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

“Madam—” her own footman said at this unprecedented behavior.

“Let me out!”

The footman reached up to assist her. Mrs. Breen ignored him.

“Lady Donner,” she cried as she stumbled to the pavement. “Lady Donner, please wait.”

Lady Donner turned to look at her.

“It is so delightful to see you,” Mrs. Breen effused. “I—”

She broke off. Lady Donner’s face was impassive. It might have been carved of marble. “Do I know you?” she said.

“But—” Mrs. Breen started. Again she broke off. But what? What could she say?

Lady Donner held her gaze for a moment longer. Then, with the ponderous dignity of an iceberg, she disappeared into the house. The door snicked closed behind her with the finality of a coffin slamming shut.

“Madam, let me assist you into your carriage,” the footman said at her elbow. There was kindness in his voice. Somehow that was the most mortifying thing of all, that she should be pitied by such a creature.

“I shall walk for a while,” she said.

“Madam, please—”

“I said I shall walk.”

She put her back to him and strode down the sidewalk as fast as her skirts would permit. Her face stung with shame, more even than it had burned with the humiliation of her husband’s curse. She felt the injustice of her place in the world as she had never felt it before—felt how small she was, how little she mattered in the eyes of such people, that they should toy with her as she might have toyed with one of Sophie’s dolls, and disposed of it when it ceased to amuse her.

The blind, heat-struck roar of the city soon enveloped her. The throng pressed close, a phantasmagoria of subhuman faces, cruel and strange, distorted as the faces in dreams, their pores overlarge, their yellow flesh stippled with perspiration. Buildings leaned over her at impossible angles. The air was dense with the creak of passing omnibuses and the cries of cabbies and costermongers and, most of all, the whinny and stench of horses, and the heaping piles of excrement they left steaming in the street.

She thought she might faint.

Her carriage pulled up to the curb beside her. Her footman dropped to the pavement before it stopped moving.

“Madam, please. You must get into the carriage,” he said, and when he flung open the carriage door, she allowed him to hand her up into the crepuscular interior. Before he’d even closed the latch the carriage was moving, shouldering its way back into the London traffic. She closed her eyes and let the rocking vehicle lull her into a torpor.

She would not later remember anything of the journey or her arrival at home. When she awoke in her own bed some hours afterward, she wondered if the entire episode had not been a terrible dream. And then she saw her maid, Lily, sitting by the bed, and she saw the frightened expression on the girl’s face, and she knew that it had actually happened.

“We have sent for the physician, madam,” Lily said.

“I do not need a physician,” she said. “I am beyond a physician’s help.”

“Please, madam, you must not—”

“Where is my husband?”

“I will fetch him.”

Lily went to the door and spoke briefly to someone on the other side. A moment later, Mr. Breen entered the room. His face was pale, his manner formal.

“How are you, dearest?” he asked.

“I have ruined us,” she said.

She did not see how they could go on.

Yet go on they did.

Word was quietly circulated that Mrs. Breen had fallen ill and thus a thin veil of propriety was drawn across her discourtesy and its consequence. But no one called to wish her a quick recovery. Even Mrs. Breen’s former friends—those pale, drab moths fluttering helplessly around the bright beacon of Society—did not come. Having abandoned them in the moment of her elevation, Mrs. Breen found herself abandoned in turn.

Her illness necessitated the Breens’ withdrawal to the country well before the Season ended. There, Mr. Breen remained cold and distant. Once, he had warmed to her small enthusiasms, chuckling indulgently when the dressmaker left and she spilled out her purchases for his inspection. Now, while he continued to spoil her in every visible way, he did so from a cool remove. She no longer displayed her fripperies for his approval. He no longer asked to see them.

Nor did he any longer make his twice-weekly visit to her chamber. Mrs. Breen had aforetime performed her conjugal obligations dutifully, with a kind of remote efficiency that precluded real enthusiasm. She had married without a full understanding of her responsibilities in this regard, and, once enlightened, viewed those offices with the same mild aversion she felt for all the basic functions of her body. Such were the consequences of the first sin in Eden, these unpleasant portents of mortality, with their mephitic smells and unseemly postures. Yet absent her husband’s hymeneal attentions, she found herself growing increasingly restive. Her dream of the ladder recurred with increasing frequency.

The summer had given way to fall when Sophie became, by chance and by betrayal, Mrs. Breen’s primary solace.

If Mr. Breen took no interest in his daughter, his wife’s sentiments were more capricious. Though she usually left Sophie in the capable hands of the governess, she was occasionally moved to an excess of affection, coddling the child and showering her with kisses. It was such a whim that sent her climbing the back stairs to the third-floor playroom late one afternoon. She found Sophie and Miss Pool at the dollhouse. Mrs. Breen would have joined them had a book upon the table not distracted her.

On any other day she might have passed it by unexamined. But she had recently found refuge in her subscription to Mudie’s, reading volume by volume the novels delivered to her by post—Oliphant and Ainsworth, Foster, Collins. And so curiosity more than anything else impelled her to pick the book up. When she did, a folded tract—closely printed on grainy, yellow pulp—slipped from between the pages.

“Wait—” Miss Pool said, rising to her feet—but it was too late. Mrs. Breen had already knelt to retrieve the pamphlet. She unfolded it as she stood. A Great Horror Reviled , read the title, printed in Gothic Blackletter across the top. The illustration below showed an elaborate table setting. Where the plate should have been there lay a baby, split stem to sternum by a deep incision, the flesh pinned back to reveal a tangle of viscera. Mrs. Breen didn’t have to read any more to know what the tract was about, but she couldn’t help scanning the first page anyway, taking in the gruesome illustrations and the phrases set apart in bold type. Too long have the First Families battened upon the flesh of the poor! one read, and another, Blood must flow in the gutters that it may no longer flow in the kitchens of men! —which reminded Mrs. Breen of the boy who had hurled the stone through their carriage window. The Anthropophagic Crisis, Mrs. Graves had called it. Strife in the House of Commons, carnage in the streets.

Miss Pool waited by the dollhouse, Sophie at her side.

“Please, madam,” Miss Pool said, “it is not what you think.”

“Is it not? Whatever could it be, then?”

“I—I found it in the hands of the coachman this morning and confiscated it. I had intended to bring it to your attention.”

Mrs. Breen thought of the coachman testing the weight of her husband’s walking stick, the brigand’s blood black in the jaundiced fog.

“What errand led you to the stables?”

“Sophie and I had gone to look at the horses.”

“Is this true, Sophie?” Mrs. Breen asked.

Sophie was still for a moment. Then she burst into tears.