So I walked carefully and briskly, face blank, eyes fixed directly ahead, turning toward the crowded industrial skyline. But the city now seemed as different as when I had first noticed that the Beacon was gone. The blown-glass delicacy of the baby changed everything. What had been familiar, even comforting, was now hard edged and dangerous, a walk down a cobbled street suddenly as precarious as scaling a two-hundred-footer. The streets I had known were crowded with skull-cracking brick corners, spear-point railings, and slicing shards of broken glass. The baby’s defenseless softness cried out to me every time someone came close, every time the footing felt less than perfect.
I might fall. Not from the sky. Just walking on the uneven sets and cobbles, I might fall, and that would be enough. I braced my arms around the baby, trying to form a cage around its terrible fragility, and my stomach turned.
You can’t do this.
At the corner of Old Threadneedle Street, I felt the child stir, and as I passed the entrance to the Northgate underground railway, a noisy belch of smoke burst from the grating in the pavement, and the child began to cry, softly at first, then with real distress. I poked and cooed, but it made no difference. Could she be hungry already? Surely not. We had only just left. I risked taking her out of the basket and holding her against me.
The infant opened its eyes and quieted, seeming to look at me, and when I held it against my chest, I could feel its tiny heart racing so that I felt thrilled, terrified, and so far out of my depth that I could barely see the shore. And then she was crying again, a high cycling wail that closed her eyes and made her face hot.
I’d had her less than an hour and was already failing her.
A white woman in an enormous crinoline-buoyed dress and a pink-bowed bonnet gave me a haughty look as she passed, and as I turned away, I found myself looking up at the implacable stone and high iron railings of the Pancaris Home for Orphaned Children by the canal. It was a hard building, blockish and unornamented save for the thorny rose etched into the stone above the door, which was the emblem of the order.
I knew little of northern religions beyond the fact that for most of them, life was a kind of test, something to be endured before being reunited with the spirit who made the world. They favored self-denial and service, which, for the Pancaris nuns, meant celibacy, teaching, and raising other people’s children.
The baby was still crying. I thought of Rahvey saying she wouldn’t ask what happened if I never took the child back to her. I wasn’t going to abandon the baby, not yet, but I had to see. Perhaps it would be a place of light and happiness.…
I climbed the long, steep flight of stone stairs and entered. The building was cold and dark inside, its hallways narrow and echoing. There was no airy lobby, no bustle, no sound of voices to distract from the squawling infant in the basket.
“Can I help you?”
I turned to find an elderly white woman in a black gown and the hair-concealing headdress they called a wimple looking down on me from a high, backless stool at a desk. The stool was inexplicably mounted on a platform accessed by three wooden steps.
“I was just looking around,” I answered weakly.
“You were under the impression this was a zoo or a museum?” said the woman, peering at me over her reading glasses.
“No,” I said. “A friend of mine has had a baby. I don’t think she will be able to keep it. I was wondering, if she were to bring it here, what the place would be like.”
“It would probably be better if your friend came for herself, wouldn’t you say?” said the nun, eyeing my wailing basket. “Show me the child.”
I did as I was told, hesitant, but desperate for anything to stop the crying. The nun put the baby on one of the towels over her shoulder and patted her spine till she burped, spewing a dribble of milky vomit onto the cloth, then falling promptly, magically silent. The nun returned the infant to me in superior silence.
“Thank you,” I said. “Could I see where the children live? Where they sleep?”
“I fail to see how that is pertinent,” said the nun, “but, very well. Come this way.”
We descended a narrow staircase into a gaslit, windowless, and whitewashed corridor that smelled of antiseptic. The nun took a ring of keys from her rope belt and unlocked a heavy door, admitting us to a room—also windowless—containing six iron bedsteads, six chairs, six desks, and six small cabinets. There were three children inside. They looked to be about Berrit’s age or younger, one black, two Lani, all girls. They were working at their desks, but got to their feet and turned to face the door, standing to something like attention.
They said nothing.
I took a step in, but the nun grasped my wrist.
“I see no reason to disturb their studies,” she said.
I hesitated, taking in their blank, hollow faces, the buckets of cleaning supplies and brooms propped beside each cabinet, and asked, “What are they reading?”
“Something improving,” said the nun with chill pride. “Devotional texts, moral pamphlets, studies on the value of cleanliness and labor.”