by Jeannette Ng
“You gave me those books,” I threw back at him. “You want me to do this.”
“But this is different… this is dangerous. I need you to be safe, Cathy.”
“But if Mab–”
“Don’t–”
A sharp gust of wind extinguished both our lanterns.
“…say her name,” finished Laon, his voice penetrating the sudden, eerie darkness.
Numbing in its bite, the wind brought a bone-deep cold. I shivered.
It was a terrifying moment as my eyes became accustomed to the dark. For a moment all I could see was the hazy twilight colours that seeped in through the door at the far end.
I wanted to protest that there was no power in the saying of a name, to defend all the conclusions I had come to. I wanted to shout and spill the secrets that I had kept locked up for so long, utter the things unutterable. I wanted to fight this eerie oppression, to rebel against the hundred eyes that watched me at this moment and dared me to keep speaking.
But they were all childish, dangerous desires and had no place in my heart.
“Let’s go back, Laon,” I conceded.
Chapter 20
The Snow in the Summer
The Spirits answered, That there were more numerous Worlds than the Stars which appeared in these three mentioned Worlds.
Then the Empress asked, Whether it was not possible that her dearest friend the Duchess of Newcastle, might be Empress of one of them?
Although there be numerous, nay, infinite Worlds, answered the Spirits, yet none is without Government.
But is none of these Worlds so weak, said she, that it may be surprised or conquered?
The Spirits answered, That Lucian’s World of Lights, had been for some time in a snuff, but of late years one Helmont had got it, who since he was Emperor of it, had so strengthened the Immortal parts thereof with mortal out-works, as it was for the present impregnable.
Said the Empress, If there be such an Infinite number of Worlds, I am sure, not only my friend, the Duchess, but any other might obtain one.
Yes, answered the Spirits, if those Worlds were uninhabited; but they are as populous as this your Majesty governs.
Why, said the Empress, it is not possible to conquer a World.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Description of
a New World, Called the Blazing-World
The Pale Queen’s Masquerade was to happen barely a week after her arrival, and the castle was turned upside down to satisfy her whim. The place simply teemed with activity as her servants scuttled back and forth.
I had thought the castle spotless, but apparently such cleanliness was but a delusion on my part and everything from the glittering droplets of the chandeliers to the snaking banisters and the lolling carpets had to be scoured, polished, washed, dusted and beaten all over again. The roiling mass of shadowy servants dealt with it all in their customary silence.
Such aggressive purging I understood to be the creation of a blank canvas for Mab to impose her vision upon. Silver willow trees sprung up within the castle, breaking apart the flagstones and flooring. All the tapestries and portraits were rearranged and replaced with others found in the dusty attic. The grand ballroom was aired out and its many glass doors flung open. Bats blacked the sky each day to take invitations from the hand of the Pale Queen to her multitude of guests. The painting of frost continued on each of the windows, blocking out more of the increasingly infrequent light from the pendulum sun. As time ticked by, the width of the sun’s swing grew slowly shorter.
I had been in Arcadia for almost two months.
After that night in the empty chapel, Laon became all the more distant, speaking only to remind me that I would be leaving at the end of the two weeks. A haze of brandy followed him and I could tell he was no longer preparing negus as an excuse to consume it.
I was afraid. I treasured too much the fleeting flashes of intimacy to confront him about his habits. A shared book and a gentle word would have me believing that we could be close again. But I dared not push too hard. The Pale Queen had eyes everywhere, and that discomfort of being watched only intensified over time. I told myself that whatever it was I needed to do to help him, I would do it after Mab’s departure. I promised myself that over and over, as I held my tongue.
All this only made me more determined to stay, even as I nodded to my brother’s insistence that I make arrangements for my departure. He needed me to pick up the pieces of him. He needed me more than ever, though he did not know it yet.
I was the only one who knew of the stolen woman that Mab kept somewhere in the castle. There were times I would imagine rescuing her, leading Laon to her like a damsel in Le Morte d’Arthur. I would then remember the story of Sir Gareth of Orkney, known as Beaumains, guided on a quest by Lynette to save her sister Lyonesse. My brother would insist that Lynette was secretly in love with the knight and that the ending was pointlessly tragic. I disagreed, and we spent hours debating the subject, arguments that would end with us smiting each other a great many buffets on the helm.
But such fantasies were of little practical use. For all my growing suspicions about the stolen woman, I had nothing to prove it. Mab delighted in veiled remarks, of course, ever ready with an insinuation, but there was nothing concrete. For all that she dwelt often on the subject of changelings and their important role as intermediaries between humans and fae.
I carried these secrets and suspicions with very little grace. They weighed down my dreams and made restless my days. They distracted me from what little work I could put into the deciphering of the Enochian pages and the perusal of the salvaged letters. When I was not thinking of my brother and Mab, the artificiality of the castle and its mismatched details intruded. I could barely believe I had been so long deceived by the trickery of an architect.
Still, there was something almost comforting about the emptiness of the castle’s history. I no longer filled those long, intriguing years with the imagined lives of lords and ladies. Their tangled lives as told through the stone of the castle no longer haunted me.
More and more, I found myself falling asleep atop a nest of papers, yet such toil brought me no closer to actual answers.
On the morning of the Masquerade, an old woman hobbled into the courtyard. I was crossing it after reminding my brother to eat breakfast, when I encountered her.
“Call me Grandmother,” she said before I even asked how to greet her. “I come on the Pale Queen’s orders.”
With the exception of Miss Davenport, she was the most mundane being I had seen in Arcadia. She had a permanent stoop and was dressed in a shapeless gown of muddy, indeterminate colours with a brilliantly white apron. Her white hair was pulled into a neat bun at the nape of her neck.
At her feet was a large, white, lumpy sack.
“Don’t stand there and stare,” she said, wagging her bony finger at me. Dark blemishes spotted her papery skin like spidery ink blots. “Come help your grandmother with her featherbed.”
“That’s a bed?” I said, as I gazed at the misshapen bag she had dragged into the castle. In a land full of strange and profane creatures, it was apparently this that strained my credulity.
The old woman nodded.
I sighed in resignation and picked up the corner of the featherbed. I grunted at the unexpected weight of it. The old woman looked at me and smiled, her lips parted and curled to reveal enormous teeth. Sharp to a point, each seemed larger than even my thumbnail.
There was something reassuringly inhuman about that smile.
The featherbed was, despite its long acquaintance with the ground, a stark, pure white. I gathered it into my arms and led the old woman to one of the empty rooms.
“Somewhere high, I think. Airy,” she said. “I’m not afraid of walking. So one of the towers, perhaps?”
“Of course,” I mumbled under the weight of the featherbed.
I took her up one of the towers, needing to take frequent breaks to put down the old woma
n’s bed and rest my aching arms.
I had hoped that upon seeing the room came with a bed of its own, she would be dissuaded from her plan, but that was not the case. When we finally arrived, she instructed me to take it to the window and shake it out before making it.
“Until the feathers fly,” she said as she sank onto the floor. She gave a satisfied sigh, as though finally glad to be at rest.
Diligently, I obeyed.
I hauled the featherbed to the window and slowly tipped it outside, hands clawed to keep a hold of it. Due to its extraordinary weight, I was terrified my arms would give out and I would drop it.
It was hard work.
I dragged it half inside again to allow myself a break, allowing the wall to take the weight for a moment. My breath was ragged from exertion and I daubed my sweat-slick forehead with the palm of my hand. I glanced outside and saw snowflakes drifting like white feathers.
“Have I shaken it enough?” I asked.
“Harder! Beat it if you can, until all the loose feathers come out. Else you won’t be able to reshape it properly.”
As I shook harder, the snow grew heavier.
It became impossible to avoid their flurrying fall and worried that I would get the featherbed damp, I hauled it back inside and shuttered out the cold.
“No, don’t close the window just yet,” said the old woman, getting up to lean herself out of the window. “Let me see.”
She peered at the falling snow and reached out a hand to catch a snowflake. She squinted at it, her milk-white eyes straining.
“You can’t trade for weather like that. It needs to be made the old-fashioned way, you understand?” said the old woman.
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
She shook her head and held the snowflake to my eyes. Icy fronds bristled from a curved spine. It was shaped like a tiny feather.
“Now, don’t you see?” Her wide eyes squinted into slits as she spoke, focusing on the delicate snowflake. “Though I suppose you might be as blind as the rest.”
“They are from your eiderdown?” I said, as realisation dawned.
“Yes, yes. I’ve been sewing it for years.” She gave a heaving laugh that screeched into a cough. “And it should be more than enough to satisfy the Pale Queen’s lust for winter.”
Chapter 21
The Gift of the Tree
About three weeks ago, while a number of boys were amusing themselves in searching for rabbit burrows on the northeast range of Arthur’s Seat, they noticed a small opening in one of the rocks, the peculiar appearance of which attracted their attention. The mouth of this little cave was closed by three thin pieces of slatestone, rudely cut at the utter ends in a conical form, and so placed as to protect the interior from the effects of the weather. The boys, having removed these tiny slabs, discovered an aperture about twelve inches square, in which were lodged seventeen Lilliputian coffins, forming two tiers of eight each, and one on a third just begun!
Each of the “fairy” coffins contained a miniature figure of the human form cut out in wood. They were dressed from head to foot in cotton clothes, and decently laid out with a mimic representation of all the funereal trappings which usually form the last habiliments of the dead. The coffins are about three inches in length, regularly shaped, and cut out of a single piece of wood, with the exception of the lids, which are nailed down with wire sprigs or common brass pins. The lids and sides of each are profusely studded with ornaments formed of small pieces of tin, and inserted in the wood with great care and regularity. Another remarkable circumstance is that many years must have elapsed since the first interment took place in this mysterious sepulchre.
As before stated, there are in all seventeen of these mystic coffins; but a number were destroyed by the boys pelting them at each other as unmeaning and contemptible trifles.
“Strange Discovery”, The Times, 16th July, 1836
Miss Davenport came to help me dress for the Pale Queen’s Masquerade. Not for the first time, I protested at Mab’s plan for an extravagant entertainment but that only earned me a drawl that she was aware of how provincial my upbringing was. She then commanded Miss Davenport to assist me.
The changeling knocked on my door and greeted me with that warmth I had not seen in her since the Pale Queen’s arrival. It was almost a relief to see her chattering as she threw open the wardrobe’s latch of clasped hands and laid out the dresses onto the bed. She allowed me space to examine them each in turn as she busied herself with the pouring of tea. She chattered throughout, half to herself and half to me.
“I only seem to recall that your brother takes his tea without sugar, but how do you like yours again, Catherine?” said Miss Davenport.
Whatever the source of my dream, I knew my jealousy of her to be quite irrational, but I could not help the flare of irritation when she spoke my name.
“No, you shouldn’t tell me, I really should remember by now.” She gave a soft giggle at that. For all the shrill notes of her voice, there had always been something infectious about her cheer. “And of course, I take one sugar and no milk, of course. Milk is ever so dreadful.”
“Two sugars and a drop of milk, Miss Davenport.” I forced a smile. “If only to mask the salt.”
“Oh, how formal of you!” she exclaimed. “As though we are not the best of friends. You simply must call me Ariel. Your brother does, doesn’t he?”
“I suppose he does.”
“Which practically makes us sisters.” She laughed again at that and pushed the cup of tea into my hands. I noticed again that brittleness to her laugh and I wondered which was her mask: the fearful, silent creature that was before Mab or this cheerful, chattering one?
I scattered salt onto the cakes on the tray, but for once she seemed disinterested in food. She looked intently at the odd little shaker that held the salt before again rummaging in the back of the wardrobe, promising to find me something else beautiful.
“I’m sure one of these dresses would do well enough,” I said, looking at the arrayed gowns. “They’re finer than anything I own.”
It was hard to believe that they were all new, as the woman in black had said, but I was beginning to notice their oddities. They were faded and yellowed as I would expect dresses over a hundred years old to be, but the wear on the hems was just a little uneven. Moreover, the seam allowances were perilously tight. They were not made to be altered and, more importantly, none of them had been altered. There were no marks for stitches undone and done again.
“You’ll need a mask.”
“I though the principle was rather more metaphorical.”
She murmured an indistinct answer, and then there was a cascade of masks on the bed.
“What’s it like?” The wardrobe door hid her from view but I could tell that she had stopped her search and was quite still. I could not see her expression.
“Pardon?”
“Being a person, I mean?” She sounded wistful.
“I’m not sure I could answer that.”
“My earliest memory was of Ariel Davenport’s grandmother singing to me. I was curled up in her lap. She was wearing a red apron. Her hands smelt of raw dough and yeast from baking. And I remember nothing before that.”
“It’s not unusual,” I said, gently. “Most people don’t remember much of being a child.”
“Sometimes, I would try very hard to remember what came before.” She gave a high, forced laugh. “I sometimes think that if I couldn’t remember then that would be proof. Of something.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“I’m told those memories, of Ariel Davenport’s grandmother, I’m told those aren’t real.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m told I was swapped after Ariel Davenport’s grandmother died.” She paused. “So I can’t possibly really remember her.”
“So what–”
“Don’t know.” She emerged from behind the wardrobe. She gave a careless shrug and sat down beside me. Sh
e dragged a hand over her eyes, a messy gesture. “How much of your childhood do you remember?”
“Plenty, but not from when I was in arms.”
“Like?” she said, hopeful. I could tell she wanted a story.
“I always liked to think that my first memory was of Laon. I was three, maybe, and we were playing. I don’t remember what, but we were hiding under a table and we had to be very quiet. The tablecloth was red and I think I remember his fingers against my lips.”
“Is it real?”
“Of course it is,” I said. I touched my fingers to my mouth, lingering on that memory, the vivid feeling of his skin against mine.
Miss Davenport gave a low hiss as she exhaled. Her brows were pulled together in thought. “Does he remember it?”
“No, actually, he doesn’t.” I traced the curve of lip, and closing my eyes I could almost feel it again. The warmth of him against me in that tiny space under the table, curled against each other. “It’s not that unusual. Memories aren’t perfect.”
“Oh, of course. I knew that.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I was…” Miss Davenport hesitated. Her voice wavered. “I didn’t feel different when I found out. When they told me. But why would I? I was always different.”
“I see…” I was uncertain what to say to that. I wondered in that moment if changelings were made to never quite fit in so that they would better cleave to their true masters when called upon. I wondered then if Miss Davenport’s mannerisms were that way by design. “You don’t speak much of the time when the fae found you.”
“What is there to say? They found me to tell me I was a changeling. Gave me new purpose when I was lost and alone. It’s better than being alone. I just… I was just curious as to what it is like to have real memories.”
“Are not the memories afterwards real?”
“They are, or rather as real as memories I could make are. After all, I am hardly the real Ariel Davenport.” She flashed me her teeth in a smile before leaping to her feet and holding up the nearest dress. The watered silk rustled and rippled in her hand. “Does this evoke winter to you?”