The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  The little girl watched them warily, nibbling at a rose haw she’d snatched from one of the cut sprays. It was hard and sour, but interesting. The tyger watched them too, pacing more quickly than usual.

  “Your Uncle Randall gave your mother a fine length of sky-blue silk,” he said. “Will she have a gown made of it, do you think?”

  “No,” said the child. “She showed it to Uncle Thomas and Aunt Caroline and asked them if she ought to have a gown made for the christening party.”

  “Really?” the tyger said. “And what did they say?”

  “Aunt Caroline looked cross, and said Mamma mustn’t think of such a thing while she’s in mourning. Uncle Thomas didn’t say anything. But his eyes got very small.”

  “Rather a clever thing for your Mamma to have done,” said the tyger. “What did she say in reply?”

  “She said Yes, yes, you’re quite right. And Uncle Thomas went and talked to Uncle Randall about it.”

  The tyger made a low percussive sound in his chest, for all the world like quiet laughter.

  “If a rabbit’s being chased by a fox, it’s wise to run straight to the wolf,” he said. “Of course, the question then is, whether it can get away safely after the wolf’s taken the fox by the throat. Wolves like a bit of rabbit too.”

  “It’s bad to be a rabbit,” said the little girl.

  “So it is,” said the tyger. “But if one has grown up to be a rabbit, one can do very little about it.”

  “Only run.”

  “Just so.” The tyger turned his great wide head to regard the sunken garden. “Why, your aunts have come out to take the air.”

  The little girl retreated to the plum tree. Leaning against its trunk, she watched Aunt Caroline and Aunt Elizabeth coming along the walk.

  Aunt Caroline was pale and thin, had a shawl draped about her shoulders, and Aunt Elizabeth half-supported her as she walked.

  “Yes, I do think the bloom’s returning to your cheeks already,” Aunt Elizabeth was saying in a determinedly cheery voice. “Fresh air will do you a world of good, my dear, I’m sure. Whenever I feel faint or bilious at Brookwood, dearest Henry always advises me to take my bonnet and go for a ramble, and after a mile or so I’m always quite restored again, and come home with quite an appetite for my dinner!”

  Aunt Caroline said nothing in reply, breathing with effort as they walked. There was a stone seat overlooking the sunken garden, and Aunt Elizabeth led her to it.

  “We’ll settle ourselves here, shall we, and watch them making it ready?” suggested Aunt Elizabeth, sitting down and making room for Aunt Caroline. “There now. Oh, look, they’ve got the water going again! Really, this will make the prettiest place for a party. You’ll want to put the long table for the collation over there, I suppose, and the trestle tables along the other side. And I would, my dear, have two comfortable chairs brought down and set on a kind of step, ’tis called a dais in London I think, where the nursemaids may sit with the little boys and all may pay their respects conveniently.”

  Aunt Caroline hissed and doubled over, clutching herself.

  “There, my dear, there, courage!” Aunt Elizabeth rubbed her back. “Oh, and you were feeling so much better after breakfast. Perhaps this will help. When I’m troubled with wind, Henry will—”

  “It’s a judgement from God,” gasped Aunt Caroline.

  “Dear, you mustn’t say such a thing! It may be He sends us our little aches and pains to remind us we ought to be ready at all times to come before Him, but—”

  “I prayed the boys would die,” Aunt Caroline told her. “I thought of having them suffocated in their cradles. God forgive me, forgive me! And it wasn’t a week after that the pains began.”

  Aunt Elizabeth had drawn away from her. Her face was a study in stupefied horror.

  “Never!” she said at last. “Those dear, sweet little lambs? Oh, Caroline, you never! Oh, how could you? Oh, and to think—”

  Aunt Caroline had begun to sob hoarsely, rocking herself to and fro in her agony. Aunt Elizabeth watched her a moment, struggling to find words, and at last found them.

  “Well,” she said, “It’s—Henry would say, this is proof of the infinite mercy of the Almighty, you know. For, only think, if you had followed such a wicked thought with a deed, what worse torments would await you eternally! As it is, the sin is hideous but not so bad as it might be, and these timely pangs have made you reflect on the peril to your eternal soul, and you have surely repented! Therefore all may yet be well—”

  Aunt Caroline toppled forward. Aunt Elizabeth leaped up, screaming, and the men stopped work at once and ran to be of assistance. Upon examination, Aunt Caroline was found not to have died, but merely fainted from her pain, and when revived she begged feebly to be taken to her chamber. Aunt Elizabeth, rising to the occasion, directed the men to improvise a stretcher from the ladder. She paced alongside as they bore Aunt Caroline away, entreating her to call on her Savior for comfort.

  The little girl watched all this with round eyes.

  “There’s one secret out,” remarked the tyger. “I wonder whether any others will show themselves?”

  ***

  The east wind was blowing. It swayed the cloths on the long tables, it swayed the paper lanterns the servants had hung up on lines strung through the trees in the garden. The tyger lashed his tail as he paced.

  The little girl was walking from lantern to lantern, peering up at them and wondering how they would light when evening fell.

  “Your Uncle Randall asked your Mamma to marry him today,” said the tyger.

  “He did it in front of Uncle Henry and Aunt Elizabeth,” said the child.

  “Because he thought she wouldn’t like to say no, if they were present,” said the tyger. The child nodded.

  “But Mamma said no,” she concluded. “Then Uncle Randall had a glass of wine.”

  The tyger put his face close to the bars.

  “Something bad is going to happen,” he said. “Think very hard, quickly: are you a rabbit, or do you have teeth and claws?”

  “What the hell’s it doing?” said a hoarse voice from the other end of the courtyard. The child looked up to see Uncle Randall advancing on her swiftly. He had a strange blank look in his eyes, a strange fixed smile.

  “Hasn’t it ever been told not to go so near a wild brute? Naughty, naughty little thing!” he said, and grabbed her arm tightly. “We’ll have to punish it.”

  He began to drag her away in the direction of the potting shed. She screamed, kicking him as hard as she could, but he laughed and swung her up off her feet. He marched on toward the thicket behind the shed, groping under her skirts.

  “We’ll have to punish its little soft bum, that’s what we’ll have to do,” he said wildly, “Because a dutiful uncle must do such things, after all, ungrateful little harlot—”

  She screamed again, and suddenly he had stopped dead in his tracks and let her fall, because Cousin Louise was standing right before them and staring at Uncle Randall. She was chalk-white. She seemed as though she were choking a long minute, unable to make a sound, as the little girl whimpered and scrambled away on hands and knees.

  Uncle Randall, momentarily disconcerted, regained his smile.

  “What?” he demanded. “None of your business if we were only playing.”

  Cousin Louise threw herself at him. Being, as she was, a tall girl, she bore him over so he fell to the pavement with a crash. His wig came off. She beat him in the face with her fists, and found her voice at last, harsh as a crow’s:

  “What were you going to tell her? Were you going to tell her you’d cut her tongue out if she ever told what you did? Were you? Were you?”

  Uncle Randall snarled and attempted to throw her off.

  “Ow! Who’d believe you, stupid bitch? The guests’ll be arriving, I’ll say you’ve gone mad—”

  The child climbed to her feet and ran, sobbing, and got behind the menagerie wall. There she cried in silence, hiding her fa
ce in her skirts.

  When she ventured out again at last, neither Uncle Randall nor Cousin Louise were anywhere in sight. The tyger was looking at her steadily.

  “That’s another secret come to light,” he said. “Now, I’ll tell you still another.”

  Rubbing her eyes with her fist, she listened as he told her the secret.

  ***

  Mamma and Aunt Elizabeth carried the babies into the chapel, so the nurserymaid was able to spare her a moment.

  “Lord, lord, how did your face get so dirty? As if I ain’t got enough to see to!” she grumbled, dipping a corner of her apron in the horse-trough and washing the little girl’s face. “Now, hold my hand and be a good child when we go in. No noise!”

  She was a good child through the solemn ceremony. Mamma watched the little boys tenderly, anxiously, and Uncle Henry and Aunt Elizabeth smiled when first John, and then James, screamed and went red-faced at having Satan driven out with cold water. Uncle Thomas was watching Mamma. Aunt Caroline was tranquilly distant: she’d taken laudanum for her pain. Beside her, Cousin Louise watched Uncle Randall with a basilisk glare. Uncle Randall was holding himself upright and defiant, smiling, though his face was puffy with bruises.

  Afterward they all processed from the chapel and up the long stairs, to arrange themselves in ranks before Grandpapa, that he might give them his blessing. He stared from his high white bed and had to be reminded who they all were. At last he moved his wasted hand on the counterpane, granting an abbreviated benediction on posterity, and they were able to file from the sickroom into the clean-smelling twilight.

  The wind had dropped a little but still moved the lanterns, that had candles inside them now and looked like golden moons glowing in the trees. It brought the sweet smell of wood smoke from an early bonfire. The dusk was lavender, so lambent everything looked slightly transparent, and the milling guests in the garden might have been ghosts. The child wandered among them, unseen as a ghost herself, watching.

  There were stout old gentlemen with iron-gray wigs and wide-brimmed hats, who spoke at length with Uncle Henry about harvests and horse fairs. In high white wigs were young men and young ladies, lace-trimmed mincers of both sexes, who wondered why there were no musicians, and were quite put out to be told that there would be no dancing because of mourning for Papa.

  Admiring gentlemen in silk stockings, slithery as eels, crowded around Mamma to pay her compliments, and Uncle Thomas held her arm possessively and smiled at them all. Aunt Caroline, on a couch that had been brought out for her, looked on dreamily. Uncle Randall edged through the crowd, telling first one inquirer and then another how his bruises had come at the hands of a low slut of a chambermaid, damn her eyes for a scheming hussy, wanted a guinea for favors as though she were the Queen of Sheba, screamed like a harpy when he’d paid her out in the coin she deserved! Ha-ha.

  John and James lay in the arms of the nurserymaid and Aunt Elizabeth, who was glad to get off her feet, and the little boys stared in wide-awake astonishment at the glowing lanterns and ignored all their well-wishers, who moved on speedily to the collation table for cider and ham anyway. Some guests vanished in pairs into shadowy corners. There were perfumes of civet-musk strong in the air, there was wine flowing free. Someone got drunk remarkably quickly and tripped, and his wig went flying. It hit Uncle Henry in the face with a poof and a cloud of powder. People tittered with laughter.

  The little girl walked through the shadows to the keeper’s shed. She found the ring of keys where he had hung it up before hurrying off to the somewhat lesser collation for the servants. Nobody but the tyger saw her as she came and tried the big brass keys, one after another, in the padlock that secured the door of his pen. At last it clicked open.

  She slipped it off. The bolt was a simple one, just like the bolt on the nursery door. Sliding it back, she opened the door of the pen.

  The tyger paced swiftly forward, his green eyes gleaming. He looked much bigger out of his prison. He turned and gazed at her a moment; put out his warm rough tongue and slicked it along the pulse of her wrist, the palm of her hand. She felt a shock go through her body, an electric thrill of pleasure. She parted her lips but could find no words, only staring back at him in wonderment. He turned his head to regard the party in the sunken garden.

  “Now,” said the tyger, “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  He stretched his magnificent length, gave a slight wriggle of his shoulders, and bounded across the courtyard. Standing beside the empty cage, she folded her little hands and watched.

  He charged the party, vaulting from the top step into the sunken garden. Horrified guests looked up to see him land in the midst of them all, and gilt chairs were knocked over as people scrambled to get away from him, screaming in their panic. Some staggered on their high heels, some kicked off their shoes and ran in their slippery stockinged feet. Aunt Elizabeth went over backward in her chair, clutching young James, and both began to shriek. The servants fled for their lives. Aunt Caroline watched all from her couch, too drugged to care.

  But the tyger leapt straight through the garden like a thunderbolt, overtaking Uncle Thomas, whom it felled with a sidelong rake of one paw. Uncle Thomas went down, howling and clutching himself, and blood ran red all down his white silk hose. The tyger didn’t even pause, however, it sprang clean over him and continued forward, and the only person left before it now was Uncle Randall, who had broken a heel on the topmost of the opposite steps and was still there, frantically attempting to yank off his tight shoe.

  Uncle Randall looked up into the tyger’s eyes, but had no time to do more than bleat before it struck him. He broke like a doll, and rolled over with it into the darkness.

  There was a second’s hush, cries cut off abruptly in those who still crouched or lay sprawled in the sunken garden. Uncle Henry, who had crawled to Aunt Elizabeth’s side, rose on his elbow to look and said, “O Lord God!”

  The tyger appeared at the top of the steps, dragging Uncle Randall by the back of the neck. Uncle Randall’s head hung at a strange angle and his body was limp. The tyger’s eyes reflected back the light of the golden lanterns.

  It stared at them all a moment before opening its jaws. Uncle Randall dropped like an empty coat. The tyger’s beard was red.

  It bared its fangs, and turned and bounded away into the night.

  ***

  When they asked her why, she explained. After she had told them everything, they made her explain it all over, and then explain once more. No matter how often she explained, however, they did not hear what she said.

  ***

  Finally they sent her away, to a convent school in France. It was by no means as bad as it might have been.

  She made no friends, but her eyes being now accustomed to look for detail, she saw keenly the fond possessive looks or angry glances between the other girls, heard the midnight weeping or sighs, saw the notes hastily exchanged; watched the contests for dominance and knew when the cloister gate was locked and when it was left unlocked, and who came and went thereby, and when they came too.

  The heavy air buzzed like a hive. She no more thought of participating in the convent’s inner life than she would have thrust her hand into a wasp’s nest, but she watched in fascination.

  Then, one morning at Mass, above the high altar, the crucified Christ opened green blazing eyes and looked at her. He smiled.

  Calamari Curls

  The town had seen better days.

  Its best year had probably been 1906, when displaced San Franciscans, fleeing south to find slightly less unstable real estate, discovered a bit of undeveloped coastline an inconvenient distance from the nearest train station.

  No tracks ran past Nunas Beach. There wasn’t even a road to its golden sand dunes, and what few locals there were didn’t know why. There were rumors of long-ago pirates. There was a story that the fathers from the local mission had forbidden their parishioners to go there, back in the days of Spanish rule.

  Enterprising Ya
nkee developers laughed and built a road, and laid out lots for three little beach towns, and sold them like hotcakes. Two of the towns vanished like hotcakes at a Grange Breakfast, too; one was buried in a sandstorm and the other washed out to sea during the first winter flood.

  But Nunas Beach remained, somehow, and for a brief season there were ice cream parlors and photographers’ studios, clam stands, Ferris wheels, drug stores and holiday cottages. Then, for no single reason, people began to leave. Some of the shops burned down; some of the cottages dwindled into shanties. Willow thickets and sand encroached on the edges. What was left rusted where it stood, with sand drifting along its three streets, yet somehow did not die.

  People found their way there, now and then, especially after the wars. It was a cheap place to lie in the sun while your wounds healed and your shell-shock faded away. Some people stayed.

  Pegasus Bright, who had had both his legs blown off by a land mine, had stayed, and opened the Chowder Palace. He was unpleasant when he drank and, for that matter, when he didn’t, but he could cook. The Chowder Palace was a long, low place on a street corner. It wasn’t well lit, its linoleum tiles were cracked and grubby, its windows dim with grease. Still, it was the only restaurant in town. Therefore all the locals ate at the Chowder Palace, and so, too, did those few vacationers who came to Nunas Beach.

  Mr. Bright bullied a staff of illegal immigrants who worked for him as waiters and busboys; at closing time they faded like ghosts back to homeless camps in the willow thickets behind the dunes, and he rolled himself back to his cot in the rear of the Palace, and slept with a tire iron under his pillow.

  ***

  One Monday morning the regulars were lined up on the row of stools at the counter, and Mr. Bright was pushing himself along the row topping up their mugs of coffee, when Charlie Cansanary said: