Chapter Thirty-three: Tears in the Night-time

During the day, with the strangeness of everything, it had been easy to set aside thoughts, fears, and feelings and be immersed in the bustle. The goodbye at the church, the journey to the house. The house itself had been a shock. The size, the casual wealth. The absolutely ridiculous wealth, in fact. She’d been standing barefoot on marble floors before lunchtime, hoping she didn’t sweat on anything.

Looking back, it was funny how her worries had been sweaty feet and not the Sabinis busting down the door and dragging her back to hell.

“This is our morning room. It gets the best light and I read the newspapers in here.” Such a normal statement. So ordinary. So reassuring. So far away from “please stay out the garden or the traps will kill you to death-death-death.”

The drawing room where no one drew, the casual remark that they didn’t entertain. That suited Violet fine. The familial evening room where Lady Stella knitted blankets. Knitted blankets! Why was that the thing that almost had her screaming? Was it the cosy domesticity after she had seen her new employer/ward casually ripping off a man’s hand? Was it the hand she was actually screaming about, because she seemed to have just accepted that in the moment?

Although the pun had been in extremely bad taste.

The laundry room had almost killed her. She had thought she’d understood the magnitude of wealth here with the size of the house and the life-sized unicorn, rising on its back legs, water spraying up from its horn to fountain around it, in the front yard. Near the stables. She’d thought that had let her understand this family was rich. Then Lady Stella had casually mentioned binning silk if the stains were difficult to remove. Binning silk!

It was almost enough to make a grown woman cry. She had nearly broken composure at the thought of the murder mirror in the dining room, at the sheer trauma someone would need to survive to even conceive of such a notion.

But then, but then the kitchen. The casual mention of a magic cupboard that kept food cold. Most kitchens had some magic in them these days, even if it was only an aetheric kettle that boiled water without a heat source, or a hot plate, smaller than a cooker but more convenient for heating pots and pans. The common magitech was cheap, all but the poorest people had some, even if the lower priced versions used worse materials or the runes were made by apprentices and sometimes, rarely, devices exploded.

Magitech was everywhere. It was common. It was daily. It was not a full-sized cupboard that radiated an aura of coldness that felt like an attack. She hadn’t known what it was until it was explained, but now she was certain it was the kind of item that there were only ten of in all of London, maybe fifteen total in England, and two of them probably in Buckingham Palace. It was the province of kings and emperors and the richest of earls, maybe the railway tycoons, and possibly the inventor of the frune. Not a random house in Highgate.

Then a room holding more silk than she expected fashion coutures to casually have on hand, as if money was a concept that simply did not exist in this household.

Finally, the knife room.

A forbidden room she was not allowed to enter, after the tour of wonders she had had. No, that was the story in far too many fairytales. That was doom, so she had asked what it contained, to kill the curiosity. The knife room.

A room full of knives.

A room full of knives that potentially meant that…

She might be misinterpreting things. It was possible there were other meanings that her brain simply couldn’t conceive of. She had only met Lady Selene once, and during that time the woman had casually identified a Sabini spy, murdered her as calmly as cleaning up spilled soup, somehow dealt with an entire corpse within minutes, and returned to them with not a hair out of place or a speck of blood on her clothing.

The efficiency was more terrifying than the room full of knives.

Violet had never met this bi-da that Lady Selene made knives for. She wasn’t even sure what a bi-da was, but people did not make a thousand knives for a casual acquaintance they shared a household with.

Yet a maid did not cast aspersions on her employer.

So, the knife room was best to be known, but not considered.

The market trip had somehow been worse and better than the house tour. Lady Stella had unimaginable levels of wealth and, beyond that, unimaginable levels of magical silk powers. Violet had nothing, was nothing. Nothing more than a burden. She had no illusion that she was special; her childhood dreams had been shattered by the realities of life. She had a pretty enough face and body, and a skin tone that made her exotic and alluring in this sun-cursed nation, and nothing else. She had come here with only the dress she was wearing.

She knew her meeting with Lady Stella was a coincidence. Nothing more than that. She was no different than any other prostitute in London, except that she had only been here six months. Short enough that she still remembered her life before, short enough that she could still imagine a different kind of life. That was her only difference from most of the others.

She didn’t want to put her saviour out any more than she already had, just by coming here.

She had no way to return to Jamaica, no family to return there to, no way to survive in England if she was turned out. She couldn’t be a burden. She had to prove her worth, to give the Maris family a reason to keep her here.

Which had looked impossible before the market.

They had no staff, at all, and the entire house was spotless. A family of nobles that cleaned after themselves? Or, in Lady Stella’s case, binned things that were dirty and replaced them? That alone told Violet she was dealing with nobility. The casual way Lady Stella had asked to be referred to as Stella screamed high nobility. The kind of nobility that had so much wealth and power they didn’t care what anyone’s opinions were. They didn’t have to.

She didn’t belong here. She didn’t know how to belong here.

Then, on the way to the market, this giant woman with more wealth than a small city and incredible magic and the audacity to defy the Sabinis to their face and gloat about it, and who was really quite… this… her saviour had just calmly announced she was sixteen years old.

Violet was so stunned, her brain malfunctioned and all she could do was repeat, as in a stupor, the statement that Lady Stella was so tall. As if she didn’t know that already. She had been incredibly lucky her brain broke in that particular fashion, because if she had been looping on “you’re so beautiful” to a sixteen year old she would have personally handed herself back to the Sabinis.

Well, no, not that, never that, but she would have thrown herself in the Thames or something.

Sixteen. Mentally and emotionally Stella was on the border between childhood and adulthood, and she had more power than some of the men who’d dominated Violet’s life. Wealth. Magic. Even sheer physical strength and height. But in other ways, Stella was so young, so earnest, sometimes even naive, and the market had shown Violet she could belong here, for a time at least.

Stella had no understanding of money, had never apparently haggled, but could spot pickpockets without looking and terrify fraudulent merchants. Violet understood scrimping, saving, and haggling. It wasn’t a perfect match but it was something she could do in a household where she had imagined no role.

It was, she thought, enough.

She still couldn’t sleep, though.

After a while of tossing and turning, she rose and put on her new indoor shoes, as if that wasn’t the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard, and headed down to the kitchen. A cup of tea was just the thing when she couldn’t sleep.

She was looking for the cups when Lady Stella materialised beside her and Violet screamed and jumped higher than the top of Lady Stella’s head.

“Ho- how do you do that?”

“Do what, Violet?”

“You… you appeared, out of the shadows, like…?”

“I walked into the kitchen, Violet.”

“But… I didn’t hear…?”

“Yes, I don’t make sound. Was there something you were looking for?”

“Cups? I was going to make tea?”

“Excellent idea.” Lady Stella retrieved two cups from a cupboard and started making tea.

“I can do that, ma’am?”

“No, that’s okay, Violet. I assure you I do know how to make tea.”

Violet settled back and watched as Stella made them both tea in the middle of the night. Her body was ridiculous for her age, for any age. She was taller than any woman Violet had ever met, and she had thick muscles, but was still limber. She looked like what she was, a warrior.

She was a child in the body of a Valkyrie or something, a child made for war.

A child whose eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, and who seemed desperate to distract herself with any activity.

“A-are you okay, ma’am?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, certainly, I am most certainly…” her voice trailed away as she lost focus, then weakly returned. “I’m fine.”

That had been very unconvincing. Violet moved over beside Lady Stella. She rested a hand on the girl’s back. “Is it because your mother has gone?”

“I’ve never been away from her,” Stella admitted, her voice sounding so incredibly young, so incredibly pained. So lost. “No, it is my bi-da I miss tonight. She is the one who explains things to me.”

“I’m not sure what a bi-da is,” Violet admitted.

Stella nodded as she poured out the tea. “Not everyone has one. My bi-da is my mama’s friend and she has lived with us since I was seven, so she is like a sort of second-mama to me.”

A sort of second-mother that her mother made almost a thousand knives for and had lived with them for the past nine years? A maid did not cast aspersions, but it would be so reassuring to know.

“What do you need explained, my lady? Maybe I could help?” She wasn’t expecting the full body shudder, or the tears that just started flowing. “Lady Stella?”

“Why didn’t they come, Violet? Why didn’t they let me help them? Why was my mother right? Why… do you know… I went… and they… why? Why, Violet? You were there with them? Why did you come? Why didn’t they?”

It went against all propriety, but Violet pulled Stella into a hug. She held her tight as the tea grew cold and the girl sobbed herself out.

“I’ll make us fresh tea,” Violet said. “We can have it in the evening room and I will attempt to explain it to you.” So that was what they did. “The first thing you have to understand, ma’am,” she said as they settled into comfortable chairs with fresh tea, “is that those women were not my friends. There can’t be friends in a place like that.” There couldn’t be love. “We all helped one another where we could, but any of us would have betrayed any other in a moment. All that mattered was our own survival. No friends, no connection.” No real relationships, just two women who comforted each other in the night, when no one else would hold them, just one woman who would not cry that the other had chosen to remain, that the choice had been made for her by time and betrayal and life and the belief she was where she deserved to be.

Just one woman desperate to know if she had reached a safe harbour, and terrified to ask or assume.

“I can’t truly explain why they didn’t come, but I expect it was mostly time, my lady. Six more months and I might have stayed too. A place like that changes you as a person. I was there half a year and could see a life beyond it. The others… had accepted it as where they belonged. I was still fighting.” Fighting. She almost snorted. Her fighting had involved crying herself to sleep every night, accepting every indignity during the day. It was strange to call that fighting, but it was the right word to reach Lady Stella, to convey the important truth. Violet had never given up hope.

“I was too late,” Stella muttered.

“My lady, you could not possibly have come earlier. There was no way for you to do so. You were in time to save four women,” which was exactly the wrong thing to say, of course.

“I saved four, then my mother killed one. Why did the Sabinis have a spy, Violet?”

Violet sipped her tea. This was going to be a long night. It was a good thing she couldn’t sleep, after all. Besides, she’d found another way to be needed, for now.

Previous Chapter: Chapter Thirty-two

Next Chapter: Chapter Thirty-four

Editor’s Note

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

From: The London Eye Editorial Board

Subject: Language

Date: June 16, 1922

Some readers may be pleased to know that okay is not an anachronism. It was not common in England by 1922, which is why the English characters don’t use it, but it was common in America, and possibly in Jamaica, too.

Author’s Note

Today’s queerguide has a post about diversity in fiction.