Education #5
This isn’t the world where she lies. She left that world behind some time ago, and she doesn’t have a path back.
This is the world where an alchemist came and swept her away from everything she’d ever known, the world where she’s being shaped, one carefully sculpted lesson at a time, into something she wasn’t.
She’s always been the daughter of a storm.
It’s only since she’s come to Boston that she’s started learning how to hold back her squalls and take her time.
She’s learning to calculate, going from natural disaster to unnatural disaster through the slow, ambient alchemy of her uncle’s house.
“I do,” she says.
His brows lift. “Who?”
“I’m not sure I remember.”
He scowls as he looks at her. “What do you want?”
“I want friends my own age, and I want to see them at least twice a week. And I want to play in the park. I’m tired of being locked up inside and never seeing the sky.
” She looks at him with calm calculation.
“I think you could give me those things without changing whatever it is you’re trying to do with me. ”
(She doesn’t know it, will never know it, but this is the moment when he stops looking at her as a potentially useful tool and begins looking at her as his presumptive heir.
She has it in her to be powerful, and he’s seen enough over the past months to know that she’s clever.
Until this moment, he wasn’t sure she could learn how to focus that cleverness, or that she would ever find a way to reach past biddability for the fierce self-interest he’ll need her to have if she wants to thrive in the world he occupies.
That she might not care about that world has never occurred to him.
It certainly hasn’t occurred to him that she might one day want to burn it to the ground.)
“I think those things can be arranged, for the clever niece who handed me the moon,” he says.
A flicker of the girl she’d been growing up to be shows in her eyes. “You won’t hurt her, will you?” she asks.
Uncle John takes a great, ponderous breath.
“Of course I’m going to hurt her,” he says.
“If you know enough to know what I am, what I do, I can’t understand why you’re even asking me that question.
A moon isn’t really human; none of the Incarnates are.
They’re universal impulses walking around in human skins, like scarecrows that have torn themselves loose from their fields.
They’re a collection of useful parts and pieces, and I have a use for each and every one of them.
I’m going to hurt her. If you’re very good, and you don’t have any further objections, I might even let you help. ”
Floretta considers this for a moment, weighs the promise of his approval against the sound of Deborah’s laughter, and comes to a conclusion that was inevitable from the moment she decided to tell her uncle what she knew: “All right,” she says. “I’ll tell you.”
He smiles, and keeps smiling as he receives the name.
He’s still smiling when night falls, and he waits for Deborah in the upstairs hall, a silver rope in one hand and a sharpened razor in the other. He ties her wrists as she screams, and no one in the house comes to her rescue.
When he drags her to the room at the bottom of the stairs, the room that is always locked, the room she has never entered in her employment here, it is to find Floretta already waiting, seated primly on a stool at the very back of the room, her hands folded neatly at her knee, watching the door in wide-eyed silence.
Deborah catches her breath, and begins to beg.
“Floretta, please,” she says, words quick and tight with panic.
“I don’t know what your uncle is doing, I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing, but you have to help me.
You have to tell him that this is wrong.
Please, Mr. Baker!” And just like that she’s back to begging John directly, jerking on her bonds and struggling to get away.
“I won’t tell anyone, I swear. This can be our little secret. I won’t say anything.”
“Of course you won’t,” he says, voice warm and reasonable. “You won’t have anything to say.”
He moves across the room to an iron ring set into the floor, forcing her down into a chair that has been set atop a piece of slick, well-oiled canvas before bending her over double, his elbow at the small of her back, his hand against the back of her neck.
He releases her neck to grab the rope that binds her wrists and tie it roughly to the ring, trapping her in place.
“The moon is waning,” he says, stepping away while she thrashes against her bonds.
She has known she was in danger since the moment he grabbed her, has no illusions about what happens to moons who fall into the grasp of alchemists; still she fights, still she struggles to get away.
“Your aspect will show more brightly as your time of divinity approaches. When you shine despite yourself, that’s when I will harvest you. Until then, you’ll be kept.”
“That isn’t how we work, you stupid man!” she gasps. “I won’t shine for you, I won’t!”
“I think we both know that isn’t true,” he says, almost gently. “Come, niece. We have other places to be.”
Floretta rises delicately, and hardens her heart against Deborah’s begging as she follows her uncle to the door. She glances back only once at the woman, bent double and not glowing at all as she sobs in her chair. She glances back, but doesn’t say anything, just follows her uncle out of the room.
He closes and locks the door behind himself, smile flickering out and fading as he looks at her.
“You had best be telling the truth about her,” he says. “She was a good housekeeper, and I don’t want to replace her over a child’s lie.”
“I didn’t lie,” says Floretta. “She was glowing. She told me her secret name was Selene. She’s a moon.”
“Good,” he says, and together, they walk away.
Seven weeks pass, one day following another.
Abovestairs, the life of the house continues.
Floretta takes her lessons, John does whatever it is he does when he isn’t concerning himself with the education of his niece, and Miss Cottingsly trains her new housemaid, teaching her everything she’ll need to know in order to serve in the house of a master alchemist.
A new tutor is added to the ones Floretta already has, this one teaching her classical Greek to go alongside her Latin, and the mythology of all the many Olympian gods.
She learns the names of muses and heroes, and none of them mean anything to her, not even the ones who have already touched upon her life.
Still, she likes the sound of them, likes the way they hang in her ears, like stars set into a clouded sky.
Every night she accompanies her uncle down to see Deborah beneath the stairs, and every night the former housemaid spits at them and swears she will not shine.
Her wrists are scabbed and torn, and her skin is ripe with sweat, the ground beneath her ripe with other, even less pleasant things.
Uncle John won’t allow her bath or basin, won’t rinse the floor with bucketed water, for, he says, once her divinity is proven, every scrap will be of value.
That’s why he still feeds her, even though he could easily excuse starving her for her insolent refusal to do as he’s asked.
It’s such a simple thing, asking the moon to shine.
Why is she refusing him even now, when she knows she’s been well and truly caught?
It makes no sense. There can be no worse ending than the one she already faces, no worse trials than she already endures.
Then, seven weeks after her capture, John and Floretta descend and open the door on a room awash in silvered moonlight. Deborah looks at them, defiance in her sunken eyes, and John grips Floretta’s shoulder in sudden triumph.
“Watch her,” he says, and turns, leaving the two of them alone.
Deborah looks her dead in the eye, then thrusts her hands out as much as her bonds allow. “Let me go,” she says, and it’s more of a command than a plea.
“No,” says Floretta.
“Surely you can see that this is wrong. I’m being held prisoner. Your uncle is a madman, a monster, and I deserve my freedom!”
“No,” repeats Floretta. “You’re not a person.
You’re a celestial body, and there’s no law against stealing the moon.
There would be, if anyone thought that you could do it, but we’ve done something impossible, my uncle and me, and so there’s no one to say that we can’t.
He’s done nothing wrong. I’ve done nothing wrong.
He’s going to be a king among the alchemists, and he’ll raise me up on high beside him, and I’m not going to let you go. It’s wicked of you to even ask.”
“I’ll show you wickedness,” snarls Deborah, and throws herself against the limits of the rope that holds her, moaning as it rips roughly through the scabs circling her wrists.
Floretta watches this with almost-academic detachment. “That looks like it hurts,” she says. “You should maybe not do that anymore.”
“You little … You understand that you’re condemning us both, don’t you? He’ll kill me, and he’ll never let you go. He can’t now. You’ve seen too much.”
Floretta’s smile shows all her teeth. “That’s what I’m counting on,” she says.
“I can’t go back to Father Clemence. He wouldn’t have me now anyway, after everything I’ve seen and done in Boston.
He wouldn’t know what to do with me. I want my uncle to keep me here forever.
You’re helping me get what I want. And that means I’m not going to help you get anything you want. It would only hurt me.”
Her uncle returns, a dark presence behind her. She turns at the sound of his breathing, and sees that he is wearing a leather apron now, carrying a bucket full of tools. He moves toward Deborah, not caring what he steps on, what squelches underfoot.