Roses (3 page)

A deadly silence thickened the air. Ma Dane, who was never quiet, sat motionless, and Eli made no sound. Even Pa Hamish paid attention for once and opened his sleepy, brown eyes wide.

“What is it?” he asked finally, disgusted.

The baby mewed.

“Please, Ma, it was on the doorstep—” began one maid.

“—with this,” finished the other, holding up the amulet.

Ma Dane shivered, though it was stiflingly hot.

“That hangs in the drawing room!” cried Pa Hamish. “Is this some trick?”

At the raised voices, Eli began to make a fuss, but for once, Ma Dane did not notice. She swallowed hard and gasped, trying to regain her composure.

“Where—” she began, but she was not able to continue.

“You should not touch such things!” shouted Pa Hamish. “Put that back where it belongs!”

“No, please, Pa,” cried the maids. “We just found them!”

“Liars! Thieves!”

Ma Dane abruptly pushed back her chair and stood, juddering the table and causing all of the china to rattle. Her husband fell silent and Eli stopped his blubbering.

“Is it a girl?”

One maid pulled back the swaddling before nodding.

Ma Dane’s cheeks turned a shade paler.

“What is the meaning of this?” scoffed Pa Hamish, but his wife was not listening.

Ma Dane’s dark eyes darted about the room feverishly as she clenched and unclenched her fists into her skirt, biting the soft flesh of her cheek. She had tried to ignore the signs, she had willed it not to be real, but here it was. Here
the thing
was.

The blistering orange glow of the morning sun was streaming through the broad crystal windows and outside she could hear,
among the screeches of seagulls and ringing of bells, the gentle sucking of the sea. It brought back an unwelcome memory and she licked her sweaty, thin lips. Many, many seasons ago, she had stood at the edge of Sago’s shore and made a young, desperate promise. She wished that she could not remember, but it hung as heavy as a gold amulet around her neck.

“Take it upstairs and give it to the wet nurse,” she commanded in an unusually weak voice.

The maids exchanged frightened looks.

Pa Hamish’s mouth dropped open.

“Put the amulet in my rooms,” Ma Dane carried on. “And do not speak of this again or you shall lose your places.”

She sat down.

The maids silently thanked the gods they were always told not to believe in and rushed out, fearful that their mistress might change her mind.

Ma Dane rang the bell for the next course and servants appeared, carrying platters of fresh omelets from the kitchens.

Pa Hamish stared at her, shocked.

“What by gods was—”

“
Silence!
” hissed Ma Dane.

And like the obedient, downtrodden husband he was, Pa Hamish never mentioned it again. In fact, he did not see the child until she was sixteen seasons old and could no longer be confined to the nursery. He had forgotten her existence and when he saw the freakish thing roaming one of Rose Herm’s long corridors, he screamed.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

The Baby with Amethyst Eyes

T
he evening following that awful arrival, Ma Dane retired to her rooms after a fretful day pretending to listen to her visitors while her head was filled with the horrors of her past. Traipsing into her dressing room, she let her restless dress-maids unlace her gown before dismissing them. She wanted to be alone. That baby had awakened something inside her—something that she had long buried. She could feel it fizzing through her blood. She clutched her head, trying to convince herself that it was only a headache, but she knew that it was more than that.

Staggering into her vast bedroom, she stood before her gilded looking glass and pulled at the pins in her hair. She had been so eager to be left alone that she had forgotten to let her dress-maids take it down. She entertained the thought of firing them for such
negligence—that would give the servants something new to worry over. It seemed a good idea.

Suddenly, her dark hair tumbled down her back, the pins falling free. She froze, her reflection in the mirror pale and aghast. The pins moved themselves into a neat line on the dresser beside her and her hairbrush alongside them began to twitch.

Ma Dane stamped her hand over it. She had worked so hard over the years to control herself—she would not give in now.

“Asha!” she spat. “Asha, what have you done?”

Picking up the brush, she threw it to the floor, and her rage consoled her. Marching over to the bed, she snatched up the rose amulet that had been left with the baby. It was different from her own—heavier, darker, and more powerful. The weight of it in her hand suddenly gave her a rush to her head, and her anger was about to be replaced with fear when her stubbornness took over.

This was
her
house.

With the amulet burning a Magical heat into her hand, Ma Dane walked into her dressing room and opened a back wardrobe where her old collection of dresses was kept, the ones her mother had made for her trousseau when she first married Pa Hamish. She had not let go of them in all those seasons, though they were wildly dated and almost absurd now. With a hiss of rage, she threw the amulet into the closet and slammed the doors.

News of Rose Herm’s new addition spread and Ma Dane’s high society friends began asking probing questions, wondering if the abnormal child that they overheard their maids whispering about was real. Rumors circulated through drawing rooms and dance halls, people speculating whether the child was Ma Dane’s or simply a curse rooted in the dodgy dealings of the Herm-se-Hollis
past. Oddly, Ma Dane was more concerned about the former assumption.

The arrival of the baby also unsettled the servants at Rose Herm. From the first instance it crossed the threshold, there was a noticeable anxiousness in the air, even in the kitchens. Ma Dane did not know if it was simply her imagination, but her day-to-day dealings with the house staff in the following moon-cycle felt strained. Sensing something, Eli forever blubbered in her presence and Pa Hamish disappeared as often as he could to his men’s club. He had never broached the subject of the baby since Ma Dane had summoned him to silence, but it would be some time until he forgot it completely.

Another moon-cycle passed before—worn down by rumors and terrified servants and sick of waiting for the event to brush over of its own accord—Ma Dane decided to take matters into her own hands. She arranged an early summertime ball in the lush, expansive back gardens of Rose Herm and invited all of Sago’s high society.

The evening was well underway with heaped platters of food and the hum of a full orchestra when Ma Dane called the guests to attention. It was a typical, stifling hot Sago day and everyone thought the beads of sweat dripping down Ma Dane’s round face were due to the punishing sun.

As smoothly as she could manage, Ma Dane addressed the rumors that had been buzzing through Sago’s social scene concerning the new arrival at her house. She even managed to provoke a titter from the crowd when recounting one particular story that a winged moorey had flown through her drawing room windows. But she assured everyone that this was not the case and described her new cause to take in the beggar children of prostitutes. Thus, her high society friends and the servants of her household—even her husband—swallowed the lie that the baby was a street urchin, born mutilated as a result of its mother’s under-realm ways, and life returned to normal.

But that night, and every night for the following moon-cycle, Ma Dane dreamt that Asha was crying.

It was lucky that a wet nurse was still employed at Rose Herm when the newborn arrived. Master Eli was past the age of needing one, but Ma Dane had been considering a second child (she quickly decided not to after the arrival of the amethyst-eyed baby), and so she kept the woman on, not wanting her to be snatched up by another household.

It was also lucky that the wet nurse was from a largely Magic Blood family in The Neighbor, and therefore was not so repulsed as everyone else when she was presented with the newborn. She still whelped upon seeing it, but after she had recovered from the initial shock, she would let it rest in her arms and feed from her, seeing how weak and malnourished it was. She was kind natured and the tales of Magic Blood cousins born in her home country with various strange goings on left her assured that the baby’s blood would settle soon and she would look like a true Pervoroccoian in time.

The wet nurse was the baby’s sole nurturer for many seasons. To avoid upsetting everyone in the house, the child was confined to the nursery and allowed outside only once every four days, when the wet nurse would take her around the gardens. She was absolutely forbidden to venture away from Rose Herm itself; Ma Dane was too fearful that her appearance would spark old rumors.

Thus, the child grew into a shy, quiet toddler, seeing only the wet nurse and a few other servants who happened to pass on their walks. She was dressed in the old clothes of Master Eli and never seen by the Herm-se-Hollis family.

When sixteen seasons had passed, the wet nurse knew it was high time that she left the household and that a proper nanny be
employed. She had long stopped feeding the baby herself and was now purely a babysitter. Though she had come to love the lonely child, there was little more she could give her and she was restless to move on. After several petitions made through other servants to meet with Ma Dane were ignored, the wet nurse handed in her resignation. Only then was she summoned one winter’s morning to Ma Dane’s office, and she decided to take the baby with her.

Ma Dane’s office was a spacious room at the back of the house on the ground floor filled with books and a long, wide desk that she sat behind to do business. She liked to spend an hour in her office every morning, attending to the needs of servants and managing the household’s accounts. Pa Hamish never concerned himself with such things, leaving all the monetary and household management to his wife.

It was a warm morning with a fresh, salty breeze whistling in from the sea. The residents of Sago generally exalted in its short winters, it being the only time that they could venture outside without parasols. Soft, glowing light seeped through the windows of Ma Dane’s office as the wet nurse entered, the light silhouetting Ma Dane’s bulky form bent over her desk. The wet nurse walked into the middle of the room, and Ma Dane finally looked up.

She jumped. Her eyes locked on the baby toddling at the wet nurse’s side. In some way she had imagined it frozen in time, forever to remain a silvery bundle and she could not fathom the toddler before her.

“I trust you received my letter of resignation, Ma,” the wet nurse said, after a long silence had ensued.

Ma Dane roused herself and a deep shudder traveled down her body.

“She is harmless,” the wet nurse added, mistaking the shudder for one of disgust. “In fact, if I may be so bold, Ma, I think she looks mighty better.”

She was right and Ma Dane could see that. Once you recovered from the shock of the thing, its large violet-colored eyes and pearly silver skin could almost be endearing. It was also chewing on the nail of its right thumb in a way that reminded her painfully of Asha.

“Anyway, I must resign, Ma,” carried on the wet nurse, taking Ma Dane’s silence as indifference. “I think the child will need a nanny and . . . I am not sure how much longer she will stay in the nursery, Ma. She is a curious little thing.”

“Yes, you must go,” said Ma Dane at last. “I had not realized that she had grown so much.”

“Babies have a tendency to grow, Ma.”

Ma Dane ignored this impertinence.

“Has there been anything . . . I mean, have you noticed . . .”

“Magic Blood?”

Ma Dane shivered.

“No, Ma. I believe she is just a quirk of nature.”

“Sometimes it is slow to come,” Ma Dane whispered, but the wet nurse did not hear her.

“I will inquire into a nanny immediately and you may leave when she arrives.”

The wet nurse nodded before pressing her left hand to her chest in the sign of respect. She scooped the child into her arms and walked out of the room.