Elyssa

Chapter 1

I was born two and a half hours after my mother was declared dead by the man who killed her. A strange time to be brought into the world, the doctor that had a fancy for an foetus in a pickle jar nearly dropped me in fright after I gave out a weak cry. He held me- his hands slick with dark blood, poised over the alcohol filled urn that was supposed to be my final resting place- dumbfounded. His students, young and deeply committed, were just as bewildered. I would have been duly handed over to an orphanage, unwanted, as an aberration of nature, if it were not for the youngest student present, an Edward Milner. He took me home, handed me to his cook and instructed her to take care of me, a task she undertook with exceedingly bad grace but could do little about.

Perhaps I should explain. My mother was being treated for a disorder of the mind, by a pioneering surgeon of the day, with a procedure that had ever been tried before. It had been suggested that the treatment wait until I was born, but the doctor was eager to push on, lest one of his rivals perform the surgery first. My mother died, and then two and a half hours later the doctor came back with a group of his favourite students, keen to acquire a new curio.

I fancy I remember this, I can hear the hisses of shock- ‘she is alive!’ they would have gasped, been horrified- scared they would have been blamed for something perhaps- maybe the woman on the table was still alive after all…but no, she was still and cold, with the pallor of death, what is more, she died in a room full of students who would swear to it.

The doctor, white-faced, said ‘We must never speak of this. I will take her’

Edward Milner refused. Hopelessly naïve and idealistic at that point, he knew about the orphanages, the workhouses- I doubt it even crossed his mind that the doctor was perfectly capable of throwing me down a well, or more likely, into the river. He was the one who took me home- not that I was expected to live more then a day, but on the off chance I did, he wanted me to be in a more hygienic locality then wherever the doctor would have take me.

I grew up in a rickety house five minutes from the asylum where Edward Milner worked, and my mother had died. I had no family, my mother had unusual circumstances and scandal surrounding her, and no one came forward to claim me or so Edward Milner was told. I slept in a drawer in Mrs Peplow’s room for the first year and then moved into a small room of my own.

Mrs Peplow was the cook. I was raised mainly by her, a rounded woman of many moods, most of them bad tempered. She had no patience for a small child and told me repeatedly she wished Dr Milner had never brought me home. Not that she knew the details of my arrival on Earth, but I doubt that would have changed her mind. She was a good cook however and on her good days she would bake me biscuits and still more rarely a cake to have at tea with Edward Milner.

Of Edward Milner I saw little, he was usually at the hospital, not arriving back until well into the night. On the infrequent days where we spent time together he would always say ‘well, what have you to say today?’ This became something of a joke between him and Mrs Peplow, it was obvious by the time I reached the age of five without breathing a word I was a mute. A silent child with a deadpan expression, I never cried, except once when I had to tell the world I was in fact alive.

That is how I know the facts of my birth. Both Edward Milner and Mrs Peplow seemed to think I was dumb as well as mute and once, in a fit of melancholy involving a bottle of scotch, he told me the whole sorry tale. I was six years old at the time.