The White Forest (4 page)

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll help you write a few correspondences.”

Pascal stood as she left, making a polite half-bow. When she was gone, he resumed his seat and took a quiet sip of tea. “Mademoiselle hates me,” he said. “She thinks all of this is my fault.”

“Rest assured it’s not,” I said.

“Then who is to blame? What possibly could have happened to Master Nathan?”

I shook my head and looked at the wilted black tea leaves at the bottom of my bone-colored cup, as if they might provide an answer.

“There’s something I need to tell you, Jane,” Pascal said. “Something I’ve remembered in my sifting through that evening’s events. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Madeline because I thought it might disturb her.”

“Then why tell
me
?”

“Because you don’t shy away from strange things,” he said. “One might even say they are part of your nature.”

I sighed. Though Pascal was unaware of my particular abilities, the boy knew me well enough. “Go ahead, then.”

He pushed his tea aside, leaned close, and said, “On the night he disappeared, Nathan told me that Ariston Day had helped him come to some new understanding about a place called the Empyrean.”

“Ariston Day?” I said.

“That’s right. You’ve turned pale, Jane. Is everything all right?”

I assured Pascal I was fine, though I felt anything but. Nathan had told Ariston Day about the Empyrean, even though I’d explicitly asked him not to. I did not want my secrets exposed. I felt hurt, but more than that I felt afraid—for reasons I didn’t fully understand.

“Please continue,” I said, trying to mask my emotions.

“I’d never heard him talk about it before,” Pascal said, “but that night, Nathan said the word with such reverence—
Empyrean—
as if it was a holy place. When I asked him to tell me more, he became guarded. He said one day I would understand the importance of the Empyrean. We all would. That’s what Ariston Day claimed, at least. And then he left me, following the other Fetches deeper into the chambers beneath the Temple. Do you know what he meant, Jane? It’s a religious term, isn’t it? Something from the Middle Ages? I know I’ve heard it before.”

“Pascal, I—”

“The priest at my parents’ church used to lecture about the old customs and beliefs. I think he might have mentioned that word.”

I steadied myself, looking directly into Pascal’s dark eyes. I could hear Nathan’s voice in my head, solemnly listing the seven levels of the medieval Heaven as he attempted to explain my talent: “There’s the Faerie, Ethereal, Olympian, Fiery, Firmament, Aqueous, and most importantly, the Empyrean, Jane. That’s where the saints and the angels are said to live. A place of purity and stillness.” I told him I didn’t care for such cosmologies. They were nothing more than children’s stories. But Nathan persisted. “You’re hedging, Jane. You believe in all this more than you let on. You have to. You’ve seen it.”

I pulled myself away from that memory and directed my attention again toward Pascal. “Nathan said so many odd things before he disappeared. I’m sure he was merely spouting more of Day’s rubbish.” I lied because telling the truth would make things worse for Pascal. Knowledge of the Empyrean spread through one’s body like an infection. I didn’t want that for him. In many ways, Pascal was like a child
to us. We all did our best to take care of him because he was alone in London, and Alexander had broken his heart.

After Pascal’s mention of the Empyrean, I found I couldn’t continue to sit in the Queen’s Host and act like everything was fine. I excused myself, saying I had to catch my father before he left his offices.

“You aren’t angry with me too, are you, Jane?” he asked.

“Never, dear,” I said.

By the time I opened the tea shop door to leave, I could barely breathe, wondering why on earth Nathan had been foolish enough to divulge our secrets to Day. Nathan was so unpredictable near the end. I wondered too who else he’d told. Perhaps it was due to my distracted state there on the doorstep of the Queen’s Host that I did not shun the newsboy who approached me. He was small and filthy haired, and he rudely shoved an equally filthy newspaper into my hands. It was a copy of the
Illustrated Penny,
the worst of the rags, and rather than push back, I paid him and opened its pages.

The
Penny
was printed for illiterates and told the news entirely in pictures. In this particular issue, a series of images purported to show the last moments before Nathan’s disappearance. Thick ink lines conjured the sullen streets of Southwark and the domed turrets at the Temple of the Lamb. In the first frame, Nathan bid farewell to a group of nefarious-looking young men, presumably the Fetches of Ariston Day. Hollow-cheeked and grim, the boys made knowing expressions as they watched Nathan stumble down the empty cobblestone. The smoke from the glue factory consumed him, turning him into a living shadow.

He passed through pools of gaslight, moving toward the Thames, which appeared as a black vein in the landscape. Nathan seemed drunk or otherwise of altered consciousness, leaning too heavily on his walking stick. He paused at a railing above the water to check his clock. In doing so, he lost his footing.

His expression as he fell toward the rushing current of the Thames was exaggerated—mouth a wide zero, eyes flat circles, and
yet the artist captured enough of the actual sharp edges of Nathan Ashe to make my heart quicken.

Nathan’s body was tossed along in the inky depths, sweeping past ancient debris long sunk in the river. The artifacts were nothing more than a scribble on the page, but I found my imagination presenting me with specific objects over which Nathan floated—the smooth head of a Roman god, a medieval cross burned in the great London fire, a carriage wheel, a coin box, an ax handle, and a rotted psalter with pages open and undulating. Soon, in my mind, the objects became fabled things lost beneath the waters: whole sunken Saxon villages, forests lying flat, a phalanx of dead Roman soldiers still in armor. There were even the bones of a monster. Nathan floated gently through its rib cage, and shadows of bone caressed him.

The next image was sun-washed and showed Nathan limp and soaking on a wooded shore. He was nowhere near London. The Thames had carried him to some outer environ, but this was not Dartford or even Gravesend. This was a place of fernlike trees and massive erect stones.

Faces hovered among the tree trunks—not precisely human, as their eyes were too large and their mouths were lipless and cruel. The creatures regarded him with desire. It was clear he could not escape them. There was nowhere to go. And so Nathan crouched on the beach, waiting as the creatures disgorged themselves from their hiding places.

I closed the newspaper but could not force the image from my mind—beautiful Nathan in his French-cut suit, set upon by beasts. What they wanted from him, I didn’t know. But certainly they would take him.

I touched my own face, felt the coolness of my cheek. I’d shed no tears, standing there at the entrance to the Queen’s Host. Instead, my expression had hardened with worry. The fantasy in the
Penny
was not beyond my imagining. I was concerned, in fact, that such a scene might be closer to the truth than the illustrators could possibly know.

Only Nathan and Maddy knew my secret. I was familiar with realms of the unnatural, for I myself was an unnatural. Not a monster in appearance; I looked like other young women, though perhaps not as primped and manicured. But I wasn’t the same as other girls. My friends believed I was sick or gifted. Either way, I was unfortunate. Something entirely new upon the earth.

I
should take a moment to explain myself and the beginnings of what Nathan called my “talent” and others, my “disease.” I must start with my mother, as her death was the measure of my loss and the origin of my strangeness. I was only six when the earth took her on the Heath near Parliament Hill. On that day, she’d been walking along an outcropping of shale that had deep fissures in the stone. Her dogs had wandered there to hunt for voles and snakes, and she followed, pulling her cloak against the chill of the morning, careful to avoid stepping in the black fissures. The sky was a pall of white, and beyond the shale, grass shifted, as if moved by some unseen body. Mother told me she’d attempted to distract herself from the eerie scene by making lists of flowers she’d seen on the Heath: maiden pink and feverfew, harebell and yarrow. She’d made a list of guests she wanted to invite to the festival of St. Dunstan’s Day and imagined ink drawings of their likenesses decorating the invitations. Soon each guest had a flower for a face. Her cousin was a marigold; her aunt, a death lily; and my father was the red bloom of the pomegranate tree.

She was pulled from these reveries by a sound rising from the fissures in the earth, an old voice trying to sing, and there was a smell that she later described as the cloyingly sweet scent of another
world. The sweetness made her feel heavy, as if she were sinking into the stone, and when the dogs grew weak, Mother knew she had to gather herself. She carried the vizsla back to Stoke Morrow with the spitz lagging behind, and eventually she fell to her knees in the foyer, putting her face on the cool flagstone, calling for Father.

I stood in the entryway and watched as he took her into his arms, as if her body had no weight. He brought her to the sofa in the Clock Parlor, where his collection of some twenty clocks kept time. I followed, hovering near Father’s side as he covered Mother with a quilt, watching as her skin turned a terrible shade of cornflower. When she began raving, she told us the fissures in the earth had stony teeth. These deep holes had been looking to devour her, she said.

The expression on Father’s face went from confusion to alarm as he realized his wife had lost her sense. Before he could take me to the maids, Mother grabbed my wrist so tightly it hurt.

“Jane,” she said. “Come close now.” She drew me forward until my face was nearly touching her own. This gesture was as much a surprise as anything, because Mother was known for keeping herself at some remove. In many ways, she was a mystery, rarely showing emotion and never coming close.

There in the parlor, I could smell the earthiness of her breath as she told me that a part of her remained in the stomach of the stone out in the field of shale. There was a world down there that wasn’t anything like ours, and she was damned for seeing that place.

I kissed her cold hand and held back tears. I wanted to beg her to stop talking, but she was my mother, and I knew I had to listen. I let myself weep beside her as she repeated over and over again that I must never be swallowed and that there were
two
worlds. I must be vigilant to ensure I remained in this one. Going to the other world would be the end of me.

I made no sense of her warning. I knew only that a woman could leave the house her normal self and then return a few hours later a lunatic. The earth must have been a cold king to do a thing like that.

Mother resumed an expression of clarity shortly before I was led
away. She looked into my eyes and said, “Has the Lady of Flowers come for me, Jane? Do you see her at the door?”

I turned toward the parlor door and saw no one. “Who is the Lady of Flowers?” I asked.

Mother barely had enough strength to answer. “She’s there, blooming in the darkness, silent and waiting—”

Before I could ask Mother to explain further, the maids hurried me to my room and gave me a sip of laudanum tea to help me sleep. They tucked me into my feather bed, and I dreamed Mother’s body bloomed with mouths that drifted across the surface of her skin, moving to the vasculations of her heart. I found a garden deep inside her, a second Earth, hoary and white, with trees made of tusk and unmoving streams of bleached paper pulp. Moonlike blossoms glowed in the underbrush. All that whiteness terrified me, as it was the color of absence, the color of abandonment. Even in the dream I knew Mother was leaving me, and I sensed there were creatures waiting among the trees, creatures I could not see. I dreamed of the white forest and the invisible creatures night after night, though I was never able to explore that place, only to look, as if it was a picture painted on the walls of my mind.

•   •   •

A comet appeared in the sky above Stoke Morrow shortly after my mother’s death, and Father took me into the garden to see it. He said the spray of its tail made it look like an Egyptian eye staring down on us, and he told me bitterly that the Egyptians had been correct about their gods. “Gods are animals, Jane. A jackal, a hawk, a common house cat, and like animals, they hunt and sleep and kill, never conscious of their own cruelty.”

And in that moment, I was taken again by a vision of the white forest from my dream. I had a sense that the creatures that waited for me behind the trees were animal in nature, and Father’s statements made me wonder if somehow they might also be gods. I continued
to dwell on the image, and though it was clear enough in my mind, I did not know what any of it might mean.

•   •   •