The White Forest (15 page)

I couldn’t let Maddy know any of this, of course. If she made a connection between me and
The Royal Hunt,
I had no idea what she’d do. I hoped, in fact, that she might cease her investigation after our experience at the Silver Horne. But Maddy was intrepid. She came to Stoke Morrow the following morning and didn’t bother to dismount her carriage to summon me. Instead, the Lees’ coachman, a
tall gentleman with a beard who slouched when he drove the horses, came to the door and said that Miss Lee requested my presence for an outing. I wrapped a shawl around my shoulders and stepped into the wet spring air.

The carriage was parked beneath the flowering trees. Horses, dark and well groomed, observed my approach. I tapped on the carriage window and when Maddy lowered it, I feigned surprise. “I was expecting an audience with the queen,” I said.

“There’s no time for humor, Jane,” she replied. “Get in.”

“I’d like to know where I’m going first, if you don’t mind.”

She sighed. “I’m abducting you.”

“In light of recent events, I don’t think that’s terribly funny, Madeline.”

“All right, I’ve made arrangements for us to meet with the sister of a Fetch,” she said. “Her name is Judith Ulster. An acquaintance of mine in Cheapside told me that Miss Ulster has actually been
inside
Day’s Theater of Provocation—despite the rule against women. She knows how it works, and she’ll tell us the whole truth about the place.”

“You have acquaintances in Cheapside?”

“I keep in touch with some of the girls who posed for my father. They’re fascinating women. Now will you get in this carriage, or do I have to go without you?”

I complied, of course, in spite of my reservations. I wouldn’t let her go alone. It wasn’t until I was sitting on the bench seat across from Maddy that I asked where we were to rendezvous with Miss Ulster.

“The archery gardens outside the Crystal Palace.”

My heart sank, and Maddy must have seen the trouble on my face. “That’s right, Jane. Every so often we have to be seen in public. We can’t spend all our days wandering the Heath like sylphs. I’m sorry.”

“You know I have an aversion to the Crystal Palace,” I said. “Why would you choose it?”

“
I
didn’t choose it. Judith Ulster is quite the sportswoman, and
she’s to be at the archery field practicing all afternoon. She said if we want to speak to her, we should meet her there. She was hesitant about even meeting at all—something to do with her brother, the Fetch. I couldn’t very well say, ‘Oh, I’m afraid the Crystal Palace would never do, Miss Ulster. You see, my friend Jane thinks blood will pour out of her eyes and ears if she ever sets foot inside that place.’”

“I never said anything about blood,” I replied.

“You might as well have. The palace is an amusement. Nothing more. At any rate, we don’t even have to go inside. The archery gardens are on the outskirts of the palace grounds.”

“You’re so glib about the whole thing, Maddy,” I said, “as if you don’t even remember the prophecy.”

“Oh, I’m finished with you, Jane. The so-called prophecy was nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by a charlatan in Piccadilly. The whole of it was merely brought on by one of Nathan’s whims.”

“His whims are beginning to have far greater import than we previously believed,” I said.

Maddy removed a slim leather-bound volume of poetry from her skirt pocket. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’ll read until we arrive. No more talk of prophecies. We are looking for facts.”

I understood her mistrust of the events in Piccadilly, which had occurred nearly a year prior, shortly before Nathan left for the war. It had been a brighter time for all of us, though the evening itself was markedly strange. The prophecy seemed absurd, yes, but Maddy hadn’t seen what I saw. The machine in question that gave us the prophecy was the only object I’d ever encountered that had no soul.

A knock had come at my dressing room door that particular evening, and I answered, thinking it would be Miss Anne, asking what I’d like for dinner, but it was Maddy, looking splendid in a lapis-colored dress and a yellow scarf. I was so happy to see her, so in love with the idea of her, that I forgot dinner entirely.

“Nathan wants us to go into the city with him,” she said, excitedly. “To Piccadilly Circus.”

“We were just in the city last week,” I said.

She was wearing silk gloves, so she was able to take my hand with no fear of transference. “Come on, you hermit. We’re going. He has some invention to show us. He’s terribly enthusiastic about it, and you know how Nathan is when he gets excited.”

“I suppose there’s nothing we can do.” I took the feverfew from my vanity and placed it on my wrist.

“We should give Nathan what he wants in these last few months, Jane,” she said. “Make him happy before he goes off to war.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing Maddy would do whatever she could to please Nathan, war or no war.

I’d been hoping the three of us would sing at the piano that evening and then go walking on the Heath, naming flowers that grew from the undergrowth (feverfew and maiden pink, harebell and yarrow). But there would be no changing Nathan’s mind. Maddy was right about that. Though the city would be full of clamoring objects, I could not deny him.

Maddy and I descended to the Clock Parlor, where Father’s timepieces ticked away the hours—my favorite, an ivory elephant with a clock in its chest, seemed to observe me as I entered the room.

We found Nathan there pacing. “I’ll never know what the two of you get up to in that bedroom,” he said.

“Jane and I had to make hasty love,” Maddy replied. “We can’t seem to get enough of one another.”

Nathan grinned at this. “Yes, well, I hope you’ve satisfied yourselves. It’s a long trip to Piccadilly.”

“Why precisely are we going there?” I asked.

Nathan raised his sharp eyebrows. “Maddy didn’t tell you? They’ve installed a psychic vending machine. It’s the damnedest thing. I want you girls to see it.”

We boarded Nathan’s carriage beneath a sky of low, dark clouds. Maddy and Nathan chatted about something inconsequential while I sat silent. The clouds seemed to settle in my chest, their damp weight pressing down on me. The hinges in the carriage trilled like a shrill flock of magpies, and again I wished that we’d stayed at Stoke Morrow, safe and warm, taking a light supper that Miss Anne prepared.
But we were already on Hampstead Road, and Nathan’s horses were terribly swift.

•   •   •

London seemed a series of tall shuttered houses that evening, all crowded along a single narrow street. The air was full of dust and the pungent smell of dense humanity. We came as close to Piccadilly as traffic permitted and then dismounted, using a series of passages to avoid getting mired in the congested streets. These “secret passages” were oddities of London, symptoms of a city that had been built and rebuilt—a city without order or plan. The poor made their home in these passages, and we walked through their makeshift parlors, brushing lightly through the darkness with Nathan as our leader. The elderly and the infirm observed us guardedly, and I wondered what they made of the three of us. Their watchful gaze told me we didn’t look like angels but some more sinister breed of visitant.

Finally we arrived in the bright world of Piccadilly Circus, a raucous street of commerce. The word
circus
was used in the ancient Roman sense, meaning circle, and Piccadilly Circus was just that, a wide circular avenue connecting to Regent Street. The place was filled with every sort of shop one could imagine. Maddy said it reminded her of a Parisian boulevard, so unlike most of the narrow and wandering streets of London.

We entered the Grand Bazaar, an open-air market in the center of the Circus, and quickly found Nathan’s psychic vending machine—a large silver box with a dispensing tray and a metal arm. The machine was carved with figures from London life—a soldier, a flower girl, a man of commerce. People passed by in the crowded market, leaving the three of us unnoticed. I looked at my two friends as they admired the odd vending machine, and I could not believe how delicate they both seemed in the crush of London, how much I wanted to protect them.

“The way this works, then,” Nathan said, “is that you put a halfpenny here in the slot—” Nathan used the tip of his father’s cane to
indicate the slot beneath a carving of a particularly well-endowed barmaid. “Then you pull this lever here, and the machine will give you what it thinks you should have.”

Maddy said, “What it
thinks
you should have?”

“That’s right,” Nathan said. “It’s a mind-reading machine. See here—” He pointed his cane to the inscription on the machine, which read
DR. LOT’S PSYCHOMATIC DISPENSARY
. “There are claims that it can even make
prophecies
like the Sibyls of ancient Rome.”

“A mechanical Sibyl,” Maddy said. “How darling.”

“Have you already made use of it, Nathan?” I asked.

“I have,” he said.

“And what did it give you?”

“A cheaply produced crucifix,” Nathan replied. “Jesus looked like a little monkey on his cross.”

“So this magic machine thought you needed a monkey Christ?” Maddy asked.

“Not magic,” Nathan corrected, “technologically evolved.”

“The technologically evolved mechanical Sibyl thought you needed a poorly made idol from a several-thousand-year-old religion?” she said.

“Correct,” Nathan replied.

“And what message do you take from that?” I asked. “Is it a prophecy?”

“Yet to figure that out, Jane, my girl. But I’d certainly like to see what it gives the two of you.”

“I didn’t bring any money,” I said, feeling a chill from the machine. I mistrusted the idea of a mechanical Sibyl. And I liked the machine even less because there was, in fact, something different about its essence. I perceived a black and shifting hole at the center of this so-called Psychomatic Dispensary. It emitted neither color nor sound as other objects did. In effect, the machine had no apparent soul. I watched the hole widen and contract like a hungry mouth, waiting for our coins.

Nathan produced two halfpennies, holding them over his eyes like a dead man.

Maddy and I took them.

“You first, Maddy,” I said. “I’d like to see your trinket before I decide whether or not to spend my halfpenny.”

She approached the vending machine. Yellow light from the Grand Bazaar’s gas lamps illuminated her lapis dress. She looked quite beautiful in that moment, and I caught Nathan admiring her too. Maddy put the coin in the slot beneath the carving of the barmaid and then pulled the lever with a bit of difficulty. A wheel spun within the machine, and I could see the void inside distend, as if trying to push something forth. Then there was the faint noise of an object landing below.

Nathan took a velvet bag from the dispensary tray. “Your prophecy, my lady,” he said, bowing to Maddy.

“Oh, I do hope it’s not a monkey Christ,” she said. “That would offend Mother.” Maddy unfastened the string tie and overturned the bag to spill its contents into her palm. At first, it appeared that the vending machine had given her another coin, perhaps a shilling, which would have been a good trade up from the halfpenny. But the coin wasn’t the right color for a shilling. “A token?” Maddy asked, reading the inscription. “It’s good for one entrance to the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.”

“The machine thinks you need a little holiday,” Nathan said.

“But the palace hasn’t even opened yet.” Maddy sounded a bit disappointed. “That’s not for another six months.”

“Keep in mind the Psychomatic Dispensary traffics primarily in the future,” Nathan said. He waved his fingers in front of her face with mock theatricality, as if mesmerizing her. “One day, Madeline Lee, you will go to the Crystal Palace. There you’ll meet a dark stranger. He’ll tell you awful secrets—things you never wanted to know.”

Maddy slipped the token into her dress pocket. “Jolly,” she said. “I’ve been searching for a dark stranger for years.”

I approached the machine, and the black hole within it recoiled. The machine seemed to know me for what I was. I adjusted the feverfew at my wrist, and I put my coin delicately in the slot, then
touched the handle. There was a shimmering across my field of vision and the sound of a hammer pinging against metal.

“You all right, Jane?” Nathan asked.

The experience of touching the machine made me feel dizzy, but I steeled myself and pulled the handle, feeling the gears turn as if they were also turning inside me—as if they were there among my own heart and liver.

A thud startled me. Something large, far larger than Maddy’s token, had fallen into the tray.

Nathan, once again, reached down to fish the prophecy out.

We were all taken aback by what was presented. The object was not concealed in a discrete velvet bag. My prophecy was on view for everyone to see.

“My God,” Nathan said.

“Apparently your needs are significantly different than ours, dear,” Maddy added.

What had fallen into the drawer was not a trinket but a piece of the machine itself that had been dislodged—a cog, glistening with oil. I noticed the vending machine’s arm had not returned to its original position but hung at an awkward angle. And it was then that I realized the black hole inside the machine had closed.

Nathan sighed. “It appears our Jane was too much for Dr. Lot’s Psychomatic Dispensary. I should have known.” He produced a handkerchief, wrapping the cog carefully. “I think you’d better keep it, Jane. It is, after all, what the machine believed you needed.”

I took the cog gingerly, not knowing quite what to do with it.

“So what’s the prophecy?” Maddy asked. “How do we interpret this?”

Nathan shrugged. “Jane’s meant to eventually break the machine and end the show. She breaks the machine, the curtain closes.”