Even wrapped up against the bitter cold of winter, a shiver ran down the small girl's spine. The snow covered street that used to burn her feet no longer felt real. The only building that had ever given her nightmares was within touching distance, she knew what she had to do, yet the notion of reaching out and grabbing the brass-door knocker repulsed her and made her stomach do a back flip. She took a deep breath and brushed off the snow that had accumulated on her shoulders.
A coughing fit suddenly took a hold of her body. Her ribs burnt and her eyes watered, she was sick, and her brother knew it. She turned to him, and he nodded firmly, a stern look in his eye. The pleading conversation that they had exchanged only a few hours before was still echoing inside her brain.
Please. You're my brother. Don't make me leave you. I love you.
She was by now too weak to say what she had wanted to say to him, what she needed to say to him.
She adored her brother, he had been her protector. They'd stolen food together, slept under the stars together, survived together, even, and now he was ready to abandon her, just like their parents had done to them.
It all seemed to make so much sense in her five year old brain. He's abandoning me because he doesn't love me anymore. The thought that he was doing it because she was deathly ill never even crossed her mind. That was implausible.
She stood there in the doorway, hands on her hips and a defiant glare etched into her face.
She wasn't planning on moving anytime soon.
"Please, Bee."
"It's Beatrix, not Bee." She choked out, her voice resonating off the walls of the ally they were in.
He chuckled slightly. "They'll take care of you in there, Bee."
It was only when he turned to walk away that she broke down. She began to sob, hoping that he would hear and come back, she'd been in this situation before, and he always came back. This time was different, this time he simply steadied himself before continuing his fast paced stride.
She turned her attention back to the house of horrors.
The building was a massive ugly thing, it was three storeys high, some of its windows were missing shutters, and some of the others were cracked. The roof was missing its slates in several places, and the paint was peeling off the balcony.
She turned her gaze back towards London's bleak skyline, and then down the street that her brother had to carry her down, only partly because she was kicking, screaming and refusing to go, but also because she was simply too weak to drag herself along. The possibility of running after him crossed her mind, but she knew she'd keel over before she caught up to him. The streets had been her home since before she could remember, and she knew the labyrinth of cobblestone and alleys like the back of her own hand. She knew which places to avoid, and she knew where the shop owners were that would feed and clothe her.
And then there was this, the one single building that she had tried to escape ending up in, but her fate was inevitable.
Nope. She thought. Not going in there.
Just as she was about to turn away, her vision blurred, her legs buckled, and she collapsed into the snow. She couldn't get up, and she wasn't contemplating waking in the morning.
She was still face down on the floor when one of the Orphanage Sisters found her a few hours later.
"Oh, you poor dear." She said in a thick cockney accent. Her thick dirty-blond her fell over her shoulders, and her eyes twinkled with some sort of magic.
She gently lifted her from the floor, and in a voice just below a whisper and without the accent she added, "Good luck, Sweetie."
What the half-dead, dirty bundle of rags didn't know – and what the woman posing as a sister did – was that Beatrix's arrival had been planned and eagerly awaited, not planned by her brother (though it had been on his mind for awhile when he noticed his sister's health deteriorating), but planned by a much higher power.
Although she didn't know it, Beatrix was a lucky girl, a very lucky girl indeed.