Free Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth Page A

for the unhelpful blurring of the boundaries from the likes of St. Wilgefortis — but, as with clothing, so with names: if you were a saint your name could be used for either sex. Half the nuns at The House of the Magdalenes had men’s names. The Reverend Goodchild had his own theories about this, and enjoyed many a good snigger about it with Mrs. Albert Comstock.
    St. Pharaildis was pictured with an enormous hen on either side of her, if she
was
a her. Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton — like some of the illustrators in the Lindstrom & Larsson catalogue — had no conception of perspective (grouped rather incongruously in a free-for-all freemasonry with Japanese and mediæval artists), so it was difficult to make out whether the hens were meant to be in the foreground, or whether they really were — as they appeared to be — bigger than she was. Alice, knowing nothing about the saint, was puzzled by the hens, but decided that they must be the instruments of her martyrdom. Here she was, being pecked to death by giant hens unleashed by some evil despot, because … because she … she defied his cruel edicts and his imperious mien by distributing eggs — from a willow-woven basket — to the starving poor within his evil domain. She pictured just two hens — as there were two in the window — outlandishly large, advancing menacingly, towering over Pharaildis.
    Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O!
    Their heads — like the pistons of the Coketown steam engines in
Hard Times
— worked monotonously up and down, the heads of elephants in a state of melancholy madness.
    And on that farm he had some hens, E-I-E-I-O!
    Peck. Peck. Peck.
    With a peck-peck here, and a peck-peck there.
    Pharaildis (not yet martyred, not yet pecked into sainthood) staggered back a little each time, a girl being pushed in the shoulder by a schoolyard bully, her basket held before her — base forward — like a fragile protective shield, a Basque (a Basque with a basket) playing jai alai. Mabel Peartree had just such a big basket, square with a central handle, and carried it looped over her arm on her way to the shops. It was exactly the sort of basket you imagined being carried by Little Red Riding-Hood, with a piece of cake, a bottle of wine, and a bunch of flowers tucked neatly into one side of it.
    “Oh, Miss Peartree! What big teeth you have!”
    Miss Peartree opened her mouth to reveal — gigantic and glinting — the mighty fruits of G. G. Schiffendecken’s labors. He was a dentist who created on the epic scale of a Michael Angelo sculpture. (This could very well be the only known occasion on which startled comment had been made about the size of her teeth, rather than the size of her —
Ye gods! —
enormous nose.)
    “All the better to eat you with!”
    Munch. Munch. Munch.
    Pharaildis’s feet crunched on the hens’ eggs, incensing them further. After the
crunch, crunch, crunch
came the
peck, peck, peck
and after the pecking came the
munch, munch, munch.
    Alice had really liked the name Pharaildis — there was nothing exotic about
Alice
— but the hens had put her off.
    Had St. Wilgefortis specified the sort of beard she had in mind, or had she to make do with the one she was offered? Alice rather pictured her in front of a mirror, browsing through a selection (ready-to-wear rather than custom-made) offered by a diffident angel, deciding which beard suited her best, trying them on, a fashion-conscious client choosing a bonnet, turning sideways to view herself from different angles, fluffing them up becomingly, judging the effect of threading them artistically through her necklace.
    Here was a useful Beauty Hint: she should make a feature of her moustache, thread it with beads, bedeck it with little silken bows, make the most of what she had until the beard came along, bedazzle Mrs. Albert Comstock with her frivolous femininity.

9
    Her hand was aching. She had been clutching the bar too tightly, and lines were impressed across the