The White Forest (23 page)

Corydon was peeling the white bark off a birchwood branch with his fingernails, letting the thin, curled pieces fall to the ground. He seemed in a state of contemplation, looking first at the bark and then at me, as if comparing me to the wood.

“So there you are,” he said, furrowing his brow.

“You’ve been waiting for me?” I asked.

He looked terribly grim. “You know who I am, miss?”

“I believe you’re Corydon Ulster,” I said.

He shook his head. “I used to be Corydon Ulster. I’m a Fetch now. Did you receive my letter?”

“I’m sorry to say I did,” I replied.

He tossed the half-peeled branch to the ground. “You’ve been meddling where you oughtn’t.”

“We’re trying to find Nathan Ashe.”

Corydon laughed harshly. “I’ve heard all about that. You girls fancy yourselves detectives.”

“We don’t fancy ourselves anything,” I said.

“You made her cry, you know that?” he asked, tension building in his voice. “My sister, Judith, is a strong girl. She never cries. But that day, after she talked to you, she walked home in tears. I follow her sometimes. She doesn’t know I watch, of course. The other Fetches watch too.”

“I’m sorry we made your sister cry, but it isn’t we who made her unhappy, Corydon,” I said. “You took care of that yourself when you abandoned your family for a
cult
.”

“Brave words for a girl alone,” he sneered. “A
witch
alone.”

“I’m not afraid of you or any Fetch,” I said. Even as I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I wasn’t sure if they were true.

“Course you’re not,” Corydon said. “Things in this world don’t bother you.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know your meaning.”

“Master Day told us you’d play dumb,” he said.

“What does Day claim to understand about me?” I asked.

“Master Day doesn’t
claim
anything. He states it as fact.”

“And what does he say?”

Again, Corydon laughed, and it was clear he didn’t intend to be forthcoming.

“I’m on my way to see someone. You’ll excuse me,” I said.

But Corydon was off his rock and standing in front of me before
I could even take three steps. His face was an ugly mask, desperate and angry. He was big in the shoulders, and I feared he could bring me to the ground. “Let me feel it,” he said. “Let me feel what Nathan Ashe felt. I want to see the Doorway.”

Corydon’s hands were on me, one gripping my arm and the other groping for my breast. I reacted without thinking—or perhaps some unconscious part of me took over and did the thinking. My own hand was suddenly at Corydon’s throat. I did not squeeze the throat but rather allowed my ability to fill him. My power flowed like cold water through my arm. I could feel his pulse against my palm, and I pushed my talent against that pulse. I imagined it flowing up the column of his throat toward his brain and down his throat toward his heart. Ulster slowly loosened his grip and stood staring at me with what might have been awe. I kept my hand at his throat, and his body began to shake, as if in seizure. One of his gray eyes trailed off to the left, and his jaw went tight, causing him to bite his own tongue. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth.

I wondered, in that moment, if I could kill Corydon Ulster with my talent. And was he
worth
killing?

This last thought startled me into letting go of his neck, and he crumpled to the ground. I regarded him quietly, wanting to hurt him again. There’d been a kind of pleasure in such release. I found I was still angry, but I could not stop myself from thinking of Judith Ulster’s tears.

I leaned close to him. Corydon seemed barely conscious, his left eye still lazy. “Don’t you ever come after me or any of my friends again,” I said. “Learn some manners, Mr. Ulster, or you might not fare so well next time.”

I left him there, walking off into the woods, shocked by what I’d done. I looked down at my own hands. I’d never permitted the transference to overtake another person so completely. Had there been such power in me all along?

By the time I reached La Dometa, I’d steadied myself. I’d considered whether I should tell Maddy about my encounter with Corydon and decided against doing so. The story would only upset
her and make her fear for my safety. The newly hired servant who met me at the door informed me that Maddy wasn’t feeling well herself, and I didn’t give much thought to the illness, attributing it to her continued anxiety over Nathan. Eusapia Lee instead greeted me in the parlor, wearing a black veil and sitting on a straight-back chair. A vase of marigolds and an untouched cup of tea sat on a table next to her. I knew from previous conversations with Eusapia that marigolds represented the Virgin Mary’s sorrow and joy—losing a son but gaining a god. Adolphus Lee’s photographs of naked women covered the walls of the parlor, and it was once again difficult for me to believe that Eusapia did not find such images distasteful, though she’d always acted as though her dead husband’s work was beyond reproach.

“My dear,” I said to Eusapia. “Why are you wearing that veil?”

“Is that you, Jane Silverlake?” she asked, peering through the dark gauze. “The light hurts my eyes,” she said. “And the air hurts my skin.”

“Have you seen a doctor?” I asked.

“No doctors can cure me,” she said. “But bring one for Madeline if you like. My girl is ailing. The last of our clan—sick, so very sick. Go and see her, Jane. Go and see as she withers away.”

“What is her sickness?” I asked.

Eusapia looked toward her marigolds. “Her symptoms are a sign of horrors to come,” she said more to herself than to me. “Horrors to come.”

I ascended the stairs, glancing at pictures of Melchior Lee, which Eusapia kept as a type of shrine to her son after he died in the Opium Wars. I found Maddy in her bedroom, dressed in a gown more voluminous than her traditional fare. The air smelled sour, as though she’d vomited. It was clear she’d been crying too. “What is it, Maddy?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. “Jane, it’s an awful feeling. I haven’t been able to hold anything down.”

“Your mother said I should bring the doctor.”

“He’s already come,” she said. “Mother has forgotten. She forgets
so much. I wonder if my brain will one day be as broken down as hers.” There was a drowsiness to her voice that I was not accustomed to. Perhaps the doctor had given her something for her nerves.

“And what did your physician say, Maddy?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need to sleep, Jane,” she said. “I’ll feel better if I sleep. Is there any news of Nathan?”

“No news,” I said. “But I’ve read a portion of his journal. He apparently found the white ape finger on the island of Malta. He stole it from a group of monks. I think it may well have some connection to the trouble he’s gotten himself into.”

Maddy closed her eyes. “What else did you learn?”

“He went to Malta not only to join the war effort but also to continue his investigation into the occult phenomenon that he believes surround my abilities.”

“He was truly obsessed,” Maddy said.

“But he wrote about me in a kind way,” I said. “As if I wasn’t an experiment, but someone he loved.”

Maddy opened her eyes to study me. “He loved you as a sister, yes,” she said. “I always knew that. Does he say anything about his love for me?”

“I don’t recall anything, no. We’re mentioned rarely, only in passing.”

“But if you had to guess,” Maddy said, “would you say he loved me as a man would love a wife?”

I was startled by this question. “I think he
cared
for us both, Maddy.”

She attempted to rouse herself. Red blotches appeared high on each cheek; her lips looked bloodless. “But do you think he
loved
me romantically?”

“I don’t know. You need to rest. We’ll talk about this later.”

“It’s always later,” she said. “And we never say what we mean.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I think Nathan was in love with me, Jane. I think he was in love
with me, but he didn’t know how to say it plainly. Or perhaps—
your
presence prevented him from doing so.”

My dress suddenly felt too tight and my skin was hot. I couldn’t bear her jealous wrath after what had happened with Corydon Ulster in the woods. Was it possible that no matter how strong I grew, I would never be stronger than Madeline Lee?

At that moment, I knew if I stayed in her bedroom any longer, I wouldn’t be able to hold back my feelings. I excused myself and rushed down the hall.

Descending the stairs, I felt myself dropping through layers of memory, desperate for something better than the present moment. I loved Maddy. She’d made me feel almost normal for so long. How could she act as though I’d been an intruder in her relationship with Nathan?

I remembered a time when she and I were in my dressing room at Stoke Morrow taking turns at the gilded mirror, her fox fur cape tossed over one corner of it. The head of the fox, still attached, had yellow glass eyes that watched us with care.

“You know Nathan loved how we fixed you up last night,” Maddy said. She was running a brush through her black hair methodically. The brush was Limoges and of good weight. The city scene painted on its back was all spires and cathedrals bedecked with light. Maddy had made me what I was, and on certain days I think she believed she invented me whole-cloth, using the strength of her fantasies to drape my bones in flesh.

“Did he?” I asked.

“He said you looked like a countess walking down a grand palazzo in Florence.”

I tried to thank her, but she said I need not. “I’m happy to make you a countess any day, Jane. And yet, there should be something more for us both. I think we’ll both have families one day. Can you imagine our children playing together, Jane?”

I realized I could not.

“Do you recall the famous line that the Lady of Shalott said in Tennyson’s poem?” Maddy asked.

“ ‘I am half-sick of shadows,’ ” I say.

“You have a perfect memory for poetry.”

I attempted a smile.

“I
feel
as the Lady feels,” she said. “All these recent happenings with Nathan—our walks and our conversations—are but shadows, and I’d like my life to finally begin. Wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t know how to answer. What did she mean by “life”? Marriage and children? The processes of aging?

Instead I took a moment to envision the second birth of the Lady of Shalott, her gasp of air in a noisy outer barony. For the Lady, release from her cloistered tower meant death. She knew the consequence of going into the world, but the Lady could not bear mere glimpses of her beloved Lancelot in the magic mirror. Instead, she wanted to touch him—“his broad clear brow . . . his coal-black curls”—and so she left her cloister and died for love. By the time Lancelot discovered her, she was dead, drifting in a boat at the river’s edge not so far from the tower where she’d spent her days. I was generally disgusted by Lancelot’s final musing: “She has a lovely face.” As if his judgment was what mattered. As if the lady was no more than a surface for a man to look upon.

“I want to
thrive
, Jane,” Maddy was saying. “I want both of us to thrive.”

I gathered the strength to take the brush from her and stood behind her at the mirror, not a magic mirror of Shalott, but my own dressing glass. Maddy looked hopeful and beautiful in that moment. What would it feel like, I wondered, to crack the brush against her skull? An awful notion. She was mine, and I was hers. And yet she had a lovely face—
I could not stop myself from thinking this
—certainly lovelier than my own. But what did Nathan think? A horrid question. If Nathan ever chose one of us, the fantasy would be broken. Floodwaters would rise.

I
n the weeks that followed my last visit to La Dometa, I saw nothing of Maddy. She did not call upon me at Stoke Morrow or even write, and I was left to while away the hours, paging through books and sitting at my mirror glass, wondering what she was thinking of me. It seemed that she and I kept a city of grief buried between the two of us. Discussing Nathan’s feelings for us was the beginning of an excavation, and such archaeology was proving too much to bear.

Long shadows crept over my father’s house, threatening to pull me down into a life of solitude again. Miss Anne watched me carefully from doorways, body poised, as though she might flee at any moment. Father finally came to sit by my side in the Clock Parlor one evening and said, “Tell me what bothers you so, Jane. Is it the Ashe boy?”

“It’s not,” I replied. “I’m all right, really.”

For a moment, he looked as he had before Mother died—full of quiet strength. “I’ve been lost in my own sorrows for so long that we barely know how to speak to one another,” he said. “But I can tell when my own daughter is in pain. Please don’t shut me out entirely.”

“It’s Maddy,” I said. “She doesn’t want to talk to me. She thinks I’ve taken something from her. And I worry that perhaps she’s right.”

He leaned close, putting his hand gently on the shoulder of my
linen dress. “You have your mother’s heart. She thought her whole world was going to fall apart more than once, I’ll tell you. But the world never broke. She was always strong enough to keep it whole. You are too.”