Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  JEANNETTE NG

  Under the

  Pendulum Sun

  A Novel of the Fae

  To the fictions of our childhood,

  I add this apocrypha.

  PART ONE

  Gethsemane

  Chapter 1

  The Quiet in the Port

  Great and ancient empires, Mahomedan and Heathen, have received a shock by the prowess of British arms, nerved and strengthened by GOD, which has broken down strong, and hitherto invulnerable barriers; and so a way has been opened for His blessed Gospel to pass from here to the remotest bounds of reality.

  Thus, Palestine is now accessible; and Englishmen may travel freely through the length and breadth of the Holy Land. The enlarged, and still enlarging, boundaries of our dominions in India, open new fields of labour for the Lord’s servants. China, its forbidding gates forced open by war, calls out to the faithful.

  But it is the Faelands that arrest our attention. Arcadia’s vast unknown, which has been for many ages closed against us and the Divine Word, is at last made clear and knowable. And, as Britain has had the high and singular honour, in the wonderful providence of GOD, the Lord of Hosts, of breaking down that barrier, it is but apposite that she should have the honour of being the first to carry in the balm of the blessed Gospel.

  Rev William E Matheson, “Appeal on Behalf of Arcadia”,

  News of the World, 5th December 1843

  My brother and I grew up dreaming of new worlds.

  Our father had owned a paltry library of books and a subscription to the most fashionable periodicals, all of which we gleefully devoured. We would linger by the gate, impatient for the post that would bring new sustenance for our hungry imaginations. Bored of waiting, we told each other stories of what could be. I remember my brother, Laon, finding one of our tin soldiers at the bottom of his pocket. The red paint was barely worn and it looked up at me with a long-suffering expression. I snatched it from Laon’s hand, declaring it the Duke of Wellington, and ran off claiming that the two of us would adventure together. Like Lord Byron or Marco Polo.

  We invented whole new worlds for our soldiers to explore: Gaaldine, Exina, Alcona, Zamorna. From our father’s books we learnt of pilgrims and missionaries and explorers, and so we wrote of grand journeys, long and winding. As we read of the discovery of the Americas, of the distant Orient, and of strange Arcadia we added similar places to our ever more intricate maps. We mimicked the newspapers and periodicals we read, writing new ones for our tin soldiers. In the tiniest, tiniest writing, we detailed their exploits, the politics of their parliaments, and the scandals of their socialites.

  But for all our stories, our imaginations were small and provincial. For the talk of tropics and deserts, our childish fictions filled them with the same oaks and aspens that grew in our garden. We built on their landscape, exotic buildings that were just our little whitewashed church in Birdforth in disguise. We rained down on strange soil the same Yorkshire rain as that which drenched our skins and drove us inside, peeling off our clothes, housebound by the weather and desperate for diversion.

  As such, I could never have imagined Arcadia.

  I was familiar with all the tales, mind. The first explorers had spun overwrought stories upon their return: until I laid eyes upon the Faelands, I was blind, and now I see. I have never seen colour, nor grandeur, nor wonder, until I saw the shores of Arcadia. Later travellers were more prosaic, but still offered no adequate description. There were few maps and fewer landscapes available, and almost all of them had been denounced by one explorer or another as fraudulent.

  For all the many contradictory theories I had read on the relationship between our world and that of the fae, I was no more enlightened. It was said to be underground, but not. It overlaid our own, but not. It was another place, but not.

  All I do know was this: Our ship, The Quiet, sailed in circles on the North Sea for six whole weeks. On the dawn of the first day of the seventh week, my wavering compass informed me that we were heading straight back towards smog-shrouded London.

  Nervously, I clutched my compass. My brother had given it to me before he left for Arcadia to become a missionary. He was among the first to be tasked to bring the Word of God to the Fair Folk. He had been there three years now and had been nothing but terse in his correspondence. I tried to swallow the worry that consumed me, but it knotted around my heart.

  That was when I caught my first glimpse of the Faelands.

  Impossibly white cliffs rose from the white sea foam. For a moment my mind feared it to be Dover, that I had simply returned to those mundane cliffs of chalk and stone, that no foreign land awaited me.

  Yet those cliffs were too white, too stark. They could not be Dover.

  Behind them I expected the rolling hills of home. But instead the landscape was jagged and jutting knife-sharp from the sea. It seemed cobbled together, each part eerily familiar but set against something other. I recognised the leering profile of a hill, the knuckle-like crest of a mountain. Yet as wind and wave shifted the shapes, it all seemed different again and my strained eyes watered.

  The Quiet glided gull-like into a wide, wide river. Unfamiliar structures sprawled against the green grey mass of the land in arching, crumbling lines. Squinting, I made out the spined turrets, barbed roofs and oddly leaning walls. For a moment I thought the town to be an endless dragon coiled around the edge of the harbour, huffing smoke from its distended nostrils. It shimmered, the shingled roofs seeming scale-like, and then it shifted.

  I blinked, and buildings were back to where I remembered them. There was no dragon made of shifting structures. Just a town of crowded streets.

  The ship heaved under our feet like an unruly stallion. A shout broke out among the sailors in words I didn’t understand. They started busying. As they clambered up and down the ratlines and hauled rope this way and that, they muttered invocations under their breath. I wanted to chide them for their superstition but we were sailing to Arcadia and none of it made any sense.

  I tried to stay out of the way as the sailors blasphemously crossed themselves in the name of salt, sea and soil.

  An unnatural wind curled around the sail, whipping it back and forth. It fluttered full and then deflated with each breath of the wind. The Quiet became anything but as the timber groaned. The cabin boy flung his arms around the prow and cooed at it.

  It was a long while before the ship was tamed and brought to shore.

  And then I was simply there, stepping unsteadily from the ship into the shamble of a docks. Twisting streets full of seeming people reminded me of crowded London.

  The ground was a shock to my feet, and I staggered. My carpet bag and trunk joined me on the docks. I fumbled for my documents and scanned the milling crowd for my guide. I tried not to notice the oddities of each figure – the strange colours and the wings and the horns. There would be time aplenty for the wonder of Arcadia once my bags had been unpacked and I had found my brother.

  “Miss Catherine Helstone, I presume? The missionary’s sister?”

  With an upturned nose, round chin and soft, brown eyes, the woman I turned to meet was perhaps one of the least ethereal people I’d ever met. She was shorter than me. But as her skirts hung long and limp, without a murmur of wave or curve, her figure seemed tall and lank. She dressed in sombre, mortal colours, her gown being a muddy shade of navy blue and her shawl more grey than white.

  A smile spread across her freckled cheeks as I nodded.

  “I thought I recognised you,” she said. “You look just like your brother.”

  “I do?” Though Laon and I shared the same dark hair and strong nose, few remarked on our resemblance. Features that were handsome on a man were becoming on a wo
man’s frame.

  “I’m Ariel Davenport, as I’m sure you know. Your guide.”

  “I am very pleased to finally meet you,” I said. We had exchanged a handful of letters through the Missionary Society in preparation of my journey.

  She shook my hand vigorously between her two clasped ones and swooped in two sharp kisses. Her smile getting wider, she added, “Though I’m not the real one.”

  “I’m… I’m not sure I follow.”

  “I’m not the real Ariel Davenport, you see.” There was an unpleasant edge to her laugh; it was a touch too brittle. “I’m her changeling.”

  “Her changeling?” Many of the intermediaries between the fae and humans were said to be changelings. One of Captain Cook’s botanists was said to have learnt of their fae origins upon arrival to Arcadia and was conscripted to their cause. Despite such accounts, changelings never seemed quite real to me. But then, given how sheltered I had been, the French were never quite real. “So you were raised as her–”

  Ariel Davenport gave an exasperated sigh and rolled her eyes at my ignorance. “She was a human child, I was a fairy-made simulacrum of a human child. We traded places. I grew up there and she grew up here.”

  “What became of her?” I asked.

  “That’s not for me to tell.” She gave me a disarmingly lopsided smile and in an impeccably proper accent, added, “And it’s hardly polite to ask.”

  “I- I’m sorry,” I stuttered. I dropped my gaze. Our nanny, Tessie, used to keep a pair of steel scissors by our beds to ward off faerie abductors. In restlessness and boredom, I once said to Laon that we should close the scissors, so that they no longer formed the sign of the cross, and invite in the fae. He was horrified. And so I never suggested it again.

  “Regardless, now I’m here again. Because I’m useful to them and I understand you humans,” said Miss Davenport. “Speaking of which, I am most remiss in my duties. I should hardly keep you talking here all day.” She waved for an expectant-looking porter to hoist up my trunk onto his shoulders. His sallow skin glinted green as it caught the sunlight.

  Miss Davenport hummed tunelessly as she led our way to the rounded carriage. I tried not to stare at the flaring gills of the porter as he heaved my trunk and bags onto the carriage. He lashed them with rope to a wizened stem that jutted from the middle of the roof.

  “How far to Gethsemane?” I asked, an ominous shudder passing through me as I said the name.

  “That what the missionary called the shambles?” said the coachman.

  “Yes, I believe so,” I said. “It is where Reverend Laon Helstone resides. Though I believe his predecessor did the naming.”

  The coachman grunted, turning his attention from me.

  “You’ve not answered me,” I pressed. Perhaps it was simply that Laon’s predecessor was overly enamoured with winning the martyr’s crown. After all, what other reason has one to name a building after the garden in which Christ spent his final hours before his Crucifixion? “How far to Gethsemane?”

  He tutted to himself, the space between his brows folding like an accordion. “Two revelations and an epiphany? No, there has to be a shortcut… Two painful memories and a daydr–”

  “Sixteen miles,” interrupted Miss Davenport. “It is sixteen miles away. We’ll arrive well before dark.”

  I nodded uncertainly.

  “He says that for the tourists,” she added, glaring at the muttering coachman.

  As I alighted, a cacophony of bells chimed midday.

  Hand still resting on the carriage door, I turned and looked up. My breath caught, heart bursting with expectation. I had read so much of the pendulum sun of the Faelands. Foolishly, I half-expected to see it waver in the sky before rushing east again, like my own pendant did in my experimenting hands when I was trying to comprehend the very idea.

  It did not, of course.

  The sun was significantly larger than the one that had been a constant of my life. But it seemed otherwise the same, stinging my eyes as I squinted at it.

  “It doesn’t move that fast,” said Miss Davenport. “You won’t see much by just looking up. Even at midday.”

  I looked back down, white spots swimming in my eyes from the brightness. I pressed my own cold fingers to my closed eyes. I knew I wouldn’t see anything, of course. Arcadian days were as long as earthly ones.

  Still, the temptation had been too much.

  “Sorry. I should know better,” I murmured, shuffling into the carriage and sitting myself on the dappled upholstery. I even knew that I was at the very edges of the Faelands and that many of the oddities of the sun’s pendulum-like trajectory would not be discernible here.

  “Your brother also did that when he first got here,” she said.

  I smiled. For all the distance that had come between us, I felt closer to him again.

  Laon and I were inseparable from the second I returned from the Clergy Daughters’ School after the death of our sister, Agnes. I was seven and a half when I was bidden to press my lips on the cold, dead skin of her corpse. I tried not to think of the coffin laid out on the table. Of how the corpse seemed like a stranger wearing my sister’s clothes, of how hollow the promise of other worlds seemed then. I laced my own fingers, not thinking of the warm hands of my brother holding mine when we stood watching the soil swallow up the coffin.

  “It’s not very far, Gethsemane,” said Miss Davenport, interrupting my reverie. “But it’s outside of Sesame, you know, the port town. Not many people go beyond the borders of that. Almost all the other missionaries we’ve had set up in Sesame or one of the other ports. Things are rather more earthly there, you know. Though perhaps it doesn’t matter. You do not seem alarmed by the carriage.”

  I glanced about the bare, woody interior of the carriage and calfskin upholstery, which was scored by a disconcerting pattern of scrape marks.

  “The seats are a little lumpy?” I ventured, resettling myself on the stubborn cushion.

  “Ah, yes. The fabric is…. We are but borrowing the skin from the cows.”

  “What?” I was understandably incredulous.

  “It’s my fault, really,” she said, sheepishly, scratching her upturned nose. “The artisans had no idea what a carriage was so I had to describe it to them. I did so incorrectly, or rather in ways that weren’t correctly understood. I try not to make that sort of mistake, but I was in a hurry and old fishbrains out there has a very specific mind. And more used to making animals. Point is that I forgot to mention that the cow was dead when you made seats out of their skin, so here we–”

  “How is he?” I interrupted. I almost dared not ask. The thought clasped a cold hand around my throat. The allegedly living upholstery under me roiled; the carriage rumbled and I felt sick to the core. I had kept my worries in check for a very, very long time and now, and seeing the possibility of a reprieve, it was all the harder to endure. “Laon. My brother… the Reverend, I mean.”

  Miss Davenport shrugged. “I don’t really know how to answer that. He’s as I’ve always known him. Alive and healthy, I suppose, you care about that.” She frowned, her high forehead furrowing.

  “I- Yes, I do. Very much.” My fingers hurting with how hard I was holding myself, I forced myself to loosen my hands. I would be seeing him soon enough.

  “Why! Pleasantries are a lot harder than I remember them to be.” Miss Davenport giggled behind her glove, a piercing twitter of a noise. “He’s very well. Better than the mission, truth be told. Which I probably shouldn’t say, but it’s not easy to be a missionary around these parts. He’s conducting services no one comes to, begging to gain access to the rest of the Faelands and asking them questions about their–” She cleared her throat and continued in a deep, ponderous tone, “cosmological and metaphysical importance.”

  I attempted a laugh, but faltered. “That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “That is rather the point,” she retorted. “That’s where the humour comes from.”

  After a silenc
e, Miss Davenport filled the empty space of the carriage with amiable, effortless chatter. She described to me the properties of the pendulum sun and the fish moon. Much of what she said was familiar to me from my reading, but it was good to be distracted by her voice. Too long have I spent alone with my own thoughts aboard The Quiet.

  I found myself staring and studying her mannerisms more than her words, trying to detect her fae origins. At first glance she seemed as human as me with that scatter of freckles and lopsided smile. Still, she had that awkwardness I heard rumoured of changelings, a certain deficiency in their simulation of humanity. Tessie once told me to stop my tantrum and to behave so as to prove myself not a changeling.

  “You could look outside, if you want, Miss Helstone. The window does open.”

  After excessive fumbling, I unlatched the window and leaned out. Mist closed around the spiny sprawl that was Sesame, like layers of gauzy curtains. We were alone on the road as it stretched into dense fog. Frowning, I could make out the hunched canopies of bearded trees. Above us, a cloud-bruised sky was heavy with rain.

  “The weather isn’t always like this,” said Miss Davenport. “But at least you’ll feel at home. You could pretend that it’s moors behind the fog. It’ll chase away all those feelings of homesickness you feel.”

  “I’m not homesick.”

  “Not yet.”

  Her eyes darted to the window and she hesitated, her gregariousness stemmed by some unspoken emotion. Studying her gloved hands, in a voice quite quiet and quite different to her earlier demeanour, she said, “I was raised in London. Spitalfields.”

  I waited, unwilling to intrude upon her vulnerability. I realised after a moment that I was holding my breath. I tried not to stare, but glancing over at the now silent Miss Davenport and her features, I noticed there was something odd about her, though if this was to do with something unsettled rather than unsettling about her aspect, I could not say.