by Lani Lenore
“Well, aren’t you lovely,” the woman commented to her. Wren put on her best disposition, telling herself that this was it – this was her chance to make a good impression.
Show her that you’re smart and competent. If she’s not looking for a daughter, surely she might be interested in a nanny if she’d rather call Max her son. Henry could make himself useful through work.
But before she had gotten the chance to speak further, the woman had looked over at her husband for approval, and Wren saw her downfall there in his eyes. He had been staring at her the whole while, gazing intently like a hungry wolf wanting to gobble her up. Wren had not even noticed, but his wife saw it now, and she did not like it one bit.
That was the end of the encounter. The woman grabbed her husband’s arm and pulled him away from them. Wren was helpless against it. Her hope sank like a stone in the deep, cold well of despair.
“That went beautifully,” Henry muttered as the couple passed by. “They usually have to see me first before they run away. Nice job on that one.”
Wren didn’t respond to her brother’s chiding. She swallowed down that rejection; told herself to be brave. Beside her, Henry grew quiet again, looking sullen as usual, and eventually Max had hidden himself behind her dress fully so that he could not be seen by anyone. Still, Wren waited, glancing pleadingly at the others who had come to visit, trying to keep her smile even though she felt like crying.
No one else gave them any attention.
2
The day went by with no result, just as so many days before. Afterward, it was back to chores at the Home – washing and cooking and wiping up coal dust. Soon enough, Wren was back in her bed, staring at the drab ceiling of the attic dormitory that housed all twenty of them – boys and girls alike – wondering once again if she would get out of here before she was old.
Another day, that’s all, she thought. I’m not any worse or better for it. She had to think of it that way, or else she might eventually give up.
She had succumbed to the curse of the fifteen-year-old girl – too pretty for her own good, caught between being a child and woman, and because of that, no one wanted to embrace her. The ones who did want to draw her in desired to for reasons that she wasn’t willing to lay down her dignity for.
For thirteen years, she had been her mother’s daughter. She had been taught what was proper for a lady with morals and manners, was trained to be an efficient wife and mother, as society dictated. Her life hadn’t been all fun and games, but she had been comfortable and safe with her family. She’d expected her only trouble to be preparing herself for suitors in the coming years, but the family had fallen on hard times after Max was born.
Her father had lost his job over an adulterous scandal that had sent them all reeling. The family name had been dragged through the mud. None of his old colleagues would risk associating with him after that, and months passed without income. Wren’s mother had grown cold and distant toward them all, slipping away into unhealthy bouts of depression. Some days, she couldn’t even remember her daughter’s name. She neglected her baby as much as the rest of them, and Wren had taken to raising the boy herself. Her father couldn’t find another position and turned to drinking. Eventually the accounts were wiped, the family money gone, and there was only one other option.
Miss Nora paid a small price for the children, who would bring money in to her from the factory – unless she might sell them off for a higher price to someone willing to adopt. Wren’s mother had hugged her and kissed her goodbye on the steps, but Wren was convinced that her mother wasn’t really there inside that body. The woman had gone away a long time before that.
Wren tried not to think of her parents too much anymore. She didn’t wonder where they were now or what had become of them – if they had stayed together or whether their marriage had fallen apart. There was too much to worry over in her life as it was, and all she knew was that she was not going to reverse it.
She was stuck here. There was no way out.
In the past, Wren had kept her mind busy by trying to think of a way that she and her brothers could leave the orphanage, maybe survive on their own somewhere that there was fresh water and green fields. Her mind would drift around like a bird flying in the heavens, circling to keep a watchful eye, but once it settled again, she always found that it was pointless to even consider. If they weren’t at the Home, they would be on the streets, among so many other children whose parents couldn’t afford to keep them fed. They would be forced into lives of crime – would be thieves, dirty and flea-ridden, starving and destitute. Henry might have actually preferred that sort of life, but not Wren, and she didn’t want it for her brothers either.
Those ideas eventually became impossible fantasies that she created to soften her situation. In one instance, she had dreamed that their parents abruptly came back for them, shining and rich, to take them to an estate in the country where the air was clean. In another, a wealthy man would fall in love with her and take her to be his wife, and he would let her brothers come along to his castle by the sea. Her more fanciful side had often imagined doing something a bit more extreme, like sneaking on a train, or even a ship. It would take them far away, and somehow they would find a place to belong. Maybe there was some country across the ocean – or an island in the middle of it – where they could go, free of the smog and the poverty, and live their lives in the sun.
But she had to remind herself that she was too old for fairytales like that.
“Wren?” Max was calling for her attention from the bed next to hers. There were no babies at the Home anymore, and so all of the children were kept together in one large room that was full of echoes and damp smells. They were unsupervised through the night and left to care for one another.
Max was among the youngest, but he had his own bed just as Wren did. The mattresses were stuffed with sharp down that often pricked them, and the metal frames creaked in the night, but it was better than sleeping on the ground, or outside in the gutter.
“What is it?” She looked over at him, seeing how he was curled around his pillow. He had no toys, so he often adopted the pillow as a stuffed doll.
“Are you sad?” he asked her. “I can’t sleep if you’re sad.”
Wren hated herself for letting him notice, though she sometimes thought he was unnaturally perceptive. She didn’t like her personal feelings to bring any of them lower than they already were. She was one of the oldest here, and her brothers were not the only ones who looked to her for guidance.
“I’m alright. Come here,” she invited, holding out her arm to welcome him in.
Max and his pillow crawled into bed with her, as he did on many nights when he couldn’t sleep. She often wondered if it was a good idea to keep him so close, though she did feel he deserved to be coddled by someone. She feared that this made him look to her as if she were his mother. She had, after all, been the only one caring for him since he was old enough to remember, but she had never liked the idea of that. She was only a child herself and was unfit to raise one. What Max needed was a real mother. They all did, but it was almost too late for that – especially where she and Henry were concerned. They had seen far too much to go back to being petted again.
“Everything is alright,” she told him. “It’s the same as it was yesterday. We’re all together and we’re safe.”
“When are you going to stop pretending that you’re alright?” Henry asked abruptly from his bed on the other side of her.
Judging by his intolerant tone, this burst had been welling up inside him for several minutes. His eyes were blazing in the dim light, and she would have to put out those flames.
“I’m fine. I’m just tired,” she told him.
“You’re upset about today!” he accused.
“I’m not,” she insisted firmly, trying to calm him down before he got too loud and disturbed the others. “It’s been a long day, and we need our sleep for tomorrow.”
“That’s a lie, and
you know it. You wish those people had wanted to take us home.”
Perhaps she had – wolf eyes and all – but at the same time, she was glad to have avoided that fate. She did not, however, intend to explain all of this to Henry. It was beyond him.
“I never stop wishing for that,” she admitted. “But it hasn’t happened yet, and we have to accept that.”
Henry twisted onto his back, his movements swift and restless. “We don’t have to be here, you know,” he growled angrily, but his voice was subdued now. “We can leave whenever we want. We can go find our real parents and make them take us back.”
They don’t want us, Henry! Even if she had screamed it at him, she didn’t think that he would have gotten it through his head. Wren resolved not to think about their parents, even though the subject had come up, but only promised herself that she would be a better mother herself – someday.
“Life isn’t so bad here, Henry,” she said instead.
“It gets worse every day,” he complained for the sake of the argument.
At times like this, Wren wasn’t sure of what to do with him. It seemed like everything she said made him angrier – made their situation worse. No matter what she said, she couldn’t win, and likewise he wouldn’t relent.
She did the only thing she could do.
“You’re going to upset the others,” she told him sternly. It was avoiding the subject, but it was true. Some of the other children were already starting to stir in their beds, wondering why he was raising his voice.
Henry and Wren stared at each other in a silent battle, and then he gave up with an angry huff. She could practically see the smoke venting out his nose and ears as if he were a disgruntled dragon.
“Well, you’re upsetting me,” he said sullenly, but he quieted down. Henry rolled over in his bed to ignore her, leaving her with a feeling of guilt in the pit of her stomach. It seemed that she couldn’t do right by both of her brothers at the same time.
Wren sighed into the cool air, wondering if anyone would ever be bothered to console her as she tried to do for them. Would she ever get back the effort that she put forth?
“Tell me a story,” Max requested, seeming to have already forgotten about Henry’s outburst – or perhaps his existence altogether.
Wren began to feel more discouraged at that. She had once been full of stories for them and the other orphans. She’d thought that it would make their sad, lonely lives more tolerable if they could imagine that their hum-drum activities had some sort of fantastic significance – such as the coal dust being the scattered remains of evil fairies, and if they did not clean it up quickly, then the creatures would come back to life and curse them all. She had also told them stories of the adventures they might have if they left the orphanage, but had stopped long ago because she thought Henry and some of the others were becoming too deeply influenced by them. She feared that they might actually try to run away in search of a train that would take them to a mystical circus. Now, she kept all her fantasy ideas to herself.
She gathered Max closer and rested her head against his, all the while staring up at the ceiling to remind herself of where she was. They only had this reality now. She could not afford to get lost.
“I don’t know any stories,” she told him, and she recognized the defeated sound of her own voice. Before he could beg, she began to hum a quiet lullaby, and that seemed to work well enough. The boy was still.
Wren closed her eyes and tried to shut down her swirling thoughts – to lose herself in the melody of her own tune. Tomorrow was a workday at the mill, and she knew she needed to be rested for the long hours ahead of her.
Keeping her eyes shut, Wren finally fell asleep to the distant sound of a flute which crept in to mesh with her own song, calling her through the veil of a secret world.
Chapter Two
1
That night, Wren dreamed of flying.
It was fairly common for her to visit the sky in her dreams, soaring freely across the heavens, but this time was different. Her venture was in the dead of night, beneath a dark sky and over a black ocean. She flew low over the water, which was deep and endless, and the only light she could see was a small, dancing orb that frequently darted away from her.
She had tried to follow the light, but it always slipped away, as if purposefully trying to lose her. Eventually, she had lost it completely. She was left alone in the darkness. After that, she could not find her way to wherever she was going, and also had no memory of what she had been looking for. She had gotten nowhere before she had woken up in her bed, where the daylight was peeking in through the window beyond the cloudy haze of morning.
After pulling herself out of the thin blankets, she was still drowsy, the vivid dream having drained the life from her. It was as if she had indeed flown across the ocean in a single night and returned to her bed only when she had not found what she’d been looking for. The sound of a song played on wooden reeds was lingering in her ears, along with the notion of swirling whispers, and it left her feeling muddled.
Once she had embraced the day, she found that it began the same way as the one before it – as if she had expected it to change because of a dream. She was still an orphan at Miss Nora’s, and as such, certain things were expected of her. She had to help usher the rest of the children out of bed and make sure they got themselves ready. Sometimes she had to help Nora with breakfast as well since the woman didn’t believe in bringing in outside help for tasks like that. All of them, even the young children, had jobs at the Home.
Of everything Wren had to do in the morning, including getting herself ready for the day, she found that one of the most difficult was getting Henry to rise. He was particularly cranky, especially after a rude awakening, and everyone else had refused to deal with him. She was his sister. It was somehow made her obligation.
Today, she waited until she had finished her duties in the kitchen before going after him.
“Henry, get up,” she said before she’d reached the doorway. The rest were already downstairs, dressed and getting their rolls to eat on the way to the factory, and if he didn’t rise now, there was no way he would get there on time. “Please don’t be difficult. I don’t feel—”
She stopped when she had come into the room, expecting to see him still asleep there in the empty dormitory, but he wasn’t there. The bed was vacant, the sheets disturbed, and her brother was gone.
He’s awake? That’s a surprise.
She wondered why she hadn’t seen him about, but was pleased that he’d taken some initiative. If she had hoped for perfection, however, he wasn’t quite there yet. He hadn’t made up his bed. The sheets were twisted and his pillow was on the floor. This wasn’t something that mattered much, but she couldn’t allow any of them to be so messy. Miss Nora did keep an eye on things, whether or not she associated with them much, and she would notice if they didn’t have their room as neat as they should.
Wren went to the untidy bed, knowing that Henry would give her one of his looks if she hunted him down to complain about it. She would just do it herself and spare them both the argument.
As she folded the sheets, she kept imagining how she might have nagged him – Why can’t you, for once, just try! – but she would never say those things. She was practiced at keeping them inside. She tucked the sheet back under the thin mattress – but halted when she felt an unusual lump there. Her brow creased as she settled her hand over the mass and drew it out.
It was a small leather coin purse, and it was not Henry’s. She shook it and heard the jingle of a few shillings tapping against each other. Her heart sank as disappointment took over.
Stealing, Henry? How many times have I tried to tell you that we aren’t thieves? We’re better than this.
She squeezed the purse in her hand, trying to decide what she should do with it when a voice rose up behind her.
“I was going to do that,” Henry said, speaking of the bed, and Wren froze. “If you’d leave things alone ever
y once in a while…”
She hadn’t been sure of how she wanted to approach this before he came into the room, but she was suddenly so upset with him that she knew she had to confront him now. He started to approach the bed, possibly to take over the task, but dropped off when she turned to him and held up the item she’d found. His eyes widened and he went as white as a ghost.
“What is this?” she wanted to know, though she didn’t need him to tell her. It was clear enough.
“Gimme that!” he shouted and snatched it out of her hand roughly. It didn’t do much good for him to take it from her. She had already seen it and knew what it meant.
“Henry! You have to stop this!” she urged, trying to keep her voice low. They were alone in the room, but a loud argument might be heard downstairs.
Henry stared at her with their father’s firm gaze – the one that was so commonly seen when he was opposed.
“I’m trying to help us,” he said, stuffing the purse in his pocket as he reached for his cap. “And you won’t say anything!”
She was insulted that he thought she would rat him out to Miss Nora. She had her loyalty to her family first.
“You’re going to get caught,” she tried to reason. “What happens when the man you’re stealing from notices and grabs you up? Do you want to be hanged?”
“I’m careful,” he insisted heatedly. “Besides, I could get away.”
“Really, Henry…” She shook her head. “It’s pointless! Everyone will know that the money isn’t ours if we try to spend it on anything!”
Henry’s lips tightened like a fist, and she saw the truth in his eyes then. She could not control him forever. The things she had told him – the rules she made and advice she gave – didn’t matter much anymore. He was getting old enough to form his own opinions, and they were clearly different from hers.
“One of us has to do something,” he accused. “Since you won’t, it has to be me.”
Henry put his cap on snuggly and stormed away from her. Wren only hoped that her words had sunk in at least a little bit, but she doubted they had.
