Rich Horton - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

Such were her thoughts when Lady Donner returned, drawing from the company an elderly gentleman, palsied and stooped: Mrs. Breen’s escort to table, Mr. Cavendish, one of the lesser great. He had known Mr. Breen for decades, he confided as they went down to dinner, enquiring afterward about her own family.

Mrs. Breen, who had no family left, allowed—reluctantly—that her father had been a Munby.

“Munby,” Mr. Cavendish said as they took their seats. “I do not know any Munbys.”

“We are of no great distinction, I fear,” Mrs. Breen conceded.

Mr. Cavendish seemed not to hear her. His gaze was distant. “Now, when I was a young man, there was a Munby out of—”

Coketown , she thought he was going to say, but Mr. Cavendish chuckled abruptly and came back to her. He touched her hand. “But that was very long ago, I fear, in the age of the Megalosaurus.”

Then the footman arrived with the wine and Mr. Cavendish became convivial, as a man who has caught himself on the verge of indecorum and stepped back from the precipice. He shared a self-deprecating anecdote of his youth—something about a revolver and a racehorse—and spoke warmly of his grandson at Oxford, which led to a brief exchange regarding Sophie (skirting the difficult issue of an heir). Then his voice was subsumed into the general colloquy at the table, sonorous as the wash of a distant sea. Mrs. Breen contributed little to this conversation and would later remember less of it.

What she would recall, fresh at every remove, was the food—not because she was a gourmand or a glutton, but because each new dish, served up by the footman at her shoulder, was a reminder that she had at last achieved the apotheosis to which she had so long aspired. And no dish more reminded her of this new status than the neat cutlets of ensouled flesh, reserved alone in all the year for the First Feast and Second Day dinner that celebrated the divinely ordained social order.

It was delicious.

“Do try it with your butter,” Mr. Cavendish recommended, and Mrs. Breen cut a dainty portion, dipped it into the ramekin of melted butter beside her plate, and slipped it into her mouth. It was nothing like she had expected. It seemed to evanesce on her tongue, the butter a mere grace note to a stronger, slightly sweet taste, moist and rich. Pork was the closest she could come to it, but as a comparison it was utterly inadequate. She immediately wanted more of it—more than the modest portion on her plate, and she knew it would be improper to eat all of that. She wasn’t some common scullery maid, devouring her dinner like a half-starved animal. At the mere thought of such a base creature, Mrs. Breen shuddered and felt a renewed sense of her own place in the world.

She took a sip of wine.

“How do you like the stripling, dear?” Lady Donner asked from the head of the table.

Mrs. Breen looked up, uncertain how to reply. One wanted to be properly deferential, but it would be unseemly to fawn. “Most excellent, my lady,” she ventured, to nods all around the table, so that was all right. She hesitated, uncertain whether to say more—really, the etiquette books were entirely inadequate—only to be saved from having to make the decision by a much bewhiskered gentleman, Mr. Miller, who said, “The young lady is quite right. Your cook has outdone herself. Wherever did you find such a choice cut?”

Mrs. Breen allowed herself another bite.

“The credit is all Lord Donner’s,” Lady Donner said. “He located this remote farm in Derbyshire where they do the most remarkable thing. They tether the little creatures inside these tiny crates, where they feed them up from birth.”

“Muscles atrophy,” Lord Donner said. “Keeps the meat tender.”

“It’s the newest thing,” Lady Donner said. “How he found the place, I’ll never know.”

“Well,” Lord Donner began—but Mrs. Breen had by then lost track of the conversation as she deliberated over whether she should risk one more bite.

The footman saved her. “Quite done, then, madam?”

“Yes,” she said.

The footman took the plate away. By the time he’d returned to scrape the cloth, Mrs. Breen was inwardly lamenting the fact that hers was not the right to every year partake of such a succulent repast. Yet she was much consoled by thoughts of the Season to come. With the doors of Society flung open to them, Sophie, like her mother, might marry up and someday preside over a First Feast herself.

The whole world lay before her like a banquet. What was there now that the Breens could not accomplish?

Nonetheless, a dark mood seized Mrs. Breen as their carriage rattled home. Mr. Cavendish’s abortive statement hung in her mind, all the worse for being unspoken.

Coketown.

Her grandfather had made his fortune in the mills of Coketown. Through charm and money (primarily the latter), Abel Munby had sought admission into the empyrean inhabited by the First Families; he’d been doomed to a sort of purgatorial half-life instead—not unknown in the most rarified circles, but not entirely welcome within them, either. If he’d had a daughter, a destitute baronet might have been persuaded to take her, confirming the family’s rise and boding well for still greater future elevation. He’d had a son instead, a wastrel and a drunk who’d squandered most of his father’s fortune, leaving his own daughter—the future Mrs. Breen—marooned at the periphery of the haut monde , subsisting on a small living and receiving an occasional dinner invitation when a hostess of some lesser degree needed to fill out a table.

Mr. Breen had plucked her from obscurity at such a table, though she had no dowry and but the echo of a name. Men had done more for beauty and the promise of an heir, she supposed. But beauty fades, and no heir had been forthcoming, only Sophie—poor, dear Sophie, whom her father had quickly consigned to the keeping of her nanny.

“You stare out that window as if you read some ill omen in the mist,” Mr. Breen said. “Does something trouble your thoughts?”

Mrs. Breen looked up. She forced a smile. “No, dear,” she replied. “I am weary, nothing more.”

Fireworks burst in the night sky—Mrs. Breen was not blind to the irony that the lower orders should thus celebrate their own abject place—and the fog bloomed with color. Mr. Breen studied her with an appraising eye. Some further response was required.

Mrs. Breen sighed. “Do you never think of it?”

“Think of what?”

She hesitated, uncertain. Sophie? Coketown? Both? At last, she said, “I wonder if they reproach me for my effrontery.”

“Your effrontery?”

“In daring to take a place at their table.”

“You were charming, dear.”

“Charm is insufficient, Walter. I have the sweat and grime of Coketown upon my hands.”

“Your grandfather had the sweat and grime of Coketown upon his hands. You are unbesmirched, my dear.”

“Yet some would argue that my rank is insufficient to partake of ensouled flesh.”

“You share my rank now,” Mr. Breen said.

But what of the stripling she had feasted upon that night, she wondered, its flesh still piquant upon her tongue? What would it have said of rank, tethered in its box and fattened for the tables of its betters? But this was heresy to say or think (though there were radical reformers who said it more and more frequently), and so Mrs. Breen turned her mind away. Tonight, in sacred ritual, she had consumed human flesh and brought her grandfather’s ambitions—and her own—to fruition. It was as Mr. Browning had said. All was right with the world. God was in his Heaven.

And then the window shattered, blowing glass into her face and eyes.

Mrs. Breen screamed and flung herself back into her husband’s arms. With a screech of tortured wood, the carriage lurched beneath her and in the moment before it slammed back to the cobbles upright, she thought it would overturn. One of the horses shrieked in mindless animal terror—she had never heard such a harrowing sound—and then the carriage shuddered to a stop at last. She had a confused impression of torches in the fog and she heard the sound of men fighting. Then Mr. Breen was brushing the glass from her face and she could see clearly and she knew that she had escaped without injury.