Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(27)

“I’ll bring her back when it’s time for you to feed her,” I said to Rahvey. My face was set, but a part of me desperately wanted her to say she’d changed her mind, that she would keep the baby, raise it, love it.…

“If you don’t, Anglet,” she said, “I shan’t ask what happened.”

I stared at her, and I suppose something of my horror and revulsion showed in my face.

“What?” she said. “Florihn is right. Not everything in life is the way you’d like it to be. Sometimes it’s best to accept that and move on.”

“Vestris went to Papa’s grave,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I said it except as a way of stabbing at Rahvey, and I immediately wished I hadn’t.

“When?”

“Before I did,” I said. “She left flowers there.”

Rahvey’s face closed up.

“It was probably before she got Florihn’s message about the baby,” I said, trying to cover the cruelty of what I had done.

Rahvey nodded but said, “She still hasn’t been, but then, it really was you two who were Papa’s girls.”

I gazed at her, baffled and upset, then looked away. “I didn’t mean to suggest she cared more about the grave than about visiting you,” I said.

“No?” she said. “Even if it’s true?”

I couldn’t answer that, so I looked back at her and responded to her previous remark instead. “Papa loved you, Rahvey. No less than he loved me or Vestris.”

She nodded a little too fast, smiling tightly and not meeting my gaze. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. She passed me the baby, then turned away so I could not read her face as I settled the child into the basket of towels.

“What is her name?” I asked.

“What?”

“The baby. What do you call her?”

Rahvey shrugged. “We only thought about boys’ names,” she said. “Call her whatever you like.”

I picked up the basket. As I did so, the baby stirred, jaws flexing and closing in a yawn. I gazed at her, then looked up, momentarily still.

I felt the eyes of the world as a presence like the rumble of the ocean or the still, insect-singing heat of the savannah. Outside, the Drowning and Bar-Selehm in general were crouched, waiting.

Fourth daughter. Doubly cursed. The child that should not be.

I tried to carry the basket as if it were lighter than it was, as if it held nothing of value. I gave my sister one last look, but Rahvey had closed her eyes.

“Tell no one where she is,” I said.

I opened the door and stepped out into the world.





CHAPTER

10

THERE WERE A FEW kids playing out back, and a woman who lived two streets over, a busybody who never actually did anything helpful. The woman rose from her darning as I emerged onto the buckled porch and fixed me with the expectant gaze of one who lives for other people’s tragedies.

I felt every muscle tense and had to concentrate to keep my face neutral.

Don’t look at the basket, I told myself. Just walk away.

So I walked carefully and briskly, face blank, eyes fixed directly ahead, turning toward the crowded industrial skyline. But the city now seemed as different as when I had first noticed that the Beacon was gone. The blown-glass delicacy of the baby changed everything. What had been familiar, even comforting, was now hard edged and dangerous, a walk down a cobbled street suddenly as precarious as scaling a two-hundred-footer. The streets I had known were crowded with skull-cracking brick corners, spear-point railings, and slicing shards of broken glass. The baby’s defenseless softness cried out to me every time someone came close, every time the footing felt less than perfect.

I might fall. Not from the sky. Just walking on the uneven sets and cobbles, I might fall, and that would be enough. I braced my arms around the baby, trying to form a cage around its terrible fragility, and my stomach turned.

You can’t do this.

At the corner of Old Threadneedle Street, I felt the child stir, and as I passed the entrance to the Northgate underground railway, a noisy belch of smoke burst from the grating in the pavement, and the child began to cry, softly at first, then with real distress. I poked and cooed, but it made no difference. Could she be hungry already? Surely not. We had only just left. I risked taking her out of the basket and holding her against me.

The infant opened its eyes and quieted, seeming to look at me, and when I held it against my chest, I could feel its tiny heart racing so that I felt thrilled, terrified, and so far out of my depth that I could barely see the shore. And then she was crying again, a high cycling wail that closed her eyes and made her face hot.

I’d had her less than an hour and was already failing her.

A white woman in an enormous crinoline-buoyed dress and a pink-bowed bonnet gave me a haughty look as she passed, and as I turned away, I found myself looking up at the implacable stone and high iron railings of the Pancaris Home for Orphaned Children by the canal. It was a hard building, blockish and unornamented save for the thorny rose etched into the stone above the door, which was the emblem of the order.

I knew little of northern religions beyond the fact that for most of them, life was a kind of test, something to be endured before being reunited with the spirit who made the world. They favored self-denial and service, which, for the Pancaris nuns, meant celibacy, teaching, and raising other people’s children.