Finding You Page 3

  Suddenly I feel cool fingers close over mine, and a voice at my ear says, “Let me help you.” A few quick movements later and my corset fits snugly about my ribs, hooked and tied. I turn to see who spoke, and it is the girl with the wild red hair who smiled at me. She is a little taller than I am, though her build is slight, and her eyes—deep, brown—are kind and sad and wise. “I’m Valentina,” she whispers.

  “Thank you,” I say, feeling the weight of her kindness. “I’m Isla.”

  She nods and smiles a sweet, forced smile.

  I turn so she won’t see my tears and pull on the blouse I was given. It’s made of lace only, hinting at the low-cut corset that does more to reveal my small breasts than bind them. The skirt is pale like the blouse, a creamy cotton with a high, wide waist and buttons up the side.

  There are thin stockings that reach my thighs, made of lace more sheer than the shirt, and leather boots that cover my ankles and take me an age to button. When I stand and look down at myself, I feel like a different girl. I’ve been branded like an animal. Someone else has bathed me and chosen my clothes and decided who I’m to be. I don’t have my family or the boy I love.

  When no one is watching, I clasp my locket about my neck and tuck it beneath my shirt into my corset, a secret statement that a piece of Isla Powe still exists.

  I try to count the number of girls but lose track as they’re shuffled about. There are at least thirty, probably more. As the girls finish dressing, men approach with black cords in their hands. Some of the girls fight them, but I stand still, concentrating on the sliver of peace that comes from the weight of the locket about my neck.

  The small girl moves closer to me when the men come toward us, and I stroke her hair gently and keep my head straight as a man kneels in front of me. He weaves the cord between my ankles, tying my feet together with only a foot or so of slack, enough to walk but not to run. I know without looking down that he steals a glance up my skirt as he works, but I don’t flinch. Tam will come, I tell myself. I use the thought of him for everything it’s worth, to strengthen my willpower. When the man binds the ankles of the other girl, she cries loudly, her fingers digging into my arm, but I say nothing.

  They tie our wrists the same way and line us up against a wall, telling us we may sit. I sink to the ground and the little girl mirrors me. The cord around my ankles is tighter than it needs to be, biting into my skin through the stockings. The girl who helped me, Valentina, sits only a few feet away from me, and a little farther down the line, another face catches my eye: a taller girl, with a strong frame and bold features surrounded by fine blond hair. The cat-girl, I think. She doesn’t sit. She stands erect against the wall and keeps her head level, her eyes direct. I wonder what she hopes to gain by her defiant attitude.

  They’ve dressed us to look as young as possible, I realize in dismay. Frilly sleeves, lace bodices, ribbons, and bows. Flowers ornament some of the outfits. The skirts are all short like a child’s and fail to cover our knees.

  There are so many of us, but somehow I’ve never felt so alone.

  After a time, a wide door on one side of the warehouse opens slowly, letting in a rectangle of brighter light, and revealing the silhouettes of half a dozen men. Most wear simple workers’ clothes, but one man—striding ahead of the rest in a glinting silk suit—stands out. From his dark, neatly trimmed beard to the perfectly tied cravat around his neck, he’s different. His eyes fall on me, twinkling when he smiles. I feel cold.

  The way he walks is deliberate, his shoes making very little noise. He stops five or six feet from me, and another man appears at his side. This one is smaller—his head only reaches the first man’s shoulder—and he coughs loudly as he runs nervous eyes over each of us girls. A valet, probably.

  “Yours is first pick, of course,” the commanding woman says, gliding over and arching her brows at the man in the suit. “If you’re paying the usual price.”

  He ignores her last remark, meeting my eyes again. I try to look away, but his gaze is like a magnet. “Are they new?” he asks, his voice low and smooth.

  “Brand-new. No one’s touched them. Will you be wanting the usual number?”

  “This lot is beautiful.”

  The woman scoffs. “A few of them maybe. We were hard-pressed, took some risks. How many? We do have other clients, you know.”

  “None who’ll pay what I do,” the man says smoothly. And still failing to answer her questions, he takes two gliding steps forward and looks down at me. Before I know what’s happening, his manservant is hauling me to my feet. I press against the wall, breathing through my teeth; the man in the silk suit is too close, with his coal-black hair and glinting eyes that never blink. He strokes his beard for a moment, watching me, and then his gloved fingers graze the side of my face, trail along my cheek. I close my eyes. I want Tam. I want Pa. “This one,” I hear him say in his silky voice, and his hand is gone.

  He moves slowly down the line of girls, choosing whomever he likes best. Valentina is picked; the younger girl who clings to me is not.

  The man’s valet pays the woman, and she nods, smiling like a crocodile. And then the other men begin to advance, without orders, moving together in perfect unity. One of them approaches me, his smile full of jagged teeth. My heart thuds faster and faster, but the wall is at my back. I have nowhere to go.

  His hand slides around my wrists and pulls me, stumbling, after him. As he does, the younger girl whimpers and surges forward, her small, hard fingers clawing at my arm. Immediately, one of the women appears and throws her backward, against the hard wall. As if she would have gotten far with her ankles bound.

  I hope the girl can see how sorry I am, how I feel for her. I wish I could call out that it’ll be all right, that she doesn’t need to worry. But that would be a lie. I don’t know what will happen to her, but I can imagine. The man hefts me onto his shoulder like a sack of produce, and I don’t struggle; there’s nowhere to go, even if I did get free. The little girl is held back, for the next round of buyers, no doubt. She gets smaller as I’m carried away, but her eyes, crazed and desperate, stay fixed on me for as long as I can see her, and her wails get louder and more miserable. And then I’m outside in the dying sunlight and I can’t see her anymore, just the doors closing behind me. A second later, I’m hefted into the back of a cart, and there are arms and legs sticking into my back and just the sky above me.

  The trapdoor in the cart is closed. I clamber into a sitting position, glancing around at my companions. There are about a dozen other girls in the cart. A few stare back at me and at each other with wide eyes. No one speaks. Some crumple against the sides of the cart, crying into their arms, and I cannot see their faces.

  Movement is awkward with the cords around our arms and legs. I manage to scoot against one of the sides as three men climb into the driving seat. I don’t see the fancy man or his attendant. No doubt they have a much finer way to travel, I think, anger pulsing through me.

  With the crack of a whip, the cart starts to move. The road comes into view behind us, hard-packed dirt hemmed on either side by sickly looking trees. We must be outside the city, if not quite to the rich forests I’ve read about, then somewhere in between. If there’s a place to make an escape, this might be it.

  I pull my knees slowly up to my chest and begin to finger the knots that bind my ankles. I bite the inside of my cheek when my hand begins to throb, and I want to cry. Spy stories run through my head, filled with clever characters who get out of far worse situations than this all the time.

  “Try anything”—my head jerks up as one of the men turns around to sit facing us, his feet resting on a row of crates—“and you’ll be sorry.” A pistol rests on his lap, the barrel pointing at us. I swallow and look at my hands, now still. We’ll be driving for a while, I reason. It looks like we’re in the middle of nowhere. I can wait until he grows bored of watching us and then make my escape.

  For hours, the cart jostles on.

  The man con
tinues to watch us, though he sometimes converses with his companions. Every time I try to work at the knot, I feel his gaze drifting in my direction, and I stop.

  The sides of the cart are too high to see over, and even the trap at the back only allows so much of a view. The heat is as bad as—was it only yesterday? Or the day before? As bad as it was when Tam left, when I last saw my pa, when I was taken, when everything went wrong.

  The sky is the soft blue-turning-pink of a hazy summer evening; I would have gone to the city library, no doubt. Taken the long walk before the heat was so bad, buried myself among the encyclopedias that Tam could never see the need for, relished the long words and the artificial breeze from the slow-turning fans on the tables.

  When I look around, Valentina’s brown eyes catch mine. Her face droops with uncertainty, though she tries to smile when she sees me watching. Her effort shames me, and I look away.

  All about me are beautiful, different, dismal girls. The cat-girl is in the far corner, thin and strong, with her back straight and her head high. She doesn’t cry or stare into nothingness or hide her face like the rest. She looks straight ahead, but her hands are between her legs, fiddling endlessly with the knots. She is still fighting. When the man looks her way, her hands pause, but her face shows no recognition.

  four

  I wish I could count the hours that we travel. When the sun sets, the men light a lantern and share food between them. In the shadows, the eyes of the paler girls are dark holes in faces I can’t make out, while those with darker skin blend in almost entirely. I watch the sky, mostly, and when the light is far enough gone that the air is muggy with the leftover heat, I start on the knots around my wrists again, under cover of evening.

  The longer we go on, the more frantic I become.

  The cord is tight, numbing my fingers as I try to work out the ridges where the knots start, my eyes closed and my head full of the books I’ve read on sailing. They were Tam’s idea, in case we ever ran away and had to travel by ocean, he said. There were knots in those books, but practicing with pieces of twine didn’t prepare me for freeing myself in the dark.

  Suddenly, the cart stops. The horses nicker and the men grumble to each other, climbing down from their seats. I sit still, rigid, listening. With a crash, the trap at the end of the cart comes down and the faces of two men appear, the lantern between them.

  “On yer stomachs,” grunts one, his voice like gravel. “An’ be quick about it.” I missed my chance, I think, frantic. I was too slow. There’s a shout as the cart lurches and a girl climbs over the side. One of the men takes off after her—the cat-girl is missing, I notice—and I crane my neck to try to glimpse what’s happening in the darkness. A second later, I hear a cry, cut short, and the man returns, coming into the lantern light with the girl over his shoulder like a rag doll. I assume she’s unconscious since there wasn’t a gunshot.

  “I said on yer stomachs, didn’t I?”

  Everyone scrambles to obey as the girl’s limp body is slung on top of us. “The next one that stupid gets worse,” says the man. He slides his hand along his hip, where the pistol rests. “An’ if I hear a sound from any of you, I’ll kill the lot and the master’ll get his money back, ay?”

  I press my cheek flat against the grainy wood of the cart’s bottom. I can feel splinters sliding against my skin, waiting to prick me if we’re jostled at all.

  If I’d run, too, would one of us have been shot and killed? Would he have run out of patience? Or would one of us have gotten away? Maybe trying to escape will only get me killed. Maybe it’s not worth the risk. Maybe I should wait patiently for Tam.

  There’s hardly enough room in the cart for all of us; sweaty, sticky skin presses against me on every side, smothering. Maybe if they’d fed us in the past day and a half, we wouldn’t have fit at all.

  A noise like thunder or flapping wings makes me jump, and something heavy falls on me; some of the girls shriek and there’s a shout to “shut up” as the heaviness—which must be a tarp of some kind—is adjusted. Then comes a second cover, hard and heavy, which might be wood. The sound is like furniture being moved; the crates from the front of the cart, maybe. I feel like my ribs are about to break, and it’s all I can do to breathe and not panic. Worse than the elevator box, I think.

  I hear the whip on the horses’ backs and we start moving, but we’ve been traveling for only a few moments when we halt again. I can hear people talking: questions, demands. The rough voices of the men who drive the cart answer in what sound like casual tones, and eventually the people who stopped us must be satisfied, because we begin to move again. I wait and wait for the pressure to be lifted so that I can breathe again. But we only keep driving.

  By the time we jerk to a stop, I’m drowsy and achy. The weight comes off, and then the tarp, and the air feels open and enormous and cool. I suck it in, wishing my lungs could hold more.

  But then the back panel of the cart swings down, and there are more men than just the drivers now: some who were at the warehouse with their velvet-voiced master, and some faces that are new but just as distasteful. In the wavering lantern light, the only thing the men have in common is the eagerness of their expressions. My heart thumps madly against my chest as they come forward to drag us out.

  One of them takes hold of my leg to pull me forward, his greedy fingers moving eagerly up my thigh. I grit my teeth, drawing back, but he grins, liking that I squirm. I imagine swinging my tethered hands at him, spitting in his eyes, clawing at his face until he bleeds, and screaming at him to never touch me again. Instead I hold my arms close to me and press my eyes shut. This is a dream, I tell myself as he pulls me toward him, his hands fumbling over my hips, my breasts. I’ll wake up any moment.

  In a second it’s over. He puts me on the ground, moving on to another girl as a couple of men take knives from their belts and cut the cords around our ankles and wrists. They pull us to our feet and my legs feel like they’re about to buckle. I lock my knees and look down at my hand, where the X stands out against the rest of my palm. I can almost feel the iron pressed against it. One day, I tell myself, the scar will soften. It will fade, and I will forget what my hand felt like without it. In a way, I can look forward to that.

  Beneath my feet are cobblestones. A courtyard, maybe. In the moonlight I can see snatches of stone walls on all sides, twice as tall as me. Behind me, what looks like a mansion rises up and away, a few of the windows lit merrily.

  Greedy-looking men crowd around us, tall and strong. They could do anything they wanted, I think, shuddering. And then I wonder if this could be our fate, bought to placate the rich man’s workers. No. I tell myself to breathe. He wouldn’t have picked us so specifically. It’s no great comfort, but for a moment it’s something.

  We huddle together as the men surround us. In the moonlight, one girl’s hair is so light that it looks like silver. Her eyes are wide and her cheeks shine, wet. Valentina is holding the hand of a smaller girl whose face I can’t see. She strokes the girl’s shoulder and looks nervously about us.

  “Come on, then,” says one of the men, gesturing begrudgingly. They herd us in the direction of the mansion, away from the gate. Before we reach the house, we come to a stone shed with a door in it, which one of the men unlocks and opens. Blackness stares out at us. My feet stop short, and someone behind me trips on my heels.

  Rough hands shove us forward with sarcastic mutters of “Watch your step” and “Look where you’re walking,” and by the lantern’s light I can see snatches of a dark set of stairs leading down, down, down.

  The air is thick with a smell like mildew and refuse, wafting up at us as we move forward. The lantern at the front does little good, and my feet slide over the steps. Then a hand, small and soft and clammy, finds mine, and I reach about and find someone else’s. When the floor flattens out, we fall into step as a tight group, holding strangers’ hands and tied together by the same fears.

  A new glow appears ahead of us, and then the face
, arm, and chest of a man carrying a small lantern come into view. He moves with stumbling, half-drunken steps, and his hair drags across his face, stringy and shining with grease.

  He sighs, a long, rattling sound. “Bout time ’e got a new load, ay?” he says with a laugh, looking us over with eyes that gleam in the lantern light. Then he beckons to us. “Welcome, welcome,” he drawls, but I don’t want to follow him. I don’t even want to breathe the same air as he does. The girls at the back are prodded along, though, and we obey. The floor is sticky, every step bringing a new tug on my boots and more of the same smells. When we finally stop, the man holds out his lantern and points at what I gradually realize is a cell.

  We’re underground, in a prison. I let out a shuddering breath. “In there,” says the man, leaning in close to one of the girls. “If ye don’t lak it, ye can always stay out ’ere and keep me company.” And he is our jailer. We obey, because there is no alternative. The door clicks closed behind us and a key turns loudly in the lock.

  Our guard takes a seat at a crude little station with a chair and counter and sets his lantern down. By its light I take in the cell as best I can: There are a few cots hung from the two solid walls, but they are bare and hard, scarcely better than the floor. The iron grating that makes up the two remaining walls is thick and, I suspect, impossible to break through. The darkness is too deep to show me for certain if the cell beside ours is occupied, but it looks empty.

  The jailer sits on his creaky chair and watches us, unblinking. He smiles, a twisted half smile that curls up my insides.

  Someone is whispering, and I turn to see Valentina comforting one of the girls who has begun to cry again. I take a seat on the cold, slick ground and try not to think about what makes it slimy. One of the girls sits down beside me, and in the half-light I recognize her.

  “Eugenia,” I say, startled. She jolts, then studies my face.

  “Isla,” she says after a moment. “Isla Powe.”

  Seeing her feels like a piece of home, for a moment. But we look at each other, and there is nothing left to say. I saw her face most days at school; I recognize the pale complexion, long, black hair, and slight frame that made people confuse us. But I hardly know her.