The White Forest (20 page)

“Oh, Nathan.”

“It’s all right, Jane. My mind simply drifts to my future from time to time.”

“Do you fear the war?”

“I fear its effects.”

“I dread it,” I said. “If you don’t come back—”

“If I don’t come back, you and Maddy will carry on, and you’ll
ensure she does carry on, Jane. She pretends to be the strong one, but
you
are stronger. No one could endure life the way you do—experiencing the things that you experience. So you will care for her. You will help her back into the world. Give me your word.”

“Of course,” I said. “She’s like my sister.” And then I noticed him looking strangely at his own hand, the hand that he’d been using to touch the idol.

“Have you lost sensation again?” I asked.

“It isn’t loss,” he said. “As I said before, it’s as though the hand has been taken up by someone else. It belongs to someone else to use. Perhaps Victoria is exercising her power over her new soldier.” He laughed.

I looked again at the little stone animal between us. Perhaps the queen, but more likely the baboon itself. The objects had found their newest servant in Nathan.

U
pon returning to Stoke Morrow, I intended to immediately make my way to the library where I would read from Nathan’s journal, but as I was removing my shawl in the foyer, I discovered a rather soiled-looking letter on the hall table. It appeared to have been dragged through a puddle of mud prior to delivery and was addressed in an unsure and crooked hand to one, “Jane S.” I rang for Miss Anne, but when she did not answer my summons, I realized that this was her day for shopping. She would likely not return for another hour. I dusted off the letter and opened it carefully, knowing already from the handwriting and the cheap paper that it was not from Ariston Day.

The letter read:

To Jane of Stoke Morrow,

I have come to understand that you and your dirty notch of a friend came to solicit from my own sister as she practiced her arrows in the park. I will have you know that my Judith is to be left out of this affair. She has nothing to do with any of your reeking secrets, and I’ll not have a person like you drag my girl down. Lord Nathan told us what sorceries you showed him at the witch’s house on
Hampstead Heath. I know full and well that this demonstration means you practice black arts and are of no good. Master Day tells us you are not a witch. But I still believe differently. And you must know what happens to witches, Jane of Stoke Morrow.

The letter was signed,
Corydon Ulster, Fetch
, and the pure incivility of Judith’s brother’s comments made me ill. I could hardly believe that Nathan had betrayed my trust so by telling those rough boys about what had happened at the witch’s cottage. The experience there had occurred before Nathan had gone off to war and wasn’t anything to be trifled with it. The event had fundamentally changed us both, and not for the better.

Nathan had asked for a private meeting in the garden of Stoke Morrow, and because it wasn’t often that he and I found ourselves alone, I immediately agreed. Maddy was occupied making a round of home visits with her mother, Eusapia. Being alone with him made me feel as though I’d discovered a new hour. In my heart, I begged the clocks of England to stop and leave us there together. Nathan was dressed in a tan summer suit with a violet pierced through the buttonhole, and I wore a ribboned gathering of feverfew at my wrist, lest any objects might attempt to interrupt. I held his arm as we walked the flagstone pathway and listened to him talk about his training for the Queen’s Guard, an endeavor that had consumed him in recent months. It seemed a perfect evening, and I wondered if something new might transpire between us. Maybe we’d even find a fresh chance at romantic involvement. My hopeful heart or my wistfulness over Nathan’s imminent departure made me more pliable. I could see his manipulations, and yet I was powerless against them as he skillfully turned the conversation toward an idea that had occurred to him—a final experiment before the war.

“We must put your talent to the test, Jane. Something more substantial than observing your father’s collections.”

“Can’t we stop calling it talent?” I said, trying to shift the conversation slightly. “It isn’t really that. It came upon me without warning.”

“As does talent,” he said, stopping to admire the stone canopy covered
in lichen at the center of the garden. The old thing interested me not a bit. It was Nathan who held my attention. His training for the guard had matured him, and he looked powerful standing next to me. “But talent also has to be honed, Jane. I know you’re not interested in Crooke’s psychical society, but you must allow me to make my own final experiment. If I should die in the war—”

“Don’t talk like that. You’ll come back to us.”

“Of course I will. It’s just, I don’t want to imagine my soul forced to remain eternally curious about you.”

“What sort of experiment?” I asked. “I thought you understood by now that the ability doesn’t have an application. I’ve already shown you all it will do.”

“But you’ve never put yourself in any situation of particular extremity so as to know if that were true or not,” he said. “I think we should have a small adventure, just you and I, to a place that might help you focus your abilities.”

I was suspect. Nathan was known for his “small adventures” to places where no son of a lord should go.

“What place? Name it,” I said to Nathan.

“The ruin on the Heath,” he replied.

I withdrew my hand from his arm. “We are not children, Nathan. We needn’t look for adventure in haunted houses.”

The house to which he referred was well known to many of us in Hampstead. It had belonged to one of the city’s most infamous witches, known as Mother Damnable. Entering her house was the kind of thing that children dared one another to do. In fact, I believe Nathan had dared Maddy to do just that when we were younger, and she smartly refused. I didn’t believe in hauntings, but I
did
believe in bad places, or low places, as they were known. And the cottage on the Heath was just such a place of ill omen.

“I’m not going there for one of your larks, Nathan. It’s dangerous—physically dangerous. I mean, the whole roof looks as though it could collapse at the next strong wind. And you and I both know the place also seems to harbor some force that may be dangerous to the spirit.”

“It’s precisely that force which is necessary to boost your senses,” he said. “Look, I’ve been there myself, and even I, who have no sort of heightened perception, no
talent
, felt something. The very timbers of the house seem possessed. If you go there—and I shall go with you, of course, and protect you at every turn—if you go there, you may discover some new illumination. I’ve been reading essays by Mr. Crookes—”

“Oh, Nathan, please stop with Crookes.”

“Mr. Crookes says that if a certain gifted individual can be brought into a gifted place, the combination of the two will result in explosive revelation.”

“But I don’t know that I want an explosion.”

“Jane, you must have shared your ability with us for some reason, otherwise you would have kept the whole thing to yourself. Isn’t that right?”

I was quiet. In coming out, had I been looking for mere attention? Or was I asking for action?

“But how shall we go without Maddy knowing?”

“She has another tour of homes scheduled next week. We’ll go that afternoon, in the light of day. What’s the worst that could come of it, Jane?” He put his hand on mine, stroked my fingers in such a way that I could no longer be sure I was standing firmly on the ground. How could I say no to him—his clear eyes and his beautiful mouth, begging me?

•   •   •

I can see the two of us on the day we journeyed toward Mother Damnable’s cottage. We were like figures in an oil painting, nearly devoured by the blackish greens and golds of the Heath. The rolling landscape fell away toward the south where a smoky brown fog hung over London. I held my wrap against the chill breeze, following Nathan’s sharp and sturdy figure along the sandy path through the fallows. The Heath was rife with brake ferns, furze, and ugly dwarf trees. Neither Hampstead Town nor St. Pancras was visible, and I
felt adrift in the silence of nature. There were no objects—no clamor. Such absence should have provided solace, but instead I found it disturbing. I wished I’d brought my father’s pocket watch or perhaps a tumbler of salt from the kitchen. I was in need of a familiar amulet against the day.

As a child, I’d believed the Heath marked an end to civilization. One could get lost, not just physically lost, but spiritually. To venture onto it was to pass outside the boundaries of conventional reality. It was a liminal space where an encounter with a highwayman or fairy or even a brown bear seemed probable, though the bears I’d pictured were equally fantastic as any nymph. They stood on two hairy legs, wore sly human grins, lived in houses, and talked all sorts of terrible lies.

Mother Damnable’s cottage lay on the outskirts of the dark hamlet known as Hatchett’s Bottom, which was nothing more than a crooked gathering of narrow houses and shops that had sprung up during the late Middle Ages and remained largely unchanged by time. Hatchett’s Bottom was surrounded by the Heath and stood as a bastion of humanity in the parkland. Wooden buildings leaned precariously against one another, nearly toppling their soot-blackened chimneys onto the tattered walks. The place smelled of ash and horses. Shops were designated not by name, but by picture—a white bull for the butchery; a shoeing hammer for the livery; and a red peacock, the significance of which I could not guess.

A few citizens moved along the cobblestone streets, weighted down by peasant wool and other freight, leaving me glad that we did not have to enter the hamlet in order to find the cottage. These were an impoverished people, gaunt and broken. I considered how terrible Mother Damnable’s crimes must have been to be driven to the outskirts of such an awful place. The reasons for her excommunication were a mystery lost to time. The good mother herself was long dead. Only house and rumor remained. We who lived near the Heath heard tales of her at Christmastime, when all the best legends were brought out along with holly and mistletoe.

Mother Damnable bore no children, and two of her three husbands
died from falls on the precarious hills of the Heath, skulls broken on protruding stones. Her third husband caught fire during a mummers’ dance. His long robe got too close to the bonfire and burst into flame, almost as though it had been dipped in alcohol. The stag mask he wore for disguise fused to the very flesh of his face, and he had to be buried wearing it.

Mother Damnable was also said to have predicted the Devil’s three visits to Hampstead Town, ringing a bell on the streets of Hatchett’s Bottom and calling on everyone to bolt their doors. On the third visit, it was said she had tea with the Devil himself. Many people attested to passing by her cottage that day and witnessing Mother Damnable and a gaunt gentleman with long whiskers sitting at her table. They appeared to laugh over some old joke. He stayed late into the afternoon, and when he left, it was said that Mother Damnable looked at her fellow men with a superior and knowing air.

She was, at times, called a witch and, at other times, rumored not to be a witch at all but some kind of creature born from another place. It was said that Mother Damnable could pass between two worlds. And it was this claim that troubled me most. “ ’Tis a blighted place where the old Mother goes,” wrote one minister of Hatchett’s Bottom. “Children are known to kneel at her window and watch as the hag cuts open the very flesh of the air and steps through into another realm. My own son saw this act and sat upon my knee with tears in his eyes, telling me of the unholy scene. She makes worship with devils in that other place. All of them dance in a hectic circle. And in the end, the old Mother removes her skin and stands in the wastes like a tongue of fire and the devils bow down to her and call her their queen.”

•   •   •

Damnable’s cottage was set in a sort of eddy hidden by ragged elms, making it visible neither from the Heath proper nor from the grim village of Hatchett’s Bottom. Nathan and I had to stumble upon the place rather than walk to it directly. The cottage was a primitive sort
of dwelling, an assemblage of timber and stone that looked like it had been born from the forest. Around the house was a low, broken wall, and we entered through the remnants of a garden gate. The yard was empty but for tall grass and a tilted wishing well to the north. There was no sort of front door, which meant the animals of the Heath had been allowed to come and go as they pleased, and also that most of the objects in the house had been removed by villagers. The floor was littered with dirty grass and rushes where small animals made their homes. A rusted bacon rack hung from the single remaining roof beam like some disused instrument of torture.

“I don’t like this, Nathan,” I whispered, as if we were at church.

“Just allow yourself the experience,” he said. “Keep me apprised of what you feel. I’ll protect you.”