Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(28)
The baby was still crying. I thought of Rahvey saying she wouldn’t ask what happened if I never took the child back to her. I wasn’t going to abandon the baby, not yet, but I had to see. Perhaps it would be a place of light and happiness.…
I climbed the long, steep flight of stone stairs and entered. The building was cold and dark inside, its hallways narrow and echoing. There was no airy lobby, no bustle, no sound of voices to distract from the squawling infant in the basket.
“Can I help you?”
I turned to find an elderly white woman in a black gown and the hair-concealing headdress they called a wimple looking down on me from a high, backless stool at a desk. The stool was inexplicably mounted on a platform accessed by three wooden steps.
“I was just looking around,” I answered weakly.
“You were under the impression this was a zoo or a museum?” said the woman, peering at me over her reading glasses.
“No,” I said. “A friend of mine has had a baby. I don’t think she will be able to keep it. I was wondering, if she were to bring it here, what the place would be like.”
“It would probably be better if your friend came for herself, wouldn’t you say?” said the nun, eyeing my wailing basket. “Show me the child.”
I did as I was told, hesitant, but desperate for anything to stop the crying. The nun put the baby on one of the towels over her shoulder and patted her spine till she burped, spewing a dribble of milky vomit onto the cloth, then falling promptly, magically silent. The nun returned the infant to me in superior silence.
“Thank you,” I said. “Could I see where the children live? Where they sleep?”
“I fail to see how that is pertinent,” said the nun, “but, very well. Come this way.”
We descended a narrow staircase into a gaslit, windowless, and whitewashed corridor that smelled of antiseptic. The nun took a ring of keys from her rope belt and unlocked a heavy door, admitting us to a room—also windowless—containing six iron bedsteads, six chairs, six desks, and six small cabinets. There were three children inside. They looked to be about Berrit’s age or younger, one black, two Lani, all girls. They were working at their desks, but got to their feet and turned to face the door, standing to something like attention.
They said nothing.
I took a step in, but the nun grasped my wrist.
“I see no reason to disturb their studies,” she said.
I hesitated, taking in their blank, hollow faces, the buckets of cleaning supplies and brooms propped beside each cabinet, and asked, “What are they reading?”
“Something improving,” said the nun with chill pride. “Devotional texts, moral pamphlets, studies on the value of cleanliness and labor.”
Not knowing what to say, I just nodded. I had never thought that hopelessness might have an aroma, but if it did, that was what the still, silent air of the room smelled of: hospital sterility and despair.
The nun showed me out, and I had to resist the impulse to hold the door open, to tell the children to run. But then I was being steered into the nursery, an identical room: white, unadorned, and silent, containing eight cagelike cribs. Another nun sat with a book on one of the curiously high stools. She considered us as we entered, bowing fractionally to her sister before returning her eyes to her reading.
“They are all sleeping,” I said, trying to sound impressed.
“It is nap time,” said the nun at my elbow, as if this were obvious. “Every day at this time.”
“That’s very … disciplined,” I said.
“They need structure in their lives,” said the nun. “Most of them are here because their mothers had none of their own—something you might want to pass on to your friend.”
As I left the room, I thought that it smelled less like a hospital and more like a morgue, as if it were a place where spirit came to die. Clutching the basket to my breast with a new and tortured sense of desperation, I walked quickly down the hallway and out.
*
PAUSING ONLY TO PICK up a bottle of sheep’s milk from the Holymound market, I returned to the Martel Court via the labyrinth that was Old Town, a complex of rough, sand-colored stone and spiraling minarets that had been all there was of Bar-Selehm before the whites came. I pulled my hair back, slipped my arms through the handles of the basket, hitching it up onto my back, and climbed up to the shuttered chamber above the clock mechanism, comfortable in the knowledge that I was invisible up there in the smog. But as I withdraw one arm from the handles to work the louvers, the basket shifted and swung, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment, I glanced down into the face of the sleeping child, suspended by a wicker band over eighty feet of nothing but hard, shattering stone.
I clambered inside, my heart racing as if I had been chased over rooftops by Morlak’s gang.
Inside, hanging from a high buttress by its hind legs, was one of the large fox-headed fruit bats that called the city home. It watched me with black, glassy eyes and ruffled its rubbery wings. For a long moment, I just sat there looking at it, and eventually—comfortable that we were no threat to each other—it tucked its head and went to sleep.
What have you done? What are you going to do?
All my excitement about working for Willinghouse, of championing Berrit’s memory and serving as an agent of justice, lay exposed as vain and idiotic in the awful frailty of the sleeping child.