by H C Turk
That current era became one of horror for me, for upon nearing the gate, I was attacked from behind. Startled by a sound implying imminent death, I whirled around to see Miss Elsie rapidly step near.
“And it’s not an escape you’re seeking again, is it, lass? On me own, I’d be finding it hard to leave this city, for it’s too far to walk, and I have no coins for transport. And that if I knew where to go, for the wildest place about is Pangham Gardens, and that’s but another green with fishes’ pools. So be taking some food for your eating, child, so you won’t be found half starved this occasion.”
“In truth, miss, I have no intent of departing, since I fully share your stated position. This segment, however, is the most sheltered garden portion.”
“Aye, and you’re saying, then, that it’s not rife with people. And I would have let you be, Alba, had I not thought there was a chance of your dangerous fleeing. So if you’re weary of me now, you’ll be letting me know, in that rarely have I found you bashful with your speaking.”
“If I were so belittled by your presence, the realm for me to seek would be that space beneath my bed rife with seclusion. Therefore, be less of a tender lass whose emotions are as easily disturbed as the water’s surface. For who, in fact, is the stolen youth hereabouts: you or I?”
“Now I’m the one growing weary, child, not with your presence but your own soft emotions. So let’s be forgetting your wicked life of kidnapping and be off with us to the tulip bed, in that wild persons are great eaters of bulbs, are they not?”
“I must say, Miss Elsie, that your ability to rant on comically is a virtue, especially compared to the dour attitudes of your peers and the mistress. But if a plucking up from earth be our next activity, let us not choose innocent flowers, but the fiendish bridge that pollutes the entire garden.”
“And it’s the tiny bridge, you’re saying, that deserves to be ruint? What harm is it doing you, lass, in that it’s only a bit of wood?”
“To me, miss, the bridge is constructed of recollection; for a great friend of mine drowned in the sea, any bridge now bringing me wretched memory.”
“For your sorrows, I’m feeling true pity, Alba, but we can’t be destroying our home to end them, for it’s your own heart which gives the pain. My father himself it was who died beneath the wheels of a carriage when this daughter was younger than you, and each wagon or cart is yet bringing these memories. But I’m bringing something of me own when I think of him dead: I think of the love I had as a child, which remains with the woman and with the old woman I’ll become. And I’m telling you more, lass, that I’m not making to preach on you as though I could end all the misery in your heart. But with God as my aid, never would I have your pains be worsened.”
The woman then abandoned me to seclusion, her changed countenance not the profound view of a minister with a sermon, but the preoccupied smile of a friend.
• • •
In this manner, my days proceeded. Boredom I avoided by sensing London from the roof: the confusing accumulations of masonry that were buildings, the smell of the sinning populace, the sounds of misplaced horses, misplaced people. Sinning activities occupied my perceptions: the false weather of smoke haze from the sinners’ tanning the hides of God’s animals, producing inks and oils and endless resins for papers and woodwork, perfumes and powders for their bodies, all of these acts requiring fire, all conspiring to make London impossible to accept. Satisfaction I gained from viewing the sky, residing in the basement, and touching those green and godly portions of the garden.
My greatest emotion in this living, however, came from death, my mother’s demise oppressing me more than the bulk of London. Painfully predictable was this memory’s sequence of reoccurrence: the black smell, black loneliness, the impossibility of our being apart forever. Whenever glutted with this distress, I attempted to change my thinking in light of Mother’s last idea, that she would ever live within me as our mutual love. But what a sham my selfish intent became, for by attempting to save myself additional distress, I received an extension of my thought: that whereas sinners died and yet were loved by their surviving families, they also left Earth to spiritually exist with Lord God in Heaven. But my mother, though morally superior to the sinning world’s best parts, was not only gone in body, but had no soul to be transferred. Though undeserving of such a mediocre legacy, she would exist after death only as the love of a child so shameful as to recall the acidic smell that was her mother’s demise instead of emphasizing the love that was her sole immortal part, her endless gift. Thereafter, the girl was so poor of heart as to feel remorse for her own inadequacies rather than dismiss them and return to loving her mother as that superior woman deserved. But, no, the daughter had only torment from the loss and from her selfish response, causing such misery she might have been a sinner herself.
This last idea seemed punition from God. By allowing my own torment, I was supporting the sinners who had destroyed Mother instead of emphasizing that final witch from Man’s Isle. Because survival was my due, I was correct to fit within London until able to leave the city. I thus became profoundly aware of my position amongst the sinners. Their manipulating me meant nothing unless it meant retaining me. And though this detention would end with my ultimate cooperation, the Rathel’s intents for me were murderous. However, the death being planned was that of a sinner instead of a witch, so I should cooperate to benefit my own race. Though I knew nothing about killing except those examples the sinners had shown me, I might learn. And since the victim was a sinner with a soul to live infinitely with God, what ultimate loss had he? This soulless witch had no portion to bake in Hell for her part in the murder—so bring the victim on!
A decent enough witch I remained to reject this murderous thinking. I continued to believe that sinners had received their name by promoting evil beneath the perfect eyes of God, whereas witches had no such proclivities, for they lacked the lustful habits and wicked personal relationships of sinners. The sexual distress witches inspired was not an activity, but an emanation, as though a smell. The sinners’ evil, however, was a systematic intent called society. And to cause a person’s demise would not make me a terrible witch but an average sinner. No greater failure at loving Mother could I achieve than to become one of her murderers.
• • •
“I am surprised at how readily you have come to accept London, Alba. Would you choose to live again in undeveloped land, or is your preference to remain here as my servant?”
Rathel’s astonishing words after midday meal delivered me with uniqueness, for at once I desired to strike her as I never had any person. Such was the sinners’ influence that I had begun responding to their social situations with the same immorality they displayed. But the feeling was gone with this awareness, and I replied without violence.
“My current situation is one of peaceful survival, a state incomprehensible to the typical destructive sinner.”
“And what of your future? Do you envision a house and home of your own in this city?”
“I envision living in a realm forever removed from the revulsion caused by your fantastic questions. Being your servant or seeking an abode in this heretical realm are ideas to sicken me. If God’s will be done in accord with my natural state, my future living shall be in my genuine home of Man’s Isle.”
“No, you would not reasonably wish this,” Rathel replied, “for more parts of that island each day are inhabited by humans. Any of the populace learning of your identity would be passionate to kill you.”
“Am I to bless you, then, for rescuing me from that future, bless you for the morality that beforehand drove you to murder my mother?”
Even with a moderate wig, Rathel was false. The more respectable persons in this house—witch and servants—wore only their own hair, but we had little fraud to conceal. I smelled the mistress to glean her secrets, the sinning odor so familiar to me now, so continually unpleasant. Well did Rathel hide her thinking behind controlled eyes and a moderate
countenance, an ability doubtless learned from dealing with her sinning peers. I also believe she attempted to obscure her smell with an extra application of social scents. But the woman could not avoid breathing. Beneath the creature grease in her mouth, I could smell her heart.
Rathel replied without hesitation, for she was ever assured of her words. Plainly she spoke, the movement of her jaws as precise as her enunciation, her eyes set directly toward me, seeming to project ideas. And though I looked toward her equally, only one of us saw a bad landscape, a cold and powdered view less discomforting now only due to unfortunate familiarity.
“No, Alba. I believe you do understand that had I not been too late in finding you, I would have saved your mother. Regardless, she and her racial sisters were guilty of damaging Sarah Meacham, a person who might now be dead from witches’ vengeance. But no one died on Man’s Isle by my choice. They were executed by human panic and ignorance, traits so dangerous as to kill human and witch unselectively, as you have seen.”
“I have seen that you are a sinner, and therefore naturally bigoted, preferring your people to mine, whom you consider animals. Our slaughter, then, is acceptable if the killing might allay a sinners’ panicked riot that might in kind cause further murders. And there was your sin—not in selection, but in allowance; for you were the expert to distinguish witch from sinner knowing full well that identification would lead to the witches’ deaths, though in fact we killed no one, and therefore deserved no death ourselves. Our only crime was to subdue a sinner who would have ruined our family to satisfy her own lust.”
“One saved is better than all lost,” the sinner answered. “Your mistake is in believing that I could have convinced the officials of Jonsway that all your people were neither witches nor guilty. They were witches, and were guilty. Had I attempted a dishonest convincing, I would have lost my esteem with Bishop Dalimore and his colleagues. Without my position of expertise, never would you have been released into my care. Therefore, you also would be dead. Your further mistake is in believing that I have the capacity to change the world. I have not, and to testify that witches are saintly would lead to my own condemnation. If you knew humans as I know witches, you would not doubt me here. The greater world remains as it is; therefore, I save my personal world.”
“Sorrowful your existence is to be improvable only with killing,” I returned, “for is not the method of your salvation to have a peaceful innocent murder for you?‘“
“Be not so wise, young Alba, as to appear the total fool. No one your age knows all of her people, witch or human. Even in my elder state, I am not completely aware of my own race’s potentials. But I know something of them as well as witches. I know that despite the witches’ simple society, they are not so inhuman as to never feel murderous passion. My proof here is you. Family passion was your elders’ justification for destroying Mrs. Meacham. Family passion was Sarah’s intent in seeking you. Morally, however you were all her inferiors; for Meacham’s goal was to improve your life, not destroy your mind.”
“Ultimately, morality is interpreted only by God, whereas death is evident to everyone. Therefore, God shall be my judge in ascertaining Meacham’s evil in attempting to steal me and thereby ruin my mother’s heart. But clear to any human with a mind is the vast gap of wickedness between Meacham’s blathering and the stench of my mother’s flesh.”
“Condemn me or my race, Alba, but no good will you gain from it. Nor will you benefit from all your speaking, for you neither teach me nor learn for yourself a better understanding of our races.”
“My understanding is sufficient to verify that you will never connive me into being a member of your race, into becoming your servant or peer in heinous London.”
“But this was my beginning query,” Rathel stated. “My true surmising was that you would depart if given the selection. Since you are managing to fit within this household for your own survival, as you say, I would show you how such cooperation might lead you away from the City.”
“But previously you asserted that my original home would no longer safely house a witch. You thus suggest I live where—Pangham Gardens?”
“Pangham is a lovely place, one you will better appreciate when less fearful of the greater city. But Pangham is no more fit for living than that garden our own. Compared to the wilderness, these gardens are as trees to the forest. But England is a land of many forests. I can situate you in a place similar to Man’s Isle for you to live as wildly as you desire. The site would be free of attacking humans, whereas Man’s Isle is not. In your wisdom, you should see that I have not stolen you from your home, but rescued you from death. I have brought you into a business to our mutual benefit, a business you fail to understand enough to accept.”
“I am not understanding enough to accept killing,” I retorted, “which is the criminality you call business.”
“Your part is simply to behave as the devil made you. Behave naturally, as is your stated wont, and you shall succeed.”
“I recall your business, Rathel. And you shall never succeed if it entails my killing a man, by sex or magic or bludgeoning, for I have not the capacity, and your failure of wisdom is to disbelieve this fact.”
“The capacity is not magical nor physical, but sexual, existing within you, though you seem unaware. I am aware, however, and have therefore removed all men from this household. Understand that I seek no murder on your part, only that you allow yourself to be sexually natural with this one human. My vow is to release you after your part of the business is…attempted. I would have said ‘concluded,’ but no longer will I mandate success. Your cooperation is all I seek. Thereafter, whether I am correct or you, a wild place I will provide for your remaining years, and they are many compared to the lives of humans.”
“I am human,” I corrected the ignorant Rathel. “God made humans in many guises, but sinners within are all the same. So are murderers.”
“So are witches,” she replied. “Be natural for me is all I ask, and thereby fulfill my purposes. These were described in Jonsway, and have not changed. The design began before I met you, perhaps before you were born.”
With her ending speech, I received from Rathel a sense of melancholy. I replied with appropriate sympathy.
“I pity your history for it to predicate future death. I pity your expertise as well, for it consists of imagination more than knowledge. If I am to kill some male, that person will live long, for no one dies from preposterous notions. Am I to strangle the gent with my body hair? Considering your understanding of mortal witches, perhaps he’s yet a baby whose breath you expect me to steal in his sleep.”
“Young he is, but no infant. Too young, however, for marriage, and his parents would not allow him to be betrothed. Not to a charge of mine. My plan, therefore, is to await his attaining the proper age, in the meantime making you enough of a lady to be acceptable to London.”
“Am I to be killing all of London, then?”
“London knows that I have brought you here to rear as a lady, to make your social graces fit your appearance. Therein, I shall succeed. When the boy becomes a young man and asks for your hand, his parents will not overcome his desire, since you will be his peer. And ask he will, wed you he will, and you shall kill him on your wedding bed.”
“So succinct, so certain? What if he does not care to wed the particular me? What if he has a previous beauty selected?”
“No concern are these potentials, for few men can resist the white witch, and none toward whom she applies herself. Apply yourself to my subject, be yourself with him, and with all my resources I shall deliver you to a wild land to satisfy your living.”
“What, then, must I learn of becoming a lady fit for English, sinning society?” I returned. “If consuming animal flesh or tobacco is entailed, the remainder of both our lives shall proceed unfulfilled.”
“Only the refusal to eat meat will seem odd in England,” Rathel stated. “Nevertheless, we shall truthfully explain you as having a stomach too
sensitive for animal products.”
“What else need be done, then, in that my speech is adequate and Elsie dresses me as she will?”
“You speak like a man: too aggressively and too often. With people not of our household, your words should be moderate. Especially, you must not embarrass the young man by displaying yourself as his verbal superior. You must also achieve the carriage of ladies, and learn enough of London to seem only new to our city, not an enemy thereof.”
“Flailing a man to death with my baby dent might prove easier than this last requirement.”
“Remember, ladies are not prone to overstatement. Remember also the satisfaction you have found in London. Would you not choose to visit St. Nicholas Cathedral again? Part of being a lady is attending church. A parish body uses these facilities for their services. This upcoming Sabbath will find us there if you desire. Since recently you have become aware of your surrounds only to find them less than ideal, I propose to improve them. Certain parts of London heretofore unseen by you might prove entertaining in their irredeemably sinning nature.”
Humor was found in Rathel’s mouth as often as insects. This last was not comical felicity, however, but mocking; for had not her final sentence been as portentous as many of mine? But comedy would not be the cause for my next experience in God’s great house changing from inspirational to heretical; for the same as cathedrals, heresy is an invention of sinners.