by Jeannette Ng
May 23 1840. – It is the strength of all infidels, to begin their arguments with the question, Why? And the question shows at once that they know nothing, with all their learning and wisdom; for if they knew anything, they would not begin to state their argument with the question, Why? For Why? indicates that we do not know the reason for a thing – that we are ignorant; and ignorance proves nothing – it proves only that you are ignorant.
The sloping hand in the margins mocked him. I suspected that it was added much later, without the Reverend’s knowledge, but I could not say for certain.
Among his visitors I did recognise a description of Mr Benjamin in a group of self-described miners who were despondent at a lack of work. Though none of them converted, Roche had hired a few of them to keep tidy the grounds. One by one, they left until only Mr Benjamin remained.
As his stay in the Faelands lengthened, Roche’s hand grew more erratic. His tone took on a paranoid air, worried that someone was reading his journal. He mentioned repeatedly the mistakes in his choice of staff. Given the two other hands present, perhaps his fears were not completely unfounded. He began abbreviating his words and little glyphs crept in, the beginnings of a code. There was even an entry written in mirror writing.
My breath unfurled before me, like the winding mists of the moors around the castle. Feeling the cold, I pulled my shawl tighter around my shoulders.
Details grew sparse, but I gathered he had festering in his mind some sort of plan. His efforts in proselytising were likely stymied for the same reasons my brother’s were, namely his lack of access to “inner” Arcadia. He feared his plan, afraid of the costs, the sacrifices. He wrote as a man haunted, counting the worth of his own soul.
Perhaps no man could seem brave in such moments.
I turned the page and it crumbled before my eyes, fluttering to a delicate confetti. The paper was thin, beyond fragile. I squinted at it and could see that somehow the ink had corroded through the paper, leaving behind a very literal word-shaped lacuna.
The journal resumed some months later and Roche was in England again. He had married after much dithering over a bride and was resolved to return to Arcadia. He wrote little of his new wife, not even her Christian name. He referred to her only as Miss Clay and then Mrs Roche. I could only guess at the missing pages, but I assumed they described his fears culminating in his return and a change of heart after marriage. Perhaps his bride inspired in him some latent fervour or simply that she was reason enough for him to desire to depart English soil.
From the margins, the sloping hand called him names. It decried his fears as foolish and claimed his words were false. Beyond a periodic scrawl of Liar! Coward! False-hearted!, it offered no counterpoint nor argument.
Over and over Roche stated his desire to return to Arcadia, to pledge his one brief life to the great work in a land of darkness. It seemed a mantra, as though he was trying to convince himself, to purge himself of doubt. He was willing himself to believe. Unlike the earlier passages, it was not a fear that characterised his writing, but a profound delusion.
Folded among these pages were letters. It rounded out the portrait of an uncertain man, grasping for reassurance.
Another lacuna.
The tightly curled hand began to write, though I could not make sense of its entries. All opaque allusions to poison and fears and pain. It wrote of grandiose ideas, confronting fears and uncomfortable truths. It invoked the trials of Job and the sufferings of Jonah.
And then, nothing. The final pages had been torn out.
I did not remember falling asleep, but when I opened my eyes I had a shawl draped over my shoulders and a heap of books were on my table. As I handled them each in turn I recognised the handwriting in the margins and I knew them to be my brother’s. They also reeked of wine.
There were accounts of Cook’s voyage to Arcadia, a general missionary’s handbook, and a series of published debates on the theological and biological nature of fae. For all that I had thought I was well read on the subject, most of it was unfamiliar.
A slender quotation-riddled volume argued that fae were a lost tribe of Israel and that Arcadia was the desert to which they were cursed. A rebuttal to Paracelsus argued that Arcadia was the land of wandering east of Eden to which Cain was banished and his children by his sister were the fae, forever cursed for having been born of that sinful union. A screed denounced the mission to Arcadia as futile as the fae, as fallen angels, were soulless.
A tract by Dr Immanuel Campbell to the Edinburgh Society for the Study of the Fae discussed the work of Mr Hobbs of Malmsbury and purported that his work should be read as description of the fae rather than of natural instincts of Man.
The beasts of infinite viciousness who cruelly exploit and savage one another from a bottomless well of pure spite are not Men in a state of nature before the civilising influence of Society. The image of the Leviathan is not a representation of an earthly sovereign as Mr Hobbs supposedly propounds. The gigantic beast formed of a multitude is no metaphor. The potency and loyalty it commands do not concern the abstract qualities of a mundane political society. The dire warnings of chaos, bloodshed and doom are carefully contextualised into a Treatise on the proper organisation of a Body Politic.
I read of Cesare, a medieval priest who was accused of being a changeling. It was unclear if Cesare was a true person, but it sparked a great fear that wandering priests were secretly soulless changelings who were tricking villagers into a parody of the rite that bound them to Arcadia.
In the wake of such paranoia sprang the theology that it was the rite and receiver that mattered, not the priest who performed it. The rite itself was sacred. Thus false priests gave true communion.
After all, when Jesus first enacted the rite Himself to Judas at the Last Supper did the Adversary enter the fallen disciple. He harboured treason in his heart and that, argued the forefathers of the Church, had corrupted the rite.
It all seemed hopelessly superstitious, but it did make me wonder of fae and their souls. It had been an unspoken assumption that they did have souls in a way that mirrored humanity’s but each theory about their true nature flirted with that question.
I wondered if such thoughts plagued Roche too. He wrote so often of the missionaries who set sail and then spent years petitioning the Pope to sanctify the journey they had already undertaken. He envied that certainty; he craved it.
Chapter 13
The Queen in the Castle
Behold the chariot of the Fairy Queen!
Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air;
Their filmy pennons at her word they furl,
And stop obedient to the reins of light:
These the Queen of Spells drew in,
She spread a charm around the spot,
And leaning graceful from the ethereal car,
Long did she gaze, and silently,
Upon the slumbering maid.
Oh! not the visioned poet in his dreams,
When silvery clouds float through the wildered brain,
When every sight of lovely, wild, and grand,
Astonishes, enraptures, elevates,
When fancy, at a glance, combines
The wondrous and the beautiful,—
So bright, so fair, so wild a shape
Hath ever yet beheld,
As that which reined the coursers of the air,
And poured the magic of her gaze
Upon the maiden's sleep.
Percy Shelley, Queen Mab
The sky seemed on fire when I woke up again.
I scrambled out of bed and pulled open the curtains to look outside, heart pounding. I saw that the lands that surrounded the castle were ablaze. The mists had been burnt away. Each slivered pane of glass shattered the image of the endless fire into a broken sea. Livid, vivid red, like the stained glass images of Risen Christ and His blood-red robes.
Clutching a shawl to myself, I ran down the stairs. I remembered that the great hall overlooked the
outside. My feet were still bare as I found myself pulling open the long curtains, coughing at the dust.
It was still too far to make out, so I padded through the winding corridors and up through the trap door that led to the attic and the roof beyond.
I saw it then, the floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire, seething stench and smoke. It burned on and on, yet I recalled nothing on those plains for the fire to devour. There had been nothing but mists and constructs of mists there when I had wandered through. What could be feeding those towering columns of fire?
The flames painted the sky in the lurid colours of dawn and dusk, colours that were alien to this particular canvas. The pendulum sun never gave it such shades.
It was then that Laon happened upon me, brow furrowed at the horror of the flames. Diogenes followed him, a slinking, black shadow of a hound at his feet.
“What’s happening out there?” I asked, breaking the horrid silence between us. I barely glanced at him. The argument from the night before lay between us, but for now, we were able to ignore its carcass. “Laon?”
“The moors are being cleared,” he said. “By the Salamander. I spoke to her this morning. It’s for the Pale Queen’s visit.”
“Moors?”
“The emptiness out there.” There was a coldness to his voice. Though my eyes were on the fire, his were on me. I could feel his gaze on my skin and I ached to touch him again. “You didn’t think it was that way naturally, did you?”
“I don’t know what is natural here,” I said.
“The fae like to keep the land out there…. Uncultivated. Formless.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s overgrown, so they’re burning everything back, returning it to mist.”
“But what is out there when- when it’s not mist?”
“Dreams. Thoughts. Things our minds give shape to,” he said with a soft, long-fingered gesture. “The mists are very malleable and it is for that reason they desire to keep it that way. I suppose it’s a resource of sorts, harvested periodically. They probably sell it at the Goblin Market or something. But our minds are here so it means it all grows faster; they need to clear it more often.”
“So human minds do things to the mists?”
“It shapes them, somehow.”
“I- I think I understand,” I said. The wind was twisting the black smoke away from Gethsemane, but I could still taste an acrid, sulphurous edge in the air. “Like the real moors? They choose for it to be empty.”
He nodded and turned to look out of the window with me. The once mist-covered moors seemed a great furnace, yet from those flames there was no light, only a dense, swallowing darkness. My eyes were aching from the sight of it all and I imagined a figure of flame dancing through it, trailing liquid sparks with every step.
The blaze on my face reminded me of the first time I saw the moors of Yorkshire be set aflame. Terrified, I had clung to Laon. Tessie’s words echoed in my mind: It is how things are done. The moors need to stay the moors. It’s just like cutting your fingernails.
Until then, I had always believed the moors this wild, inhuman landscape, where endless sky wrapped its heathen arms around an untamed, primal earth. And yet there it was before me, nature being brought to heel. Like any wide-eyed fool, I had mistaken a broken animal of the circus for a wild one.
“The books…” I began. I was glad to have them but after our argument, I didn’t want to thank him. “Were they you?”
“I owe you them,” he said. “I promised.”
The ground shook and broke open. The leaping flames were crushed under the weight of churned soil. An enormous creature thrust its nose from the ground, crested like a wave and then dove back into the grey-black dirt. As it wheeled, I saw its huge snout, its wide fins and finally, its great tail curving from the ground.
“What is that?” I breathed. “That isn’t–”
“It’s a whale.”
“A whale?”
“Yes, it’s called a sea whale.”
“Which I have obviously seen before…” I glanced at him and our eyes met. He gave a half smile that brushed against the welkin blue of his eyes. I was reminded of all the times in our childhood when we would pretend at knowledge, nodding along to what the other said, no matter how ludicrous, desperate not to be the more ignorant sibling. “I’ve read about them and they’re called that not because… they live in the sea but because they… eat it?”
“Close.”
“What do you mean, close?”
“They’re full of saltwater and sand,” he said. “I’m told fish live inside them.”
“Oh,” I muttered, the sound of surprise escaping my lips.
Another of the vast creatures leapt from the ground. It was closer, so I could make out its skin, seemingly this thick carpet of bracken and wicker. The scattering dirt and dripping flame clung to it, blackening but not burning the sea whale. Unthinking blue eyes stared out from under a vortex of crackling twigs. Its tail fanned out, and I saw the woven pattern of its substance against the bright flames.
A spurt of water spewed from the back of one of these creatures. The droplets melted into the flames, and though the wind was blowing the black away from the castle walls, there was salt on the breeze.
“That’s the sea,” I said in wonder. Rich and foul, it was unmistakable. I thought immediately of my days on the deck of The Quiet and the endless calls of gulls at port. “I know this is Arcadia, but how?”
He gave a half-hearted shrug. “I assume they heard about conch shells and got carried away.”
“That you can hear the sound of the sea in them?”
“That they have in them, captive, an oceanic fragment.”
I heard it first in my bones. Low and mournful, it reverberated through the ground like a bell. A long, inhuman moan, more like the conch shell murmurs or the howling of wind through the caves we used to play in than any sound from a creature’s throat.
Startled, I took a step towards Laon. He caught my hand and we laced our fingers together, like we used to when we were little.
“It’s just the whales,” he said. “The fire calls them. They rise to the surface like earthworms in rain.”
“How do they not catch fire?”
“The sea inside them, I assume.”
“Is it possible to… to see inside one? What sorts of fish would live inside a whale?”
“I- I don’t know.”
“We should find out.”
“I don’t think it’s in Father’s encyclopaedia,” he said, a wry smile twisting his lips. “But then, not many things are.”
“It might be,” I retorted sharply, retreading the paths of our old argument. Wonderfully familiar, I leaned towards him, relishing that elusive closeness between us. “But we’re missing half the volumes. For all we know, they might be in the fabled W.”
“Don’t be silly, it would be under S for sea whale and we have that one.”
“It can’t be. It doesn’t tend to do individual entries for animals.”
“But it’s not an animal, it’s a place. Like a desert or–”
The eerie sound of the whales struck up again, interrupting him. Louder than the first cry, it seemed a reply. It echoed through my bones and teeth.
Abruptly, Laon let go of my hand and turned from me.
“None of those books are here now. We are very far from any of that,” he said, walking away. “Breakfast is getting cold.”
The chimes and bells rippled through Gethsemane, seeming to my ears louder than usual.
Laon, Miss Davenport and I stood in the courtyard waiting for the Queen. Diogenes, Laon’s dog, had been reduced to a quietly whimpering heap. The Salamander was absent as ever and Mr Benjamin had excused himself to tend to the raising of the portcullis and the opening of the gate.
Everything was as ready as we could make it. I had been pulling dust sheets from the furnishings and folding them with Laon. I piled vases high with flowers as Miss Davenport cha
ttered, hanging up bright curtains. We even dragged out some of the rugs and beat them in the courtyard. I even heard Mr Benjamin muttering to the garden’s plants, telling them of the Queen’s arrival. The castle shone with scoured resplendence, the banisters and the steps polished to the brightness of glass, all presumably the work of the elusive Salamander.
Mab was to arrive when the clocks struck noon.
At the fading of the last chime, men of sand-brown skin stepped out from the shadows. Before I could bring myself to be surprised, they announced her arrival in gravelly voices. They bowed low to me as they spoke, dripping grit upon the ground with every motion. It trickled off their skin like the sand in an hourglass, steadily and smoothly.
Laon assured the men of sand that we were ready for her arrival, and they nodded mutely.
Then suddenly, the Queen’s retinue were pouring through the far gates. They moved in absolute silence, neither their clothes nor their shoes making a single sound.
I was reminded again of the limits of my own petty imagination as the Pale Queen’s retinue bore little resemblance to the processions I had conjured up in the mists but for the fact that both were utterly silent. But this was no polite parade of lords and ladies with streaming banners and rigidly prancing horses.
Black-cloaked beings shambled in and squatted by the path. Little protruded from the darkness of their cloaks except for long, gnarled fingers made for strangling. Ladies in feather gowns flounced about in fluidly boneless movements, each carrying a pair of long, bloody shears and a threaded needle. They wore necklaces of still tongues that lolled black blood onto their white gowns. Others seemed almost human, but the shadows that stretched out from their feet were not those of their own human-seeming shape but those of restless, leaping horses.