The morning had rained and left the cobbles slick, each stone catching a small private moon. Men spat into the gutter; women knocked the heads off cabbages; fish lay with their mouths open like drowned bells. The air was a wet rope of brine and rot and sweet apples just beginning to give. Amelia liked to walk the edges of things—toes grazing the seam between one stone and the next. If she could keep to the line, perhaps she would not be pulled into the noise.
"Mind your basket, girl," the apple-woman said without looking. "Last week you brought back bruises."
"I'll pick from the bottom," Amelia murmured. Her voice rarely reached other people the way she intended. Words went out and returned changed, like coins traded at a bad stall.
"Isn't that Hobley's one?" someone whispered behind a brace of geese.
"Hush," another voice replied, not kindly. "Her mother's got the devil in her. It passes down."
A boy's bark cut the air—high, silly. Another boy clattered a pebble against the stall leg so the apples shivered. "Mad Sarah's pup," he sang. "Mad Sarah's—"
Amelia's spine tightened. She slid one apple away from the heap and turned it in her hand until her thumb found the dent beneath the skin. She imagined the dent pressed out again, the apple restored to smoothness by wanting it so. The wanting did nothing. The apple stayed bruised. She put it in the basket anyway, beneath a sound one, in case someone lifted the top to inspect her choices.
"Look how she stares," the first boy said. He leaned until his breath touched her cheek and smelled of salt and old sweets. "Like a dead fish."
"Mind your business," Amelia said without any heat. It was a thing she had been told adults said at times like these. Her voice did not sound like a woman's voice or a child's. It sounded like stone.
The boy flinched—not because she frightened him, she knew, but because stone does not blink when pebbles hit it. He did not know what to do with a girl who would not answer like a girl.
At the next stall, a line of women considered cloth. A piece of pale ribbon lay looped atop the bolts. For an instant, the market went away. There was only the ribbon and what it could do. Amelia felt the drag in her fingers, the familiar softness tightening into strength. She pinched the edge, then let go quickly, as if someone had seen her touch a secret.
"Poor child," the apple-woman said, softer now. "No mother to speak of and a father married to his leather. God help her."
The words should have warmed, but they chilled instead, like rain going down the back of a dress. Pity did not feed a body any more than gossip did. Pity did not come up the stairs at night.
A church bell startled pigeons into beat-scrap flight. The sound clanged against Amelia's teeth. She winced and fixed her eyes on the seam between stones again, one foot to the next to the next. The market was too much—voices, smoke, iron shoes on wet rock—but she would not run. Running made them chase.
When she reached the alley mouth that led home, the boys were there again, or new ones who had learned the trick. A pebble skittered past. A hand flicked her bonnet's ribbon loose. "Look at her," someone laughed. "She doesn't even feel."
In truth, she felt too much. The laughter buzzed on her skin like stinging flies. The gutter's reek crept up her nose and made her eyes water. Somewhere a man shouted at a horse hard enough that the animal's scream split the day. She wanted to climb out of her nerves and lay them flat on the stones to cool. She wanted—oh, but she wanted—to have one clean minute where all this was in her hands.
Instead, she gathered the bonnet ribbon, tied it neatly under her chin, and walked between the boys as if they were trees. They fell off to either side, surprised by the space she took up, surprised she did not stop to defend or plead. She could not explain to them that if she began explaining, she would never stop: why she could not bear the clang of the bell; why the fish's cloudy eyes felt like a question directed at her; why she kept her basket perfectly level because if one apple rolled, something terrible would follow. She could not say any of that in words they would leave alone.
At the last turning, she glanced down. In the gutter lay a mouse, small as a curled leaf, sodden and still. A drop of rain clung to one ear and did not fall. The mouse looked peaceful in a way the living rarely did. Amelia stood very still and felt something like envy. Not of death, precisely. Of the hush that held it.
When she reached the house, the hammer was already beating—three and one, three and one. She hung her shawl on the peg and waited for the quiet that was never quiet to settle in. Her father looked up only to say, "You're damp. Don't drip on the lasts."
"I'll make tea," she said.
From above, as if to prove him innocent, the first faint moan threaded down through the ceiling. The tea would go cold on the hob. It always did.