Chapter 8
A Note to the Reader:
An Account of Multiple Abductions
The Guild came for my sisters and I many times. Due to my mother’s occupation, we were frequently abroad, and this served my mother’s goal of evading the Guild Inquisitors quite well. Therefore, I was six years old by the time an Inquisitor managed to cross our path for long enough to steal Madge.
We were on the temperate, windy coast of Oanse at that time.
My mother was smoothing a rocky agreement of some dull nature between Oanse and the Guild, and her then husband, a distractable Copper with no interest in the offspring of his wife’s previous unions, allowed the Guild right into our rented seaside manor while she was away at court.
I remember the moment well. The three of us were engaged in domestic training under our governess.
Pretoria and I were embroidering. Madge was drawing, as usual, in the light of a glassless window, the salt breeze stirring the ends of her tight blonde ringlets.
Our governess was, ostensibly, preparing our next lesson (in actuality, she was flirting with a local shepherdess over the edge of the balcony).
A door slammed off in the house. Pretoria pricked her finger in startlement and, cursing, threw her embroidery on the floor. I glanced from it to her in horror—I enjoyed embroidery, in all honesty, and was quite taken with my own pattern of flowers and birds in flight.
The parlor door opened. A woman stood there in a travelling gown of reddish tweed, tightly buttoned and fitted like a glove. There was a medallion at her throat, and a briefcase in her hand.
I sensed immediately what she was. It was in the way Pretoria’s eyes shot to the balcony as if she intended to escape, and the slow way Madge rose from her stool, folding her hands before her skirts in acquiescence.
Between the Inquisitor’s high, laced boots and my silk slippers, Pretoria’s embroidery lay discarded on the floor. Help me, it read in careless stitches.
(I wish I could laugh at that particular aspect of the memory, but even these many years removed, I cannot.)
At four years my senior, Madge was already two years past the age when Guild parents were required to submit their Entwined progeny. Pretoria was several months short of that ominous birthday which would make her a candidate, and was spared only by that technicality.
Before my mother returned, Madge was gone, bundled into a coach and off on a ship. The way my mother wailed when she learned the truth—it is scarred into my mind. It was a shattering, a breaking. A tearing of the soul. She immediately orchestrated our transfer and left her negligent husband behind.
They came for Pretoria at the appropriate time, three months later.
My mother was present, in a lofty, sprawling apartment in Castenfal, on the Continent.
She saw the Inquisitor in the dining room, while a maid bundled Pretoria and I out the back door and took us for a walk.
This walk ended at a cable car, which deposited us at a mountain chalet for several weeks until my mother could risk retrieving us.
Bribes paid, excuses made, she had bought us another season. Another scattering of precious months.
I was not there the day my mother’s scheming finally failed and Pretoria was whisked away.
I returned from a walk with one of the maids to find her sitting listless on the floor beside Pretoria’s bed, the veins about her eyes burst from strain and tears, and chunks of her hair scattered across the floor.
I had thrown myself into her lap and cried the tears she no longer could. She simply held me, another third of her soul broken upon the floor. Her grip was loose, gentle. She did not speak.
By the time the Guild came for me, my mother had begun to come unhinged.
I saw it in the increase of her flirtations.
I saw it in how constantly she rejected her latest assigned husband, refusing to beget any more children for the Guild to steal.
She drank too much, laughed too loud, and began to send me away for longer periods of time, as if she had already lost me.
The Guild took me on the precise day of my eighth birthday, at dawn.
I looked for my mother as a maid led me down the stairs—I had heard her voice in the hall—but she did not come.
She did not say goodbye. The last I saw of her was her hollow-eyed face in an upper window, little more than a flash before the carriage door closed.
The red-tweed Inquisitor, this time a man, offered me a small smile.
“No tears, there’s a good girl,” he said, leaning forward to pat my knee paternally. “Partings are hard, I know. But your sisters are so excited to see you again, little Miss Rushforth. Chin up. There now.”
I waited until I was alone in my cabin aboard the steamship to cry. I cried as my mother had, as she had taught me to. And I swore that I would never be like her. I would never let the Guild take my children. I would never turn away and not say goodbye.
Because there would be no goodbyes.