Somebody told me there was. Are you hurt anywhere?
Dunno—everything’s sort of jumping and down. Harriet, there’s a bad girl up there.
Dottie’s form swam into view, and Harriet stepped down onto a springy amalgam of moss and sneakily discarded mattress. Careful, Dottie said, and the floor swelled and knocked Harriet’s feet out from under her; it was no floor, but a bed of slugs and soft-shelled organisms shiny with filth. She crawled the rest of the way, and Dottie flung both arms around her neck. So her arms were all right. There was a nasty cut on the side of her head and her left leg was sprained, if not outright broken. Harriet rummaged for their end of the rope and tied it around Dottie’s waist. Slow work for numb fingers, but she got the knots corset-tight, chattering away so as to obscure the fact that they were depending on the girl who’d sent Dottie down here to haul her up again. It was so cold that they blew steam as they spoke, anonymizing each other’s features. Harriet jerked the rope. Oi, she screamed, careful not to use any names. Oi, you—start pulling! She didn’t have much hope of being heard. Dottie had already shouted herself hoarse. And Gretel hadn’t actually agreed to anything.
Then Dottie went hyuuuurgh as she flew up five or six ledges above Harriet’s head, higher, and higher still, each elevation a feat of bad-tempered strength. Harriet climbed up after her, singing. Her torchlight battery died halfway up, and she sang louder.
7
Dottie was told she couldn’t just lurk around in the night grabbing people, and Gretel was told off for . . . Clio didn’t even know where to begin at first, but once she warmed to the theme, she managed to come up with a catalog of Gretel’s “simply bloodcurdling” character defects. Both Dottie and Gretel resented the criticism and transmitted malice in each other’s direction when their parents weren’t looking:
You’ll wish you left me down there.
You’ll wish you’d stayed down there.
At the end of her diatribe, Clio cried: Oh, Gretel! Has Mama been too cross with you? It’s only because I do so love you and we are among strangers who don’t know what an angel you are really! Gretel, don’t cry . . .
I’m not crying, Gretel said. She really wasn’t. At all.
Margot and Simon looked Gretel over as Clio expounded on the girl’s sensitive nature, opposing every point she’d just made in her rant of two minutes ago. Then Margot tucked her arm around Harriet and said, Hmmm.
Dottie had been bashed on the head so hard she’d lost her sense of smell. Gretel was informed of this and felt remorse when Clio reminded her that sense of smell and ability to discern and distinguish flavor are linked. Yes, Gretel felt remorse, but she didn’t say so. She would only say, Oh well. She’d pulled Dottie up, hadn’t she? What more did everybody want from her? Also the expensive doctor Clio sent for was of the opinion that Dottie’s sensory impairment was temporary, if of indefinite duration.
Gretel’s double pupils were evenly spaced, so it was possible to be disturbed by them without knowing quite what you were getting disturbed by. The effect was clearer than the cause: you felt your sight blurring when you made eye contact with her, and most interpreted this is as a prelude to some act of spectral thuggery. The kids stared at Gretel’s clothes and the way she hopped and skipped all over the place; all that spare energy. There was a lot of bad feeling toward Clio and her daughter, especially when it got out that Clio owned the place. Clio had to act fast to nix the growing possibility of a strike. It was the parents she wanted onside; she’d noticed that on the farmstead the childless went along with what the parents decided. Past a certain age, childless adults reverted to child status, and their co-farmers patronized them and didn’t really care what they thought. Clio would’ve been treated in a very similar way (only with more external deference) had she not had Gretel in tow. But since she was a mother, the farmstead parents accepted all the assumed character credentials that entailed and heard Clio out as she proposed turning the Lee family gingerbread into a commercial concern. That was the reason she’d paid a visit to this farm, notable among the many farms she owned only for its consistent underperformance. As for how Clio had sensed an opportunity—that was thanks to Margot Lee, this distant cousin by marriage, who’d drawn on what she’d gleaned from their familial acquaintance and written directly to Clio urging her to think of the children. Margot had circled the names of all the children on that list made in Harriet’s wonky handwriting, before putting it in the mail. This was how you got Clio’s attention: she only really revered the callow. Youth was a state of utmost truthfulness and grace, and its ambassadors should be indulged, venerated as household deities, even. As for the ex-children, including Clio herself—well, it was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped. And there were still ways to receive the blessings of youth. In fact, gingerbread was an ideal vehicle for returning its consumers to a certain moment in their lives, a time before right and wrong. And the key selling point would be that the gingerbread was produced by 100 percent genuine farmstead girls, raised among the very wheat that went into it.
Clio patted three scowling heads—Zu’s, Dottie’s, and Harriet’s—and one smiling head—Elsa’s. Just let me borrow these four for a while and I’ll make you all rich.
Rich? Margot Lee asked a question about potential export sales that was intelligible only to her and Clio, an encrypted warning not to exaggerate. Time and time again Clio’s audience had been refused the little they’d asked for; their confidence couldn’t be secured with assurances of excess.
I meant there are prospects here for you, and for the girls. Stable ones that will grow more profitable in time. What you get out of it will really depend on what you put in.
Annie Cooper said: Jiaolong and Nathan should go too. They’re good cooks—
I’m afraid it wouldn’t work as well. There’s something unhygienic about boys. Not once you get to know them as individuals, of course—no no no. Purely in terms of image. It’s the sort of thing that decreases the appeal of an edible product.
Nathan and Jiaolong were annoyed to hear her talk like this. They weren’t boys; they were fifteen-year-old men, and if this woman wasn’t able to see that, then they couldn’t be bothered with her. Zu put her arms around as many of her peers as she could gather—the fourteen-and fifteen-year-old adults and the fourteen-and fifteen-year-old kids alike. What do we think, lads? Are girls yummier?
The Coopers and half of the Cook delegation agreed to the plan. Zu Cook and Harriet Lee were to wait three months, long enough for Dottie Cooper to have recovered from being thrown down that well. Then the three girls would join Clio Kercheval in the city and take the biscuit world by storm. But Elsa . . . Elsa wasn’t allowed to go, even though she was the only one of them who was chic in dungarees and therefore seemed most suited to a city sojourn. Zu would willingly have swapped places with her cousin, but for both the parental decision was final. Elsa pleaded her case with all she had (the most memorable of the scenarios she enacted had farmstead life grinding to a halt as frustrated teenaged men fought over her, the only girl left), and this only reinforced her parents’ conviction that they were too fond of her tomfoolery to let her go just yet.
As expected, Margot said. I mean, look at who her mother is.
Elsa’s mother was Gwen Cook, the woman whom someone (Harriet still didn’t know who) had suggested was a better match for Harriet’s father than Harriet’s mother was. Gwen’s objection was guileless, maybe as guileless as Gwen herself.
Isn’t it factory work that Kercheval woman’s talking about? Our Elsa’s not cut out for that.
* * *