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“This child. I’m giving him back.”
Mrs. Natalia Mancini, she just stopped organizing the budget for next week’s medicine and stared at the woman in front of her - Dressed in a faded dark coat, hair cropped so short and so ugly for a moment she thought her a nun.
She recognized her just a moment after, memories clicking into place.
Hiding behind the woman and completely silent as tears kept falling down his pale cheeks was Credence Barebone.
The workers at the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin had liked little Matthew. He had been a quiet, smiling child. Smart for his age. Always trailing behind the nuns or the nurses because he didn’t like being alone.
He looked miserable.
“I need to talk to the headmistress”, Mary Lou Barebone insisted.
She put away her balance book and pen and said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Miss Barebone”, and also, “he’s a boy. The papers you signed are all in order. He’s not a thing you can return.”
“Surely he can be institutionalized again”, and Mary Lou Barebone’s eyes had no mercy to them. Cold and sharp like the frost hanging from the orphanage eaves.
“Are you struggling, Miss Barebone? Word says you’ve just opened a church close to Manhattan Bridge”, replied Mrs. Mancini, acid. Two Bridges and its tenement houses were a den of gossip, and she didn’t live that far away from the intersection of Pike and Henry Street.
“... I am not struggling”, replied Mary Lou Barebone with a sneer that spelled pride and anger.
“Then I can’t accept your request. Let alone let you bother the headmistress for such a thing.” And maybe Matthew, Credence Barebone looked too thin and too terrified for this decision to be healthy. But the orphanage was always fit to burst. Unwanted, parentless children were strewn everywhere on this side of Lower Manhattan like yesterday’s litter, and there was no way to admit one hungry mouth more to feed if he already had been adopted into an actual home.
Not without a case worker getting involved, at least, and deeming that home unfit enough he’d be better off as a ward of the state. Mrs. Mancini took a mental note of requesting one to be sent.
There was a long pause as the woman in front of her fought against disgust and humiliation to speak again.
“This child is possessed”, finally hissed Mary Lou Barebone. “I take him into my home, a decent, good, Christian home, and what do I get? The offspring of demons. I’m not allowing him in again.”
Credence flinched, let out a small noise of despair and fear.
Mrs. Mancini stared at her. Doubts swirled in her head, but most of them were about the sanity of Miss Barebone.
“What in Heaven’s name, are you talking about?”, she said, and her Italian drawl showed through. In the way she accented her words, in the ‘are you out of your mind?’ gesture of her hand that Miss Barebone, thankfully, chose to ignore.
“Possessed, I tell you.” The woman was practically spitting. A quiet, menacing voice at odds with the way she slammed both hands onto her desk.
… Leaning closer, almost splayed over the old, ratty wood of it. “He makes things fly. He makes figures of smoke float on thin air.”
… Making herself bigger, voice flaring with cold fury without actually getting louder. “Are you telling me this isn’t the work of the Enemy?”
… Seeking Natalia Mancini’s eyes, forcing her gaze into her. “Are you daring to tell me this isn’t witchcraft?”
And maybe, maybe, she had indeed been scared by the display.
Miss Barebone was thin and plain and on the wrong side of twenty-five. That speech had caught her unprepared, managed to spike her pulse just enough she had, had to look away. Sputtered out a small, hesitating, “but… but he always…”
“Always what, Mrs. Mancini?”
“His mother… She, ah. She did the same?”
Mary Lou Barebone’s face curdled with unbridled revulsion, and Natalia Mancini swallowed dry, eyes wide. God forgive her. She had said the very thing she shouldn’t have.
“Explain”, she ordered. And Mrs. Mancini, she didn’t dare to disobey.
“It was… Four years ago, I was a nurse at the Infirmary for the Destitute. It’s close, yes? Only worked at the orphanage on weekends. Little Matthew, I brought him in myself and then started here full-time. He was a newborn.”
“That does not concern me”, Miss Barebone enounced between her teeth. “His mother. Who was his mother?”
“It’s been ages! I don’t remember her name. But… But she did the thing you said. Images over white smoke. Floating bubbles. I think, to show him? She-- She died of sepsis. I think. I-I always thought I had…!”
She didn’t finish that sentence. Fear and remorse intermingled so hard she had to shake her head to clear it.
Mary Lou Barebone wasn’t a tall woman. But when she straightened up, it looked for a moment as if the shadows of her dark coat occupied half of Mrs. Mancini’s rickety office.
“A child of the devil and a witch, then”, she stated. Slow and careful, the caress of a knife’s edge.
Natalia Mancini had no idea of what to tell her. She averted her gaze from this woman, looked at little Credence Barebone still half-hidden by his adoptive mother, still shaking in mute terror and too big clothes.
Mary Lou Barebone spoke again. There was a vow engraved in her soft tones. “I guess the only way is to straighten him up, then”, and also, “God has sent me a test.”
She grasped Credence’s shoulder as her signal to leave, not deigning to take his hand, and disappeared from her office.
Mrs. Mancini would be haunted by the image of it. The regret of not having just taken back the kid. A promise to seek him out and save him, at least to soothe her conscience.
Fortunately for her, it wasn’t bound to last.
Many years later, Percival Graves would go into the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin Orphanage, and request talking to Mrs. Natalia Mancini, head nurse and secretary from 1903 to 1912 and still a health worker in the institution. She would have no recollection whatsoever of anyone called Credence Barebone, or Mary Lou Barebone. Would even be surprised to find his records in the old file cabinet, a strange look on her face as she examined the document.
He had gotten lucky, Graves realized.
MACUSA had gotten to her way before he did.