Good thing you’re set on broadening your horizons, girl, Daddy’d said when Bets showed it to him yesterday. Most Wheelers know these roads inside out, but this… He’d shaken his head, turning the map this way and that. If you ain’t inherited my sense of direction, well, you’d better ask yer Mamma for the next best thing. Reckon she’ll give it to you easier’n she will me.
But Bets knows Mamma never gave anything so easily as she did criticism, followed by her own—the only—opinion. Death won’t have changed her mother that much.
She’s counting on it.
Steeling her resolve, Bets holds out the drawing, keeping her hand flat and low, close enough for Mamma to lick. It really is the worst piece of art she’s ever crafted, as appalling in the gloom as it is in full bright, but Bets yammers like she has so many times before when showing off what she’s made. Too quick, too eager for approval.
“The bookmobile stops in the city twice a month to restock,” she says, pointing. “Here and here and there. Don’t know exactly where else I’m headed, but probably we’ll follow the river,” she wags her finger at a splotch and a purple squiggle, “then motor alongside the canyon a whiles.” Brown penciled nonsense cuts across the page, so ugly Bets can hardly bear looking at it. “Reckon this map’s going to lead me on some grand adventures, don’t you?”
Chin lifted, Mamma rolls her eyes at the thing.
Don’t hold back now, Bets thinks, suppressing a grin when Mamma uncrosses her arms, snatches and crumples the page.
How will you ever get by, the ghost’s blue sneer seems to say. Magnanimous, Mamma fumbles at her skirt, freeing Daddy’s silver-toothed map from the wool’s dark folds. With a huff, she tosses it up into the dirt tunnel. Don’t let me stop you.
“Oh,” Bets says, smiling at last, running a thumb over the mouth-piece’s worn ridges. A new song tickling her lips. A coal of certainty burning hot in her belly. “I won’t.”
The Bride in Sea-Green Velvet
Robin Furth
“Have you brought her?” Sir Henry eyed the heavy burlap sack that Kane held in his right hand and impatiently tapped the steel tip of his ebony gentleman’s cane against the polished marble tiles of his summer house floor. It was dusk—the time he always preferred to meet with Kane—and the sun was setting over his vast estate and over the crashing, ever-encroaching sea. But neither the beauty of the sunset nor the sound of the waves against the ragged cliffs were what made his pulse quicken. His heart was set upon much more sublime treasures.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Kane half-bowed as he removed his cap, exposing thick, unkempt black hair threaded with gray. Sir Henry grimaced with distaste. He despised Kane’s overt show of obsequiousness. It was a sham, and they both knew it. Yet it was as much a part of their twenty-year business interactions as the fat velvet purses which Sir Henry regularly handed over and which Kane inevitably stashed into his seemingly bottomless pockets. Sir Henry pointed at Kane’s boots with the spiked tip of his cane. Graveyard mud still clung to his soles and heels in heavy clumps. In fact, he’d left a trail of dirt across the polished floor.
“Come now, man. You could have at least wiped your feet. Especially in the presence of a lady.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Kane walked dutifully to the doormat and wiped his shoes. There was something comical in his earnestness as he scuffed his soles back and forth, back and forth across the coarse fibers. “She was ever so hard to dig up,” he said. “Buried in clay, she was. And ever so deep. No coffin, neither. Had to dig the clay out of her eyes.”
With characteristic impatience, Sir Henry motioned for Kane to hand over the sack. But Kane tutted. “She cleaned up ever so well,” he said. “But I had to do the work myself. Bought special detergent and all.”
“You’ll be remunerated, as you always are.” Sir Henry held out his hand again, but Kane still did not budge. Instead, he stared at Sir Henry placidly.
“The field gate-guard, he had a gun. I risked my life, sir, to get this one for you. Though I must say, she’s a beauty.”
It was torture now, and Kane knew it. Sir Henry thought he would burst if he did not feel the sensuous weight of the sack in his hands. “Come, man. There will be an extra guinea for your trouble.”
“Six.”
“Excuse me?”
“Six guineas, sir. With regret.”
Sir Henry rolled his eyes. The man was a pickpocket as well as a grave robber, but Sir Henry raised his hand and clicked his fingers. The manservant who had been standing by the door, quiet as a shadow, slipped out of the room. He returned a few moments later with a velvet purse, even fatter than usual.
“Your money,” Sir Henry said as he held out the purse with one hand and held out his other for the sack.
“I would appreciate it if you counted it for me, sir, so that I can see it. It’s not that I don’t trust you, sir, but it’s the guild’s rules, as you know.”
Sir Henry gave an exasperated sigh. That damnable guild. Thieves, pickpockets, drug dealers, grave robbers. Sir Henry felt demeaned by the need to work with them, but how else would he procure his darlings? He would have had an assassin kill Kane long ago if he could have found a more amenable lackey to cater to his needs, but none was available. In the sordid graveyard circles he trod, Kane was the best. Besides, do in Kane and one of his brethren would come in the night and slit the throats of everyone in the household. Or perhaps they would choose exposure or blackmail. He was certain the guild had a file on him heavier than this velvet purse.
“Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. That’s fifty pounds, man.” Kane did not reply, but waited patiently as Sir Henry counted out the final six shillings of his bonus. “…Five-and-ten, five-and-eleven, six shillings.” Scowling, Sir Henry held out the purse. “For some men, Kane, that’s a year’s wages.”
“And for some,” Kane retorted, “it’s less than pocket money.” Covered in graveyard dirt as he was, Kane flashed a grin as false as a three-bob bit, then took the purse and stashed it in his coat’s deep inner pocket. As he did so, the light caught the skull-and-crossbones insignia of his damnable guild, tattooed on the web between left thumb and forefinger. Sir Henry grimaced in distaste.
“Kane,” Sir Henry said as the man turned to go. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Grin wider than ever, Kane placed the voluptuously rounded sack in Sir Henry’s hand—a hand that trembled with barely contained excitement.
“Thank you,” Sir Henry said. “You are dismissed.”
Kane bowed. “You know how to reach me should you need me,” he said, and then stepped out of the French doors and into the shadows of the night.
Listening to the crashing of the sea against the cliffs’ sheer drop only yards from the summer house’s large glass doors, Sir Henry waited until Kane disappeared. Then, his hands shaking, he reached into the rough burlap sack and withdrew his prize.
His heart skipped a beat. Even in the jaundiced light of the gas lamp, she was exquisite. The very foundation of beauty lay in his hands. No flesh or sinew or muscle to mar the gorgeous symmetry, the perfection of the skull. Large, round eye sockets, gently curved orbital bones, delicate nasal cavity, slightly pointed chin, brow ridge both smooth and understated. She was the very essence of feminine charm. Scoundrel that he was, Kane had outdone himself. Hands still shaking, Sir Henry returned his prize to the grubby burlap sack. Blowing out the lamp, he exited the summer house, carefully locking it behind him.