Unpacking the logic that had made up my world took me weeks, but once I’d dismantled the old ideas and re-formed them, I was left with a terrible truth: not every child possessed my powers, therefore not all children had sapped their mother’s lives while in the womb. Childhood touch was not the silly stuff of fairy tales. I was alone in my deformities, a murderer, a monster.
Peter, pleased with himself for the sandbox, was oblivious to my change in disposition, but Mrs. Blott was not. “Maisie,” she said brusquely, “stop this moping about. You’ve a roof overhead, you have food on your plate. There are those out in the world who have much worse troubles than you.”
I nodded, solemn-faced, but made no attempt to move from my place at the kitchen table, where I’d been sitting for hours, staring out the window at our empty, silent drive. I looked down at my hands—the dirt beneath my fingernails, my cuticles chewed pink and pulsing—and I wished myself outside of them. For the thousandth time that week I shut my eyes and hoped I’d open them inside another body: one that was prettier, cleaner, better.
“She needs company,” said Mrs. Blott to Peter that evening. They were in the library without me but had left the door open. If I stood in a particular spot on the main stairs, I could hear everything they said.
“Too dangerous,” muttered Peter, “company would not know what to do with her. Nor she with it, I think.”
“I understand your worries, I agree, but you cannot raise a child in isolation. As the girl gets older . . .”
Mrs. Blott’s voice lowered, and I pressed against the wall to try to make out the rest of her words. A loud floorboard creaked. The library door closed.
As a result of this conversation, it was decided I might go with Mrs. Blott to visit old Mother Farrow, an invalid who lived by the river. With no family to care for the old woman, Mrs. Blott brought her food and company whenever she could. I would be allowed to join her on these visits, so long as I followed Peter’s instructions. If ever I did not obey, I’d lose the privilege at once, with no chance of parole.
The instructions were these, typed and printed and hung in a frame in my bedroom:
Under no circumstances will you deliberately touch a living thing.
Under no circumstances will you deliberately touch a dead thing.
If a living or a dead thing is touched, you will immediately return it to its natural state.
“But number three is a circumstance, which means I’d have to break rule number—”
“Maisie,” said Peter, “I appreciate your logic. Someday you’ll have a fine career in court. But for now, let’s keep this simple. Do you understand and agree to these conditions?”
I did.
AND SO AT age seven I met Mother Farrow, who would live to be one hundred, but was then just ninety-six and almost blind. She sat always in her bed, propped up by pillows, so gaunt she looked already like a skeleton, her remaining hair wispy as a child’s. She had seven real teeth, and was proud to show them to me, refusing Mrs. Blott’s offer to call in the dentist for a new, false set. In place of real feet under her bed sheet, Mother Farrow told me she was rumored to have horse hooves. Mrs. Blott denied the gossip, but I looked once, while she tended to the garden and Mother Farrow dozed, lifting up the heavy blankets at the foot of Mother Farrow’s bed to reveal a pair of yellow knit slippers. They seemed the usual shape, but who was to say what was hidden underneath them? I lay the blanket back carefully, content to let the mystery survive.
The very old are like the very sick, the very strange, in how they move about the world, how the world treats them. I sensed in Mother Farrow the same disconnect that I knew in myself, a similar longing to be part of a world that had no place for me, and refused to change its pace to accommodate my particular needs. She’d had a long life, and it seemed that in those final years she feared not death itself but the loss of her accumulated decades of knowledge, which, if unspoken, would wither on the vine. While Mrs. Blott made soup or casserole, swept out the kitchen, changed linens, I’d sit at Mother Farrow’s side and listen to her speak.
She told wonderful stories of princesses, and witches, and monsters in the wood. Coeurs Crossing, the village near Urizon, was a haven for stories, and in her girlhood, before the thrills of modern entertainment, there had been little else for Mother Farrow to do once the chores were finished but listen and tell. All her tales were set in our surrounding hills—a young woman lived in our village, a little girl lived in my house. They were the antithesis of Peter’s more practical assignments, the dark to logic’s light, the remnants, he told me, of a less civilized world. People told stories, he said, to explain natural reactions—the waxing of the moon, an unusual harvest, bizarre psychological behaviors that they witnessed in their peers. These tales, he said, were from an age when people had no understanding of why nature acted in accordance to physical laws. They were pretty explanations, but disproven. They were no longer vital.
A wood witch stole a baby from her cradle, left a changeling in her place.
A young woman magicked herself out of a locked prison and disappeared.
A naughty little girl hurt her mother and was banished to the forest; now her spirit caused mischief through both village and wood.
A mother sacrificed herself for her daughter.
“YOUR MOTHER WAITS for you,” Mother Farrow told me once.
Mrs. Blott stood by, holding a cold compress to Mother Farrow’s forehead. She looked at me, seated on a stool in the corner, with the expression she used often when we ventured out to care for the old woman. An expression that very clearly told me: Mind your fantasies.
“Your mother has been watching you turn into such a pretty little girl,” Mother Farrow said. She held her hand out to me, and I stood, ready to go to her, before I was stilled by another telling look from Mrs. Blott. “Mothers are always watching.”
Even at eight I had questioned how Mother Farrow, childless for almost a century, might be expert on this topic. Yet since I’d met her she had been a source of wisdom, so I listened. A mother, said old Mother Farrow, at least a mother from Coeurs Crossing, was given ways to watch her children. All because there once had been a troublesome young girl.
This particular girl was especially naughty, eventually jailed for crimes on which, Mrs. Blott interrupted brusquely, they could not elaborate. Her poor mother sat outside her underground cell, without food, without drink, for days on end. She’d hold her hand up to the old stone wall and cry for her child. She’d try to sneak notes to her daughter under the roughly hewn door. The people of the village tried to displace her, for soon her daughter would die, and she should not be afoot when the guards dragged the girl to the pyre. Knowing this, the mother remained at her vigil.
When the men who would burn the foolish child came down to the prison cell, they saw the mother sitting. She faced the wall behind which lay her daughter, forehead pressed to the stones as if in prayer. They unlocked the heavy door.
The girl was gone.
There was no sign of tampering, no way the door could have been forced. The mother, for her part, was too weak to even stand, and it was deemed impossible that she could have stolen the key from the jailers. The only explanation, it was said, was an old sort of magic, the kind that passed between a mother and her child. The mother’s longing, her sacrifice, her love, had let the girl escape. From that day on, said Mother Farrow, the women of the village, those who sympathized and all their descendants, possessed a special power over their children. Could watch them through barriers as hefty as stone or as far away as death, and could protect them.
Which meant, of course, my mother might be looking after me.