The White Forest (39 page)

But Day was already standing, the tool he’d used to murder the boys—a long crude piece of sharp metal that might have once been used to gut animals—gripped in his hand. He looked like some obscene and ridiculous priest, mouth open with longing.

I lowered my arms and let him come because I saw there was no other way. In my heart, I saw the stag—massive and horned—a
dark creature running toward the forest deep, crashing through the bracken. Then it was gone.

Day shoved the tool into my stomach. The pain felt as though he was breaking me in half. I pictured my friends, my father, and the beautiful Heath where the trees were lush and true. I thought of myself walking with Maddy and Nathan, and as we slipped deeper into the lovely wilds, I pushed my body forward against the blade, driving it deeper.

Black stars opened across my field of vision, and I felt as if I was emptying like a pitcher. I could hear Day speaking some litany about the emergence of a new creation story. He said it began with the sacrifice of a god. “I should have known all along,” he said. “I couldn’t bring down the wall myself. I had to wait for you, Jane. The death of a god is necessary. And of course you came. You wanted to save your friends. Your heart has always gotten in the way of your power. And now we’ll have the Paradise, you’ll see.”

I reached down and caught Day’s hand, which still gripped the blade that was lodged inside me. With all my remaining strength, I forced the knife upward, making a long deep cut in my own skin. Black stars exploded around me, momentarily obscuring the interior of the wall. Pain seared through the very center of me, and I could taste blood in my mouth, could feel it rolling down my chin. I willed myself to remain conscious. To finish this.

“You think you know my secrets,” I said to Day. “You think you understand the Empyrean. But you know nothing.” I pulled the blade away from him and threw it aside. The jagged metal had left a wide cut in me, beginning near my navel and moving up toward my breasts.

I pressed my fingers into the cut and with great effort pulled back my flesh. Day stared into me. His was the horror of a priest who realized all his sermons were mistaken. Every word he’d spoken was proven untrue. I looked down into the cavity that I’d opened, and there I saw no organs or bones. I did not even see the white trees that had filled Mother Damnable. I was instead filled up with the
universe itself, a bright and turning sphere of countless planets and stars. And beyond the universe was the beautiful Unmade where everything began and would end. I was the sum of all of this. The balance existed inside of me. And I saw that such a sense of the infinite was driving Ariston Day toward his own oblivion. He was so small compared to it.

•   •   •

The ape-gods were around us then. They’d filed in through the open door, and at that moment, they surpassed me to fall upon Ariston Day. He did not struggle. He only continued to stare at the center of me in the shifting void that surrounded the planets and the stars. I watched as the creatures pulled at Day’s arms, forcing them backward until the joints in his shoulders popped. He howled in pain, begging for their mercy and then for my mercy. One of the white apes tore off Day’s lower jaw and left him making a terrible airy moan, unable to form words. Another scooped out his eyes, one by one. By the time they were finished, Ariston Day’s body looked like a pile of meat and bone lying before the machines.

And then the gods came to me, lifting me up just as I was no longer able to stand. They lifted my body with their bloodied white hands and carried me in silent procession out of the wall and into the quiet forest. They made no sound, but their soundlessness became a kind of song. The gods set my body on the wide white river that Pascal had described, and I found it was no longer still. The warm water carried me swiftly in its currents, and the folds of my skirts expanded in the white water. The warmth of it caressed the hole in me, soothing my pain.

Time moved differently on the river. Morning came to the Empyrean, and I saw Maddy and Pascal, walking together on the shore. They carried Alexander between them; his arms were slung around their shoulders. They did not see my body. Perhaps by that time I was already beneath the white waves, or perhaps like the gods, I was invisible to them. Around my friends, the Empyrean was dissolving
—floating away like so much smoke. I could see the Crystal Palace reappearing. They would make it back to London. They would go home, and I found myself longing momentarily for their companionship, for my father, and even for the dark halls of Stoke Morrow, but the river bore me on.

Farther along, at a bend in the river, I saw Nathan Ashe crouched by the water. His flesh was withered and white, sprouting thick patches of hair. He looked at me when I passed like he understood the mystery of my procession better than he understood his own timepiece. He was one of them, the god-apes. Nature and supernature had collapsed within him. He knelt by the water’s edge, dipped his hand into the white water, and drank a communion from it.

Like me, Nathan would stay.

There were others too on that pale shore—Mother Damnable dressed in red with a wide lace ruff around her neck. She’d been the witch of the Heath, but in the Empyrean she was resplendent. There too was the girl from Rome who’d suffered at the hands of Theodore de Baras. I could still see marks on her wrists from where he’d chained her, but here she was free. And then farther on was the Lady of Flowers, beautiful in red linen, holding out her hand in a sign of love. There were others too, so many, women whose names I did not know, but whom I understood entirely.

And finally when I reached the mouth of the great white river, I saw a lone woman, dark haired and pale. She wore a mantle of red starlight at her shoulders, and she gathered me from the waters and dried me with that garment. The woman held me in her arms, and I looked up into her face and saw it was the face that I’d known long ago.

Mother did not speak, for there at the edge of the river, we had no need for words.

Everything was known between us, then and always.

I
can see them all—the ones I loved. I watch their years spool out.

The case of the disappearance of Nathan Ashe was put to rest by Inspector Vidocq, who made the unsubstantiated claim in his final report that Ariston Day had murdered all of his Fetches, beginning with Nathan. How Day disposed of the bodies was yet unknown. But they were gone, all of them except for two—Corydon Ulster and Alexander Hartford. Ulster had been convalescing in the sick ward of Bethlehem Royal after an accident on Hampstead Heath and claimed that an angel dressed in red starlight had saved him from the fate suffered by his compatriots. Vidocq reported that Ariston Day himself had simply disappeared, as he had in each of his previous incarnations—in County Sligo and Suffolk. The inspector warned that if authorities were not vigilant, the madman would resurface under a different name in a different city to gather the sons of wealthy men and expose them to exploit and horror.

An empty plot was made for Nathan Ashe at Highgate Cemetery. There was a marble bench beside the beautiful white monument where Lady Ashe could sit and contemplate his life. The epitaph read simply:
LOVING SON, BELOVED FRIEND
. My own father went to sit with her on certain afternoons. She would ask if he intended to make a memorial for his daughter, Jane, who’d disappeared along with the
poor misguided followers of Ariston Day. Father told her softly that there would be no piece of stone for Jane. She was everywhere around him and inside of him, his precious girl. No stone could hold her essence. And yet Father did take pause at the statues that were cropping up all over London—statues of a woman with her head bowed low who held a gathering of flowers in her hands.

Maddy gave birth to a daughter and called her Jane Ashford Lee. Although Nathan isn’t with her, she keeps a picture of him, taken with her Father’s daguerreotype machine, on the mantel above her fire. In the picture, he looks young and strong, as though he’ll never die.

•   •   •

From time to time, Nathan comes to sit with me in a glen of the white forest. I spread out over him like a red sky, now more an essence than a girl. He no longer looks like the young man he once was—the boy in the daguerreotype. He’s the same as all the other white creatures who walk the Empyrean, except there is something different in his eyes. Something that gives him away every time.

We watched the christening of Maddy’s child together. There were so many flowers at the baptismal font in the small chapel (maiden pink and feverfew, harebell and yarrow), and Maddy could find no one who might tell her where they’d all come from. The flowers had simply appeared.
As if sent from the Lord himself,
said the sweet-faced girl who kept the chapel clean.

Maddy knew it was not God who’d sent them, at least no sort of god anyone imagined. She looked toward the statue of the Virgin that stood near the altar, studying its eyes, perhaps waiting for them to move. When the statue proved to be nothing more than a piece of stone, Maddy glanced away, returning her attention to the child and her friends. Gathered at the chapel for the christening were Pascal and Alexander, Eusapia Lee and my own father, and even Lord and Lady Ashe. All of them watched with joy as Jane Ashford Lee reached for the flowers that surrounded her. She cried out until the
priest put a daffodil in her hand, and she gripped it as if she’d never let go. All of London, every building and every object within that city of wonders, shuddered at the force of her grip. Even the Empyrean shook for a time. Yet the child herself was silent and lovely upon the earth.

Touchstone Reading Group Guide

The White Forest

By Adam McOmber

Set in Victorian London,
The White Forest
is the story of Jane Silverlake—a young woman with an unusual ability to see the souls of objects. When Jane reveals her ability to her best friends, Madeline Lee and Nathan Ashe, Nathan’s fascination with her talent upsets the balance of the trio’s friendship. Soon, Nathan has disappeared while participating in the dark activities of a cult that may have something to gain from Jane’s ability. Jane and Maddy resolve to find Nathan, but doing so forces Jane to confront the mysterious sources of her ability, and brings the three friends to the brink of a new reality from which they may not return: the Empyrean.

For Discussion

1. After Jane reveals her talent to her friends she tells Maddy:
“When [Nathan] looks at you, Maddy, he sees a beautiful girl...when he looks at me, he sees my talent. We both have something to offer”
. How does Jane’s talent change the dynamic of the threesome? What does Nathan have to offer Jane and Maddy?

2. At the beginning of the novel, Jane says,
“I wasn’t a witch meant for burning, nor was I precisely the doorway Nathan imagined...If anything, I was the landscape behind the door”
. What is the significance of this foreshadowing? How do the other characters see Jane? How does she come to see herself? How does your understanding of who, or what, Jane is shift throughout the novel?

3. How do the wildness, beauty, and strangeness of Hampstead Heath contribute to the plot and atmosphere of the novel? Why does Jane both love and fear the Heath? In what ways does it shape her as a character?

4. After Nathan’s disappearance, Jane and Maddy’s relationship is increasingly strained by the question of whom Nathan loved. Whom do you think he loved, if he loved at all? Explain your answer.

5. Discuss the ways that Jane uses her power to help, to protect, and to manipulate. What are some examples of each? As her understanding of her power grows, how does Jane change? How did your perception of her change—is Jane innocent or culpable?

6. Nathan is so fascinated with Jane’s talent that he uncovers the secret writings of Theodore de Baras while abroad during the Crimean War. What drives him to do so? How does the discovery change him?

7. What motivates Nathan? How does his curiosity about Jane set many of the novel’s events in motion? Do you blame him for wanting to experience the Empyrean?

8. Jane is sometimes described as “unnatural” and she uses flowers or nature to control her abilities. In what other ways does the theme of natural versus unnatural play out in
The White Forest
?

9. Discuss the recurring image of the Lady of Flowers that Jane first sees in her mother’s wardrobe. Who is the Lady of Flowers? When is the image a source of fear? When is it a source of reverence?

10. Ariston Day wants spiritual transcendence and a
“cure for every ill of modern society”
. Do you think the world’s betterment is his true goal? In what ways do his actions contradict this claim?

11. Jane asks Inspector Vidocq,
“Why is it that all men wish to
explore
me?”
. How would you answer her question? Jane’s servants and Madeline fear her talent, while the men around her want to use it. Why?

12. Maddy tells Jane that she and Nathan thought of Jane as
“charity,” as a “lark”
. Is she being honest? Given what she says, do you think Maddy truly cares for Jane? Why does Jane remain loyal, despite Maddy’s admission?