The Robber Girl

by Franny Billingsley

  Now came the bells, the midday bells, reeling and pealing and singing and ringing. Should I stand up? I knew which direction to face. But I wasn’t sure about singing the song—I had such an ugly voice. Better think about more important things. Better think about hiding the watch.

  I knew from Gentleman Jack that it was best to hide things in plain sight. I’d hang it from the library wall in the dollhouse. That’s where the grandfather clock stood in the human-size house. I pushed one of the thumbtacks into the wall and hung the watch from a link of chain. The bird flew against the library wall.

  Now the watch shone, but the rest of the house was dirty. That was unfair to the watch. I’d clean the house, and the house and the watch would match. It would take me a long time, but I had all day. I couldn’t leave the attic. The corners curled around me and kept me still.

  “Do you see,” said the mother doll, “that you came back to the cottage, just as we said you would?”

  “Do you see,” said the father doll, “that the Indigo Heart is magnetic? It keeps the people it wants to keep.”

  “I’m not here because of magnets,” I said. “I came back because I have a new plan for getting Gentleman Jack out of jail. I’m here because the snow won’t let me leave.”

  “Gentleman Jack is your magnet,” said the dagger. “You’ll follow him out of the Indigo Heart.”

  “The Indigo Heart will draw you back again and again,” said the father doll.

  I remembered the lightning fizz I’d felt when I crossed the red clay road. That was because of the iron in my blood. But the fizz wasn’t strong. I could break it anytime.

  I started by cleaning the kitchen. I took out the tiny pots and pans. They didn’t have blackened bottoms like the ones in the human-size kitchen, but they looked real and were surprisingly heavy.

  “Cast iron,” said the dagger. “I know my metals.”

  I took out the oven and the stove and the table and the cabinets with their little drawers. I dusted them and wiped them on a damp cloth. Then I dusted the kitchen and scrubbed it with soap. I put everything back, but before I put the cabinets back, I opened some of the little drawers.

  They were empty. But I knew where the sugar was. I would fill them up.

  I HAD TO PUT ON A DRESS before I went to school. Mrs. del Salto said so. But where would I carry the dagger? In a sheath beneath the dress? But then I’d have to fling up my skirts to grab it. “You may not go in those britches,” said Mrs. del Salto.

  “Gentleman Jack lets me wear britches.”

  “I am not Gentleman Jack,” said Mrs. del Salto.

  “I will go in my britches,” I said.

  “Then you shall not go to school,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Then you will not see Gentleman Jack.”

  But I wore her down—that’s what she said—and I came downstairs wearing both britches and dress.

  “An interesting look,” said Mrs. del Salto. “All I can say is I’ve done my best.”

  But that wasn’t all she could say. She told me there was no time left to brush my hair, but that I’d have to eat breakfast. And that next time we’d brush my hair and that I’d have to eat breakfast seven more times before I could see Gentleman Jack.

  The Judge and I paused in the foyer on our way out. There was the table, there was the drawer. The drawer slid open like butter.

  “Butter?” said the dagger.

  “Smooth, you know,” I said.

  “Butter can’t be a drawer!” The dagger didn’t notice the drawer was lined with green felt. It didn’t understand that the felt made a bed inside the drawer so the keys could rest. I wouldn’t tell the dagger; it wouldn’t like me thinking such thoughts. I remembered how, after I’d mended the cup, the Judge had said I’d restored its bloom. I’d think about that. I’d think about how the keys could rest on the green felt and restore their bloom. The dagger couldn’t understand what words like that meant. I’d hide my thoughts beneath the Judge’s words.

  I thought about how I didn’t have a key.

  “You don’t need a key if you want to go out,” said the dagger. “You only need a key if you want to come in.”

  The Judge took his key from the drawer. Now there was only one key. He’d put it back when he returned. Then there’d be two again. When I went to Grandmother’s, I’d have a key to her house. But I didn’t have a key to the cottage.

  How would I get back in? Would there ever be three keys?

  When I turned to leave, my spine was aware of the table and the single key in the drawer.

  Outside, it was very bright. The sun bounced off the snow and made you squint. I wished it would snow again. You couldn’t go to school when it snowed. You had to stay inside because of the way the house curled around you.

  “If you wish for snow,” said the dagger, “you can’t see Gentleman Jack.”

  The dagger was right. Wishing for snow was a betrayal of Gentleman Jack.

  Our feet squeaked on the snow. Rough Ricky had once said that snow squeaked when it was very cold.

  “Snow is always cold,” said the dagger.

  “Are you contradicting Rough Ricky?” I said.

  “I guess not,” said the dagger.

  I thought about how in eight days I’d see Gentleman Jack and tell him the story about the Fair and also that I’d found a Songbird for Grandmother. I thought how happy I was that Gentleman Jack was in trouble, because I could save him. But then I thought that being happy about Gentleman Jack being in trouble was a betrayal of Gentleman Jack.

  But I was still happy.

  I heard the peanut man’s whistle before we reached Main Street. “Peanuts! Fresh, hot peanuts!” But we turned away from him, away from the Sheriff’s office and the General Store and the Sapphire and the Shrine.

  We hadn’t far to go. First we came to a great blackened ruin of a house. It had been burnt and no one had built it up again.

  The house bulged at my eyeballs; it made me cough, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. The Judge turned and folded an arm around me; his free hand patted my back. He patted out my coughing.

  “Better?” he said.

  I couldn’t really be better, because the house was breathing, even though it was so dead. It breathed out ashes and something that could burn you if you breathed in deep. The indigo trees behind the house were all burnt. There were no green needles, no indigo tang. Instead, they made a skeleton forest. Through their outstretched bones, you could see, in the distance, four grave markers rising from the parched ground. Three were stone; the fourth was a wooden star, painted white.

  I thought of Rough Ricky and his Affliction, and I wondered, not for the first time, how you got an Affliction. Could you just set one fire and you were suddenly covered in scars? Or did you get an Affliction by setting fires over and over, each time getting more and more scars, until one day your face was cemented into place and you couldn’t smile?

  The school was just a couple hundred feet farther on, across the street. It was made of the same pink stone as everything else. The Judge said that first it had been built of indigo, but after the house burnt, they’d rebuilt the school to keep the children safe. It had a hard face, like Rough Ricky. It had two window-eyes and a long nose-door. The three steps below the door made a mouth. Children were playing in a yard beside the school. The yard was plain and messy; it wasn’t all sneery and looking down on you the way the school was. The boys played on one side of the yard. The girls played on the other.

  “Robber girls don’t play,” said the dagger.

  The girls went round in a circle, singing. I wished I didn’t have to see Betsy in the circle. I wished she didn’t have ringlets and that the sun didn’t make her hair so bright.

  “I must tell you,” said the Judge, “that Mrs. Elton is the schoolmistress.”

  The sour-apple taste of green candy rose in my throat.

  “You must respect her and follow the rules.”

  We were quiet a little while, watching the girls go round i
n their circle. They sang some regular words and then they sang some words that didn’t make any sense.

  “You’ll need this.” The Judge handed me something in a frame. There was no picture in it, though, not like the picture of Isaac and Magda. There was just a smooth expanse of gray. The gray looked soft, but when I touched it, it was hard. My finger left a little mark on the hardness.

  “And this.” The Judge handed me a white stick. I took it; I flexed my fingers around it. It broke. I looked up at the Judge. Would I have to wait another day before I could see Gentleman Jack? Would it be nine days?

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It works just as well in two pieces. It’s chalk, for writing on the slate.”

  I stood while the children played and the school stared at me with its Rough Ricky face. I had a slate and chalk. But I had already broken my chalk and I didn’t know how to write.

  The Judge handed me a pail. “Your lunch.”

  Would he give me a key to get back into the cottage?

  “Don’t think about the cottage,” said the dagger. “Think about Gentleman Jack’s questions.”

  That was smart. Gentleman Jack’s questions always filled my mind. Sometimes, when I couldn’t understand something, he’d tell me to recite his questions over and over. It would help me concentrate, he said.

  “What will they try to make you believe?” That was one of the questions.

  “They’ll tell me it’s forbidden to dig for gold in the Indigo Heart,” I would say. “They’ll tell me the Blue Rose is a star and that the Indigo Heart is made of stardust, so when you dig in the Indigo Heart, it’s like you’re hurting the Blue Rose.”

  “Will you believe them?” Gentleman Jack would say.

  “I will not believe them.”

  “You have found a lovely name for yourself,” said the Judge. “But you will also need a last name.”

  The Judge didn’t know I’d already borrowed del Salto. It was just for now, though, until Grandmother and Gentleman Jack gave me my real name. “The name del Salto goes with the name Starling.” My voice was filled with used-up coughs, so it was uglier than usual. “Because of the L’s and the S’s.”

  “I quite agree,” said the Judge.

  Maybe the Judge would think I knew how to read because I knew some letters and the sounds they made. He was hard to fool, though.

  Now the door opened and Mrs. Elton appeared. She held a bell and she looked a little like a bell herself, with her narrow waist and big skirts. She rang the bell, and when she had finished, it dangled from her hand like a teardrop. It was strange to think of how many things Mrs. Elton owned—the wax baby in the blue pajamas; the candy with the floating flower; the red ball, which was for jacks; and the bears with the outstretched arms that said, “We’re soft. Come feel how soft we are.”

  “Don’t think about softness,” said the dagger. “Think about sharpness!”

  The Judge and I went up the mouth-stairs and up to the nose-door. The nose-door had a knob, but I couldn’t tell if it was a knob that opened or a knob that closed.

  The Judge took off his hat. He said, “Ma’am,” to Mrs. Elton and that he was happy to present her with a new pupil. “Starling del Salto,” he said.

  “Too long,” said the dagger.

  I picked at the side of my thumb, out came the blood. My thumb had been ready for blood, it wanted to bleed. Other children came up behind me. When Betsy Elton had come up behind me in the General Store, I’d been able to read her footsteps. But even though I was still wild, I couldn’t read all these footsteps. They tramped all over one another and got confused and stamped one another out.

  The Judge asked very low if I had any questions. But you can’t ask questions if you don’t understand anything. You can’t ask questions when the footsteps stomp one another out.

  You can’t ask, “How does everything work?”

  The school smelled of newness. It smelled of wood shavings and wet paint. The walls and floor were raw and painful. On either side of a central aisle stood rows of desks with benches attached. They shone with varnish. Varnish smelled sharp. It smelled like the idea of not understanding anything.

  The bigger children sat in the back, the smaller children in the front. “Sit down, Peter,” said Mrs. Elton, and a little boy in a red shirt sat in the front row and kicked his legs. There were no desks attached to the front-row benches.

  “Stop squirming!” Mrs. Elton stepped onto a platform at the front. Behind her on the platform sat a desk, and on the wall behind hung a gigantic slate. She told everyone to be quiet, then beckoned me up. She was very tall on the platform.

  I stood in a great silence, with Mrs. Elton looking at my front and the boys and girls looking at my back.

  Mrs. Elton wrote a word on the big slate. Mrs. Elton said she wondered if I knew what the word meant.

  I said nothing. Mrs. Elton’s desk gleamed at me. I swallowed varnish.

  “If you don’t know,” said Mrs. Elton, “you must say, ‘I don’t know, ma’am.’”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Elton wrote again. “What about this word?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “Or this?”

  I didn’t know.

  “That spells Book,” said a sharp little voice behind me. “That new girl don’t know nothing.”

  “Quiet!” Mrs. Elton’s voice was terrible. There came a snap, snap, snap. That was Mrs. Elton hitting a stick against the palm of her hand.

  “Mind your grammar, Agnes,” said Mrs. Elton. “As for Starling, she must sit in the front row, between Peter and Molly. She must be in the youngest class.”

  I sat. There was no desk, so I had nowhere to put my slate. Peter sat on my left, his legs dangling above the floor. Molly sat on my right. Molly had soft brown hair, and her legs dangled, too. But I was too big. My legs didn’t dangle.

  I had the same gravy-splat feeling I’d felt at dinner with the Judge and Mrs. del Salto. It was the same feeling I had when I thought about my mother leaving me, probably because of my Affliction. The feeling smelled of varnish.

  “Quick,” said the dagger. “Think of Gentleman Jack!”

  “Who saved you?” Gentleman Jack would say.

  “You saved me,” I would say.

  I wondered if the dolls would say that to me. I’d bring them the dog and the collar and the baby, which would be like saving them. Then I’d say, “Who saved you?”

  “You saved us,” the dolls would say. Maybe today even, I’d bring them the dog, and they’d say, “How happy we are!”

  Gentleman Jack didn’t care if I could read or write the alphabet on my slate. What he liked was that I could read people’s footsteps. He liked that I was soft-footed and that I could draw the dagger almost as fast as he could draw his Lucretia.

  Mrs. Elton wrote more words on the big slate. She said that the first-level children should copy the words. I was a first-level child and I had a slate, but I didn’t know how to copy words.

  Molly dangled her feet. She made some marks on her slate. Her hands were clean, her nails pale and shiny as moons. I put my hands in my lap. My hands were rough; my nails were broken. My fingers couldn’t make those marks.

  I breathed through my mouth so I wouldn’t smell the sharpness. School smelled of varnish, and varnish smelled of shame. I looked at Molly’s hands so I wouldn’t see anything else.

  Maybe I didn’t know how to write words on a slate, but I knew how to speak like Gentleman Jack. He was a gentleman. He was Royal. He’d never say, “Don’t know nothing.” I spoke like the Gentlemen, except for my ugly voice.

  Peter wasn’t writing on his slate. He was drawing something that was probably a horse. You could tell by the mane. But Molly was writing. Molly, with her soft brown hair and moon fingernails. She was smaller than me, but she was making marks on her slate.

  Smack! Peter yelped. The stick had come down on his fingers. “Are you supposed to be drawing on your slate, Peter?” said
Mrs. Elton. Her voice was bleached, like old bones.

  “No,” said Peter.

  “No, what?” said Mrs. Elton.

  “No, ma’am,” said Peter.

  “What are you supposed to be doing?” said Mrs. Elton.

  “Writing,” said Peter.

  “See that you do so,” said Mrs. Elton.

  Mrs. Elton bent over me. “You are not writing on your slate.” Her face was too big to see properly, her features all squished flat. “Have you been paying attention?”

  I hadn’t been paying attention.

  “What was I just saying?” said Mrs. Elton.

  Mrs. Elton had told Peter to write on his slate, but that couldn’t be the right answer. I looked away from her face, flat and hard as the school. My eyes got stuck on her skirts, swinging side to side. I’d think about how Gentleman Jack always helped me remember, even though I wasn’t that smart. “We must work with the materials we have,” he’d say.

  But Mrs. Elton wasn’t going to help me. Her face was too close. She opened her mouth, it made a black hole. I saw her teeth. I saw her tongue. A great silence pressed at my ears. I couldn’t hear her speak.

  There was only the black hole of Mrs. Elton’s mouth and the silence.

  Even the dagger was silent.

  Now I couldn’t think about the dog or the collar or the baby. I picked at the skin of my thumb, which was wanting to peel itself away. I’d lick off the blood. Then I’d know I was alive.

  If I’d been sitting in the back, I could have slipped out through the door. But I was sitting in front, one a too-short bench that had no desk. If I left now, I’d have to walk along the front, brushing past the knees of the first-level children on one side, and on the other side the edge of Mrs. Elton’s platform. I’d have to turn and walk up the aisle of desks, where everyone could see me.

  The door was at the end of the aisle.

  Mrs. Elton’s enormous face backed away. Now I heard her again. She called the fourth level to the front. Up came Betsy, a red-haired girl named Tilda, and a boy named Gabriel.