The White Forest (7 page)

I stood looking down at Nathan’s now silent button, utterly confused. I hadn’t seen a play since I was a child. Father had taken me to a very poor production of
Macbeth.
I’d enjoyed the performance of the witches but had forgotten much of the rest. And as I was thinking this, I realized there was now a smell in my bedroom, cigarettes and tonic—the smell of Nathan Ashe.

“Nathan?” I said. “Are you here somewhere?”

The room rippled around me, but no answer came.

If I’d learned anything from Nathan, it was the importance of experiment. When something new occurred, I was to examine that occurrence carefully. Before I had time to think, I’d pulled my shawl over my shoulders and left Stoke Morrow. I nearly ran down Hampstead Road, making my way toward the house where Maddy lived with her mother, an Italianate cottage called La Dometa. My heart beat quickly, and I felt as though I was being pursued by those invisible hunters myself. I could almost again hear the sound of their horn, and the smell of Nathan lingered around me too. I could not help but wonder if he’d found some way to send me a vision and, if so, what message did he mean to communicate?

I must have knocked too vigorously on the door of La Dometa because when Maddy answered, she looked tired and irritated. Her mother, Eusapia Lee, had recently dismissed their help for some reason that was logical only to her. Eusapia was in the throws of a degenerative nervous illness that caused her mind to wander and confabulate. She often forgot people and even whole episodes of her life.

Maddy wore a charcoal-colored dress—a mourning gown, if I’d ever seen one. A bit of black lace was tied around her neck. “Jane, what is it?” she asked. “You’re a mess.”

I raised my hand to feel the perspiration on my brow and then attempted to smooth my hair back into its bun. “Something’s happened,” I said.

“Is there news about Nathan?” she asked, looking momentarily hopeful.

“No, not precisely,” I said. “But I need to speak to you. I saw something strange, Maddy.”

She stepped aside without a word. I followed her into the quaint powder-blue foyer, which was filled with music—a flute, if I was not mistaken.

“Are you having a recital?” I asked.

“It’s Mother,” Maddy said, disdainfully. “She’s hired some awful man from a music hall to come and play for her. She read a pamphlet recently about symphonic therapy. Apparently, if music is played once a day in the home, it has the effect of organizing the mind. Daily treatments are supposed to improve memory and even calm the nerves, if we’re to believe the pamphlet writer. I told Mother no amount of flute playing would cure her brazen senility, so she might as well give it up.”

“You’re terrible, Maddy,” I said. I tended to enjoy Eusapia’s milder eccentricities, but then again, I didn’t have to live with them.

Maddy shook her head. “I want to take up rooms in the city, Jane. I want so very much to get away.” I’d heard her express this sort of desire before. Maddy was the sort of “New Woman” who thought a girl living alone in London would be liberating rather than debasing.

“Where’s Pascal?” I asked, taking off my shawl, looking to change the subject.

She waved her hand, as if shooing an insect. “I don’t keep track of him any longer.”

“None of this is his fault,” I said. “You know—”

“Jane, you arrived at my door for some purpose, and I don’t believe it was to lecture me about my French ward.”

I took a breath. Discussing aspects of my talent with Maddy was generally unpleasant, but in this case, I felt it was necessary. “I took a nap this afternoon and when I awoke, all of the objects in my house were terribly agitated.”

She became visibly tense. “Jane, I’m not really interested in hearing about your occult experiences right now. Not when we should be thinking about Nathan.”

“But I believe this might somehow pertain to Nathan.”

She sighed. “Let’s go sit in the parlor then. I can’t stand to hear mother’s music a moment longer.”

We retired to the front parlor of La Dometa, and Maddy closed the large sliding doors, muting the sound of the flute to a degree. The Lee parlor was a gaudy place, decorated by Eusapia’s late husband, Adolphus. He’d ascribed to the Pre-Raphaelite philosophy that, when making art or home furnishings, one should hold to the rule of nature:
reject nothing, select nothing, and scorn nothing.
The parlor walls were covered in vined tapestry and the furniture was painted a floral pattern. The pale nudes that had led to his downfall glowered from their leaded frames. On the desk, an ivory clock showed a scene in which the allegorical figure of Chastity bound Cupid with ropes of ivy. Vases of orange marigolds populated the room. I was glad for the flowers because they had the effect of numbing my senses enough so that I could concentrate on this conversation with Maddy.

She sat in a chair across from mine, curling her legs comfortably under her body.

“Do you still have the necklace Nathan gave you?” I asked. “The one with his spoon on it?” Nathan had given Maddy the necklace as a gift one Christmas. He’d drilled a hole into a small silver spoon that he’d used as a child and hung it from a chain. The note he attached to it read, “Mother me?” I suppose the gift was meant as one of his jokes, but Maddy loved the necklace. She wore it every day for nearly a year.

Her face hardened when she heard my question. “Do I still
have
it?”

“Yes, I’d like to—”

“Of course I have it, Jane,” she said. “Do you think I just tossed it away?”

“Well, may I see it?”

She leaned back in her chair and studied me from beneath half-lidded eyes. Though she was my dearest friend, she could be very queenly at times. “It’s locked in a box in my room,” she said finally. “I’m not sure I remember where the key is at the moment.”

“Could you go and get the necklace for me, please? I need to perform an experiment.” As soon as I spoke, I realized I’d used the wrong word. Maddy hadn’t liked the experiments between Nathan and me one bit.

“I don’t think I want you handling my necklace. It’s the only piece of Nathan I have left, and allowing you to use your so-called talents on it seems like sacrilege.”

I reminded myself that Maddy was under a great deal of strain. “I’m not going to harm it. I merely want to see if it reacts in the same way as—”

She held up a hand to silence me. “Your experiences are personal, Jane. You know very well what happened to Nathan when you started sharing too much. In fact, I doubt we’d be in this trouble if—”

“Maddy, don’t you dare level accusations at me,” I said, surprised at my own boldness. “Whatever happened isn’t
my
fault. Nathan wanted to experience my talent. All of the choices were his.”

I knew that I protested too much. Images of the final night we’d spent with him—the night he disappeared—rose in my mind. I saw myself lying in the field of shale on Hampstead Heath, weeping and whispering into the deep fissures of the rock. The purple dusk was above me, and the black rock was below. I was full of fear and sorrow, and I was aware that something had come up and taken hold of me, stretching me beyond my own boundaries. The rest of that night, I remembered only fragments—shards that I could not reassemble to form a whole.

Maddy cleared her throat to draw my attention. She regarded me carefully, and I knew I needed to focus on the conversation at hand, lest she begin to question me.

“I’m glad you’re here at any rate, Jane,” she said. “We have an actual problem to discuss.”

“What problem is that?” I asked.

“Vidocq,” she said, accentuating the hard
k
sound at the end of his name.

“The French inspector?”

“The very same. Has he interviewed you?”

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t aware he planned to. Has he spoken with you?”

“I’m sorry to say he has,” Maddy replied, “and I’ve realized all my fears are coming true. He’s out to tarnish Nathan’s name.”

“How do you mean?”

“He’s digging up all sorts of facts, prying into everything. Then he’s reporting it all to Lord Ashe.”

“Oh God,” I said. Nathan’s father was one of the staunchest members of the House of Lords, superior in upbringing and rigid in his systems of rules and philosophies. If he learned even half of what his son had been up to since Nathan returned from the Crimea, it wouldn’t matter if we found our friend or not. Nathan would be disowned—stripped of his inheritance and left to live on the street.

“You must be prepared, when the time comes, to speak appropriately to Inspector Vidocq,” Maddy said. “You’re easily intimidated, and I don’t want you telling him too much.”

“I haven’t even been called upon,” I said, the idea of being questioned by the inspector already making me nervous. “I doubt that I matter much to him.”

“Not so,” she replied. “Vidocq seems quite interested in you—in both of us, actually. The nature of our relationship with Nathan has come under some scrutiny. The inspector seems to think the friendship unnatural.”

“Well, it is unnatural in some respects,” I said. It felt good to be honest about this.

“I’m only asking that you watch yourself, Jane.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And don’t
touch
the inspector. Don’t offer your hand. We wouldn’t want his tie pin to start singing lullabies to him.”

“That isn’t funny,” I said.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

•   •   •

As I was leaving La Dometa, Maddy said, “When I find the key to my treasure box, Jane, I promise I’ll show you the necklace. I’m
sorry if I seemed abrupt earlier. I’m just—well, I’m beside myself. It’s been weeks, and we’ve heard nothing.”

“I’m sure we’ll have some information soon, dear.”

“Do you think so?”

“I do.”

I did not kiss her cheek in parting. I knew Maddy wouldn’t appreciate my skin against her own at that moment. Even a brief transference would be too much for her.

A
s I walked slowly back to Stoke Morrow, I focused on the silence of Hampstead Road. There were no carriages or merchants’ carts, and I found myself alone on the isolated lane where tall willow trees provided shade. The cool of the air felt good against my skin, and I stroked the white feverfew gathered at my wrist. I’d learned once from a physician friend of the Lees that this medicinal flower, when consumed, was known to reduce the size of blood vessels in the human brain. It muted the symptoms of headaches, and it seemed to have a similar effect on my talent. Yet even feverfew could not quell my thoughts of Nathan Ashe. He’d known how to upset me, and thinking about our experiments together made a flush rise in my cheeks. I’d worked against losing control with him, yet in the end, I’d lost that battle. The image of the creature making its way through the painted trees lingered in my thoughts, and I wished, yet again, I had some further possession of Nathan’s to experiment with.

When Stoke Morrow, black and crumbling, appeared on the horizon, I did not want to return to it. The house looked, for all the world, like a prison. As a child, I sometimes fantasized about simply slipping away and walking forever on the open Heath where no man-made object could trouble me. These fantasies became more pronounced when I reached my teenage years. A series of tutors
came and went, never able to completely explain the reason for their departures. Some said I was not teachable. Others said I had a disease of the mind, and I was attempting to infect them. I wanted to punish those tutors as I punished Miss Anne, but I knew they were too intelligent to stand for it. The best I could do was hide myself in the darkest corners of Stoke Morrow and wait for them to go.

Father had finally given up on hiring tutors, saying I could educate myself in the library as I saw fit. “People aren’t reliable these days, Jane,” he said. “Learning to do for yourself is a better lesson than any those so-called teachers could provide.”

Instead of reading in the library as Father suggested, I wandered the long halls of our ancestral home. The objects murmured softly, often seeming more alive than the people in my life. I immersed myself in color and sound, readily intoxicated. I loved my father, yes, but even he was beginning to pale in comparison to the clamoring souls of these objects. I do not know when precisely I surrendered myself to the talent entirely, but I remember how I began to feel that I was no longer a girl. I was a wraith. I thought that if I continued to let myself go, I might be absorbed by the energy of the house, and if that happened, I wondered if anyone would think to look for me.

I must have looked like some ragged wastrel on the day that I first met Maddy and she drew me out of my dark corner on the stairs. I remember gazing into her violet-colored eyes and thinking I’d found my savior. If anyone could free me from the solipsistic prison I’d built, it was this lively child of the age.

I remember she attempted humor after she’d examined my dark and threadbare dress, asking if Stoke Morrow was perhaps some cloister. When I looked embarrassed, she softened and asked me to take the gray cap off my head.

I did as she wished, and she helped me unfasten my long hair from the tangle Miss Anne called a bun, then further surprised me by arranging my tresses. The maid only touched me when she had to, and it was strange to feel someone paying such loving attention to my body. Unlike the maids or my tutors, Maddy didn’t say I frightened her. She didn’t claim to see evil in me. I felt that if I stayed
close to her for long enough, I would become something new—a girl, normal in almost every respect.