Mask, peony and dagger design

Every Friday for nine winters a travelling player called Albern Pike stepped off the last train with a trunk, a painted mask, and a dagger wrapped in a cloth printed with peonies. The mask was lacquered cream with a grin cut wide and eyes narrowed to almonds, and it never once changed its face, whatever the weather of the man behind it. The porter, Dunstan Hale, said the peonies on that cloth grew a little fuller every week, as if the blade under them had been drinking.

Then came the Friday a ticket girl named Edie Scrase found Pike weeping in the waiting room with the mask in his lap. She asked him why he wore a smile when he was clearly grieving. He told her a mask smiles so the man beneath can cry without anyone having to look at him. Edie laughed and said that was the most foolish thing she'd ever heard, and he laughed too, and they stayed talking until the ten past nine rattled in with its lamps lit.

Pike never came back. The trunk stayed in lost property with the dagger inside it, its peony cloth unwrapped and dry as paper. Edie kept the mask and hung it on a hook in the signal box, where it still grins at the points man every evening. If you wait for the nine ten, look up at the box window, and you'll see it smiling back at you, and Dunstan swore it was smiling wider than when he first saw it.