The room at the end of the hall was a nursery, although not just now in use. There was the smell of trapped air, and sheeted forms that suggested chairs, chests, rocking horses, phantasms. There had been some testimony about the Bell children at the William Sharon–Allie Hill divorce trial. Lizzie couldn’t quite recall it and couldn’t imagine how it had been relevant. She did remember a cartoon from the Wasp at about that time—Mrs. Pleasant, dressed like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Buttercup, but with a basket of babies. “In my youth when I was young and charming, I practiced baby farming,” the caption had read. She remembered Mrs. Bell telling her there were six children, but some of them grown.
In one corner was a small bed. Mrs. Bell stepped toward it and her light fell on Jenny Ijub, lying on her back under a tumbling-blocks quilt. The bedding had been pulled over her, but incompletely, so that Lizzie could see the brown shoulders of her dress, the dirty toes of one stocking. She had a finger in her mouth and there was a high flush on her cheeks.
She was asleep. For the second time in as many hours, Lizzie felt relief shoot through her. She knelt on the floor and touched Jenny’s face, drawing a finger along the brow of one closed eye. Beneath the lid, the eye flickered, then stilled. Lizzie shook her shoulder gently and then less gently. “Jenny. Jenny Ijub. I’ve come for you.”
The little girl didn’t move. “I gave her something to help her sleep,” Mrs. Bell said. “She was so agitated. It wasn’t healthy.” Dust spun about Mrs. Bell’s lamp, swirled across her powdered face.
Lizzie leaned in and smelled camphor on Jenny’s breath. She shook Jenny harder. Was it possible to come into the House of Mystery and not go away drugged? Don’t eat or drink anything. She herself shouldn’t have had the cordial. She felt fine, but it had been incautious. She wedged her arms under Jenny and pulled her closer.
Jenny came awake all at once, kicking and striking out till Lizzie released her. Her body relaxed then, but her features remained pinched and her voice was strung with tears. “I won’t go back,” she said. “You’re not the mother of me.”
Lizzie didn’t want a quarrel in front of Mrs. Bell, with whom she was still angrier than she could say. She didn’t want to take the time to overcome Jenny with reason and gentleness. Neither did she want to carry her forcibly from the house. She had a happy inspiration. “I’ll take you to the ducks, then.”
Jenny regarded her, suspicious but sleepy. Her pupils were black points in the brown eyes. Her hair was wild and blown about her head. One ear stuck out. Lizzie smoothed the hair to cover it.
Jenny indicated Mrs. Bell. “Can she go, too?”
“May she go,” said Lizzie. “No, we’ve taken too much of Mrs. Bell’s time already.”
“All right,” Jenny said. She fell asleep again.
Mrs. Bell stood above her, half lit by the lamp she held and half in shadow. She didn’t look at Lizzie and she didn’t say a word. On a shelf behind her, a row of expensive dolls stared into the middle distance of the room, seven painted skulls, seven tiny Cupid’s-bow mouths. This made Lizzie think, inevitably and guiltily, of Jenny’s broken doll.
Lizzie couldn’t see that these dolls had ever been played with. She’d had three dolls herself as a child and never played with any of them, not liking their compulsive smiles, their lumpy bodies, the emptiness of their lives. Without her to pick them up, move their arms, and speak their voices, they were nothing. It was too much to ask. And then they had stared, of course, much like Baby Edward. Their eyes had never closed.
“You lie there until you calm down,” she’d said to them sometimes, to justify her neglect. (“Lizzie keeps her dolls just like new,” her mother told people, with obvious approval.)
Lizzie searched the floor for Jenny’s shoes. She took them in one hand and lifted Jenny into her arms. She recognized the smell of Jenny’s hair, sweet but spoiled, like stale cake or those candies in Chinatown that came in a thin wrapping of rice paper that you ate along with the sweet. “We’re most grateful for your kindness,” she told Mrs. Bell stiffly.
“My pleasure.” Mrs. Bell’s voice matched Lizzie’s, note for impeccable note. Her face was as vacant and unused as the dolls’. “Do call again.”
Jenny was an awkward load. The steps seemed steeper descending, the bottom of the well a terrifying distance away now that Lizzie had no hand free for the banister.
There was a portrait on the wall next to Lizzie where she paused to rest. She assumed this was the likeness of Mr. Bell. If so, he was a balding, handsome man with a sharp nose and white side-whiskers. His eyes were very, very blue. Mrs. Bell’s portrait hung next to him, life-sized and wearing fewer clothes than you might expect of a mother of six. In her arms she held a tiny white dog with a smashed flat face. Its color was incontrovertible.
Behind Mrs. Bell and the dog was the grandfather clock from the entryway. The time in the picture was just past two, an artful reference to Mrs. Bell’s age at the time of the sitting, or so Lizzie supposed. The longer hand was just past twelve. XII, in fact, but what difference did that make?
If Lizzie had seen these things on the way up, her magical juncture might have begun in wandering lost and frightened in the dark. This would have been an awful way to start the rest of her life.
Of course, if she’d seen her signs on the way up, they would have come in the wrong order.
Lizzie shifted Jenny in her arms and continued down the stairs. At the bottom she paused to look up. Mrs. Bell stood with her lamp in the darkness of the floor above. The lamp lit her face from below, gave her a ghoulish tint. It occurred to Lizzie that she really should have asked Mrs. Bell to thank Mrs. Pleasant for the chickens, but it seemed unbearably awkward to do so now. She passed the real grandfather clock and went out the door.