Corroded

Not home. Not at all my bed.

A wretched urchin in somebody else’s care.

The square of opium had squashed somewhat beneath the heat of my body, but I fished it from my trouser pockets and bit a corner. The tar burned my tongue, a bitter pill almost too hard to swallow. Too precious to spit out.

I forced it down, my shaking fingers clenching the wax paper into a sharp-edged globule.

I imagined that I could trace the gobbet of sweet bliss as it entered my esophagus, slid to my belly and pooled there. Warm, welcoming. Soothing as only medicine could be.

When I finally slept again, I dreamt of a woman I imagined to be my mother. Her voice eased my fevered mind.

Sweet, sweet girl...

* * *

My mouth was dry. As if I’d spent all night sucking on cotton, my tongue felt coated in grit, my throat sore. I woke mounded in bedclothes, huddled beneath the makeshift tent I’d made of the sheets over my head.

No light pierced through the fabric to tell me what time it could be, or how many sweets had made it back to their beds. My ears felt stuffed full of the same cotton I had apparently swallowed.

I felt like death warmed for tea, and worried that I might be gaining ill.

I had no time to waste on a sickbed.

Muffling a groan, I pushed the bedspread off of me. Daylight seared through my tired, gummy eyes. I almost gave in to the fierce surge of lethargy, almost flipped the blankets right back over my head, I was so desperate to nestle down into the comforting dark. Somehow, I refrained, even if only barely.

The light, more faded than expected in my bedroom above the drift, was still bright enough to trickle through the fine pale curtains. The strength of it told me it was past morning.

The sweets, being nighttime labor, were rarely expected to wake before noon, at the earliest. This would allow me time to clean most of the soot from my skin, repair the lampblack in my tangled, half-fallen mass of hair, and have Talitha’s bedclothes laundered.

My stomach growled beneath my ill-fitting clothing.

I would eat, as well. The Menagerie staff ate at all hours, and the kitchens would be able to spare a plate easily. They rarely took note of which members of this garden came to beg a plate at what time, for many were the men and women employed by the Veil’s demands.

I had been here, making my way among the staff of these grounds, for near a fortnight, and almost all had come to know me by face. Them what didn’t learned of my free passage—often attached to Hawke’s permission, which still rankled. It had taken me only a few days to learn that I was considered his to leash, and his to claim.

While I appreciated the freedom this earned me, the speculation it engendered galled.

Still, the staff left me alone but for my few needs, and did not overly burden me with idle gossip.

In some ways, I missed the easy camaraderie shared between myself and Betsy—and later, with Zylphia.

As if it were an eternity ago.

Quietly as I could, I eased from Talitha’s narrow bed, mindful of the sleeping women surrounding me. Few were recognizable beneath blankets and, in some cases, feather pillows pulled over tousled curls and braided plaits. To my left, I recognized the bright gold heads of Talitha and Jane, who looked near enough alike that they often play-acted sisters. Jane slept on her back, one arm slung across her eyes, her mouth open and a murmured snore leaking out into the crisp afternoon air.

Talitha, her now-frizzy curls tangled and the remains of rouge smudged across her mouth and cheeks, slept curled upon her side, her high-necked shift all that protected her from the cold.

Black Lily, her glossy raven’s wing hair tucked beneath a night cap, slept on her stomach, one arm hanging from the mattress. Beside her, the stunning red hair of a milk-white Irish lass tumbled in copper-bright waves from beneath a still mound of blankets.

I did not look for others; most every bed was full, and I dared not risk waking them. I stripped the bed quickly, collected my shoes, corset and coat, and crept past the beds. I was forced to squint through the unforgiving light, but I managed to make no noise as I bypassed protruding feet and pooled blankets.

I was nearly out when a rustle behind me seized my passage. Holding my breath, I glanced over my shoulder, already prepared to whisper an apology. Instead, I let it out silently when I saw only Jane, elbowing up to tug the bedsheets once more over Talitha’s figure. A bleary glint of guileless blue through a curtain of blond was all the recognition I received as she turned to her stomach and settled back into sleep.

Feeling oddly content by the simple display, I stepped out of the shared sleeping quarters, and shut the door behind me.

My head ached fiercely.

“Good morning!”

The cheerful, painfully bright voice hammered a railroad spike through my skull. Jolting in my skin, my corset slid from my hands and flapped to the floor, the thin metal slats causing it to topple over my foot as I bit back a surprised shriek. The sheets crumpled.

“I’m so sorry!” The same voice nailed another metaphorical pin next to the first, and I flinched.

“Shh,” I hissed, turning quickly. Too quickly. The room spun, my breath shortening as if I’d only just taken a shot of opium direct to the lungs, but my head rang hollowly with pain. I winced.

“I’m so sorry,” softly repeated the girl who set a wide silver tray upon the lacquered, knee-high table arranged in the center of heavily embroidered sofas. Her wide eyes, made all the wider by her dismay, were an innocuous brown, filled to the brim with such innocence that I had never understood how she came to inhabit this debauched den of iniquity.

Madeleine Ruth Halbard was not a sweet. Nor was she a circus denizen, a trickster, a thief, or worse.

What she was, what she had always given the impression of, was terribly young. At sixteen years of age and living under Hawke’s thumb, she must have known all the secrets of flesh and sin, but I was hard-pressed to see the knowledge written upon her as so many dollymops and street-women displayed. She seemed fresh-faced, earnest.

Deucedly uncorrupted.

I could not fathom it.

Aware that I was scowling, and that I surely looked a fright with black all over my face and my hair half- tangled down my back, I made at least some attempt to soften my disposition. “The girls are still abed, and like as not had a late night of it.”

“They did.” Her simple knowledge, indication that she knew what the sweets did by evening, was just one more dent in her so-innocent demeanor. But her smile, when it came, brightened her plain, round face, and the hand she gestured to the platter with was stained by black. “I’ve brought you breakfast, toast and tea. How do you take it?”

Maddie Ruth had not once brought me breakfast.

I was immediately suspect. Setting the blackened sheets upon a chair, I answered, “Two sugars,” and remembered enough of Fanny’s stern upbringing to add, “if you please.”

As the girl, whose build was much like mine in curvature and near enough to my height to make me wonder if she’d surpass me with time, bent to her task, I picked up my corset and brushed off the streaks of smeared soot from the leather.

I kept one eye on the strange dumpling of a creature.

What was her intent? A motive. There would be a motive here.

Yet, almost immediately, I felt shame for the thought.

What kind of turn had I taken when I immediately held suspect the kindness of a girl bringing tea? I was hungry, this was true, and the smell of warm toast and jam curled into my nose like ambrosia from the heavens. Even the ache in my head had subsided with the promise of sustenance.

Maddie Ruth was not a decadent thing, not like the sweets abed in the quarters behind me. Certainly I was no threat to her—whatever it was she did for the Menagerie.

I admit that I felt a certain kinship with the girl. From her round, freckled face to the plain chestnut hair