Altered America Read online

  “I can hide your growing belly,” she whispers to me. “And when the baby is born, I can take it away where it will be happy. It’ll only cost twelve pounds.”

  “The Missus will notice,” I say. “Or Mr. Smith.”

  “I’ll take care of them,” she says, her eyes gleaming like candle flames while the wind shrieks. “And Cook won’t say anything. Can you get the money?”

  “Where will you take my baby?”

  “To a place where they raise babies and educate them. Fine people run it, generous and wealthy. Your baby can learn to be something other than a servant.”

  I sell my best clothing and my mother’s necklace, and that with all the shillings Mr. Smith has left beside the bed comes to a little under eleven pounds. Violet is angry – she rummages through my things, looking for something else to sell, but finds nothing. Finally I cry for her, and she catches the tears in her bottle, several spoonfuls worth, and smiles before bringing me a cup of water.

  As the weeks pass, I cry more and more. Violet takes the tears away and comes back with fruit, knobby melons and glossy limes. She gives Cook something to put in Mr. Smith’s soup, and he dreams his way through the days like the Missus. Cook doesn’t like it much, but when Mrs. Smith is doped on fairy fruit, she gives Cook no trouble in the kitchen, and when she’s not, she orders two puddings a night and changes her mind on the meat on a regular basis, right after Cook’s just finished the marketing.

  I grow bigger and bigger, I float my way through the house like a cloud, carried along by Violet’s song. I think she gives me fruit as well—the weeks pass too quickly, too quickly, and then one nightmare of a night I dream my belly splits and I wake up in the middle of blood and soreness. Violet is wrapping up the baby in my coat.

  “Give it to me,” I say, but she holds it away.

  “It’ll just make you miserable later, trying to remember,” she says. “I’m taking her to a nice lady, Mrs. Sucksby. She’ll give her a good life.” She gives me a glass of water, so sweet I know there must be fruit juice in it, just a spoonful or two to send me back to the coolness of the pillow and dreams of sleeping a thousand years, like Sleeping Beauty, with all them plants and thorns.

  In the morning Violet and the baby are gone, but I am still sore. Downstairs everyone is cranky, but there is no fruit, and no tears in the house. I cannot cry no matter how much Mr. Smith raises his voice or hand. Finally he sends for the physician, who comes and leaves behind a blue glass bottle. More laudanum.

  Mela:

  I smell the birth on the wind and it makes me restless. On the night my cubs were born, the rains were just starting. The clouds were low and lightning played over them as though the storm were thinking, dreaming. Then rain fell in sheets bending the grass flat, drops as warm as blood.

  All my babies were born dead except my son. I was prepared for this. My people do not live long, and we are few. But he lived, and I washed him clean, there in the torrents of rain, my tongue and the warm water sluicing away the afterbirth.

  The Elephant Women and the Hyena Women came to look at him and congratulate me, for their children are few as well. Three groups rule the lands where the acacia trees grow, the Elephants and the Hyenas and the Lions, because we walk most easily between the land of humans and the Real World. There are lesser beings there – we have fairies too, but they are little, malicious things, and rarely come down from the branches.

  Lily:

  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 dart 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 pair 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 d
oesn’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 tried not to hear it, at any rate. I tried 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.

  Afternotes:

  This story was the byproduct of a separate effort that I was working on with Spencer Ellsworth. I was intrigued by the idea of fairies paying for human tears and an economy partially based on that. The title references Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, an allusion to the fairy fruit that Mrs. Smith is addicted to.

  Mela the were-lioness is a product of overseas magic, and owes some of her existence to Rudyaard Kiplng, whose stories I steeped myself in as a young adult. She herself is addicted to another form of fairy magic: the illusion that her cub, killed by her carelessness, is still alive.

  The witches came out of nowhere while I was writing the story and I kinda love their cheerful cackling demeanor. They seem like proper English witches and deserve their own story someday.

  Memphis BBQ

  At this point in the Memphis spring, wisteria overflowed the roadside ditches in frothy purple drifts. The dogwoods were in full bloom and the l
andscape looked idyllic.

  Nonetheless, Postman Chaz McCartney was reasonably sure corpses moldered somewhere in those green-lit woods. With the Civil War less than a decade old, scars of war still marked this terrain where fighting had occurred. And Doc Lightning’s bandit gang, which operated in a pirated zeppelin, had hit only two towns over a few days back, and were surely still in the area. He sniffed the air, steamy from last night’s rainstorm coupled with the morning’s hot press of sunlight.

  But it wasn’t the scent of death that met his nostrils. He smelled something else long before his horse got within sight of the Brown’s cabin, hidden away among a tangle of redbud trees, wild blackberries, and kudzu. Barbecue, hot and spicy and greasy, a pepper-laden whiff that scraped the bottom of your lungs and set them tingling. He breathed in appreciatively, mouth watering, stomach sending up a grumble saying the biscuits and sawmill gravy he’d had for breakfast were long since dearly departed, and it was well past time to be sending in reinforcements.

  It was almost enough to make him forget about Mandy. Almost. He’d pretended to himself that his errand didn’t involve her or her mother’s cooking, but it was getting along to lunchtime and he’d offend Ma by turning down the lunch that would inevitably be offered.

  His horse snorted and jerked its head at the bit, full of spring-spangled impatience. He patted his mount’s shoulder. “Steady on, Comet.”

  Forget about Mandy. But when he got closer, there she was, standing out front among what looked like a small crowd, shouting at her father. Not people, though, making up the crowd, but attempts at mechanical men, the kind her father Timothy Brown had been working on for three decades now, all of Mandy’s life and then some. He’d raised his own lab assistant in the shape of his daughter.

  Chaz couldn’t catch what they were saying, now that Mandy had stopped shouting, but the way she was pointing at one of the mechanicals would seem to indicate the topic.