Speak to me, Brewster Boy! He didn’t speak.
“Throw me!” said the dagger. “Then he’ll speak, all right!”
“But Mrs. Elton will see you, and the Judge will take you away.”
There came the sound of someone being sick. I looked toward the front row. There was a space beside Molly’s head, but I’d expected that. It was the space where my head should have been. There was another space on the other side, though, where Peter’s head should have been. Peter was leaning over the floor.
That was all right. I didn’t think I’d be going back to my seat today.
I reached into my pocket, my fingers closed around the ball for jacks. I’d make the Brewster Boy speak.
The ball bounced off his head. It was too small to hurt him, but it surprised him.
“What the hell!” he said.
All the children gasped, quick and sharp; they weren’t used to words like Hell. I was, though, and I had no need to gasp, no time to waste. Three breaths and a swallow are quickly gone.
“I challenge you to a knife-throwing contest,” I said. “First blood wins.” The jacks ball dribbled to the floor, rolled under the desks. I remembered how it had dribbled before, down the steps, when Rough Ricky came to school.
“That was a great day!” said the dagger.
“You can’t have a throwing contest without both people got knives.” The Brewster Boy had wet, tired eyes with hollows beneath, as though scooped out with a spoon.
I shrugged. “I’ll let you throw first if you’re scared.”
Did he see how bright I was, how much I felt like myself in the garnet dress? Time stretched like elastic as I waited and watched the Brewster Boy, and strange thoughts came to me. What did I mean by Myself? Did I mean the Robber Girl who lived with the Gentlemen? Did I mean the girl who lived with the Judge and Mrs. del Salto? Were they different people, those two girls?
“What about it?” I said.
“I got twice the reach you got,” said the Brewster Boy. He swung out his arm. It was pretty long.
He hadn’t exactly accepted the challenge, but I pretended he had. “Let’s go outside. A person who rides with Gentleman Jack would never fight in a schoolroom.”
I turned my back on the Brewster Boy. He’d have to follow me or else he’d seem scared. Yes, there he came, shuffling up the aisle behind me. There were four more rows of children—all the way up to the eighth level—and then the very oldest children, who were not really children but studying to graduate from high school. It didn’t matter how old they were, though: they all looked at their desks, but as we passed their row, they stood and followed.
“Keep your seats!” said Mrs. Elton. But I heard the children following me, tramping up the aisle, rushing down the mouth-steps, where they clustered at the edge of the yard. Only Betsy stayed behind with her mother. They squashed together in the doorway.
There were dandelions to be picked and dandelion necklaces to be made, but no one picked the dandelions. No one made the necklaces. No one stuck their thumbnail into the stem, let the milky stem-blood ooze to the surface. No one climbed the cottonwood tree into the blue air.
“I’ll ride with Gentleman Jack, sure enough,” said the Brewster Boy.
The Brewster Boy and I faced each other. The others were too far away to hear me shout-whisper at him. “You’re supposed to scare Betsy, not hurt her!” Some scraggly hairs prickled from the Brewster Boy’s chin. He needed more practice growing a beard.
“But Gentleman Jack—” said the Brewster Boy.
“Gentleman Jack would never hurt a child!” I said.
The Brewster Boy shrugged. “I aim to get me them bloody hands.”
How could I not have known my plan would go so wrong? When you’re wild, you can tell when an animal is going to attack. There’s something about the tension of the muscles, the way the animal looks at you, the way its fur goes up or down, the way it smells.
I had to make myself wild again.
The Brewster Boy grabbed his bowie and got ready. His shoulders were slightly hunched, his wrist was bent. When your body is out of line, it’s hard to throw true.
The Brewster Boy wasn’t able to throw his knife any better than the men in the Sapphire. I knew exactly where the bowie would land just from the way he bent his wrist.
It took him ages to throw, which gave me plenty of time to calculate, and then jump. I jumped toward the bowie rather than away because I’d have to snatch it up fast. I couldn’t let the Brewster Boy get it again.
The bowie wobbled past me, thudded to the ground. I leapt for it, the big bowie with its single edge and the smells of rust and moist leather. The blade was about ten inches long, far bigger and heavier than the dagger. But here we were: I had the bowie without ever having reached for the dagger. That was good for lots of good reasons and one bad reason. The bad reason was that the dagger had lost its edge. Maybe I couldn’t have stuck the Brewster Boy with it.
“Gentleman Jack won’t like it that you don’t take care of your knife,” I said. “You haven’t kept it clean and dry and sharp. But I bet it’s sharp enough to slice into you. What do you want to bet I could hit your stomach?”
The Brewster Boy didn’t want to bet. “You tricked me!” he said.
“Outsmarted you, more like,” said sharp-voiced Agnes.
I raised his bowie, held it properly, backward facing, thumb on one side of the handle, which lay in the scoop of my thumb and forefinger. How heavy it was. The Brewster Boy backed up.
“She springed away,” said Agnes. “Dead away from the knife.”
Right now I didn’t have room in my head to despise Agnes and her terrible voice. I would have to despise her later, and anyway, I’d sprung toward the knife, not away.
It’s good to show people you know how to throw a knife. It’s good to have a straight, solid wrist. It’s good to let the knife lie in the cradle of your thumb and first finger, to hold the blade facing behind you, so it will somersault through the air.
The Brewster Boy saw I could hit him if I chose. He had no reason to believe I wouldn’t aim for the belly. He might have been thinking of belly wounds, how they turned green and you swelled like a toad, for he turned and ran. He cut across Main Street, through the property with the burnt house, and vanished into the indigos behind.
“Does anyone have a penny?” I said.
The children understood. You mustn’t take someone else’s knife unless you paid them for it.
No one had a penny. I’d once had a penny, but I gave it to the collection plate.
“I told you to keep that penny!” said the dagger.
I should have kept the penny.
And then Mrs. Elton was ringing the school bell. She rang it so hard, the bell lost all its echoes and vibrations. She rang it so hard, it sounded like a slap in the face. Discomfited, I thought. The Brewster Boy had discomfited Mrs. Elton, and now Mrs. Elton was discomfiting the bell.
Too much time was passing. Even if I had a penny, I’d have to catch up with the Brewster Boy to give it to him. I was running now. I’d run as fast as I could and give him back his bowie before it leapt out and bit me.
But would that work? I wished I’d worn the opal pendant. I needed the gift of clear sight, except I didn’t understand what it meant when the opal grew cold and what it meant when it grew hot. Could you give a knife back to its owner and escape being stung and mortified? I knew how un-bendy the rules were. You could put the knife in a drawer, but it would get out. You could even lock the drawer, and it would still leap out and bite you.
I ran fast, but a knife is faster than a girl, even a robber girl. I followed the Brewster Boy across Main Street, leaping the burnt bones of the house—not breathing in case there were any lingering pockets of lye—sprinting through a patch of indigo trees. The bowie twitched. I hadn’t thought I could run any faster. I was wrong. A gully yawned in the distance, spanned by a pink stone bridge. There was only one way the Brewster Boy could have gone. I
was within spitting distance of the bridge when the bowie twitched again.
I closed my fingers tight around it, but the rule of knives was stronger than my fingers. The bowie arced through the indigo shadows. It didn’t shine, it smelled of rust and damp, but that didn’t matter. It carved its way down my forearm. I’d known it was going to leap and bite, but I was still surprised. I found myself sitting back on my heels, looking at the inside of my arm. I watched the blood fountain from the pale underside. I’d run so fast, I felt sick. Or maybe it was because the bowie had cut so deep.
I knelt beside the grave markers, three of stone and one of wood. Sunlight glanced off the edges of the wooden star. The star shape pressed itself into my eyes. Was it Ironic that the Brewster Boy’s bowie had bitten me just when the dagger had lost its edge—just when I was no longer able to sharpen it?
I turned to the side and was sick on a carpet of indigo needles. I crawled to the gulch to get away from the pool of sick. It hurt more than I’d imagined. It was funny how I felt the gash more in my stomach than in my arm. My blood was streaming out, but even when it’s fast, you can’t feel it. You can’t feel the flow of your own blood.
Thoughts pressed in on themselves. They were too crowded. I had no room to think. The gash, the gush, the red blood—they surprised me. They didn’t seem real. The bowie slid from my fingers. I didn’t seem real, either. Was I truly on my knees now, stretching out on my stomach, looking down into the gully? You could tell there’d been a fire here. The treetops prickled up from the bottom like the ashy stubble on an old man’s face.
I did not so much throw the bowie as let it go. One minute my fingers were wrapped round it; the next minute they were not. It slid down the side of the gulch, caught on a bit of root, then bounced away.
I didn’t hear it land.
I closed my eyes and lay there, my good arm draped over the edge of the gulch. Waves of shock crashed through my skull, and I thought crazy, disjointed things. I thought about Oakheart and how he could sleep without closing his eyes. I thought about my own self and how I was closing my eyes but not sleeping.
I thought of the dolls’ baby, and how he was waiting for me in the General Store. I thought of how I had no money to buy him. I thought of how Gentleman Jack had craved a boon and the Blue Rose had spat at him.
I should get up and go to the Sheriff’s office so he could see the blood and help me. But waves of shock crashed on the shores of my thoughts. The heart of the earth beat beneath my ear. The earth was alive and breathing.
“There you are,” said Betsy Elton’s voice. “Tilda and Gabriel have gone to fetch the Sheriff.”
I could hardly hear my voice under the crashing of the shock waves. I asked Betsy to take the sheath and dagger and hide them for me. “If the Judge knew I had the dagger, he’d take it away,” I said. “But I need it.”
“I’ll have to give you a penny,” she said.
How could I have forgotten that? I couldn’t think anymore. My mind was all crash and quake, and I was cold, so cold. I tried to tell her it didn’t matter, that the dagger was hardly sharp enough to hurt her, but my voice was too far away.
Betsy pressed a cool round object into my palm. I felt her search for the belt and the sheath. I felt her pull the belt tighter before she unbuckled it, then it got looser, and then—
“Here’s the Judge!” said Betsy.
Somebody picked me up, somebody walked me through the trees, their feet loud on the indigo needles.
I looked up into a face with a beak nose and chicken-scratch eyes. It was all right now; the Judge was here. The Judge was a person who would always keep his promises, even to a dead girl.
I HEARD TICKING. It was the pocket watch, ticking from the dollhouse. Its clear, sturdy voice was counting out the time, counting down to Day Zero. In my head were bells and ticking. The ticking was steady, the bells were all crash and slam. The ticking was cool. The bells were hot.
I saw the room as though I were floating on the ceiling. I saw the roof of the dollhouse. It had four chimneys. I saw the waggling fish tail of the electric candle. I saw a pool of light. A pool of light, a pearl of light. Grandmother wore pearls, and when we went to live with her, she was going to let me wear them.
I saw the top of Mrs. del Salto’s head, but her hair wasn’t rusty. It should be rusty to match her dress.
“Hush now,” said Mrs. del Salto.
But I hadn’t said anything. Mrs. del Salto’s hand made a familiar pattern on my forehead. But how could I recognize it? She’d never touched me.
Tick, tick, tick. “She’s so hot!” said Mrs. del Salto. Tick, tick, tick.
“The infection’s set in bad,” said another voice. The voice smelled of ironed shirts; I smelled the heat trapped inside the cotton.
Mrs. del Salto’s hand reached for mine. This time I recognized the pattern of her hand. Then came a heavier hand. It belonged to the smell of ironing. It didn’t have a familiar pattern.
“Infection,” said the ironing voice.
“Bergamot,” said the ironing voice.
“Poultice,” said the ironing voice.
Bergamot. That was a new word. I didn’t like having it in my head. It was too loud. It had been fried in color and made my eyes hurt. Poultice was a new word, too. It was a terrible word, filled with the sounds of poultry and lice. What if the new words crowded out the old words I knew, the words from when I lived with the Gentlemen? What if my thoughts were being rearranged, like puzzle pieces? Where would the old words go?
I tried to un-think the new words, but I couldn’t. They made a parade through my head. Organza, star steps, discomfit, poultice, galaxy, magnifying glass, RETURN TO SENDER—
“Drink this,” said the ironing voice.
I shook my head, which clanged the bells inside my skull. I didn’t want to drink down poultry and lice.
But the hand insisted, and Mrs. del Salto said to let the doctor help me get better. Liquid dribbled in the side of my mouth. It was too hard to struggle. The doctor said it would make me feel better. His voice went slow, then dissolved and trickled sideways.
He was right. Not hearing him was better.
His voice made me think of the Federal Marshal, how one minute he’d been sitting on his horse in the middle of the street. How the next minute his face fell open, how he’d sat very still for a long time, his hand on his stomach. How at last he, too, had trickled sideways.
Beneath the Federal Marshal’s job name was a personal name. His name was Marshal Starling. I had a personal name, which was Starling. Good thing I wasn’t his daughter, because then my name would be Starling Starling.
If the dagger were here, it would say something about the name Starling. It would say that Gentleman Jack told me not to let people call me Starling. That I was too un-fancy for the name.
Where was the dagger? I knew somehow that it wasn’t here, in buttercream cottage, but I couldn’t remember why. The poultry and lice had made me thirsty. My tongue was a slice of old leather. “I need some water.”
“She’s too hot,” said Mrs. del Salto in her new faraway voice. It was the opposite of a magnifying-glass voice, an anti-magnifying-glass voice.
It was a mini-fying-glass voice.
I couldn’t think of the old words. When the dagger came back, it would remind me.
Then I had the notion that I’d asked for water even though no one had spoken to me first. But that couldn’t be. An Affliction has strict rules, just like the rule of knives. An Affliction doesn’t change just because you’re sick.
If you killed a child, you couldn’t wash the blood from your hands. If you burnt something, you couldn’t peel away the scars. And now all I could see were Gentleman Jack’s gloves inside my head. I saw the initials GJR, embroidered so beautifully by Grandmother.
Usually I loved thinking about the gloves. But now my hands longed to fly up and push the darkness into my eyes. Maybe it was because the color primrose is pretty much just yellow, and the pinto�
�s ribbons had been yellow, and the revolver spit had been yellow. One of my hands could move, but the other couldn’t, which meant I couldn’t push at my eye jelly, which meant the primrose gloves hung right in the center of my mind.
“I wonder at her voice,” said Mr. Poultry-and-Lice. “I believe she must have sustained some damage to her vocal apparatus—”
But I didn’t want to hear about my voice. I refused to hear!
Time had gone all funny. First it went slow. In the slowness, Mrs. del Salto said I was hot, and then I asked for water. In between, someone must have spoken to me, but I couldn’t remember. Finally, time went from being stretched out, like taffy, to being concentrated, like life in the dollhouse. The dollhouse felt more real than the twelve-times-bigger world all around. The space inside the dollhouse was more concentrated and real than the outside space. It was a dreaming space.
My teeth chattered against the water glass. I was hot but my teeth chattered. Someone leaned over me. A cup pressed itself to my lips. I smelled bitterness. I smelled poultry and lice.
The cup made an unfamiliar pattern. “Where’s my yellow cup?”
Now came the cracked edges of the yellow cup. It was comforting, even in its yellowness. Why did I like it, though, and not the yellow ribbons and gloves? Maybe it was because the yellow cup made me think of fairness. I had broken it and the Judge had treated me fairly, even though it hadn’t seemed so at the time. What did the gloves make me think about? It was too tiring to figure it out. When I woke up, I’d like the color primrose again.
I awoke to an intensity of roundness. Roundness hugged me from all sides. The round attic room, the curl of the dollhouse, the wheel upon which the dollhouse spun. The curving ceiling, the round nest of my bed, even though the bed-roundness was all inside my mind. Circles within circles within circles.
Something cold and wet snuffled at my neck. I wanted to be startled, but I was too tired. I tried to push myself up, to see what the cold, wet thing was, but one of my arms shrieked. I stopped; the shrieking stopped. I turned my head to the side; I came face-to-face with a long black wolf muzzle.
The Robber Girl Page 24