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Contrary to my usual habits, something about recent events, this city or
perhaps even the company has made me introspective. Normally, I analyze,
plan and move on, but lately my past has been with me, ghosts at the banquet.
Even frantic physical activity isn't serving to distract my mind. Revisiting
the past, all the moments Before, is counterproductive. I'm not even
sure where the line is between After and Before. Before Eleanor?
Before the streets? Before my parents died? Before I left India?
So many options…
Certainly, nothing my mother ever taught me prepared me for life on the
street. As I recall her, she was an even tempered woman with a sweet
voice and masses of brown hair that she kept carefully controlled.
She was a bit more involved with her children than was quite fashionable
among the British in India. Servants were so easy to come by that any
couple who could afford to marry could afford to have someone else mind the
children. So many died in the heat, contracting diseases the English
system could not endure, that caring for one's children invited heartbreak.
Even those who survived the earliest years weren't safe to love; all of us
were shipped back to England for schooling well before we turned ten.
We might see our parents a time or two during those years and might, if we
were lucky, end up in the same school with a sibling or two.
I had neither. Mama didn't like to leave Papa, and he was too busy
to make the trip, too busy trying to keep the money flowing to get all of
us properly schooled, the boys settled into careers and the girls married.
Miss Pullman's school was highly exclusive. Papa got me in through
a friend of his who had family connections and no money. We were a
little too bourgeois for that company; I think Papa had visions of visits
to friends leading to marriages that would pull the whole family into a new
circle. I know that Mama did from comments she let slip after Emily
and Elizabeth made the pilgrimage Home to England.
I don't believe that she had any great hopes for me in that direction.
I was a bit of an uncivilized monkey, scrawny enough that my continued survival
surprised the servants. With George and Terrence the closest to me
in age, I tended to tumble in the dirt a bit more than was ladylike.
Even then, I knew that clever words could get me out of most anything.
George suffered for it more than Terrence. As the elder (and as brother),
George had to look out for me. (I suppose that's why he fell so easily
into the role when I found him again. The whole family'd conditioned
him from an early age.)
When I went to school at age 7, I was popular enough, at least with the
other students. Mischief making monkeys always are. I made the
trip with a friend of Mama's, Mrs. Mackenzie, who was returning to England
with her four year old son in hopes of having one child live to adulthood.
She was kind enough to me in an abstracted way, and her little boy adored
me. I think his name was Douglas or something like that. I led
him all over the ship into all the places that small children long to see
and are not permitted to go. It's a wonder that we emerged with all
our limbs intact.
I found school tedious. I hated being trapped in a single building
without even a garden. There wasn't enough to do for me to expend my
physical energy. I ended up sneaking all over the place at all hours,
poking into things that were none of my business. I'd never learned
to respect the privacy of others, so it never occurred to me that my curiosity
might not be appreciated or that I should necessarily keep my discoveries
to myself. None of this made me at all popular with the adults at Miss
Pullman's. I learned discretion far too late.
I was 12, just on the verge of advancing to another school. Going
on to the seminary run by Miss Pullman's cousin, Miss Hackett, seemed a forgone
conclusion. My sisters had before me; nothing could prevent it.
Well almost nothing.
Papa's budget had stretched to the breaking point with seven of us in England
and Charlotte almost old enough to leave. He could manage, just, if
he and Mama were very careful and no unexpected expenses came up. I
can't precisely reconstruct what happened then. He invested, hoping
to make his fortune. I'm sure that someone advised him, that he thought
he knew exactly what he was doing. I don't know. I wasn't there.
George wasn't there. I'm sure everything looked honest and—and British.
I don't know how many times I've seen the market played in that way, how
many scams have been perpetrated. My father wasn't the first fool nor,
most certainly, the last. What happened to him, to us, wasn't important
to anyone's plans; we were collateral damage, incidentals. Money made
has to come from somewhere, and our ruin made a Setite rich. I expect
that he set out to make money by ruining people, but I doubt he ever bothered
to discover who he'd destroyed. I suppose he might have found the situation
amusing if he'd tracked it. Somehow, I doubt he did. A snake
playing focused games would have tracked all of us and seen us destroyed,
just for the fun of it. Instead, Jonathan, George and I all reached
adulthood, and I became Kindred. An upper middle class English family
of no particular note… Well, I doubt we were even worth commenting
on.
It's possible that there was a Setite next to Papa, encouraging him in his
madness. I wasn't there. George doesn't know. Jonathan
was dead before I found him. As the eldest, I'd have expected him to
know something. Then again, as the eldest, I'd have expected him to
make an effort to find the rest of us. He had some social connections
after all; Oscar Wilde paid for his funeral. But I digress…
At any rate, it is theoretically possible that a Setite recommended Papa
invest as he did or pushed him to final despair or even killed him and framed
him for Mama and Charlotte's deaths. But I doubt it. I simply
find a certain cosmic irony in letting people consider my grudge against
the Setites to be simple. They did kill my family. I do despise
them. It's just not that simple.
It's that they might have done it for fun. It's that they'd have laughed
at the unexpected consequences of their money making schemes if they'd known
at the time. It's that I don't want them to be casual in that laughter
again. I want them to remember that sometimes the victims bite back,
sometimes the forgotten emerge from the shadows. I want to change the
way their world works.
I don't remember what Mama and Papa looked like, not really. Miss
Pullman took my portrait of them to sell the frame. Selling my things
was, she informed me, the only way she saw to recoup some of what she'd spent
on me since my father's last tuition payment. I was surprised at the
venom in her attitude toward me. I'd had no idea of the enemies I'd
made in my efforts to avoid boredom. She kept me on as a servant, she
said, out of charity, but I suspect that she rather enjoyed how I'd fallen.
She certainly showed me no kindness. The meanest whore on the streets
had more compassion.
I do my best now to forget that time. It was worse than the streets
and is the reason I distinguish between deliberate and incidental cruelty.
Before Gene is the true dividing line.
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