“Dalhaven’s Daughter” is a 17000-word story I wrote for the Writers of the Future Contest (Hollywood, CA) that won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Fourth Quarter. I will be publishing this piece in 8 parts.
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Graceway City brimmed over with the rising sun’s light, and the Purlieus received the scattered remnants of the rays. Luke Hawking had never been one to be sentimental about sunrises, but that morning in particular, he found himself looking gloomily toward the shining building tops of Graceway—all from the confinement of his small garden in the Purlieus.
“Luke?”
Luke turned. His uncle walked toward him from the back of the worn house, where he’d been gardening since dawn. His faded overalls were freshly smudged with dirt.
“Watching the sunrise?”
“No, sir,” Luke answered a little shortly.
“I hope not,” his uncle said gently, joining him as he turned to go back into the shabby house. His old, wise gaze skimmed carelessly over Graceway, the way Luke could never train his own gaze to. “‘All that glitters is not gold.’”
Luke nodded, casting a final glance over his shoulder at Graceway’s shimmering treetops and building roofs. Then the young man determinedly followed the old into the house.
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If one were standing at the boundary between Graceway City and the Purlieus that morning, he or she may have seen an unusual spectacle.
The pale pavement of Graceway was abruptly cut off, like a staircase step, to the lower dirt road of the Purlieus. It was an unmistakable, uncrossable line. To one side was refined structural order, distinguished, educated people, and a diversity of culture, climate, and vegetation. To the other were people considered beneath the splendor of the great city.
Yet that morning, a pair of feet crossed the boundary. The wrong way, it may be worthwhile to note. Instead of stepping up from the dirt to the pavement, laden with uncertain hope as youths from the Purlieus tended to be when they ventured into Graceway for the first time, the feet jumped down into the dirt. The young owner of the feet then continued to walk into the Purlieus. Graceway had now one less its population. Hence the strange phenomenon.
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“I’ll need you to come with me to Mrs. Ainsley’s house this morning, Luke,” his aunt said as she cleared the breakfast table.
Luke paused at the doorway and scowled, in the knowledge that his back was turned and his aunt could not see his face. “Who’s Mrs. Ainsley?”
“I’ve told you, Luke! The widow who moved here recently, with six children! The poor woman, without a husband in his rough neighborhood, without a soul to help her keep…” His aunt shook her head as she continued to wipe the table.
Luke had never been fond of children. The sight of the shrieking, filthy youngsters always irritated him. What’s more, he was constantly reminded of his own miserable childhood. It was discouraging and distressing, deeply so, that children still ran wild and grew to become what their parents were: haggard laborers of the dry, unfruitful Purlieu fields. The Purlieus surrounded Graceway like seawater would an island, yet sometimes it felt as though the Purlieus were the prison one could never find one’s way out of.
Luke, therefore, couldn’t help his stormy facial expression as he followed his aunt through the narrow dusty road of the neighborhood that morning. He stared down at the dry, trampled figs and shallow footprints in the dirt that would soon be blown away by the winds of the Purlieus, which lacked clear distinction between seasons and were usually swept with dry dust storms, with very rare rainy months, during which the workers labored to finish the plantation all over the land. Just then, it was late August: the wet season had passed and the Purlieus were in their relative glory of green crops growing thinly in the fields.
“Mother! Mother!” screamed the voices of a group of dusty children. The herd of boys and girls rushed rudely past Luke and his aunt, trampling the already-flattened figs on the ground, sweeping into the front yard of one of the houses.
“Mrs. Ainsley’s children?” Luke asked, eyeing them distastefully.
“I suppose so,” his aunt replied grimly. They followed the children into the yard.
It was only after the children dispersed that Mrs. Ainsley acknowledged their presence. Apologizing tiredly, she swept the gravel with a broom of twigs, which showed how unprepared she was for life in the Purlieus. A yard could never be free of gravel: wind swept bits of crumbled rock through every wall, every hour of the day.
“…I don’t know how to thank you, Mrs. Hawking,” Mrs. Ainsley said, peering at the securely wrapped package of potatoes Luke’s aunt handed her.
“Please, don’t worry about it,” Luke’s aunt told her reassuringly. Luke watched as his aunt comforted the poor, bewildered woman. A few minutes later, Luke and his aunt were walking back home in the morning sunlight that promised a rare day of peaceful weather.
“She’s moved here from the southern Purlieus recently,” Luke’s aunt was telling him, “her children have been increasingly troublesome here, being used to the rain in the south…is that her daughter?”
They both paused to see a little girl sitting against a stone wall in the road, a rare sight in the Purlieus. Children were not to be alone in the road, for their own safety. No one knew when a dust storm would sweep into sight. It was possible that one of Mrs. Ainsley’s children may not have known.
“Are you all right, dear?” Luke’s aunt said kindly, approaching her.
The girl lifted a dirt-streaked face and glared up at Luke’s aunt with such hostility in her young, shining eyes that Luke charged forward in anger, forgetting that she may be the daughter of their neighbor. “She asked you a question,” Luke said sternly to the defiant child below him, “and it’s expected that you answer her.”
She attempted to glare up at Luke also, but upon finding Luke’s stare even more hostile than her own, she snapped, albeit somewhat helplessly, “Yes, I’m fine.”
Judging by her voice and manner, it was already clear that she was not from this vicinity. “I think she’s lost, Luke,” his aunt whispered to him.
“I’ll take her home, don’t worry,” Luke sighed. His aunt nodded and walked on.
After staring grimly after his aunt for a few moments, Luke turned back to the girl. Now that he knew her to be a child who had wandered too far from her home, he only felt exasperated pity at her situation: the first lesson children of the Purlieus learned was to remain within their own street, with friends, within reach of their parents. Yet a few children still died from being left out in a dust storm each year.
“What’s your name?” Luke asked in a slightly gentler voice, looking down at her.
“Kamrin.”
“Where do you live, Kamrin? I’ll take you back home.”
She lifted her head. “I’m from Savannah borough…of Graceway City,” she added as an afterthought.
Never in his life had Luke been more astonished. “You’re from Graceway?”
Kamrin frowned up at him. “Yes?”
Luke hesitated, trying to grasp the situation. Kamrin did not seem to understand the enormity of a Graceway child lost in the Purlieus.
“This is the Purlieus,” Luke began, expecting her to start crying in shock.
Instead, she looked at him sarcastically. “I know that.”
Taken aback, Luke demanded, “You mean you left Graceway intentionally?”
“Yes?” Kamrin said challengingly. “Why?”
Luke shook his head at the ridiculous situation. A child in Graceway City should never have been permitted to exit her borough, much less the city, alone. Furthermore, why would any child in her right mind run away into the Purlieus, in every way inferior to Graceway? There she should be living in a clean neighborhood receiving a top-notch education, enjoying her green front garden without having to really cultivate anything, and whatever the climate was like there, it would likely be milder with more rain and little to no dust storms. Savannah borough, judging by its name, was likely in western Graceway: the richest and most plentiful area in Graceway yet, with the best-yielding fields and healthiest oak and pine trees.
“If you’re from Savannah borough, Kamrin, how in tarnation did you get here?” Luke asked, fumbling for a memory in his dusty, worn school classroom years ago: the Purlieu schoolteacher had taught them geography one day, tracing an old map of the Purlieus, which formed a ring around the circular Graceway City. He’d taught them the city’s four main divisions, North, South, East, and West, and the numerous boroughs within each. We live, the schoolmaster told the students, in the northern Purlieus; therefore, if any of you ever tried entering the city, you would be killed by the climate of northern Graceway, the notorious winter storms of Taurus or Angelis borough, before you could do anything else. “Remember, children, stay in the Purlieus and work hard; Graceway people will never want you in their city,” the schoolmaster had said.
Twelve-year-old Luke, with young and dream-filled eyes, had rebelliously hardened his determination then, of one day stepping into western Graceway, perhaps by walking around through the Purlieus first instead of braving northern Graceway’s winter, and getting work in the great city… Then Luke had been forced to quit school at thirteen as he had to help his uncle and older brother in the fields. “For heaven’s sake, Luke. Stop sulking,” his older brother had told him harshly one night, from the doorway of Luke’s room, in which Luke had been staring despairingly out the window all day. “You think you’re the only one who had to drop out of school to work?”
“Well,” Kamrin said, a little more unreservedly than she’d been, “I walked away from home and took a streetcar. It took me through the West division and into the North, and that’s when I got off.”
“And then you walked into the Purlieus? Why?”
Kamrin shrugged, a little carelessly. “I was tired of being home. I wanted to run away.”
Luke turned his head briefly to refrain from calling her an ungrateful brat. After a sigh, he turned back to her and said, “How old are you, Kamrin?”
“Eleven.”
“You should know, then, that there’s no possible way for you to stay here. No one can take you in and you’ll probably get sick in this environment. The only thing for you to do is to go back home.”
“Streetcars in Graceway only travel clockwise, if you didn’t know. If I take the streetcar again, it’ll go around the East and South division before it takes me West.”
“Then we’ll walk,” Luke said impatiently. “I’m twenty years old, and the law shouldn’t forbid me from acting as your guardian until we reach Savannah borough. Please don’t argue with me,” he added quietly as she opened her mouth, “I’ll take you home as I said I would, and since you got yourself into this trouble, the least you can do is follow me without complaint.”
Kamrin followed Luke meekly as he, after a brief pause, wanting to get this duty over with as fast as he could, marched toward the nearest neighbor’s house. He asked to borrow two water bottles and a backpack, inwardly wondering how he was to take the necessary food. At the neighborhood well, Kamrin watched curiously as Luke filled the two old, clunky, dented metal bottles with water.
“Why are you doing that?” Kamrin asked.
Luke looked at her in amused exasperation. “We’ll need water for our journey. It’ll be a week’s walk at least.”
“In Graceway, you can ask any house for food or water, or to stay there for the night. They’ll say yes.”
Luke frowned at her in disbelief, but seeing Kamrin’s face so perfectly serious, he assumed that she was telling the truth; who was he to distrust a child born and bred in Graceway?
“All right, then. We’ll take these just in case.” Slipping the bottles inside the backpack, Luke was secretly relieved as he would not need to take any food, a task he would not have trusted himself with. The thought of travelling to Graceway—so suddenly, after years of silent yearning—was beginning to feel real. This realization brought worry and apprehension, yet both were drowned out by a thrill of exhilaration he hadn’t felt in years. It was a long-buried dream stirring to life inside him.
