Eden's Embers

by Helena Maeve

  * * * *

  The hours would have passed quicker with work to occupy her, but the summons had been very explicit. She was to present herself at the mission house at noon precisely.

  At one o’clock, she still sat outside, on the mission house porch, all but biting her nails.

  Should have brought a book. Or my knitting. A sandwich wouldn’t have gone amiss, either. Her stomach growled at the notion and she pressed a hand to it as if that might dull the noise.

  At least the weather was mild today, elsewise she might have been cowering from the rain or baking in the noonday sun. A breeze was rolling in off the river to the west, stirring the crest of ancient oak trees and scattering pollen over the valley. The mission house offered her a perfect vista from which to watch the sprawl of town all the way to the fields and shipyard.

  It was as if the whole world was laid out at her feet, a fishbowl hemmed in by a tall brick and mortar fence topped with armed sentinels. What lay beyond didn’t interest her. She had heard stories from those who sought refuge in town—they spoke of terrible desolation and roving bands of rapers burning and pillaging as they pleased, sucking dry what few settlements sprung up in the ruins of the Old World.

  She had always imagined the rapers to be toothless, foul-smelling and unwashed. She hadn’t pictured them as tall or striking as Jackson.

  Although his clothes could do with a good scrub, she thought, trying to banish any lingering interest in that man’s good looks. It wasn’t wholly her fault. There was nothing to do except think up here and she’d been schooling her thoughts toward more respectable quarters for the space of an hour.

  After the first fifteen minutes, she had understood that there was no error of timekeeping. The elders wanted her to wait until her resistance whittled down to dust, perhaps even to save themselves the headache of another spat.

  “You can go in now,” said a voice from behind the screen door. Alana turned to find Mrs Krall already retreating inside, her long, black skirts swishing mournfully across the ground. There was no sign of her daughters.

  It wasn’t exactly a reassuring welcome, but Alana had never taken much pleasure in her visits to the mission house. “Let’s get this over with,” she muttered for her own benefit and climbed to her feet.

  There had been talk a while back of granting some kind of aid to those who fell foul of the council, but the proposal had fallen through when the council argued that if a man had committed no crime he had no need of representation. No mention was made of women, but then Eve’s fondness for bad fruit was a hard sin to forgive.

  Alana knew her way through the musty foyer, past the front sitting room with its dusty pianoforte, and in through the double doors that led into what might have once been the dining room. She caught another glimpse of Mrs Krall’s skirts as she climbed the stairs, but it was too brief to confirm that it hadn’t simply been a ghost.

  The council was already poised and ready behind the wide shelf of a mahogany table, with Mr. Krall at its helm. The reedy man on his right was the town sheriff and the closest thing they had to a judge. On his left sat the preacher, whose name no one really knew and whose beak-like nose put Alana in mind of a parrot. He was an old, wizened creature who loved to drink and, on all accounts, had his very own favorite lady-friend at the pleasure house.

  It was Teacher Connor who greeted Alana when she stepped through the door, only he christened her Athena.

  “Gentlemen,” she greeted, stopping short of a sardonic curtsy. “We really must stop meeting like this. People will talk.”

  Krall had never been her biggest admirer and he appreciated her wit not at all. He furrowed his bushy ginger brows when she spoke—it was not the proper form for a defendant to open the proceedings, but Alana had kept her silence for a whole goddamn hour and she was beginning to tire of toeing the line.

  Deal with it.

  “Were we not clear the last time you stood before us, Miss Burke?” Krall asked and folded his hands before him. “Did we not say you were to stop all subversive crafts before the stability of this community was put in jeopardy?”

  Alana opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again just as quickly when the preacher gave a minute shake of the head. He was still sharp enough to give counsel to a girl who needed it—and to do so without alerting his peers.

  “Is it or is it not true you continue to peddle soporifics in your shop?” Krall pressed, seeming as unnerved by Alana’s silence as he might have been by her lip.

  “I provide many kinds of tonics and tisanes,” Alana retorted. “Some can have a soporific effect—”

  “Manufacture dwindles in every area—and all because your concoctions twist men’s minds, making them sluggish and slow.” Krall jammed a finger against the table. “Two days ago, John Lau lost a finger to the wood ax after he drank one of your—your potions. Do you deny it?”

  “What?”

  Krall was relentless. “Do you deny you cooked a draught for him?”

  “No, of course not—” Alana cut herself off. “Are you saying I poisoned him willingly? That’s one hell of an accusation…” All the more so since John Lau—of the pretty mouth and the bawdy jokes, who had stolen a bottle of rye from his father’s pantry just so he could share it with Alana—was her neighbor of fifteen years. She had played with him when they were children chasing each other up and down the slopes of New Eden.

  For a while there, Alana had even hoped to marry him, but the council had set John on a different path.

  Krall narrowed his beady black eyes at Alana. “Yes. It is.” He filled his lungs with breath as he fixed her across the table. No one had invited her to sit, so Alana was still standing, still alone in the face of five elderly men who held her fate in the palm of their hands. “It has come to this council’s attention that New Eden is no longer safe with you trading your talents to gullible men and women…”

  “You can’t take the shop from me!” Alana cried, balling her hands into fists. “That was my mother’s shop—there is need for what I do, can’t you see that?”

  The large majority of the council remained stony-faced, but Alana could see a crinkle at the corner of Krall’s eye. He’s enjoying this, she thought as she watched him reach for the thick, leather-bound register before him and thumb open the cover. Every birth and death, every marriage or crime, every major calamity was recorded in that single archive. Forty years of history were condensed in tight, careful cursive, at once to remind the people of New Eden of where they came from and to remind them that their every deed was preserved for posterity.

  “What you do requires discernment. Something you clearly lack, Miss Burke.” Krall tapped his finger against the page. Alana was too far away to see if he had reached her name, but the effect was that of a physical blow. Her insides were already swimming with dread. “We are prepared to be magnanimous. You will retain your shop—for now—subject to oversight by the sheriff’s department.”

  “Yes, of course,” Alana said, breathing out a sigh of relief. “I have nothing to hide…” All of her notes were in a very private, bordering on nonsensical shorthand that her mother had taught her when she was just a girl. No names would be revealed even if the sheriff came snooping through her affairs.

  “There is one other clause,” Krall added, just when Alana felt her heart resume a more normal pace. “Thirty is already much too old for a maid, Miss Burke. As such, it is this council’s wish that you should take a husband.”

  A cold shiver ran down Alana’s spine. “I am not unmarried for lack of trying, sir. No man will have me.” And of the ones who’d wished to, the council had either arranged for them to find other wives or Alana’s temperament had simply smothered the flame of their passion for her until none was left.

  Something told her that Krall already knew as much. It might have been his shark-like grin, it might have been the mocking arch of his bushy black brows. “Fortunately, Sheriff Lewis here is prepared to salvage your reputation.”

 
; “It’d be my pleasure,” the sheriff said, letting his gaze drift over Alana’s body as though scrutinizing her flaws. Whatever went through his mind, he must have found her pleasing, because he peeled back his lips into an unsettlingly wide grin.

  Alana balked. “I don’t—”

  Krall clicked his tongue. “It would be a great pity to lose your shop, wouldn’t it? The sheriff will see to it that doesn’t happen. Who knows, Miss Burke, perhaps you’ll learn your place at long last?”

  So that’s your play. When he’d said the sheriff would keep an eye on her, Krall had meant that he would do it as her husband. Alana felt her legs wobble, so she locked her knees and thrust out her chin. “Is that all, sir?”

  She was dismissed summarily, with nary a glance her way from either preacher or Teacher Connor. She had been wrong to suppose they were on her side. That wasn’t the way the law worked.

  She was gasping for breath by the time she reached the porch, her hands shaking badly and her body rebelling against an order her mind was still struggling to comprehend.

  Perhaps it was the altitude or she really shouldn’t have chanced that moldy jam this morning. Whatever the reason, Alana made it two steps from the house before she doubled over and summarily retched her breakfast into Mrs Krall’s pink rosebushes.

  Chapter Two

  “Let me talk to him,” Alana hissed. “Sera, I have no quarrel with you, but your husband—”

  “My husband is abed with a torn limb!” Sera Lau shot back, blocking the door with her stout, stocky body. She had never been fond of Alana, but like most everyone else in New Eden, she had visited the shop on more than one occasion, largely when the menstrual cramps got bad or later, when she found she couldn’t conceive.

  Stubborn tendrils of envy aside, Alana had always tried to treat her as she did the rest of her clientele—with respect and fairness. It hadn’t occurred to her until today that she might have been wrong in the attempt.

  “He told Krall that it was a sleeping draught that cost him his finger,” Alana snapped. “I want to know why he lied.”

  “And how do you know he did?” Sera asked, pinning a meaty hand to her hip.

  Alana rolled her eyes. “I’ve been preparing the same potion for him since he was sixteen. He’s never complained before. What, does he think I’ve decided to rework the formula for my own amusement? You’ll let me speak to him or I’m camping out on your porch until he mans up and comes clean.”

  “Mommy? What’s going on?”

  Sera’s five-year-old peeked around her legs. She had a very round face, yet, unlike her parents, a pair of very blue eyes stared up at Alana through silver-blonde bangs. She was a gift and only Alana and Sera knew the truth of her conception—a fact that Sera seemed keenly aware of as she nudged the little girl back inside.

  “Hush, go back to your dolls. Mommy won’t be a while…”

  “I mean it, Sera.” Alana had too much to lose to let this go. “This isn’t right. John knows me—” She didn’t get to finish the thought.

  Sera stepped out with her gaze flinty and something like a snarl building behind her teeth. “John has a child to raise,” she snapped. “He’s a father and a husband. What will he do if he can’t work?”

  “He lost a finger, not a leg!” It was a callous thing to say when John was no doubt in great pain, but Alana made no claims to be a saint.

  “You think that old bastard Krall gives a damn?” Sera scoffed, tossing her inky black braid. “He’s been trying to get rid of John for years, put one of his cronies in in his stead… All he needs is an excuse. If John can’t mind himself with the wood ax, then he’s a liability, isn’t he?”

  “But he said I’m to blame,” Alana persisted. “Now Krall is talking about marrying me off to Lewis—”

  Even Sera seemed taken aback by this, if the pout gracing her cherry-red lips was any indication. “Lewis? But he already has a wife…”

  Alana scoffed. “Not the son.” The father was in his late fifties and had been widowed twice. The third wife had obtained a divorce after she had shed her dress and showed off her bruises at the harvest fair. Rumor had it he’d killed the first two wives. Alana felt her insides churn at the mere thought. “I have to make this right. Please—”

  “I’m sorry,” Sera sighed, shaking her head. “It’s out of my hands.”

  An inhuman, frustrated noise was building in the back of Alana’s throat. She fought to choke it back down, but it built and built until she couldn’t smother her anguish. “What do you mean?” Alana cried out. “Your husband lied!”

  “My husband did no such thing.”

  Alana tugged a hand through her hair. “But… He said—”

  “He said nothing. I told Krall he was taking your potions.” Sera thrust out her chin. “And that is no lie.”

  That she had left out the rest—that she had said nothing about John using Alana’s remedies for an age or his sleeplessness getting worse and worse precisely because Krall worked all his men into the ground—went without saying.

  Despite her best efforts, Alana felt bile rise to the back of her mouth. “Why? I was there when you had your baby—I soothed your pain.”

  “And my husband never lets me forget it,” Sera snapped. “‘Be grateful to Alana,’ he tells me, ‘she’s been my dearest friend for years.’ How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “You’re his wife…”

  “I’m the woman who cooks his meals and raises his child,” Sera retorted. “Don’t confuse that with being a wife.”

  “I don’t…” Alana aborted the apology she could feel on the tip of her tongue. “How is that my fault?”

  Sera had the good grace to shrug. “You’ll be married soon. You’ll see what it’s like.” She held up a finger when Alana meant to dismiss the notion. “Don’t come here again or I’ll set the dogs on you.”

  The door slammed in her wake, leaving Alana alone on the porch. She felt as though she had been kicked in the teeth. Her vision swam with unshed tears.

  In the kennel by the Lau’s wooden shack, two mangy hounds were growling and squirming in their chains. Alana didn’t spare them a second glance. She worried that it might be too tempting to jump over the fence and let them tear her apart.

  * * * *

  By nightfall, Alana had already dredged up most of the liquor in her pantry and stacked the bottles on the kitchen table. She had been through her stores in the shop and liberated the more noxious substances—mushrooms, belladonna, even the nutmeg her mother had consistently banned her from using in poultices and brews.

  She knew all the recipes for a deadly cocktail and quite a few that would make life seem rosy again, resulting in nothing worse than a hangover tomorrow morning. Those were the hardest to accomplish. It didn’t take much skill to poison someone if you put your mind to it, whatever the council believed. It was a lot harder to do it by accident.

  Krall made it sound as if she was playing at alchemy like a child with an Easy Bake Oven. He had no clue of the science behind her craft. It took patience and precision to keep a man whole. John Lau had been careless in the lumber mill, so it was Alana who was paying the price.

  How the council had the gall to call this justice was beyond her.

  She swept a hand under her eyes, smearing the tear tracks she felt slicking down her cheeks. Everything was wrong. This wasn’t how she’d been counting on going into matrimony, much less the sort of man she’d been wishing for. The council sometimes responded favorably to petitions, provided that the families joined by such a union were able to offer adequate incentive.

  Alana had only ever had her shop, a dead father and, for the past six years, a dead mother.

  Only one picture of her parents survived. Alana kept it in the kitchen, enclosed behind a cupboard door for fear of smearing the glass. She reached for it now. She needed its cold comfort.

  “I’ve done it now, Mom. I’ve really gone and done it…”

  Her mother’s image remained
as silent as ever, her thin lips stretched into a frozen smile. She must’ve been nineteen or so when the picture was taken. She looked young, her hair swept back into a coil of braids not dissimilar from Alana’s. She was pale, though, where Alana’s skin had always been a mottled olive, a mix of nuances that didn’t make her beautiful so much as odd. She stood out—there were few things less thrilling in a town like New Eden, where everyone knew to toe the line and wear the appropriate inches of hemline or face the council’s wrath.

  Alana’s mother had been careless in her youth. The picture showed her flashing a good three inches of skin above the knee, although that might have been her husband’s fault, for hoisting her up into his arms as if to carry her over the threshold. Alana had often wondered if they were trying to recreate the weddings of old, when women wore white dresses with ten-foot long trains and veils made of beautiful, embroidered lace, when the churches were alive with organ music and honeymoons took place on sandy beaches instead of the wood lodge in the forest, where you had to bring your own clean sheets and pillows or make love on a stained, bare mattress. She had never asked her mother. It had been obvious, from the way she had clammed up whenever Alana had brought up her father’s name, that the memories had been too painful.

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” Alana asked the photograph. “Why didn’t you tell me this could happen?”

  The simplest answer—that her mother could not have known—didn’t even cross her mind. Her mother had been her only teacher. There was nothing she hadn’t known, from the Latin names of flowers and herbs to the chemistry of the human body. She had never made Alana feel as though she needed a man in her life to steer her true because the path had already been drawn. Her mother had made do on her own. She had raised a child and kept a shop all by herself.

  It galled Alana to think of all they had achieved suddenly falling into the sheriff’s hands. I’d sooner burn it to the ground, she thought, but didn’t mean it.