Chapter One: The Caul

Disclaimer

I have not turned into Sondheim since the prologue.

Author's Note

The legend of the caul is a heckuva interesting business. If you want to research it, wikipedia is your God, but any information on it may contain sort of spoilers for this story.

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.

Sam Levenson

Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought his birth.

John Milton

In the middle of the birthing, the midwife heard an unfamiliar gasping. It began as an infantile sound, like a drowning child, but slowly she heard the rasp cascade into something more adult and desperate. It was the dying rattle of man whose throat was cut, like someone screaming underwater.

Oh, she thought pensively, wiping sweat from the mother's brow, this one won't make it alive. Pity, poor mite. His mother – whatsit, Alice – was really a dear. Pity about the father. Pity about the girl.

In the unforgiving light of the candle, Alice did not look dear. She looked young, and gaunt, and lost in her own private miasma of pain. Her face was twisted in terrible lines. She did not look human. Her blonde hair lay in streaks over her sweaty face, and as she cried out without sound, shrieking like wild thing, she resembled nothing so much as a fox caught in a trap.

Poor thing, thought the midwife once more, and then once more to lose herself in the secret old gray counry called grief. She's far too young.

But the midwife was wrong. Young as Aliec Ford might be, and she was not less than twenty-five, withered as she was by worry, she was far older than the infant dying of suffocation as the midwife meditated. And now there was a new sound. The free, hissing sound of something drawing breath. In the dark, painful silence, the baby began to cry.

It was an agonized wail. The midwife's face, half delighted, half terrified, was only slightly lit by the single candle, her cheeks inky caverns. She opened old, cracked lips, threaded with shadowy membranes, and intoned, priest like, "The baby was born with a caul."

"A caul?" These words from the horrified mother were practically a supplication to take the dreadful, mewling thing that cried out so with pain, that had issued from the awful odorous cleft between her legs, away.

"A caul. He took a part of you as he left, right enough. It was near to killed him. But he ripped the caul from his little head, didn't he. A strong boy. It is a boy." The midwife held it up.

It did not look like a boy. It did not look like a baby. Its sallow, pale face was washed out by its shock of red hair. Babies were not supposed to have such thick hair. The baby thing kept crying, mewling with all the difficulties of the world.

"La, Mrs. B.," sing songed the midwife, taking the thing and holding him on her knees, "he's a strong boy, and born with a caul. The thing's squalling played an odd harmony to her sing song speech. "Do you know what that means, Mrs. B.? Do you?"

Alice did not bother to correct the surname mistake. "No," she managed.

"It means he'll grow up to be a saint."

A child was born on the twenty-third of August, 1801, to Mrs. Alice Ford, the eldest sister of the father, Mr. Henry Barker. The family, in an understandable desire to keep this quiet, did not announce the birth. The inbreeding seemed to have no ill effects upon the child, but for his arms, the right of which was longer than the other.

In a fit of irony Henry had named the child Benjamin. This, he was told by an old Jewish acquaintance, meant, "son of my right hand."

Henry Barker thought this terribly amusing. This most likely explains a great deal about Henry Barker.

The first thing Benjamin Barker remembered was the factory. He never learned what the factory made, or the names of any of the workers he watched so avidly. But the first thing he remembered was the sight of the sooty, thin faces of the factory's wraiths, filing out, shoes stuffed with rags. They did not seem to possess gender or identity, only a vast sea of depravity and lifeless life. The people were personless. They were nonexistent to most. They were "its."

Later, Benjamin would not recall that he has watched his scene from his cradle, out the ashy window, through the foggy L,ondon air. Nor would he remember the name of the factory, Turpin's Fine Silk, or remark that it was the same factory where he would work his fingers to the bone from the ages of thirteen to sixteen. He would only remember the factory as an ageless, anonymous nightmare of gaunt, pale faces, genderless and joyous, begging him for help. It was help he could not offer, he know from the cradle, as the factory haunted his dreams through adolesence and adulthood. He could not stoop to them, because to do so would be to become one of their number.

He could not be that, he was determined from childhood, watching the factory, watching the Industrial Revolution out of transparent, pallid eyes. He could not be one of the nameless, lifeless creatures screaming for bread. But perhaps he might fight for them. Watching the factory, a tiny cold rage against injustice was born in Benjamin Barker. Someday, he promised himself, he would be the one to administer that divine justice.

Like most perverted fantasies, this was perversely true.