Not, of course, that it mattered.
The director of the place had trotted out the best he had to offer, and she had taken two little boys about eight years old, but small and looking five at most, with thin, half-starved faces and dull, incurious expressions. In height and weight, they were virtually identical. The main difference between them seemed to be that one hummed breathlessly and tunelessly to himself constantly and the other did not. They were not very intelligent and altogether incurious; this, too, was probably the result of being starved all of their lives.
This was not what the director would have had her believe, but Cordelia knew better, both from scrying on these places from afar in preparation for selecting one, and from the stories children who had run from the orphanages into the street had told her.
Food was scant, and poor. Generally as little as the directors of the places could get by with. Cordelia suspected that they were pocketing the difference between what they were allotted to feed each child and what they actually used to feed each child. Meat was practically unheard of, the staple diet was oatmeal porridge, thin vegetable soup, and bread. Infants were weaned onto this as soon as possible. The infants in orphanages were generally wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes and laid out on cots, as many as would fit on each cot, so that they looked like tinned sardines. In this orphanage, they were lucky, their smallclothes were changed twice a day; in many other places, once a day was the rule. They were fed skimmed milk, or the buttermilk left after butter had been churned out of it; this was cheaper, much cheaper, than whole milk. They didn’t cry much; crying took energy, and these infants did not have a great deal of that to spare.
It didn’t take very much to kill them either. A bit of the croup, a touch of fever, being too near an open window—nine out of every ten died, and were unceremoniously buried without markers in potters’ fields. They had entered the world noisily; they generally left it silently, slipping out of it with a sigh or a final gasp.
Older children fared little better, though by the time they reached the age of three or four, all but the strongest had been winnowed out. And orphanages would have made fertile ground for Cordelia to hunt for ghostly servants without ever having to kill the children herself, except that these children were either wild creatures or so utterly passive that they made Peggoty look lively by comparison.
However, with a bit of feeding, perhaps the passive ones could be enlivened to the point of becoming useful. It would be interesting to experiment with these two.
She had been told their names were “Robert” and “Albert.” Virtually every other boy child in an orphanage was named “Albert,” in homage to the late Prince of Wales. Presumably, this was in an effort to get the children into someone else’s hands by appealing to their patriotism or sentimentality.
Well, as of this morning, Robert, who was the one that hummed, was silent, and Albert, who had been the silent one, was humming. Proof enough that the transfer had been successful.
She decided that she would wait to see which of the two developed the stronger personality over the next few days, with proper feeding and access to some second-hand toys and worn picture books she had indifferently purchased from a flea-market stall. Toys were supposed to be educational, and she didn’t want to be bothered with actually sending them to school. That would be the one she would use in the second experiment to displace the spirit of the other. The displaced ghost she would make into her servant if it looked as if there was anything there worth the saving, the other she would feed for a while longer to see how he turned out. Orphanages might well prove to be an additional source of servants, when her own efforts on the streets dried up.
Provided, of course, she could keep people from noticing that all of the children she took to work for her died. The problem with using orphanages as a recruiting ground was that the people who ran them were generally busybody nosy-parkering sorts.
Well, she would deal with that difficulty later. For the moment, her experiment was going well, and she might not even need any more ghostly recruits if she could act in her own person as a man.
David was deep in the countryside at the moment. This was annoying, because she could not keep her eyes directly on him—but it was also something of a relief, because she was free to do whatever she chose without having to have him under her supervision.
And the cause was good. A “weekend”—which really meant a week or more—house party, at the estate of a very influential MP. Commons, rather than Lords, but in this case, that was all to the good. It was time for David to move a little out of his own social circle and into the circle that lived, breathed, and ate politics.
Not that the man was crude; it was his grandfather who had actually made the money. His father had undertaken the more genteel path of investing it prudently and skillfully. The son was a solicitor, with the specialty of estate management, and never saw the inside of a courtroom. Actually, he seldom saw the inside of his law offices; he had lesser solicitors and an army of clerks to do most of the work for him. The sole reason for becoming a solicitor, both in his and his father’s minds, was so he could go into politics, the taint of Money having become cleansed and purified by contact with the Law.
So David was there this weekend, under the Great Man’s prudently-extended wing. This would be a purely social occasion; the selected male guests would be examining him for any potential flaws, such as a weakness for dabbling in art or poetry, or a tendency to drink too much in public—or a too-flamboyant manner when drinking. The female guests would be probing his suitability as a husband—not that any of them would have a chance at him. Left to himself, he would marry in due course, but only within the ranks of the Elemental Masters.
Or at least, that was probably what he would do, though there were the odd marriages outside those ranks. It would make things difficult for him, of course, unless his wife was the sort to wish to play Lady of the Manor in the country, while he attended to his business in the city and his position as the chief of his Master’s Circle—Cordelia blinked at that thought, her attention distracted from assessing the two boys as they ate.
“Graves,” she told the maid assigned to care for them, “Give them the toys when they have finished. And at luncheon, see to it that they not be allowed the jam and cakes until after they have finished the nourishing meal Cook will make for them.”
The girl bobbed a curtsy. “Yes’m,” she said deferentially. She had been an under-housemaid, chosen by Cook because she professed to have looked after her younger siblings until going into service. She seemed competent. She would scarcely have done as a nanny, of course, had these been anything other than what they were—pale, passive little specimens unlikely to give trouble. But she was certainly up to watching them, seeing that they were kept clean and neat, and teaching them how to play with the toys they had been provided with.
Cordelia retired to her parlor, but to think, not to conduct business or attend to social obligations.