Page 13

As cliffs go, it was not perhaps a particularly tall one, but it was many times Rose’s height and only the taller trees overtopped it.

“Bedrock.” The Badger sniffed at the wet, gritty stone. “Now, if you know where to burrow around here then you will soon find that Mother Nature has prepared the way. This is limestone, and when water wants to find its way down, limestone makes a tunnel for it.”

The Badger’s sturdy claws and strong arms made quick work of the digging. He shoveled earth under his chest and kicked it back to form a growing mound behind him. Before long a half-moon had sailed into view, and by its light Rose could see the Badger’s hind paws scooping soil from the passage he’d excavated. The moon cut its path across the sky, and the signs then the sounds of the Badger’s digging faded into the depths beneath the foot of the cliff.

After some time, long enough for Rose to grow first cold, then bored, then afraid, the Badger reemerged, pushing a mound of loose earth before him. He had, it seemed, found space enough in the depths both to turn himself around and to dispose of the bulk of the displaced soil.

Clambering out onto the slope, the Badger shook himself, shedding earth. He peered at Rose as if seeing her for the first time, eyes glimmering in the moonlight. “You found your way to the Riverbank through your own devices, digging your way along the fissures.”

Rose hugged herself against the night cold and nodded. “From the garden.”

It seemed a long time ago, but perhaps it had been only a year since she had found the crack and the cave and the passage and the fissure and the blind crawl. The Muse hadn’t seen her go. Rose hadn’t said goodbye. And now, if the Rat’s story was true, she might never see her again. Rose felt badly for that, though the Muse had often seemed cruel.

“You didn’t grow up in the garden though?” The Badger asked the question as if he already knew the answer.

“No.”

The Badger looked out into the night. “There was a baby.” He snuffled that bone-deep snuffle of badgers. “There was a baby in the world, and there was—written onto the pages of a book—the love that the mother had for that child. And although the knife had done its work, the man knew that somehow his task lay incomplete.” As the Badger spoke, it seemed that the stuff of the night all around them became a cloth that the day had woven as its shroud, and which mere story might unweave into new fabrics that told a different tale.

In the garden, just to the left of its rose-grown heart, lay a house of white stone, at once both a sprawl of towers and a cozy cottage, at once both long corridors with wide windows and a simple hearth with the fire’s glow and warm corners. Into this house, the mother had written her daughter and set the Muse to watch over her, to be perfect where she had been imperfect, to choose the right paths where she had chosen the wrong ones.

And when the mother had laid down her pen, the Muse sat awake, watching the baby in her crib, watching the flickers of a kitchen fire dance across soft and sleeping skin. Watching somehow, in the same place and time, the crystal light from the arches of high windows slide across the gentle innocence of a child’s sleep.

The Muse knew as fact what in the mother’s mind had been only a shadow amid the torment of her thoughts. The Muse understood, just as had the man, that this was not a story that had reached its end.

The mother had set her muse to stand in her place, to succeed where she had somehow failed. And the Muse, as she touched her fingers to the baby’s hair, knew that this would require sacrifice. It’s hard to hide a baby—babies do not know how to be silent. It is harder to hide a child—children do not know how to be incurious, and curiosity can kill. It can even kill cats, despite their ninefold lives.

As if hearing the Muse’s thoughts, a cat chose that moment to take his place beside the baby’s crib, both in the firelit kitchen and in the great sunlit hall, and in all the places the Muse had imagined. A cat with many lives and with eyes as deep as oceans.

The cat did not speak—few cats can—and he did not linger, walking away as he had come, through many walls, but the Muse knew wherever he went was worth following him to. And carrying the baby, she traced the feline’s footsteps.

Where to hide a baby? Where in the vast expanse of the written word? In which of so very many worlds? In whose hands? And why hide a baby in strange places unless it were being sought, O best beloved?

An echo caught Rose and lifted her momentarily from the spell of the Badger’s story. The night had grown colder than she had thought possible in summer. A cruel wind whipped the trees, and the moon hid now behind the arms of a storm’s gyre.

The Muse knows many good couples she could give you to, and as she walks, a great Newfoundland dog follows her for a while, sorrow in its heavy footfalls.

“I know, Nana,” the Muse says, for Pan has taken the hound’s children—pan, panic, pandemonium—and Nana had done so well nursing that girl and those two boys. And the Darlings are good parents. “I know.”

But the Muse leaves Nana sniffing disconsolately at a garden wall. To give you to good parents would make you too easy to find. And you must not be found. Not you. Not a hair, not a footstep, not a single white bone poking from the blackness of the earth.

She comes to a house, Satis House, not quite a mansion, but far from a hovel. A house stranded in the unkempt overgrowth of its garden and the high wall that made an island of it, the tall gate ever locked. A house wrestling with time, choking on the ivy that has reached from the soil to drag it down.

The front door opens for the Muse. She silences its groans with a whisper and paces within. Dark wallpaper, peeling and ancient. Worn carpets missing a maid’s attentions. Cobwebs and neglect. In the dining room, an untouched feast, too ancient to stink, moldering on the plate. The Muse walks on. Empty rooms. The glow of a lone fire in a lone hearth beckons. A single oil lamp burns beside a voiceless piano. Someone sits hunched before the fire in a ragged chair, their back to the door.

The Muse enters unremarked, the sleeping baby in her arms. A woman occupies the chair in the deflated splendor of a wedding dress, a dress yellowed by decades of regret. A woman of unknown years, old before her time. This woman’s pain is clear. A face on which sorrow has made its home is twisted beyond even the harsh limits of her existence. Tears course along well-worn channels, and the fire fills her eyes, consuming the whole of her attention.

And in this moment, the trailing hem of that dress which has been all this time too close to the fire, smoldering sullenly, bursts into flame as if waiting for nothing save the oxygen of the Muse’s regard.

Flames leap, a hunger long denied, and the woman does nothing save watch, her white hands claws now, clutching the arms of her chair.

“Enough.” The Muse clicks her ivory fingers, and the fire becomes a frozen thing garlanding the woman’s legs. “Aurelia Havisham, stand up!”

The woman stands, seeing the Muse for the first time, and the baby, cradled in one arm now. Her mouth works, or rather it moves but fails to work. She finds her words at last. “What is this? I deserve no angels! Let the fire have me.”

“Foolish words.” The Muse shakes her head. “You’ve not felt its bite yet, and when you do there will be no going back.”

Both of them look to the doorway where the shadow of a man is approaching, as frozen as the flames. “He cannot save you, but he will wait there, and perhaps you can save yourself, Miss Havisham. I have brought someone to see you. A girl about whom I have great expectations. Her name is Rose and she needs you more than this story does.” The Muse waved her hand at the young man in the hall, caught in his running, already struggling to take off the coat with which he means to smother the flames.