Any Other Name (The Split Worlds) - By Emma Newman Page 0,97
that name.
“‘Nasal Climber 6-1-L’,” she muttered.
The Shopkeeper had made all sorts of comments about his customers whilst she’d worked for him but she couldn’t recall anything about one having nasal problems. She realised that cracking a code without a reference point was going to take far too long and then hit upon the idea of finding an entry that she could tie to a person. It could give an insight into the numbers and letter after the pseudonym, at least.
With no date reference and only the product names to go by it seemed an impossible task at first. Then she remembered the day Tom had found her and how they’d rushed to the Emporium to find something to save Josh from Horatio. The Shopkeeper had given her a Luck Charm and it had only been a couple of days after she’d reconciled the accounts at the end of her vacation.
Cathy flipped back to a picture of the earlier entries and scanned the list until she saw the entry “Luck Egg – short duration”. It was only a few rows beneath the last product she remembered tallying up. Under “payment” the Shopkeeper had written, “One kiss of genuine gratitude and affection”, and she knew it was the charm he’d given her to protect Josh.
Her name was entered as “Flanders cockerel 5-2-L (AS)” and when she scanned up the list she spotted “Flanders cockerel 5-1-AS” against a purchase of a Seeker Charm. She deduced that was Tom, as the Shopkeeper had warned her he’d bought another Seeker Charm just before Lord Poppy found her. That meant “Flanders cockerel” was the code for their family name and that the second number was an indicator of where in the sibling pecking order they came; Tom was 1 as the eldest and she was 2 thanks to being the middle child. After a few moments of chewing the end of her thumbnail, Cathy hazarded a guess that the first number was the number of generations down from the Patroon, or at least something along those lines to identify which set of siblings the second number related to. AS was most probably Aquae Sulis and the L against her name was because they’d entered the shop from Londinium, even though officially she was an Aquae Sulis resident. She wondered how he kept track of cousins but his memory was incredible – perhaps he only needed the prompt.
If she applied the same logic to the one who’d recently bought the shadow charms, that person was the eldest child of their generation and a Londinium resident. “Well, that’s bloody useless, I need to know the family.”
Flanders cockerel… how could that signify Rhoeas-Papaver? The Flanders part was probably because of the First World War association with the red poppy, but why cockerel? Then she recalled a painting by Monet that hung in the drawing room of her childhood home, one of a woman and child walking through a corn field dotted with poppies, and it was called Les Coquelicots. Could cockerel simply be a play on the French word for the red poppy?
“‘Nasal Climber…’” Cathy whispered the epithet. People often referred to the Wisterias as climbers; it was a rather pathetic pun, the plant named after their line being a climbing vine and the family constantly trying to climb higher in social circles. Did any of them have a particularly large nose? Could the Shopkeeper be that childish with his nicknames?
She tried to remember the names of the Wisteria families resident in Londinium and recalled one that had been on Dame Iris’s list of people she should know about: the Sinensis-Wisteria family. “Sinensis” was fairly close to “sinuses” and the eldest son did have notably large nostrils. She shook her head. Surely it wasn’t so simple?
If it didn’t turn out to be the right family there would be no real harm done. With nothing better to offer him, it was time to contact the Arbiter and hope the Wisteria was buying the Shadow Charms to keep an illegal Rosa hidden. She needed to keep the Arbiter and Sorcerer on side. Even if they couldn’t get her out of the Nether by the time the painting was due, perhaps they’d get her out before Poppy realised how bad it was.
Max handed the piece of paper to Ekstrand and the Sorcerer scanned the information he’d copied from the Gallica-Rosa’s file. He would have given him the information sooner but the Sorcerer had been having one of his bad days.