“Mama…？” he said.
They were alone in that alley but she could hear the silk wagons creaking not ten paces from them in the fog-thick street beyond and the roar and shouting of men at their selling carts.
“Oh my heart,” she murmured. She kneeled beside him, uncertain what more to say. She did not think he would remember that day when he’d burned her hand. Whether he knew what he did or not, she could not be sure, but she knew it was not a good thing in this world to be different. She tried to explain this to him. She said every person has two destinies granted them by God and that it is a person’s task in this life to choose the one or the other. She looked into his little face and saw his cheeks white in the cold and his black hair long over his ears and she felt an overwhelming sadness.
“You always have a choice, Marlowe,” she said. “Do you understand me?”
He nodded. But she did not think he understood at all.
When he spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper. “Is it bad, Mama?” he asked.
“Oh, honey. No.”
He thought for a moment. “Because it’s from God?”
She chewed her lip. Nodded.
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“What if I don’t want to be different?”
She told him he must never be afraid of who he was but that he must hide it, this blue shining, whatever it was. Even from the reverend? Yes. Even from Brynt? Even from Brynt. She said its purpose would make itself known to him in time but until such day there were those who would put it to their own ends. And many others who would fear it.
That was the year the reverend started coughing up blood. A leech in Whitechapel said a dryer clime might aid him but Brynt just ducked her head, storming out into the fog. The reverend had come out of the American deserts as a boy, she explained later, angrily, and all he wanted now was to go back to the deserts to die. As they drifted slowly through the gaslit nights, his face looked grayer, his eyes more and more yellow, until he stopped even the pretense of mixing his elixirs and just sold straight whiskey, telling any who would listen that it had been blessed by a holy man in the Black Hills of Agrapur, though Eliza did not think his customers cared, and even this lie he told wearily, unconvincingly, like a man who no longer believed in his truth or their truth or any truth at all.
The reverend collapsed in the rain one night, while weaving sickly on a crate, hollering to the passersby on Wentworth Road for the salvation of their souls, and Brynt carried him in her arms back to the rookery. The rain came in through the roof in several places and the wallpaper was long since peeled away and mold grew in a fur around the window. It was in that room on the seventh day of his raving that Eliza and Marlowe heard a soft knock at their door and she rose and opened it, thinking it might be Brynt, and she saw instead a strange man standing there.
A corona of gray light from the landing beyond haloed his beard and the edges of his hat so that his eyes were lost to shadow when he spoke.
“Miss Eliza Grey,” he said.
It was not an unkind voice, almost gentle, the sort of voice she imagined might come from a grandfather in a children’s story.
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“Is it Brynt back?” Marlowe called. “Mama? Is it Brynt?”
The man took off his hat then and turned his face sideways to see past her and all at once she caught sight of his face, the long red scar over one eye, the meanness in it. He was wearing a white flower in his lapel. She started to shut the door but he put out a big hand, almost without effort, and let himself inside, and then he shut the door at his back.
“We haven’t yet been acquainted, Miss Grey,” he said. “I do believe that will be rectified in time. Who is this, then?”
He was looking at Marlowe where he stood in the middle of the room holding a little brown stuffed bear close to his chest. That bear was missing one eye and the stuffing was coming out of one leg, but it was the boy’s only treasure. He was staring up at the stranger with a blank expression on his pallid face. It was not fear, not yet. But she saw that he sensed something was wrong.
“It’s all right, sweet,” she said. “You go on back to the reverend. It’s only a gentleman what wants some business with me.”
“A gentleman,” the man murmured, as if amused by it. “Who might you be, son?”
“Marlowe,” said the boy sturdily.
“And how old are you, Marlowe?”
“Six.”
“And who is that on the mattress back there?” he said, waving his hat at the reverend where he lay, sweating and delirious, face turned to the wall.