The darkness throbbed in the light of the smoky tapers and she throbbed with it. Tension had ruled their lives for months, but there lay the bright future: a child slept in the old, broken-down cradle. A girl-child.
"Boys are useless," her mother always said with a sneer. She had consulted astrologers and gypsy travelers. Her daughter's belly swelled with a female child – only then had they offered methods of removing the offending female from the womb.
Still, her mother paced about, eyed her belly, rung her hands, gnashed what little teeth she had left, struck her son, and with simpering air procured "gentlemen" who possessed a proclivity for fucking pregnant whores.
The labor had lasted all day and the old mother whores were present as midwives and witnesses. Precautions had been taken in the event that the child was a boy; an overlaying of blankets had been set aside.
Birthing a child was excruciating, it burned, but she did not cry out. Blowing like a horse and growling like a mad bitch, she forced her child inch by inch into the world. Her mother worried she would birth a son or die.
Her mother had screamed when the little girl had slivered her way out of her daughter's cunny and she swooped the child up to clean her and coddle her. The old mothers all smiled and nodded in approval.
The congratulations rung hollow in her ears and with great effort she passed the afterbirth as her mother cooed over the infant and danced about the room with it in her arms. The old mothers praised the peach fuzz of blonde hair and the blue eyes the color of bruises.
Daylight had passed and so had the noise and the women. She had been sleeping, now she looked at the infant and found its appeal lacking. Looking into the cradle she saw another link in an unbroken chain of existence.
She was a whore, her mother had been a whore, and her mother before her and so on. The women of her family had been whores since the Romans had taken London. A very long time. How long before this one took part in the family trade?
Just when her mother's beauty had waned she was deemed old enough to start earning her keep. That is what a daughter is for, after all, a source of income and someone to take care of you after you were nothing more than a withered, old cunt.
The overlay was in her hands - how had she gotten out of bed? – she meant to break the chain. She had seen it done before, on boys, and layered the blankets over the infant's face and placed her palm atop the overlay, the breadth of her palm applying pressure.
Her body swayed with the throbbing of the darkness and even after it was dead she did not lift her hand. Plat-plat dripped the blood from her quim onto the floor. A gasp that could have been a shriek in the silence did not disturb her trance.
"Oh, Bess! What've you done? God damn you, you stupid slag!" Snapping her head around she saw the rage and anguish on her mother's face. Her face twisted into a rictus of mirrored emotion. You didn't take the overlay away, she only sneered.