The White Forest (30 page)

“And what do they say?” I asked.

Day leaned close once again, speaking in a direct and matter-of-fact tone. “They explain your very existence, my dear. The so-called Lady of Flowers was only
one
incarnation of the unnamed goddess who controls the gates of the Empyrean. There is a line of such incarnations running down through the ages, right up to the modern day. All of these women have the power to fling open the doors if they so choose. All of them can bring about the new Paradise.”

I found I could not breathe, thinking of the red vision I’d seen time and again.

“What the papers reveal,” Day continued, “what excited your beloved Nathan Ashe, is that you, Jane, are the incarnation of the goddess in our current era. You can return all of us to a primitive dream, curing every ill of modern society. Rome is a disease. London is a disease. You are the cure. You can unmake what should never have been made to begin with.”

His words caused an unexpected reaction in me. Beneath my anxiety, I felt a certain power begin to rise. It coursed through my limbs, and I felt as though I’d been waiting all my life to hear this. In just a few words, Day’s story explained my near lifetime of suffering and isolation.

I pulled myself back, knowing I couldn’t allow myself to fall under his spell. His business was to proselytize, and I did not want to become part of his religion. By himself Day was dangerous. With me at his side, he might be lethal.

“I don’t think I should be here, Mr. Day. I need to collect my thoughts.”

“I wouldn’t leave, Jane. Not just yet.”

“And why not?”

“Because I can help you reunite with Nathan,” he said. “If you will, in turn, help me.”

I felt my anger boil at this. “I’m not here to barter,” I said. “If you think you know how to bring back Nathan, then tell me, or—” I raised my hand as if I meant to touch him.

Day extended his own hand in response. “I’d love to be hurt by you, dear Jane. To experience your power as Corydon Ulster did—even to go mad from it. It would be to know supreme bliss, to connect to something I once thought unknowable.”

I lowered my hand, looking toward the pool. “If you understand what I’ve done to Nathan,” I said quietly, “tell me how to mend it.”

“You sound guilt-ridden,” Day said. “A goddess feels no guilt. She merely
acts,
and her actions are a pronouncement.”

“I won’t get caught up in your fantasy,” I said. “Just give me the information I’ve come here for.”

“What I know is the same as what you know, Jane. You put Nathan in the Empyrean, but
how
you did it is not easily summarized. To understand that, we must first understand your very existence. Theodore de Baras says those of your kind are the intercessors. You are the gate and the bridge, as delicate a fabrication as has ever walked upon earth.”

His mouth was so vile, but his words were necessary.

“In de Baras’s papers,” Day continued, “he writes of meeting a girl very much like you in Rome. She was a child of the streets—simple and without guile—yet she had a gift. As he describes it, she could make the ancient statues sing, and she caused bright lights to rise up from the cobblestones, like sunlight dancing on the ocean’s waves. When de Baras found her, the girl was attempting to use her talents as part of a street performance in the plaza before the Pantheon, but her abilities only frightened the crowd. They wanted the simple amusements of jugglers and snake charmers. Only de Baras recognized her for what she was, having already come into contact with the cult of the Lady on his island home. He took her back with him to Malta and kept her at the ruin of Crendi, imprisoned there in a
temple, unbeknownst to the Brotherhood of Saint John. The monk fed her and clothed her in exchange for access to her talents. He made experiments with her, much as Nathan once made experiments with you, only de Baras took his experiments further. When the girl began to refuse him, he took her clothes, kept her chained to the stone altar in the temple. He found that cutting her flesh was a way of opening the fabled doorway.”

“Stop,” I said. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“But you must, Jane. You
must
hear it so you understand something more of yourself and the dangers you may face. There were other ways to open the door as well. All of the methods involved fear. De Baras hints that, eventually, he was actually able to walk into the Paradise and come back again. But after that, he became increasingly paranoid, believing that some creature had followed him out of the white forests of the Empyrean and returned to the temple with him. De Baras believed the monster meant him harm because of what he’d done to the girl.”

I thought of the white ape Nathan had seen in the ruin. Was it possible that this was the same guardian that de Baras had drawn out of the Empyrean? Before I could think further about this, I heard something moving above us. I looked up to see a flash of red between the illusion of thunderheads. There were Fetches crawling in the clouds on some sort of wooden latticework. “What’s going on?” I asked Day.

“They only want to look at you,” he said. “And who can blame them? You are to be our savior, after all. You are the great scourge. Queen of all queens. The goddess reborn.”

I stood, smoothing my skirts. “I’ll take my leave.”

But he would not be silenced. “The world has not been good to you, Jane,” he said. “It offers you nothing. Your true home is waiting—Nathan Ashe is waiting. You pulled him away. You
moved
his body because you wanted to wrestle him from Madeline Lee. And on the evening of
The Royal Hunt,
in a moment of terrible agitation, Nathan Ashe let himself go. He surrendered to you, allowed you to pull him from this world and into the next.”

I’d been so full of grief while lying prostrate in the field of black shale on the Heath that I’d been capable of anything. I’d awoken hours later when the sky was black and starless, thinking madly:
What have I done? What have I done?
Not remembering any of it clearly. “Even if that were true—” I said.

“I want to restage
The Royal Hunt
, Jane, but this time, you will be the sacred beast. I want to provoke you. I believe I’ve discovered a means of opening the doorway and keeping it open permanently. I’ll help you fulfill your destiny and reunite with Nathan. I believe that the Empyrean will transform earth, make it finally pure.”

I stared down at Day in his cane chair. Flame light moved in his oil-dark eyes. “I’m sorry, Mr. Day,” I said. “I don’t think we can help each other.”

On legs of glass, I made my way through the dark of the trees toward the faint glow of the staircase, listening, all the while, to the Fetches crawl through the clouds above me.

“This is bigger than you,” Day called after me. “Look at what a filth-ridden hole our city has become. Think how overgrown it will be in one hundred years or even two hundred. So much pain and suffering. You owe this to humanity, Jane. You owe it to us all.”

O
n my hurried return to the carriage, which hovered in the greasy sunlight of Southwark like some black and untenable island, I barely took notice of the dim figures in the streets. I’d spent my life not believing in the savior Christ or the Christian God. As Stoke Morrow was empty of my mother’s presence, the world to me felt empty of an all-knowing, all-seeing deity. The idea that I was an incarnation of some primitive goddess whose very name was lost to time went against rational thought.

In the muddied street, my arm was brushed by something soft, and I imagined it was Ariston Day or the ghost of Theodore de Baras softly caressing me, trying to steal my power. But it was neither Day nor de Baras. Rather it was something like a child, standing at my feet. I say “like” because the urchin was of an indiscernible age and sex, shrunken as my mother had been when her blood slowed. The small creature moved with the some deliberateness, lifting a bouquet of wilted daisies toward me.

“I have no money,” I said, passing by the urchin, though the silence of the daisies appealed to me in all that moaning ghetto.

“Not for sale,” the urchin said, peering up at me with soot-dark eyes. “I am told to give them to you, mum.”

“And who gave you such instruction?”

“Mother,” said the child. “Mother says you are beautiful and deserve them.”

“Well, I am nothing more than plain,” I said.

“Mother says you must come to our church in Spitalfields, called the Hall of the Red Star.”

I paused at this. Miss Herron-Cross had also mentioned a church in Spitalfields, one that my own mother had shown interest in. “The Red Star?” I asked. “And what do they worship there?”

Tears welled in the child’s eyes, glistening in the grime on its cheeks. “Please take the flowers, mum.” The child got to its knees, holding out the bouquet.

I took them, looking at the nearly rotted heads of the daisies.

“And please be kind to my family,” the child said. “Deliver us from the terrors that are to come.”

“Terrors? What terrors?” When I realized the child wasn’t going to respond and was instead mumbling more prayers to me, I moved away as quickly as I could.

•   •   •

I opened the door to the Lee carriage, saying we should make haste before we were all left penniless and bruised. But when I looked into the dim cab, I saw only Pascal on the velvet seat. He seemed unsure, more of an innocent boy than usual.

“Where’s Maddy?” I asked.

His voice was thick with emotion. “She wouldn’t listen to reason, Jane. I had to remain with the cab, so the driver didn’t abandon us in this place. She went looking for you. The process was taking too long.”

“Too long?” I said. “I wasn’t gone half the hour, Pascal.”

“As I told her. But she was concerned. She said you’re naive in ways she is not.”

“Follow me, Pascal,” I said, tossing the daisies onto the empty bench seat across from him. “We have to find her.”

“But what of the carriage, mademoiselle?”

“It will remain. I have no worry of that.” I said this loudly enough so the driver would hear. “What worries me more is going back into the Temple with no one at my side.”

We hurried along, and I kept my eye open for the urchin with the flowers who wanted to worship me.

“I’ve never been in the tavern above the theater,” Pascal said, walking double-step to remain at my side. “Ariston Day says the Fetches mustn’t go there because it’s full of heathens who don’t understand the ways of truth.”

“Today is your inauguration into falsehood and lies then,” I said. “I doubt that Maddy would have been able to find her way to the theater without an escort.” I said this
hoping
she had not. I didn’t want to picture her lost in the inner forest with Fetches crawling above her through the hideous sky.

•   •   •

The Temple of the Lamb above the Theater of Provocation contained a kind of alehouse cum pleasure garden that had been oddly decorated with the remains of the beastly amusements for which Southwark was once famous. Various wax figures slouched in the dim high-ceilinged room. Nothing as marvelous as those in Madame Tussauds, these were in varying states of decay. The wax had deteriorated, so that the figure of Queen Elizabeth looked like a ghoul with a stiffened ruff about its neck, and Saint Augustine had lost so many inches off his original height that his robe pooled at his feet. Rather than causing the tavern to look like a carnival, these figures made it seem the death of joy—a graveyard for oddities. They hovered inside this sphere of death, bent and malformed, unable to straighten their bodies and stand.

I didn’t see Maddy in the alehouse, which caused my heart to race. Either she had wandered down the stairs toward the inner forest or she was concealed in some back room. Both options were equally undesirable.

I had no real way of communicating with the fellows in the
Temple. To me, they were throwbacks to a lost era, dressed in ill-fitting suits and wearing hazy beards about their jowls. And yet I persevered, moving through what felt like layers of the real—successively digging deeper into the unreal, toward the long, stained plank of wood that served as a bar. Just as I was beginning to ask the barkeep if he’d seen a woman of my own character in this place, I was grabbed by the wrist, quite roughly, and turned to see an old man with some palsy in half his face. His blue eye looked toward his mouth, and his lower lip on the right side drooped nearly to his chin. He held me tightly, indicating that I should move along with him. When I tried to wrest my arm away, he only fastened his grip.

“Let her go, monsieur,” Pascal said, attempting to push his small frame between the man and myself.

The creature shoved him, and Pascal fell backward into the arms of a thick barmaid, who clutched him around his rather frail chest. She nearly choked with laughter as he struggled against her.

Patrons watched as the man dragged me toward the back of the Temple. We passed wax replicas of Victoria and Albert that were nearly translucent, as if their royal souls had come to ruin in this place. I realized even screaming would do no good. Everyone could see plainly what was happening; the twisted-faced man was pulling me toward a curtained doorway. Behind me, another man helped the barmaid subdue Pascal.