“I’m afraid of all sorts of things,” Priya said. “But not farm animals.”
“I wish you could have known my Molly.”
“Molly? This is a … what’s the word? Mare?”
“Is, yes. As far as I know, she’s still alive. I had to give her away after my da died.” Horses live a long time.
“Not sell?”
I shrugged. “I sold the rest. Her … the person I wanted to have her couldn’t pay for a horse, so I gave her to him. A neighbor’s lad. My age.” I knowed Lutz would give her back to me if I ever came looking. That was part of it. I didn’t say that, though, because I didn’t know if it would be fair to him — or to Molly — and frankly, I didn’t know if I would. You grieve, it’s one thing. You grieve and go back, it’s another.
She gave me a sly look. “Did you love him?”
“Hah! No, of course not. I loved that mare. Though some folk would say you can’t love an animal, on account of they have no souls.”
“I don’t believe that,” Priya said.
“That you can’t love an animal?”
“You can love an animal,” she said. She was uncoiling a little, straightening up. Though it hadn’t gotten any warmer in the room. “And animals have souls. Your religion is very strange to me, Karen. I believe that when we die, we come back on a wheel of rebirth. And depending on whether we have acquitted ourselves well — depending on our karma—we may be reincarnated to a good life. Or we may be reincarnated to a life where we must earn our way out of misdeeds — pain we have caused, injustice we have benefited from.”
I’d been blinking at her confusedly, I’m afraid. But when she said that last, I bounced on my seat bones, ridiculously pleased to find some common ground in her blasphemy. Or was it just heathenish? Can a heathen blaspheme?
I’m a fallen woman; who am I to judge?
I said excitedly, “That’s like Purgatory!”
Her lips curved so gently I’d be afraid to call it a smile, lest it fly away. “We would say it is dharma. It supports the natural and proper order of things.” She got quiet again, and I knowed from her frown that she was wondering what her past self had done to deserve a life in Peter Bantle’s cribs. But she pulled herself back together and said, “Tell me about your mare. Your Molly.”
“She’s a strawberry Appaloosa,” I said.
Priya looked at me like I was speaking one of the maybe five or six languages on earth that she wasn’t already fluent in.
I guess it was what you’d call technical vocabulary. “That means she’s a roan, a kind of speckled red and gray. With a white blanket across her shoulders and … sort of silver-dollar-sized spots of red on top of that. And she’s smart, Molly is. Smart for a horse, anyway.”
Smart enough to get herself into plenty of trouble. Learning to unlatch gates and suchlike. Nearly colicked herself once, getting into the grain. I told Priya about some of that but wound down halfway through what was supposed to have been a funny story about a barn cat when the wave of longing hit me. Loneliness and missing … Molly, and Da. Molly almost worse than Da. Because Da was gone, and he weren’t coming back, and I hadn’t had no choice about it.
I hadn’t had no choice about Molly, neither. Not really. But I’d had to make one anyway.
Priya waited a few seconds, as if to see if I was going to carry on. Then, as if I’d asked a question, she started to tell me about her baby brother, and her parents, and the crop failures. And how she and her sister had signed indenture papers to come to America so their family could afford to eat, not realizing that they was going to wind up in a barred crib or paraded on leashes through Chinatown weekly for their only exercise. “It was supposed to be domestic work,” she said. “We were supposed to send money home.”
She was picking at that cuticle again. She was going to draw blood in a minute.
“Well,” I said. “That’s what you’re doing now, ain’t it? You just got a bit delayed.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I reached out and pulled her nails away from her skin. She looked up in surprise, like she hadn’t noticed what she was doing to herself, despite having been so studious over it. Her fingers was strong for being so slender, and she gave my hand a short, quick squeeze. I was half-stunned by how warm it was, and I thought — for a second — she was leaning in toward me and I thought I might get my kissing in after all.
I wondered if someday she might trust me enough to fall asleep with her head on my shoulder. Or even lie there a little while without having to get up and pace circles to burn off the anxiousness of getting too close.
All I saw was her lips as she hesitated. Then her head twisted around and her expression froze. “What’s that smell?”
A second later and I caught it also. Burning — and not the clean smell of wood or coal. This was a dirty kind of stink, like a trash fire.
“I smell smoke!” Priya cried.
“Shit,” I said. “I do, too.”
* * *
Some good grace of God made me pry open my hiding place — right there in front of Priya — and grab out my journal and my savings. I left Da’s wooden horse, though it about killed me. We pulled sheets from the bed, wet them in the basin, and wrapped them around our heads. I opened the door — Priya made me touch it first and check to see if the wood or the handle was hot, which I had never heard about before then — and we stumbled hand in hand into the corridor, me holding up the lamp.
The door at the top of the stairs was open, and ordinarily Connie would of had the head of whoever left it so — letting all the heat run out of the downstairs like that. And the heat was sure running out now: streamers of smoke crept along the stair ceiling like foul black fingers. Hot air rushed up the steps, like holding my hand over a lamp chimney except on an industrial scale. The smoke had already left oily smears on the corridor ceiling, like the ripples on water. I stared at it, trying to think — could we get down the stairs? Could we go out the window? It was only a short drop down to the street, but it was farther to the sidewalk — much farther — and I wasn’t sure I could jump the gap. And even if the fire companies were en route, which they probably weren’t because I hadn’t heard nobody raise the alarm of Fire! it might be twenty minutes before they arrived. And then if two or more showed up, they might just have a fistfight over who got to hook up to the hydrant rather than getting to the business of dousing fires.
In twenty minutes, we might all be dead.
“Fire!” Priya shouted, thumping on the nearest door. “Fire!”
Now, that was what you call direct and functional action. Since I couldn’t make up my own mind what to do, I figured I might as well follow Priya’s lead.
She was pounding on Effie’s door, because Effie was next door to me. I whirled around and ran down to Miss Francina’s room, shouting.
Other doors were starting to open — Crispin, and Bea, and Pollywog all pouring out in their nightclothes. Crispin had grabbed boots and was stamping them on over his pajamas. That seemed like a fine sensible idea, but all my boots required a buttonhook and if I was going to die in a fire I didn’t want it to be because I stopped to make sure my shoes was fastened. Or because I broke my neck trying to run in ones as weren’t.
Madame’s bedroom was on the floor below, behind her office. I looked up and saw Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel coming out of the room they share, and from the way they headed to the stairs they had realized that, too. But just as they got there, I heard a door below slam open and Madame shouting up the stair, “Girls, it’s a fire in the kitchen! Go out the windows at the front! Get out! Get out!”