The White Forest (27 page)

“Dear God, I hate that girl,” Maddy said.

Proserpine was a pagan goddess—righteous in her beauty, but Christ rebuked her, raising his right hand. The queen bowed her head, embarrassed at her lasciviousness.

Bouquets of black moths fluttered up from beneath the stage. A woman in the audience screamed when some of the moths alighted on her face. Christ took a moment to look at her, breaking character. Or perhaps his concern was the concern of Christ.

I knew what was to happen next. The Devil was supposed to come from the mouth of Hell, not to offer temptation, as he did in the desert, but to mock the son of God for even trying to enter. But Satan did not appear. The mouth remained empty, as if something had gone wrong with the play.

Jesus glanced again at the audience, distracted.

And then an odd wistful music rose from the mouth of Hell—a high-pitched song I thought I recognized. A demon appeared, dressed in a black domino. His face was covered by a mask of black muslin. The demon spoke two words to the audience.

The words were: “She approaches.”

At that moment, a shifting shape appeared in the mouth of Hell—a character I’d not seen in previous renditions. Before I had a chance to get a good look at the figure, the new relic of Saint Dunstan was brought forth as promised, carried by two boys wearing cherub wings.

The relic was a harp, without any of its strings, its wooden body rotten. This was Dunstan’s harp, which had warned him of the Devil. And seeing it, I knew it was dangerous for me to be in the proximity of such a gifted object. There was suddenly a ringing in my ears and the curtains fell at the edges of my vision.

The stage was no longer a stage.

It had become a surface of fiery brightness.

I wanted to turn to Maddy and ask if she’d witnessed the transformation of the stage, but I could not. I was transfixed, for the figure that came forth from the mouth of Hell was draped in sheer red gauze and her body was wrapped in flowered garlands. I could see that the skin beneath the gauze was of a bluish tint, as if she’d drowned. She stood before Christ, a silent glowering goddess.

And then Christ himself bowed before her.

This could not be right, I thought.

Christ would not bow.

The doorway behind them was no longer the mouth of Hell. It was a shimmering gateway, and I could see the white forest beyond
and the still stream. Flowers glowed like weird lamps in the undergrowth. It was the Empyrean, that cold pure place, and I knew that neither the white forest nor the figure of the goddess were part of the performance. This show was meant only for me.

The goddess was looking directly at me, extending one flower-decked arm and pulling it back slowly, as if moving water. She wanted me to come to her. She wanted me to join her.
She’s there, blooming in the darkness, silent and waiting.
I realized this was both the Lady of Flowers and the Red Goddess who felled the stag. They were one in the same. Her face was obscured by red gauze, and I longed to see her more clearly. I wanted to know if she once again wore the face of my mother.

I began to walk toward the edge of the stage as if in a trance. The woman wanted me, and more than anything, I wanted to go to her. As if to entice me, she reached up and began to pull her veil away. I saw the braid in her dark hair exposed and then her gray eye. With a kind of ecstatic horror, I realized it was not Mother beneath the veil. No, on this night the goddess wore my own face. It was me on the stage, standing before the Empyrean, drained of my humanity and filled up with the stonelike power of another world.

I felt Maddy’s hand on my arm. “Jane, where are you going?”

I tried to pull away. Maddy was nothing in that moment, a mere insect at my side. Despite my fear, I strove to walk toward the goddess, but Maddy would not loosen her grip. And then the vision collapsed and was gone. Christ was again doing battle with Satan in a kind of choreographed dance.

I felt light-headed and began sinking to my knees as the awful nature of the vision came crashing down upon me. How could the goddess have stolen not only my mother’s face but now my own? What meaning could that have?

Maddy took me by the arm and led me to the southern woods, far from the festival grounds, and she held me there. I was shaking, and she tried to keep me warm, but her touch didn’t help. Instead, it reminded me of why I’d agreed to go to the Temple of the Lamb despite
Pascal’s wise warning. It was for none of the reasons I’d stated. The puzzle of what I’d done that night in the forest had become too much. I believed Ariston Day might understand things, not about Nathan, but about me.

“Please tell me what you saw on the stage,” Maddy was saying.

Before I could speak, we were interrupted by a sound from the trees behind us and then a voice—“Can I help in some way, mademoiselles? Is something the matter?”

It was Inspector Vidocq, dressed as gilded Helios, and I was not glad to see him. “A passing hysteria caused by memory, Inspector,” Maddy called. “Our Nathan used to be such a prince of Dunstan’s Day.”

“What memory, in particular, concerning Mr. Ashe caused you to break down in such a way, Miss Silverlake?” Vidocq asked with interest.

“No particular memory,” I said, weakly. “There are just so many here.”

“But there must be one,” he said. “A lady does not collapse in the forest from vague recollection, does she?”

I grasped for something and surprised myself by coming out with, “Nathan nearly kissed me here last year.”

“What?” Maddy said. “You never told me that, Jane.”

I immediately wished I’d made up a lie, but my vision and the pressure from Vidocq forced a truth out of me. “We were watching the reenactment of Dunstan’s trials, and Maddy, you had stepped away. Nathan told me he wanted to know what it was like to touch me deeply—to be inside me.”

“And why would he want to do that?” Vidocq asked.

“Because Jane is so utterly pure,” Maddy said in an acidic tone. “Nathan probably thought touching her would lead to a religious experience.”

I looked toward the ground, hoping Vidocq would take such an answer, but he did not seem satisfied. The fact was that Nathan had been drunk. I pushed him away, wiping my mouth and glaring, all
the while feeling my anger rise. After he forced his kiss on me, I didn’t want to control myself anymore. I wanted to unleash my rage. Once, I’d wished for nothing more than a kiss from Nathan, but when it finally came, I realized his kisses were not kisses at all—they were manifestations of his deranged need, not for me, but for the other world.

W
hen Vidocq departed, I found myself unable to speak to Maddy. I closed my eyes and lay there in the dead leaves, and images of the goddess on the stage vibrated inside my skull. I felt myself drawn back to that final evening when Nathan disappeared. The night when I’d done things I could never take back.

The three of us had convened in the Roman ruin of my father’s garden with a plan of eating a light supper of apricots and cold quail in an attempt to recapture a camaraderie that had not returned with Nathan from the war. Nathan, Maddy, and I no longer slipped easily into old feelings, and the ruin seemed like the natural place to try to rekindle what was neither quite romance nor friendship. Our plan quickly dissolved as Nathan registered another complaint about his hand. Once again, he said it felt as if it was no longer his own, and he asked if I could move it for him—like he was some marionette.

“Of course I can’t control your hand, Nathan,” I said. “How many times do I need to say that?”

“Oh please, let’s stop,” Maddy said. “Nathan, you won’t get any better if you keep fixating on these experiences with Jane.”

“It’s true,” I said. “Our experiments are no longer healthy for you. Perhaps they never were.”

Winter leaves, fallen from the surrounding oaks, floated on the
surface of the pool, and desiccated vines navigated the statuary like the dried arteries of a riverbed. Nathan paced at the feet of Mercury, examining his right hand in the evening light.

“Let me see your hand, Nathan,” Maddy said.

He brought it to her gingerly, as if carrying an over-full cup of tea.

She took his hand in both her own and squeezed his index finger. “Do you feel that?”

“No. Not a bit,” he said.

“Perhaps we should have a doctor come,” I suggested.

“It’s a temporary discomfort, I’m sure,” Maddy said. “Mother has bouts like this when she suffers from nervous distraction. Is this the hand you used when you practiced firing your rifle?”

Nathan nodded.

“Then that’s the answer, isn’t it?” Maddy said. “Overexertion of the nerves. Best not to think about it.”

“But it’s my
hand,
Madeline,” Nathan said. “How am I not to think about it?”

She sighed. “Perhaps we could bind it for you, that way you won’t overexert it again. Jane, do you have any scarves we could use for binding Nathan’s hand? Nothing too dear. Just a bit of cloth.”

“I—” But I had no time to finish. Nathan removed himself from Maddy’s care and announced he was going to smoke. As soon as he was out of earshot, Maddy’s demeanor changed from one of calm disinterest to something more serious. “I fear he has lost himself,” she whispered to me. “We have to be careful here, Jane. He isn’t behaving as our Nathan. Our boy didn’t come back to us from the war.”

“That’s why I wanted a doctor.”

“We mustn’t bring a doctor into this. Father saw doctor after doctor in the last year of his life, and they did nothing. What if a doctor wanted to hospitalize Nathan? He’d be taken from us, perhaps permanently.”

I wanted to argue that a doctor’s job was to clarify—to interpret—and if Nathan required hospitalization to cure his instability, then so be it. His time on Malta had left him visibly less substantial.
A diet of rations etched his figure, and the sea air and sun peeled back a layer of his essence. He’d become a slate on which Ariston Day could scrawl superstitions. The more time Nathan spent with Day, the more symptoms arose—dim vision and temporary loss of voice. Nathan even had a new acrid smell about him. Maddy called it a scent of bad dreams. “It’s as if he’s passed through some cloud of aether,” she whispered to me, “and he’s come back to us with the outer reaches of the universe still clinging to him.”

I went to sit by the statue of Athena, hoping for wisdom. The goddess’s face was cracked down the middle. Athena, like the other gods, was little more than a restless shell. The stone from which she was made emitted a low long sequence of tones, nothing particularly divine. I drew a quiet breath. “You’ve read the papers, Maddy. Many soldiers are coming back from Crimea temporarily—damaged,” I said. “One doesn’t observe the fall of an empire and return clicking one’s boot heels. Nathan’s experiencing a variety of male hysteria.”

“We must stick it out,” Maddy said. “The only cure for him is a good dose of everyday life. Act as you always act. Nathan will come around.”

“And if he does not
come around
?” I asked.

“We’ll have him committed to Bethlehem Royal. How’s that? We can wear black when we visit him, as if we are both widows to his madness.”

“I’m making my departure now,” Nathan said, appearing from behind a column, the butt of a cigarette still pinched between his fingers. He looked haggard. Maddy was right; he wasn’t our Nathan anymore. “Day’s hosting a provocation tonight in Southwark that I must attend.”

“Don’t go,” Maddy said. “Stay with us.”

“The provocation is important,” Nathan replied, beginning to make his way down the stone steps. Maddy ran to him and clutched his arm. Perhaps it was because she startled him that Nathan pushed her. Regardless, he gave her such a shove that she fell. Nathan took two more steps before looking back, and he seemed confused as to why Maddy was on the ground.

I put my hand on her shoulders and said, “Are you all right, dear?”

“Fine, Jane. I’m fine.”

I glared at Nathan. “Are you really in such a hurry? How could you?”

“How could
I,
Jane?” he said. “I think the question here is really, how could
you
.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

He turned his back on us. “Yes, you’re an innocent, aren’t you? You’ve no control over any of this. How long will that be your story, I wonder?”

•   •   •

Maddy and I watched as Nathan walked into the twilight of the southern woods. This was the woods where the three of us had once played out tales of mystery and fantasy among the trees of Lebanon. She stood at my side in the Roman ruin, and I believe we both knew that life as we understood it was coming to an end. We were losing Nathan to Ariston Day. Nothing would be as it once had been. Perhaps that was even for the best. And then, before I quite knew what was happening, Maddy turned to me, cheeks flushed, and said, “Jane, I need to speak to him. I can’t just let him go off like that.”

“He’ll come back tomorrow,” I reasoned. “We can talk to him—”

Before I could finish my thought, Maddy was rushing down the steps of the ruin, holding her train so it wouldn’t drag in the mud. She disappeared into the windblown shadows of the forest, the contours of her body shaded and then finally lost.