The White Forest (18 page)

“What if Lady Ashe returns?”

“She’ll think we’ve merely taken our leave. Nathan’s rooms are on the other side of the house. That’s the downfall of expansive living—one’s house is no longer entirely one’s own.”

I agreed to go, but on the condition that our “investigation” would be brief and that we would alter nothing. Maddy and I left the parlor together, making our way deeper into the mansion.

N
athan’s rooms created a powerful confluence of sensation. The objects there were all so personal to him, and they called out to me. I felt faint in the presence of their chorus. I didn’t want to see the monstrous woman who wore my mother’s face again or feel the horrible pain churning in my stomach—as if something was inside of me that demanded release. I raised the feverfew to my throat and held it there, allowing the silence of it to calm me. But it wasn’t enough. The objects moaned for me, summoning me. They seemed to know their master was in absence, and they mourned him.

“Are you all right here, Jane?” Maddy asked, looking once again concerned.

I nodded. “We passed a vase in the hall,” I said. “Could you go and gather some flowers from it?”

Maddy did as I asked, returning with a bouquet of dripping white lilies. I held them to my chest, finally able to breathe and to see the room as merely a room—more spacious than my own, with wainscoting and low-light gas lamps embedded in the wall. Alongside the lamps were the familiar pen-and-ink drawings that illustrated stories from Arthurian legend, one of Nathan’s boyhood interests. My attention was drawn to a particular piece of art that showed Lancelot in partial armor kneeling in a wood near Glastonbury, apparently
praying to a tree. The expression on the knight’s face was one of reverence. Both his elegance and his long hair reminded me of Nathan. Then, of course, there was the tree, a sturdy oak, of the kind my mother said had given birth to me. Thinking of my recent vision, and then of her holding me as she told me that story, made me feel uneasy.

Maddy and I had visited Nathan’s room many times before, though, of course, we were not actually permitted to do so by the rules of the house. Nathan snuck us in during evenings when his parents were in the city and showed us his collections, which were largely composed of objects and talismans of the supernatural. He was especially proud of a stringed lute that once belonged to Percy Shelley, the poet. Shelley had reportedly played the lute on the deck of his boat, the
Ariel,
as the schooner drifted off the coast of Italy. After the wreck of the
Ariel,
which killed Shelley and his fellow sailors, the lute was discovered on the shore by a fisherman. It made its way onto the black market and finally into Nathan’s hands. Though not a poet, Nathan considered himself a kind of outsider along the lines of Shelley and Lord Byron, and the lute became an emblem of that connection. “You know, girls,” he said on the day he showed us the lute for the first time, “it’s said that when they dragged poor Shelley’s body from the ocean, he had no flesh on any part of him. He was a skeleton dressed in poet’s clothes.”

“That’s macabre,” Maddy said.

“Sometimes I sit and think of those dead hands strumming these strings,” he continued. “Here, Jane, touch the lute, and tell me if you can feel the presence of Shelley’s hands.”

I sighed and put my hand on the instrument. There was neither music nor death in its soul. What I heard was water, a great abundance of it, moving and crashing through its wooden body. I took my hand away.

“Well?” Nathan asked.

“The lute is cursed,” I replied. “Its owner will meet the same fate as Shelley unless said owner stops acting like such a fool.”

Nathan lowered his gaze, putting his fingers on the strings. “I thought you were serious.”

“Only you would be excited about a curse,” Maddy said. “One day when you stop being so morbid, perhaps you’ll find that people finally enjoy your company.”

More than we cared for curses or his occult collections, Maddy and I were in awe of Nathan’s personal space—particularly his bed and his grooming items. The dolls his mother had made for him in childhood, all in a little line on the windowpane, caused us to coo, and we even liked the smell of the room, a mixture of talc and shaving liniment.

It was during one such adventure in his bedroom that Nathan showed us the piece of paneling above his headboard that could be removed. Behind the panel was a secret compartment that he said not even Lord Ashe knew about. “I made it myself,” he said, “by carving out the wall.”

In the hollow, Nathan kept a wallet of money in case he found he should ever run into an emergency, a picture of both Madeline and I (fully clothed) taken using Adolphus Lee’s daguerreotype machine, a bottle of bourbon, and a pistol.

“Dear God,” Maddy said, “it’s as though we’re looking into the storehouse of an outlaw.”

This pleased Nathan to no end, as it was the exact persona he was going for. We’d each taken a drink from the bottle of bourbon and felt quite wicked because of it.

It was painful then to now return to Nathan’s inner sanctum under such a somber circumstance. The titillation that had occurred in this room prior was driven out by the dark spirit of his absence. The draperies were drawn, and the room was full of silence.

“I can smell him still,” Maddy said quietly.

She went to remove the panel from above the headboard, careful not to make a sound, laying it on Nathan’s pillow. Everything was in its place, even the pistol. But something had been added, something neither of us had seen before—a small leather journal, bound with a piece of rope. It was filthy, nearly ruined.

Maddy took it out carefully, unbound the pages and read the first line.

April 19, 18—Arrival at Malta

“It’s a war journal,” she said. “I didn’t even know he kept one.”

“Nor did I.”

Nathan had written us few letters during his station on Malta. The letters were sparse of actual occurrences and were instead filled with facts about the island. During his tour, Nathan had not seen the front. Through some bureaucratic error, he had not been sent on to Sevastopol in the Black Sea, where his brigade was intended. Instead, he and his brigade had resided on the island of Malta, off the coast of Italy, for months.

He wrote to us that the island fascinated him because it was a wellspring of myth. “Do you realize that the preserved hand of Saint John the Baptist is said to be hidden here? Malta was purportedly where Saint Paul shipwrecked after his missionary journey and began writing his epistles.”

Nathan’s letters became increasingly morose due to his lack of physical activity and general psychological stagnation. His one remaining interest seemed to be the cloister of monks who inhabited the island, known as the Brotherhood of Saint John. “The brothers are all quite Romantic and enlightened,” he wrote, “and I believe they know things that other men do not. They even seem to be involved in some secret task, and it’s my aim to understand it.”

I’d dismissed the notion of the brotherhood’s hidden purpose as just another demonstration of Nathan’s imagination, left to its devices in his boredom.

I’d come to know well that he believed many people possessed secret knowledge, not due to any infirmity on his part but because he’d been raised in a wealthy and stable household with kind parents and had little else to do than allow his thought-life to expand. As a younger man he’d come up with dozens of instances concerning individuals (the Lord Mayor, Lady Maul of Islington, and the bizarre-looking fellow who organized the human curiosities at St. Bartholomew’s Fair, to name a few) who were concealing arcane arts just beneath their modern facades.

I’d argued that people simply weren’t as interesting as all that. The common man worried about his bank account, ate his dinner, and took himself off to bed by nine. The closest this man came to ancient sorcery was the prayers he mumbled under his bedcovers.

My guess was that Nathan’s journal of the war was filled with more of his ponderings about the Brotherhood of Saint John and their secret knowledge, and I didn’t think that would make for useful reading. Maddy, however, thought differently. She wrapped the journal in her handkerchief and handed it to me. “Don’t touch it directly,” she said. “It might produce more stomach pains.”

“We can’t just
take
it,” I said.

“Why not, Jane?”

“Because it might be a useful piece of evidence,” I replied.

“And that’s precisely why we
should
take it,” she said. “Likely it contains facts that we don’t want Vidocq to know and might be beneficial to our own investigation. Put it in your dress pocket.”

I did as she asked. She was impossible to argue with.

“We’ll take this too,” she said, reaching for the pistol.

“Whatever for?”

Maddy shoved the pistol into the pocket of her own dress. “Protection.” She resumed staring into the hollow above the bed. “There’s something else in here, Jane, all the way at the back. Some sort of pouch.” Maddy reached her entire arm into the hollow. What she withdrew was indeed a red silk pouch with a drawstring. She stood holding it for a moment, and then without consulting me, loosened the drawstring and let the contents of the pouch fall into her hand.

Immediately, she started to scream, allowing whatever had come from the pouch to drop to the floor. I hurried to close the bedroom door, begging her to be silent. “You’re going to rouse the entire house,” I said, returning to her. She’d stuffed most of her fist into her mouth and was biting down in such a way, I was afraid she might draw blood.

“What was it?” I asked. “What was in the bag?”

She pointed toward the place on the floor where the thing had fallen, and at first, I thought it might actually be a human finger.
I crept forward carefully and realized that it was simian in nature, likely from an ape. The finger was covered in hair and was an unnatural white color. Its fingernail was woody and yellow, and the whorls in the flesh were exaggerated due to the finger’s desiccated state. It appeared to have been severed at the knuckle, and bone protruded from the ragged end.

“Looks like some sort of talisman,” I said.

“Where would Nathan have gotten such a disgusting thing?”

“Perhaps he purchased it on Malta,” I said. “Are there any white apes on Malta?”

“Even if there are, why would he bring it here?”

Knowing Nathan, I thought the finger was meant as an addition to his occult collection, which already boasted a dried Japanese sea horse that was said to promote virility and the eye of a large ocean fish, which purportedly granted second sight. This finger had garnered a place of honor and been housed with Nathan’s most secret trove of objects.

“We have to put it back in the wall,” I said.

Maddy made a horrible choking sound in her throat, and I worried that she might scream again. In fact, I worried that all of the household staff might be on their way to Nathan’s rooms that minute. I acted quickly, grabbing the silk bag from Maddy and stooping over the finger. The finger would not go into the bag easily. I attempted to use the journal to guide it inside, and when that didn’t work, I picked the finger up in my own hand.

This was a mistake, for as soon as I touched the thing, it no longer seemed dead and desiccated. I imagined that it moved in my hand, flexing slightly. I threw back my head and clenched my teeth. Forcing myself not to scream, I pushed the awful white finger into its bag and threw it into the hollow of the wall.

Just as I was sealing the panel off, the door opened and I turned to see Mr. Fanning, the Ashes’ head servant, looking quite perplexed.

“Miss Silverlake?” he said in a whispered voice. “Miss Lee?”

Despite her state of crisis, Maddy was able to cover, saying, “Oh, Fanning, don’t tell the Ashes we were here. We just miss Nathan
terribly. We wanted to look at his things. That’s all. We wanted to remember.” And then she rushed forward and flung her arms around Fanning’s neck. The old servant was so caught off guard, the last thing on his mind would be reporting our indiscretion to Lord Ashe.

Seeing Mr. Fanning again caused me to recall the morning he’d arrived at Stoke Morrow in a rain-wet carriage, horses steaming, his own dark cloak drenched, to ask if I’d heard from Nathan. Nathan hadn’t come back from the theater in Southwark the previous evening, and Lady Ashe was terribly worried.

“I’ve been craving news myself, girls,” Fanning said as he stood in the doorway of Nathan’s bedroom. “There are times when I simply go out to the barn to sit with Nathan’s riding things, just to remember him as he was. I thought the war would have taken him, if anything. I never imagined this.”

“I know,” Maddy said, wiping crocodile tears from her eyes. “But you won’t bother Lady Ashe with this intrusion, will you, Fanning?”

“Of course not, my dears,” he said. “Of course not. Your secrets are always safe with me.”