by Jeannette Ng
But I could not believe it of myself, of Ariel. We were no more fae than we were human.
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
At other times, I would open again the journal of Jacob Roche or try to make sense of Enochian. The odd word and phrase began to emerge, and my growing familiarity with the Bible was helping what little progress I made, but my mind would not focus. It had no interest in such paltries. The great mystery of what befell Jacob Roche seemed so much less pressing now, though my mind did begin to spin wild theories on the influences of Mab and the other fae. His words on Jonah, the omniscience of the divine and being trapped in the belly of a whale seemed more resonant now than it did before, when I first read it.
Strangely, in all the days, I did not dream.
Granted, I slept very little, eyes as bright as lanterns as I watched the moon weave between the clouds, its yellowed teeth and unseeing eyes still unnerving me after all this time.
I began questioning my own memories and I wondered now if the woman in black was but a manifestation of my simulacrum mind. After all, the chapel was deserted when I had returned with Catherine Helstone’s brother. I had been so convinced that she was a stolen child, imprisoned by Mab. With the blood that now stained my hands, it seemed laughable that I had believed even for a moment that I could save her.
But more than that, I feared who she might be.
Clutching my shoulders, my elbows, I selfishly worried about being replaced. I had played cuckoo to the Helstones, and for more than twenty years I had stolen love meant for another. I tried to hold onto all those memories, but they were slipping away, fading. I told them like stories to myself, over and over, trying to cling onto them, making up the details, but they lacked the vividness of true memories. My own unreality was catching up with me.
After all, what claim did I have to any of that?
I was not the real Catherine Helstone.
Mab left three days later.
I watched the pomp and ceremony from my window, all conducted by Catherine Helstone’s brother. There was splendour equal to her arrival, her court arrayed in their best. I recognised all the forms of her retinue: the men of sand, those with the blinking, peacock tails and the crouched and hooded hags. Her guests, I assumed, had all left already, at the close of her hunt. I had the vague memory of them taking their leave of her, bundles of susurrus gossip and drawling compliments as they vanished.
The Pale Queen did, however, send me a parting gift.
An agitated Mr Benjamin delivered the parcel. He hovered at my door, shifting listlessly from foot to foot.
“It is good to see you alive, Mr Benjamin,” I said.
“Safe and safe,” he said.
“And she is gone.”
“She is never really gone.” His eyes darted. “As long as you still dream.”
“I…” I hesitated, not wanting to dwell on my empty nights. I panicked then that it was another aspect of being a changeling, the fact that I would never dream again.
I opened the parcel and found a horrifying object: a dessicated hand was cupped into a shallow bowl, the skin sewn crudely to itself. White grains were cradled in the leathery surface of its fingers.
The accompanying note read, quite simply: Salt from human hands.
Trembling, I touched a grain of that white substance to my tongue. It was, indeed, salt.
It was a human hand.
The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. I had not given it any thought, that Ariel and I had been eating fae food with no ill consequence. After all, had she not said my hands were not human?
She must have known.
I remembered the odd intensity with which she studied the salt shaker and how she became increasingly disinterested in food as she spoke about her changeling past. She must have worked it out. Realised how Mab was keeping this a secret from her, from me.
My own inhuman hands felt to my mouth. My empty stomach roiled. Despite not having eaten for days, I wanted to vomit.
Each of the vessels that held salt within this castle was made of human hands.
My own hands were shaking as I reached for the salt shaker on my table. I unscrewed its cap and poured out its contents. I squinted inside. At the base of it was affixed a small, slender bone. A finger bone.
I choked back a bitter, acid mouthful. I regretted it immediately. I wanted it all out of this body. I wanted out of this body.
I could hear my own deafening heartbeat.
Mr Benjamin’s voice roused me. “Is the sister pleased with gift?”
“Pardon,” I said, sitting down, my head light from the revelation. I felt more unmoored than ever. “Did she… did she give you anything else?”
He shook his head.
“Thank you, Mr Benjamin.” I swallowed, my throat dry and tasting foul. “Or should I be thanking the Pale Queen?”
“Gifts still come with a price. But maybe already paid,” he said. “I thought I could pay the price. That I would be worthy.” He hung his head and, haltingly, without prompting, the gnome confessed that the immense clarity he had felt before what he had believed to be his execution had faded. He had lost that focus that had guided him and the guilt weighed heavily upon him.
I envied his guilt and his capacity for it.
“I can’t help you,” I said.
“I thought I could do so much. Now nothing means nothing. Everything means nothing. Questions all back and worse. Can I ask you?”
I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t have answers, Mr Benjamin.”
“Can’t carry this anymore. Heavy, too heavy. Questions heavy. Thoughts heavy. What can do with one life that cannot have done with one death? What is worth?”
“I really don’t know, Mr Benjamin.”
His face crumpled. “I saw her standing like at the jaws of the hell beast. Like in the other chapel. She broke the bread and I believed. She paid that price but I cannot.”
“I don’t understand what you mean. Who–”
“Just a parable…” he hesitated. “But I thought I could be like the story. Be like her and believe. She was so certain!”
“You really should speak to my–” I stopped, the word stung, bringing a pang within me. I pressed my lips together, took a shallow breath and corrected myself, “Catherine Helstone’s brother.”
“But, a sister for a brother–”
“I am not his sister.”
“Oh.” His eyes widened and he swallowed awkwardly. My words hung tangibly between us and his hands began to fidget. “How you know?”
“You knew?”
Slowly, the gnome nodded.
“How long did you know?”
“The Pale Queen’s orders. About the salt, about the food, about the sister-who-is-not-the-sister. She didn’t say. I guessed.”
“Since before I arrived?”
He nodded again. “I guessed first. The changeling guessed after, after the Pale Queen came. The changeling asked me questions. Made me promise not to tell you. It would grieve you.” He looked me up and down. “It is grieving you. The changeling was right.”
“She was, I suppose.” I thought of all the questions she had asked of me, her shifting looks, and how desperately she had explained changeling nature to me. I should have guessed myself.
Meekly, the gnome added, “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said, quite firmly. “But you should leave me be for now.”
“Forgive?”
“Soon.”
Mr Benjamin sighed, his sharp shoulders heaving as he did so. He lingered by the door, before finally leaving and adding, quite quietly, “Good fakes are same as real.”
The rich, salty smell of bacon and the rattling of chinaware woke me.
My mouth watered as I squinted open my eyes. It was Catherine Helstone’s brother with a tray laden with what I could
only assume to be the past three breakfasts piled together.
“Sorry,” he said, quite stiffly. “I let myself in. But I assumed you would want some food.”
I nodded. I had fallen asleep still wearing my day dress. Crushed though it may be from my slumber, I was largely decent in it.
“I didn’t know you weren’t…” said Laon. “I thought you wanted to be alone. I didn’t know you weren’t eating until Mr Benjamin told me.”
“Thank you.”
After my days of hunger, I thought I would be ravenous. But quite divorced from that constant ache of black void-like emptiness, I felt only nausea at the sight and smell of food. I gazed dispassionately at the generous wedges of pound cake and the slices of cold pie, barely recognising them. The mountain of bacon only turned my stomach.
Long, intolerable minutes passed. Catherine Helstone’s brother stared at me as I waited for him to salt the food.
“You aren’t eating,” he said, a commanding note intruding into his voice. “You should eat.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“I… I need you to salt it.”
“But when I wasn’t here, didn’t you–”
“I’m not human and I don’t want to be relying on…” I said, trying to suppress that shiver of revulsion. “I don’t want to rely on what I used before.”
He nodded, knowing not to press the issue, and obligingly added salt to each of the dishes.
I broke off a piece of pound cake and, ignoring the dollops of marmalade and jam crowding the edge of the plate, I ate it dry. My tongue felt suddenly swollen and crowded in my mouth. I forced myself to chew.
His eyes barely leaving me, Catherine Helstone’s brother collected the larger of the cake crumbs and pressed them together in his fingers. By touch, he reformed the crumbs and additional cake into a lumpy beast and presented it to me.
I looked quizzically at him.
“I’m afraid I can’t make the noises anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“We used to…” he looked a little embarrassed. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember.”
“It does. Tell me.”
He gave a half shrug and said, “You used to make little animals out of my bread. You would ask me to give them voices and we used to tell stories about them.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said. Fear, insidious in its form, unfurled within me. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach and in that acidic taste at the back of my throat. I combed through my memories, the stories that I had been telling myself as I failed to sleep, staring at the moon. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“You wanted to name them and keep them, but they grew mouldy and you grew hungry.”
I shook my head. “When was this? I thought we told stories about the tin soldiers, about Gaaldine and Exina and Alcona. Didn’t we?”
“We did, this was before that.”
“Really?” I tried to remember the days before the soldiers. I couldn’t. It must have been then that I was swapped for a human child.
“You were quite little, it’s normal to not remember.”
“But–”
“Eat, Cathy. Please.”
I didn’t correct him about my name. I supposed that Ariel shared her name with the real Ariel Davenport.
As I forced myself to chew, I wondered if perhaps she could be Catherine and I could be Cathy. The cake was dry and clung to the room of my mouth. I drowned it down with sweetened tea.
Looking at him now and his concern for me, I felt frail under the weight of my own guilt. I was a doll of flesh that had usurped the place of the real Catherine Helstone and took for myself the love they owed her.
I thought of the woman in black I had followed across the rooftops of this very castle. My mind did not dwell on her often and I had been avoiding those questions for too long.
Or rather, the answers.
There was an answer to the question of why Mab had brought her of all captives to the castle. An answer to why she had fine English features and why she looked similar in age to me. These were all answers I did not want to entertain.
“I keep trying to work out when it was,” I said after starting on the soft rolls. “And the rest…”
Catherine Helstone’s brother swallowed uncomfortably.
“We should do something.”
“I don’t think we should…” That weighty tension was again in the line of his body, from shoulder to clasped hands. “You and I. We shouldn’t…”
I looked at him, confused. He would not meet my gaze, the intensity of his blue eyes firmly studying his hands. Perhaps he could not bear to see my eyes, a reflection of his own.
“I adore you.”
I stared at him in silence; the oppressive guilt that had been gripping me only tightened, clasping around my throat. My leaden heart ached to breaking.
“Cathy…” His knuckles were turning white. “I adore you, treasure you, desire you. Beyond reason. Beyond hope. I would worship you and the ground that you walk on… but we, you and I, we can’t…”
“What are you trying to say?” I frowned.
“I’ve longed for you for so long and now… I want nothing more but to lay at your feet my corrupt heart, as it is, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh. I am consumed with sinful, wandering thoughts of you and I thought–”
“Laon,” I interrupted, sharply, cutting through his florid speech. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“I had prepared…” He sat up, startled, finally looking at me again.
I squared back my shoulders, my frown deepening.
“I murdered Ariel,” I said. Catherine Helstone’s brother winced at that, but I continued, “On the same day, I found out I am a changeling, that I have no soul and that salvation may be beyond my reach. All that and you worry about us?”
“You are my sister.”
“I’m not; I’m not even real.” A delirious laugh rang out from my throat like silver bells. “A thousand things weigh on my heart and on the soul I do not have, but not that. Ariel’s blood stains my hands. I have lived another’s life and stolen her family. I barely know how to feel all the guilt I should feel.”
“Cathy, it’s not your fault. It was the Pale Queen who–”
“But I am quite monstrous.” Another laugh, clear and shrill. “So, no, brother of Catherine Helstone, that matter is but a feather on my heart. My sin is far greater than yours.”
“For years, Cathy, I’ve–”
“You laid not a hand on me, so what does it matter?” I was standing now, all accusations and anger. I barely recognised my own voice for the bitterness.
“Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart…”
“No one cares about your heart, Laon.”
“Cathy…” He staggered back as though slapped.
“Your hands are clean and mine are not,” I said, without a care for the hurt in his eyes. I could still smell the blood, see it well up from her wounds. “Ariel’s gone. I can’t believe you would think… how could you worry about such things after what I have done? I killed her.”
“It was the Pale Queen who killed her,” he said, reflexively. Over and over he must have been telling himself that. “You were just her tool. One that happened to be holding the knife.”
“And I’m not real,” I said with a breathy laugh. “Unlike you.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” Though his voice was softer, it was no apology.
“Of the two of us, you are the real one. You have a soul. You matter. I don’t.”
“I didn’t mean to say that.”
I shook my head. “But you did, all the same.”
Chapter 29
The World Beyond the Door
1816 will forever be remembered as the Year Without A Summer. It simply did not come, as the weather remained stubbornly dry and cold, not only in this country, but als
o the rest of Europe and, judging by reports, the Americas. Hard frosts were suffered every month.
Many persons supposed that the seasons have not thoroughly recovered from the shock they experienced at the time of the total eclipse of the sun. Others seem disposed to charge the peculiarities of the season upon the spots on the sun. If the dryness of the season has in any measure depended on the latter cause, it has not operated uniformly in different places – the spots have been visible in Europe, as well as here, and yet in some parts of Europe, as we have already remarked, they have been drenched with rain.
It is impossible to say the true reason for this summerless year, but almost one hundred years after the South Sea company had made and unmade numerous fortunes with its fantastical finances, it has again resurfaced and emerged as a force to rival the East India Trading Company. Due to the Crown upholding its monopoly over trade with Elphane and such it remains still, yet few know what really fills the crates and barrels that are loaded onto the ships that sail to the Faelands, only that they return with splendid fae riches.
It is perhaps only right that the lost company should be the one to first trade with the lost land.
Andrew Groombridge Knight, “Meteorological Observations”,
Philosophical Transactions, November 1831
Catherine Helstone’s brother left.
At the click of the door, I crumpled to the floor, no longer a tower of defiance and cold anger. It extinguished inside me, like a flame between damp fingers. I folded my legs tight against my chest and wrapped my clutching arms around myself.
My skin was not my own, but still I tried to hold myself together. All the pain that my words had caused him, I felt reflected now upon my own knotted heart. His touch had made me feel so very real and it ached to be otherwise now. I did not want to acknowledge those passions, to dwell on what it might mean.
I killed Ariel.
I could barely remember the scene around us, but for the mocking laughter of the Pale Queen. Mr Benjamin had trusted that Mab would keep her end of that bargain, that she would allow passage into inner Arcadia and further missionary work. My brother had believed that too. But with that sound of laughter like a cheese wire through my thoughts, it was difficult to believe.