by Jeannette Ng
“Elizabeth Roche. She was here, with him.”
“In Arcadia?”
“He brought her here,” I said, sitting up and rearranging my skirts primly. As my fingertips brushed against the fabric, I heard the whispers tell me that once a Khazar princess slept with letters inscribed upon her eyelids that killed as soon as they were read. “Her trunk, I saw it in the room above the chapel. The shiny new initials on an old trunk. Those were her things, those were her scissors.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“No, but it does in this case. I can see the pattern,” I said, almost laughing at calling the chaotic press of knowledge in my mind a pattern. It was too messy, too ragged, too empty. “And the translation. That was her too.”
“The translation? You mean, the Enochian? The one we… found the other morning.”
“Yes, because that was what she was here for. Roche didn’t bring her here to simply be his helpmeet. He chose her for a reason. Her religious obsessions. He had a mad, mad plan.” My mind was reeling through all the bewildering love letters I had read between them; it was all too clear now what he was looking for. “He half thought himself mad for trying it, but he couldn’t not do it.”
“What did he do?” There was fear in Laon’s voice now.
“He needed someone for them to break. He knew given the right bait, they would tell the truth. Because nothing would hurt her like the truth, nothing would break her like the truth.”
“The truth?” he echoed.
“The truth about themselves, about us, about God.”
It was some time before I felt strong enough to walk back to my rooms. My mind was still reeling and I found myself murmuring fragmentary secrets even as they began to fade from my mind. The clarity with which I beheld it all was slowly eclipsed by the growing sense of the reality around me, as this more tangible world came again into focus.
“When first Roche started here, he met lots of fae. They wanted to talk to him,” I said. “They weren’t bored with missionaries yet, I suppose. And he learnt something then, through all the arguments and the baiting of him.”
“He didn’t really write about that.”
“He did,” I said. “But he hadn’t made sense of it yet. He had realised something about their nature. And that was enough to set his plan into motion.”
Though I did not see the moths, I could feel them at the edges of the room. The walls of empty books felt oppressively close. I was suddenly aware of how bitter each page tasted upon the spiralling, hollow tongue of each moth. I could hear the gentle thrumming of their ghostly wings.
“Three dozen and five,” I said. “That was the number of letters before she would admit to being in love.”
“She?”
“No, I don’t mean that. The leaves on the tree outside the window… no, not that.” I tried again to clear my mind. It was all falling away. “The colour of the nightingale’s blood upon the whitest rose… No, not that either…”
I was shaking, and Laon held me for longer. He stroked my hair and I buried my face into his chest, the buttons of his shirt digging into my face. For all his loving attention, I knew his mind, too, was reeling.
“They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be a habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.”
“Isaiah?” he said, brows furrowing as he recognised the passage.
I shook my head, though I wasn’t meaning to contradict him. The patterns that had seemed so clear before were eluding me. I pulled away from his anchoring presence. He was too real. Unsteady though I was on my feet, I began pacing.
The library was tiny, little more than a box of a room, but it was enough. The steps made me dizzy, but that brought me closer to the strange clarity of the moths.
As I turned again, I saw Laon standing by the bookcases, the moonlight upon him. I saw him more clearly now, the lines of worry etched onto his face and the deep look of horror in his eyes.
“It can’t be true,” he said, shaking his head. “Roche wouldn’t, couldn’t, surely…”
“He came because he wanted to know more about… everything,” I said. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? The Bible translation. The Tongue of Angels. Enochian apocrypha. Those were the secrets he was chasing.”
“But to drive his own wife mad.” Laon spat out the words, flinging his hands as he spoke. “Good people don’t do that. Good men don’t do that.”
“Perhaps–”
“He has to be a good man. He needs to be.” He turned away. He took a deep, trembling breath. “He must be.”
“You’ve never met him.”
“But he’s a missionary. He can’t be…” He brought his hip flask to his lips, but it was empty, and he cast it to the floor with a growl of frustration. He was breathing very heavily.
“What I tell you is true, Laon.”
“Because the moths say so?” The note of brittle mockery did little to hide how fragile he was.
I knew he didn’t want to believe me. He needed Jacob Roche to have been a good man, for missionaries to be good people, because he fled here fearing himself to be anything but. He came here haunted by thoughts of his own sister and he needed the journey to redeem him.
“No, I… I can find proof,” I said.
I cast my mind into the receding mass of whispering secrets. I had forgotten so much already. Who was the Queen of the Screech Owls? What was the secret that the Astrologer of Blood divulged at the beginning of time? What colour were the shoes of–
“Cathy?”
He was shaking me, his eyes hollow with worry.
“I’m still here,” I said weakly.
I was lying, though. I was struggling to remember particulars from Roche’s early journal. I tried to picture the pages before me, but instead I felt shudder through me each of the tiny steps taken by tiny feet as they crawled across the page, the letters vague and black before me, too large to read, too large to be of any sense. I remembered myself feasting on its secrets, drinking in the dark, dark ink.
The carriage ride to the castle, the picking of a name, the hiring of staff.
That was my answer: “The Salamander!”
“Are you alright, Cathy?” His hand was on my forehead; I was scalding to his touch. “You’ve got a fever.”
“We need to find the Salamander,” I said. “She said she knew Roche. So she must have been here. From the start.”
“She doesn’t answer to either of us.”
“But she’s real. She brings us food every mealtime and cleans the castle and clears the moors. She exists and that means she can be found.”
“How do you mean to find her, then?”
“She cooks all our meals,” I said. “So we should start with the kitchen.”
The kitchen proved much harder to find than either of us could have guessed.
“There has to be a kitchen,” said Laon. “Our food must come from somewhere.”
“Perhaps it’s like the library,” I said.
“Perhaps, but that’s no help in finding it.”
“We need to think logically,” I said, pacing in circles. Diogenes leaned into me, hoping to calm me, but I shooed the hound back to my brother. “Or illogically, given this place. But either way, a kitchen needs fuel.”
“Does it when it’s run by the fae?” he said, scratching the dog’s black belly.
“That is a point, but I have seen a coal hole in the courtyard.”
“A coal hole?”
“I thought I saw one at least. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone shovel coal into it, but I assume it joins up to where the coal is burnt.”
I led him to the courtyard and, beating around the bushes, we happened upon the round metal hatch.
Rolling it back, we peered into the blackness beneath us. I threw a pebble inside and it seemed forever before w
e heard a clattering echo.
Mr Benjamin happened upon us, gardening shears in hand, and we explained to him our predicament.
“That is the coal cellar beneath,” was all he could confirm.
Unable to find rope, we were knotting together bedsheets into a makeshift cord to climb down it.
Laon climbed down into the coal cellar first, the darkness swallowing him. I held my breath, hoping the cellar was not as ridiculously deep as it looked and trying to trust in our ridiculous rope of torn bedsheets. My eyes showed me nothing but blackness as I tried to make out what was beneath. Waiting, my heart was in my throat and thundering fear.
“Can Benjamin come with you?” asked the gnome in a very small voice.
“I thought you didn’t like the Salamander.” The rope was less taut now. Laon must have found some sort of bottom. I put my hand on the rope.
“No, I don’t mean now.”
“But I should–” I was about to tell him that I needed to go but I recognised the tone of his voice. I remembered it from the morning of the hunt. I quelled the wavering fear I felt at Laon alone in the darkness below and turned my attention to Gethsemane’s sole convert. I smiled as reassuringly as I knew how. “Tell me.”
The gnome nodded solemnly. “Fear tells fear. The Reverend doesn’t fear.”
“He does.” I glanced nervously at the black abyss at the doors of the coal cellar.
“You fear like me.”
“But then you are also brave like me.” I did not feel brave, but it was easy enough to say.
“What I ask is, when the Pale Queen summons, and you leave Gethsemane to the wilds within and take them the book…” Mr Benjamin hesitated before averting his gaze and saying, “I would not make a very good fisher of men. In the book, Jesus said to follow him and become one. I was a miner of azote. And now I’m gardener and groundskeep, none of that is fisherfolk.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Or fishfolk,” he added, cleaning his spectacles nervously.
“Are you asking to come too, Mr Benjamin?”
He did not answer directly, but instead said, “When I came here, I was looking for work. I didn’t believe, but then I saw it. I saw faith. She brought it here with her sacrifice. I saw her and I knew.”
“Do you mean Elizabeth Roche?”
“I can’t say…”
“She was here. The three of you sang hymns together. Then she did something. It inspired you…”
He shook his head, lips pressed together and eyes screwed shut. “I cannot answer that. But when I thought I would win the martyr’s crown, I was willing. I-I thought I could matter. I thought I could be like her. Prove. It all became very clear, and I could do it all without doing it all. And then I thought I would never matter…”
“You do, Mr Benjamin,” I said.
“And now, this is just a longer road. Why should I fear a longer road?”
“It is hard in a different way.”
“So, miss,” said the gnome, quite determined now. “Will you bring Benjamin with you?”
“Of course.”
Relief broke on Mr Benjamin’s brown face and he smiled his many teeth at me. He threw up his cap in joy and he promised that he would be as good a follower as any of Christ’s dozen.
And then, I hitched up my skirt and climbed down.
Chapter 39
The Bread at the Table
It is an Article of Faith in the Church of Rome, that in the blessed Eucharist the substance of the Bread and Wine is reduced to nothing, and that in its place succeeds the Body and Blood of CHRIST. The Protestants are much of another mind; and yet none of them denies altogether but that there is a conversion of the Bread into the Body, (and consequently the Wine into the Blood,) of CHRIST; for they know and acknowledge, that in the Sacrament, by virtue of the words and blessing of CHRIST, the condition, use, and office of the Bread is wholly changed, that is, of common and ordinary, it becomes our mystical and sacramental food; whereby, as they affirm and believe, the true Body of CHRIST is not only shadowed and figured, but also given indeed, and by worthy communicants truly received.
John Cosin, Bishop of Durham, Tract Twenty Seven: The History of Popish Transubstantiation; to which is opposed the Catholic Doctrine of Holy Scripture, the Ancient Fathers, and the Reformed Churches
The Body and Blood of Christ are not present there, after the manner of a body. Yet it would not be true to say, “This is mere bread”; for this would be to deny the Real Presence; and so the fathers deny, that it is any longer “mere bread”. But it is true to say, “This is the Body of Christ”. For this does not deny that it is bread as to its earthly substance; but speaks of it, as to its heavenly.
Edward Bouverie Pusey of the Oxford Movement, The Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ the Doctrine
of the English Church
The descent felt endless.
My hands, the skin raw from the strain. I placed them on knot after knot upon the rope. My breath came out ragged and I feared the sweat on my palms would make me lose my grip.
The window of light receded and the darkness slowly swallowed me. I thought of all the times I had scrambled up and down trees as a child and how effortless it had been.
But I wasn’t climbing into the unknown then.
“Cathy!” came Laon’s voice. He was below and too far away.
I was too out of breath to reply.
For all the hitching up of my skirt, it had come undone. It was all a tangle, but I could only keep going. There was no way I could readjust my clothing.
My foot finally hit coal and I heard Laon shouting for me again. He scrambled towards me and I heard his gravelly steps. His arms wrapped around me in the darkness, and I breathed in the intoxicating scent of exertion.
He sat me onto the ground, and I leaned against his back.
“Catch your breath,” he said. “There’s a door there, but it’s behind a mountain of coal. I can’t get at the latch.”
My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and I could make out a door outlined in light before us. The coal heaped high in front of it made it impossible to open until we moved it.
When I finally got my breath back, I told Laon of Mr Benjamin’s decision.
“We don’t know if we’re going anywhere yet,” he said, grimly.
“I know you think she can still refuse us.”
“She can.”
“We’ve done everything she wanted.” That familiar note of desperation crept into my voice.
“Fae aren’t…” he sighed heavily, and I could feel his shoulders shake behind mine. He reached a hand over to steady me as I was still leaning against him, and our hands tangled. I smiled at our closeness. “We can’t predict what she’ll do.”
“Mr Benjamin called her the most human.”
“Which isn’t saying very much at all. No one really understands fae.”
“I know you don’t think much of the Paracelsian argument.”
“It’s not just that,” he said. “There have been other theories. That they don’t see themselves as people, but as parts of stories. That they play again and again the roles they were born to.”
“Sounds very Calvinistic,” I scoffed. “And predestination is very unfashionable these days.”
Laon gave a chuckle at that. “I suppose we are all bound by the roles we are born to.”
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves. And I quote that as a soulless changeling.” I winked, though it was far too dark for him to see, and I leapt to my feet. “Shall we get started?”
With painstaking slowness, we moved the coal heaped in front of the door.
Crouching by the line of light at the door, I could make out the shape of the latch. Using the pin of my brooch, I clicked up the latch, and the door swung open.
For all that I was certain I had not dreamt her, it was still a shock to see the woman in black again.
She crouched in the middle
of the vault of a kitchen, under the enormous overhanging hood of a fireplace. Behind her were an array of pothooks and chains. Banks of stoves with black cauldrons lined the walls.
The air was cold as the stone that surrounded us and smelt faintly of burnt bread. The rows of short windows high in the walls let in very little light.
The woman in black seemed to barely notice us as she snatched and growled like some strange animal. Her dress was torn, and the bandages trailing from her wrists were bloodier than before, soaked a fresh, vivid red. Her hair, wild as a mane, hid her head and face from us.
A low, long keening came from her throat. Her entire form was wracked by her wordless sobbing.
“Elizabeth Roche?” Laon ventured, taking a hesitant step closer. He was clearly horrified to see anyone in such a state. “Betha? Is that you?”
She did look up at her name, but as she began rocking backward and forwards, she said in a singsong voice, “He was the Word that spoke it. He took the bread and broke it. He took the bread and broke it…”
It was that poem of Donne’s again.
As she paced, she repeated the poem to herself like a mantra. We heard a clinking. Each step echoed, and it was then we saw that her feet were in shackles. She walked until the chain that was attached to the stove was pulled taut and she walked back again.
“Elizabeth Roche,” Laon repeated. “I am here to help. I am–”
He didn’t finish, though I could not tell if it was because he could not quite bear to say the truth or if it was because of how her head snapped up and looked straight at him. Her eyes were wild and searching. They seemed red in the faint candlelight, shot with blood.
“Who?” she said very sharply. “Who are you?”
Laon swallowed, his throat quivering. He met her gaze and spoke in his gentlest voice: “The new Reverend.”
She laughed at that. “I tore him apart with my bare hands.”
“Elizabeth Roche–”
She frowned, her features crumpling as she thought. “No, that’s not right…”
“It’s your name,” I said, trying to soften my shaking voice. I felt my pulse roaring in my ears, and my own fear gnawed at my gut. “Is it not? You married a missionary. You came to be his helpmeet and he used you to learn things from the fae. They were cruel with their knowledge.”