by Caitlyn Kinsella

She was brought into the country under the whispers of rough voices and the smell of motor oil, the ocean pulling against them. She was sold under a quay and spent her childhood on a flat-bottomed boat, poling the river that snaked from the capital into wild land.

The man who bought her bought her to ease his loneliness. He christened her Clotilde, the patron saint of exiles. His wife had died, and he wanted someone to talk to.

She grew up in the eastern countryside, never more than a mile from water, wrapped against rain in a dock-man’s coat. She hobbled her way through a new language, and when they went ashore for provisions, people thought she was his daughter.

Slowly, she learned to ignore the river odors, the male smell heavy in the boat. To cut her hair with kitchen scissors. To take bars of soap into the river and wash herself clean while the man walked into villages for bread and tea and library books they never returned. By the light of the storm lantern, he read to her; then, when she had learned, she read to herself, or they alternated chapters aloud. He taught her a poem about King and Country he’d learned at school, and they sang it back to one another on fog-filled days, as he steered the boat through locks she raised or lowered. When ghosts rested hands on the boat’s windows, Clotilde told him what she remembered of her family, the sisters and parents and barn cats. He listened, but never suggested she find her way back.

***

When she was fifteen, orders came on the winds of the city. Greyhounds were the best way to make money. The man had a friend who drove an old army lorry full of dogs around London, in predawn secrecy: he needed someone to get the dogs from country racecourses to the docks of the capital. So they agreed to stealing. The man had arrangements with some of the kennels, keys left on hooks, latches left unlatched, but sometimes he and Clotilde slipped through the murk of night with wire cutters and thieves’ intent. The boat began to smell of fur.

Missing dogs were more valuable than pinched library books, and they kept a list of towns they could no longer tie up in, places where other floating families had seen a man and a girl leading sleek, starved dogs through the morning, steam rising in wreaths around their red hair.

“They think we’re Irish,” the man said, as though an assumption could be a disguise.

The lorry man in London, seeing Clotilde leading greyhounds from the hold for the first time, grinned at the man who had bought her. He held his hands in front of his chest, making appreciative noises. Smarting, Clotilde left the dogs untied on the dock, retreating back into the hold and closing the curtains.

***

The man had a sister, whom they spent Christmases with. A sister who gave her brother’s stolen child dresses; who explained, gently, the blood that started irregularly; who told Clotilde what men did to women in the dark.

“Why would you let anyone do that?” Clotilde drew her knees to her chest.

“It’s how you get a baby.” The sister settled her teacup into its saucer, mouth drawn thin. “But men don’t always ask.”

A lanky boy followed Clotilde back to the boat, on an evening she’d spent at a library. A man in a butcher’s shop slid a hand up the back of her dress. A university student swimming in the river caught her bathing and tried to touch her breasts.

The next time they were in London, the lorry man whistled as she walked off the boat, her hands full of leads. “Five quid, for an hour,” he said. “Ten, if she bleeds.”

“Take the dogs,” the man said, not looking at either of them.

A third man shouldered out of the gloom, standing close to Clotilde, the dogs milling between them. “Twenty,” he said, “if you don’t need her back.”

“Get on the boat, Clotilde,” the man said.

She dropped the leashes and boarded the boat.

***

They did not stop stealing. The man’s sister needed a new hob, the boat needed a new motor, Clotilde needed new clothes. But Clotilde stopped bringing the dogs up from the hold.

“He says you’ve been having some trouble,” the sister said, at Christmas, the man gone to town for their ham. “What if you stayed with me, went to school? You’re clever, you might like it.”

But Clotilde would miss the river, the music of water in lifting locks, the piercing, touchable silence before the sun rose.

“Do think about it,” the sister said, and filled the boat with books, a glimpse of the world on offer.

***

They were somewhere near Coventry, when the boat pitched sideways. The man stumbled against her. “Sorry, my saint,” he said, righting himself.

He had been warm against her. His hand had pressed into the small of her back, and “press into” had been the words his sister had used, to describe other things men might decide to do.

He patted her shoulder, as he handed her the stew that was supper, and said they’d go into the city and find her new shoes, before giving the next batch of dogs their brief liberation.

Clotilde waited until he was asleep, then slipped the storm lantern from its hook and set out into the night.

She had no identifying documents, nothing to tell anyone where she had been born, no identity card for the life as Clotilde that the waters of England had baptized her into. Somewhere to the east, across the Channel, lived a family with a picture of a disappeared daughter, a headstone over an empty grave. To the west, forest, then sea. In the south, a tangle of marshes and boats and men to avoid.

Clotilde lit the lantern. She pointed herself north.

Caitlyn Kinsella is an itinerant bibliophile and lover of long words. Her fiction has appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Sonora Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere.  She can be found on the American East Coast, or roaming about London, haunting cafés and libraries.  Caitlyn is currently at work on a novel.