Mags wakes to the sound of a baby’s cry, her now customary wake-up call. But as she stretches and braces for the cold air outside the blankets she feels the bed shift and a pressure on her arm.
“I got this,” Nancy says, voice rough with sleep. “You ain’t barely slept through the night since Charlotte was born. Don’t want no bags under your eyes scaring the culls away.”
Mags laughs and readily obeys but she doesn’t fall immediately back into sleep. Instead she settles back on the pillows and watches Nancy pace the small room, singing to baby Lucy. She seems softer recently, the hard edge of fury at the world not gone exactly but quietened, allowed to slip away entirely in moments like this.
These are the moments Mags thinks they might actually have done it, escaped Quigley’s foul clutches and found a better life. True they are squashed into this tiny room, often hungry and seldom warm, but she is Ma Porter’s best girl and set to inherit this house when she goes (which won’t be long waiting, if the sound of her cough this last winter is anything to go by). And Nancy services no culls except on her own terms which is perhaps the best thing of all.
“What you thinkin’ about?” Nancy eases herself back under the covers and Mags shuffles her body so they can curl around each other for warmth, for comfort, as they have done since girlhood.
“The future,” she says.
Nance laughs drily. “Future looks bleak if we don’t snatch a few hours’ more kip before this one,” she jerks her thumb at Charlotte, “wakes at first light demanding breakfast.” She pillows her head into Mags’s side and promptly begins to snore.
It isn’t long before Mags followed her into sleep but her last thought before she does (and it is foolishly sentimental, so she would only indulge in a half-asleep state) is that she doesn’t need dreams of the future to make her smile when the present looks like this.