Elizabeth Bear: Karen Memory

She was a fighter, and it had cost her. My daddy was a horse tamer, and he taught me. Some men don’t know how to manage a woman or a horse or a dog. Where a good master earns trust and makes a partner of a smart wife or a beast, acts the protector, and gets all the benefit of those brains and that spirit, all the bad ones know is how to crush it out and make them cringing meek. There’s a reason they call it breaking .

The more spirit, the longer it takes to break them. And the strongest ones you can’t break at all. They die of it, and my daddy used to say it was a damned tragic bloody loss.

He probably wouldn’t think much of me working on my back, but what he taught me kept me safe anyway, and it wasn’t like either of us asked him to get thrown by a horse and go dying. Which just goes to prove it can happen to anyone, no matter how good and how careful they are.

Priya looked up at me through all those bruises, and I thought filly a third time. I could see in her eyes what I saw in some of my daddy’s Spanish mustang ponies. You’d never break this one. You’d never even bend her. She’d die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through a smile.

My hand shook when I pushed the coffee at her. “I can’t take that,” she said, and that was my second surprise. Her English weren’t no worse than mine, and maybe a little better. “You can’t wait on me. You’re a white lady.” “I’m a white tart,” I said, and let her see me grin. “And you need it if you’re going to sit up with Miss Lee here. You’re skin over bones, and how far did you carry her tonight?”

I thought she’d look down, but she didn’t. Her eyes — you’d call ’em black, but that was only if you didn’t look too closely. Like people call coffee black. And her hair was the same; it wasn’t not-black, if you take my meaning, but the highlights in it were chestnut-red. I knowed I weren’t supposed to think so, but she was beautiful. “She got shot coming out from under the pier,” she said. “She told me where to run to.”

Madame Damnable’s. Which were near on a half mile off, and uphill the whole way. I poked the coffee at her again, and this time she let go of Merry Lee’s hand with one of hers and lifted the cup off the saucer, which seemed like meeting me halfway. I leaned around her to put the saucer and the biscuits on the bedside stand. I could still hear Crispin moving around behind me and I was sure he was listening, but that was fine. I’d trust Crispin to birth my babies.

She swallowed. “I heard Mr. Bantle shouting downstairs.”

There was more she meant to say, but it wouldn’t come out. Like it won’t sometimes. I knowed what she wanted to ask anyway, because it was the same I would of wanted if I was her. “Priya — did I say that right?”

She sipped the coffee and then looked at it funny, like she’d never tasted such a thing. “Priyadarshini,” she said. “Priya is fine. This is sweet.”

“I put sugar in it,” I said. “You need it. In a minute here I’m going to head down to the kitchen and see if Connie or Miss Bethel can rustle up a plate of supper for you. But what I’m trying to say is Madame Damnable — this is Madame Damnable’s house you brought Merry Lee to — she’s not going to give you back to Bantle for him to starve and beat on no more.”

I’m not sure she believed me. But she looked down at her coffee and she nodded. I patted her shoulder where the shift covered it. “You eat your biscuits. I’ll be back up with some food.”

“And a bucket,” Crispin said. When I turned, he was waving around at all that blood on rags and his forceps and on the floor.

“And a bucket,” I agreed, making sure not to look where he pointed.

I took one glance back at Priya before I went, cup up over her face hiding her frown, eyes back on Merry. And then and there I swore an oath that Peter Bantle was damned sure going to know what hit him.

On récolte ce que l’on sème.

That’s French. It means, “What goes around comes around.” So Beatrice tells me.

I never made it back up to Priya that night. Connie and Miss Bethel was both up — the whole house was up by now — but I didn’t see Miss Bethel and Connie took one look at me and poured a cup of sweet chocolate laced with whiskey down my throat and sent me up to bed, promising to feed Priya only if I went willing. Though I suppose it won’t surprise you none that when I finally made it to my room I weren’t in no condition to sleep.

What might surprise you is my room, though, if all you’ve seen is the downstairs or the company bedrooms of a parlor house like Madam Damnable’s. My room’s maybe no bigger than a dockside crib — I can touch both walls with my hands outstretched, and one’s just chimney brick with a coat of whitewash. But there’s a little white table with a lamp on top, and a shelf between the legs for my books and my little wooden horse. My room is all whitewash except the ivory moldings, and it’s all mine.

It’d be a monk’s cell except there’s a rag rug on the floor that I braided and sewed from scraps of our party dresses, so it’s every bright color you can fathom all wound around one another. The bed’s a straw-tick cot I can just about turn over in, soft and clean and hay sweet, and nobody sleeps on those sheets but me. We work downstairs, in the fancy chambers. My room’s a dormer, and it’s warm from the heat rising from the kitchen, and best of all, it’s got a little glazed window I can see over the rooftops from, to the Sound. I can’t see the street, because of the roofline blocking my view, but that’s all to the good the way I figure.

It was light, which ain’t so unusual for me going to bed, but my window faces near to west as makes no difference and anyway, the rain was coming down through a thick gray pall like a dirty fleece. I drew the shades and the curtains and pulled on my nightshirt, but when I laid myself down I couldn’t sleep a wink. I just stared up at that dormer ceiling and picked at my cuticles with my thumb, which is a terrible bad habit.

I could feel every stem of rye in my usually cozy straw tick as if they was laid across my skin like flogging stripes. You’d think I’d never hemmed nor ironed the sheets, nor pulled them tight, there was that many wrinkles gouging me every time I rolled over.

Eventually, I pulled myself over the side slat — which was a mite more challenging than it should of been — and fetched my diary from its hiding place under a half-loose floorboard. The diary’s a little book I sewed the pages of myself, and stitched a pretty calico cover for. I got a pencil off my table and I balanced the little book on my knee to write. I should of given it cover boards, for sure, but I’m still working out how to bind those. I think I might need the big sewing machine, and maybe some kind of special needle.

Writing settles me, like, and I figured if I could get the night down I might be able to get it out of my head for a few hours and get some rest. My eyes burned and my joints ached, I was that tired, and maybe a little dizzy from the whiskey.

But I couldn’t write so good, or get anything laid in a proper straight furrow. Instead, I picked out words and sentences on the paper all wrong and in any sort of order and only realized how little sense or progress I was making when I tasted the splintery, resiny ponderosa pine of the pencil. I’d chewed through the yellow paint. That kind of pine somewhat smells like cinnamon, but it turns out it don’t taste like cinnamon at all.

Anyway, I must of slept eventually because I woke with a page of my diary crumpled and damp under my cheek and my pencil on the floor by the bed. My room had gone stuffy. The rain was over, and when the sun came out it just about turned the whole city into a sweat lodge, even in winter. I knowed from the way the light hit my window that I’d missed breakfast, which Connie dishes up around one.