She considered me for a moment, but she wasn’t trying to remember. She was deciding whether to speak. When she did, it came out in an unbroken stream without inflection, and though it was the same voice she always used, her eyes went blank. It felt oddly like someone was speaking through her.
“The Right Honorable Josiah Willinghouse, twenty-four, Brevard party representative for Bar-Selehm Northeast, sits on the Shadow Trade and Industry Committee. Appointed seven months ago. Elected to Parliament three months before that. Currently the youngest serving member. Educated at Ashland University College, Ntuzu, and Smithfield Preparatory School, like his father before him. Son of the late Jeremiah Willinghouse, also member of Parliament for Bar-Selehm Northeast, mining magnate, and Lady Tabitha Farnsworth, also deceased. Josiah Willinghouse’s first parliamentary speech concerned water restrictions at the time of drought and their impact on Mahweni farmers in his district. His motion, which was seconded by Stefan Von Strahden, was denied in a vote along party lines.”
A shiver ran down my spine. “How do you do that?” I asked, all my wary hostility swallowed up by awe.
The girl blinked and suddenly was herself again, though she too had shed her hostility. “I don’t know,” she said, embarrassed by the inadequacy of the remark. “I just remember what I read.”
“It’s extraordinary,” I said.
She flushed and looked away, but there was a flicker of satisfaction in her eyes that she couldn’t conceal.
“What’s your interest in Willinghouse?” she asked. “Or do you just like handsome politicians?”
“Hardly handsome,” I scoffed a little too quickly, so that the girl raised an eyebrow.
“All right,” she said. “Anything else you want to know about?”
“Yes,” I said on impulse. “Ansveld. The luxorite merchant who died.”
“What about him?” she asked, wary again.
“Where did he work?”
“Mr. Thomas Ansveld of Ansveld and Sons Quality Luxorite Emporium, Twenty-two Crommerty Street, Bar-Selehm,” she said automatically and without inflection.
I marveled again. “Have you always been able to do that?” I asked.
“As long as I can remember,” she said. “My father taught me to read, but it was years before I knew that what I could do was … not usual.”
“It’s a gift,” I said, smiling.
The girl looked less sure of that, and a trace of her former stiffness returned. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she said.
“I mean it. You shouldn’t be selling papers. You should be a reporter.”
Something complex flashed through her face, a bright and incandescent joy quickly doused and smothered. “Right,” she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have customers.”
*
I HADN’T LEARNED MUCH, but it felt like a start, and I returned to the Martel Court exhilarated. That feeling was dashed as soon as I climbed up to the louvered shutters of the room above the clock. The baby was crying again. I could hear it like a siren in the air, an awful, accusatory keening.
She calmed a little when I picked her up, but began again when she tried to nuzzle at my breast and found no sustenance. I whispered to her and pushed the habbit into her tiny hands, but nothing helped. She needed her mother, and though she was clearly ravenous, she would not take the milk I had bought earlier.
How often does a newborn feed?
I had no idea.
You can’t do this. You don’t know where to start.
Reading to her did not help at all, so I put her in the tool satchel along with the habbit and everything I owned, save my books, and made the descent from the clock tower to the street.
On my way to the Atembe underground station, the baby’s screaming drawing every eye my way, I thought of the blank high windows and implacable iron gates of the Pancaris orphanage.
Leave her on the steps now, and all this goes away. The nuns will raise her. The nuns know what they are doing.
But I didn’t. There was no principled decision, no careful thought process or moral choice. I just didn’t because I knew what the place was. I should never have gone. It had wasted time I could have spent doing my new job, and now leaving the child there would be harder. I tried to soothe her, but she wouldn’t stop crying. Even without the hostile stares of my fellow passengers, it was a terrible thing to be responsible for that awful, frantic bawling. I let my hair fall in front of my face and kept my eyes down.
At Rahvey’s house, I was greeted with outrage and incredulity at my lateness and incompetence, so I fled to the temple graveyard till the feeding was done. The child had quieted the moment Rahvey pressed it to her breast, and the silence bellowed the extent of my failure.
As night fell, however, I grew scared of the cemetery’s silence and its deep shadows, and when the hippos began roaring, I couldn’t stand it any longer and returned to Rahvey’s hut.
Sinchon wasn’t pleased. “The baby is feeding,” he said, as if I had no other business being there.
“Again?” I asked.