by Cat Rambo
Lilly:
It’s cold going to market without my coat. The other maids are stand-offish at first—Betty says they ain’t seen me in months, and maybe that’s true, judging by the differences in some of them. But they know what I need to find out—Miriam’s heard of Mrs. Sucksby’s.
“It’s a baby farm.”
“Whozzat?”
“They take the baby and board it for ya, or adopt it if you give ‘em enough.”
She gives the word “adopt” a nasty twist, so I say it. “Adopt?”
“One payment and they make sure you won’t see your baby again. Got what they call a high mor-ta-li-ty rate.” And she twists the words again like a knife. “That means the babies die.”
Back home I go about my duties. Mr. Smith’s angry, so angry.
“Where’s Violet?” he snaps.
“I don’t know, sir.”
He scowls something fierce. “Have to replace her if she’s run off.” He reaches out and touches me, and the gentleness scares me more than the scowling. “Been a while, eh, Lily?”
“I’m having my woman time, sir,” I say, very soft, looking at the floor. “Just started.”
He ain’t happy, but he goes off to examine the mill.
I slip out before dark, that gives me a head start. I know the address for Mrs. Sucksby. It’s a part of town I never seen before, buildings leaning on each other for support like they was drunk, and everything dirty, so dirty.
The house hunches up between two others. A few lights on, but not many. I go round the back and almost walk into a woman sitting on the steps, but duck back afore she can spot me. She’s a mangy old thing, sitting there enjoying the stars coming out, and finally she rises, gathering up her skirts, and goes off to the privy. I dart up the stairs and inside before she returns.
The pantry has a big cupboard under the sink. I hide under there and wait.
It may be been less than an hour I wait, but it seems like days. I keep hearing footsteps, and it don’t seem like everyone is going to sleep like I’d hoped. Finally I crawl out and go up the back stairway to the second floor.
There’s rooms and rooms full of babies up there. How will I know which is mine? But I spot her, wrapped up in my coat, on a cot with two others.
Footsteps sound, two pairs? Three? I duck under a cot just as they come in. All I can see is three pairs of feet, one set of black ladies’ boots, the others men’s shoes.
“Take the ones against the west wall,” the woman says. Light from the lantern one of them must be holding shines on the wooden floor, showing dust mice as big as kittens, and places where diapers have leaked. “That’s a half-dozen disposed of, and not so many dying at once that anyone will notice.”
“Do you think anyone really pays much attention to the death rate of bastard babies?” a man says.
“I think that we carry out this charade so no one will know they have been taken, and that we will play it out as fully as we have been directed,” she says. Her voice is colder than any wind. It sounds like Violet’s.
Her footsteps clack away, and I peek out enough to see what the men do. My baby is on the east wall, safe enough, but they pick up the other babies, and each time take a bundle out of the burlap sack one carries and lay it in the first baby’s place.
The babies cry and whimper as they are picked up, but the taller man touches a finger to each forehead, and they still, snuffling themselves asleep. Arms full of babies, the two men leave.
I go over to see what they’ve put in place of the babies, but there are still babies there. One yawns and looks up at me. They look like any of the other children. I don’t understand.
Voices, coming back up the stairs, and shouting, somehow they know I’m here. I grab my baby and one of the others, one of the new babies, and scramble out the window, out along the slanted roof. The old window frame slides back down after me.
It’s cold on the roof but calmer than I expected, once I get over the fear that they’ll figure out which way I went. Shouts come from the alleyway and I hear footsteps in the room underneath, but I sit where I am, in a nook between the chimney and the roof, with the coat wrapped around the three of us, while we get acquainted.
Mine has black hair, which I don’t like, because it reminds me of Mr. Smith, and blue eyes, which I do like. The other baby isn’t much to look at—brown hair, brown eyes. Its skin has a funny feel to it, like old leaves. It don’t make a sound, just looks at me and reaches up a hand, tiny perfect fingers curling around my rough red one.
It’s like me, this other baby—it doesn’t know what to do. All three of us stay there, my baby asleep, the other baby watching me. The church clock, far away to the west, is chiming three when the witches find me.
Mela:
You can hide a cub, but they will not stay hidden. You can tuck them among thorn branches, but they will not stay, and even when they do, death can come slithering down the trunk, a python to whom a cub is only a mouthful, a little mouthful, what the Mem Sahib called an appetizer when she served dinner to other English folk. When fever came, we thought the Colonel would go away after she had fallen, but he stayed, and little by little, we became friends, because we never spoke of our losses to one another.
Pythons eat cubs, and when they have, you cannot recover your baby, no matter how much you roar or moan. No matter how much you weep, even though lions never weep.
After we came here, a fairy came visiting, curious about me, about the Colonel. She told me what they could offer: fruit full of sweet hallucinations, combs and charms and little cantrips to keep a house clean or a man faithful.
And memories. They offer dreams and memories. But the price is high, too high and I have no coin with which to pay.
Lily:
Witches! When they swoop down, grabbing me, pulling me into the sky, I scream and almost drop my baby, but one of them grabs it as we whirl up in a rush of wind and stars.
“What’s this then?” one demands. She looks like something out of a storybook: all long nose and beady eyes and hairy chin. I would have known her for a witch anywhere. “A baby!”
“Two of ‘em, even,” the other says. Her tone is regretful. “I don’t want to drop er while she’s carrying babies, Grizz. That’s too wicked.”
“Soft as pudding, you are, Sophie,” Grizz scoffs. “Set her down on the clock tower, we’ll find out what’s going on. Mebbe we can take the babies and then drop her.”
“I don’t want no baby,” the first says, but we are already tumbling through the sky, whirling like scraps of paper or feathers on the wind, to land on the narrow lip of the clock tower, gritty bricks nice and solid under my feet.
Grizz has my baby, and Sophie takes the other. She spits when she looks at it. “This ain’t no real baby,” she say. “It’s a changeling, be dead before the day is through How’d you come by a fairy husk, girl?”
I tell them my story, holding onto the edge of the tower. Below us are London streets, and the faint distant lanterns of night watchmen.
The witches debate whether or not to drop me—“Keep the populace a little worried, after all, so they respect honest English witches,” Grizz argues. Sophie reaches out for my hand and looks at the palm before she says something to Grizz, too quiet for me to hear, that persuades her.
I try not to hear it, at any rate. I try not to hear the words “not long for this world.”
I have a plan. I make my way down the tower steps from the belfry with the babies. I know what to do. How to give my daughter a good life, the kind of life I never had. It all depends on the woman next door, the woman with the gleam of gold at her wrists and stories of a baby missing from her arms.
Mela:
She comes in the very earliest moments of the morning, when the light is just starting to show its chill brilliance, little Lily with a bundle in her arms, to the back door.
When I open it, she stares up at me. There is fear in her face, but there is also desperation.
She says
, “Miss Mela, you lost your baby, didn’t you?”
Satisfaction flares in her eyes when I nod, and she holds the bundle out to me.
“Here,” she says. “You take her. You’ll give her something better, eh?”
My paws twitch, but I don’t reach out for the bundle.
She tries again. “Think of your son.”
When I do, when I remember the perfection of his pudgy paws, of the needle-sharp kitten teeth, of the milk and flesh smell of him, I reach out. The baby is heavier than I remember.
“You’ll take care of her, won’t ya?” the maid says. The anxious morning sunlight reveals her features. “You’ll give her a good life. Better than mine.”
It is, as always, easier not to reply. That is the way of my People. So she turns away, reassured, when she should have listened to what I did not say.
Lily:
After I’ve given her my baby, I go back to the attic and what I have there. The fairy baby and Mrs. Smith’s big blue bottle. The baby looks at me with its dark eyes. Its skin looks older, withering.
I sing to it while everyone sleeps, down in the darkened house. I pretend it’s my baby, that we will leave soon and go away to the country, to a little house, a little garden where there is sunshine and no soot. But even while I sing, I see it fading away.
Three drops, never more, never more, the doctor said. I put much more than that in the glass of water and drink it down.
On the bed, I curl up with the changeling, and pull the blanket and my coat around us in a nest of drowsy warmth. We lie there together, and I sing a song that sounds a little like Violet’s and pretend it’s my own baby there. The fairy baby doesn’t breathe, although it watches me, its features fading, and slowly the darkness swallows me, and it, and we are gone.
Mela:
I take the baby to a gate I know, a doorway that is watched by the fairies, and pay the watchmen there. They eye the infant in my arms with covetous looks, but they do not dare meddle with me. I take it to the Queen of the Old Country, and there I trade it for what she has for me: a tiny key that will unlock a drawer, a drawer full of sunshine and memories.
I slide the drawer open. It is narrow, one of many making up the brass-bound apothecary’s chest. The drawer’s thick walls make the inner compartment, lined with golden foil, smaller still.
The interior shimmers with a memory: mid-afternoon sunlight filtered through acacia leaves. My cub and I lay on the mudflats near the water, the chalky blue and gray water. The air smelled of the shift between rainy season and drought, when the sun-warmed mud begins to dry and curl at the edges. A big-headed baby baboon perched nearby, high in a yellow acacia’s canopy, picking at the bark to make it bleed sap—a sweet, sugary whiff on the wind.
We watched it because the pair of flat-headed basilisks that spent their days quarreling over the division of the tree’s many-branched territory were working together for once. They were creeping up from two sides, and between them, they might be its match, if the nearby mother didn’t notice what was happening soon enough.
But she did, she does. The baby is saved, and the two basilisks driven off with furious shrieks. All is well. All is well.
My hand trembles on the drawer’s knob. It wants to slide shut again, now that the last of its sunlight is gone. I keep it open as long as I can, but when my fingers’ strength fades, it closes and cannot be opened again.
The Fairy Queen held a black-haired, blue-eyed baby in her lap and sang to it. And when she had finished her song, she took it downstairs, for servants are scarce in the Old Country, and it was time for this one’s tenure to begin.
“Rare Pears and Greengages” takes its title from Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” It takes place in Victorian times, in a world where Fairy overlaps the human world, and both worlds emerge the worse for the encounter. In flavor, it is somewhat influenced by Kipling and Dickens as well.
The narrative moves between two POVs, one a transplanted African shapeshifter who has lost her child, and the other an abused household servant faced with an unwanted pregnancy.
A Twine of Flame
Annie dreamed of fire. Where once she would have feared the dancing flames or stretched out winter cold hands to catch their warmth, now she felt only weariness and resignation and disgust. She counted the flames and thought of numbers, wondering how many deaths were credited to her now.
When she woke, she found herself in fire as well. The sprites had once again worked themselves loose from under her skin, and they circled her as though the air were full of flaming feathers, shedding waves of heat like chickens being plucked. The grass, already dry as last year’s noodles, smoked and smoldered. At the rock’s edges, leaves of lamb’s quarter succumbed to the heat, crumpling inward as they withered. Annie sighed and held her arms open.
The sprites flowed back into her like water, pouring along her wrists and elbows, wriggling in under the muscles like fading wisps. As always, she wondered at the sensation. She felt their movement, but not the heat that could have cooked her to the bone.
The sky overhead was autumn’s chilly blue, but she did not know if winter would come, not in these years of mingled deaths and miracles. Along the deserted road, corruption splotched the fields with spots like blackened sores, fringed with icy mushrooms, as though someone had been raising the undead.
Annie had little to fear from the zombies that might rise from those dark clusters. The flames that companioned her would kill them long before they could touch her. Still, they were unpleasant company. Two weeks ago, she had been trailed along the road by a pack of them, an entire village’s worth, it had looked like. After she’d killed two, the rest of them had the sense to stay back, but still they followed, staring at her and trying to talk. They expelled air from their rotting lungs, forcing it out in groans and phlegmy bubbles of single words. “Giiirrrlll.” “Fiiiiiirrreee.” “Please.”
Once she had stretched and peed among the ditch grasses, she took the road again. She no longer carried anything. She was lucky the flame sprites allowed her any clothing at all.
Up ahead a hamlet huddled in the road’s curve. The gates were closed, a good sign. They had not succumbed yet to the undead, but they might or might not welcome Annie. She was another hand against the encroaching monsters but she would be also another mouth to feed from ever-scantier supplies. And if they had heard of the Flame Plague, they would be watching her. It was risky, but there were so many lives there. Enough to free her? She didn’t think so but it would put her closer, much closer.
She checked her clothing: intact for the most part and the only burns along one sleeve, easily torn away and discarded. Smoke curled from three chimneys to join together in a single, reaching pillar. Perhaps there would be soup, thick bean soup with cabbage and chunks of sausage. Her mouth watered.
Two teenagers, all knobby wrists and haunted eyes, guarded the gate. She tried to bear herself like an asset, something of use, not something that would drain their resources. They looked at her and shouted as she came up the road. One motioned her back while another ran to fetch a priest.
The holy man’s hollow eyes were glittering pits set in a stubbled face. Townspeople leaned from the walls to watch. Their faces were like sooty, smudged fingerprints, hard to make out.
“Where are you from, girl?” the priest asked. His breath stank with starvation. He was denying himself for the sake of his flock. He saw himself as their savior, that was his weakness. Could she play the part of a message from God? She was not sure what God would have to say to these abandoned people. Or to her. Or even if God existed anymore. He might have been torn apart, like these lands, by the ever-warring sorcerers.
She bowed her head to him and stammered. “I ran away from bandits. They took my horse and pack.”
“She’ll lead them to us!” someone hissed, but the priest held up a hand.
“Where are you from, though?” he asked again.
“Canal du Midi, on the coast. My father sent me
inland, to escape the storms.
He nodded. Everyone knew of the storms harrying the coast, none of them natural, leaving behind pools of tainted, murky water that poisoned everything that touched or drank from them. Wind elementals, twisted by sorcerers vying for power, drank the souls of those unwary enough to be caught outside at night or in storms.
The priest studied her. She dropped her eyes, trying to look subservient, meek. Unthreatening. She could see doubt warring with compassion on his face, and she let her head droop as though weary for a moment, hoping to touch his heart. At length he beckoned her inside.
They fed her onion soup and a single slice of black bread, full of grit that crunched between her teeth. Far fewer of them than she had guessed. Two dozen of them altogether, the youngest a babe in arms, the oldest a grandmother. Six able-bodied men.
After the meal, they told their stories. They took it in turns to patrol the walls and watch for zombies, four at a time. They had made it through months of hardship so far in this way. Every two hours they switched. She gathered that if she stayed, she would be a welcome addition to their ranks.
They laid out bedrolls in the common room and set no one to guard them while they slept. Convenient. She curled up with her eyes closed, feeling the sprites brewing beneath her skin. They were impatient. She let them wait until the next change of guards had passed and the two newcomers laid down to rest, their breathing become regular and rhythmic.
When she finally let the sprites loose, they flickered out into the darkness, each taking a separate person. She lay there, listening to the catch of breath each time a flame sank into its new host. They would not feel the building heat as anything other than an odd flutter, a touch of dizziness. The lucky would never know what had happened.
She pulled herself from her blankets and crept out, not bothering to close the door behind her.
