of them, I regret to report, applauded.

I would like it officially noted that I did apologise and that I was the one who climbed the ladder and physically rescued my younger colleague. I was very careful and even gave him an extra tea break to recover, with access to the nice biscuits. Pip did not consider the apology sufficient.

By the following morning, my tea tasted unmistakably of salt. I made no accusation, having no proof beyond the taste of my own tea and a very particular look he gave me over the rim of his cup, but I did set him to reshelving the second floor that same afternoon. He did not argue the point, which I, at the time, took as tantamount to a confession.

I raise all this only to explain the second glance. The first is for the compliment. The second is to check it isn’t still the ladder talking.

Pip’s Account

I have read Bramwell’s account of the above TWICE now, and both times I have had to put my head in my hands in horror!!!

He used the word ‘buttock’ in an OFFICIAL DOCUMENT with my NAME attached to it. This is going into the Library’s permanent collection, Bramwell, where anyone can find it forever. Future scholars are going to read a detailed account of my left buttock and think, ah yes, Pip Thimble, Junior Librarian, notable for buttock. And there is nothing I can do about it, because IT HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN DOWN.

I want it understood that the ladder was completely his fault. I have never disputed the belt loop. I have never disputed the britches, however much I would like to. What I dispute, furiously, and on principle, is that anyone with a functioning memory decided the correct place to write this down was HERE, in a book other people are going to READ, rather than simply letting it die quietly, as good manners intended. And might I add, his version makes the whole thing sound rather graceful, a neat little rescue, when in fact I dangled. I DANGLED. Upside down. In front of six elderly ladies. For what felt like several hours, not “considerably longer than it in fact was,” which is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence.

Six ladies from Lower Hollowmere. One of them CLAPPED. I have thought about that applause more times than is healthy for someone my age.

And now he’s told everyone about the salt too, which I will admit to, because I am not a coward. But I would like it on the record that I have never once regretted it, not for a single second, not even slightly. If anything, I regret that it was only salt and not something worse. I have been embarrassed before. There was an incident with a snail I’m not getting into. This is worse than the snail.

Right. That’s it. I’ve decided.

If Bramwell wants to put my left buttock into this library’s historical archive, in writing, for other people to read, with my actual name right next to it, then Bramwell has just guaranteed himself a next time. I don’t yet know what the next time will involve. I haven’t worked it out. But there will be a next time, and when it comes, he will absolutely deserve it. I will feel wonderful about it, and I would like that noted in the official record too, right alongside the buttock.

Bramwell’s Log

I have read the above twice, out of a sort of appalled fascination, and I would like it on record that I am not remotely alarmed by the promise of “a next time.” I have survived Pip’s next times before. The last one involved my good pen quietly becoming a considerably worse pen, a substitution I failed to detect for nine days, and for which nobody has ever been held to account.

Thaddeus went next, caught somewhere between the returns desk and the staff room, and emerged wearing a waistcoat of the same dark satin as the one that had, by then, appeared on Barnaby the hamster, matching down to the small brass buttons, though his had many more pockets than strictly necessary, each already filling, within the hour, with folded paper, spare pencils, and, I noted with some concern, at least one biscuit clearly intended for Barnaby.

I have seen a great many strange things in this employment. I am not sure any of them prepared me adequately for a hamster wearing a waistcoat complete with tiny pocket watch.

I noticed, throughout all this, that Pip had acquired a small notebook of his own and was writing in it with the furrowed concentration of someone drafting something he did not wish to be observed. Whenever I glanced over, he stopped, closed it, and gave me a smile I did not trust in the slightest. I chose, for the moment, not to enquire.

Pip’s Account

Barnaby looked SO PLEASED with himself!!! He kept patting the watch with his little paws, as if checking it was still there, and I have never, in my life, wanted to protect anything quite so much as I wanted to protect that hamster and his tiny waistcoat in that exact moment.

(I would like it noted that I was NOT plotting anything during this bit. I was making a list. That’s all it was. A list.)

Bramwell’s Log

Mistress Spine, I am given to understand, put up considerably more resistance than the rest of us, on the grounds, as she explained afterwards, that she had a meeting scheduled and did not have time to be assaulted by architecture. This, in the end, did not prove a sufficient defence.

She emerged some twenty minutes later in a high, stiff collared dress the colour of old vellum, a fitted waistcoat over it with rows of small buttoned pockets running the length of the bodice, and, most alarmingly, a pair of buttoned boots that produced, with every step, a sharp, precise clicking quite unlike her usual quiet tread.

I mention the boots specifically because of what they did to Pip, which I found most intriguing, given that I know he’s plotting against me. Therefore, I feel it important to note that I heard Pip scream, which I thought was a bit dramatic.

Pip’s Account

I did NOT scream. I want that clearly stated. I heard a sharp clicking coming down the corridor towards me, click, click, click, unlike anything I’d ever heard in this building before. After everything that happened to us at that market only a few nights ago, ducking behind the returns trolley and staying there felt like the only sensible thing to do.

It was Mistress Spine, in new boots. She found me crouched behind the trolley and asked, in the driest voice I have ever heard, whether I intended to reshelve from that position or simply admire the floor.

I did not scream. I may have made a small noise. That is not the same thing.

This was NOT the retaliation, for the record. The retaliation is still in the planning stages. This was just me being ambushed by a woman in noisy boots, which could happen to anyone, and has nothing to do with my ongoing plans for Bramwell, which remain private.

Bramwell’s Log

Mistress Spine took the whole business with rather more equanimity than I had expected, once the initial resistance was overcome, remarking only that the pockets were, she supposed, an improvement on her previous arrangement, having spent a good while now losing pencils down the sides of chairs, and that if the Library wished to solve that particular problem for her, she was not about to object on principle alone.

She did, however, formally request that the boots be quietened, which the Library appeared to consider reasonable, because by the following morning the clicking had softened to something considerably gentler, more whisper than announcement, though Pip still, if I am honest, flinches slightly whenever he hears her coming.

I did ask him, once he had recovered himself, whether that had been the opening move in his promised retaliation. He gave me a look of such wounded dignity that I did not ask again.

The Lantern Bearer, appearing rarely and only after dark, missed the whole business and, so far as any of us has observed, remains in exactly the same robes as always. Dame Pellifrax, who was not present, having her own door, her own cottage, and her own excellent reasons for not living permanently within these walls, remains, I expect, blissfully unaware that any of this occurred at all, and I see no pressing need to enlighten her.

I had assumed, by this point, that the Library’s enthusiasm had run its course, having successfully dressed five of its regular staff and one hamster, but I had forgotten, as I periodically do, that the Autocurator counts amongst our number too, however rarely any of us are reminded of it.

It had been quiet for some months, as it tends to be when nothing in particular requires cataloguing, and I confess I had given it little thought beyond the odd rearranged chair and the occasional note in a hand that was not mine. I do not think the Library had forgotten it, though, because the broom cupboard door opened one final time, quite late that evening, with nobody visibly inside to be caught by it. There followed a good deal of rustling, a pause, and then a dry, papery, faintly put-upon noise, the precise sound of a throat being cleared by something that, so far as any of us have ever established, does not possess one.

Nothing emerged from the cupboard.

A bowler hat, however, drifted out at approximately head height, hovering with no visible means of support some five and a half feet above the floor, and made its way, with unhurried dignity, to the reading room, where it settled gently over the back of an empty chair and remained there.

Pip’s Account

Everyone else got a WHOLE OUTFIT, and the Autocurator got a hat. Just a hat! I asked Bramwell if that seemed a bit unfair, and he said he reckoned the Autocurator had simply turned down everything else. When I thought about it, that made sense, because the Autocurator has never once, in the whole time I’ve worked here, done anything the rest of us have asked it to.

I like the hat, though. It’s very smart. It sat on the chair for the rest of the evening, not doing anything in particular, and then at some point I looked over and it wasn’t on the chair any more; it was floating by the returns desk instead, and nobody had seen it move.

Bramwell’s Log

The hat, I have since learnt, comes and goes much as the Autocurator always has, appearing when it wishes to be discernible and, presumably, vanishing when it does not, which strikes me as thoroughly in character. It has taken to clearing its throat, on occasion, from wherever it happens to be hovering, a small, dry sound with no obvious purpose beyond, I assume, reminding the rest of us that it is present and holds opinions about whatever we are currently doing.

It communicates, as it always has, by relocating furniture and objects, though it has recently extended this practice to relocating Pemberton, who was found this morning atop a bookcase she had not, by her own account, climbed, glaring in the general direction of the bowler hat with an expression suggesting a considerable and ongoing grievance. She has not forgiven it. I am not certain the Autocurator has noticed, or would greatly care if it had.

Mistress Spine’s Account

I came through at the end of the day to find my staff variously dressed as illustrations from a period I had never heard of, a hamster wearing a pocket watch, and a hat floating unaccompanied above the returns desk. I want it on record that I asked no questions, having learnt over seven months that asking questions in this building rarely shortens the explanation.

I said only that everyone was to remain presentable during visiting hours, and that if the Library intended to continue dressing its staff in future, I expected to be consulted first, as a matter of basic courtesy between colleagues, whether in the same building or otherwise.

I also noticed a certain atmosphere between Bramwell and Pip that I chose not to enquire into, on the grounds that it was almost certainly their own doing and would very likely resolve itself, as these things generally do in this building.

Bramwell’s Log

It was Thaddeus who found the last of it some hours later, once the reading room had settled and most of us had gone up to our attic rooms for the night. He came to find me holding a note that read simply:

“Come and see what it’s made for Barnaby.”

I followed him down to the small alcove behind the returns desk, expecting the usual teacup Barnaby sleeps in, and instead found a whole miniature library set up along the corner of Thaddeus’s own desk, shelves no taller than my hand running along a little wooden frame, each lined with books smaller than my thumb, their spines lettered in handwriting too fine to read without a glass, a tiny set of steps leading up to it, and Barnaby himself, halfway up those steps in his burgundy satin waistcoat, his pocket watch swinging gently with every step he took.

I heard Pip arrive behind me, still mid-sentence about something I confess I have already forgotten.

Barnaby reached the top, crossed to the nearest shelf, and drew a book from it with both paws, turning it this way and that as though weighing whether it deserved his attention, before setting off along the little gallery towards the next one, his waistcoat catching the lamplight, his watch chain glinting with every step.

Pip crouched down until he was level with the whole small, impossible scene, chin nearly on the desk, and did not say a single word for a rather long time, which, for Pip, was its own kind of statement.

I found I had crouched down beside him without deciding to do so.

Thaddeus pressed one more note into my hand without looking away from the hamster.

“He has been trying to help catalogue for days. I did not think anyone else had noticed.”

I had not noticed either. I do not think the Library had needed to be told.

Pip’s Account

The miniature library for Barnaby was so WONDERFUL!!

I’m still plotting retaliation against Bramwell, regardless of a sweet little hamster enjoying a tiny library.

That still stands, so get ready, Bramwell!!