Haunt Me Still (25 page)

Maybe. “If so, it wouldn’t have worked for
Macbeth.
Not for the premiere, anyway, which took place at Hampton Court, in the rectangle of the Great Hall.”

“Maybe that’s why it was so dangerous,” said Joanna. For a moment we stared at each other, not speaking, the only sound the drone of the plane.

Modern theaters, for the most part, were no longer built in the round, on Dee’s plan. They hadn’t been since the restoration. Could that be why the play had grown a reputation for being cursed?

Good grief, what line of thought was I allowing myself to be drawn down? I stood up quickly, as if I might shake off all this talk of magic like a dog shaking off water.

“It makes the play a catch-22,” said Joanna. “Play it to the hilt, capture the essence of the conjuring, and even without the exact rite, you’ll half-wake forces beyond most people’s control, without any safe place to contain them. Fail, though, and you invoke Macbeth’s curse.”

I frowned.

“End of the cauldron scene,” said Joanna. “
I will be satisfied,
the king screams when the witches warn him off pursuing more knowledge.
Deny me this, and an eternal curse fall on you!
So you see, in the hands of the untrained, either the magic half-works, in a terribly dangerous way, or it doesn’t, and the production pulls a curse down on its own head.”

“If you believe in magic,” I said. “If it exists,” said Joanna, “it doesn’t matter a toss whether you believe in it or not.”

Lady Nairn had said something very similar. “No,” I said. “What matters is what Carrie believes.”

“If she’s Corra ravensbrook, she believes in magic. Death magic.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and buried my head in them. Dee had spent years and most of his treasure invoking angels, trying to rediscover the language that could bring force to a statement like “let there be light”:
Fiat lux
.

Now someone was out there grasping toward something much darker. “
Fiat mors,
” I whispered. “Let there be death.”

Was that what she wanted? And meant to have, via some ancient rite of cauldron magic?

It was a power she’d already grasped. Images and sounds slipped through my head. Auld Callie in the tree, the rope creaking against the oak. The blue gown pattering down across Sybilla’s body, tied and bloody. My own hands, smeared with her blood. Killer, or consecrated victim? for all I knew, she’d foisted some of the killing off on me.

And Eircheard. Rollicking, irreverent, kind Eircheard, his face twisted in agony, his heart, for Christ’s sake, ripped beating from his chest. The bitch had torn out his heart.

And now she was toying with Lily.

If she’d been present, I think I might have torn her limb from limb like a Maenad. If I’d been on the ground, I might have run screaming into the night sea, or crowds, or wide empty fields spreading under the moon. Somewhere large enough to hold the grief and anger pent-up within me. In the tin can of a plane, all that passion had nowhere to go but into tears. I wrapped my arms more and more tightly around my knees, trying to hold it in, but the sobs welled up and out all the same.

Beside me, Joanna gathered me in her arms and let me cry.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, I slept. I woke in darkness to Joanna’s gentle shaking. We’d arrived at Teterboro Airport, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. It was three in the morning, local time. The meeting wasn’t till seven-thirty, but I saw no point in waiting; I had no hours to waste.

I glanced in a mirror. My eyes were bleary, still rimmed with red, but nothing that someone who didn’t know me might not chalk up to being awake at a preposterous hour. I ran cold water over a couple of washcloths and brought them with me, to cool down my face. It was the best I could do.

“You think he’ll just invite us in at this hour?” asked Joanna. “I don’t intend to give him a choice.”

A limo was waiting at the foot of the stairs. We drove through suburban New Jersey, into the glazed glare of the Lincoln Tunnel, and up into the cement canyons of midtown Manhattan. Past the Empire State Building, past the darkness of union Square, down toward the Village, and left into Astor Place, where the cab drew up to a graceful Romanesque building in terra-cotta brick, its windows soaring up six stories to curve in semicircular arches. Up ahead, a few giggling tourists were spinning the famed Cube sculpture on its axis, but at half past three the open space—not quite a plaza, though it seemed to aim in that direction—was otherwise mostly quiet.

In the lobby, the doorman was hunched over a computer screen, watching a third-rate horror film, judging by the soundtrack. Hearing that we were old friends of Clifton’s, he glanced up with heavy-lidded eyes. “The professor’s expectin’ ya?”

I gave him a wide, giggly smile. “With shots of tequila.”

He waved us on with a smirk.

I phoned Clifton from right outside his door. “God, this better be good,” said a luxuriant voice into my ear.

“Come to your door and you tell me.” reaching into my bag, I pulled the mirror I’d taken from Joanna from its black velvet wrapping and held it up before the peephole.

Behind me, Joanna stirred. “Is that mine?” she whispered. I nodded. “This will drain its power,” she hissed.

“I’m sorry,” I mouthed. “I owe you.” If I had to lie naked in a field with the disc of cold black stone lying on my belly at every full moon for a year to recharge it, I would. Meanwhile, if it could help show the way to the manuscript and Lily, it would be magic mirror enough.

A few moments later, I heard an intake of breath over the phone. In the door, bolts turned in their locks.

THE DOOR OPENED
on a willowy woman with short dark hair tousled with sleep. She wore a silk robe of multicolored stripes that made me think of Joseph and his Technicolor dream-coat. In one hand she held the phone on which she’d been talking to me. I stood in the hall, blinking in surprise. Jamie Clifton was a woman.

The promise, dangled before her, of learning more about the mirror whisked us inside, where we perched on an uncomfortably low but doubtless very cool leather sofa, while Jamie padded around the kitchen, making coffee. The condo was a model of sleek urban chic, a loftlike space with high ceilings, exposed brick walls, and a lot of gleaming steel and granite. Almost one entire wall was a window overlooking the plaza below. The glass coffee table before us, though, was piled with papers to grade, and the kitchen island was scattered with takeout cartons, which cluttered the image.

“How’d you know about the lettering around the rim?” asked Joanna as Jamie set mugs of coffee down in front of us. “There’s nothing visible in the image you sent Owen.”

“He showed you?” she shrilled in annoyance. “Asshole.” Sinking cross-legged into an armchair in a cloud of striped silk, she breathed in the steam rising from her mug. “Explain to me again why I should help you?”

.

She could play coy all she wanted, but she’d let us in at a ridiculous hour of the morning. She was interested. I leaned back against the sofa. “Because you’d like to know what it spells.”

“You’ve seen it?” There was an eager catch in her voice.

I smiled. Knowledge, the oldest temptation.

She disappeared down a hall and came back with a hinged frame, folded closed. “The image I sent…it was only half the picture. Not quite aboveboard, maybe, but I wanted to give the Brits a reason to take my inquiry seriously without giving the game away. The daguerrotype you’ve seen—it’s freakin’ gorgeous, of course, but it’s the companion shot that’s really fabulous. Taken at the same sitting. They’re both by Matthew Brady, the Civil War photographer. He had a studio in New York before he went down to Washington. Did you know that? He did society portraits. Very solemn, most of them. But he convinced some of his clients who were actors to experiment with emotion and action.”

She’d hardly taken a breath since she started, her words tumbling out in a quick staccato patter. Opening the frame with a flourish, she set it down on the table before us. On the left was the daguerrotype she’d sent Owen. On the right was another, again showing forrest in the same kilt and plumed bonnet. But this pose was more akin to a still from a silent film than to the Victorian solemnity of the other portrait. A woman, turned away from the camera, faced him, holding the mirror as he leaned back in exaggerated horror. What he saw in the mirror remained unseen. But in the woman’s hand, a few letters were visible in reverse around the rim of the disc:
.

“Daguerrotypes flipped images left to right, like mirrors,” said Jaimie.

Reversed back, the letters read NGISBU. They were from the middle of Arthur Dee’s identifying phrase, NOTHING IS BUT WHAT IS NOT, minus the first five letters of “nothing” and everything after the “u” in “but.” I glanced up at Joanna.

“It’s Dee’s,” she confirmed.

Jamie looked from me to Joanna and back. “No shit? You can tell? Just like that?”

My voice raspy in my throat, I quoted Arthur Dee: “
You will knowe the Mirror by its black surface, and by a Posie around its edge: Nothing is but what is
…not,” I added. “It’s the mirror that was originally used in
Macbeth.
”

“The mirror that originated the curse,” said Joanna.

“Well, then it came into play on May tenth, 1849.” Jamie shook her head. “He had it the day of the riot. Did you know that?
Forrest carried it the day of the riot.
”

“But it was Macready who was acting at the opera house, wasn’t it? forrest’s fans were on the outside, throwing stones.”

Jamie shrugged. “Some say he
was
there.” She walked to the window. “
There,
” she snorted. “
Here.
It was here. This building rose from the ashes of the Astor Place Opera House…. Imagine twenty thousand people down there, throwing paving stones and oil-soaked torches. And then cavalry and infantry marching in behind, squeezing them ever closer into the building, filled with a standing-room-only crowd.”

Her voice seemed to people the night with the cries of men and the screams of horses, the roaring of flame and echoing volleys of gunfire. “Who knows where forrest was? He might have been in the crowd, or even in the building. Probably idle speculation. But the suspicion was there.”

I tried to keep my mind on the photos. “Who’s the woman?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jamie. “At first I thought she might be his wife, Catherine. She was an actress herself, you know. But this can’t have been her. They’d already parted by the riot. Sad story, that. Forrest could be a real bastard. With regard to his wife, he became a character out of one of his plays. Henry the Eighth, maybe. Or even worse, Othello.”

The person Ellen Terry had her story from had been a woman,
a fellow denizen of the drama,
she’d written,
whose personal tale is as tragic as any role she might encharacter on the stage
.

“What happened?” asked Joanna.

“Catherine Sinclair was beautiful and vivacious, the daughter of actors, and Edwin swept her off her feet when she was very young and he was already an international star. For twelve years, they had a blissfully happy marriage—as happy as one can be, at any rate, that endures the death of every child born into it. She bore four children to full term, but none of them lived more than a week.”

“Jesus,” said Joanna.

“In the spring of 1848, he took Catherine on tour with him. One afternoon he returned unexpectedly to their hotel room and found her in what he regarded as a compromising attitude with another actor, a known ladies’ man. Then, in the early months of 1849, he went snooping among Catherine’s things and found a letter from the same man. A ridiculous letter, really. Completely over the top in declaring his passion for her—and no proof that she returned it. But that was it for forrest. He decided his wife was a fallen woman and he was a wronged man. There was one bitter fight that went on all night, apparently, and then six icy weeks of silence. And then he threw her out.

“Beyond all understanding, she seems to have still loved him. She jumped through all kinds of hoops for him and signed some really humiliating letters that he dictated. It wasn’t until he tried to cut her off without enough money to live a respectable life that she began to fight back. In an era both phobic of publicity and fascinated by it, any sensible person would have settled matters out of court, for his own pride, even if he couldn’t muster the tiniest crumb of sympathy for a woman he’d adored for twelve years. But Edwin had become a vengeful god. He forced Catherine into court for a divorce trial and accused her, in open court, of adultery with numerous men. It became one of the sensations of nineteenth-century America.”

Had Ellen Terry’s “poor soul” who regarded herself as the guardian of a
Macbeth
manuscript been Catherine forrest?
I am hoping that you can glimpse the Forest through the Trees,
she’d written to Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

“What happened to her?” I asked, gripping the edge of the sofa.

“Remarkable woman, actually,” said Jamie. “After the divorce, she went west to run theaters in gold-rush California: San Francisco, Sacramento, the gold camps. Toured Australia, then London, and then traveled through Scotland on her own. Her parents were Scottish by birth. Same as forrest’s.”

“She went to Scotland?” I asked. “You’re sure?” Sir Angus had believed that Terry’s informant was the dark fairy of Dunsinnan legend.

“Twice, that I know of,” said Jamie. “Can’t pinpoint the date of the first trip, but the second was 1889. She saw Ellen Terry’s
Macbeth.
”

Plucking the frame from the table, I examined it, but there was nothing to be seen that we hadn’t seen already. At the back, both sides were sealed with brown paper. Picking it up, I walked into the kitchen, found a knife, and slit one side open.

“What are you doing?” cried Jamie. “They’re sealed in the original frame. It’s half of what makes it valuable.”

“Not so valuable as a life,” I said, lifting the daguerrotype plate from the glass. It was the one with the date. There was no other inscription. No mark of any kind. I slit open the other side of the frame.

To the back of the plate, someone had fixed a note written from Hells Delight, California, in 1855:

At the last sentence, Jamie rose in excitement. “The fountain hill. Fonthill. The castle on the Hudson that Edwin built for Catherine.”

“Does it still exist?” I asked.

Jamie laughed. “It does. He sold it, in 1855, to some nuns.”

“
Under the watchful eye of heaven
,” said Joanna.

“They originally ran a school in what’s now Central Park. After the nuns moved their school north to Fonthill, it became the College of Mount Saint Vincent…. Where I’m on the faculty. The building’s just called the Castle now. It’s where I teach.”

I had no time to wait for bells to ring. “We have to go now!” I fairly shouted at her.

I could see, though, that there would be no hesitation. It took Jamie no more than five minutes to throw on jeans, a sweater, and a jacket. Downstairs, we stepped out into the cold darkness of early morning. I looked at my watch as we slid into the car. It was a quarter past four.