The Visionist: A Novel by Rachel Urquhart

it took myself and another sister to carry you here. I made you drink a sleeping draught. To calm you. You were dirty and your hair was full of lice. We washed you—scrubbed and picked until you were clean of all life except your own.” She sat up, smoothing the covers over her legs, making the bed neat around her. “As you may have heard, I am Charity, but known as Sister Charity to all within this place. You, too, will be a sister soon, after your confession. Sister Polly. Sister Polly, the new believer.”
    Polly heard the girl’s voice coming to her from afar, as though each of them stood atop her own mountain calling into the wind through cupped hands. Confession? She wanted to lean forward and cry, What? What is it you are saying? Tell me again! But she was lying down, bound beneath her bedcovers, and she found herself clinging to each sentence in her mind just long enough to card it into meaning.
    “I do not know where I am,” she said, afraid of the sound she would make in this stark new place.
    “You are in The City of Hope,” the girl answered. “Your home. You must forget all that you have left behind, for your life begins now. Soon you will hear the bell and we shall rise and wash. It is Sabbath so we shall go together to the meetinghouse this afternoon, and you will be able to see all the believers who live here.”
    “Shall I see my brother then, too?” Polly asked. She felt her heart awaken, beating inside her ribs as though it wanted to get out. “Will Ben come to the meeting place?”
    A veil dropped over the ginger girl’s face. “I cannot deny,” she said, “that you will see young Benjamin, but he is nothing to you now, nor you to him, and you must look through one another as if you were naught more than apparitions. You must see into the spirits of the believers behind him and draw from their purity, for you have no flesh kin now.”
    Polly looked up at the ceiling. It was smoothly painted. No cracks through which her angels might come to rescue her. She closed her eyes again. The City of Hope. Where was the hope in losing everything and everyone she had ever known? How long would she be held here? How would she find Ben and whisk him away? Away to…where?
    “Why must I pretend that my brother is not my brother?” she asked. She no longer felt afraid of this stranger. Nothing moved her anymore, not love, not worry, not even sadness. She had become as hard and dry as a winter seed.
    “Mama said she had business to attend to,” Polly said, not intending to speak her doubts out loud. “Perhaps. And yet, how could she have left us in a place where there can be no love?”
    The girl let out a sigh. “There is love here, you will see. Brother for brother, sister for sister. But flesh bonds are forged in the fires of carnal sin. Your Ben, like you, was born of a filthy act. Here, that filth will be lifted. You shall see for yourself, if you are willing to renounce your blood ties and confess. Should you refuse, then you do not belong among us.”
    The room was quiet as Polly tried to absorb what the girl was telling her. Certainly there had been evil in her old life. But there had been tenderness as well, hidden in the instants when she and Mama brushed hands while picking berries, or looked up and smiled at each other having finished a particularly burdensome chore. Tenderness tucked away into the time she spent chasing Ben through the barn in fun or coaxing him from his secret hideaways. Had not Mama glowed proudly at the sight of Polly poring, in secret, over the books in her attic room? Had they not shared many such small but rebellious alliances? The luxury of a sweet from the Dry Goods. A soft pair of mittens Mama knit for her—privately, of course, so that Silas would not punish her for using up valuable wool. Such flickers of love had sustained Polly when all else seemed hopeless and cruel. How would she survive without them now?
    She had no choice. She and Mama might have found