Then Dottie went hyuuuurgh as she flew up five or six ledges above Harriet’s head, higher, and higher still, each elevation a feat of bad-tempered strength. Harriet climbed up after her, singing. Her torchlight battery died halfway up, and she sang louder.
7
Dottie was told she couldn’t just lurk around in the night grabbing people, and Gretel was told off for . . . Clio didn’t even know where to begin at first, but once she warmed to the theme, she managed to come up with a catalog of Gretel’s “simply bloodcurdling” character defects. Both Dottie and Gretel resented the criticism and transmitted malice in each other’s direction when their parents weren’t looking:
You’ll wish you left me down there.
You’ll wish you’d stayed down there.
At the end of her diatribe, Clio cried: Oh, Gretel! Has Mama been too cross with you? It’s only because I do so love you and we are among strangers who don’t know what an angel you are really! Gretel, don’t cry . . .
I’m not crying, Gretel said. She really wasn’t. At all.
Margot and Simon looked Gretel over as Clio expounded on the girl’s sensitive nature, opposing every point she’d just made in her rant of two minutes ago. Then Margot tucked her arm around Harriet and said, Hmmm.
Dottie had been bashed on the head so hard she’d lost her sense of smell. Gretel was informed of this and felt remorse when Clio reminded her that sense of smell and ability to discern and distinguish flavor are linked. Yes, Gretel felt remorse, but she didn’t say so. She would only say, Oh well. She’d pulled Dottie up, hadn’t she? What more did everybody want from her? Also the expensive doctor Clio sent for was of the opinion that Dottie’s sensory impairment was temporary, if of indefinite duration.
Gretel’s double pupils were evenly spaced, so it was possible to be disturbed by them without knowing quite what you were getting disturbed by. The effect was clearer than the cause: you felt your sight blurring when you made eye contact with her, and most interpreted this is as a prelude to some act of spectral thuggery. The kids stared at Gretel’s clothes and the way she hopped and skipped all over the place; all that spare energy. There was a lot of bad feeling toward Clio and her daughter, especially when it got out that Clio owned the place. Clio had to act fast to nix the growing possibility of a strike. It was the parents she wanted onside; she’d noticed that on the farmstead the childless went along with what the parents decided. Past a certain age, childless adults reverted to child status, and their co-farmers patronized them and didn’t really care what they thought. Clio would’ve been treated in a very similar way (only with more external deference) had she not had Gretel in tow. But since she was a mother, the farmstead parents accepted all the assumed character credentials that entailed and heard Clio out as she proposed turning the Lee family gingerbread into a commercial concern. That was the reason she’d paid a visit to this farm, notable among the many farms she owned only for its consistent underperformance. As for how Clio had sensed an opportunity—that was thanks to Margot Lee, this distant cousin by marriage, who’d drawn on what she’d gleaned from their familial acquaintance and written directly to Clio urging her to think of the children. Margot had circled the names of all the children on that list made in Harriet’s wonky handwriting, before putting it in the mail. This was how you got Clio’s attention: she only really revered the callow. Youth was a state of utmost truthfulness and grace, and its ambassadors should be indulged, venerated as household deities, even. As for the ex-children, including Clio herself—well, it was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped. And there were still ways to receive the blessings of youth. In fact, gingerbread was an ideal vehicle for returning its consumers to a certain moment in their lives, a time before right and wrong. And the key selling point would be that the gingerbread was produced by 100 percent genuine farmstead girls, raised among the very wheat that went into it.
Clio patted three scowling heads—Zu’s, Dottie’s, and Harriet’s—and one smiling head—Elsa’s. Just let me borrow these four for a while and I’ll make you all rich.
Rich? Margot Lee asked a question about potential export sales that was intelligible only to her and Clio, an encrypted warning not to exaggerate. Time and time again Clio’s audience had been refused the little they’d asked for; their confidence couldn’t be secured with assurances of excess.
I meant there are prospects here for you, and for the girls. Stable ones that will grow more profitable in time. What you get out of it will really depend on what you put in.
Annie Cooper said: Jiaolong and Nathan should go too. They’re good cooks—
I’m afraid it wouldn’t work as well. There’s something unhygienic about boys. Not once you get to know them as individuals, of course—no no no. Purely in terms of image. It’s the sort of thing that decreases the appeal of an edible product.
Nathan and Jiaolong were annoyed to hear her talk like this. They weren’t boys; they were fifteen-year-old men, and if this woman wasn’t able to see that, then they couldn’t be bothered with her. Zu put her arms around as many of her peers as she could gather—the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old adults and the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids alike. What do we think, lads? Are girls yummier?
The Coopers and half of the Cook delegation agreed to the plan. Zu Cook and Harriet Lee were to wait three months, long enough for Dottie Cooper to have recovered from being thrown down that well. Then the three girls would join Clio Kercheval in the city and take the biscuit world by storm. But Elsa . . . Elsa wasn’t allowed to go, even though she was the only one of them who was chic in dungarees and therefore seemed most suited to a city sojourn. Zu would willingly have swapped places with her cousin, but for both the parental decision was final. Elsa pleaded her case with all she had (the most memorable of the scenarios she enacted had farmstead life grinding to a halt as frustrated teenaged men fought over her, the only girl left), and this only reinforced her parents’ conviction that they were too fond of her tomfoolery to let her go just yet.
As expected, Margot said. I mean, look at who her mother is.
Elsa’s mother was Gwen Cook, the woman whom someone (Harriet still didn’t know who) had suggested was a better match for Harriet’s father than Harriet’s mother was. Gwen’s objection was guileless, maybe as guileless as Gwen herself.
Isn’t it factory work that Kercheval woman’s talking about? Our Elsa’s not cut out for that.
* * *
—
HARRIET AND ZU convened in Dottie’s bedroom to play nurse, fluffing the patient’s pillow and tying garlands of dried comfrey leaves around the plaster cast on her leg. Dottie had a little bouquet of sweet peas and mint leaves that her younger brother had picked for her, and she sniffed at it hopefully as all three agreed on Zu’s summation that they’d help meals stretch further on the farmstead just by not being around. And it was daft not to jump at a chance to send money home.
Is Gretel definitely not here? Dottie asked, for the fifth or sixth time.
Seeming like someone in love, Harriet sang, but Dottie said: There should be more songs about needing to know where someone is so you can take it easy and not have to keep thinking about your kicking leg being out of action. You’re sure she’s visiting another farmstead? I feel like she’s right here, hiding again. Or she’s around a corner plotting something. Don’t you feel like she’s listening in right now?
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING HARRIET found Gretel standing outside the Lee cottage and surveying the clouds. It’s Thursday, she said. She took out her half of the lottery ticket, and Harriet produced the other half. They held the two pieces together and hunted rogue numbers in the vicinity of Giant’s Clog, Mr. Jack-in-the-Box (who did not emerge), and the rusted loom. The measuring tape wrapped around the loom stand had fallen down and looped in a skew-whiff sequence, but the numbers didn’t match the ones they had.
As they went
about, Gretel spied more numbers than Harriet did. Harriet wondered if it was because she was seeing things four ways, and she asked about that. Gretel said she didn’t know what Harriet was talking about, so back at Gretel’s Well Harriet rubbed a tile clean with the corner of her jumper and bade Gretel take a look at her own eyes.
Huh, said Gretel. Four pupils. But there were only two last time I looked.
She said her eyes hadn’t been like that before she went down the well . . . “her” well.
Maybe I was completely different before. I’m not going in again, so I guess we’ll never know.
Dottie and Harriet had gone farther in than Gretel had and they hadn’t changed. Harriet put this to her point blank.
Oh, la, Gretel said. So you didn’t change. Is that anything to brag about? Three girls went down a well: two were made of gingerbread and one was—not . . .
Made of gingerbread . . . this was insulting. And yet. And yet Harriet had heard Gretel’s musings over consecutive platefuls of gingerbread: Is there anything that this foodstuff lacks . . . is there any other food that so completely nourishes body and soul, any food more absolute in its embrace of the life-force of its eater . . . ? Gretel Kercheval would defend the virtue of well-made gingerbread before any gourmet tribunal. So all right, insult wasn’t really what Harriet had just taken from those words. It was more chagrin at being lumped in with Dottie. This was a wholly new chagrin, as being lumped in with Dottie and the other farmstead kids had been something she’d welcomed up until then. The newness of her chagrin may or may not have mirrored Gretel’s upon hearing Harriet partition the three of them on the basis of cellular stability. They stood on opposite sides of the well, sad and angry, trying to decide whether to patch things up or whether this was just the way things were and therefore there was nothing to patch up.
What were you doing down there, anyway?
Point of view, said Gretel.
What?
I thought there might be a point of view down there. Most of the time I just go here and there without one. So.
Jiaolong, Nathan, and Atif walked past with threshing forks over their shoulders. Harriet and Gretel put away their lottery ticket halves, and the Threshing Fork Three greeted Harriet. Gretel they snubbed. It seemed to them that she’d come to take the girls away. She’d tried to do it one by one beginning with Dottie but had got caught at first attempt, so then there was this drawing of some bonkers distinction between the boys and the girls, and now all the girls were going to go and live with Gretel. They were sure Elsa would end up going too. If the girls came back, if they did, they’d come back awful, in lace shirts and satin overalls and boots that fastened with gemstones.
The Threshing Fork Three walked on, and Harriet and Gretel watched them go. There were numbers shaved into the tangled hair on the backs of their heads. Nathan, Thibault, and Atif were never able to determine at what place, time, and by whose hand those numbers were shaved, but there were nine. Three numbers per head. Harriet and Gretel got out their lottery ticket halves again. They hadn’t won. They hadn’t won, but the shock bulletin sent tremors of mirth through them. The Threshing Fork Three heard snuffling and looked back—what was Gretel up to . . . weeping crocodile tears, perchance? She and Harriet were rolling around on the grass, crying with laughter. Harriet already seemed to be a bit of a lost cause, but the Threshing Fork Three had known her all her life and were reluctant to give up on her. Nathan went back, handed Harriet a threshing fork, and reminded her that she wasn’t a Miss Moneybags; she was only a sidekick.
Gretel got up and demanded a threshing fork too. The Threshing Fork Five got down to work and had their share of the wheat ready for winnowing faster than ever before. There was even time for a game of carrot-patch tag before Gretel was bundled into a limousine, torn clothes and all, leaving the other four draped around motley items of farm machinery wheezing through what felt very much like perforations in their breathing apparatus. They’d kept up with her and it had felt easy while they were keeping up. While they kept up they were all child, fast and light, testing the stretch and reach and pull of their forms and finding laughably little resistance. Falling so much as a millimeter behind Gretel brought them up against joint and bone and sinew.
8
Harriet didn’t sleep well in the city. The dormitory was too hot. She sat up in bed and looked down the row of gently snoring girls, punched herself in the side of her head, and whispered: What did you think this was going to be like, idiot? Did you think you’d have free time to tumble around Druhá City searching for lucky numbers with Gretel Kercheval?
Back at the farmstead Gwen Cook had suspected the girls were getting roped into factory work, and it turned out they had been, but the nature of it was more diffuse than they’d imagined. Clio had collected thirty-three farmstead girls age fifteen and under, all of whom had a guileless look that complemented the simple goodness of the folk delicacy they mixed, baked, shoveled out of ovens, and boxed with handwritten labels. On weekends she kitted them out in dresses, petticoats, bonnets, and aprons and scattered them around what Harriet described in letters to Margot as an authenticity theme park. The house Harriet, Dottie, Zu, and the other Gingerbread Girls slept and worked in was cinnamon-colored and had a sugar-dusted effect to its roof and windowsills. The girls were too gaunt to be the legitimate inhabitants of a house like that, so Clio met with nutritionists, came up with a potion that guaranteed vigor, and had the girls eat seven meals a day. Seven bowls of vitamin- and mineral-enriched gruel that couldn’t really be differentiated from hogfeed. The gruel ensured that the girls came across as the epitome of plump-cheeked country childhood in photos and in the documentaries and TV adverts. Their eyes and teeth sparkled, their skin was smooth, and their pigtails were extra-bushy. The gruel that took care of all this had a stomach-turning odor of rotten eggs and roasted rubber. There was envy toward Dottie, who supped her gruel with a tranquility of sorts. Her sense of smell hadn’t yet returned. Did that eerie brat do me a favor? I think she did . . .
You had to finish the whole bowl. There was water to wash it down, and the mixture was so claggy you had to have a lot of that. If you rebelled, a matron came and brought you a new letter from some member of your family who was either bursting with loving pride in their miraculous breadwinner or anxiously awaiting your next pay packet or both. About three weeks in, Harriet and a few of the others twigged that Clio had a forger in her employ and the letters were faked. Harriet stopped writing home. The temperate wisdom of the replies she was receiving from “Margot” rang a lot of alarm bells for her even though the handwriting was an impeccable match. She could only assume that Margot was receiving reassuring missives from “Harriet” too. A lot of the girls didn’t mind this: they found this mother Clio Kercheval had assigned to them was much better at cheering them on than their actual mothers were. The fake mother took more pride in them.
So none of the Gingerbread Girls were forced to do anything. Not forced, no, nobody could say that . . . it was more that there were frauds they helped perpetrate against themselves, hoaxes they somewhat willingly became beholden to. If being manipulated like that did your head in too much, you could run away, like Gretel did, but unlike Gretel, you wouldn’t be welcomed back. Bearing this in mind the Gingerbread Girls stayed on and were sorted into different teams each weekend.
Team 1 was on in the afternoons, hosting tea parties on the third floor. Tasks: pouring tea, handing round gingerbread, giggling a lot, and conveying country sayings they’d memorized from a book. The book was almost certainly a parody, but Clio lost her temper when asked about it. Things said with a pure heart are pure!
There was a warren of kitchens on the second floor, and in the evenings Team 1 donned daisy-patterned hairnets and piped pink icing onto gingerbread figurines. They leaned so close to the gingerbread that this was where they’d have been in danger of depleting stock if it hadn’t been for the perennial nausea induc
ed by all the gruel they ate. Zu became an art-nouveau icing artist, blending her yearning for the forbidden into every embellishment. Gingerbread compasses were her speciality.
Team 2 played “Pass the Parcel,” “Please, Mother, May I,” or “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” in the garden with other kids who were biding their time until their parents took them home. Team 2 always found it impossible to convince the visiting kids that they weren’t robots.
Team 3 spent the afternoons concocting gingerbread lore in the library on the fourth floor. Gifts of the Four Wise Men: Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh + Gingerbread . . . In the evenings they hosted Breadcrumb Balls. They had no problem with the singing and choreographed dancing with Hansel dolls; after weeks of practice they had those bits down to a tee. But the bit where they had to skip around the grown-ups’ chairs with their skirts shimmying wasn’t easily done without flashing underwear. Some of the grown-ups didn’t like that bit either, but a greater number had a good old stare. Might as well; they were allowed. With a “look but don’t touch” rule, everybody knew where they stood. You could ask some of the older girls to jump higher and most obliged, looking convincingly abashed at their naughtiness. This wasn’t done for tips—they didn’t receive any—it was done out of determination to give their all to the gingerbread experience. The less idealistic Gingerbread Girls were free to refuse, but the worst they could say was “Fudge off,” as Clio had a zero-tolerance policy toward swearing.
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