I Am Not Here to Be Let In

(Brin)

She had chosen the hour cold — three days running, counting the carriages — because the thing burning in her was anything but, and she had learned just enough this past year to make the cold serve the fire instead of smother it. Dilly had laid the seed of it weeks ago, at their own kitchen table — said the small true thing and gone quiet over it, the way Dilly did — and Brin had carried it folded away ever since, half-forgotten under everything else, the way you carry a thing you don’t yet have a use for. And then a week ago it had flowered, all at once, and not banked since. A woman she would never meet had walked free out of bondage with her papers in her own two hands and her son still owned behind her — the law full of things to say about the mother and not one word to spare for the boy — and Brin had heard it, and the old seed had caught like dry grass and gone up roaring. She and Sukey and Nell had wound each other up over it across a week of furious afternoons until the three of them had gone clean through fright and out the far side into this: a white, joyful, terrible certainty that walked them up the avenue now on their own two feet, against the carriages, toward the grandest gate in the city.

The slack gold end of the day was the hour — when the mothers of the realm stepped down in their afternoon best to collect their daughters, and the forecourt of Lady Madrigal’s held more of the court, for half an hour, than any drawing-room in the kingdom. The street changed as the three of them came up it. It was the blue that did it: clean, decent, a perfectly good plain blue, and not the Madrigal’s blue, which every mother on that forecourt could read at fifty paces the way you read weather, in the body before the mind. Not ours. Three girls who were not ours, walking the wrong way with their chins up and their hands empty, and the change ran up the forecourt ahead of them like a held breath.