Hawthorn

by Carol Goodman

  “You hate rubies,” I had reminded her as I secured the clasp beneath her veil. “You told me once you thought they were gauche.”

  “What did I know? I was just a child. Look how they make my neck look—so graceful, don’t you think?”

  “It looks like your throat has been cut,” I said, regretting the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. For all I knew van Drood had meant me to say them to plant the idea into her head, but she only laughed and told me not to be so maudlin.

  But she’d taken the choker off and not worn it to the opera that night. All the shopping, I realized then, was her attempt to keep at bay the morbid thoughts that preyed on her. The next day we’d gotten lost in the streets behind the Louvre. Helen said she felt faint and had gone into a little courtyard beside a church. I went into the church to find her a glass of water and when I came back with it I found her staring up at a statue of a gargoyle, tears streaming down her face beneath her veil.

  “What is it?” I cried, staring up at the gruesome face. “It’s only a gargoyle. They’re meant to drive away evil.”

  “It’s not the gargoyle,” she moaned, “it’s what’s under it.”

  There was a sort of roughly hewn globe beneath the corbel supporting the gargoyle. It was very old and crumbling and difficult to make out so I stepped closer to see better—and then recoiled. Climbing out of the globe, gnawing their way out, were rats.

  “It’s meant to represent the world being destroyed by poverty,” the nun who’d given me the water and followed me out said.

  “It’s the shadows,” Helen said. “All that’s evil and foul in the world coming out at last. It’s what’s inside us.” She laid her hand on her breast. “Eating its way out.”

  The nun stared at Helen and then crossed herself and hurried away. I took Helen’s hand and led her back to the hotel.

  When she was settled in bed I went back out again and into the Tuileries, walking briskly around the manicured paths and neatly lined allées of pollarded trees, searching the faces in the crowds for someone familiar. We’d been in Paris for four weeks and I hadn’t seen Raven or Marlin or any of my other friends. Had they abandoned us? Had they abandoned me because I’d given away the location of the vessel? Or had van Drood’s henchmen scared them off—or, worse, done away with them?

  The thought that I was all alone, at van Drood’s mercy, made me walk faster and faster. I passed fashionable ladies strolling arm in arm, and nannies chasing after their charges down the wide paths. I heard snatches of conversations. Many were talking about the trial of Madame Henriette Caillaux, wife of the finance minister, who had shot the editor of Le Figaro for publishing her husband’s personal correspondence, which revealed that she had had an affair with him while he was still married. Others were talking about where they would go to escape the oppressive heat.

  “I hear the kaiser is taking the waters at Bad Ischl,” a dandy in striped trousers remarked to his older female companion. “Perhaps we should go there.”

  “I hear Marienbad is smarter,” his companion replied.

  Are you all insane? I wanted to shout. War is coming! And no one, including myself, was doing anything about it.

  I took a turn around the basin where little boys were launching toy warships and old men strolled with their arms folded behind their backs and young men lounged in cast-iron chairs reading Le Figaro. L’acquittement, the headline read, Le verdict de honte. So Madame Caillaux had been acquitted. Only one column on the far right side of the page dealt with Le conflit Austro-Serbe. How could everyone be so blind?

  I passed a statue of Medea grieving for her children and then one of a Roman senator in calm repose, then one of men in scant tunics fighting. The statues alternated between scenes of tragedy and peace as if reflecting on man’s ability to look away while others suffered. I stopped in front of a statue of Cassandra and stared at the doomed Trojan woman. She had been cursed to see the future but not be believed. Eventually it drove her insane. I imagined myself running through the Tuileries, snatching the newspaper from the hands of that well-dressed dandy and telling him he would be marching to Belgium in a matter of weeks, shouting at the little boys launching their boats that real warships—flying ones—were on their way to bomb them, shaking the old woman who thought Marienbad was smarter than Bad Ischl. It would be smarter to go hide in your root cellar.

  They would lock me up. Just as van Drood had locked me away in the Bellevue Pavilion for the Insane. Only no one would come for me this time.

  I turned away from the statue, defeated, and found a tall veiled woman standing in front of me. At first I thought it was Helen, but this woman was taller. Had I been talking to myself? Was she going to call the gendarmes to take me away?

  But then she lifted her veil and I recognized Lillian Corey.

  “Thank the Bells, we’ve been trying to catch you alone for weeks! Come with me—we don’t have much time!”

  24

  LILLIAN PUT HER veil back down, linked her arm through mine, and steered us toward the river side of the park. She kept us to a measured pace but her grip on my arm was tight and I could tell she wanted to walk faster. We turned left on the Quai des Tuileries and joined the afternoon crowds making their slow promenade beside the Seine.

  “I swear I’d like to knock the hats off these ladies and gentlemen just to wake them up,” she said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing. I-I’ve felt so alone. Where have you all been?”

  “Never far,” she replied, squeezing my arm. “But we had to be careful. Van Drood has spies everywhere. At the hotel, in the Tuileries, in the maisons de couture, even the Louvre. But Raven and Marlin have been watching you from the rooftops so when we needed you today we knew where to find you.”

  “Needed me? Has something gone wrong?”

  “The real question is has anything gone right! But I’ll let the others fill you in. We’ve called a meeting.”

  We crossed on the Pont Neuf to the Île de la Cité. “Did you know,” she asked, “that the first settlement of the city was here on this island? There is a legend that the original settlers, the Parisii, were the survivors of the lost city of Ys. The Boat People, they were called. That’s why Paris has a boat on its coat of arms and its motto is Fluctuat nec mergitur—she is tossed by the waves but she does not sink. Some say the survivors of Ys were fairies. So it makes sense that there’d be an established community of fairies in Paris.”

  We were passing by the great cathedral of Notre Dame now, under the watchful eyes of the grotesque stone gargoyles. I shivered, recalling the sculpture of rats gnawing their way out of the earth.

  “I haven’t seen any fairies since I’ve been here.”

  We had come to a little park behind the cathedral at the tip of the island. I looked around for my friends and any fairies, but all I saw was an old woman sitting on a bench knitting socks.

  “You just have to know where to look,” she said. And then, nodding to the old woman, “Bon jour, Marie.”

  Marie made a reluctant grunting noise and clicked her needles together. The hedge behind her vanished, leaving only a greenish haze—the same green, I saw now, as old Marie’s eyes. A green that reminded me of Gillie. Before I could ask if she were a French cousin of the Ghillie Dhu, Lillian was saying merci beaucoup and pulling me through the green haze into a charming secluded bower bounded on three sides by tall hedges (the one behind us grew back as soon as we were on the other side) and open to the Seine on the fourth. Lanterns hung in the hedges and bits of stone statuary—remnants from the cathedral’s restoration, I guessed—littered the grass. A picnic was laid out on a checked cloth—wicker baskets full of bread and cheese and fruit and bottles of wine and lemonade—around which lounged an odd assortment of characters, including a turbaned man in a white tunic, a dwarf, a naked woman, and, standing with his back to us, a winged man.

 
“Raven!” I cried when he turned around.

  He rushed across the grass to me and lifted me in his arms. He mantled his wings over our heads and kissed me. All the doubts I’d felt these last weeks fell away.

  “I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to come to you. Van Drood—”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “It’s better you stayed away.”

  The light filtering through his feathers dappled his face. He held my face in his hands and looked into my eyes. “Are you all right? Has that monster—”

  “He hasn’t touched me,” I said, but Raven was already picking up my hand to look at the net under my glove. I snatched my hand away. “Don’t! I don’t want it to spread to you.”

  “Why would you care if you were really all right?” he demanded. He unmantled his wings and turned from me. “Omar, have you figured out how to get this thing off her?”

  Omar uncrossed his long legs and stood up to look at my hand. He waved his hand over the net and spoke some words in Hindi. The net stirred and swayed back and forth like a cobra’s head bobbing to a snake charmer’s flute, but then it sank back down, biting deeper into my skin. I bit my cheek to keep from crying out.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t mastered the right spell yet,” he said sadly.

  “You moved it at least,” I said, trying to reassure Omar—and Raven. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. In the meantime . . .” I turned to the rest of the gathering. Miss Sharp stood up to embrace me. Dolores Jager and Gus were there, too.

  “I thought you had gone to find Mr. Bellows in the Ardennes,” I said to Gus, and then turning to hug Dolores, “I thought you were in Vienna!” She was wearing a striped skirt and vest and carrying a courier’s bag strapped across her chest. She looked older, somehow, as if she’d become an adult in the weeks since I’d last seen her.

  “We flew to the Ardennes but we didn’t see any sign of Mr. Bellows or the vessel. So we flew on to Vienna to check on Dolores—”

  “Gus flew me out so I could deliver my report to our friends here,” Dolores said, waving to the others. The naked woman stood up, her long black hair settling around her in an approximation of clothes. “This is Islay,” Dolores said. “She’s a selkie. She’s come from Britain to represent her people. And this . . .” She held out her hand and one of the “lanterns” descended from the hedges and alit on her palm. It was a diminutive winged sprite, much like a lampsprite, but draped in diaphanous layers of gauze that were somehow more stylish than the rustic lampsprite’s garb. I leaned closer, expecting that she would brush her wings over my skin to communicate . . . and she promptly sneezed in my face.

  “Sorry,” Dolores said, “I should have warned you. That’s how the lumignon communicate. They’re cousins to our lampsprites.”

  The lumignon let loose a stream of chatter that I only half understood despite the quantity of pixie dust she’d sneezed in my face. I caught the words “American barbarians,” “our august history,” “Marie Antoinette,” and “Vive la France!” the last pronounced with one hand over her heart and the other pointing to the sky.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mademoiselle . . .”

  She let loose another stream of incomprehensible words that Dolores translated as “Gigi.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mademoiselle Gigi.”

  Gigi sniffed at me and flew down to the picnic basket, where she helped herself to a thimbleful of wine. I started to sit down on one of the toppled statues, but everyone cried out and Dolores grabbed my arm to stop me. The statue I’d been about to sit on lifted its stone head and blinked at me.

  “These are the gargoyles,” Miss Sharp said. “They’ve generously agreed to be a part of our council even though they are very busy.”

  “We . . . guard . . . the . . . island,” the gargoyle said in a slow, rumbly voice. “Since . . . before . . . the . . . first . . . men.”

  “They’re very old,” Dolores whispered in my ear.

  “But . . . not . . . deaf,” the gargoyle rumbled. “We . . . protected . . . the . . . city . . . when . . . the . . . North . . . men . . . came . . . and . . . we . . . will . . . guard . . . it . . . now . . . from . . . the . . . shadows.”

  “We will be much in need of your protection, Monsieur,” Omar said, bowing to the head gargoyle. “The shadows are amassing as we speak. We have seen them gathering in the streets of Paris, whispering fear into the hearts of Frenchmen and instigating a passion for war amongst the heads of state.”

  “It’s even worse in Vienna,” Dolores said. “My father thought that even after we failed to avert the assassination of the archduke we might still stop the war. And at first we thought it was working. The German ambassador warned the Austrian foreign minister against taking hasty measures against Serbia. The emperor Franz Joseph’s first letter to the kaiser did not mention any military action. My father felt sure that the situation could be resolved by diplomatic means.” Dolores looked around the strange assembled group, her pale face lit up. I remembered when she wouldn’t utter a word. Now she’d become an eloquent spokeswoman for peace.

  “My father has always believed in the power of diplomacy. He would be heartened to see us all assembled here today in the spirit of peace and cooperation. He labored day and night, hardly sleeping or eating, urging an honorable peace over a cataclysmic war. We thought it hopeful when the kaiser embarked on his Scandinavian cruise and the emperor Franz Joseph proceeded with his holiday at Bad Ischl. But we had not counted on the warmongering duplicity of the foreign minister’s chef du cabinet, Count Alexander Hoyos—”

  “Hoyos?” I interrupted. “I saw his name on an envelope in van Drood’s office.”

  Dolores nodded grimly. “I am not surprised. Count Hoyos interpreted Franz Joseph’s letter to the German undersecretary of foreign affairs, claiming that what Franz Joseph really meant was that Germany must support Austria-Hungary to crush Serbia. He appealed to the valor of the kaiser, who responded that he would not fail Austria-Hungary. The flame of war had been kindled. In the coming weeks my father and his colleagues in Vienna and Berlin tried to avert war, but at each turn we were faced by van Drood’s agents, who stoked the fires of nationalistic fervor. Count Hoyos interpreted the kaiser’s response as a mandate to occupy Serbia. And so Vienna issued an ultimatum to Serbia that Serbia could not accept and now Austria has declared war on Serbia. My father has gone to Russia to talk to the tsar and Beatrice has gone to London to speak to parliament, but it is unlikely now that the ball has been set rolling that war can be averted. We suspect that the Germans will soon be marching on France through Belgium—”

  “Where the vessel is,” I said. “We don’t even know if Mr. Bellows has been able to warn the guardian that an attack is on the way. We don’t even know if Mr. Bellows is all right!”

  “No,” Gus admitted. “Sirena and I searched the area but we didn’t see Mr. Bellows. When we tried to make contact with the local fairies we were rudely rebuffed. They don’t much like Darklings.”

  “Could Mr. Bellows have been waylaid by some of van Drood’s henchmen?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” Miss Sharp conceded. “But our informants in Belgium say they haven’t seen any increased shadow activity in the Ardennes.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why has van Drood waited so long to go to the vessel and open it?”

  “It doesn’t seem like he needed it,” Gus said. “You humans have been all too ready to plunge yourselves into a war even without an infusion of more tenebrae.”

  “I’m afraid that’s true,” Miss Sharp said. “But we know from Ava’s trip to the future that the third vessel does get opened and that it results in a war that destroys everything.”

  “Perhaps van Drood didn’t need the vessel to start the war,” I said, “but he needs it to win the war. And perhaps he was just waiting for the right time to attack the vessel.”

 
“What do you mean?” Miss Corey asked.

  “I think I know,” Dolores replied. “The German army will be marching on Belgium. What better host to carry an army of shadows to attack the defenders of the vessel?”

  We talked long into the afternoon about the best strategy to employ.

  “We should still do all we can to avert war,” Dolores argued.

  “We must mobilize!” the lumignon countered.

  “We . . . must . . . defend . . . our . . . city . . . at . . . all . . . costs,” the gargoyles rumbled.

  “We must secure the channel,” the selkie insisted.

  It was decided to do all of those things. The lumignon would marshal all the fay of France to be ready to help the troops. The gargoyles would stand guard over Paris. The selkies would secure the coastline. Gus would fly Dolores back to Vienna to monitor the progress of war preparations and then go on to Belgium to check on the Darkling deputation to the Ardennes. Vi and Lillian were set up in a little garret on the Left Bank near the Sorbonne from which they were able to keep in touch with their connections in the French government. They even had a wireless, although the lumignon sniffed at that mode of communication and offered to carry messages across the channel to Daisy, who had stayed behind in London. Sam and Agnes were waiting in Calais for further orders.

  “And what about Nathan,” I asked. “Has anyone seen Nathan?”

  Everyone looked uncomfortable. Finally Omar answered. “No one has seen him since Victoria Station. I’m afraid he might be too far gone in the shadows to help.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. “I know that if I could talk to him he’d be all right.”

  “Perhaps,” Miss Corey said quietly. “But for now it’s best you stay with Helen.”

  “And what will I do?” I complained. “I can’t sit around Paris shopping while the world is falling apart.”