Wasp (24 page)

Beth eases herself upright, clinging to the edge of the trough for support. Her knees quiver but keep her on her feet. ‘The mess—’

‘Stable girl will clean up. ’Twas her fault horseshit was there in the first place. Do as I say. Thy pride will mend.’ He nods towards the House. ‘After thou hast dried out, things must be mended in there.’

Settling Accounts

Rain starts falling in long, wet lances, smacking forcefully on the cobbles. Kingfisher pulls his coat tighter and peers into the muddied skies. Many times he had stood outside his hut in the forest of his homeland, revelling in the fresh, cleansing downpours that sometimes blew in from the coast. Here, the rainwater is harsh and choked with soot.

‘No darkie is ever going to extort coin out of me.’

Kingfisher draws his attention back to the squawking buffoon in front of him. ‘Your debt grows heavy and is long overdue. I am afraid I must insist, sir, especially as you have enjoyed yet another long session at the gaming tables.’

‘I barely step out of the coach and you accost me in my own stableyard. How long have you been lurking here?’

‘Not long, sir. Your whereabouts was common knowledge. The account must be settled. The House has granted you good grace for long enough.’

The client glances at Leonardo, standing like a misshapen boulder by the yard gate, then turns back to Kingfisher. ‘Very well, I shall fetch your cursed payment out of my strongbox. You can wait out here and get a soaking, and if it costs you a fever then so be it.’

The back door slams. Kingfisher tugs his hat lower across his forehead. A foul night to go chasing bad debt. The client is as obnoxious as they always are but everyone pays in the end. In one manner or another.

Movement by the stable door interrupts his musings. A shape is hunched over the ground, hands scrabbling over the cobbles. Kingfisher steps forward for a better look. A young woman, her skin as dark as his own. She is trying to winkle manure from between the stones, but the rain is turning it into a foul sludge that slips between her fingers and splatters her knees. She hears the scrape of boots coming towards her and looks up, water smearing oily drops down the course of both cheeks. His eyes know the cut of her face, as she knows his.

Kingfisher does not believe this encounter to be fated, though there are those whose lives are channelled by such things. Rather, this is another example of the great, endless roll of numbers that determines the way of the universe coming up with an event, a moment, a point where a decision one way or the other can change lives. It doesn’t matter whether this woman had remained cowering at the back of the slaver cage until sold, or whether she fled with some of the others, only to be recaptured somewhere down the dark road. She is here. Now.

The words come to his mouth before his mind has time to consider them. ‘I am sorry,’ he says in their mother tongue. ‘I shall try to make this right.’

She looks at him, mouth shivering in the cold, eyes full of disbelief. ‘Can you make it right for those who died on the boat? Can you make it right for those who have died since? You could not save your own wife, Osei, so how can you help me? I am a slave now.’

‘I know your voice. It was you who whispered into my ear during that long voyage. Even above the groans of the ill and dying I heard you. I know what I have done.’

‘Truthfully, Osei? You walked away with that white man, leaving us in our cage, not looking back. Here you are now, driven in a carriage and wearing those foolish clothes. The man who holds me here is in fear of you, despite his noisy words. How did you come to have such power, Osei? Who else have you abandoned or betrayed?’

The back door opens. Kingfisher slips a hand under the girl’s arm. He half expects her to jerk away, but she allows herself to be helped up without protest. The client is halfway across the yard with a purse dangling from his fingers. When he sees them an oily grin slides across his mouth. ‘Like the look of that one, do you? She’s not much of a belly warmer, I can testify.’

‘Give her to me and your debt is settled.’

The client laughs. ‘Want one of your own do you, blackie? Then take her by all means. Like the rest of your breed she’s of scant use to me.’

Leonardo drives them back to the House. If he has any thoughts on the matter he keeps them to himself. Kingfisher smuggles the girl up to his chambers, wraps her in the coverlet from his bed and feeds her the cold supper that is waiting for him. She gives the thanks her father taught her to and says nothing more, watching him with those moon-pool eyes while she eats.

‘You will stay in here for now,’ he tells her. ‘I shall talk to my mistress. A place may be found here for you.’

‘So I am still a slave then, Osei? As are you?’

‘Every village has its chief, even in this cold-lashed land. It is a blessing that some are kinder than others.’

‘My family calls to me. I want to go home.’

‘So do I, little one. So do I.’

She sleeps with him in his bed and, whatever she expects, he doesn’t touch her. Next morning he collects the breakfast tray and smuggles a little extra. Later, in the kitchen, a commotion outside draws everyone to the window.

‘Looks like the Sisters are punishing one of their own,’ Cook says. ‘It’s that new girl.’

Along with the maids, Kingfisher watches the events in silence. When the yard has emptied he goes out to the stables. He studies the shivering girl perched on a stool before the stove, horse blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

‘You are making a pretty mess of the tack-room floor,’ he observes.

‘Pardon me, but it was your friend Leonardo who dunked me in the trough.’

Kingfisher nods. ‘Better water than horseshit.’

‘Don’t pretend to care, darkie. I didn’t cry. Not a tear. Nor would I if my hand had been cut off.’

‘You are not very civil in your tongue, English girl, no matter what table manners they might have taught you.’

She doesn’t appear to know what to say to that. They look at each other for a moment. He doubts he can stare her down. She seems ready to wait until next winter before moving that hard gaze. Fingers run across her shorn head.

‘I always had pretty hair,’ she mutters. ‘I doubt it will ever grow back the same.’

‘That may be, but do not complain to me. I am forced to wear these rancid wigs. My scalp feels as if angry insects have bitten it. The cologne makes me sneeze and the food turns my stomach.’

‘Look, Kingfisher, I—’

‘Kingfisher is not my name. It is something I was made to take, trained to answer to as if I were a dog. If I spoke it in the forest the trees would not hear. It has no meaning.’

‘You don’t like it here?’

He glances out the window. ‘It is nearly always raining, and cold. Clouds never seem to lift from the rooftops, and there is no friendliness in the wind. Even the birds have nothing to say, and your horses are stupid. They do not think for themselves because you bind them in saddles and harnesses, and make them pull huge wooden tombs crammed with noisy people. Their spirits are chained, like your women are chained. In my tribe old men died with a full set of teeth. Here, even children’s mouths are rotten.’

‘Well, it’s better than being a savage.’

‘What exactly do you believe?’ Kingfisher faces her. ‘That we eat babies fresh from the womb? That we garnish our food with their brains and slaughter their mothers to appease some form of animal god? Yet you murdered us by the hundred, perhaps the thousand. You are the interloper in our country: the savage, the barbarian. Your god is foreign and pagan in our eyes. Our land, the ground on which we lived and died and worshipped for generations, has become your killing ground. Now your blood has mingled with the blood of our ancestors and poisoned it.’

He rolls up his sleeve. ‘See this bracelet? It is beautiful, is it not? Yet the slavers did not deem it worth stealing. No cold gems or dead metals went into its making. It is fashioned from a piece of my wife’s hair and decorated with bones. You look disgusted, but she spent hours crafting it to perfection. She was clean. She washed herself every day. She did not smell of stale sweat or foul breath. Lice did not plague her hair the way they infest people here. Even the wigs on your heads are plastered with animal fat. You hunt deer for sport instead of for food. Everyone is a savage.’

He remembers coming into the city with Crabbe and the Fixer, the baby a bundle in his arms. The place thronged with traffic. Little black carriage boys in sparkling feathery turbans clung to the backs of their masters’ coaches as if their palms had been nailed to the panelling. Buildings, larger than any he’d seen before, crowded around one another. He stared until his eyes hurt with the sight of it.

‘What is that smell? It is like a rotting food,’ he’d asked.

‘That there’s the city, you heathen monkey,’ Crabbe said.

‘It stinks of burned wood and dead things.’

‘More life there than among your tree trunks, I’ll wager.’

‘People should not live like this.’

‘Preacher now, are you?’

From boyhood, Kingfisher could run silent and unseen through the trees. The city is just another forest, teeming with life and death. He learned that during his first month at the House and had used it to his advantage since.

‘You and I are the same,’ he tells Beth. ‘We were both captives. We are both captives still. I came from a slave pen, you from a madhouse. As I’ve been obliged to tell someone already, some prisons are worse than others. Make the best of this one.’

An Unusual Assignment

‘You were all a part of it. Every one of you. Eloise sent me down to the washhouse on purpose.’

Hummingbird sits on the bed, wads of linen spreading her toes. She attacks the nails with a pair of scissors. ‘You’d better come in, Kitten,’ she says, blades going
snip-snip.
‘It won’t do to yell in the corridor.’

Beth throws her ruined day gown onto the chair and slams the door behind her. ‘Don’t even pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. For all I know you might have been there, hiding your face behind one of those masks. I could’ve choked to death.’

Snip.
‘Perhaps next time you’ll think twice about snitching on one of the girls.’

‘Don’t talk of it so lightly. I have bruises.’

‘Moth got a hot hand.’

‘And what’s that exactly? A rap across the knuckles? A smack on the fingers with a leather belt? If so, she deserves it for thieving.’

‘She was branded.’

Beth’s mouth closed. Opened. Formed a word. ‘Branded? You mean
burned
?’

‘Do you know what it’s like to have a hot iron pressed against your skin? You can hear it sizzle like bacon on a skillet.’

‘She suffered that for a tuppeny length of ribbon?’

‘Theft cannot be tolerated. Who would dare admit a Masque into their home if she might lift the silver? Besides, the Abbess didn’t burn her so much for filching that ribbon as for disobeying me. In the House, discipline is everything. I was willing to forgive her because Moth is impulsive and was maltreated as a child. Usually we fetch a cane across the rump for breaking minor rules but the Abbess wanted to make an example. She’s mother to all of us, Kitten, but she doesn’t spare the rod. Or the brand. Your bruises will disappear, and that’s more than can be said for Moth’s little memento.’

Beth stares at the rug. ‘I never thought—’

‘No, you didn’t.’ Hummingbird tosses the scissors onto her bedside table, plucks the wads from between her toes and swings her legs off the bed. ‘You’d best get that soiled gown back to the washhouse.’

‘How can I face anyone? How can I sit in that dining room with everybody watching me? Or go to the parlour, or even look Eloise in the eye again?’

‘The Sisters have already punished you. No one will stare. No one will mention it. What’s done is forgotten. Just remember to keep your tongue still in future.’

Bethany faces another surprise when the Fixer sends for her. She meets him in the Mirror Room where he’s clad in satin jacket, breeches and hose. A white wig is perched on his usually bald head, fastened at the back with a black ribbon the size of two spread hands. He seems at ease in this dandy’s garb.

‘Dance,’ he says. ‘A gavotte first, then we’ll try you with a few couplets. I need to examine your style. You can dance, can’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Beth smooths her fresh day gown. ‘No music?’

‘I can’t conjure an orchestra out of the floorboards. Don’t worry, I’ll mark the time. Give me your hand. Now, one
 . . . 
two
 . . . 
three
 . . .
’ Up and down they go, feet whispering on the oak floor. A little less stiffness in your legs. That’s right, work with me, don’t fight.’

They move. Turn. Move again. ‘You are too stiff. You’re not fumbling with a wheelwright at some country harvest festival. At least try to feign interest. Grip my hand properly, don’t let your fingers go flabby. And look at me, find a smile even if you have to imagine you’re gazing at someone else — a sweetheart or old beau. This can’t be the first time you’ve danced with a man.’

Every touch, every brush of the Fixer’s body digs a shiver out of her belly. In the great ballroom at Russell Hall, Lord Russell had held her so close their breath mingled. His face was slick with smiles, her nostrils full of his thick, spicy cologne. His eyes on hers. She looking
at
them but not daring to look
into
them. He’d had one of his footmen, a musician by a previous trade, tinkle a melody out of the spinet. His face was impassive enough but Beth knew she’d catch hell from the servants later. Getting above her station. Getting improper notions into her head. Getting this. Getting that. And the housekeeper asking, ‘Why should the squire give you favours, a while-away-the-hours village girl?’