This was initially going to be flashback set during the previous chapter, when Miss Peregrine tells Abe that when she first got Claire, "things didn't go at all like I'd expected." But I wanted to spend more time on it than a flashback would allow, so I made it into its own chapter. It's inspired by a similar scene in The Light Between Oceans, one of my favorite books of 2017.
Alma lit her pipe and sat down to enjoy a rare moment of quiet in her kitchen, before her children came in for their afternoon tea. They were outside on the lawn right now, playing tug-of-war with Bronwyn at one end of the rope and the rest of them at the other. They never beat Bronwyn, even when they all played against her, but sometimes they came close.
A card from Abe had arrived that morning, and at the kitchen table, Alma picked it up again. It was a birth announcement, with a drawing on the front of a stork carrying a pink bundle in its beak. Inside were lines where Abe had filled out his new daughter's name – Susan Louise Portman, though he'd written off to the side, We're calling her Susie – her weight and date of birth. There was a black-and-white photograph too, of Abe and his wife holding the baby.
Alma and her children had all passed it around and looked at it that morning. The children were mostly happy for their former housemate – except Emma, who Alma knew felt stung, though she'd tried to hide it – but for her, it was a very strange feeling, and she still didn't know quite what to make of it. None of her children had ever grown to adulthood before, much less had a child of their own. She couldn't shake the unsettling feeling that she had failed Abe somehow, letting him grow up like this.
"Miss P?" Claire's voice called, distracting her, and then the screen door swung open, and Claire came skipping inside. "I picked some cherries from the orchard, Miss P, see?" she asked, holding up a basket. "Can we have them with our tea? We should have something pink, because Abe's baby is a girl."
Alma smiled. Claire was as girly as little girls came; everything in her wardrobe was pink or ruffled or both, and she always wanted to play dress-up or tea party. "All right, Claire. Why don't you take them to the sink and wash them off?"
Claire slid the stepstool over to the sink, climbed up, and remembered to wash her hands first. She loved to help in the kitchen, and for a six-year-old, she was good at it. Alma let her make the food for teatime on her own sometimes, with supervision, of course. Once she'd used a cookie-cutter to make them all heart-shaped sandwiches with strawberry jam.
"Abe's baby is awfully small," Claire remarked as she turned on the tap. "Was I that small when I was a baby, Miss P?"
"You were just about the same size," Alma said, looking at the photograph again. She'd have to remember to put it in their album later. Her littlest children had loved the stork drawing; they really believed that a stork brought new babies, and that the stork was an ymbryne.
"Is she going to get bigger, or just be a baby forever?" Claire was her question-asker, but Alma didn't mind; she was young enough that she still asked easy questions and was satisfied with easy answers.
"No, she'll get bigger. She's not peculiar, so she should grow up all the way."
"But... how do you know she's not peculiar? Maybe she has a peculiarity we can't see, like with Enoch."
"An ymbryne can always tell."
Claire looked over the shoulder to see the photograph on the table. Abe, his wife, their new baby. Father, mother, child. Just like the doll family in Claire's dollhouse upstairs. Just like the families she saw when Miss P took them into the village. Her little hands stilled from washing the cherries, and for the first time in her life, it occurred to her to wonder...
"Miss P, why don't I have a mother? Or a father?"
The question made Alma nervous, but she didn't betray that. "Because you're peculiar, Claire," she answered calmly, "and peculiar children don't have mothers or fathers, remember? They have ymbrynes."
"Oh, yes, I knew that," Claire said quickly, as if she'd just forgotten. "Well, a mother couldn't be as good as you, anyway."
Alma let out a long, slow exhale of her pipe and fell silent for a moment. In her mind, she heard again Claire's wails in the middle of the night; every night for those first few sleep-deprived weeks, she would wake up for a feeding and would only cry harder, inconsolable, when Alma came to her instead of her mother.
"Your mother would be just as good to you, Claire, if you had one," she said in the same calm tone, though a bit quieter now. You had one once, she thought. She loved you. You missed her. But of course, she said nothing of that to Claire. Out of all her children, Claire was the only one who wasn't troubled by her past, and Alma intended to keep it that way.
Claire had been abandoned in Telford when she was about three months old. She was left wrapped in a blanket on the steps of a church, and found there by another ymbryne, Miss Nightingale, who'd sensed that there was a peculiar child in the area and had been searching for her. She was placed in Alma's care that very same day.
Alma remembered the first time she held Claire in her arms as if it were yesterday. She was fast asleep, and as Alma gazed at her, she felt everything else grow still, as if the world had stopped spinning and shrunken down to just her and this child. She almost couldn't believe it – her first charge at last, and it was a baby. She was getting in right on the ground floor. Soon enough, she would have other charges, older children with unhappy pasts that she wouldn't be able to change or fix. But this one, this little one in her arms right now, would be different. Never mind that her mother abandoned her, Alma thought scornfully. Claire would never know that; she would only know love and acceptance and stability. She would never want for anything. Alma would see to it.
She was convinced that she would be the perfect ymbryne, that she would never make any mistakes – not with this baby, or any of the children to come. Of course, it all seemed easy with Claire asleep in her arms like a perfect angel. But then, she woke up, crying to be fed, and Alma's daydream crumpled.
She prepared a bottle of formula for Claire, but when she offered it to her, Claire only cried harder and turned her face away. She'd felt Alma's breast on her cheek, and she nuzzled it with her mouth through her blouse, wanting to nurse. Claire was a stubborn baby, and the two of them went on like that for some time, Claire trying to breastfeed and Alma trying to give her the bottle. She realized only then that Claire had probably never had a bottle before. She realized that she wasn't perfect, after all. Far from it, she scolded herself. Hadn't she just sworn that Claire would never want for anything? And now, here she was, wanting already.
Alma's scorn for Claire's mother vanished in a wave of pity. Her mother had given her life and breastfed her – two things that Alma could never do, even if she cared for this child for a hundred years. She'd probably only given Claire up when her peculiarity became too hard to hide anymore. The poor woman... Alma wondered if she was sore right now from not having a baby to nurse. She vowed to never judge her children's birth families so harshly again.
Finally, with the baby still crying and Alma feeling frustrated almost to tears herself, not knowing what else to do, she unbuttoned her blouse and held Claire to her bare breast, which she immediately took. Her hungry sucking motions slowed, but didn't stop, when no milk came, and she opened her eyes and focused for the first time on Alma's face.
She was only a few months old, but Alma swore that she could see an understanding in Claire's gaze as she stared up at her, as if she realized that the mother who'd nursed her was gone, that her life would be different now, and that she'd have to accept this strange new woman and her strange bottle. She finally took the bottle after that, but only with a great reluctance.
Alma heaved a sigh of relief and thought that battle was over, but no, she had to go through it all again, almost every time she fed Claire. For their first few days together, she kept refusing to take her bottle until she'd had Alma's breast first. It seemed to soothe her, even though there was no nourishment to be found there, so Alma put her own discomfort aside and remembered the words that had been drilled into her at the Ymbryne Academy. "It is an ymbryne's greatest privilege to make sacrifices for her children." She thanked the birds when Claire finally outgrew the habit, and that she didn't start eating through her backmouth until she was old enough for solid foods.
Claire set the cherries to dry on a dish towel and came over to the table, bringing Alma back to the present. She tilted the card up to look at the stork drawing. "I wish Miss Stork would bring us a new one, too," she said.
"Mmm, I know," Alma demurred. Her children were always wishing for a new brother or sister to play with. Alma knew that she had quite enough children to look after already, but she also knew that if the Ymbryne Council ever asked her to take in another peculiar boy or girl who needed a good home, she wouldn't find it in her heart to say no.
"Well, I'd better get back to tug-of-war," Claire said, turning her head to look through the window onto the lawn. "I'm sure the others need my help. How much longer till our tea, Miss P?"
"Seventeen minutes. I'm about to put the kettle on now." She got up and watched through the window above the sink as Claire ran outside and across the lawn, her pink dress swaying. Alma suddenly remembered that when Miss Nightingale had first found Claire, she had been wrapped in a pink blanket – a bit faded, but most definitely pink, as if her mother already knew how girly she was. Perhaps mothers had instincts too, like ymbrynes did. As she watched Claire play, Alma said a silent prayer that her mother could sense in her heart that her daughter was being very well-cared for. Alma had learned that she wasn't perfect, but she knew that she was doing that much right.