ASIM_issue_54 (15 page)

By this admission, he was guaranteeing that no one would marry a daughter to either of his other sons, even though neither of them had shown any signs of the hairy curse.

Philippe said that he did not remember what had happened the first two times and that then he had been unable to prevent himself from changing. He pleaded for his life.

Dame Blanche, who was at the trial, told me later, “I tried, Yvonne. That boy was no danger to anyone but himself. Once he knew what he was, if he was supported instead of threatened, he could have learned to control. In Armorique, it isn’t even illegal! If he’d been born across the mountains or even sent there into exile, he would have been allowed to live, maybe even valued as a hunter or army scout.” She sighed. “I will, of course, go to his execution so that at least one person is there to comfort him … Will you come?”

I shook my head.

“Of course not. I’m a fool. It would distress you too much.” She squeezed my hand. “Go look after that fool of a cousin of yours.”

“No,” I said sharply. “She has enough people looking after her.”

And in the end, Eglantine went to see him die. I think she wanted to be sure.

* * *

We arrive at the temple, Eglantine escorted by her father. The village priest is there, ready to perform the ceremony. Green boughs decorate the square and the temple doorway. The vows will be taken outside, where everyone can enjoy—and, most importantly, witness. Her new lord’s parents being gone, his own witnesses, who will mark the papers, are his steward and closest friend, Gilles, and one of his king’s younger sons, with whom he was fostered in his childhood.

Geraint is a tall, powerful man who has a body well-muscled from fighting. His country, unlike ours, is constantly at war with would-be invaders. I do sometimes wonder how her doting parents could possibly let her go to a country so dangerous, but if anyone can protect her it is he—and he
is
rich, after all. Their descendants will bring the family great lands and connections in the next kingdom.

I have seen and spoken with him a few times and liked him. He is kind, a gentleman in more than rank. He is amusing, but never coarse. From what his men have told me, he is brave; his king trusts him, with good cause.

He smiles as his bride arrives and she gazes up at him with adoration, despite having met him only recently. He is dark, in contrast to her pale beauty—and hairy. Far more hairy than I had noticed at first. And a few times since his arrival, he has excused himself to go hunting alone, refusing all offers of escort.

I can’t help wondering …

If what I think is true, I will pray for him. Pray, for his sake, that she never finds out.

…Nike Sulway

She caught the train across town, changing lines at Central. The train out west only seemed dirtier. The ads above the seats were the same, the graffiti, the rubbish, the mysterious black grime that collected along the windowsills. But the people were different. More exhausted, less well-dressed. She had a timetable in her hand, and checked the name of the stations as they flew past, counting them off like rosary beads. For a long time, the train stopped in a tunnel between stations. The lights flickered off, then on. The passengers smiled at each other reassuringly before checking their watches.
A short delay
, the driver announced.
Technical difficulties
. She had heard somewhere that this was a euphemism the state rail authority taught their drivers to use when someone’s body had to be scraped off the rails.

From the station it was a short walk past stores with barred windows, then up a flight of stairs almost hidden between a video store and a newsagent to the clinic. Green linoleum patterned to look like marble, the faint smell of stale cigarette smoke and bleach. The waiting room was small, the magazines at least ten years old. There was a woman with a toddler there already, and another woman, younger than herself, with that particular, haunted look she had seen in the mirror before she left the house this morning.

Finally, she was in the room. The doctor smiled distractedly, waved her towards the chair. She sat, her bag clutched on her lap like a shield.

“So,” the doctor said, “Katherine.”

“Kate.”

The doctor looked over the top of her glasses. She was new at the clinic. Dr Roberts—whom Kate had been seeing since high school—had passed away several months ago. “Kate.” Her smile was sympathetic, concerned. “Your husband not with you today?”

“He’s working. And it’s his turn to pick our daughter up from school.”

The doctor nodded, studied the file again before closing it, taking off her glasses, placing them on the desk in front of her. A year ago—the last time Kate had been into the clinic—the file had been thick with notes and test results going back several years, but the file in front of Dr Hall was slim. Kate felt the first clutch of wariness grasp her. She looked for the first time at the posters on the walls, advocating full disclosure, early testing, therapeutic termination, and sterilisation for those women who continued to conceive non-viable foetuses. Babies.

“Have you spoken to him about your situation?” Dr Hall said.

“I thought it would be better to get the results first.”

“I see.” The doctor peered at Kate, tilting her head like a bird about to strike, frowning a little. “You know, there’s no reason to be unduly concerned. You’ve had one perfectly normal, healthy child. Statistics indicate that a woman like yourself—who has had at least one prior viable pregnancy brought to term—is more likely to conceive another. And this is only your second conception.”

Kate glanced at her file again. There had been four miscarriages before Julia, and two since. Normally, a third non-viable conception would have made her a candidate for compulsory sterilisation, but Dr Roberts had seen a lot of women like her. They had recommended him to each other, whispering his name, passing his phone number to each other, scrawled on the back of old receipts or folded into library books. He was
sympathetic
, they’d said. She had heard rumours that his own wife had been one of them. That they had a daughter they’d released into the wild. But Dr Roberts was gone now and Kate’s file was magically thinner; her history erased.

Dr Hall moved out from behind her desk and sat in the chair nearest to Kate. She put her hand on Kate’s arm and tried to smile. “These are never easy conversations,” she said.

A week ago, during the tests, Kate had quashed the feeling that things were not right. During the ultrasound, the radiographer had smiled reassuringly, but Kate had heard the heartbeats racing each other, the beats blurring together. She had seen the radiographer’s frown and heard the doubt in his voice when he reassured Kate that perfectly normal babies sometimes came in twos and threes.

Kate pulled her bag closer to her belly. “So the results are not good,” she said. “Not normal.”

“I’m afraid the tests show that the pregnancy is not genetically viable,” Dr Hall said. “But we’ve caught it early. At this stage, we can perform a simple correction either at the public hospital, if you don’t have insurance, or at a private clinic.”

“A termination, you mean.”

Dr Hall nodded. “It’s for the best. You can try again in a few weeks.”

“I’ll have to think about,” Kate said. “Speak to my husband.”

Dr Hall leaned forward on the desk. “Mrs Baines, I understand from Dr Roberts’ notes that this is not your first unviable pregnancy. I’m sure Dr Roberts explained to you, in the past, the legal and medical necessities. The need for timeliness. If you delay the procedure beyond another week, things become more complicated. More dangerous.”

Kate stared at her handbag. The clasp no longer snapped shut. Her bag’s mouth gaped like an old woman’s: toothless and slack. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, standing and moving towards the door, “to make the necessary arrangements.”

Dr Hall moved to stand between Kate and the door. She put her hand on Kate’s arm. “Please do,” she said. “I know it’s unpleasant, but these processes have been put in place to protect everyone, particularly women like yourself. And the alternative, should you chose not to cooperate …”

Kate nodded without raising her eyes and, eventually, the doctor opened the door. The woman and child in the waiting room looked up, and Dr Hall smiled and asked them into her office. “I’ll hear from you tomorrow,” she said to Kate. “Before 4 pm.”

* * *

She kissed her husband and slipped out of bed. The hall was dark and warm. Barely any light penetrated here. She went into her daughter’s room, careful not to trip on the toys spread across the floor, the books laid out in a careful grid. She smoothed the hair from Julia’s forehead and kissed her hot cheek. (There is always a last time for everything.)

She had cried when Julia was born. Nothing could have prepared her for the experience of childbirth, for the way it hauled her back into the scents of her childhood: of blood and fur and earth. In the birthing room across the hall she had heard another woman grunting, almost growling, and closed her eyes in terror. She’d submitted herself to all the tests, and taken her own medication religiously—even more after the pregnancy was first confirmed and then approved—but there was always a risk. When the final pains came, and she felt her daughter’s round head pushing down through her, she felt as if she was exploding. She wanted to howl, and let the claws push through her skin, to bare her teeth and snarl at the midwife. “You’re doing great,” the woman said. “Really good.”

And then Julia’s head crowned, the contractions eased a little and she reached down, during the breathy pause, and touched her daughter’s head. The wet slick of hair that felt—to her seeking, terrified fingers—like wet fur. She had had an urge she had never told anyone about: to haul the child out and lick it clean. And then the next pain came, hauling her down into the bowels of the earth where everything was darkness and pain. “Good, good,” said the midwife as Kate clenched her teeth, bore down and felt her daughter slip out of her body. Tiny, toothless. Human, after all.

She never told anyone about the momentary, sinking disappointment she felt. The sense that her daughter—beautiful, beloved—was hers, but not of her. That it was like bearing another woman’s child. But then the nurse lifted the baby up and she had seen Julia’s pink, crumpled face, pulled her to the breast and let her suckle. She was overwhelmed by relief as Julia suckled and she examined her pink skin, her ten fingers and toes, he smooth belly and round chin and snub nose. Knowing the midwife was going out into the hall and recording a normal birth, that soon she would be released from the locked birthing ward into the pink and grey maternity ward with the other mothers. That she wouldn’t have to know what it was like, despite all the testing and precautions, to give birth to a fox.

Kate left Julia sleeping and went into the hall again, back through the house to the kitchen. She touched the bench and the stove, the clean dishes stacked in the drying rack, the copper pots suspended from the ceiling. Finally, when there was nothing left to delay her, she stepped out into the dark.

The garden backed onto the National Reserve; there was no fence to mark the divide. The grass was mown up to a certain point, and then was left to grow leggy and wild. The trees grew close together. There was a path, which soon petered out. When her husband had brought her here, to show her the house he had chosen, she had wondered whether the proximity to the forest was intended as warning or comfort. The trees were beautiful, and strange; reminders of the wildness of her almost-forgotten childhood. Sometimes, especially in winter, she heard the others. The low growling, the muted animal calls. Sometimes she had come out in the morning and found their spoor on the back step, or a hank of plaited fur on the path between the house and the washing line. A threat. A gift. A form of welcome or recognition. She had quickly cleaned away these things, washed her hands, combed her hair, smiled at her husband as he came out of the shower smelling of nothing but skin and soap.

Perhaps, if this had been her first child, she would have been able to go through with the
procedure
, as Dr Hall had called it. The termination. But she knew too well the way the slight tightening of her belly became a child. Knew that even now the children inside her were making their connections, that the longing she had to crack open eggs and suck the warm, silky contents was both hers and her children’s. The dreams she had: of running through the undergrowth, of hauling a damp-furred child from between her legs and licking the bloody, salty fluid away until the fur was red and thick and alive beneath her tongue. She knew, too, the way love fizzed up through her when she had held her newborn daughter: a soft acid burning away any doubts she might have had. No matter how strange the child might be.

Kate knelt at the edge of the garden to remove her shoes. Despite the fences and the traps, the suburbs were full of foxes at night. They came in out of the reserve, running low across the ground. Sometimes she saw them streak beneath a streetlight, or dashing across a floodlit garden. Over the last few months, since she had felt the child take root in her body, she’d seen them more often. It was as if they were taunting her. As if they knew. Every morning, when she went out into the garden, she would find their pawprints in the freshly-turned earth of the garden, or on the back deck. More and more of them each night. They were circling the house while she slept, watching her, waiting to see what she would do.