Newbury & Hobbes 04 - The Executioner's Heart by George Mann Page A

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