How they shouted! How they laughed! How they rough-housed and wrestled, and splashed in the shallows, and ran races, and held mock sword-fights with sticks!
Then Edgar caught sight of the bright red jacket. He elbowed Robert. He pointed. Ruddy, muddy faces turned. They looked at her. For a moment, Georgina stood scared half to pieces.
“Oy!” cried Robert, raising a hand. “Want to play?”
“Yes, pl—” She coughed. “Yes!”
A spate of introductions followed. She almost slipped on hers, but stopped herself in time and told them that her name was George.
“We have a cousin named George-eeeeee-na!” Petey said in a sing-song way. “She’s a giiiiiirl. Tom thinks she’s priiiiiitty!”
“Shut it!” Tom gave him a swat. The others laughed.
“Is she?” Georgina asked.
“No!” Tom had gone purple. “She’s a right bland pudding!”
“Forget her,” said Robert. “Come on, George. Let’s play!”
“Let’s!”
Such an afternoon it was! They hunted tadpoles, skipped stones, sailed twig-boats, climbed trees, and hit conkers. Two of the boys had pop-guns. Edgar had brought his yo-yo, and another had a paper kite. When they tired of that fun, those who didn’t have velocipedalers balanced on the handlebars of those who did—terrifying, but exhilarating!—and they rode back into the village with clangy-bells jangling.
Georgina offered out the packet of hard candies. Instead of politely accepting a single one, her companions of course grabbed by the fistful. Waxed-paper wrappers flew like confetti. They stuffed their mouths until their cheeks bulged like chipmunks, the cherry ones turning their tongues a vivid red. It gave them great amusement when they made faces at one another.
In a brick alley, they shot marbles and aggies, pitched penny-coins, and a boy named Jack chalked bad words on the wall. They kicked a canvas ball around the market-square, trying to score it off the big bronze numerals of the steam-clock.
A better time, Georgina hadn’t had since the day the wireless came with the news about Papa’s regiment. On that day, the life and heart had run right out of Mama like water from a cracked jug.
The steam-clock tolled the hour of five. The smaller boys, Petey among them, began to fuss and complain. They were tired, they said. Tired and hot, half-sweated from top to toes.
“Quit your whining,” Robert told them when he’d had more than his fill. “We’ll head for home in a while.”
“I want a cold drink,” Petey said. “And my dinner.”
What he needed was a bath and a nap. But that, Georgina didn’t say. She realized she’d best hurry quick if she was to return to Drewbury Hall before her cousins. She couldn’t go with them, couldn’t let herself be found out.
“I’d best go,” she said. “Chores.”
“Chores!” They all groaned.
Jack added, “Bother chores!” and spat into the gutter. Robert gave him an envious, admiring look. Georgina wondered what Uncle would say if he knew the kind of company his sons were keeping.
They said their goodbyes, agreeing it had been jolly grand all around and they’d have to do the same again soon. Maybe they’d go down to the trolley yard to throw rocks at rats, or see if they could get their hands on some snap-bangs and spark-fizzers, or even cherry-bombs.
Tired and hot and half-sweated from top to toes herself—it was vigorous work, boy-playing was!—Georgina could not afford to dawdle. She went at a run, then a trot, then a brisk walk, keeping a ready look to throw over her shoulder if she heard the clangy-bells of the velocipedalers approaching up the lane.
She cut through the woods and came out by the garden hedge, pushing through its scratchy branches. The stone bench, where Rosie had said she would wait, stood there empty but for the book of fairy-tales.
“Rosie?”
There was no answer.
Rosie wouldn’t have just gone away, would she have done? Even if she’d gotten bored to a frazzle with what she’d called a dumb old book. Had Mrs. Curtis come along and caught her, the housekeeper not fooled by whatever magic Rosie had used? If Rosie even had waited? Or had Mrs. Curtis come along and saw no one here at all? Just the book on the bench, which she’d scold Georgina for leaving behind?
But if that were the case, surely Mrs. Curtis wouldn’t have left the book behind either. No, not her… she would have marched it right in to Uncle’s study to show him what a forgetful and neglectful silly creature his niece was. An expensive book such as this, there just asking to be dew-soaked and ruined!
“And she went wandering off,” she imagined the housekeeper saying. “When I told her to stay in the garden. This kind of disobedience simply cannot be permitted, Mr. Drew. I know you mean well by the child, but perhaps a girls’ school would be a better place for her after all.”
“Rosie?” Georgina tried again.
Yet still, there was no answer. Dusk’s cool shadows had begun to stretch long across the yard. In Drewbury Hall’s downstairs windows, the light of gas lamps glowed. The shapes of servants moved to and fro in the dining room, setting the table.
“Sugar, spice, everything nice,” Georgina said.
In a wink, she was a girl again. A tired, hot, half-sweated from top to toe girl, but a girl nonetheless. Her fine straight hair fell long down her shoulders, the cap turned back into a ribbon, the shirt and knee-britches and boy-shoes and socks became her own familiar clothes.
She undid the shiny buttons, took off the red jacket, and then did not quite know what she should do with it. Certainly, she couldn’t very well take it to her room, where her cousins might see and recognize it as belonging to their new chum, George.
With Rosie continuing nowhere to be seen, she settled for folding it carefully and placing it upon the bench. Then she picked up the book of fairy-tales and walked up to the house.
Braced as she’d been to be scolded, to land in trouble for leaving the book lying about in the garden and be called upon to answer for her absence, she raised her head and went inside.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Curtis upon seeing her, as if she’d entirely forgotten Georgina altogether. “Yes. You. There you are. Dinner at seven sharp.”
It was, in a strange way, almost disappointing. She washed and dressed, brushed her hair, and arrived at the dining room promptly upon Cook striking the bell. Tidy, proper, and ladylike, she sat without squirming or fidgeting. A good little girl. Seen but not heard.
Uncle and his guests came in. They’d been out shooting clay pigeons, testing his new wind-up launcher, and it had put them in lively high spirits. None of them paid the first bit of attention to Georgina.
The boys were late to their chairs, clothes hastily changed, having splashed their faces but with dirt behind their ears and their hair needing combed. Petey continued to fuss and complain, whining when reminded to sit up straight. Tom and Edgar only picked at their food, declaring that nothing tasted any good. Robert had sunk into a surly mood, which wasn’t mollified even when his father said he could go out shooting with the adults tomorrow.
But nobody went shooting the next day. By morning, all four of her cousins lingered in bed, feeling poorly. Their throats hurt, they said. The sides of their necks were swollen and sore. Their faces were flushed. They were itchy and hot.
Mrs. Curtis consulted her mercury-stick and pronounced them feverish. Partridge was sent to fetch the doctor. It was some while before they returned. Uncle paced the whole time, wondering aloud if he should try to get a wireless to his wife in New York, or if he should wait. She would not want to be dragged from the stage and limelights without good reason.
The doctor came in with his black bag and examined the boys. He had them each in turn open their mouths, stick out his tongue and say, “Aahhh.”
Their tongues were still as vividly red as if they’d been eating cherry candies. Georgina hid a giggle, but then she saw the doctor’s grim look. He had Mrs. Curtis lift their night-shirts. A rash of tiny red bumps spotted a
ll up and down their backs.
“It’s the scarlet fever,” the doctor said. “I’ve seen several other cases of it already today; that’s why I couldn’t be here directly as you called. Half the children in the village seem to be coming down sick.”
“Scarlet fever, dear God,” said Uncle, and rushed to dispatch that wireless.
His guests took their leave with rather unseemly haste, despite the doctor’s attempts to reassure them that the disease was most dangerous to young children, and that many fine scientists were making excellent progress in the development of serums to reduce the mortality rate. Mrs. Curtis put the servants to frantic work changing linens and cleaning everything the boys might have touched.
Georgina, sent to the garden and told not to get in the way, went down toward the hedge. She saw at once that what she was looking for wasn’t there. The jacket, with its row of shiny buttons, was not where she’d left it, neatly folded upon the stone bench.
Something else was there, though. Something pale, something crumpled and dew-damp. She picked it up and smoothed it flat.
It was a bag. A small packet of white paper, the kind that hard candies would go in. Lemon drops, and cherry. The very one that had been in the pocket of Rosie’s red jacket.
The other girl’s words echoed through Georgina’s mind.
“Boys are the horridest, aren’t they just?” Rosie had said.
Her words, and her grin… the grin that had been not a little scary…
“Don’t you wish that they’d all get the speckles and die?”
~*~
Christine Morgan works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility and divides her writing time among many genres, though her true calling seems to be tending toward historical horror and dark fantasy (especially Viking-themed stories). A lifelong reader, she also writes, reviews, beta-reads, occasionally edits and dabbles in self-publishing. She has several novels in print, with more due out soon. Her stories have appeared in more than three dozen anthologies, ‘zines and e-chapbooks. She’s been nominated for the Origins Award and made Honorable Mention in two volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She’s also a wife, mom, and possible future crazy-cat-lady whose other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, and cheesy disaster movies.
~*~
The Queen of Lakes
L.S. Johnson
When my brother and I were small enough to share a bedroom without embarrassment, our mother used to read to us at night. She had an old book of stories that her mother had given her, before they left Scotland. All the stories were tales of princes and knights facing great perils. Even when she began with a swineherd, or a lowly apprentice, Tim and I knew at once that the boy was secretly of nobler blood, perhaps even royal blood. The heroes of Mother’s stories always fought alone, no matter the odds. They slew each-uisges and great sea monsters, outwitted kelpies and trowes; they stayed deaf to the calls of selkies and banshees. And at the end, they triumphantly claimed their spoils: rooms full of treasure, kingdoms to rule, the most beautiful maidens for their brides.
Afterwards, when Mother’s voice had faded with the candlelight, when her lips had brushed our foreheads and her cracked, callused hands had smoothed down our blankets, I would fall asleep and enter a bright world full of heat and color and blood. Sweltering in my armor, the gory head of a creature skewered on my sword, the roar of a thousand voices all cheering me. And then to the tower, kicking open the door and climbing the cool stone stairs, until I come at last to the enchanted chamber, where my princess silently awaits her king.
King Rose.
I didn’t understand, you see. That only men could quest, and fight, and triumph.
~*~
Every day Mother wakes me to a world grey with exhaustion. I braid my hair in the dark, listening to Father snoring. A bit of bread and some cold tea and I am out the door and into a silvery dawn. I imagine I am rising in time with the sun, both of us jostled out of our beds, trudging towards our circumstances. We sit all day, the sun and I, my back aching and my eyes straining to see the thread against the cloth.
If the sun would not rise, I would not have to go, but I do not know how to make it my conspirator. Who tells the sun what to do?
With each step the sky lightens, trees forming out of the gloom. Amidst their skeletal forms I can make out patches of early snow, tinting pink. My breath makes a raspy sound, like I am old before my time. I am old before my time. There is the forest and the road weaving through and my plodding feet lumpish in my woolen stockings and clogs. If I close my eyes I can see exactly how I look: small and dumpling-plump in my layers, my scarf low over my head to cover my ears, only my chapped face visible.
My nose is running.
When the road begins to curve, the start of a wide, blind arc leading over a rise, I do not dare quicken my pace. But my breath quickens, it starts coming in short loud pants.
At the crest of the rise I can see it, its surface scummed with algae and ice. The lake is wide and deep, even in winter you cannot see the far bank. It seems to run to the very horizon; it seems without end. When I was small people fished here, Father included, and things were better then. In those days I had hoped to finish school, perhaps even go to the city like Tim did, to train as a teacher. Miss Rose.
But there was a girl, of marrying age, and then a boy, and then another girl. All found dead on the banks of the lake. When the first girl was found everyone thought it the work of an animal; but the lake began to smell, and the fish became thin and small, not even worth cleaning Mother said.
There were three long days between the boy disappearing and his remains being found. Abigail Fitzwilliam said she saw his body all torn to pieces, though I knew she was just repeating something she overheard, she could never bear to see even a drop of blood. That night Mother and Father stayed up late, whispering, and though I could not make out all the words I remember hearing Mother say it’s almost like that daft story of Gran’s, about that man-horse creature. The each-uisge.
And Father said something sharp and growling, his tone so enraged it made me shudder to hear it, and the next day the story book was gone.
When the second girl disappeared, when Mr. Duggan came to tell us, I remember: Mother crying, and then looking at me hard, as if I had something to do with it. Later Abigail told me the girl had been loose, which made me envision a doll with its joints all broken, its limbs flailing wildly. No wonder she had come apart in pieces.
Three deaths in all. For weeks after Father would go out at night with other men, carrying torches and rifles and axes, and Bart Masterson with his blunderbuss. Even when it was all right to walk past the lake again, things were never the same. There were no more fish in the water, no more birds in the trees. Slowly the soil began to grow dry and crumbling, as if some poison were leaching out from the lake itself. From my window I could watch the grey color overtake the rich brown, a few feet each year, the crops rising green on the one side, stunted and withering on the other, until we had only a cartful of surplus to bring to market.
Each summer there was a strange odor, like that of a dead animal.
And still the sun just sat in the sky, and Tim went to university with all our monies for his fees, and I was taken out of school and told I had to sew for Mrs. Duggan. Every day now for months, and it seemed that it might be this way for the rest of my life, either piecework or marriage to Bart Masterson’s oldest boy Sam, doing for him and lying beneath his oafish smirk.
Every day, up before dawn. Every day, the needle or Sam Masterson. Until last month, when the each-uisge came back.
~*~
The moment the path starts to dip, the world goes silent. The very wind ceases to blow; not a leaf stirs, not an animal can be seen, not even an insect. There is only the rasp of my breath, the blood thudding in my ears.
It is forty-two steps from the silence to the far end of the curve. Forty-two steps where the only sound in the world is myself.
Myself and the e
ach-uisge, I mean.
“Where did you go?” I ask. For he is beside me, though I did not hear him approach. I never hear him.
“Here and there,” he gurgles. His voice is low and wet, as if his mouth were full of jelly. “Across great lakes and little rivers, so many lovely sights. Though not a one as lovely as you, Rose.”
He teases my braid, making it sticky and knotted, and I slap his hand away. Thanks to his fondling I’ve been scolded by Mrs. Duggan more than once now, for looking slovenly. He strokes the bare strip of my throat instead, smearing my skin as he hooks a gluey finger beneath my scarf, trying to tug it away from my neck.
His fingers are so very cold.
The first time he touched me I was so frightened I nearly stopped walking, but I did not stop, I have never stopped.
I do not know what will happen if I stop.
“Shall I tell you all the places I have been, Rose?” His breath smells of moss. “Would you like that? To hear about the world? Would that please you?”
His hands drop to my chest, rubbing my breasts through the thick wool of my coat. Moisture begins to seep into the fabric; still he slides his hands in slow circles. No boy has ever touched me like this. The sensation makes strange muscles flex between my legs, like I’m peeing.
My feet have not stopped moving: twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five steps.
“You know it would,” I whisper.
He raises his hands and lays them over my eyes. His palms gum my lids shut; his long torso presses against my backside. We are still walking, but we are somewhere else now: we are in a world vibrant with color, warm and rich, filled with the smells of good earth and blossoming flowers. Everywhere I see handsome, well-dressed people, men and women, all laughing and talking and reading. Reading. He slithers against my buttocks, up and down, up and down, but I can only see the books and papers, the gazettes and broadsheets, their warm smiles as they share their words with each other.
“Come with me, Rose,” he says. “Come with me and see for yourself.”
I am panting like a winded horse. He rubs faster now, whining in my ear—
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