The Singing Fire by Lilian Nattel Read Free Book Online

its peacocks. She couldn’t be lying on the floor like this; she was there in the wallpaper among the exotic birds and fear was just a peacock’s tail staring with many eyes.
    When the beating began, she heard the peacocks scream, and then she was unaware of the girls and their rancid breath as they bent over her. It was the linden tree she smelled, the one in her family’s courtyard, and the smoke from the feather factory, and mud when you pick up the washed linens that have fallen into it. She didn’t see the girl looking down at her with eyelashes so pale she seemed to have none, and she didn’t feel the other girl kneading her arm and leg in the rhythm of the broom handle. For when the soles of her feet were welted and numb, the handle was used on the inside of her, like a butter churn. She hardly noticed when the Squire followed it.
    Later Nehama went to sleep. The youngest of the prostitutes, a girl named Sally, gave her laudanum to relieve the pain, and when Nehama cried over and over, Don’t look at me, Sally told her not to worry, for she was wearing a thick cotton nightgown and no one could see her. It was a good lie.
    As the weeks passed, Nehama often dreamed that she was sleeping with her sisters in the old bed with the iron posts, an arm around her, an elbow in her ribs, a hand on her hair, only to wake up with the youngest prostitute lying beside her. “I was cold,” Sally would say. The other girls didn’t like Sally. “Tell me something, Nell. About your sisters.”
    And Nehama would try in her new English, fitting the pieces of language together like a puzzle that would show her a picture of something true. But if she said, “Mine sister learn me to read,” Sally would shake her head.
    “Not that one. Tell me how they thrashed you for telling tales. How they called you a disease.”
    “The pest,” Nehama would correct her.
    “The pestilence,” Sally would add with a smile. She was called the Spanish girl because of her dark eyes and dark lashes and staccato walk as if she were dancing the flamenco, but she’d never been outside of London. She was two years younger than Nehama, and at fifteen no bigger than a child. She was small-boned and small-breasted and four feet five. She’d done well as a virgin, passing it off for months.
    Sally was disliked because she was a Papist. This she explained to Nehama one day in the quiet hour after the girls had slept and before the trade started up. Sally was sitting on the floor, brushing the hair of a wig. Her own hair fell out in handfuls, so she kept it short, and when she was working she wore the wig.
    Nehama sat on the bed. The room was so small that the bed touched one wall and Sally’s feet the other. There was a window that looked into an alley, and though it was boarded up, air came through the cracks. Above the window, Nehama had pinned a theater poster that she’d found in the street, blown off a wooden post.
    “The others hate me because they’re going to hell and I’m not,”Sally said, brushing and braiding the wig. “Should I curl the hair like yours, Nell?”
    “Straight hair is better,” Nehama said. She was looking at her knees through the yellow gauze of her nightgown. Her knees looked the same as always. That was the strange thing.
    “I want to look like her. That elegant, she is.” Sally pointed her brush at the poster for Colleen Bawn , with its illustration of a young woman drowning in a cave, her locks floating on the water and a white gown billowing around her. “See the shaking waters, the rolling surf and watery effects,” the poster read. Sally sneezed. Her feet were raw with chilblains. “I’m sorry you’re going to hell like the other girls. Why don’t you get baptized in the true church? It isn’t hard.”
    “I’m a Jew,” Nehama said. “Like Fay.”
    “So? You can be baptized. Then you confess and the priest absolves you.”
    “What do you mean absolves?”
    “When you’re ready to die, you have