The Robber Girl

by Franny Billingsley

  “You don’t need keys if you don’t have a house,” said the dagger.

  The Judge knocked at the opening to the parlor. In the parlor was a window, beneath the window was a ledge, and on the ledge burned the candle.

  “To light your way,” said Mrs. del Salto. “In case it snowed.”

  “Thank you,” said the Judge.

  “Still,” she said, “I like the dark.”

  I felt how walking into the room was like walking beneath the wing of a dove. The Judge made the fire whoosh into the lamps. He bent over the fireplace and made the coals crackle and burn.

  “You said it was just for one night.” Mrs. del Salto flitted up and down, her old-crow dress rusty in the firelight.

  She meant me. The Judge had said I was going to stay just one night.

  “The snow is coming,” said the Judge.

  “Inarguable,” said Mrs. del Salto.

  We were quiet a long time. It was hard to say exactly when it started to snow. Just a few flakes at first, matching up with the room. The room was feathery on the inside—not real feathers, just the idea of feathers—and now there were feathers on the outside. The feathery flakes were sticking to the windows.

  “If the girl’s going to stay until it stops snowing,” said Mrs. del Salto, “she must at least have a name.”

  I had no name.

  “What did that man call you?” said Mrs. del Salto. She meant Gentleman Jack. Maybe she couldn’t say his name. Maybe she was afraid it would make the inside of her mouth too rough.

  “Gentleman Jack?” I said. The inside of my mouth was already rough.

  Mrs. del Salto’s skirts slithered and whispered. They were waiting for my name.

  “Gentleman Jack’s going to give me my name,” I said.

  I scratched at the rough skin on my thumb. It came off in flakes. I had to stay in this place until the trial, even though Mrs. del Salto didn’t know that yet. I had to stay in this place, where everyone had real names. I didn’t have a real name. Robber Girl was only a job name, like the Sheriff, whose job was to be the sheriff. Or the Judge, whose job was to be a judge. But they had real names underneath.

  “We shall have to find you a name,” said the Judge.

  I had a job name but no real name. Beneath the job name was emptiness.

  “Maybe a bite of dinner will help us with the name,” said the Judge.

  I thought of the stain on the white tablecloth. I thought of the oily splat, I thought of how I couldn’t use a fork.

  “I don’t want any dinner,” I said.

  “Macaroni and cheese on Friday,” said the Judge.

  “She’s awfully scrawny,” said Mrs. del Salto. I wouldn’t look at her. I’d only look at her beautiful ring. The stone was the opposite of her, all layers and depths. She existed only on the surface.

  “Later,” said the dagger, “we’ll creep into the pantry and get something to eat.”

  What was a pantry?

  “It’s a place to keep food,” said the dagger. “Grandmother’s house has a pantry.”

  After the trial, I would go to Grandmother’s house. After the trial, I would get my name.

  It was a dark night to find a pantry. The snow made ferns on the windows, and the stove made a big black hunching in the dark. I remembered where Mrs. del Salto kept the candles and the matches. The flame made the shadow of the stove jump up the wall.

  The pantry was a little room off the kitchen.

  “There will be chicken pie in the pantry,” said the dagger. “It’s called leftovers.”

  Chicken pie on Thursdays—that’s what the Judge had said. But it was Friday, and there was macaroni and cheese on Friday. You could eat chicken pie on Friday, though. You could eat it if you stole from Thursday.

  The pantry was filled with doors and drawers. There was glass in the doors and latches on the doors. But you could flick the latches sideways and open them. Bolts were better. I looked at the shelves through the glass—here a stack of plates, there piles of tablecloths, and everywhere the reflection of the candle.

  “There are bolts all over Grandmother’s house.” The dagger was old and had been to Grandmother’s house lots of times.

  The drawers were set in rows below the doors. Between the doors and the drawers was a shelf, and on the shelf sat the chicken pie. The first drawer was filled with glass jars and metal tops and the biggest spoon in the world.

  “What are these for?” I said.

  “They’re kitchen things,” said the dagger. “They’re taming things.”

  “But you told me about the pantry,” I said. “That’s a kitchen thing. You told me about leftovers.”

  “You’re supposed to raid pantries,” said the dagger. “Raiding is the same as stealing. Leftovers are for stealing. Stealing is wild.”

  The next drawer was filled with a mound of whiteness; it glistened in the candlelight. “Sugar!” I’d had sugar before, in the hideout. When we had sugar, Gentleman Jack would let me have coffee. He let me put in as much sugar as I wanted.

  I licked my finger and stuck it in the glistening mound. Imagine, a whole drawer of sugar. The hinges of my jaw ached with sweetness. Sugar was for stealing, so it was wild, too.

  “Grandmother has two drawers of sugar,” said the dagger. “One for white sugar, one for brown.”

  I set down the candle; I sliced the dagger into the pie. I set the slice on my hand. There was no fork to trip me up, no plate to make the fork clink, no tablecloth to stain. My hand would be a plate, the dagger would be a fork. I could lick my hand clean, I could lick the dagger clean.

  But I had no time to do either. There came a low whiffling sound—

  “The kitchen door!” said the dagger. “It has no bolt.”

  It didn’t even have a latch. I couldn’t stop the door whiffling open, or the feet padding into the kitchen, or the fire whooshing into the lamps.

  I shoved the dagger into its sheath. The other hand was full of pie. The light had not whooshed on in the pantry, but the candle still burned. I stood in the semidarkness, beside the open drawer of sugar.

  “Hungry?” said the Judge.

  I hated his voice, so reasonable and pleasant. You couldn’t tell what a person felt with a voice like that. At least you knew what Mrs. del Salto felt.

  His voice stabbed me in the stomach.

  “That’s not what stabbing feels like,” said the dagger.

  The dagger didn’t always understand the way words worked. This wasn’t an actual stab. It was a stab that started in my mind and ended in my stomach.

  “Let’s set you a place,” said the Judge.

  I didn’t know how to set a place, but the Judge was already turning away. I had to leave the dimness of the pantry. The Judge held a plate; he slid the pie from my hand onto the plate.

  I licked my palm. I wiped it on my britches.

  “Sit down,” said the Judge.

  He meant I should sit at the table with the white tablecloth. The stain was gone, but I didn’t know how to sit; I didn’t know how to eat. I had been stealing the pie—no, raiding the pie. A judge wouldn’t like that.

  “Tell him you’ll testify!” said the dagger. “Then he won’t care about the pantry.”

  Now there were two plates of pie on the table, and two forks and two knives. “I wish you’d eat,” said the Judge. But the pie had too much gravy.

  “I’m going to eat, if you don’t mind.”

  Why should I mind? He knew how to use the points of his fork to stick the chicken. He knew how to use the side of his fork to cut the piecrust. He knew how to get the meat and the crust and the gravy onto his fork all at the same time.

  When the Judge was done, he slanted his knife and fork across the upper part of his plate. “The knife is dull,” said the dagger, “but it’s made of silver, which means it’s valuable.”

  The Judge rose. “I’ll lay a fire in the library.”

  Now it would come.

  “What will come?” said
the dagger.

  But I didn’t know.

  We pushed through the door that had no knob. The library lamps hissed and flared; the fireplace hissed and flared. There was a big table with a chair behind it, but the Judge did not sit there. There was a child’s rocking chair in front of a wall made of books, but the Judge did not want me to sit there. He sat in a chair in front of the fire and waved me to a matching chair.

  “Tell me,” said the Judge. “What would you like to happen?”

  My thoughts skittered around like bugs. They didn’t know where to go. My thoughts had been underneath a nice, quiet rock—thinking about raiding the pie and what my punishment would be—but then the Judge kicked the rock aside and let in too much light. My thoughts were surprised.

  “Tell him you want to testify!” said the dagger.

  “I want to see Gentleman Jack,” I said. I had to tell Gentleman Jack about Flora and our plans. I had to tell him I was going to save him, not betray him. I had to tell him that we’d found a Songbird. That would make him happy.

  “But the snow has come,” said the Judge.

  “After the snow.”

  “Here’s what I propose,” said the Judge. “After the snow, you will go to school. After the first day, you may see Gentleman Jack.”

  “School is a taming thing,” said the dagger.

  “I won’t go to school,” I said. “Gentleman Jack wouldn’t like it.” Gentleman Jack wouldn’t want me to be tame.

  “You will go to school,” said the Judge. “You will show the townsfolk, like Mr. Elton—”

  Mr. Elton was the egg-man, I thought.

  “You will show him you’re not wild.”

  “I am wild,” I said. “I made the red marks on your cheek.”

  “You will show him you’re not vicious.”

  “I am vicious,” I said. “I hit him with a hammer.”

  “You will show him you do not steal.”

  “I do steal,” I said. “I was stealing the pie.”

  “It’s lucky,” said the Judge, “that you didn’t much hurt him. It’s lucky, too, that he was also in the wrong, having accused you of stealing. We spoke about it and we decided to embrace the Blue Rose’s first precept.”

  “What’s a precept?”

  The Judge said it was a sort of rule, intended to make people live more happily and more righteously. The Blue Rose’s precept went like this:

  Accept your sorrows,

  If you cannot change them.

  Embrace your joys,

  So you don’t estrange them.

  “The Blue Rose said that!” I said. “It doesn’t sound fancy enough.”

  The Judge explained that hundreds of years had passed since the Blue Rose led them to the Indigo Heart, and that they no longer really knew the exact words she used, and the rhyme kept changing and getting more modern, and maybe even a little bit funny, but the sense of it remained the same.

  I asked him about Estrange, and he said it means to grow distant, or cold. “Perhaps you’ve had a fight with a friend and now you and the friend no longer talk.”

  I was estranged from Betsy—

  “You can’t be estranged unless you were friends first,” said the dagger.

  “I’ll be estranged if I want to!” Or, could I be Stranged from Betsy?

  “What this all means,” said the Judge, “is that we’ll be friends again, and not be estranged. We will not say he wrongly accused you. He will not say you should not have hit him.”

  “I wish I’d hit him a thousand times,” I said.

  “You show commendable enthusiasm,” said the Judge.

  I looked past the Judge. In the corner stood a grandfather clock; it was even taller than the Judge. I looked from the face of the clock to the face of the Judge and back again. You could tell the Judge was alive because of my tooth marks.

  “You stung him,” said the dagger. “You mortified his flesh.”

  A person doesn’t get tooth marks when he’s dead. He doesn’t bleed when you stick him, he doesn’t bruise when you kick him. Gentleman Jack told me so when Marshal Starling was lying in the street. If I’d bitten the Marshal, he wouldn’t have gotten any tooth marks.

  The clock was dead, too. I could tell because the pendulum didn’t swing, and there was no ticking sound, and the hands didn’t move. The Judge’s clock was dead, and my pocket watch was dead. But we’d fix the watch when we got to Netherby Scar.

  There was a grandfather clock at Grandmother’s house, but it was alive and ticking. I liked the word Grandfather. It was almost as good as the word Grandmother, which was the roundest, warmest word in the world.

  There was no grandfather clock in the dollhouse, though.

  “Your clock doesn’t go,” I said. I felt Grandmother’s watch, heavy in my pocket. Gentleman Jack had let me keep it so I’d never forget that Grandmother was waiting for us.

  “No,” said the Judge. “Here in the cottage, we have let time die.”

  “Time can’t die,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised,” said the Judge. “Mrs. del Salto killed it.”

  I wasn’t that surprised.

  But I couldn’t let time die, not for me. I could only get to Grandmother’s house if time passed. Once I knew the date of the trial, I’d start counting the days again. I’d push time forward. And later, when the pocket watch was fixed, I’d make time come alive by winding up the watch’s heart.

  I looked at the wall made of books. I looked at the tiles around the fireplace. They were blue with yellow tulips. On the mantelpiece stood a gold frame holding a photograph.

  “Gold paint,” said the dagger. “Not valuable.”

  The photograph showed a girl holding a little boy. Their mouths were straight lines. The girl looked at me. I looked back.

  “Magda and Isaac,” said the Judge. “Magda would have been about your age.”

  “He means Magda died,” said the dagger.

  I wished Betsy were in a frame, squeezed into a wooden box. Then she’d be dead. The Judge and I sat quietly in that room where no clocks were ticking and no children were growing.

  “You’re growing,” said the dagger.

  I wondered how I’d look in a frame. But Magda had light hair and a plump face and I had black hair and a thin face. It was hard to imagine, and anyway I didn’t want to be like Magda and Isaac, stuck in their frame, forever the same size. I didn’t want to be dead.

  “You want to see Gentleman Jack.” The Judge was good at stirring up the conversation, poking at it like hot coals. “What else do you want?”

  “I want to know about jacks,” I said.

  THE MORNING WAS DARK. The snow made a gray flutter at the window, like doves. It was different to be in a cottage than in a hideout. It was different when it snowed. The cottage huddled in around you. The cottage pushed away the wind, the cottage pushed away the snow.

  The attic door was closed. Its tongue slid back and forth when you turned the peanut handle. I’d jiggled the door last night to make sure its tongue was securely in its mouth. It was good to be locked in an attic when it snowed.

  The electric candle stood in the window. I could light the candle. Or I could not light the candle. I could do whatever I wanted.

  “Except not go to school,” said the dagger.

  Sometimes I wished the dagger couldn’t hear all my thoughts.

  “I heard that,” said the dagger.

  The snow was quiet, which made the outside world bigger. It made the inside world smaller. The cottage huddled in around me. The door was quiet and the bolt was quiet. They kept other people out; they kept me in. I hadn’t known what it would feel like not being able to move. The snow drifted against the windows and doors, which meant you couldn’t open them. The bolt kept the door closed, which meant I had to stay still.

  The snow breathed feathers against the window. This was my second time sleeping alone. There had always been Gentlemen in the hideout.

  But I wasn’t quite alone. The
re was the dagger. There were the dolls. Were the dolls still in the dollhouse, alive and talking?

  “Not alive!” said the dagger.

  Yes, alive, for they weren’t in the dollhouse parlor, where I’d left them. They must have walked on their little joints to the back of the dollhouse. The kitchen must be in the back, where the human-size kitchen was. I wondered if they ever went to bed. Their bedroom was just above the parlor. If their eyes could close, they could probably sleep.

  “Dolls aren’t awake!” said the dagger. “Dolls aren’t asleep!”

  I’d let myself be trapped by the soft corners of the cottage and by the bolt at the door. I could turn round and round like a bird in a nest, making the room fit my shape. Later, when I was in Netherby Scar, I’d wind the pocket watch, and my fingers would go round and round.

  It would be in Netherby Scar that I would come alive and the watch would come alive. We’d each of us help the other come alive.

  I fished the watch from my britches pocket.

  There was a little knob on top, just for winding. The watch was made of silver, beginning to grow dull. Silver was valuable, even if it was dull, which meant you could sell it for a lot of money. But things could be valuable for different reasons. I didn’t care about the money—I would never sell the watch!—but the watch was valuable because it meant Grandmother was waiting for me. I ran my fingers over the engraving of a bird in flight. The oils from my fingers would tarnish the silver, but I’d had the watch for sixty days. That was enough days to have learned how to polish it.

  “Iron and carbon don’t get tarnished,” said the dagger.

  They could get tarnished, but you could never win an argument with the dagger.

  I flicked the tiny clasp at the bottom of the watch; the case opened. The watch face was on one side of the case. On the other side was a photograph of Grandmother when she was young. She was very beautiful, her black hair pulled back from her face, a few tendrils curling down the sides. Her eyes were long and her eyebrows made upward slashes, which doesn’t sound pretty, but it was.

  In her arms lay a baby in a white smock. The baby wore a little white bonnet, on to which were stitched some letters. The letters were too small for me to read, but that didn’t matter: I didn’t know how to read, and anyway, I already knew the baby was Gentleman Jack.