It rained all day the day Raven was born.
Dors was teaching fractions to seven-year-olds when the announcement came through the corridor speaker: classes dismissed, the steward’s daughter had arrived. The children were gone before the sentence ended. Chalk dust still hanging in the air.
By the time Dors reached the nursery wing, half the court was already there, pressed against the observation glass in wet shoes, dripping on the marble.
The baby had no name yet. She lay in the bassinet with one eye open and one eye closed, regarding the assembled crowd through the glass.
The open eye moved slowly across the faces. Unhurried. Unimpressed.
Several people waved. A minister made the face adults make at infants.
The eye did not soften. It completed its survey of the room, and closed.
The crowd laughed and cooed. Dors did not.
She stood at the back, filed the observation, and returned to her classroom. The fractions were still on the board.
Raven was two when her mother left.
There was a note. The steward read it once, folded it, and put it in the drawer beneath the navigation charts where nothing was ever retrieved. He did not read it again.
That evening he sat with Raven on his lap in the east study. She was pulling at the buttons on his vest, methodical, testing each one for give.
“Where is Mama?”
“She’s traveled somewhere far, far away.”
Raven considered this. She had a two-year-old’s measure on distance — the courtyard was far, the kitchen was far, the end of the corridor where the tall clock stood was the farthest place she knew.
“Why doesn’t she take me?”
He didn’t answer. He pulled her closer, one hand across her back, and she let herself be held. After a moment she reached up and touched his face.
Her fingers came away wet. She looked at them. Then at him. She did not ask what it was. She wiped her hand on his vest and went back to the buttons.
Between two and three, Raven went through four nannies.
Nanny One lasted six weeks. Nanny Two lasted four. Nanny Three made it to three months but was found one morning sitting in the hallway with her coat already on, waiting for someone to tell her it was acceptable to leave. Nanny Four was still technically employed but had developed a system of strategic absence.
In the gaps, Raven ran unsupervised through the court with a pack of older boys. She was bald, fast, and operating without a plan, which made her difficult to predict and impossible to contain.
She convinced four boys to help her dismantle an automatic garden gate because she wanted to see what was on the other side. There was nothing on the other side. She was satisfied with this result.
She led a raid on the kitchen pantry. Not for sweets — for the large silver serving bowls. She wanted to see if they would float in the fountain. Two did. Three didn’t. She took notes in crayon. The data was inconclusive. She requested more bowls.
When she turned three, someone proposed sending her to school. The proposal was presented as though it were a plan. It was not a plan. It was the last idea in a building that had run out of them.
The guard’s name was Behrens. He had been posted at the east corridor for six years without incident, and now he stood with his arm extended at a careful angle, a three-year-old attached to it by the teeth, while four members of the household staff maintained a semicircle at what they had determined was the minimum safe distance.
Someone had tried lifting her off. The screaming had a documented range of three corridors. Someone had tried a sweet. It was on the floor. The under-steward had gone to find gloves, for reasons he had not explained.
Dors came down the corridor at her usual pace and stopped at the edge of the semicircle. She assessed the arrangement: one guard, one child, jaw engaged, feet off the ground, grip stable.
“Raven,” she said. “It’s time for class.”
Raven opened her jaw. She stayed on the arm a moment, hanging by her hands, and looked at the new arrival. Black dress. A bun pulled tight enough to have a structural function. Metallic hands, clasped in front, making no move toward her.
She slid down Behrens’s arm and landed on both feet.
“What’s a class?”
“A room where things are taken apart to see how they work,” Dors said. “Today it’s numbers.”
Raven considered this. She looked back once at the arm.
Dors turned and started down the corridor. She did not offer a hand. She adjusted her pace by a measurable fraction. The child caught up.
Behrens lowered his arm. Nobody dismissed him. He remained at his post, holding the sleeve away from his skin, and said nothing about it in his report.
The classroom held eleven children, arranged by an old seating chart nobody remembered the logic of. Dors added a twelfth desk in the second row. Not the front — the front was for children who needed watching.
Raven sat. On the board, in chalk: yesterday’s fractions, half erased, and today’s date.
Dors began. Numbers first — what a half was, demonstrated with a strip of paper folded once. The children folded their strips. Raven folded hers, unfolded it, folded it the other way, and held it up to the light to check whether the crease had damaged the paper.
Dors did not tell her to stop. She wrote the next fraction on the board.
A boy in the fourth row whispered something to his neighbor about the new girl. Both snickered. Raven turned around and looked at him. The whispering stopped for the remainder of the lesson and, according to no record, several days after.
At the end of the hour Dors gave out the folding strips to keep. Eleven children left theirs on the desks.
Raven put hers in her pocket.
The lesson was measurement. Each child had a length of string and a list of things in the room to measure: the desk, the doorframe, the distance from the first window to the second.
Raven measured her desk twice. The answers disagreed by a thumb’s width. She measured a third time, then reported all three numbers, in order, without choosing one.
“The string stretches,” Dors said. “Measure again with less pull.”
Raven did. The fourth number matched the second. She wrote them down and sat with the string in her lap, winding it around two fingers.
“How far can string measure?”
“As far as you have string.”
“What if the string ran out?”
“Then you mark where it ended, and start it again from the mark.”
Raven wound the string tighter. Unwound it.
“Where is Mama?”
“I don’t know.”
The other children went on measuring. A boy at the window called out a number and his partner disputed it.
“Is she further than the clock?”
“Yes.”
Raven looked at the string in her lap. Then she measured the doorframe, wrote the number down, and did not raise her hand again that hour.
Raven’s father passed away shortly after she turned four. His brother Hal took over the office the same day.
Hal had been in office less than eleven weeks when he raised the matter of the child’s quarters.
The item appeared fourth on the agenda, after the harvest accounts, worded as a question of allocation. The rooms adjacent to the family apartments were needed, the memo said, for functions. No functions were specified. The child could be comfortably situated in the east range.
“The east range had been closed for two years,” said the chamberlain.
Hal observed that rooms could be opened.
There was a pause.
The head of household staff, who had served under three stewards and outlasted two chamberlains, said that the east range was a long way for a child of four. She did not say from what.
The physician mentioned drafts. A few others cautiously voiced their concerns.
Hal waited for them to finish, then moved to the compromise he had prepared. The child would remain where she was. Supervision, however, would be formalized. A dedicated governess. Continuous. He believed one of the teaching units was already familiar with the child.
The chamberlain confirmed that one was.
The assignment was drafted that afternoon and delivered to the education office before the evening meal. It ran to four lines. It specified duties, hours, and reporting structure.
The minutes of the meeting recorded the item as: Quarters, resolved.
At Home with AI 
Leave a comment