“All you must do,” he said soothingly, “is take care of yourself and our child. Do nothing that might harm it, or you.”
She tried not to laugh when he said that. She tried not to scream. In her dreams she was a child still, not yet pregnant, and Thomas lay in a toy chest. His fingers curving over its rim were bone white, were bones; he was trying to escape but he was too weak to rise. When he managed to pull himself out, he turned to show Eleanor the key in his back.
It would’ve been so easy, he said in his ticking, whirring new voice. You could have saved me just by winding my key.
She woke soaked in sweat. Soaked in more than sweat; her water had broken. For three breaths she thought she could outrun it. On the back of a brindle hare, the thighs of a soldier pressing on either side of her.
The first contraction swept the visions away, and her husband woke at the sound of her cries.
* * *
The baby was born with a coat of fine hair and a voice like a cat’s. You could hide it in a seashell, that voice, to keep her safe. It was the kind of thing a witch might do. Eleanor drifted on waves of dreaming and the herbs the midwife gave her.
“The hair will fall out, in time,” the midwife told her briskly, already at the door. “She was born too soon.”
Eleanor slept to avoid looking at the child. While she slept, her husband filled her room with roses. It was late autumn and the flowers were scorched and frozen in turn, by the overfed fire and the chill bleeding through the windows. One by one they died, heads dropping, petals blackening, stems fuzzing over with scum.
All but one. One bloom remained: a perfect full-blown rose. Eleanor lifted herself from bed, breasts heavy with milk, and hobbled toward it.
It was cold against her fingertips. When she put an ear close, she could hear its meticulous tick. It was a clockwork rose.
* * *
They named the baby Arden, and she grew. It was natural that her mother’s love should grow with her, but sometimes it seemed to Arden’s father that his wife would prefer the girl be kept under glass. He indulged her protectiveness, was even relieved by it. She’d suffered badly through the pregnancy, and he’d worried—though he told no one of it, not even himself—she might not love the child as she ought. Then the baby came and they both loved her fiercely, and all was well until the morning of her first birthday.
Arden’s father was still in bed when Eleanor cried out from the nursery, the baby’s voice rising alongside her own. He found her standing by the crib, something cupped in her hands. Arden stood with her arms reached out, shrieking for the thing with blank ferocity. On instinct he snatched it from his wife and gave it to his daughter; at once she quieted and sat down to inspect the object, turning it over in her soft fingers. He had just time enough to see that it was a little clockwork caterpillar, prettily done, before his wife’s slap cracked against his cheek.
Eleanor insisted the toy be destroyed. Her husband, steadfast for once in the face of her will, said she must give her reasons before he would do it. Because she would not, and because Arden screamed and wept and refused to eat when the thing was not near her, it was decided by nightfall that they would keep it.
Later he wished he’d listened to his wife, sensing in a vague way that the toy’s arrival, and Arden’s delighted obsession, marked the beginning of a change in both daughter and wife. Eleanor held Arden less often after that day, and weaned her without ceremony. Sometimes he caught her watching the baby and her toy with an expression both vivid and unreadable.
On the eve of Arden’s second birthday, her caterpillar shed its carapace, clicked into the shape of an orange butterfly, and flew through an open window. Stunned by its transformation, the husband looked to his wife. She was watching the sky where the thing had disappeared with a look on her face that made his stomach seize tight.
Arden took its loss calmly. The next morning, on her birthday, they heard her laughing through the walls. When Eleanor would not rise, he walked to her bedroom alone. There he found the child sitting up, clapping at a clockwork kitten pouncing and tumbling over her rumpled bed.
The gifts came on every birthday. Eleanor did not like them, refused even to look at them, but never again suggested they be destroyed. She had more children: another girl, a boy. A fourth child who slipped away before it could be born. Among the three who lived, only Arden received gifts no one could explain. And only Arden was treated by her mother with a cool civility, an unmistakable distance that inspired her siblings to likewise view her more as visitor than sister. Her father tried to make up for it by loving her best, but being held at arm’s length seemed to suit his firstborn child. She was forever sneaking off to be alone with her toys, always smiling over some memory or joke no one shared. As she grew up she became beautiful, but it was an impenetrable kind of prettiness. Nothing about her invited you to step closer.
As the years passed the gifts were increasingly a source of discord. In the days before her birthday Arden grew restless, snappish. In the days after she was secretive and silent, only to break, when she thought no one was near, into antic play. At eight she received a magnificent palace that opened on a hinge and was filled to the brim with tiny, intricate dramas: a prince and a chambermaid kissed, a crone bent over a spinning wheel, an adviser whispered into the ear of a king. Her father didn’t like the knowing looks on the figures’ faces, or the jealousy the gift prompted among his other children.
When she turned twelve Arden’s gift was a baby doll. Over the space of a week the family realized the thing was aging, becoming more of a child each day. Arden rarely parted from it, tending to it as it aged over the course of one year, from baby to child to girl her own age, who could flutter its lashes and dance a minuet but neither slept nor ate nor spoke any word but Arden, and sat motionless in a chair when the girl was sleeping. The doll kept growing, to the age of a mother, then a grandmother, then a crone. The day before her thirteenth birthday, Arden couldn’t stop weeping. The crone watched her for hours through filmy glass eyes, until, at midnight, its clockwork heart gave out.
The night before Arden’s sixteenth birthday, her father couldn’t sleep. His wife, too, was awake beside him, but he left her to her thoughts. They were no less opaque to him now than they’d been the day they married. He couldn’t regret his choice of partner, but he wondered sometimes if their dreams looked anything alike.
It was late. So late it was early. Their first child would be sixteen tomorrow. Of age, he thought dimly. Tomorrow, the girl would come of age. Hours passed and neither parent shifted from their sleeplessness. The sun came up, its light threading the eye like a needle. It outlined Arden as she let herself into their room.
“Look,” she said. Sixteen but still a child in her nightgown, her voice turned up at the oddity of what lay in her hands. She would never have come to them if it hadn’t unsettled her. “I got my gift.”
It was a clockwork hare with brindle fur and a gaze of black glass. On its back, trim in blue and white, was a little tin soldier.
* * *
Arden was unhappy with her gift. Though the soldier was handsome, she supposed, and the hare hopped obligingly about the room, its velveted nose quivering, the gift was childish. The thing she liked best about it was the way her mother seemed to think it might bite her, as if it were an ogre or an enchanter, not a silly tin man on a strange little mount. Arden sent it hopping into the parlor where her parents were reading just to hear her mother’s gasp. If she could not be loved by her mother, she could at least distress her.