Page 11 of Inkpot Gods

“Yes, sir,” says Floretta, meekly.

“There’s no need to sound as if you fear me,” he says. “I can be your greatest ally, if only you’ll allow it. Your mother’s mother was my sister, Margaret, and no finer flower of American womanhood has ever walked the world. She chose to settle with her husband in the village where you were born, and nothing I could say would sway her. After she died, I tried to bring your mother here to live out her days in safety and comfort. She was no great beauty, you understand—whoever your father may have been, you take after him—but she was my flesh and blood, and there’s a power in that. What belongs to you can be used against you, always, and I would prefer to guard my vulnerabilities.”

Floretta blinks at him, mouth hanging slightly open in her bewilderment. The things he’s saying may make sense to him, but to her, they’re so much sound, words strung together in unnatural orders, like shining beads on a silver string.

“Close your mouth,” he snaps. “You look like a cow when you gape at me like that, and I’ll not have anyone saying that my household shelters a simpleton.”

Floretta closes her mouth with a snap.

“Miss Cottingsly will see to your new wardrobe today. I don’t want to see this dress again, or any of the others you brought with you from the woods. They’ll be burned as soon as you have something less offensive to the eye to wear in their stead.”

“But these are my dresses,” Floretta protests. “I don’t have anything else.”

“You will.” He pauses then, looking at her closely. “Did any of them belong to your mother? Are they sentimental in some way?”

“No,” she answers, speaking to the second question rather than the first—while one of them was her mother’s, she feels more sentiment toward the gifts from Father Clemence. She doesn’t have the feeling her uncle would care to hear that, or that he’s a man who trades much on sentiment.

“Then to the fire they go,” he says, pleased. “I’ll have a tutor hired for you by the end of the day. You’ll learn all the lessons you should have had thus far, and we’ll start your proper education as soon as I’m sure you’re ready for them. Do you have any questions for me?”

“I…” She stops. He’s already half-answered her most important question: he wanted her because she’s blood of his blood, and he wants to protect himself. This was never about her at all. Who she is doesn’t matter, maybe can’t matter, in the face of his incomprehensible concerns.

“I don’t think so,” she says, in a small voice. “I will miss my home, and the good father, but I’ll try to be a good ward for you. I’ll try my best not to bring shame upon your household.”

“I believe you will,” he says. “Are you ready to begin?”

She can’t answer. She can only nod.

The days that follow are among the hardest of Floretta’s life. She sees her uncle only at meals—breakfast and dinner—where they sit alone in the great dining room, attended on by Miss Cottingsly and, more rarely, by Deborah, who comes and goes like a ghost, and doesn’t glow silver again. Not in Uncle John’s presence, anyway; on occasion, in the upstairs halls, she flickers and shines, placing a finger to her lips to signal Floretta to silence when she sees the girl watching her. It’s their secret, small and strange and somehow kept away from the man who rules both their lives, as surely as a storybook king might rule his kingdom.

She’s been there a week before her uncle raises the question of her name: “I don’t like it,” he says one night, over a dinner of roast chicken and vegetables. “Your mother would never have chosen a French name for her only daughter. I’m not sure who did. It makes you sound like a Canadian.” He says the word like it’s the direst of insults.

Floretta can only blink at him. “But it’s my name,” she protests. “It’s who I am.”

“You will change it,” he says. “By the end of the year, either you will find a name you can prefer, or I’ll choose one for you. You’re young yet. When you’re grown, you’ll not remember Floretta Bearse in the slightest. You’ll be someone else, someone better and new, and that woman will carry you into your future.”

Floretta doesn’t know how to answer that. She has never even considered that names could change. Oh, she knows that when she grows to adulthood and marries, she’ll take her husband’s name for her own, and some people have nicknames, ways to call for them more quickly, but their names remain the same beneath it all, fixed points around which their person can turn. If a name can change so casually, will the person who carries it even be the same beneath? Or is he speaking true when he says that she’ll be someone else?

She doesn’t know the answer. She isn’t sure she ever wants to. She looks at him with wide, bewildered eyes, waiting to hear what he says next.

“Your new name will be something more suited to this house. It will be elegant and fine and it will mark you as my own, and you will carry it proudly. Do you understand me?”

She doesn’t. “Yes, sir,” she says, and it’s a small lie, small enough that he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t count it. Instead, he nods, and rises, leaving her alone at the table with the remains of her dinner in front of her. She scrambles to rise in turn, pushing her chair back, so that she isn’t seated while he stands. She’s still learning the rules, but she knows even now that sitting while he stands is not allowed.

“You’ll have riding lessons tomorrow,” he says curtly. “See to it that you sleep well tonight.”

Then he’s gone, striding out of the room, leaving her behind. She stares after him in silence, and when Miss Cottingsly comes to clear the dishes, she clears Floretta as well, shooing the child upstairs to her room.

Days pass. The memories of the wood and the village and the meadows fade. Father Clemence sends word once a fortnight, and while Floretta is mostly forbidden his messages, she does manage to snatch a few of them from the postman, squirreling them away to read in private. He writes of babies she will never know, harvests brought in without her, and people thriving in her absence. The hole in his own life is apparent at first, but quickly closes and fades away, his world expanding to fill the gap she left behind when she was taken away.

Most of all, he writes of rain. It began raining when she left the village, it seems, and the fields are growing greener than they have in her lifetime. Stomachs are full, tables are laden, and their small hamlet seems set to become the paradise he has always believed that it could be. With her gone, everything is better. He doesn’t say so in so many words, but she can read what’s written, and she knows what’s really being said. It stings and soothes in equal measure. She can’t be there to see them thriving, but they will survive even if she never once returns. Like a princess in a storybook, she has been offered up as a sacrifice to something far greater than herself.

But the princess in a storybook will have a happy ending when all is said and done, and Floretta no longer believes that is a possible ending for her. She goes through her days in dry, rainless Boston, looking out the windows of her uncle’s house, waiting for the hour when all will begin to turn in her direction, and nothing changes but the lessons she is offered day after dusty day. Miss Cottingsly is not her only tutor, or even her primary, although she has her share of lessons with the hard-eyed housekeeper; a man scarcely old enough to carry the title comes twice a week to teach her sums, and a woman slightly older comes as often for comportment and Latin. Why her uncle feels she needs to learn Latin is unclear, but she knows enough not to argue with him. Arguing with him only shakes the walls and reduces her dinners to dry meat and plain boiled vegetables, still eaten at the table in full view of his seasoned and gravy-moistened feasts.

No. She has been here long enough to learn the virtue of staying silent and going along with what’s expected of her, and what’s expected is that she attend her lessons and learn the things he sees fit to have her taught. If that means dead languages and scientific concepts not normally considered appropriate for a girl of her age—a girl of any age, really—then that’s what she’ll do. She will be his niece, she will be his protégée, and she will learn what she’s offered.

Those days turn into weeks, until one night she sits at her dressing table brushing the tangles from her hair and sees Deborah step into her bedroom with an armload of fresh linens, glowing as silver as starlight in the mirror. It’s a mellow, lambent light, and it has no business coming from a human skin. She hates it, and she covets it, and she doesn’t understand how Deborah can have it when she can’t. It doesn’t seem fair, that some people should glow when others don’t.

It doesn’t seem, maybe, like those people are actually people, if they can do things that people aren’t supposed to do. Envy and disdain hatch in her heart, terrible sisters that can prepare a body to do almost any terrible thing, if they’re given the room to stretch and grow.