Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  I had already crumpled in the mists and those tears had barely dried. I told myself I would not cry again.

  And then it started again, heaving another breath. Air flowed through the hall. I heard the rattling of shutters and there was a low groan from the wooden parts of the ceiling. The whole foyer seemed to shudder before it ceased again.

  Irregular footsteps. A slammed door.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I looked up to see my brother in one of the balconies, framed by an ornate arch. He was leaning heavily on a walking stick. Stone feathers cast irregular shadows on his face, but I did not need to see it to know he was enraged.

  Taken aback, I could but stare at him. I had thought that once we were out of the mists he would recognise me.

  His dog, jet black and decidedly more mundane in this light, bounded over to me. It wagged its tail with seeming delight and gave a resounding bark.

  “Begone, spirit!” he said, limping towards me, circling from one end of the long balcony to the other. The uneven rhythm of his gait, unfamiliar to me, unsettled and worried me. Each of the clawed arches cast a darker shadow on his face. He limped down the stairs that spilt into the foyer, its carpet a scarlet tongue against the darker colours. “Why do you plague me so? Does it please you to see me like this? Have you not tortured me enough?”

  He was tall, taller than I remembered him being. Perhaps it was simply the shadows and the stairs, but Laon towered above me.

  “I am your sister,” I said, straightening. “Laon, brother–”

  “Do not call me by that name! You have no right, spirit. Do not pretend to be flesh and illuse upon my hound! Is it not enough that–”

  “No, you have no right.” Anger flared within me. I met his gaze, my hands fisting tightly, and spat back his venom. The dog slunk off, cowering from my outburst. “I have written countless begging letters to be here, to stand in front of you, to help you. And I did not do all that grovelling to be berated and belittled by you. I have not come so far to be mistaken for some half-witted spirit. I expect my brother to know me and my face.” I was shaking; I could feel myself unsteady on my feet. My eyes threatened to water as I stubbornly refused to blink. My nostrils were flaring. “Or am I mistaken in who I love?”

  Thunderstruck, he stared at me, the clear blue of his eyes almost disarming. He was without words. I could see I had hurt him and though I meant to soften my words, they did not quite come out that way.

  “Or if nothing else, be able to ask me some question, some secret that we shared. If indeed Arcadia is so treacherous,” I said. I attempted a smile but I knew it was more of a grimace. I had waited so long to see him, endured the confinement of his home, and here he was, denying me even my own self. “Is it so impossible that I am indeed your sister? Can you not believe that I could and would follow you? Can you not believe that I have the strength and the love to come? Can you not believe that I would care–”

  “Catherine!”

  His walking stick clattered to the floor.

  Strong arms enfolded me and cut me off; I recognised his smell instantly and melted into his hug. It was more instinct than anything else. I breathed him in, all fear and anger and exertion. I could not remember the last time we were this close.

  “Laon…”

  He was leaning heavily on me, very heavily. I remembered his injury.

  “Your ankle–” I started.

  He was laughing, face buried in my shoulder. I realised how precariously he was balanced, though it was really too late. His arms tightened around me and we toppled to the hard floor. I squealed, but we didn’t part.

  My petticoats cushioned our fall. We clung to each other, shaking as we laughed and rolled.

  It was a moment suspended in time. I dared not look at him, face him, and I wondered if he felt the same. His face in my shoulder, muffling his voice. It had been a long few years and we had both changed. Yet, for this one moment, I felt like a child again, rolling down the moors as we chased one another through the heather.

  “You’re surprisingly heavy,” I muttered.

  Still, there was a solidness to him, and I trusted him to anchor me. I closed my eyes. It was almost easy to forget where we were and imagine again the endless sky of the moors above us.

  “Reverend Helstone?” came the voice of Mr Benjamin.

  We sprang apart. A flush of guilt racing across my skin, white hot and branding. Once on my feet, I smoothed my skirts, watching as Laon struggled to his. I offered my hand but he refused, using instead his walking stick.

  “Your room is ready for you. And where would you like to take supper tonight? Do you know if your sister has returned from–” The gnome wandered into the hall, cheerful as ever. “Ah! Miss Helstone! Delighted that you have survived your jaunt.”

  I nodded an acknowledgement to the gnome’s greeting. He adjusted his wire-framed spectacles and beamed at the two of us with surprisingly paternal warmth.

  “Will you be dining with Miss Helstone, Reverend? I can arrange for it without disturbing…” Mr Benjamin paused, clucking his tongue against his lips for a moment as doubt crossed his eyes. “You know, the Salamander.”

  Laon frowned, brows furrowing as he stared at me. “Your face looks different.”

  “I’ve not changed.” I held my chin a little higher.

  Taking a step back, my brother continued to stare. I challenged his gaze with my own and that was when I, too, began to notice the differences. He looked older, more tired. Dark hair framed his face, paler than I remembered from our days under the overcast, Yorkshire skies. I noticed the fine lines at the corner of his eyes that stayed even when he wasn’t smiling.

  Laon really wasn’t smiling now.

  “Why are you here?” he demanded.

  “The London Missionary Society,” I said, prickling again at his tone. “I have a letter.”

  “What? From Reverend Joseph Hale himself?” He was scoffing, even as he winced and leaned all the more heavily on his cane. “You shouldn’t be here, Cathy. It’s not good to be here. This is… this is a terrible place.”

  At the corner of my vision, I could see Miss Davenport appearing at the top of the stairs. She was different than usual; a scarlet ribbon wound through her hair. I tried desperately to banish the memory of the dream from my mind.

  “Why did you even come? This is no place for you. I told you not to come, not to follow me. I told you I was fine. I’m alive, I’m doing my work. Good or not, I am doing my duty to the Throne in Heaven and what more can they ask of me? I need access to the cities, I need to escape this space, I need–”

  “You didn’t write,” I said, weakly.

  “I wrote. I wrote until my fingers bled…”

  “Not to me, then.”

  “They must know. The Society. They can’t–”

  “For months, Laon. No news.”

  “This isn’t a game, Catherine.”

  “I know, Laon. It’s why I came.”

  “You should go back to England, to Yorkshire. This is not the place for you to be. It’s not safe here.”

  “I’m staying,” I told him.

  “How can you even–” he faltered in his rant. “No, that doesn’t matter. What matters is you are going. You can tell the Reverend that I’m perfectly healthy and in perfect command of all my senses. He doesn’t need to send nursemaids after me.”

  “You need me here,” I said. “And I’m safe.”

  “Nothing is safe here.”

  “Miss Davenport said that the geas that protects you will protect me. Blood binds blood. You don’t have to worry.” My voice was rising. Laon had always been prone to erratic shifts of mood, but now it seemed all the more pronounced. The knot in my chest was tightening and I could hear it in my voice, that tension, weak as it was.

  His hair fell over his eyes and he pushed it from his face. The hard line of his jaw mirrored mine. “Two weeks. You leave after two weeks.”

  “No, I’m staying.”
/>   “You can’t stay, Cathy. I don’t have time for this argument. Everything is about to happen and there is more at stake here than–”

  “Perhaps we should retire to the drawing room?” said Miss Davenport, clearing her throat. We both turned to her, Laon obviously surprised to see her. She was affectionately scratching the dog whose tail was obliviously thumping the ground. She wore her usual effervescent smile, without a trace of awkwardness at the argument she had just witnessed.

  “I thought you had left, Ariel,” he said.

  “Not at all. I’ve been keeping your sister company since her arrival.” She fluttered a hand to her long, white neck and smiled all the more sweetly. “Come, I’ve tea waiting for us. And your sister and I do so want to hear about your journey. Do we not, Catherine?”

  I made a vague noise of assent, my own name in her mouth sounding more like an insult than endearment.

  “And, Laon, you simply must be tired after it all.”

  “Not so much tired as injured,” he said, dryly. “I was in a hurry.”

  She laughed, the same piercing, delightful, grating sound. “Whatever for, my dear? Tea’s not that awful at court, is it?”

  “I had to ride on ahead to make preparations. Queen Mab is coming.”

  Miss Davenport faltered. Something brittle in her eyes shifted and she swallowed visibly before taking Laon’s hand. He did not snatch it back. “To the drawing room,” she resolved. “We shall need some tea either way.”

  Tucking my brother’s arm around hers, Miss Davenport led the way to the drawing room. My brother was leaning on his walking stick, trying not to put too much weight on Miss Davenport. I wavered, uncertain if I should follow.

  “Mab?” asked Miss Davenport’s voice. She forced a tinkling laugh, trying to sound merely curious.

  “And her court, of course. One wouldn’t expect The Pale Queen to travel alone. We need to tell the Salamander,” he said.

  “Of- of course.”

  My brother’s dog gave me a long lingering look before following them.

  As they were about to disappear down the corridor, I heard Miss Davenport’s voice: “You are coming with us, aren’t you, Catherine?”

  I did not go to tea with them.

  It still seemed strange to me to term an afternoon meal of scones and sandwiches “tea”, however fashionable it may be in London. Though that was not the reason I withdrew myself from their company.

  I knew I needed time alone to compose myself. Unbidden, images from that infernal dream crept into the edges of my thoughts and wound around them like a scarlet ribbon. I remembered how she had protested at the thought of being his companion and how intimately she spoke of him. It had also not escaped my notice that he was calling Miss Davenport by her name.

  Distantly, I heard my brother make arrangements about the arrival of the mysterious Queen and her court. I wondered which of the Paracelsian elements she was aligned to.

  I did not want to return to my strange round room, full of its own secrets. The Roche journal awaited me, a temptation that I had not only already succumbed to but which had brought me far more trouble than I had thought possible.

  Their promises, their oaths, their geas are there to hinder you, to hobble you, to hide you. They are there to blind you and to bind you.

  Their truth is not our truth. They wield it only as a weapon.

  But I still had very few answers and I wanted desperately to open again that forbidden book. My sojourn into the mists had taught me the consequences of discovery and I knew I should not.

  There was no reason to believe that a now-dead Reverend wrote truth. And Miss Davenport had told me that Roche had all but caused his own death.

  Somehow.

  I passed from the ancient, pockmarked stone corridors into the modern wing with its grandiose plasterwork and flocked wallpaper.

  There were days when I would try to imagine those who used to live in this castle, populate it with the toy soldiers and dolls that Laon and I used to share. There were days when I would peer under each dust sheet and marvel at the beauty of the ancient furniture. I would guess at past inhabitants, squinting at the worn names under the parade of portraits.

  Today was not that day.

  I wandered listless until I reached the leaf-curtained door of the garden. Given Miss Davenport’s current preoccupation, it seemed an opportunity to study the other chapel. I wondered if the scene of interrupted communion was still present there and if I would ever find an answer as to who was meant to find it.

  “Hello.”

  My hand froze on the latch; I did not recognise the voice.

  I turned to see a bald woman with an ash-white complexion. She clutched a long black shawl around her old-fashioned gown.

  “You’re the Salamander, aren’t you?” I said.

  I was staring.

  She watched me with her slitted eyes. Lifting her skirt, I glimpsed a coiling white tail and she slithered towards me in a smooth, undulating motion.

  “I- I know we have not been introduced,” I ventured. “But thank you for taking care of me. The food and castle… and the lantern that night. Thank you.”

  She smiled a flame-red, lipless smile and her features lit up. For a moment she had eyebrows and hair of fire before it rippled down her being, from her bald head to her coiled tail. Her skin blackened under the flames before being scabbed over again by her white scales. “We indeed have not met formally.”

  “Then we should remedy that.” I knew she was distracting me from something, but this was a trade. She was offering herself in return for me not seeing whatever was in the garden. “My name is Catherine Helstone. I am the missionary’s sister.”

  Her smile widened to show the coal-black inside of her mouth. “You may call me the Salamander.”

  “Why do you hide, Salamander?”

  “I am not hiding.”

  “Then why have I never seen you before?” I needed answers.

  “I do not need to be seen to tend to you,” she said, scales glinting. “I have had quite enough of the Pale Queen’s orders, quite enough of her court. I do what I must, what I owe her, but that is all.”

  “Were you here in Roche’s day? The other missionary.”

  “I remember the original.”

  “How did he die?”

  “I cannot tell you that.”

  “He had a plan. He wanted to do something, to learn something. What was it? What did he find out? What’s Enochian?”

  She shook her head.

  “I can still go into the garden,” I reminded her, reaching for the door. “And I know you do not want me to.”

  “Roche had ambitions. He thought this a mirror, and he was right, in a way. He thought this a garden, and he was right, in a different way. But he also thought this a parable.”

  “Was he wrong?”

  “No. But he wanted knowledge and he wanted to prove what should not be proven.”

  “What did he want to know?”

  “Do not ask me further.” Droplets of flame trickled down her face from her black eyes. “My tongue is even less free than my hands.”

  “Why?”

  “You are not the only one bound. I have made many oaths and I bear many curses, the one of dust and crawling may be the first but it is not the last.” She paused, cocking her head to one side. “You may open it now.”

  At that, I seized and twisted the handle and flung open the door. It was empty, of course, and the Salamander had disappeared by the time I turned back.

  I knew the bargain I had made, but even as I wandered through the unremarkable garden, I wondered if it was the right choice. Puzzles published in periodicals were best solved by first examining the known unknowns, that much I knew. One always began with the familiar and worked outwards.

  But was that truly a strategy I should be applying to my interrogation of Arcadia?

  Chapter 11

  The Willow in the Portrait

  Tineola arcanofera (Semiotic Mo
th) 2”-2” 7”’

  This rare stripe-winged moth is snowy white, with gold costae and fringes, and an interrupted marginal band of pale yellow.

  Native to Arcadia and sometimes found in earthly libraries, this pest is often said to feed off the written word. It allegedly consumes secrets and digests them into less informative fragmentary whispers.

  However, the truth of the matter is far more mundane. The semiotic moth simply is attracted to the scent of the iron gall ink that the old manuscripts are written in and the decay of the documents is due to the slightly acidic nature of the ink corroding the parchment over time. The “dust” of the moth’s wings possesses hallucinogenic properties when breathed into human lungs, explaining the whispering heard amid the clouds of moths and dust in old libraries.

  Larvae undescribed.

  Henry Doubleday, “Appendix IV: Invasive Species from the Faelands”,

  A Natural History of British Moths

  It was shortly after I had returned to my room in that tower, when I had in my hand the Reverend Roche’s journal, that Mr Benjamin knocked on my door to inform me of dinner.

  Reluctantly, I put down the volume of secrets. I had wanted to compare what the Salamander had told me with Roche’s own account. Her cryptic words were almost no knowledge at all, but I had thought they might still spark something. Why would Roche think of this place as a parable?

  Mr Benjamin seemed at first no different than usual, his languid movements as meditated as always but his mannerisms were muted. He stood stooped low, a dejected weight hung about his shoulders.

  “Your brother and the changeling await you at dinner, Miss Helstone,” he said. “At your pleasure, of course.”

  “Thank you for informing me, Mr Benjamin,” I replied in my most courteous tones, hoping to put the agitated gnome at ease. The pupils of his eyes darted rapidly from corner to corner. “And I would love to join them.”

  “If you would follow me, Miss Helstone. They are dining in the great hall tonight, which I do not believe you have seen.” He gave a low, shaky bow.