The Whatnot by Stefan Bachmann Page B

woman, one side of her face white, and the other side black, black as a lacquered box.
    Florence La Bellina stared at Hettie for several heartbeats, those red-rimmed eyes bottomless and empty. Then she turned and glided away into the shadows of the house, her skirts rippling like blood in the dark.

CHAPTER VII
    The Birds
    A madwoman was locked in the cell across from Pikey’s. Across the dripping corridor, beyond the backs of the scratching rats and the tufts of moss, she sat hunched against the dank wall. He could hear her muttering to herself in the dark, hour after hour, whispering words that made no sense.
    â€œWe knew,” she said, and her voice grated like an old hinge. “We knew he would clip their wings and put their heads in the earth. But it was sad.”
    Pikey scooted out of his corner and peered through the bars. The rats scattered. The woman did not look up. She sat as she always did, huddled in shadow. Her hair was lank and straggling, hanging over her face. Sometimes, when she said a word particularly loudly, the strands would fly away from her mouth. Pikey could not see her eyes, but he knew she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t looking at anyone.
    â€œThe water is black there, you know.” Her hands went to her ears, covering them. “Black and green and sharp as turpentine, and the hammers fall all the night through.”
    Pikey coughed and crawled back into his corner. There was a patch of straw there, damp and black with age. High in the wall, on the level of the street, was a barred window with not even a shutter to stop the snow and the wind from blowing in. The cell was set a little way underground, and the walls were always wet. Some days, when the air in the street was not as cold, and the steam coaches were more numerous, the snow would melt and the water would flow down the stone in rivulets. Moss grew out of cracks in the stones. All Pikey could see through the window were feet, passing by in an endless, pounding parade.
    â€œDon’t let him see,” the madwoman hissed from her cell. “Don’t let him see!”
    Some of the feet were slopping by in filthy, broken boots like his own. Others wore fine, ebony overshoes, waxed and waterproofed and polished to mirrors. Still others were pinched into pointy, button-up ladies’ boots that peeked out from skirts held up over the muck.
    To amuse himself, Pikey tried to imagine what sort of faces belonged to the feet passing outside. The fine overshoes, he decided, belonged to pale, bushy-browed gentlemen with warts on their noses and gold watches in their hands, gentlemen who worked in banks and smoked cigars until their lungs turned black and they coughed up little puffs of ash. The worn boots belonged to kinder men, busy and tired, like Jem when he wasn’t drunk. The dainty boots and the colorful children’s shoes were good people’s, sweet ladies and happy boys and girls. Those were Pikey’s favorite to think about.
    â€œAnd the others?” The madwoman’s voice rang out suddenly, sharp in the depths of the jail. “The others in their pretty clothes? All gone? All broken?”
    Pikey shut out her cries and moved a little closer to the window. He decided to see if any of his guesses were correct. He touched the sock that hid his clouded eye, making sure it was still in place. When a particularly fine pair of green velvet boots passed by, he scurried to the base of the window and peered up.
    The boots belonged to an elderly lady. She wore clothes all in green, with a hat and muffler of silver fox fur. When she saw him staring up at her through the bars, she let out a gasp and picked her way over the slush to the other side of the street.
    Pikey watched her go. Well, he thought. That weren’t how I imagined her at all.
    The others were no better. Nobody’s faces seemed to match the boots they wore. The polished overshoes often belonged to perfectly normal gentlemen