She knew Mrs. Harrogate was watching her. Knew it, and didn’t care.
Her ribs ached; her head ached; she was tired and sore and angry that she’d left the boys alone in that strange manor. Meeting with Dr. Berghast had not reassured her. She could tell there was something wrong with the man, something off—a kind of buried hunger, a fury he’d tried to conceal. She didn’t know its source, nor what it meant. If he was really Marlowe’s guardian, it disturbed her that he’d not mentioned the child in affection, not even once. She thought of the boy as he was in that circus, with Brynt, how hopeful and how afraid he’d been, and she thought of the life she’d dangled in front of him, the promise of a family, and she hated herself for it.
But all that could wait, she reminded herself. She kept her eyes closed, her head down, in part because she didn’t want to have to talk to Mrs. Harrogate, not just now. It wasn’t only that she was tired. She needed to think.
The first thing was to avenge Coulton. He was a good man, a kind man underneath it all, and an honorable one. He hadn’t deserved his death. And what Harrogate had said was true: if she really feared for Marlowe’s and Charlie’s safety, she’d have to kill Jacob Marber, once and for all.
Well so be it, then. It’s not like she hadn’t killed before.
* * *
Alice was eleven when Adra Norn, at Bent Knee Hollow, had disrobed and walked naked into the fire. All the women, astonished, stopped their singing and cried out; some ran for buckets of water; others held hands and wept; but after only a few minutes Adra walked back out, unscathed, her hair steaming, her eyes bright, and she stood naked in the firelight with her triangle of hair and her heavy breasts and she held out her arms in triumph.
Alive. Whole. Holy.
Something changed in Alice’s mother after that. Maybe in all of them, in all of those women. But Rachel Quicke became obsessed; young Alice would find her some nights staring into a candle flame, holding a hand over the fire, or else watching Adra across the sleeping lodge with an unreadable expression in her eyes, a mix of fear and wonder and rage.
“For those touched by God, for those touched by God,” she would mutter, over and over.
Her old anger returned, stronger, fiercer; she’d chop firewood for hours at a stretch, drenched with sweat, her skirts heavy; she’d scrub dresses against the washboard so fiercely that she wore holes into them. The other women drew their bonnets close when she passed, they averted their eyes.
It was during a full moon some six months later that Alice was shaken awake by a rough hand. It was her mother, fully dressed, who held a finger to her lips in the moonlight and led her out of the sleeping lodge. Alice saw Adra asleep in the big bed at the front of the lodge. Her mother took her to the flower meadow and told her to wait and then disappeared again into the dark. The grass shone silver under the moon. Alice shivered, cold. Maybe fifteen minutes passed and then an orange light bloomed into being. It was her mother, carrying a torch.
“Mama?” she said.
Her mother didn’t answer. She handed the torch to Alice and led her to the sleeping lodge. There were piles of straw from the barn under the windows, and her mother—with a look of cold ferocity—gripped Alice’s wrist hard and forced her to touch the flame to each pile of straw, walking the perimeter of the lodge, while the flames, with a soft whoosh, leaped up.
Alice, crying silently, shook her head as they worked, staring at her mother in confusion. She could see now that the lodge’s door had been barred shut on the outside.
The heat was intense. They stumbled back, and back again, and her mother took the torch from her. The flames were spreading quickly, bending sideways over the roof like long grass in a wind, consuming the walls. The windows shattered in the heat, one after another after another. Alice staggered back, covering her face. She could hear voices crying out in agony from inside.
“Mama!” she cried, starting forward.
“You will stand!” shouted her mother. Alice froze. Rachel’s eyes were shining weirdly in the flames. “You will stand and see, daughter! For they shall rise, they shall walk out on their own feet!”
Alice stood. She stood as she was told, in her nightdress, in the darkness, the heat like a wind at her face. She’d never told anyone of this, of what she’d done; and her mother never told anyone, not even the legal counsel, not anyone. Alice just stood and watched, crying, while the great machinery of her life turned, and her childhood neared its true end, her mother’s trial, and incarceration, and Alice’s hard hungry years on the Chicago streets. She stood, and she saw.