“Saint Sira,” I recall, “Saint Rahzad.”
“Both!” My mother smiles again, with more warmth.
“That won’t be for almost two decades!” Barely are the words out but I wonder if my two daughters will ever meet. If it matters that they share a name. Or a mother. “Have they taken her away yet?”
“Your Auntie Mews is arriving soon.”
Some names taste exactly like medicine. The vile kind that never does much good anyway. But mother ignores my scrunched face and piteous moan and is calm.
“After thirteen children and six grandchildren, Mewsie knows how to raise a child. Sophia will have guardians in the older children and playmates in the younger.”
You do not need to mutter so, and scowl at me, and carry on. Do you think I cannot read in my own beloved mother’s careful tone and shift of eyes that Sophia will be tyrannized over by the teenagers, loathed by the youngsters, and ostracized by all? I am not a fool. Our world does not suckle Gentry babes with the milk of human kindness.
I stir on my couch. I tug my mother’s bloodstained skirt.
“I want to see this one. It is likely this time I will remember her, now that I have been put off all my elixirs…”
No loosed breath or cry betrays her surprise, but I see the shock; it whitens the corners of her mouth. But also—notice! She is smiling as she turns, smiling still as she leaves the room. Proud, maybe, that I am asserting myself. You are smiling too. I sense a conspiracy afoot. My mother and the ivy at my window, heads together, plotting. For me or against? If I were not covered in honey and peppercorn, I should demand an account!
I will see what of this mess I can scrub clean. A new nightshirt has been laid out for me. I do not suppose you will turn your back?
Do you not find it somewhat uncanny—if not out and out bizarre—that this last Sophia is my fourth child, and I have not so much as held a one of them in my own arms? When I had my garden (since Darren’s conception I am not allowed to enter it), I would weed and water the soil, I would turn the earth and fret if it rained too much or too little. In the end, I harvested my own roots and fruits and vegetables, shelled the peas and scooped the gourds myself. There is some satisfaction in holding the thing I have nurtured before it is goes to be consumed.
Our world eats Gentry children. Or my relatives raise them. It amounts to the same thing, does it not? Ah, we are in accord. At last.
The knob turns. My mother enters with the last Sophia. The infant is craning her head almost all the way to stare at me. At us. Like an owl. I do not remember if her father was an owl. There may have been feathers. Sometimes, on those nights when the moon smiles most thinly, you will wear feathers and a mask made of small bones. You think I do not remember everything?
I observe aloud, or think I do, “She sits up very straight for a newborn!”
My mother sets the last Sophia in my arms. “Careful. She was born with teeth.”
So tiny. Five pounds or less in gown, blanket and diaper together. Her hair is a silk of black over a skull soft as petals. She smells like lavender and fresh cream. Gentry babes will only eat cream, and only from cows. Human milk gives them colic and turns them pasty and mean. My mother leaves us. Mutual examination follows. Thus we occupy ourselves a good ten minutes.
“Who is your father?”
“He is right outside your window,” replies the last Sophia. “But I do not think you should let him in.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because you are weak and not ready for another babe. And because,” she pauses, “having dwelled inside you for some time, I am grown interested in your person. I do not believe your best use is as host to husk.”
I compliment her on her prodigious command of the language, but she merely shrugs.
“You spoke out loud often enough during my gestation. I garnered what I could. At first I wondered if you might be mad, as some humans become who have too prolonged a contact with the Gentry, but soon realized it was more complicated than that.” Sophia’s milky lip curled. Not humorously. “You have performed remarkably under circumstances that were—are—hardly under your control. Although, if you will leave your window open…”
“It grows so stuffy in here! I am not permitted to leave. Indeed, most days I have not the strength to rise from bed.”
Again, that shrug, but more subtly, as if the movement wearies her. Her head bobbles on the slender stem of her neck. I support her more firmly on my lap, seeing that the last Sophia is not so strong as she initially wished me to perceive.
“Perhaps I would have done the same,” she concedes. “There is nothing I hate more than being cooped up. Saving your presence.” She makes me the most curious little boneless bow. “I do not know your name.”
It is almost an apology.
“Esther Aidan.” A strange delight to recollect those two little words, lost to me until I reach for them, at my daughter’s own request.
“Esther Aidan, then. Are you going to give me away?”
As if her words herald the event, I hear the cataclysmic boom of Auntie Mews’s arrival downstairs. She always travels with at least three dogs and twice that in children. They never stay with us; our cottage is too poor and not clean enough and we do not keep servants, which Auntie Mews cannot do without.
“Mewsie!” my mother greets her, with all evidence of enthusiasm. Well, they are sisters. I never had one—I do not know about them.
“I have a sister,” the last Sophia says softly.
“You do,” I confirm, surprised. Had I spoken? Or is she like you, with an ear pressed to my very thoughts? “And two brothers.”
Whatever response she may have made to this is swamped by Auntie Mews.
“Milla, my dear babe! Where is the newest changeling? I’ll scrub the malice out of her! And when she gets a little older, I’ll spank it out. Wash her unnatural mouth with soap. Won’t be a tarnish of magic left by the time she comes of age.”
“She’s with Esther at present, but…”
“With Esther?” Mews’s horror—or is it humor?—grates like a grizzly bear clawing at a tree. In my arms, the last Sophia bares her barracuda pearls. “Esther’s not bonding, is she?”
“No. She is simply curious.”
“Precious good that’ll do her. Next good storm blows in, she’ll catch the preggers again. Has she been taking her medicine? I brought more from the Holy See. And a letter from mother.”
“Have some tea, Mewsie. Would your kiddies like some biscuits?”
I stop listening, the better to study the thing I dandle.
The last Sophia, I will say, does not appeal to my maternal instincts. I do not think I have any—no more than you have an instinct for charity. But she is interesting. What’s more, when she talks, I understand everything. To the chronically confusticated, clarity has a deep allure. Her eyes are sharp enough to cut me. All the women in my family have dark eyes.
What do you want, child? What can I give you? Words surge. New thoughts. A wave. I do not know what will be left of me when it recedes.
“Will I give you away, you ask, to live with my Aunt Mews and her large pink family? What will they do with you? I will tell you. They will raise you right, dress you in pink, take you to church, punish you for fancy’s flight or any slight poetical leaning, for tears, tantrums, for keeping quiet, for talking. Auntie Mews will certainly not let a baby speak until she feels a baby should speak, and then only in that spit bubble patois fit for mortal babes. But I think—and whence comes this notion, my last Sophia? Is it mine own or applied from without?—I think you might be happier in scarlet and gold than in pink, might prefer a wooden sword to a doll. You might even like to learn about the magical properties of peppercorn at my own outcast mother’s knee. I confess I have not known you long, but I see that in you which would shrivel under Mewsie’s iron rule. It would be iron, my last Sophia, make no mistake. She will gird you in iron if that be what it takes. But I, if I kept you, would not. Fragile alien that you are, I might still do you some good. If I can but keep my wits! It is unlikely. They wander. They scatter like raindrops on a windowpane. You thought me mad even from the womb, and perhaps you were correct. Your mother is a broken thing….”