by Ellen Datlow
What she would recall, fresh at every remove, was the food—not because she was a gourmand or a glutton, but because each new dish, served up by the footman at her shoulder, was a reminder that she had at last achieved the apotheosis to which she had so long aspired. And no dish more reminded her of this new status than the neat cutlets of ensouled flesh, reserved alone in all the year for the First Feast and Second Day dinner that celebrated the divinely ordained social order.
It was delicious.
“Do try it with your butter,” Mr. Cavendish recommended, and Mrs. Breen cut a dainty portion, dipped it into the ramekin of melted butter beside her plate, and slipped it into her mouth. It was nothing like she had expected. It seemed to evanesce on her tongue, the butter a mere grace note to a stronger, slightly sweet taste, moist and rich. Pork was the closest she could come to it, but as a comparison it was utterly inadequate. She immediately wanted more of it—more than the modest portion on her plate, and she knew it would be improper to eat all of that. She wasn’t some common scullery maid, devouring her dinner like a half-starved animal. At the mere thought of such a base creature, Mrs. Breen shuddered and felt a renewed sense of her own place in the world.
She took a sip of wine.
“How do you like the stripling, dear?” Lady Donner asked from the head of the table.
Mrs. Breen looked up, uncertain how to reply. One wanted to be properly deferential, but it would be unseemly to fawn. “Most excellent, my lady,” she ventured, to nods all around the table, so that was all right. She hesitated, uncertain whether to say more—really, the etiquette books were entirely inadequate—only to be saved from having to make the decision by a much bewhiskered gentleman, Mr. Miller, who said, “The young lady is quite right. Your cook has outdone herself. Wherever did you find such a choice cut?”
Mrs. Breen allowed herself another bite.
“The credit is all Lord Donner’s,” Lady Donner said. “He located this remote farm in Derbyshire where they do the most remarkable thing. They tether the little creatures inside these tiny crates, where they feed them up from birth.”
“Muscles atrophy,” Lord Donner said. “Keeps the meat tender.”
“It’s the newest thing,” Lady Donner said. “How he found the place, I’ll never know.”
“Well,” Lord Donner began—but Mrs. Breen had by then lost track of the conversation as she deliberated over whether she should risk one more bite.
The footman saved her. “Quite done, then, madam?”
“Yes,” she said.
The footman took the plate away. By the time he’d returned to scrape the cloth, Mrs. Breen was inwardly lamenting the fact that hers was not the right to every year partake of such a succulent repast. Yet she was much consoled by thoughts of the Season to come. With the doors of Society flung open to them, Sophie, like her mother, might marry up and someday preside over a First Feast herself.
The whole world lay before her like a banquet. What was there now that the Breens could not accomplish?
Nonetheless, a dark mood seized Mrs. Breen as their carriage rattled home. Mr. Cavendish’s abortive statement hung in her mind, all the worse for being unspoken.
Coketown.
Her grandfather had made his fortune in the mills of Coketown. Through charm and money (primarily the latter), Abel Munby had sought admission into the empyrean inhabited by the First Families; he’d been doomed to a sort of purgatorial half-life instead—not unknown in the most rarified circles, but not entirely welcome within them, either. If he’d had a daughter, a destitute baronet might have been persuaded to take her, confirming the family’s rise and boding well for still greater future elevation. He’d had a son instead, a wastrel and a drunk who’d squandered most of his father’s fortune, leaving his own daughter—the future Mrs. Breen—marooned at the periphery of the haut monde, subsisting on a small living and receiving an occasional dinner invitation when a hostess of some lesser degree needed to fill out a table.
Mr. Breen had plucked her from obscurity at such a table, though she had no dowry and but the echo of a name. Men had done more for beauty and the promise of an heir, she supposed. But beauty fades, and no heir had been forthcoming, only Sophie—poor, dear Sophie, whom her father had quickly consigned to the keeping of her nanny.
“You stare out that window as if you read some ill omen in the mist,” Mr. Breen said. “Does something trouble your thoughts?”
Mrs. Breen looked up. She forced a smile. “No, dear,” she replied. “I am weary, nothing more.”
Fireworks burst in the night sky—Mrs. Breen was not blind to the irony that the lower orders should thus celebrate their own abject place—and the fog bloomed with color. Mr. Breen studied her with an appraising eye. Some further response was required.
Mrs. Breen sighed. “Do you never think of it?”
“Think of what?”
She hesitated, uncertain. Sophie? Coketown? Both? At last, she said, “I wonder if they reproach me for my effrontery.”
“Your effrontery?”
“In daring to take a place at their table.”
“You were charming, dear.”
“Charm is insufficient, Walter. I have the sweat and grime of Coketown upon my hands.”
“Your grandfather had the sweat and grime of Coketown upon his hands. You are unbesmirched, my dear.”
“Yet some would argue that my rank is insufficient to partake of ensouled flesh.”
“You share my rank now,” Mr. Breen said.
But what of the stripling she had feasted upon that night, she wondered, its flesh still piquant upon her tongue? What would it have said of rank, tethered in its box and fattened for the tables of its betters? But this was heresy to say or think (though there were radical reformers who said it more and more frequently), and so Mrs. Breen turned her mind away. Tonight, in sacred ritual, she had consumed human flesh and brought her grandfather’s ambitions—and her own—to fruition. It was as Mr. Browning had said. All was right with the world. God was in his Heaven.
And then the window shattered, blowing glass into her face and eyes.
Mrs. Breen screamed and flung herself back into her husband’s arms. With a screech of tortured wood, the carriage lurched beneath her and in the moment before it slammed back to the cobbles upright, she thought it would overturn. One of the horses shrieked in mindless animal terror—she had never heard such a harrowing sound—and then the carriage shuddered to a stop at last. She had a confused impression of torches in the fog and she heard the sound of men fighting. Then Mr. Breen was brushing the glass from her face and she could see clearly and she knew that she had escaped without injury.
“What happened?” she gasped.
“A stone,” Mr. Breen said. “Some brigand hurled a stone through the window.”
The door flew back and the coachman looked in. “Are you all right, sir?”
“We’re fine,” Mrs. Breen said.
And then, before her husband could speak, the coachman said, “We have one of them, sir.”
“And the others?”
“Fled into the fog.”
“Very well, then,” said Mr. Breen. “Let’s have a look at him, shall we?”
He eased past Mrs. Breen and stepped down from the carriage, holding his walking stick. Mrs. Breen moved to follow but he closed the door at his back. She looked through the shattered window. The two footmen held the brigand on his knees between them—though he hardly looked like a brigand. He looked like a boy—a dark-haired boy of perhaps twenty (not much younger than Mrs. Breen herself), clean-limbed and clean-shaven.
“Well, then,” Mr. Breen said. “Have you no shame, attacking a gentleman in the street?”
“Have you, sir?” the boy replied. “Have you any shame?”
The coachman cuffed him for his trouble.
“I suppose you wanted money,” Mr. Breen said.
“I have no interest in your money, sir. It is befouled with gore.”
Once again
, the coachman moved to strike him. Mr. Breen stayed the blow. “What is it that you hoped to accomplish, then?”
“Have you tasted human flesh tonight, sir?”
“And what business is it—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Breen said. “We have partaken of ensouled flesh.”
“We’ll have blood for blood, then,” the boy said. “As is our right.”
This time, Mr. Breen did not intervene when the coachman lifted his hand.
The boy spat blood into the street.
“You have no rights,” Mr. Breen said. “I’ll see you hang for this.”
“No,” Mrs. Breen said.
“No?” Mr. Breen looked up at her in surprise.
“No,” Mrs. Breen said, moved at first to pity—and then, thinking of her grandfather, she hardened herself. “Hanging is too dignified a fate for such a base creature,” she said. “Let him die in the street.”
Mr. Breen eyed her mildly. “The lady’s will be done,” he said, letting his stick clatter to the cobblestones.
Turning, he climbed past her into the carriage and sat down in the gloom. Fireworks exploded high overhead, showering down through the fog and painting his face in streaks of red and white that left him hollow-eyed and gaunt. He was thirty years Mrs. Breen’s senior, but he had never looked so old to her before.
She turned back to the window.
She had ordered this thing. She would see it done.
And so Mrs. Breen watched as the coachman picked up his master’s stick and tested its weight. The brigand tried to wrench free, and for a moment Mrs. Breen thought—hoped?—he would escape. But the two footmen flung him once again to his knees. Another rocket burst overhead. The coachman grunted as he brought down the walking stick, drew back, and brought it down again. The brigand’s blood was black in the reeking yellow fog. Mrs. Breen looked on as the third blow fell and then the next, and then it became too terrible and she turned her face away and only listened as her servants beat the boy to death there in the cobbled street.
“The savages shall be battering down our doors soon enough, I suppose,” Lady Donner said when Mrs. Breen called to thank her for a place at her First Feast table.
“What a distressing prospect,” Mrs. Eddy said, and Mrs. Graves nodded in assent—the both of them matron to families of great honor and antiquity, if not quite the premier order. But who was Mrs. Breen to scorn such eminence—she who not five years earlier had subsisted on the crumbs of her father’s squandered legacy, struggling (and more often than not failing) to meet her dressmaker’s monthly reckoning?
Nor were the Breens of any greater rank than the other two women in Lady Donner’s drawing room that afternoon. Though he boasted an old and storied lineage, Mr. Breen’s was not quite a First Family and had no annual right to mark the beginning of the Season with a Feast of ensouled flesh. Indeed, prior to his marriage to poor Alice Munby, he himself had but twice been a First Feast guest.
Mrs. Breen had not, of course, herself introduced the subject of the incident in the street, but Mr. Breen had shared the story at his club, and word of Mrs. Breen’s courage and resolve had found its way to Lady Donner’s ear, as all news did in the end.
“Were you very frightened, dear?” Mrs. Graves inquired.
Mrs. Breen was silent for a moment, uncertain how to answer. It would be unseemly to boast. “I had been fortified with Lady Donner’s generosity,” she said at last. “The divine order must be preserved.”
“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Eddy said. “Above all things.”
“Yet it is not mere violence in the street that troubles me,” Mrs. Graves said. “There are the horrid pamphlets one hears spoken of. My husband has lately mentioned the sensation occasioned by Mr. Bright’s Anthropophagic Crisis.”
“And one hears rumors that the House of Commons will soon take up the issue,” Mrs. Eddy added.
“The Americans are at fault, with their talk of unalienable rights,” Mrs. Graves said.
“The American experiment will fail,” Lady Donner said. “The Negro problem will undo them, Lord Donner assures me. This too shall pass.” And that put an end to the subject.
Mrs. Eddy soon afterward departed, and Mrs. Graves after that.
Mrs. Breen, fearing that she had overstayed her welcome, stood and thanked her hostess.
“You must come again soon,” Lady Donner said, and Mrs. Breen avowed that she would.
The season was by then in full swing, and the Breens were much in demand. The quality of the guests in Mrs. Breen’s drawing room improved, and at houses where she had formerly been accustomed to leave her card and pass on, the doors were now open to her. She spent her evenings at the opera and the theater and the orchestra. She accepted invitations to the most exclusive balls. She twice attended dinners hosted by First Families—the Pikes and the Reeds, both close associates of Lady Donner.
But the high point of the Season was certainly Mrs. Breen’s growing friendship with Lady Donner herself. The doyenne seemed to have taken on Mrs. Breen’s elevation as her special project. There was little she did not know about the First Families and their lesser compeers, and less (indeed nothing) that she was not willing to use to her own—and to Mrs. Breen’s—benefit. Though the older woman was quick to anger, Mrs. Breen never felt the lash of her displeasure. And she doted upon Sophie. She chanced to meet the child one Wednesday afternoon when Mrs. Breen, feeling, in her mercurial way, particularly fond of her daughter, had allowed Sophie to peek into the drawing room.
Lady Donner was announced.
The governess—a plain, bookish young woman named Ada Pool—was ushering Sophie, with a final kiss from her mother, out of the room when the grande dame swept in.
“Sophie is just leaving,” Mrs. Breen said, inwardly agitated lest Sophie misbehave. “This is Lady Donner, Sophie,” she said. “Can you say good afternoon?”
Sophie smiled. She held a finger to her mouth. She looked at her small feet in their pretty shoes. Then, just as Mrs. Breen began to despair, she said, with an endearing childish lisp, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Donner.”
“Lady Donner,” Mrs. Breen said.
“Mrs. Lady Donner,” Sophie said.
Lady Donner laughed. “I am so pleased to meet you, Sophie.”
Mrs. Breen said, “Give Mama one more kiss, dear, and then you must go with Miss Pool.”
“She is lovely, darling,” Lady Donner said. “Do let her stay.”
Thus it was decided that Sophie might linger. Though she could, by Mrs. Breen’s lights, be a difficult child (which is to say a child of ordinary disposition), Sophie that day allowed herself to be cossetted and admired without objection. She simpered and smiled and was altogether charming.
Thereafter, whenever Lady Donner called, she brought along some bauble for the child—a kaleidoscope or a tiny chest of drawers for her dollhouse and once an intricately embroidered ribbon of deep blue mulberry silk that matched perfectly the child’s sapphire eyes. Lady Donner tied up Sophie’s hair with it herself, running her fingers sensuously through the child’s lustrous blonde curls and recalling with nostalgia the infancy of her own daughter, now grown.
When she at last perfected the elaborate bow, Lady Donner led Sophie to a gilded mirror. She looked on fondly as Sophie admired herself.
“She partakes of her mother’s beauty,” Lady Donner remarked, and Mrs. Breen, who reckoned herself merely striking (Mr. Breen would have disagreed), basked in the older woman’s praise. Afterward—and to Sophie’s distress—the ribbon was surrendered into Mrs. Breen’s possession and preserved as a sacred relic of her friend’s affections, to be used upon only the most special of occasions.
In the days that followed, Lady Donner and Mrs. Breen became inseparable. As their intimacy deepened, Mrs. Breen more and more neglected her old friends. She was seldom at home when they called, and she did not often return their visits. Her correspondence with them, which had once been copious, fell into decline. There was simply too much to do. Life was a fab
ulous procession of garden parties and luncheons and promenades in the Park.
Then it was August. Parliament adjourned. The Season came to an end.
She and Mr. Breen retired to their country estate in Suffolk, where Mr. Breen would spend the autumn shooting and fox hunting. As the days grew shorter, the winter seemed, paradoxically, to grow longer, their return to town more remote. Mrs. Breen corresponded faithfully with Mrs. Eddy (kind and full of gentle whimsy), Mrs. Graves (quite grave), and Lady Donner (cheery and full of inconsequential news). She awaited their letters eagerly. She rode in the mornings and attended the occasional country ball, and twice a week, like clockwork, she entertained her husband in her chamber.
But despite all of her efforts in this regard, no heir kindled in her womb.
Mrs. Breen had that winter, for the first time, a dream which would recur periodically for years to come. In the dream, she was climbing an endless ladder. It disappeared into silky darkness at her feet. Above her, it rose toward an inconceivably distant circle of light. The faraway sounds of tinkling silver and conversation drifted dimly down to her ears. And though she had been climbing for days, years, a lifetime—though her limbs were leaden with exhaustion—she could imagine no ambition more worthy of her talents than continuing the ascent. She realized too late that the ladder’s topmost rungs and rails had been coated with thick, unforgiving grease, and even as she emerged into the light, her hands, numb with fatigue, gave way at last, and she found herself sliding helplessly into the abyss below.
The Breens began the Season that followed with the highest of hopes.