Jack and Jill (novel preview)

Chapter Two

“I’m going out,” she said. “Help your father to bed when he gets home, will you dear?”

That meant: Don’t tell your father where I went. Just give him his medicine and tell him lies until he goes to sleep. Did these words mean that much to Jill? No; not really. She would try to put Timothy to sleep and then she would sit in her room and stare blankly at the wall until her father came home.

She knew where her mother was going to be. She would be down the road, meeting Clark Everett, married man and banker. He’d give her mother a little money to help them get through–in exchange for favors of the sort Jill preferred not to think about. This affair had been going on for quite some time now. She guessed that her father was the only one who didn’t know it. In fact, the baby in her arms was probably not even from his loins. She wondered if he suspected.

Jill took Timothy upstairs and spoke sweet words to him, trying to explain as best she could why mommy hadn’t been listening to his anxieties. She knew by the sounds he made that he’d been hungry. Of course he was hungry. They all were. Jill told him it was best if he went to sleep; that would make him not think about his hunger. Finally, the tears stopped, his eyes began to close, and Jill stayed with him until he was fast asleep.

She looked down at the baby for a moment, buried in the covers of his small bed. He was cute when he wasn’t disrupting life. She wondered if the child’s father had indeed been Clark Everett, or if it was someone else. After a bit of pondering, she decided it was useless to try to figure it out. Timothy could have belonged to anyone in the village.

Jill journeyed down the hall to her own room. Her quarters were at the far end of the second floor hall. It was out of the way and left alone; just what she wished for. It was dark inside with only the glow of one small lantern to light the large, cold room. She had no source of heat within, and didn’t have anything but thin blankets, but she didn’t sleep too much anymore, spending more time pacing the floor with her busy thoughts.

Once inside her own room, she unbraided her hair so that it hung to her elbows in black waves. Then she proceeded to undress herself.

She never truly felt free until she had pulled the thick, dark clothing from her body. It was unsuitable for a lady to be unclothed publicly, so, when she must, she wore the only clothing that kept her from feeling as though she were suffocating. The black dress that lay across her bed now was nothing like her family wore daily, but a mourning gown she insisted on keeping in her rotation ever since her grandmother died.

She had loved me, Jill told herself. Her grandmother had never been a superstitious person, despite the proximity of the hell-mouth.

Jill did not bother pulling on her nightdress yet. She simply sat down in the only wooden chair inside her room, letting the coolness surround her body. She turned the light up a tiny bit and tilted her head against the backing, the shapes of her body splashed with orange light. The scars across her arms where she had sliced herself in the past were glaring angrily. The bruises across her legs and back were visible in the light, hideous stains on her pale skin. Jill did not mind the sight of her own tormented and abused body. She knew she was clean in her heart, never minding what the rest of them thought.

I am pure, she told herself. I am clean.

She was peaceful in her chair, eyes closed, isolated– but her feeling of comfort vanished as soon as the laughter reached her ears: the laughter that was torture upon her broken body. It reminded her of earlier that day. Her head snapped forward, her eyes opening wide. The moonlight was shining in through the open window, and when she looked there, a voice met her ears that made her body shudder.