Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (29 page)

Lilly:

The first month my bleeding don’t come and I tell myself it’s because I don’t eat much. Then it don’t come again, and again.

I try to ask the other maids what they would do without letting on why. I know whores do something, something to make the baby go away, but I also know it’s a sin. I don’t know what to do.

Violet lies in my bed, and puts her hands on my stomach and sings.  She brings me all her food, don’t save so much as a scrap for herself, and so I let her touch my stomach. Her singing goes all through me, like something humming out from her hands.

“
I can hide your growing belly,” she whispers to me. “And when the baby is born, I can take it away where it will be happy. It’ll only cost twelve pounds.”

“
The Missus will notice,” I say. “Or Mr. Smith.”

“
I’ll take care of them,” she says, her eyes gleaming like candle flames while the wind shrieks. “And Cook won’t say anything. Can you get the money?”

“
Where will you take my baby?”

“
To a place where they raise babies and educate them. Fine people run it, generous and wealthy. Your baby can learn to be something other than a servant.”

I sell my best clothing and my mother’s necklace, and that with all the shillings Mr. Smith has left beside the bed comes to a little under eleven pounds. Violet is angry—she rummages through my things, looking for something else to sell, but finds nothing. Finally I cry for her, and she catches the tears in her bottle, several spoonfuls worth, and smiles before bringing me a cup of water.

As the weeks pass, I cry more and more. Violet takes the tears away and comes back with fruit, knobby melons and glossy limes. She gives Cook something to put in Mr. Smith’s soup, and he dreams his way through the days like the Missus. Cook doesn’t like it much, but when Mrs. Smith is doped on fairy fruit, she gives Cook no trouble in the kitchen, and when she’s not, she orders two puddings a night and changes her mind on the meat on a regular basis, right after Cook’s just finished the marketing.

I grow bigger and bigger, I float my way through the house like a cloud, carried along by Violet’s song. I think she gives me fruit as well—the weeks pass too quickly, too quickly, and then one nightmare of a night I dream my belly splits and I wake up in the middle of blood and soreness. Violet is wrapping up the baby in my coat.

“
Give it to me,” I say, but she holds it away.

“
It’ll just make you miserable later, trying to remember,” she says. “I’m taking her to a nice lady, Mrs. Sucksby. She’ll give her a good life.” She gives me a glass of water, so sweet I know there must be fruit juice in it, just a spoonful or two to send me back to the coolness of the pillow and dreams of sleeping a thousand years, like Sleeping Beauty, with all them plants and thorns.

In the morning Violet and the baby are gone, but I am still sore. Downstairs everyone is cranky, but there is no fruit, and no tears in the house. I cannot cry no matter how much Mr. Smith raises his voice or hand. Finally he sends for the physician, who comes and leaves behind a blue glass bottle. More laudanum.

Mela:

I smell the birth on the wind and it makes me restless. On the night my cubs were born, the rains were just starting. The clouds were low and lightning played over them as though the storm were thinking, dreaming. Then rain fell in sheets bending the grass flat, drops as warm as blood.

All my babies were born dead except my son. I was prepared for this. My people do not live long, and we are few. But he lived, and I washed him clean, there in the torrents of rain, my tongue and the warm water sluicing away the afterbirth.

The Elephant Women and the Hyena Women came to look at him and congratulate me, for their children are few as well. Three groups rule the lands where the acacia trees grow, the Elephants and the Hyenas and the Lions, because we walk most easily between the land of humans and the Real World. There are lesser beings there—we have fairies too, but they are little, malicious things, and rarely come down from the branches.

Lilly:

It’s cold going to market without my coat. The other maids are stand-offish at first—Betty says they ain’t seen me in months, and maybe that’s true, judging by the differences in some of them. But they know what I need to find out—Miriam’s heard of Mrs. Sucksby’s.

“
It’s a baby farm.”

“
Whozzat?”

“
They take the baby and board it for ya, or adopt it if you give ‘em enough.”

She gives the word “adopt” a nasty twist, so I say it. “Adopt?”

“
One payment and they make sure you won’t see your baby again. Got what they call a high mor-ta-li-ty rate.” And she twists the words again like a knife. “That means the babies die.”

Back home I go about my duties. Mr. Smith’s angry, so angry.

“
Where’s Violet?” he snaps.

“
I don’t know, sir.”

He scowls something fierce. “Have to replace her if she’s run off.” He reaches out and touches me, and the gentleness scares me more than the scowling. “Been a while, eh, Lily?”

“
I’m having my woman time, sir,” I say, very soft, looking at the floor. “Just started.”

He ain’t happy, but he goes off to examine the mill.

I slip out before dark, that gives me a head start. I know the address for Mrs. Sucksby. It’s a part of town I never seen before, buildings leaning on each other for support like they was drunk, and everything dirty, so dirty.

The house hunches up between two others. A few lights on, but not many. I go round the back and almost walk into a woman sitting on the steps, but duck back afore she can spot me. She’s a mangy old thing, sitting there enjoying the stars coming out, and finally she rises, gathering up her skirts, and goes off to the privy. I dart up the stairs and inside before she returns.

The pantry has a big cupboard under the sink. I hide under there and wait.

It may be been less than an hour I wait, but it seems like days. I keep hearing footsteps, and it don’t seem like everyone is going to sleep like I’d hoped. Finally I crawl out and go up the back stairway to the second floor.

There’s rooms and rooms full of babies up there. How will I know which is mine? But I spot her, wrapped up in my coat, on a cot with two others.

Footsteps sound, two pairs? Three? I duck under a cot just as they come in. All I can see is three pairs of feet, one set of black ladies’ boots, the others men’s shoes.

“
Take the ones against the west wall,” the woman says. Light from the lantern one of them must be holding shines on the wooden floor, showing dust mice as big as kittens, and places where diapers have leaked. “That’s a half-dozen disposed of, and not so many dying at once that anyone will notice.”

“
Do you think anyone really pays much attention to the death rate of bastard babies?” a man says.

“
I think that we carry out this charade so no one will know they have been taken, and that we will play it out as fully as we have been directed,” she says. Her voice is colder than any wind. It sounds like Violet’s.

Her footsteps clack away, and I peek out enough to see what the men do. My baby is on the east wall, safe enough, but they pick up the other babies, and each time take a bundle out of the burlap sack one carries and lay it in the first baby’s place.

The babies cry and whimper as they are picked up, but the taller man touches a finger to each forehead, and they still, snuffling themselves asleep. Arms full of babies, the two men leave.

I go over to see what they’ve put in place of the babies, but there are still babies there. One yawns and looks up at me. They look like any of the other children. I don’t understand.

Voices, coming back up the stairs, and shouting, somehow they know I’m here. I grab my baby and one of the others, one of the new babies, and scramble out the window, out along the slanted roof. The old window frame slides back down after me.

It’s cold on the roof but calmer than I expected, once I get over the fear that they’ll figure out which way I went. Shouts come from the alleyway and I hear footsteps in the room underneath, but I sit where I am, in a nook between the chimney and the roof, with the coat wrapped around the three of us, while we get acquainted.

Mine has black hair, which I don’t like, because it reminds me of Mr. Smith, and blue eyes, which I do like. The other baby isn’t much to look at—brown hair, brown eyes. Its skin has a funny feel to it, like old leaves. It don’t make a sound, just looks at me and reaches up a hand, tiny perfect fingers curling around my rough red one.

It’s like me, this other baby—it doesn’t know what to do. All three of us stay there, my baby asleep, the other baby watching me. The church clock, far away to the west, is chiming three when the witches find me.

Mela:

You can hide a cub, but they will not stay hidden. You can tuck them among thorn branches, but they will not stay, and even when they do, death can come slithering down the trunk, a python to whom a cub is only a mouthful, a little mouthful, what the Mem Sahib called an appetizer when she served dinner to other English folk. When fever came, we thought the Colonel would go away after she had fallen, but he stayed, and little by little, we became friends, because we never spoke of our losses to one another.

Pythons eat cubs, and when they have, you cannot recover your baby, no matter how much you roar or moan. No matter how much you weep, even though lions never weep.

After we came here, a fairy came visiting, curious about me, about the Colonel. She told me what they could offer: fruit full of sweet hallucinations, combs and charms and little cantrips to keep a house clean or a man faithful.

And memories. They offer dreams and memories. But the price is high, too high and I have no coin with which to pay.

Lily:

Witches! When they swoop down, grabbing me, pulling me into the sky, I scream and almost drop my baby, but one of them grabs it as we whirl up in a rush of wind and stars.

“
What’s this then?” one demands. She looks like something out of a storybook: all long nose and beady eyes and hairy chin. I would have known her for a witch anywhere. “A baby!”

“
Two of ‘em, even,” the other says. Her tone is regretful. “I don’t want to drop er while she’s carrying babies, Grizz. That’s too wicked.”

“
Soft as pudding, you are, Sophie,” Grizz scoffs. “Set her down on the clock tower, we’ll find out what’s going on. Mebbe we can take the babies and then drop her.”

“
I don’t want no baby,” the first says, but we are already tumbling through the sky, whirling like scraps of paper or feathers on the wind, to land on the narrow lip of the clock tower, gritty bricks nice and solid under my feet.

Grizz has my baby, and Sophie takes the other. She spits when she looks at it. “This ain’t no real baby,” she say. “It’s a changeling, be dead before the day is through How’d you come by a fairy husk, girl?”

I tell them my story, holding onto the edge of the tower. Below us are London streets, and the faint distant lanterns of night watchmen.

The witches debate whether or not to drop me—“Keep the populace a little worried, after all, so they respect honest English witches,” Grizz argues. Sophie reaches out for my hand and looks at the palm before she says something to Grizz, too quiet for me to hear, that persuades her.

I try not to hear it, at any rate. I try not to hear the words “not long for this world.”

I have a plan. I make my way down the tower steps from the belfry with the babies. I know what to do. How to give my daughter a good life, the kind of life I never had. It all depends on the woman next door, the woman with the gleam of gold at her wrists and stories of a baby missing from her arms.

Mela:

She comes in the very earliest moments of the morning, when the light is just starting to show its chill brilliance, little Lily with a bundle in her arms, to the back door.

When I open it, she stares up at me. There is fear in her face, but there is also desperation.

She says, “Miss Mela, you lost your baby, didn’t you?”