The White Forest (3 page)

•   •   •

After Maddy had composed herself at the fruit cart near Shaftsbury, we managed to continue our walk, passing dress shops and smoking salons in St. Giles with barely a glance as we attempted to avoid coming within earshot of another newsboy. We ducked into one of Maddy’s favorite tea shops, the Queen’s Host, a setting that normally provided quiet respite in the busy shopping district. The interior was decked in white Italian marble and gold trim. China cabinets lined the wall, displaying saucers and cups painted with scenes of waterfalls and gilded pine forests. Maddy had great appreciation for the linen-clothed tables that were placed at discreet distances, so one could keep conversations private.

Only a handful of customers were in the Queen’s Host that day, and there, sitting near the window over an untouched cup of Darjeeling, was Pascal Paget, Maddy’s French ward. Though younger by a few years, Pascal had become a kind of confidant for Nathan, Maddy, and me. She tensed at the sight of him now though, as recent events had altered her opinion of him. “Did you know
he
would be here, Jane?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I said.

“I want to leave.”

“You can’t keep avoiding him,” I said. “We’ll go and say hello.” I gave her a slight push to start her moving across the white marble floor.

The story of their friendship and Pascal’s eventual dependence on Maddy for both room and board was straightforward enough. Maddy first made his acquaintance outside a small French-style café near Charing Cross. He’d been using a piece of charcoal to draw a picture of a street in the walled city of Nimes where white chickens wandered on cobblestone and irises made silent observance from tilted window boxes. She’d found his long artist’s hair and wistful manner so picturesque she simply had to stop and speak with him.

One of Maddy’s greatest gifts was that she could seemingly extract the heart and history of a common stranger using only a modicum of effort. People often lost their guard in the beguilement of her presence and spilled forth stories that they would have hesitated to tell even a boon companion. Pascal was no exception, and soon enough, Maddy was sitting next to him at his easel, and he was telling her how he’d lost his love in France and had come to London in order to find the boy again.

Maddy prided herself in being as progressive as her father, and she acted as if it didn’t surprise her that Pascal’s
interest d’amore
was a young man instead of a young woman. She elegantly crossed her legs at the ankle, took a sip of her demitasse, and told him in no uncertain terms that he must tell her
everything
.

Pascal had met his beloved friend, Alexander Hartford, at the
Musée du Vieux
in the French city of Nimes. Alexander was a student from America, son of a wealthy shipping magnate, who was making a study of medieval art as a way toward earning his degree. The boys struck up a conversation in front of a painting called
Sleep and Death
in which two dark-haired youths lay on a bed, entangled in each other’s arms. Sheets were twisted into a hectic landscape, and the figures in the painting appeared as though they were not brothers, as stated in the myth, but lovers.

“Isn’t it interesting that we supposed Christians are often drawn
to pagan imagery?” Alexander said to Pascal. “It seems that a showing of a god—any god—will stimulate.”

“What sort of stimulation should this produce?” Pascal asked, pointing toward the painting of
Sleep and Death
.

“That depends on your disposition, I suppose,” Alexander said.

Pascal gave him a sheepish smile. “Sleep and Death appeal to me greatly.”

“Which of them do you imagine yourself to be?” Alexander asked, trying for an academic tone and drawing closer to Pascal in the process.

The French boy took a moment to look at the two shirtless youths in their frenzy of bedclothes. “I’m not sure. They seem very much alike—nearly twins.”

“You must be Sleep, then,” Alexander said. “Sleep is, at times, indecisive. Death, however, always knows his aim and purpose.”

During the days that followed, the boys became fast friends, and a feeling rose between them, the sort of emotion that triumphs over dust. They walked arm in arm down the narrow streets of Nimes, drinking red wine in midnight cafés, and spending nights together in small, rented rooms, reenacting the scene of
Sleep and Death
. What came between them was Ariston Day himself. Alexander found a pamphlet, tucked into a street corner kiosk, promising enlightenment. The pamphlet called for young men of intelligence and means to come to London and gather at a hall called the Temple of the Lamb, where a great man would provide means to experience what they’d only heard about in myth. “The winds of the cosmos will blow through your very soul,” the pamphlet read. “And your heart will become the gateway to a new Paradise.” As a student of theology, Alexander found he could not resist such a calling; he came to the Temple to see if true enlightenment could be achieved, and Pascal followed him there to London, hoping to rekindle what they’d once had. He was, in fact, the puckish nymph mentioned as being seen with Nathan in Southwark on the night of the disappearance.

•   •   •

After the formalities of greeting in the Queen’s Host, Pascal ventured, once again, into the story of Nathan’s final night. He seemed to believe that the very act of repeating the tale provided penance for his imagined sins. I tried to signal him with my eyes that it was an inopportune moment to tell the story, with Maddy in such a fragile state, but Pascal was too agitated to pay me any mind.

“How do I explain it in English?” he said, searching the room, never looking at us directly. “I feel I am
en purgatoire,
going over that night in my mind, wondering what I might have done differently.” He adjusted the cuff of his plum-colored suit—a brazen garment brought from France where, he assured us, everyone believed meringue and alabaster were colors of a hopeful future. Pascal had a lovely face, so delicate and soft that I found myself often wanting to touch his cheek and offer kindness.

“Master Nathan was behaving so strangely,” Pascal continued. “He was complaining that his hand had gone numb and then his leg, so I decided to remain at his side. But just before whatever theatrical event they had planned for the evening was about to commence, I was escorted out of the Temple by two rough boys—two savages—who said it had been decreed that I didn’t have what it took to be a Fetch. I was no longer welcome.”

“Fetches,” Maddy said, the flesh around her eyes red from her tears. “I don’t think I can hear another word about them.”

Fetches were what the followers of Ariston Day called themselves, a name that I gathered alluded to a double-self or doppelgänger. Nathan had been a Fetch since his return from the Crimean War.

Pascal said, “It doesn’t matter what you call them, mademoiselle. It’s all a foolish game. I tried to get the attention of Alexander as I was being dragged out, but he wouldn’t come to my aid. He’s become so brutish, like all the rest of them. And then I looked for Nathan, and he was nowhere to be found. Soon enough I was on the street, staring up at the plume of yellow smoke rising from the awful Southwark glue factory and wondering how I would get home to Hampstead.”

Pascal seemed so small and helpless there in the busy tea shop.
He had the dark appearance of the French, black hair and shadowed eyes, and he smelled of the wilting chrysanthemum he wore in his lapel. His hands, clasped and resting on the table, looked as though they were made of fragile porcelain.

“Nathan has a way of escaping when he wants to,” I said, attempting comfort. “It isn’t your fault, Pascal dear.”

“Don’t defend him, Jane,” Maddy snapped. Her face was drawn, and her dark hair was wound tightly in a braided bun, a glittering pin stabbed through its center. “If Pascal and his beloved Alexander hadn’t dragged Nathan down to Southwark in the first place—if they hadn’t indoctrinated him into that unholy theater, that cult—then we’d all be here, safe.”

Pascal nearly crumbled at her words. As for a rebuttal, he could only muster, “Alexander is not my beloved. He will no longer even speak to me. He says if I cannot be a Fetch with him, he has no use for me.”

I was particularly sensitive when it came to Alexander Hartford, as I knew how much Pascal cared for him. “Alexander will come around,” I said. “And Nathan is his own man. These were all his choices. We shall simply have to wait for news.”

My calm was a facade that I feared would crack at the slightest jarring. I was, perhaps, more worried about Nathan than anyone else because I knew the extent to which our experiments with my abilities had exposed him to unnatural forces, making him susceptible to their influences. I felt nearly as culpable as Ariston Day for leading him astray. And then there was also the last terrible evening Nathan spent with Maddy and me. So much had happened there in the southern woods on that final night. I only half-remembered most of those events, and I wasn’t ready to consider my own actions. Not yet.

I ordered a cup of Chinese tea for Maddy and me, to soothe our nerves. When the host returned, she brought not only the tea but also a newspaper neatly folded on a tray. Pascal had apparently requested the paper before our arrival. It seemed even in the Queen’s Host, Maddy and I couldn’t escape the tangle of London ink. At least the paper was the
Herald,
which primarily printed the truth
about Nathan’s case. The
Magnet
and the
Athenaeum
, two lesser rags, claimed to provide interviews with so called intimates, though most such interviews proved to be creative pieces of fiction. Nathan had very few intimates, after all. His disposition prevented such things. The
Herald
came closest to fact, describing fragmentary reports of the events leading up to Nathan’s disappearance.

Night workers from the Southwark glue factory gave testimony as to having seen Nathan Ashe enter the Temple of the Lamb on the evening of June 16, but none could likewise attest to seeing him leave. The Temple, as the
Herald
reported, was a defunct pleasure dome on the docks of the Thames and home to a sprawling, disreputable tavern as well as a recently born sect known as the Theater of Provocation. Little was understood about this “theater” other than that it was open only to select members, and its proprietor, Ariston Day, was fond of pulling the rebellious sons of wealthy and prominent families into his fold. It was there that Day showed them what one of the youths described as “new geometries with which to measure the earth.”

These young men, like Nathan, wanted to dissolve their bond to tradition and the confines of rational human experience. Mr. Day reportedly had interests in dream theory as well as what was being called “immersive reality,” in which a subject’s mind was manipulated in a false environment for the possibility of reaching an ecstatic state, an opening of the soul.

Before Nathan was fully indoctrinated into the theater and began refusing to divulge information about its secret rituals, he told us some of Day’s theories. “Mr. Day says the soul of London is diseased like a body can become diseased, and one day we Fetches will be the ones to heal it.”

“That sounds rather ominous,” Maddy said.

“Not at all,” Nathan replied. “It’s a pure thought—maybe the only pure thought in the whole city.”

“How does one go about
curing
a city?” I asked.

Nathan smiled the big rakish smile I was accustomed to, but there was something different this time, as if an edge had broken off of it.
“The only way to cure a city,” he said, “is to make it
stop
being a city.”

“And what do you expect that to look like?” Maddy asked.

“A garden,” Nathan said, “untouched by human hands.”

Beyond descriptions of Nathan’s final evening, the
Herald
also reported the details of the search through the slums of Southwark conducted by the aging Inspector Vidocq, cofounder of Scotland Yard and famed model for the rational detective in the stories of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Vidocq, a dominating presence and an old friend of Nathan’s father, Lord William Ashe, had come out of retirement to pursue the case. Before leaving his home in Paris, he was said to have gone to the nave of Saint-Denys du Saint-Sacrement and prayed to St. Simeon, patron of detectives, for strength and wisdom. But when he’d arrived in London he found himself shaken by our Babylon. Our city proved a language untranslatable.

Reporters documented Vidocq’s comings and goings across the city as he questioned owners of pubs and shops. He was said to be surprisingly broad shouldered for one so old and wore a black coat and a dark hat, not adhering to the frivolous styles of France that Pascal described. His face was graven and white, and he had nearly colorless eyes. His air was of one who gazed at life through a lens of death, and Maddy told me we needed to take care, lest he discover the secret compartments in Nathan’s character. She was adamant that only she and I should know the true Nathan. As always, it seemed she wanted to keep our boy’s heart in a treasury box, untouched and free from harm.

•   •   •

We were halfway through tea at the Queen’s Host when Maddy announced abruptly that she needed to leave. She seemed panicked, almost knocking her cup from its saucer as she stood. I glanced around the room, hoping to discover what had disturbed her but found nothing out of the ordinary.

“What is it, Maddy?” I asked in a low voice.

She could barely look at me. “It’s difficult to explain. I can’t keep my memories in check. The past has come untethered from its moorings and floats into view at unpredictable moments. I suddenly remembered sitting here at this very table with you and Nathan. We’d been to the Zoological Garden in Regent’s Park to see the new hippopotamus on display. Do you recall that day, Jane?”

“Of course,” I said.

“We watched the zookeeper feed porridge to the hippo with a tiny spoon. Nathan adored the hippo. He was going to ask if he might be permitted to feed it himself on our next visit, and I made some joke at his expense and—” There were tears in her eyes. “Can you ride back to the Heath with your father, Jane?” she asked. “He’s still at his offices, isn’t he? I’m afraid—I’m afraid I need to be alone.”