The Executioner's Heart

CHAPTER 8

The girl never knew her parents.

She had been told that her father had been trampled by a horse two months prior to her birth, and that her mother had died in the throes of bringing her into the world, in the dank, underground cell of an asylum somewhere on the outskirts of Paris.

She had erupted into the world in an orgy of agony and anguish-or so she’d been told by the crooked-backed old woman in the orphanage, who seemed to delight in describing the young girl’s misfortune, cackling mercilessly and exposing the blackened stumps of her teeth.

Later, she would understand this for what it was: the old woman’s attempt to rationalise the unfathomable ways of the world, and perhaps to remind herself that there existed people whose circumstances were far worse than her own. The old woman consoled herself in this manner, by averting her own face from the looking glass and turning its scrutiny upon the young orphan who had never known anything better. It allowed the woman to focus on something other than her own lowly lot in life, her pauper’s existence.

At the time, however, the old woman terrified her. She thought her a witch, an avatar of the devil himself. She cowered from that cavernous mouth and its spittle-flecked lips that spewed only poison and fear, trying to shut out the woman’s spiteful words. The onslaught was relentless, however, and by the age of seven she found herself believing what the woman said: that she had killed her own mother upon quitting the womb, that her very soul was inhabited by evil, and that she would never amount to anything in this life. All that awaited her was an eternity in the fiery pits of Hell.

One day the woman described this terrifying place to her, told her of the torture she was likely to endure, of the demons with their silky forked tongues and pitchforks, the way they would force her to live out her worst fears for all eternity. The girl asked the woman if she, too, would go to Hell, since she knew this place so well. The woman reached out and cuffed her brutally across the back of the head for her insolence.

She wished the old woman dead, then, and not for the first time. She balled her fists and could almost see the woman’s wizened old face contorting in pain as she collapsed upon the hearth, near where she sat in perpetual, indolent repose. Her hair would catch alight like dry tinder, and with a whoosh of flame she would ignite, blazing suddenly bright in the grainy dimness of the parlour. The chair would catch fire, and the flames would spread, licking at the table legs, engulfing the wooden shelves, and finally spreading throughout the orphanage. The entire building would be razed to the ground in the purifying inferno, and all of the nannies and maids and tutors would burn incandescent like tallow candles.

The girl would be free, then, to escape a diabolical future in the acrid pits of Hell.

It did not happen quite as she’d hoped. When the old woman finally did drop dead, almost a year later, the young girl was peeling potatoes in the kitchen with two other orphans. They heard a wheezing grunt from the adjacent parlour. The girl put down her paring knife and-with some hesitation-tiptoed through to the parlour to investigate what had become of the old woman.

She was thrilled to see the scene from her imagination brought vividly to life.

The old woman lay face down upon the hearth, her jaundiced eyes still open but unseeing, her skin pallid and grey. Her mouth yawned open, slack jawed, and drool pooled upon the slate tiles beneath her. Her arms were outstretched, as if she’d been reaching for something when her heart had suddenly given out. Everything was as the girl had imagined, save for one small detail. The woman’s hair had not caught the dancing flames that even now leapt and caroused in the grate, but had fallen just a little short, fanned out like grey bristles upon the hearth.

She was fascinated by the sight of this dead thing that had once been a person. It was unreal to her that the woman had ever actually been alive. She stood over the corpse for a full minute before she was struck by the notion that, if she wished, she could bring about the conflagration she had always dreamed of. One nudge from the edge of her boot and the woman’s head would be close enough to the flames for her hair to catch alight. She could encourage the fire to escape, just as she longed to escape. She could feed it the flaccid corpse of this horrid old woman, who would burn-not in Satan’s realm, but there on the hearth, roasting like a suckling pig. It was everything the old woman deserved, and more.

It would look like an accident. She would not be held accountable. She would claim she had found the woman that way, that she had attempted desperately to put the flames out with the jug of water from the table, but it had not been enough; the fire was too ravenous, too eager.

She stepped forward, raising her foot, her heart bursting with excitement, when she heard a wheedling scream from behind her. She turned to see the other girls, half-peeled potatoes still clutched in their pale hands, and knew there and then that her escape was not to be.

The old woman was buried in the churchyard, and the girl was forced to stand in attendance with the other children from the orphanage. Some of them wept sorrowfully, for the funeral reminded them of their own losses. The young girl, however, who had never known her parents and did not feel their loss, wept tears of frustration instead. Her dream was over. There would be no escape from the orphanage, and though the decrepit old woman who had tormented her for so many years was now gone, her words continued to ring in the girl’s ears. The devil was waiting for her, impatient to reclaim his own.

When escape did finally come, it was from the most unexpected of quarters. An inventor who lived in the city came to the orphanage to claim himself a daughter. His wife had died that very morning of a terrible wasting disease, and he told the matron how the woman had always wanted a child of her own to nurture, a daughter she could shape in her own image. Her disease, however, had prevented her from bearing a child of her own, and in the latter years of her life she had been too weak for them to take in an orphan.

As she had lain on her deathbed, her husband clutching her hand as she faded, she had asked him to grant her one final promise so that she might rest: She made him swear that he would go directly to the orphanage to find a young girl on whom to bestow all of his fatherly affection. His loving wife had not wanted him to be alone in his grief, and wished only that her legacy might be continued through a child.

The matron saw this, of course, as an opportunity to unburden herself of one of her charges, and as the inventor was well-known and well-respected throughout the city, she encouraged him eagerly in this pursuit.

Without further ado, the matron stirred the girls from their chores, rounding them up in the exercise yard for the man to inspect. She told the girls that one of them would be granted the gift of a new father that day, and that they must all be grateful for the opportunity and pleased for the girl who would be saved by this wonderful, benevolent man. The matron spoke of God and His divine will, and how in the eyes of the Lord all men are made equal. Today He would bestow a gift upon one lowly orphan that would raise her up and alter the course of her life. The matron was unable to hide the wavering note of jealousy in her own voice as she explained this.

The girl held her breath as the inventor paced up and down before the line of smiling orphans, twirling the ends of his exuberant moustache as he contemplated his options. He seemed to be a gentle, intelligent man, and she giggled nervously as he pinched her cheek and ruffled the hair of the girl beside her, measuring them up as if they were livestock on display at a butcher’s market.

She did not allow herself to feel even the slightest glimmer of hope that she might be selected to become his new daughter, for she already knew that she was bound for a future of eternal damnation, and that no man in his right mind would wish to take her in as his charge. Consequently, when he ceased his pacing in front of her, removed his hat, and placed it gently upon her head, she could not believe that he might represent the means of escape she had so longed for. But when he took her by the hand, and-after a few brief words to the matron-led her out to his waiting carriage, her tiny number of possessions bundled into a small leather satchel, she allowed herself to smile properly for the first time since the old woman had died.

Perhaps, she thought, this kindly man represented her salvation. Perhaps this was finally her escape, her new life. Her chance to begin anew.

For a time all of this was true, and her most precious hopes and desires were fulfilled. Finally, she was blessed with someone to love her, and a life outside the dingy, oppressive walls of the orphanage.

But time is a cruel mistress, and it was not until much years later that she would learn the truth: that there is no such thing as salvation, and escape is only ever an illusion conjured up by the hopeful.