It had been a whirlwind couple of months. If she’d been told that rainy night when she’d left their – Anton’s – house to go to Nick’s stupid party that she would never return, she wouldn’t have believed it. Yet here she was now in her own office with the lights off just in case, snatching notes out of her file cabinets and looting her own chemistry bench. Anton wasn’t in the office. Sally checked with Betty, his secretary, to make sure he’d be out at a lunch meeting when she came to collect her things. The absolute last thing she needed was for him to catch her here making off with company property. She tossed everything – gently, in the case of the chemicals – into a single banker’s box on her desk.
She only needed one last thing. Sally yanked open the fourth drawer of the last file cabinet and pushed the hanging folders back to reveal her new Joy formula notes lying hidden at the bottom of the drawer. She’d finally perfected it a couple months ago and had started using it herself, but she hadn’t told Anton. Her mother had always been so worried about Sally’s ability to keep a man around, but Sally had also learned that it was prudent to have a backup plan in case one needed to rid themselves of a man too. This new Joy formula was hers.
The formula and General Byng. She’d engineered multiple “chance” encounters with him since she’d left Anton, seducing him not only with her feminine charms but also the promise of her new formula and what leverage it could grant him if he kept Anton at bay. The Byngs were the only people Sally had ever seen Anton tread lightly around, and she assumed it was because he and the General held roughly equal roles of importance in Wellington Wells.
Formula notes secured, Sally slid them into her box, pinned to the side by a gaggle of chemical bottles, and lifted it by the handles. She took one last look around her office with both a sense of regret and relief and walked out the door.
She felt every bit a confident woman ready to do the necessary and provide for her unborn child for about fifteen steps down the hall back up to Anton’s office. Then she started to have second thoughts.
Maybe she was being ridiculous. Maybe she didn’t have to do all this, she thought as she came to stop halfway down the hall. If she was planning to fool General Byng, maybe she could fool Anton too.
No. The advantage of the General was that he would be happy to leave her alone, so long as she dropped everything at a moment’s notice when he called on her. The General was also not opposed to taking drugs for fun. Sally could probably get him high long before she ever had to deliver on her more carnal promises. If she was especially crafty and he especially gullible, he might never even get her clothes off again.
Anton, however, never used drugs. Sally hadn’t noticed this fact until she had started taking her new Joy formula and was no longer under the obfuscating haze of regular Joy herself. She could see why he didn’t, now. There was a power in being the only one not using. It left you with a greater sense of awareness than everyone around you. That he had that awareness meant he would notice when her body started changing. Never mind how clingy and needy he was. While the General would be content to have Sally out of sight and out of mind until he wanted her, Anton always wanted to know where she was and preferred it if she was within arm’s length or at least in his sight. She’d never manage to pull off hiding an entire pregnancy from him.
But maybe he’d like the idea of having a child. Anton was a man of ego and what was a baby but a miniature version of oneself? She tried to imagine him as a father and it was not an idyllic picture. Even if he did love the idea of having a child, even if he loved the child itself… she knew he’d still be possessive and overbearing. Her mother was like that. And look how that turned out, Sally couldn’t stop herself from thinking. She didn’t want to raise her child that way. Especially not in Wellington Wells where there would be nowhere for her child to escape to. At least when she was a girl, she could slam the front door to get the last word and then sit on a park bench for a couple of hours to cool off.
Moreover, Sally couldn’t take the chance that Anton wouldn’t feel that way. He could just as easily treat his own child like he did most everyone else, as a problem needing to be medicated until it solved itself. She envisioned him testing his own remedies for colic and teething on her baby… No. Even if he was on board with parenting in theory, he wouldn’t be in practice. Not any practice she’d approve of.
But maybe she was strong enough to keep him in check? Ever since she learned she was pregnant, she felt more determined to assert herself than she ever had before. Maybe she could-
Sally was startled out of her internal conflict by a loud but dull thud on the thick glass to her left. She nearly dropped her box, the bottles inside rattling threateningly. She never should have dawdled! She turned her head to look, expecting to see that she’d been caught by Anton or a Doctor or maybe one of the constables.
It was just poor mad Harry. Dr. Haworth, she corrected herself out of habit. Anton would always get cross with her if she didn’t refer to him properly. Anton would also get snippy if she belittled his phrenological work, even if she was agreeing with Anton’s own disparagement of it. Sally could not find the right note to hit with Anton about the man. He was at once burdened by Dr. Haworth’s care and yet refused to let anyone else take the responsibility of him. Dr. Haworth seemed to live only to vex him, but regardless of which of them Sally experimented sympathizing with, Anton would turn his frustrations on her either way. The subject of Harry Haworth was a minefield Sally didn’t have a map to and was best avoided altogether.
Lost in her hopeful debate, she hadn’t noticed she’d stopped square in front of his cell.
Though she had walked past Dr. Haworth’s window multiple times a day over the last three years, the two of them had never once acknowledged each other. He because he was mad and she because she found his constant vigil at his tea table, his eyes following her like a painting in a haunted house back and forth as she passed, to be unnerving and sad.
When you were on Joy, you ignored things that were sad if you could help it. Especially if Anton snapped at you for suggesting ways in which those things could be made to look less sad. She’d once tried to gently suggest that Anton might to give Dr. Haworth some books to read. Anton had only bit back that Dr. Haworth had exactly as much entertainment as he wished to have and if she thought she knew better than he did, she was welcome to try giving the man some books herself. Sally took that to be a rhetorical proposal, but Anton was short and passive-aggressive with her for the next few days as if he were miffed she hadn’t actually tried. She kept her brighter follow-up idea of relocating Dr. Haworth to herself after that. If he weren’t right there in the hall, he couldn’t antagonize Anton and put him in a bad mood every single time he came down to her office or leer at her when she went up to his. It was easier to calm Anton down than it was to argue about it, though, and she’d spent most of her life being mentally undressed by men who weren’t safely locked in a cell. Sally decided long ago that was not a battle worth fighting.
Sally checked that none of her bottles had cracked and then looked back at Dr. Haworth to see what he wanted. Despite that he was the one brightly lit and on display, she felt like she was on the one being observed.
He squinted at her banker’s box, shifted his gaze up to her deer-in-the-headlights face, and shook his head. He gave her a stony look and pointed in the direction of Anton’s office with a forceful sweep of the hand as if to say “get out”. She couldn’t tell if it was advice or an order. Sally bit her lip and hugged her banker’s box closer to herself. In any event, mad or not, he was right. She couldn’t stay here. Not in the long term and certainly not in the short. If she was going to do what was best for her baby, then she had to leave.
She straightened up, adjusted her grip on her box’s handles so they weren’t digging into her fingers, then stepped forth into her new life.
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