Gracie, who grew up with seven loyal brothers, who could throw a right hook faster than a man could lie, did not. But she thought it might be impertinent to say. “If you say so, miss.”
“Mm. We’ll get along perfectly. Anyway. Where was I? Yes, the factory’s practically an institution, a shining beacon in Lancashire’s fiefdom of poorly ventilated, poorly regulated factories. Our girls have weekends. There are benefits too, possibilities for advancement, and if you make the mistake of becoming gravid with child, we can accommodate for that too. Especially if the spawn is male.”
Gracie narrowed her eyes. She’d expected grime in the factory’s corners, penumbral hallways half-lit by bare bulbs, rotting beams and whimpering from behind closed doors. Not this industrial austerity. No music, no sound but for the clack of careful footsteps, nothing but the machinery’s humming gospel, which seemed to seep through the bones to sing in her marrow. “Th—the spawn?”
“Son,” Miss Velvet said, with a million-dollar smile, gaze lidded. “We acknowledge the difficulty in raising sons. So rambunctious, so loud. If you were to have the ill fortune of giving birth to a boy, we’d do everything we can to streamline your existence, to make it easier to attend to your duties. Rest assured that your son would be loved, provided for like he was our own.”
A pale girl, hair bound in an off-white scarf, trotted by the pair.
“You don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have any plans for—”
“Excellent, excellent. Miss Braithwaite, we’ll get along just perfectly. Have I said that already? Because I feel the need to do so. It is a thing that humans do not do enough. Appreciate each other. Appreciate themselves.”
There it was again. Humans, not people. Spawn, not son. The tiniest aberrations in word choice. Gracie decided she wouldn’t be half-surprised if this was merely a reflection of cosmopolitan fashion; this calving of one’s self from the unwashed proletariat. She could see it being funny for these people, even satisfying, to act as an entomologist might. Certainly, London acted like it was a world of its own, a perfumed paradise, separate from its rural relatives.
Why not its reluctant exports?
Still—
“Glad to hear—well, glad to hear that you had to share that, Miss Velvet. But d’you mind awfully if we talked about the practicalities of my position here? I’d hate to be a waste of a good salary.”
“Yes, of course.” Miss Velvet, much to Gracie’s bewilderment, was beginning to purr. There was something else, Gracie thought. Something to the way Miss Velvet chewed on her words, as though there were extra syllables seeded in every sentence, colloquialisms of mandibular motion that only the rarefied understood. “Of course, of course. But that’s hardly my area of expertise. You’ll want Mrs. Phillips for that. She is the caretaker, the kindly mother of your particular division. Everything you need to know, you’ll hear from here.”
They took another turn, then a second, a third, before at last Miss Velvet walked Gracie up a spiral stairwell, two storeys past identical-looking floors, every last corridor lit exactly the same way. The effect was dizzying.
“Careful, Miss Braithwaite.” The girl’s voice, warm against her ear. A smell of leather and tannic acids, skin curing beneath a blistering blue sky; the stink of guts beneath that burning animal scent, a coppery aftertaste. “You’ve only just arrived. We have so very far to go.”
Gracie swallowed. “I hear you.”
“Good.” Miss Velvet grinned and said no more.
The two marched on in silence. Down the throat of a passage that appeared no different from the others, its walls scalloped with thick wooden doors. Miss Velvet halted at the end of the hall, narrow frame haloed by grey light. She turned—two sharp taps of her heel against the brick floor—and dove into a bow, a hand to her frilled collar, the other arm outstretched.
“Your dormitory.”
Feeling like something was expected of her, some reciprocal ritual, Gracie bobbed an anxious curtsey, eliciting a cool trill of laughter.
“We’ll have so much fun, Miss Braithwaite. I look forward to the days to come.” And with that, Miss Velvet took her leave.
THE DORMITORY WAS plain: a single wide window stretched across a wall, the glass so dirty that the world outside smeared into shadows; cots with scant bedding; several small cabinets; laundry lines drooping under fresh-washed undergarments, water bleeding from their hems into shallow pools. Everywhere, there were women, milling under the steepled ceiling, and a damp musty odour, as though of hounds come slinking from the rain.
“Hello?” Gracie said, setting her father’s one good suitcase, crammed with all the hand-me-downs that would fit, onto the floor.
A silence curled around the room. Linen and soot, Gracie thought, not for the first time. They were all the colour of linen and soot, nothing in between. Would she look like that one day too? While Gracie worried at the idea, an old woman rose from her chair. When she spoke, it was with a faint Bristolian brogue.
“Another one.” The woman laid down her knitting needles, shooed away a cat that had taken residence between her ankles, a burly black tom with pound coins for eyes, one ear long chewed down to a withered stump. “What’d he promise you?”
“Benefits, a pension plan, and opportunities to purchase the family plot in the next five years,” Gracie declared promptly, pleased by her own informative alacrity. Emboldened, she continued, bantering the terminology of landlords, not entirely certain whether the context fit, but she figured it wouldn’t be a problem, not if she spoke with enough wit. “It’s a seller’s market these days, you know? Rents picking up. Even if it’s a bit of an investment now, value will appreciate.”
“No doubt,” said the old woman, still unnamed. Her hair hung in unkept ringlets; someone’d thought to braid them at some point, but she’d since allowed the plait to fallow, the tips uncoiling into a grey mess. Despite her age, she stood unstooped, her posture almost mocking in its straight-shouldered geometry. There had to be at least fifty years between Gracie and her counterpart, and she wore all of it like honours from the King. “At least you’ve sold your soul for practical reasons.”
“I think,” Gracie said, “I take some offence at that.”
The woman smiled. “I’m sure you do. The name’s Mrs. Phillips, poppet. I suggest you take some time to think long and hard about what your goals are in life. Whether you’d rather be the lone wolf, full of vim and vinegar, or the one who survives to the end of this story.”
Anger spasmed in Gracie, instinctive. She’d not come here to be mocked; and more than that, she tired of riddles, of meanings slithering between mealy-mouthed platitudes. All that unspoken truth, odorous and seasoned with a winking malevolent delight. Everyone who wasn’t poor Gracie Braithwaite knew the score. But Gracie kept her bile down, kept her mouth shut.
Then, after a time:
“I’m here to work.”
Mrs. Philips regarded her with a cold, pale eye. Linen and soot, Gracie thought, looking the old woman over from head to toe.
“Good.”
IT WASN’T DIFFICULT work.
Gracie had expected much worse. More back-breaking labour, the kind that loosened one’s ligaments, undid the cords that tethered bone to muscle, rubbed tendon against calcium until the body was reduced to mere wires and will. Work that’d make old age nothing but a decade of whimpers.
But her chores weren’t anything like that. Oh, they weren’t easy, per se. The hours were endless. Gracie woke before dawn, went to sleep with the nightjars. Meals were regular but tasteless: porridge leavened with strands of some unidentifiable meat, chopped carrots, occasional bits of onion, celery and other vegetables, all cooked to mush.
In between, Gracie developed an almanac of new scars as she basted, sewed, stitched, unseamed a thousand lengths of good leather, each sheet more beautiful and delicate than the last. Lambskin, Gracie told herself. Maybe slink, uterine-soft. From time to time, her drudgery diversified to more taxing endeavours:
kitchen chores and the movement of crates and sacks, every container innocuously branded with symbols that made no sense to anyone but Miss Velvet, who cooed over every fresh arrival.
The oddness of having but one ostensible administrator was not lost on Gracie. She spent the first week attempting to oust plain-clothed overseers, conspirators among the other women, but none revealed themselves. It was Miss Velvet and no other, not even the man who had officiated over Gracie’s employment.
Occasionally, there’d be visitors, convoys of festively dressed gentry, all smiling, every one of them euphorically pleased with the very act of breathing. They spoke with the cadence of the opulent but conducted themselves like children, seething with questions that made no sense. One, a round-faced woman attired in violet, asked for Gracie’s tailor, praising their avant-garde aesthetics. Miss Velvet had led her quickly away. “Rich people,” she’d giggled.
Gracie eventually surrendered her investigations, focused instead on surviving to the end of each week, where a decadent Sunday roast inevitably waited. Potatoes crisped in duck fat, thumb-thick slabs of roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, mountains of roasted carrots, sweet corn, enough gravy to drown every one of Gracie’s fears.
“Who the hell were those people? On Wednesday? Bit of a weird bunch, don’t you think?” Gracie moved her peas around her plate, glancing over a shoulder.
“Customers.”
“They don’t look like the sort who’d shop here.”
“They’re still customers,” Mrs. Phillips said placidly, jaw tightening. “Not for us to discuss their tastes.”
“Speaking of tastes, what are we making, anyway?”
Mrs. Phillips didn’t miss a beat. “Attire.”
“Well, obviously.” Gracie sucked on the pad of her thumb. She had sliced the meat open on something in the latest shipment of leathers: a jag of ivory, the shape and size of an infant’s toenail. “But what kind of attire? Don’t you think it’s strange that we’re working on sleeves and flaps, pant legs but no trousers, panels for jackets that we’ve never seen?”
“No.” Mrs. Phillips sipped at her pea soup. “And if I were you, poppet, I’d stop asking questions I don’t want the answers to.”
Ah, Gracie thought. There it was. Tacit acknowledgement of the truths that she hungered for, and the insinuation that Mrs. Phillips knew them all. Now, all Gracie had to do was crowbar the answers from the old woman’s chest and everything would be as she wanted.
“That’s up to me, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Freedom of choice and all that. The young are allowed to make their own mistakes. Everybody chooses how they live their lives and all—”
Anger kindled in Mrs. Phillips’ lined features, eyes thinning. She put down her spoon, curled her palm, as though begging for some relief from Gracie’s relentless audacity, and then sighed, a long, wounded noise. Somewhere, someone was singing again, that song about highwaymen and the bargains the desperate make.
“Don’t you have a father, Gracie Braithwaite? A mother? Seven brothers who love you more than life itself? And a little newborn sibling, who’ll grow up to think you’re the sun and the moon itself?”
“Yeah, but I don’t see why—”
“Let it go, Gracie.”
“Let what go?” A third voice intruded, appallingly jubilant. Before Gracie could register how Miss Velvet had come so close unnoticed, the administrator pirouetted into view, a hand clapping down on Gracie’s shoulders. The woman smiled, lips a bright pink today, the hue of raw beef.
“Her belief that she might one day marry above a station, find a good London man—”
Gracie’s lips curled. If she married, it’d be to a man like her father, someone who knew the calendar of the soil and the migrations of the earthworms, who could not only coax a horse to drink but would lay its head upon his lap in perfect trust. The very thought of wedding a pansified dandy, palms soft as a newborn’s, both horrified and repulsed her. She said nothing about the matter, however.
“—that might forgive her rough tongue and love the fact she can carry a calf in each arm.” Mrs. Phillips rose, clasped a withered hand around Miss Velvet’s wrist. The administrator smiled, all small white teeth.
“We are so close now, Mrs. Phillips. I remember when you were afraid to touch me.” Today, Miss Velvet wore white like a bride might; with stirrings of lace and seed-pearls galore, a little fascinator shaped like a tiara atop her crimson hair.
“I was afraid of a lot of things once. But then, Mr. Phillips—God rest his poor soul—had the poor taste to die, and now the only thing I have left is hate.”
Gracie went still. The air cooked with the tension from the two women, one small and quick and grinning, the other so ancient that her flesh had lost all elasticity, furrowed and canyoned wherever it’d been brushed. Hate. Mrs. Phillips had said ‘hate,’ and Gracie would bet all the souls of her brothers that she meant it exactly.
But for all the rich loathing in Mrs. Phillips’ voice, Miss Velvet seemed unabashed. Indeed, if anything, it excited an unctuous pleasure in her. Miss Velvet peeled from Gracie’s shoulders, oiled up to Mrs. Phillips, gloved fingers walking a path around the old woman’s left clavicle. “Your hate is such a beautiful thing. If I could parcel it in silk, wrap it up in a box, I’d make a gift of it to sweet Saint Peter. Do you ever wonder, Mrs. Phillips, what dead men sing when no one’s around?”
“Whatever they like you to sing, poppet.” Granite would have been more pliant at that moment, less cold.
“Yes. Yes, you’re right.” The problem with Miss Velvet’s smile, Gracie decided, wasn’t that it looked like it had palsied into place, or was pinned there with fish-hooks slotted through her cheeks. The problem was her teeth. There were too many of them, and they were all the wrong shape, molars rather than incisors and bicuspids, no fangs in sight. Bovine dentition, small enough to stud an infant mouth. How had Gracie not noticed?
“But in the meantime…” And suddenly there Miss Velvet was again, fingers kneading Gracie’s shoulders, the heels of her palms jammed into the slope of her scapulas. With a snarl, the young Braithwaite attempted to extricate herself, but it was too late. Miss Velvet’s grip could have manacled a stallion. “I’ve something to show you, Miss Braithwaite.”
WHAT GRACIE BRAITHWAITE would remember most of that day, when the nightmares had dulled to routine and she, at last, had a private room that did not reek of mould, would be the smell. The wretched animal stink; warm grease, fresh skins only beginning to cure; a rind of sweat overlaying it all.
And the darkness, red-tinged and seething with strange shapes.
She’d remember that as well.
“These are—”
“Products,” Miss Velvet said gaily. “But I suspect the word that you might have been looking for was ‘people.’”
There was no mistaking the upside-down silhouettes for anything else: men and women and children, pared of entrails and extraneous hairs, pomaded coifs holding still even as the bodies stuttered along the production line. From where Gracie stood, she could, from time to time, see the fine sutures in their skin. She thought she recognized her own handiwork. Nausea welled within her.
“Oh.”
The wan light gleamed in Miss Velvet’s small teeth. “Yes. You see now.”
“You can’t do this,” Gracie said, because there needed to be words in her mouth, and she needed to say something, or she’d begin to scream. “This isn’t right. This is—this… These are people.”
“Were.” A disdainful flap of the overseer’s hand. “And I would hesitate to call them people, really. They were, as the French might put it, the bourgeois. I think? It doesn’t matter. These donors—yes, I like that word more—were all part of the great British Empire, a fiefdom built on telling other countries they aren’t quite clever enough to live without our supervision.”
As Miss Velvet spoke, the promenade of corpses continued to tick forward. Masked figures, bellies obscured by mot
tled blue aprons, inspected each cadaver in turn. Those still pregnant with viscera were scooped clean, the fetid remnants chucked into enormous kegs. Looms clacked and chattered in the shadows. Custom suits, Gracie decided detachedly. “There are children here.”
“Who’d grow up to be well-fed, well-read, well-intentioned, but ultimately only interested in people that look and act and smell like them.” Miss Velvet twitched a shoulder. “Despite what the church would have you think, Hell has no love for the haughty. In fact, you might argue that it is our business to rehabilitate the proud, or at least make them think about what they’ve done.”
Once, when they were much younger, Gracie and her brothers had argued the economics of morality, whether Lucifer was truly a reprobate, or if he’d been maligned—was instead the assiduous concierge of a prison with no exit policy. Once, they’d debated the phenotype of demons, their disposition, and how an encounter might take place. They’d agreed there would be fire. But Miss Velvet was only smiles, and somehow, that was worse.
Gracie swallowed. “That isn’t up to—”
“No, it absolutely is up to us. We are Hell and its myriad subsidiaries. Our purpose, the very reason we were massaged into shape, given intellect and wit to distract ourselves between working hours, was to sift between the dross of your souls, and determine who merits an eternity singing praises to Heaven, and who”—Miss Velvet’s eyes flicked to a point behind Gracie’s shoulder, smile blissful—“doesn’t.”
A scream, as though choreographed.
“By the way,” Miss Velvet resumed, a finger angled to the floor. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to note that you have no say in this matter. None whatsoever. No matter what you might think, you are the lowest of the low in this food chain.”
“So, you’re threatening me, then?” Gracie squared her stance, fists balling at her sides. Violence, with its bruising poetry, its choir of split bones and cracked bones, she understood.
The True History of the Strange Brigade Page 2
