The White Forest (34 page)

“I still don’t think I understand your meaning,” I said.

She gave me half a smile and said, “Everything has an opposite, Miss Silverlake. The aether is the opposite of creation. It’s always there, invisible but burning bright. It’s the pale web that holds the universe together. The idea that this man in Southwark believes he should dissolve the boundary between two realms—it’s a terrible thought. We could never live in that rarefied environment, not for long. The gifted one is the keeper of the beautiful Unmade and she’s our keeper too. She doesn’t seek to destroy creation or even wash it clean. ”

“Then what is she supposed to do?” I asked. “How is she to prevent someone from harming the balance?”

The woman shook her head. “Not even the bishop knows such things. I believe the Old Mother knew some of it, though. If you could speak to someone who knew her, then you might learn a bit more. But then again there were few brave enough to make her acquaintance.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And perhaps I could ask my father to help gather funds for repairs on your church.”

“That won’t be necessary,” the woman said. “But there is something you could do.” She extended her hand.

I was taken aback only momentarily. I put my hand on hers, and she closed her eyes, listening to the room around her, which did not weep but sang. She saw her church was not a ruin but a place of brightness and wonder. This unfettered place was just beyond the ruined surface.

“What happened in there?” Pascal asked as we left the Hall of the Red Star.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think it was what I needed. I’d like to go to La Dometa now.”

“But Maddy isn’t there,” Pascal said.

“It isn’t Maddy I want to speak to,” I replied.

E
usapia Lee saw me in her parlor among Adolphus’s decorations, which buzzed around us like a hive of insects. She was in a greater state of disarray than usual, eyes hollow and tendrils of hair creeping out from beneath her black house bonnet. I approached her carefully. There were times when Eusapia seemed to entirely forget who I was even though she’d known me since I was a girl. But I needed her at this moment, needed her to remember everything.

“London is a black mill bent upon the destruction of youth and innocence,” she lamented, waving a hand, as if to indicate that the black mill was about to materialize in the parlor.

I worked to shut out the clamoring souls of the room so I could listen to Eusapia, who informed me that she believed Madeline was not abducted but may very well have taken her own life.

“That seems too much of a leap,” I said, not wanting to tell her that I’d spoken with Maddy the previous night. There would be far too much to explain, and such explanations would likely only disturb her further.

“The black mill took my poor Melchior at such a young age,” she said. “I thought you girls were the lucky ones. You were protected from the mill here in the northern heights, watching the churnings and tremulations of London from afar. But you see what has happened
to my Madeline. We are still a part of the mill—even here in Hampstead Town.”

I looked at the clock on the mantel and saw the hour was growing late. I was due at the Crystal Palace soon enough. “Eusapia, there’s something I have to ask you. Maddy told me that you met Mother Damnable when you were very young—that you had some
experience
with her. She showed you something.”

“Why ever is Madeline telling my private stories?” Eusapia asked.

I started to apologize but was cut off.

“She has no stories of her own, I suppose. The poor girl lives in her mirrors and her fantasies of young Mr. Ashe. I’ve protected her too dearly, watched over her like a doting hen. When I was coming up, Jane, there were too many of us. My mother had a whole litter of children with which to contend. At every chance, we attempted to squirm loose from the pile. From time to time, we
did
escape, and we experienced reality without the filter of our parentage.”

“Eusapia, I need to know what Mother Damnable showed you. It’s very important.”

Maddy’s mother gave me a curious look and then said, “I was only five, you know. A soft little duckling, lost in the brambles. Mother Damnable was the strangest thing I’d ever seen that had thought to call itself a human being.”

“She was terrible, then?”

“Not terrible, Jane. Stupendous. She was filthy and she wore—God, I will never forget—she wore an Elizabethan ruff around her neck. She was dressed as though she was some fine woman, and perhaps she believed she was. Her red cloak even hung all the way to her feet.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“Oh yes. Yes, she did.”

I waited, thinking Eusapia would go on. When she did not, I prompted, “And what did Mother Damnable say?”

“No one has ever asked what the witch said to me. It’s better not to repeat a witch’s words, isn’t it? Everything a witch speaks is an incantation.”

“I haven’t heard that.”

She pressed her tongue against her front teeth, thinking. “Mother Damnable spoke in such an odd dialect; I barely made out what she said. She babbled it, really. She told me something about how all things would soon be as they should be. She was going to see to it.”

“Did you run from her?” I asked.

“Oh no, my dear. I was no fool. Mother Damnable, when alive, was only slightly less renowned than now that she is dead. To run from her would garner her wrath. Instead of running, I smiled at her and told her she was as fine a woman—a very fine woman indeed. Perhaps she took a liking to me because of this. Even Mother Damnable had her vanities. She grasped my hand, and suddenly we were
moving,
though I did not use my legs. Eventually, she put me on her back, and I rode her like I rode the goats at Papa’s farm. Mother Damnable was older than I am now, and yet there I was with my arms around her neck, pressing my face against her ruff and feeling the shifting of her red robe. I allowed myself to be propelled by her through the woods, going so far and deep I was sure I’d never find my way home. Finally, we stopped at the edge of a clearing—a beautiful clearing that I’ve never found again despite my attempts. And it was there that Mother Damnable indicated to me a tree—a great and brooding oak.”

“A tree?” I said with interest.

Eusapia nodded solemnly.

“What then?” I asked.

Maddy’s mother looked off into the distance, eyes reddish and damp. “Other children told their parents that Mother Damnable could split open the air and walk into Hell. But that wasn’t right. They mixed up their stories because what they saw didn’t respect any logic. I know what Mother Damnable could really do because she showed me: she knelt in the woods before the great oak. She bowed to the tree, and made signs with her hands. Then she parted her red robe, and I saw her pale and sickly flesh beneath. Running from her navel to her breastbone was a deep cut, a sort of incision. She pressed her fingers into the cut and slowly pulled back her skin,
stretching it, opening herself up. And there within her body lay another place. It was not Hell, as the children claimed. There was no fire and no devils.”

I felt light in the head as Eusapia spoke. “The other place was
inside
her, you say?”

“The white forest,” Eusapia said. “And the white river that wasn’t made of water. And the creatures that crawled there.”

“Creatures,” I whispered.

All of the objects in the room were howling. I could no longer block their sound. I pressed my fingers against my own chest, remembering the churning pain I’d felt when I’d touched Nathan’s objects and the feeling that traveled through my body when pressing on the membrane in Mother Damnable’s own cottage. I thought of what the woman in the Hall of the Red Star had said to me:
the gifted one is the keeper of the beautiful Unmade.
Was this how she kept it, then? It was all inside of her?

“The old witch didn’t die, you know,” Eusapia said in a conspiratorial tone. “She simply disappeared. People in Hatchett’s Bottom said she walked into Hell when she grew tired of our world. But I know different, Jane. The hole in her chest—she must have stretched it too big. It finally swallowed her up.”

I
n the darkness of the carriage speeding toward the Crystal Palace, Pascal would not give me a quiet moment. He was seated on the bench across from me, speaking quickly, half in French, saying something about Alexander and Ariston Day. I found I couldn’t attend to his topic, as the image of Mother Damnable pulling open her own chest was fixed in my mind. I pictured the white forest inside her. Was she keeping balance? Was that the way it was done?

“Are you listening to me, Jane?” Pascal said sharply, tapping my arm.

His touch was enough to draw my attention. “I’m sorry, Pascal. Tell me again.”

“Ariston Day has escaped.”

“Escaped?” The carriage momentarily dimmed, and I found it difficult to believe I’d grown so fractured as to not have heard this information before. But how could I really be surprised? Of course Ariston Day had escaped. Such a creature couldn’t really be imprisoned. “How?” I said.

Pascal produced an evening issue of the
Magnet,
the publication that was often first with news but lacking in accuracy. Above the fold was an ink drawing of Day in one of his trim suits, standing on a wooden box in Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park. Day’s eyes looked
nearly as animalistic as they had when I’d spoken to him at the Temple, and he was shouting something to a crowd of onlookers.

“Alexander sent this article along with a terse letter of farewell,” Pascal said. “I wish I could speak to him, Jane. I know my Alexander is still there, Jane, inside of the thing that Ariston Day has made.”

“Farewell?” I said. “Is he going back to America, then?”

Pascal shook his head. “Read and you’ll see. I don’t think you’re going to like it much.”

The article described how Day—who the
Magnet
reported was being held in connection with the disappearance of Nathan Ashe—had made a bizarre escape from a makeshift prison on Oxford Street. Inspector Vidocq himself was not present at the time of the escape, though a number of his men were keeping watch. Apparently, boys dressed in the uniform of the Queen’s Guard had entered the building and used wooden cudgels to subdue the French agents. A smoke bomb was detonated, and Ariston Day simply walked free from the room where he was being held, like some spirit that could walk through walls. Unable to return to his captured theater, Day was bold enough to appear hours later and mount a box at Speakers’ Corner to deliver a speech in which he detailed a vision of what was apparently the apocalypse.

To me, this rather public demonstration was troubling. Day had a history of being so careful and secretive. I worried that his boldness implied he thought he no longer had anything to fear because his goal was already within reach. In his speech, Day heralded the end of time and the beginning of a Paradise unlike any earth had ever known. Industry and experience would be replaced by a great white innocence. He said that the Paradise would be brought on by the incarnation of a powerful goddess who’d been living unnoticed among the thoughtless men and women of London. And then Day had done the unthinkable. He’d spoken my name to the crowd gathered in Hyde Park. “Jane Silverlake” was printed there clearly in black-and-white type.

I lowered the newspaper to my side. “He named me?” I said, horrified. “But what purpose does that serve?”

Pascal shook his head, looking pale. “This must have something to do with what’s to happen today at the Crystal Palace, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I replied, still finding it difficult to believe Day had gone so far.

“Are you really a goddess, Jane?” Pascal asked.

“That doesn’t even sound like a reasonable question,” I replied.

“But
are
you?”

“Pascal, I’m only beginning to understand what I am. ‘Goddess’ isn’t quite the word. It’s possible there is no word. But believe me, Ariston Day doesn’t have a clue as to what I truly am.”

“We must be wary of him,” Pascal said. “We don’t know what he intends.”