The White Forest (33 page)

“You met Ariston Day?”

“The same. And he told me how we could find Nathan. He told me exactly what we had to do.”

“But he lies, Maddy. Don’t be swayed. He’s serving his own purposes and doesn’t care about Nathan at all. There are things I never told you. He’s a charlatan—”

“Quiet,” she said. “I’m finished listening to you. Day is attempting to help me. We have to try his way.”

“Maddy, what’s happened?”

“Do you want to know why Nathan came to us in the first place?” she asked. “Do you want to know why Nathan was with us at all?” The tone of her voice had turned so bitter, it frightened me.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I met him on the Heath one day when I was walking with Mother, and I knew him for Lord Ashe’s son. I told him there was a girl at the house called Stoke Morrow—a girl who didn’t know anything about the world. She’d been shut up in her father’s moldy environs for so long that she might have gone a little mad. I asked him if he’d be willing to come along with me and take you out, Jane. I told him we could all go walking, and I asked him to think of you as
charity
.”

“Are you trying to be cruel?” I asked.

“I’m trying to be honest for once,” she said. “It was all a lark for him at first. For both of us, really. We tried to make you a civilized person, but it didn’t work. And then you showed Nathan your abilities and everything went wrong. There have been so many times I’ve wished we’d never let you out at all.”

I felt my heart folding in upon itself. “Rest assured I would have found the door myself eventually.”

“Jane, I have been ill every morning for the past week. I’ve seen the doctor, and do you know what he said is causing my ailment?”

“Tell me.”

“He believes me to be with child. Nathan’s own.”

This information struck me squarely in the chest with such force that I blurted, “I saw you together in the woods—you and Nathan.”

Maddy was silent, her shadow expanding. “He was wild that evening, utterly unlike himself. I was as confused about what we were doing as you must have been. But these are the results of that. These are the results.”

“Maddy, I—”

“You’ll come tomorrow to the Crystal Palace at three o’clock,” she said. “In a hall at the palace there is to be an exhibition called the Great Illumination. You’ll meet me there behind the red curtain. Do you understand?”

Fear crept into my throat at the prospect of finally being forced to enter the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. “But why?” I said. “And how am I supposed to get out of this cell?”

“You’ll meet me there at three o’clock. Tell me you understand.”

“Yes, Maddy, I understand, but couldn’t we choose another meeting place?”

Her shadow stood. The room was still too dark for me to see her face. I could see only the outline of her corseted dress. The door opened, and instead of one of Vidocq’s guards standing there, I saw a red-coated Fetch holding a dripping candle and waiting to escort Maddy away. The chalky whiteness of her face flared in the candlelight. She looked like a girl asleep.

The door closed behind her, and I ran to it, banging my fist against its surface. “Give her back to me, you vermin,” I called. “Give her back.”

“Who are you talking to, mademoiselle?” asked a Frenchman’s voice from the other side of the door half a minute later. It was one of Vidocq’s guards.

“Where were you?” I called to him.

“I was sleeping, mademoiselle,” he answered. “And I’ll return to doing so if you’ll only be silent.”

I lay down again and could not sleep. Maddy was traveling with a Fetch? Doing Day’s bidding? I knew I had to save her. Despite everything, I still believed in her goodness. She’d been my connection to humanity for so long. She and Nathan both. I’d risk anything to save them.

M
y prison door opened early the next morning, and I found not Inspector Vidocq as I’d expected, but Pascal Paget, wearing a black traveling suit, looking terribly nervous and standing next to the good agent, Karl. Shards of sunlight fell across my yellow cell, and the young men looked to me like twin Seraphim, descended. “You’re free to go, mademoiselle,” Karl said, and there was a certain satisfaction in his voice.

“Free? Vidocq has not even spoken to me. Have I been detained all night for no reason at all then?”

“It’s been decided your presence is unnecessary at the present moment,” Karl said. “Last night the inspector discovered the entrance to the Theater of Provocation. Ariston Day is in custody.”

“Arrested?” I said, disbelieving.

Karl nodded. “Day and some of his Fetches.”

“We don’t know if Alexander was among them,” Pascal said. Taking a look around the room, he added, “Let’s be gone from here, Jane.”

“The inspector believes questioning Day will take several days,” Karl said, “and your father has put a great deal of pressure on us for your temporary release.”

I thought of Father. He was good to me though he didn’t understand me.

“I have a message for Vidocq before I go,” I said to Karl. “Tell him there may be serious trouble on its way. I believe Ariston Day to be planning something, and even if he is incarcerated, you men should be put on point.”

“Is there any direction mademoiselle thinks we should point?” Karl asked.

“Toward the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,” I said. “That’s my guess. Today at three o’clock.”

•   •   •

Bond Street was crowded with a tumult of shoppers—mostly women in elaborate hats and crinoline—and I leaned close to Pascal as we walked to hear further explanation of my release. Father had threatened to report the whole affair to the minister of the interior, and Vidocq admitted he could not provide grounds for holding me. The truth of the matter was, of course, too far-fetched to hold water, and the inspector was already pleased with the arrest of Ariston Day, believing Day was the key he needed to solve the case.

“I apologize that this didn’t happen yesterday,” Pascal said. “We’ve been trying to procure your release since Miss Anne told me you were taken. She
is
sorry, Jane. She didn’t know how the inspector was going to react. Your father would have come himself, but—”

“You don’t have to make excuses for him, Pascal. Father hasn’t truly involved himself in my life for some time. He tries—but thank you for your help.” I went on to tell him that Maddy visited me in the night and what she’d instructed me to do.

“Are we going to the Crystal Palace then?” he said.

“I don’t know that we have much of a choice.”

“But you believe this has something to do with Ariston Day?”

“I believe she’s been influenced by him, yes. Maddy was not herself when she came to see me. I’d like to go somewhere else before we venture on to Hyde Park, though.”

“The Lee carriage is yours, Saint Jane,” Pascal said. “Where are we off to?”

“There’s a church in Spitalfields,” I said, “called the Hall of the Red Star.”

Pascal shook his head. “There’s a cholera outbreak in Spitalfields. I don’t think the driver will take us there.”

“I’ll be persuasive,” I said. “I must see it before three o’clock.”

“Why is the church so important to you?”

“It’s a link between my mother and me,” I said. “I hope to come to some understanding about my relationship to the Empyrean there as well.” It was good to say the word
Empyrean
freely without fear of discovery. “Pascal, I need to know more than Ariston Day if I’m to keep us all safe from him.”

•   •   •

Spitalfields was a vast wasteland in London’s East End. It had once been home to prosperous silk factories, but when the industry moved on, the factories had been turned into tenements, and the workers were left wageless and destitute. The buildings sagged and looked as though they might collapse at any moment, and as the Lee carriage passed these black and broken hovels, downtrodden faces stared out at us from the glassless windows. Spitalfields was worse off than Southwark it seemed, and every piece of brick and mortar cried out to me. I thought of how Ariston Day said that the unnamed goddess must rise up and put an end to the suffering of Man. She must unmake that which should have never been made. These poor faces, watching from the wreckage, made me wonder, for a moment, if he was right and such a time had come.

The church lay in the remnants of an ancient Roman cemetery and was not much more than a shanty house with the cryptic name painted over the door: The Hall of the Red Star. The moment I saw the church, my heart sank. The pinewood door had been torn off its hinges and tossed into the side yard, and several pews had been thrown into the yard as well.

“It looks as though someone made it here before us,” Pascal said.

I stepped from the carriage and into the shadow of the doorway.

“Careful, Jane,” Pascal said. He did not advance into the church with me, as if he knew this was something I needed to do alone.

The inside of the church was more damaged than the outside, and it was clear that some catastrophe had befallen this place. Pews were overturned, and a large hole had been punched through the front of the makeshift altar. The smell of smoke lingered in the air, and resting in the nave was what appeared to be a defaced statue of the Virgin. This was not the work of the vandals, though. Mary had been transformed with care, and I recognized her new persona immediately. Her face was covered with white paint and a bushel of dead flowers was fixed to her arm with baling wire. The final touch was a bit of red textile, draped around her shoulders.
She’s there, blooming in the darkness, silent and waiting.
It appeared as though the statue was the only thing in the church left untouched.

“If you’re looking for worship, you won’t find much opportunity here,” said a woman’s voice. “The bishop’s gone. Everyone’s been frightened away.”

I turned, and saw a woman of some fifty years standing in the shadows. She was dressed plainly in a gray matron’s gown, marred by dirt and ash. Her face was kind yet weathered. Perhaps she’d been attempting to bring some order to the wreckage before we arrived.

“What’s happened here?” I asked.

“Boys in red coats, night before last,” she said. “They demanded information about our worship. Said they’d been sent by a man in Southwark who aims to comprehend our ways. The bishop told them such things as our beliefs couldn’t be expressed in words. One has to
live
the meaning. The boys grew angry at this and made their threats. They would have killed the bishop, I think, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Bayard, the butcher, who came and drove them out.”

“That’s terrible,” I said, imagining the Fetches ransacking this place.

“Aye.” She squinted at me. “And what is it you’ve come for? You don’t look like you belong in Spitalfields yourself.”

“I’m from Hampstead Town. And I’ve come for the same reason as the boys, I suppose. For information. Though I don’t intend violence. My name is Jane Silverlake.”

The woman paused only a moment at this, long enough for me to see a flash of what might have been understanding in her eyes.

“My mother—” I began.

“Evelyn Silverlake,” the woman said.

“You knew her, then?”

She shook her head. “None of us knew her—not well. Such a thing wasn’t possible. Evelyn Silverlake came here a few times to speak to the bishop directly. She was confused. She didn’t understand the things that were happening to her, the sensations she was feeling. I tried to speak with her myself. Tried to tell her about the Old Mother of the Heath.”

“The Old Mother?” I asked. “You mean Mother Damnable?”

“Aye, but we don’t call her that down here. That’s what people called her out of spite.”

“Are you telling me that Mother Damnable and my mother were alike in some way? They both experienced
sensations
?”

“Difficult to draw such comparisons,” the woman said. “Old Mother knew what she was. She knew how to use her gifts. That’s why everyone called her a witch. But even Old Mother didn’t know exactly what she needed to
do
with these gifts. The bishop says one day someone will come who knows.”

“You mean a person who knows how to bring about the unmaking?” I asked quietly, as if to speak these words too loudly would grant them authority, “To bring the Paradise?”

The woman frowned. “Now you
do
sound like those boys from Southwark. We aren’t looking for any Paradise, my girl. There is no making or unmaking. That line of thinking is a fool’s game. Over the years, there’ve been plenty of men who’ve tried to purify the world, to return it to an innocence they believe it’s lost. But all of that is just
an attempt at gaining power—a grab for the sword, as our bishop would say. Such men want to be a kind of king. The role of the gifted one has nothing to do with power or with kings. She’s meant to keep a
balance
between earth and aether.”

“Aether?” I asked.

“Just a word,” she said. “Call it what you like: the Upper Sky, the Unmade, even the Empyrean. Men have given it so many names over the course of history. But those names don’t really matter, in the end. It’s the unchanging matter. A place without qualities. Neither hot nor cold, wet nor dry. The aether remains while all else shifts and fades.”