by Jeannette Ng
“She’s called off dinner.”
I said nothing.
“She said she’s had enough of human traditions for the day. That more than one meal a day is just repetitive. Also I really need to talk to…” Laon paused, uncertainty wavering his voice.
I turned to meet his eyes; he flinched.
“Someone,” he finished. He leaned heavily onto his cane, looking away. “I need to talk to someone human.”
“Now?”
“Please.”
“Here?”
“No, the chapel. They don’t go there.”
I followed my brother to the chapel, winding through the bustling castle. His limp set the pace and the walk seemed longer than ever. I found myself studying the rhythm of his gait, the set of his jaw and the weariness in his shoulders.
There was so much between us that remained unspoken, and for all that I could read from the way he moved and held himself, it was not enough.
We marched through the courtyard where there lurked a pair of the Pale Queen’s shadowy bird people. Upon our approach, they folded their long, fan-like tails. I had glimpsed them holding up their stained glass tails to the pendulum sun earlier in the day and marvelled at the bright flashes of colour. It reminded me of the petals of rose windows, where each light curves to a flame-like shape.
Folded, their tails dragged in the dirt. No longer illuminated, they were far less ostentatious.
My brother unlocked the chapel doors and pushed them open.
The candles within were all extravagantly lit, though instead of an inferno, they exuded an eerie coldness.
“I didn’t want to…” Laon sighed. He ran a hand through the unruly curl of his hair, a nervous habit. I noticed a wine stain on his cuff. “What I mean to say is, I don’t know what to talk about tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow… of course, Sunday. You have a sermon,” I said. Diogenes nosed over, looking to be fussed, and I relented after a moment, giving the dog a quick scratch behind the ears.
Laon nodded and sighed again, sprawling onto one of the pews as his cane clattered to the floor. It was a familiar motion, one that recalled to my mind muddy boots after long walks. I did not reprimand him.
“I don’t even know if there will be an audience, and I haven’t given a proper–” He stopped abruptly, swallowing his words. He looked away, studying the glass of my window. For all he tried to hide it, there was a note of desperation to his voice. “There’s just not been much… I confess, I’m a little rusty.”
I wanted to ask what he had been doing in Mab’s court if he had not been sermonising. I wanted him to refute my dreams.
And yet, I could feel his need. So I smiled, even though his eyes were not on me; I knew he could hear it on my voice. “You always knew what to say. Everyone loved your sermons. They were good. Articulate and brilliant. You need only speak and they’ll listen…” I tried to sound warm, encouraging, but it rang false to my ears. I could not pretend an unshakable faith in my own brother, not anymore.
“Cathy,” he said, pained. “You don’t have to…”
Still, I could tell the truth: “I miss your sermons.”
“Thank you.” He gave a half smile and, pushing away the memories of the dream I had of him and Mab, I settled onto the pew beside him.
I was close enough then to notice he smelt of wine, dark and heady. I wondered if it was for the pain of his limp or if it was for courage to face the morrow.
We remained for a while in contemplative silence. I felt all too aware of the flutter of my pulse, the warm bloom of my breath before me, the fragility of the moment.
It did not last, however. After having flung himself quite so passionately onto the pew, Laon squirmed in discomfort on its hard surface. From here, he seemed more petulant child than haunted missionary. I smiled, a little more genuinely this time.
“You’re laughing at me.” It was not an accusation so much as a statement of fact.
“Only a little,” I teased. “And only when you deserve it.”
He snorted a short laugh and sat up. Self-consciously, he squared his shoulders. “I still don’t know what to say tomorrow.”
“What does the Book of Common Prayer say? You could always say what it tells you to say.”
“I’ve looked at the table of lessons, but it is all just so distant from everything that happens here. What do the fae care of the suffering of Job? Or the loyalty of Ruth?” He grimaced. “Do they even share the sin of Eve?”
“You won’t convert them in one single service, Laon,” I said gently.
“They laughed so, so much when I told them about Jonah and the whale. That’s when I was told about the fae ones on the moors with the sea inside them. Nothing makes sense here. Parables can’t mean anything when nothing means anything.”
“You don’t have to talk in parables.”
“You might as well tell me to stop being a priest.” Laon leaned back, staring at the painted ceiling of the chapel. The dancing light of the candles flickered shadows across its vaulted curves. “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.”
“Not everything you say needs to be a quotation, Laon. I also know my Matthew.”
“They call it the Bible of the poor, you know.” He gesticulated at the chapel around us. “The windows and the statues and the paintings. Think it was one of the tracts for the Times that argued that we need again this ritual, this popish finery. We stripped bare our altars and no longer understand how to delight the masses.”
“Faith isn’t about delight,” I retorted, quite primly.
My brother laughed at that. “I’m trying to explain concepts bigger than mere words to beings that are themselves unbound by words. What could I even say?”
“Words. You will say words and they cannot ask for more.”
“But I think back to the lives of the saints, the life of Christ, all there in light and colour, written in upon the windows and the stone and the paintings.” He flung a hand up as if to grasp the chapel windows, to catch light in his fingers and tangle it like a falling ribbon. “There is a wonder there. The sublime, the sense of eternity in the lines of a building, in the face of a saint. I can’t speak that wonder. Every stone, every ray of light here speaks and I can’t speak the way it does.”
“No one is that eloquent.”
“But if I just found the right words…”
“They will become the right words when you say them.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” He closed his hand into an empty fist and drew it close. It was clenched tight.
“Sounds good though,” I said. “You always said that counted for more.”
The sides of his mouth twisted into a beautiful, if crooked smile. “Don’t quote me to me, little sister.”
“You need to give a sermon tomorrow. And that is what we will prepare. One sermon. It will be enough.”
“I still don’t know what to say.”
“She embroidered the Harrowing of Hell today. Perhaps you can talk of that.”
“Fae are so literal sometimes.” He sighed long and hard. “I was trying to explain the pain of being severed from the Lord. Hell as a separation, an emptiness, an absence. A banishment from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power…”
“And she wanted to hear of the ever-burning sulphur?” I rolled my eyes. It was every other Sunday growing up; our father was as fond of Milton as he was of Calvin. “How where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes that comes to all?”
“Yes, it got very Paradise Lost. But then we ended up speaking of the Harrowing of Hell and I confessed its decline in iconography as some think post-death second chances make us complacent. It was a stupid thing to say.”
I gave a teasing laugh. “You’re a better theologian than you are missionary.”
“It also amused her.”
“If you’v
e spoken of Hell then you should speak of Heaven,” I said. “You could always actually just say nothing but parable and do that bit in Matthew. The kingdom of heaven.”
“Even I don’t really understand that.”
“My point inexactly,” I said, resolutely. “But, more pressingly, we should eat. It’ll be easier to think after food. I know I barely ate anything during tea.”
I rose and picked up his cane from the floor. Its garnet eyes glared at me as I held out my hand to pull him up. He shook his head, refusing my hand, but taking the cane. Grunting, he heaved himself to his feet. He was unsteady enough that I wondered if he was drunk.
I flung open the doors to find a tray piled high with roast meat and pie just outside the chapel. I hoisted the heavy tray from the ground.
“The Salamander, of course,” muttered Laon, picking up the note and skimming it. “As always.”
We settled in a tiny antechamber to the chapel and repurposed the paper-strewn writing desk for dinner. Given its haphazard construction, I wondered if it was once an anchorhold, where some medieval lady who had sworn to a life of solitude and prayer would be walled in and forgotten. Our old church had the remains of a wall that our father would tease us was the remains of such a barbaric prison, asking if either of us desired a secluded life.
“At least we won’t be overheard in here,” said Laon.
“But the birds outside,” I said, remembering the shadowy avians dragging their folded tails. “Do they not listen?”
“Oh, the birds are the worst, but they weren’t…” He frowned.
“Just outside. In the courtyard.”
Laon shrugged before sighing and rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. He conceded, “It doesn’t matter. I probably wasn’t looking.”
The meat was cold but the lumpy, gelatinous gravy still retained its heat. The dumplings glistened with fat and were streaked with herbs, promising a satisfying stodginess. The roast vegetables were in a nondescript orange and yellow tumble by the thick-crusted pie. It was the sort of food that made one homesick.
My brother sprinkled salt onto it all, murmuring a prayer and crossing himself.
“Laon,” I said, between mouthfuls of dumpling and gravy. I wanted to ask the question as casually as I could. “What happened to Roche?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean just that. What happened to him? No one would tell me. Davenport just keeps telling me that it’s dangerous for me to know and–”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He sighed. “There are a lot of things I don’t know, Cathy. I was never told what happened to my predecessor. I had, at first, assumed him simply dead from an exotic disease like any other missionary, and I still like to think that. It’s a simpler answer.”
“But it isn’t, is it?” I said. “The answer, I mean. The true one.”
He shook his head, though I did not know what to.
“What about his widow, Laon?” I pressed. “What answer did we give her, as she sits safe in England? Does she even know her husband is dead?”
“I don’t know what they told Elizabeth Roche.”
Elizabeth Roche. It was a name I did not have before. I tried not to show my brother that he had inadvertently given me a piece of the riddle.
“Arcadia is full of secrets, Cathy. I can’t really begrudge it another at this point.” He seemed so defeated. For all the steel in his eyes and the stubborn set of his jaw, he was tired. “Not when I have more pressing work to do.”
Sipping the cold spiced tea, I swallowed my words. I wanted to tell him that I had found Roche’s journal and detail to him all that I had learnt from it, the mad hand and its ominous ravings. I wanted to tell him about Enochian and the revelations it promised, but now was not the time.
There simply wasn’t the time.
“I found Roche’s journal,” I said.
“Don’t, Cathy.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do this,” he pleaded. “Don’t try to solve this place. It won’t end well.”
“But I can’t do nothing, Laon.”
“I can’t see you hurt.”
Seeing the pain writ large upon his face, I could not bear to press the issue further. I relented. I pulled a Bible from the shelf and laid it down between us. The span of a book, that was the distance I was offering him in this truce. I would not cross that space.
As I opened the Bible, the scent of mould and moths filled my throat. I dragged the palm of my hand across my watering eyes. They were but stinging from the dust. Nothing else.
Glancing down the page, I read the first sentence my eyes settled onto: “And Tamar took the cakes which she had made, and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother. And when she had brought them unto him to eat, he took hold of her, and said unto her, Come lie with me, my–”
“You should read something else,” said Laon. “I would like to hear your voice, but a different chapter. Please.”
“What would you like to hear?” I thumbed through the old volume, the pages clumping together as I did so. “You always liked Hagar’s prayer.”
Laon nodded and I read the story of Hagar and how an angel told her to turn back and return to Abraham and Sarai. In her prayer she called to the God Who Sees and she named him as such.
“And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?”
We discussed the passage in the understanding of divine providence and various ways God’s Sight anchored the world and witnessed all within it.
I allowed the peace to settle again. There was a sweetness to our unspoken truce, and I glimpsed again the days of old, though then the speeches we wrote and the arguments we made were of no true consequence. The new gravity of the situation did not, however, entirely prevent more frivolous theology.
“I thought this was a serious conversation,” said Laon, the edges of his mouth threatening a smile. “You can’t just point out Light rhymes with Sight and then call it your proof.”
“That was rhetorical flourish!” I protested. “And Genesis does begin with the creation of Light itself. The act of seeing is impossible without it.”
“No, by that logic God is blind in the dark.”
“But the dark before the world is no ordinary dark. And I am quoting you on God’s blindness in the future.”
“You can’t cite me to refute me. We’ve decidedly already established that.” Laughing, Laon turned the Bible to face him and leafed through it for some superior citation. “I’m reading next.”
After, my brother insisted that he walk me back to my room, despite his limp and the stairs that led up to it.
“You should leave at the end of the two weeks,” he said.
“You need me here, Laon.” I put my hand on his shoulder; he flinched and pulled away.
“No. Cathy, please.” He was shaking, his body taut as a bowstring. “I want… I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m–”
“But, Laon. If nothing else, tonight has proven–”
“Tonight has only confirmed my suspicions. You aren’t safe here.” His eyes flickered to me and then away again. “It’s not about that… It’s not that I need you, it’s that I want–” he stopped. His voice sounded as though it was about to break. He turned and simply left.
That night, I dreamt.
Laon and I were children again, when his hands were no bigger than mine.
We were running, tumbling about the heather.
But the sun was not our own. It hung at the end of a thread, a burnished brazen disk. It seemed so close, it took up half the sky.
The pendulum sun was completely still above us.
I breathed in crushed heather and new grass.
Stockings threadbare at our knees, the skin was scraped and bruised. My feet were bare and I felt the grass tickle between
my toes. My skirts were too short. I was gangly and outgrowing them, leaving my ankles cold and exposed.
We were playing and I grabbed at his white wrists. He, too, had been outgrowing his clothes and his sleeves were too short.
With the brilliance of the sun, the moon was only visible in the shadow of clouds. It seemed awkward and small with its unseeing eyes and mouth full of crooked teeth. It swam in desperate circles, searching for darkness.
The sun was completely still. My heart beat and beat; I counted numerous seconds outside of time. It was strange to imagine these seconds unrecorded and apart. I remembered the stories of the Egyptian days that belonged to no year, the time when the false gods broke their own laws and sinned against their own blood.
Soon, they would reset the clock of the heavens. They would drag the pendulum across the sky to the furthest edge of the Faelands and it would be dark here.
The pendulum sun remained. Arcadia was holding its breath. Very soon.
I took a step closer to my brother and he squeezed my hand. He beamed at me and then he leaned over, his lips brushing against my ear in mimicry of a secret.
I laughed.
He dropped my hand and he ran. His long legs gave him speed, for all he was unaccustomed to his new height. I followed. My arms were outstretched, still running like a child in a game of chase. My breath grew ragged and I drank mouthfuls of grassy air. It tasted of the moors.
I tripped, but I scrabbled again to my feet. My brother had stopped and turned to me. He was waiting, a dark, beautiful silhouette against the pendulum sun. He reached his hand to mine and our fingers tangled.
And then suddenly, it was pitch black.
The clock had started.
Chapter 16
The Woman in the Shadows
It is like poison. You drink it slowly, over time, and hopefully you will become used to it. Sip it. Every day, until your body is so used to dying a little at a time that it no longer feels the pain as pain, no longer recognises it because it is so good at hiding, at pretending. We are all dying slowly, a little more pain would make little difference. So every day, a tiny sip of death, embraced and savoured like life, like reality, like truth, like everything that is good and worthy and wonderful. It is like drinking shards of broken glass – fragments of a dream – so beautiful, what was once real, now broken, just cutting one up inside.