Changeling

Mrs Cope had been far too old to have a child. Everyone said so. "Forty-nine and looked it" Mrs Jennings from the post office liked to say. No one had known that she was even pregnant, least of all Mr Cope, a sickly, confused sort of man. 

The tight-lipped village midwife, ruddy faced and drastically practical, would not volunteer any information, but her pretty, young maid servant had been heard telling the butcher's boy that Mrs Cope hadn't a single appointment, not even the day the little thing was born. By all accounts it had been a Thursday, mid-June, Mrs Cope had made her way down main street pushing an old-fashioned buggy, wearing her best dress (a maroon, taffeta affair that Mrs Jennings had some snide opinions about). Her head was held high, despite the squealing back wheel of the buggy and the open-mouthed stares from the villagers she passed. 

Not a fortnight later, Mr Cope was found dead in the west field, wide-eyed and clutching his chest as if in pain. The doctor ruled it a heart attack. 

The funeral was a poisonous affair, the air of the little wooden church hung heavy with lazy, half whispered accusations. The baby in Mrs Cope's arms didn't cry once, even though her mourning attire was scratchy and the church tepid and hot. 

Grace Elizabeth Cope took her first steps at the tender age of 9 months, 3 days. In the pokey kitchen of her mother's house she had drawn herself up on pale, slender legs, and stumbled across the room to where her mother sat darning in the wane light. 

Her first words, however, would not be heard until she was well past 6. 

Still pale and thin, despite her mother's valiant attempts to tempt her appetite, they'd been sat at the breakfast table, Mrs Cope feebly attempting to coax a single spoonful of porridge past her daughter's rosebud lips. Seeing the desperation in her mother's filmy eyes, Grace had taken a sharp, high-pitched breath and asked for honey. Her voice, like her appearance was soft and insubstantial, but she spoke clearly and slowly, and her mother, shocked to tears, wordlessly fetched the amber bottle from besides the flour bin and set it on the table. Grace ate with her hands, pouring the honey between them like spun copper, and Mrs Cope could only watch, dumbfounded. 

Honey, of course, quickly became a staple of the Cope household, Grace could even sometimes be convinced to drink it mixed into milk, but still, she remained pale and painfully thin, all eyes and spidery limbs and hair- thick, white-blonde tresses that spun themselves into unmanageable tangles. 

Her first day of school came a half year later. Mrs Cope spent nearly the entire night before trying to get her daughter's hair combed and tied back, but the tangles seemed sentient in their stubborn refusal to cooperate, and although she stayed perfectly still and quiet, Mrs Cope could tell by her daughters little fists clenched in her night dress, that it hurt awfully. 

And so it was that Grace set off towards the tiny village school house the next morning, dress starched, socks crisp and white, shoes shined and buffed, and hair in a fantastic, snowy cloud of tangles rising above her head like a halo in the morning sunlight. She carried her tin flask of milk and honey soberly by her side, her posture pinched, as if the dusty road was waiting to swallow her up. 

Her peers knew that this was the year little Grace Cope would be sent to school, and though gossip had simmered down some over the last 6 years, mothers still gave her wary looks when they saw her trailing after Mrs Cope at market, and many children were ignorantly eager to continue the miserable institution of disliking the Copes for themselves. 

Waiting on the seat of her ancient wooden folding desk that morning Grace found-a little too late-a brass thumb tack, placed spur up and stuck with a little school glue. She didn't bleed, nor did she cry as Bobby Fuller had been hoping, but she did finger the small tear in the seat of her dress nervously. Marissa Daniels the tailor's daughter, a whopping six months older and half head taller than Bobby pulled his hair at break time till he screamed. After that Ruby Findlay wouldn't eat dinner with her, so Marissa sat by Grace instead. Grace gave Marissa an acorn she'd been keeping carefully in the sleeve of her dress, and Marissa put it in her pocket for safe keeping. 

Thus began a friendship, spurred perhaps more by default than anything else. Marissa talked for them both and Grace listened attentively, offering in place of conversation, interesting rocks she found and generous portions of honey-milk. Years passed and the girls grew together comfortably, making an odd pair to look at, Marissa small and swarthy and soft, Grace slightly too tall for her age, all sharp white angles, eyes as wild as her hair. Mrs Daniels was cagey and unwelcoming at first, but the arrival of twin boys, healthy and screaming in the summer of Marissa's 12th year distracted her mother somewhat from her dubious friendship. 

Two weeks after Grace's 17th birthday Marissa came to school with a black eye for the first time. It was clumsily concealed with a swoop of hair, and a few strokes from her mother's powder compact, and as she rushed in late, for the first time in her school career Mr Richards, the head teacher eyed it apathetically for a few moments before waving her to her seat beside Grace. Grace didn't say anything, but she held Marissa's hand beneath the desk, and silently filled in the problems across both of their slates. 

That day the two girls ate their dinner around the back of the school house by the water pump. They sat and Marissa answered Grace's questioning look with a watery smile, moving her hair to show her friend the full extent of the damage-angry purple bruising squeezing her eyelid shut. Then, Grace knelt on the sharp filter rock surrounding the water pump and took Marissa's face gently into her hands. Gently, painfully slow, she pressed butterfly light kisses around the tender, swollen skin of her friends eye. Tears began to stream silently down Marissa's face and Grace kissed them too, wiping them dry with the pad of her thumb. 

The two girls disappeared later that night, and were never seen by anyone from the village again.

Mrs Cope moved to Bath to stay with her brother-that's what she told Mrs Jennings anyhow. She'd had to catch a public carriage from the closest town, as there wasn't one that ran to the little village, and Arthur, the butcher's son helped carry her luggage- two ancient travelling cases weighed down with clinking bottles of honey.