Cinders: Necessary Evil (Magic Mirrors Saga Book 1)

by Sky Sommers

  Step one in ending the fiasco is to get rid of the result.

  Step two, worry about everything else.

  The witch only gave me a seven day supply of herbs. She said if it didn’t work, the child was meant to be. So, now I have to live in terror for another week!!!

  It’s done. My body is my own again. It only took five days.

  I’m exhausted.

  Going to sleep.

  Throwing away the herbs.

  Never mentioning this again.

  Ever.

  Thursday, April 25th

  I’m so angry right now I could strangle Grace!

  Five days of that tea and my flow started - suddenly, just like the witch said it would - thank heavens I was home, sitting down, doing my homework. I rushed to the bathroom, but not quick enough. My dress and undergarments were soaked through. I showered and stuck the clothes in the basket to deal with them later. I felt exhausted and went to bed.

  Matthew came over to tutor me in arithmancy. Because now I really do need tutoring since I was so spaced out at school for the last few weeks that I didn’t listen. We have a test soon and I have no idea what about. I picked Matthew who got engaged sometime in the last month, would you believe it? He had to go ask his fiancee and my own Father for permission so we could study together. With the door open. Anyway, we were just getting started when SHE yelled at me to come down at once. When I didn’t, she marched in, insulted Matthew and I had to go downstairs anyway.

  To my horror, I saw my bloodied clothes laid out and got a lecture about organic matter while she issued instructions of picking and slicing and boiling stuff to treat my dress, camisole and undies. She told me this complicated procedure of what I should do, which, of course, went above my head. I was mortified.

  Did she go through the basket item by item? Why didn’t she just grab stuff to put in the wash like any other normal person?

  I’m exhausted from before, from worry, from not sleeping, from the heavy flow, from school, from everything.

  Did I need my shortcomings pointed out to me today? No!

  At least I didn’t have to suffer Grace’s catty thoughts. She was rather direct today with surprisingly few negative thoughts in my direction. I must learn how to block her out completely. Except - who would teach me?

  The underwear was beyond hope, so I threw it out. I tried scrubbing the dress a little and then went back upstairs to find Matthew gone. Now I have to study alone for that test! Grace’ll wash the dress and Father’s and Hans’ bloodspeckled shirts in the common wash anyway and I bet that’s all they need.

  P.S. Later, Grace made a point of telling me that SHE managed to ‘salvage’ my favourite dress. Like she should get a medal or something. Like she expected a ‘thank you’. For what? Embarrassing me in front of Matthew?

  Chapter 13. Keeping Calm

  Grace

  The house is quiet. Ella and the twins have been at their Godmother’s for the weekend for a change. With three mouths less to feed and wash up after and boss around to do their chores, all of a sudden, I have a little bit of time and space all to myself.

  Grizelda pops her head into the kitchen.

  ‘Morning, Grace,’ she says.

  ‘Morning, Grizelda. It’s Sunday we are closed today,’ I remind her.

  ‘I’m not here for food. I can’t believe you’re sitting there as calm as clams,’ she says and motions at the kettle, ‘Gimme a cuppa, will’ya?’

  I sigh, my brief moment of peace and quiet over. ‘Why should I be all a-flounder, do tell?’ I ask, pouring her a cup of tea, not really curious.

  ‘Why, you’re not at all concerned about Ella?’ Grizelda asks with a twinkle in her eye.

  ‘Why? Should I be? She’s at her Godmother’s,’ I retort.

  ‘No, she’s not. I saw her mount a carriage on Friday night. A closed one. With a crest.’

  The old dotty must be confusing things.

  ‘I’m sure she’d tell us before she travelled anywhere with Mellie.’

  ‘Not with Mellie. With a boy,’ Grizelda ploughs on.

  Which one of them?

  ‘And the boy’s father.’

  ??

  ‘To the seaside.’

  ‘Sounds like a meet-the-parents trip. I hope Mellie and Ella will have a good time,’ I say. ‘I mean it is too early to get Ella married off, but I do hope Mellie will have a good sense to…’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Nope it isn’t early or …?’

  ‘Nope, Mellie didn’t have any good sense at all,’ Grizelda says. ‘Mellie didn’t go along.’

  ‘Mellie sent Ella on a trip in all-male company without a chaperone?!?’ I inhale and feel my fists clenching.

  ‘I believe she said she couldn’t believe that this was true love, that her …GODdaughter had chosen so well and that she is sure a marriage will ensue,’ Grizelda reports.

  ‘You heard her saying this?’ I narrow my eyes at her.

  ‘Reportedly, these were her parting words to Ella just before she was picked up by that aristo’s carriage,’ the witch says.

  Prostituting her own goddaughter.

  ‘Is she daft or just naive? Who would want Ella after an unchaperoned trip like that? The aristo,’ and possibly his father ‘will just use and abuse her and leave her and then her only option is to be the village harlot!’ I close my eyes.

  Grizelda looks at me in earnest. ‘You really do care for her, don’t you? Unlike her GODmother,’ Grizelda makes faces at her tea. ‘…or the FAIRY godmother as she likes to be called,’ she chuckles. ‘Although she’s as much of a fairy as I am and I ain’t no fairy.’

  I grit my teeth, ‘I hate how she’s leading the poor girl down all the wrong paths.’

  ‘How do you know they are the wrong ones?’ the witch asks.

  ‘The obsession with landing or trapping a wealthy guy at any cost and without love isn’t healthy, you know. No matter how you look at it, it’s just not worth it,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe for you it isn’t and for Mellie and Ella it is. Where has your obsession with love led you?’ Grizelda asks.

  ‘Here,’ I say. ‘Enough chit-hat. Thank you for telling me. Where did they go? Which town on the seaside?’ I ask her, folding away my apron, trying to remember if Peter took our landau when he left for his research trip. No, I think he bought a set in a carriage to wherever he was going. I have the landau. ‘Henry, darling, take your toys. We are going on a trip!’

  ‘Ailmsworth,’ Grizelda says and reaches out to pat my arm. ‘As far as non-fairy godmothers go, I think you’re doing an awesome job,’ she says and lets herself out the door, her untouched cup of tea still steaming on my kitchen table.

  I roll my eyes. Just like Bart Simpson said - don’t panic, just come up with a good story.

  All I have to do is come up with a good story why Ella had to be in Ailmsworth with two men who are not her relatives without a chaperone.

  I’ll have a couple of hours of the road trip to figure it out.

  As I put away my apron and reach for my purse, I see Henry coming towards me, his tiny hands extended, covered in soot from head to toe.

  ‘Oh, no!’ I growl, startling him.

  I stop myself from uttering my favourite profanity.

  His chin quivers.

  Instead, I breathe in.

  Then out

  Then in.

  Then out.

  Before he starts crying, I take him by one of his grimy tiny hands, crouch down to his level and say in a calm manner, ‘Oh, Henry… Mama didn’t mean to startle you. You’ve been playing in the fireplace again, haven’t you?’

  I should remind Peter to put up a more decent barricade.

  Even his hair is dirty!

  Oh, goddesses!

  Bathing him will take at
least half an hour!

  I stifle the urge to say something under my breath so as not to make him cry, ‘How am I going to get this off you now?’

  He just smiles widely.

  The only way to clean him up quickly is A. hand him over to someone else, except there is nobody else from the grown-ups I can ask, so it has to be B. Boil some water and meanwhile, use the water from the bucket for washing dishes to scrub the worst of it off. At least it’s not ice cold.

  I inhale, close my eyes and try to smile on the exhale.

  I have to stop yelling at the toddler.

  And stop calling him ‘toddler’, ‘baby’, ‘the kid’ or ‘our youngest’.

  Because he has a name and a lovely one at that.

  Henry.

  I don’t know why I’m avoiding saying it.

  Except when I scold him.

  I’ve been doing this for two and a half years.

  HIS whole life.

  I sigh and put the kettle on.

  Considering how precious time is…

  I should scold him less often.

  Not that he should be spoilt or anything.

  Ella says I have mental problems.

  She says it behind my back, but it comes around to me, courtesy of Hans more than Greta.

  Maybe my problems are mental.

  I take off Henry’s dirty clothes.

  My husband says I’m distancing myself because I have trouble getting attached.

  It’s the opposite.

  My trouble is getting too attached.

  If you’ve never had your newborn whisked away…

  If you’ve never been told that your child needs intensive care and you can’t be with him…

  If you’ve never been handed a ripped paper slip with a number to call ‘for enquiries’…

  If you’ve never had to share a room with five happy moms who, at regular intervals, all feed their kids while you sit there and wonder if your child still lives as they coo over their tiny bundles…

  If you’ve never, after two days of getting a busy dial tone gotten through to the ICU only to be informed that your baby has died hours earlier because his lungs were too weak…

  If you’ve never held your dead child in your arms…

  And then another.

  And another.

  And another.

  …Then you probably wouldn’t understand why getting attached to the next child you have, after years of trying and years of miscarrying, would scare you senseless. Even if this baby that you have, the only one that survived, is healthy and happy and everything that you’ve ever wanted.

  The what ifs about the ones I lost still haunt me.

  What if I had gone with him and held him so that he would feel loved and wanted, instead of dying alone attached to strange tubes?

  What if I had come to the hospital sooner?

  What if I had spent all nine months in bed?

  What if I’m not meant to have kids?

  What if…

  I pour the boiling water into the washing basin and add cold water from a spare bucket, testing that the mix is not too hot with my elbow.

  Peter never had the what ifs.

  Don’t get me wrong, he’s not a senseless brute.

  He is just more rational, which helps him to be supportive. The way I needed him to be.

  He was the one who had to arrange for the burials and he was the one who carried the tiny caskets.

  He had to deal with my silent tears on the way home from the hospital, with my numbness at the cemetery, with my howling on the way back and the repeats year after year after year.

  Maybe he got used to death and my raging emotions after so many of my hysterics over nurses taking my miscarried babies away as medicinal waste.

  It’s only until you give birth to a baby born two or three months prematurely or a stillborn baby or a child who dies at the hospital soon after being born is when they classify it as a child who deserves a burial.

  Before, if you’re just bleeding to death after being pregnant for a few months, they clean you out and send you home.

  No body, no casket, no burial.

  Even if to you, your baby was three or four months old.

  Or three or four months from being born.

  Why does age start at birth?

  I gently wipe the soot, dipping a kitchen towel into the warm water.

  Day one is not your birthday.

  Day one is when you are conceived.

  So, treating someone a few months old as medical garbage is barbaric.

  Even more horrible is using my miscarried babies to heat the hospital furnaces.

  Which I kept reminding the nurses and the hospital staff and Peter.

  On every such trip.

  Peter is my rock.

  He has stood by me through all of it.

  Which doesn’t mean we talk about any of this in the Magic Kingdom.

  It’s as if the relocation from London and Henry’s birth and getting a few more kids under our wing closed that door forever.

  Another time, another place, another life.

  It’s as if Peter has started to believe this fairy-tale that we are in, ignoring the old scars.

  Maybe that’s for the best.

  Now if only I could get over my fear of attachment to my own flesh and blood…

  I’m working on it.

  I scrub the last few smudges off Henry’s face.

  Maybe three extra kids is just the ticket to acceptance and opening up and…

  …forgiving myself, I guess.

  For the choice to keep trying.

  For the choice to keep remembering.

  For the choice to relocate us all to an alien dimension, so that Henry wouldn’t grow up with some random strangers.

  The truth is, I met Peter thirteen years ago, far far away from here, in a coffee-shop in London, when he was grieving over the love of his life. We dated, months later I moved in and ten years later we had one kid.

  ONE.

  It’s a miracle we have Henry at all.

  I nearly died in a car accident getting to the hospital to have him.

  The doctors managed to save Henry, by which time Peter and I were already sitting pretty at the Agency, being offered new jobs of serving as guardian angels.

  Luckily, I knew the Boss of the Agency of Guardian Angels to be fair-minded and asked if there was any way that we could go back since the baby had no loving living relatives. My cousins would have gone all Harry Potter on him or given him up for adoption.

  I wanted Henry to grow up to be loved.

  Simple.

  So, here we all are.

  Relocated to the Magic Kingdom.

  A new dimension outside of time.

  A new start.

  With a new, extended family.

  Very extended.

  A condition on the part of the Agency was to take in a few motherless kids who were stranded and raise them as our own.

  As it happened, ‘a few’ totalled three.

  Our foster kids genuinely believe they are Peter’s kids from a previous marriage and the toddler is their half-brother.

  Keeping calm to deal with all the stuff they throw at you is part of the bargain. Being a good parent and a not-so-pleasant one, if the occasion calls for it, to raise decent kids is also something I willingly signed up to.

  The teeth-gritting, character-building, conscious bargain I made in another life.

  I wash Henry’s hair and see him splash around in our basin.

  One hour that I spend with Henry won’t kill Ella. I might kill her myself, but for that I’ll have to find her first.

  Ella

  Monday, April 29th

  Oh, no. I mig
ht have acted too soon…

  After two weeks of not talking to me and three weeks of hanging around - more like sleeping around - with Betty John came up to me and said he might be able to persuade his father about our marriage, but I’d have to help. I asked him why he thought I would believe anything he says since he was quite obviously back together with Betty. He said he needed time to think and Betty just wouldn’t leave him alone and it was less trouble to let her think they were together while all this time he had been figuring things out about us two.

  When I told him he could have included me as well in that thinking, instead of letting me believe he was no longer interested, he said that that’s not what the men in his family do. They figure things out first and then ‘save the lady.’

  I didn’t tell him there was no baby anymore and that I didn’t need saving, strictly speaking. Part of me wanted to slap him for thinking men are the be-all and end-all and women only create problems the men need to solve.

  John said that if I trusted him to fix things for us, then all I needed to do was a mere trifle. To come with him and his father to the seaside. In a carriage. At their expense. And just dazzle his father with my charm and grace and then, when his father approves, John could broach the subject of breaking off the engagement foisted onto him at birth and marrying me for love instead. He said ‘for love’ and had such ardour in his eyes that I believed him when he said that all the ugly things he had told to me were due to the shock of his discovery that...the situation wasn’t what he expected. When I asked him ‘What about Betty?’, he shrugged and said she was not the one he wanted and that it took him too long to realise it.