The White Forest (5 page)

It was my grief and my vision of the pale forest that opened me to what Nathan would later call my “talent.” After the death of my mother, I was changed. I no longer cared for girlish things—my glass house filled with velvet moths or my family of Austrian puppets with amber-colored eyes. I didn’t cry when my father loaded our carriage with both his trunks, intending to leave me in the care of the maids as he embarked on a curative tour of the walled city of Bath. By then, he was already absent, barely acknowledging me when he passed me in the hall. Mother’s death had driven him into a state of willed unconsciousness. The expression on his face said that the universe was not a mystery worth solving. Life was without plot. Better to forget. Better to fall asleep.

As he boarded his carriage for Bath, I stood watching, with my hands folded in front of me like some penitent anchoress, and I was aware that something was happening inside my body. Mother’s death might have driven Father to sleep, but it had the opposite effect on me. For the first time, I felt that I was truly
awake
. It was as though her passing had torn open the very cells of my body, causing an ache like I’d never known. These cells were now pouring forth some strange material, giving birth to a new Jane Silverlake who I did not yet fully comprehend.

In the days of isolation that followed Father’s departure, I became preoccupied with the changes that were overtaking me. I often felt a subtle pressure building in my chest and caught glimpses of shadows moving at the corners of my vision, but when I turned to look, nothing was there. At the same time that these experiences were occurring, I was thinking a great deal about Mother’s Lady of Flowers, wondering at her identity. I paid special attention to the flowers in Father’s gardens, watching through the rippled window glass of the library to see if the Lady might appear among the roses and
daffodils. But no such figure came, and soon enough I grew tired of waiting.

I went to Mother’s dressing room, hoping to find answers there. It was a quiet place with damask drapes drawn to keep the shadows in. I was forbidden to go into the dressing room, not only because Father wanted to preserve it but also because the maids believed the room to be haunted. Miss Herron-Cross herself attested to having seen my dead mother sitting at her mirror glass in a funeral shroud, carefully brushing grave dirt from her black hair. I’d overheard her frightening Miss Anne with the story: “There she sat, our Evelyn, and her eyes were white as bleached stone, and she dragged that brush through her hair that was more like a thicket of crabgrass. The dirt fell on the vanity in bits, making an awful mess. And our lady paid the mess no mind. She went on brushing as though she’d never stop.”

Even at my young age, I understood what a foolish story that was; Mother was gone from Stoke Morrow. She no longer watched over me. I could sit at her vanity for an entire day and not expect to feel the touch of her hand. I could lie in her bed and never dream of her lying next to me. There were no ghosts in our house. Stoke Morrow was empty but for memories and Father’s peculiar, growing collections, a bitter irony for a house with such a name.
Stoke
from the old English meaning “place,” and Morrow, a family name, which could be taken to mean future.
In the morrow, life will be different.

I sat before the dressing room’s mirror glass, gazing at the painted robins on the frame. I put my finger absently on the handle of Mother’s silver brush, and the moment my skin touched the metal, a color passed across my field of vision—a pinkish fleshy tone, and along with the color came a high ringing, like someone was sounding a dinner bell from the garden beneath the window. I drew my hand back, frightened, wanting to run from the room but forcing myself to remain. In the dim light, I leaned forward, examining Mother’s brush without touching it. The black bristles and silver backing looked innocent enough. I’d certainly touched the brush before when Mother was alive, and I’d had no such preternatural experience.

When I finally gathered enough courage to touch the handle again, I heard the ringing once more, louder this time, and saw the pink color flash before my eyes. I was no longer frightened of the sensation. It seemed, rather, that the object was extending itself toward me, showing me something that others could not see. I continued to touch the objects on the vanity. The perfume atomizer caused a hazy blue to steal across my vision. The powder box made a chuffing noise, producing no color but rather a feeling of density. I grew heavier by the simple act of touching it.

I considered the fact that I might be taking ill like Mother. She’d brought a sickness home from the Heath and infected me. My perceptions were now addled, as happens with a high fever. But upon further experiment, I came to realize my ability was something quite different—not a dissolution of the rational mind, but a force that allowed me to see
beyond
the rational entirely. Mother’s dressing room was not actually a static space, as it appeared to the normal eye. The room was alive. The surfaces of objects were nothing more than a fragile veneer. My newfound ability allowed me to see past those surfaces into another reality—a universe of animate space concealed within the inanimate. I began to imagine I’d found a way to see the objects’ very souls, and I felt as though this was the
correct
way of seeing the world. Everything up until that point had been a misunderstanding.

As I was pondering my new ability in the dressing room I heard another sound—an elegant sort of sighing that seemed somehow more significant than the rest of the sensations. I decided to investigate and climbed off the vanity seat, walking around the room until the sighing was at its loudest. The sound came from some object inside Mother’s sturdy oak wardrobe. I touched the brass door handle and paused, momentarily overcome by the maids’ superstitions. I imagined that if I opened the wardrobe, I’d see Mother inside, glaring down at me, eyes white as marbles, dirt falling from her hair.

The other objects in the room were still murmuring around me, and they seemed to grow agitated when I hesitated at the wardrobe. They chittered and vibrated, as if urging me to open it. Finally, I
steeled myself and threw open the door. Inside, I found Mother’s dresses and corsets, still all hanging in a row, and looking at them made my eyes burn and my throat feel tight. I wanted to gather the dresses and press them against my mouth and nose, to breathe her into me. But I forced myself to continue the search, as it was clear that the sighing sound was coming from behind the dresses. I pushed the clothing aside, and there at the back of the wardrobe was an object that stole my breath.

It was a large oval portrait in a gilded frame that had been hidden away, likely by Mother herself. The canvas was covered in dark, almost grotesque flowers that had been created using a technique of layered oils. Emerging from that rank flora was a black-eyed woman who seemed to be pulling herself up out of the flowers and into the light. It looked as though she was trying to disgorge herself from the painting, and I found it difficult to tell where her body began and the foliage ended. Thick vines were tangled in her hair, and the swollen blossoms of the boggy flowers were indistinguishable from the folds of her dark dress. She was a woman born of plant matter. Even her flesh had the iridescent look of a petal. The most striking aspect of the painting, the aspect that would make me return to it again and again, was the woman’s face—for it seemed to be my mother’s own. I say “seemed” because I already found it difficult to remember the specifics of Mother’s features. She was dissolving from my memory, faster by the day. But this woman, looking down at me from her bed of engorged flowers, gave me the
feeling
of Mother. She had the same countenance, and like my mother, there was something superior in her, something almost otherworldly, as if she surveyed me from some precipice.

I realized this was most certainly the Lady of Flowers Mother had been asking for.
She’s there, blooming in the darkness, silent and waiting.
Why the Lady wore my mother’s face, I did not know. Yet I was sure the painting had called out to me, willing me to find it, using my new talent as a kind of guide. I wondered what meaning this Lady might have, and though my curiosity was strong, I believed the answer would come if I remained patient.

In the meantime, I began to fancy myself a new breed of detective, piecing together a world that no one else could see. I made my way around Stoke Morrow, allowing the house to open itself to me. The fainting couch in the Clock Parlor made a noise like rushing water when I put my ear against its cushion. The marble table in the foyer emitted a dazzling shade of azure light from its surface. Every room was breathing and alive, and I was an explorer in this alien world.

Father had once told me that primitives believed everything to be ensouled. There were souls of nature that were quiet and gentle because they’d been created by a deity, and then there were the souls of man-made objects, which were tormented because their maker was imperfect. I believed that I’d become a primitive dressed in the guise of a nineteenth-century girl. I even allowed myself to think that one day I might learn to use my talent to control the world.

Father began growing his Byzantine collections in earnest when he returned from Bath, and the Lady of Flowers became a kind of psychic anchor for me in that sea of objects. His was a
horror vacui—
a fear of empty spaces. Animals carved from jade, medieval Italian serving plates, arabesque sculptures of songbirds appeared in the black halls along with a hundred other oddities. Even the gardens turned queer. Father continued to enhance the ruin—a Roman folly that to me looked no different from the statued graves of Highgate. It was as if he believed that filling the house and grounds with curiosities might edge the sickness from his heart. My newfound senses were jangled by the appearance of so many objects. I heard their mutterings, saw their colors, felt their tingling vibrations. When I needed respite from all of this, I went to the secret portrait, sometimes going as far as curling my body inside the wardrobe to be closer to the Lady. I listened to her high and whispered song, and she kept me strong in the chaos. I said nothing to Father, as I believed it was likely that he’d never seen the oval portrait. It was so well hidden in the wardrobe after all, and keeping it so made me feel connected to Mother, as if she and I both shared some secret life.

•   •   •

The more I experimented with my talent, the more intense the sensations became until I was moving down the long halls of Stoke Morrow in a field entirely awash in sound and color, listening to the murmurings of teacups and observing a bright halo above the newel post. It seemed there was an aura extending from me, and as long as the objects were in the field of my aura, I could experience their essences. At times, their babbling was so loud, I could barely hear the maids when they called for me. Stoke Morrow was no longer a house at all. It had become a body, mysterious and alive.

In the years that followed, I learned that I could momentarily infect others with my ability through touch. I overheard the maids, one afternoon, reporting this phenomenon to each other, in ridiculous and breathless whispers. When Miss Anne washed me, putting her hands on my skin, she said she heard a high moan coming from the silver tub. When Miss Herron-Cross undressed me before bed, she claimed the painted walls of my bedroom momentarily glowed a deep shade of red. “The very color of Hell,” she intoned. “I felt that if I turned around, I might see a devil leering at me.” The maids were briefly experiencing what I experienced, and instead of finding such heightened perception fascinating, they feared it.

They brought the local cleric to the house one day when father was away at his law offices. Miss Herron-Cross believed that my grief over the death of my mother had made me vulnerable to demons.

“You think our Jane is possessed?” Miss Anne asked.

“I’m quite certain of it,” Miss Herron-Cross said. “Even the child’s face seems to be changing. She grows stonier by the day. I don’t like her looking at me with those cold little eyes of hers.”

The cleric was an old man with loose and hanging skin. He raised a crucifix before my face for several minutes then asked who it was I saw on the cross. When I answered Jesus Christ, the cleric asked if I understood the terms of my salvation. I said I did, all the while listening to the terrible, creaking sound the wooden cross made, wondering if Christ himself had heard such sounds while hanging there.

Then the cleric laid his hands on me in an attempt to drive out
the unholy presence. In the next moment, he drew back, as if burned, and a look of fear spread across his face.

“What was the meaning of that?” he asked, sharply.

I fixed my dark gaze on him and provided no answer.

“The room seemed full of life,” he said, his voice quavering. “There was color and pagan song. How did you conjure such illusion, child?”

The truth of the matter was that I didn’t know how I’d done it. The transference was still very much a mystery to me. And even if I did understand, I didn’t think I’d tell him. He was such a pompous man, and I liked the fact that I’d disturbed him. I folded my hands and watched.

The cleric looked to Miss Herron-Cross. “Did you say you have reason to believe the mother was a witch?”

Miss Herron-Cross put a silencing finger to her thin lips.

“Not a
witch,
” blurted Miss Anne. “She was—”

I turned to look at her, wondering what she might reveal. “Evelyn Silverlake was good to us,” Miss Anne said finally. “She was as good to us as she had the strength to be.”

The cleric began collecting his instruments of exorcism. “This girl is attempting an enchantment,” he said. “She wishes to ensnare all of us in some manner. If I were the two of you, I’d relinquish my position and flee.”

“You cannot help her, then?” Miss Anne asked.

“There are some things in the world that are beyond Christian
aid
. I suggest again that both of you take your leave of this house. Before this child puts some mark on you that cannot be erased.”