by K. C. Finn
When my eyes came back to the water, she was there.
At first only her eyes and the crown of her head were visible; she bobbed like an alligator, watching me with those deep brown orbs, crystalline jewels plaited into her dark curls as they always were. My silvery suit was something new to her it seemed; she swayed in the water as she observed the whole of me from head to toe. Then, with an impossibly elegant gliding motion, she rose from the depths of the murky fluid, standing flat on the surface of the river and looking dry as a bone. Her sleek gown, the same shimmering shades as the moon and the water, fell about her perfect frame in elegant swathes. Her caramel skin glowed bright with life. She floated like a perfect paper lantern, illuminated like someone had struck a match inside her, and I wanted to catch her before she could fly away into the air.
She approached me over the water, small steps with pointed toes, her face an inviting mixture of sorrow and desire. She always looked as though she needed me, as if I was the very reason she appeared. I didn’t know how many other men had sat where I now sat, but when she let those dark eyes of hers claim me, I didn’t care. The moment her hand reached out for mine I responded, leaning forward eagerly to accept her touch. Fingers of ice entwined with mine, reminding me that she couldn’t possibly be an apparition. She was as solid as anyone I’d ever known: solid to touch, to see, to smell. The scent of candles burning filled my lungs as I leapt from the pier.
Where moments before I might have plunged into the midnight waters, now my feet hovered above them by her command. A silver mist rose about our feet to conceal the air on which we stood, extending out into the wider river as she led me farther from the safety of the pier. I took her other arm and set it to my shoulder, familiar with the dance from the dark moments we had shared before. She smiled, but did not speak, her full lips parted a touch, and her heart-shaped face titled as she glanced over my shoulder up at the Big House, exhaling a sigh. I followed her gaze to the brightly lit mansion, our cheeks brushing together as I led her forward in the waltz.
A history book from the Town Hall had provided the answers I sought. She was what the locals called Gray Lady Grey, a slave-girl turned countess, married to the owner of the Big House back in 1818. He had fallen in love with her against every restriction, elevated her from her humble roots to a life she was never meant to lead. At first, the girl had thought herself lucky, but the reality of being caught between two worlds was quick to set in. No longer accepted by her own kind, nor by the new acquaintance of her besotted beau, Lady Grey ran from her home in the midnight hour, along the rushes to find her way home. Now, a century later, her spirit wandered the waters of the bayou, where she had fallen in and drowned.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible if I hadn’t already seen it to be true. When we danced on the moonlit mist I felt her breathing against my neck, the sweet, warm vapour dampening my skin. The scent of deep red wine followed us and mixed with the candle smoke as I spun her in my arms and pulled her close. Her hands came to rest about my neck, toying with the back of my bright white tie as she smiled once more.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” I asked.
She put a dark finger to my lips, shaking her curls to and fro. The mist grew higher, hiding our bodies up to the hip as she pulled me back into another rotation of our dance. The old histories spoke of her dancing as the stuff of legend, painting her as a lonely ballerina spotted by drunkards and madmen out on the water. I was fairly certain that I was neither of those things, and she didn’t look all that lonely in my arms. Aside from those glances she sometimes gave the grand house that overlooked our rendezvous, her lips were curled in joy, rounded and full. Tempting too.
The first time she had claimed me for dancing, I was too astounded to do much else, captivated by her perfect, ethereal sway. The second time, I had studied her face, memorising every detail, and rushed to the Town Hall to investigate her source. This time, I knew who she was, knew that she could not be here, and could not be causing the chill in my body as her lithe torso brushed against my chest, her curving hips mere inches from my own.
“Say something,” I pleaded. “At least give me your name.”
She shook her head, the silver wisps of fabric that clung to her shoulders slipped lower, revealing yet more of her russet skin. We pivoted out in an arc that took our feet into the centre of the flowing river, all the while her deep eyes locked with mine.
“I know who you are,” I whispered over the babbling waters. “I know that you want to go home.”
The dark beauty gazed from the Big House down the river’s path: the reedy swamp that led to the clearings where the slaves of a hundred years ago had made their dwellings. She put her head down on my shoulder, clasping me until a pin could hardly pass between our bodies and a tiny sob escaped her lips. If she could speak, then she chose not to; her cry was enough for me to understand her. I held her tightly, our feet still keeping step with the ghost of a melody. I let one hand rise out of place to stroke her obsidian ringlets, soft and so very real beneath my fingertips.
“I’d take you home with me, if I could.”
No sooner had the words escaped me than she pulled back her head, her eyes glowing silver as they caught the reflection of the moon. She shook her head again, but this time much faster, more eager somehow. Her elbows hooked around my neck and she hugged my face close, a sweet aroma tempting me nearer to her lips. I kissed her without delay, feeling her cold skin, the rush of air that swept around us and tousled my suit upon the impact. Lingering moments passed as I stayed locked in her embrace, never wanting the moment to vanish, the way I knew that she herself soon would. She had never stayed this long before, never let me reach the end of the dance, or this moment I had wanted from the instant I beheld her.
When she pulled her lips away, I opened my eyes to a new vista. A faint green light surrounded us and the world became a dark blur the farther I tried to see into the distance. The bubble of air we were bathed in slowed my realisation that she had taken me under the water, but when I looked upwards I could just make out the moon. It was a much smaller circle in the midnight sky than it had been moments before. I held onto her waist tightly and studied her smiling face.
“Or perhaps you could take me home with you?” I asked with a tremble.
Her smile fell slowly, the corners of her mouth drooping into a frown.
“I have no home,” she sighed.
And then she was nothing once more. The water hit me like a frozen gust of wind, smashing into my body from all sides where the protective layer of air had once been. I scrambled in the murky darkness, my eyes stinging as I looked up for the sight of the moon. I was a long way down, kicking and paddling violently, my lungs burning with the strain of holding back the torrent of fetid water that was waiting to devour me.
I emerged with an inhuman gasp in the river, forcing my way upstream and back towards the pier. The silver smoke that had lit our dancefloor was gone, and by the time I reached the wet wood of the little jetty, the moon had clouded over and deserted me too. As the sound of my own breathing slowed to a more normal rate, I noticed that silence had fallen upon the Big House. The music had stopped. I climbed up onto the pier in my soaked suit, now dull as charcoal where the water had seeped in and destroyed its delicate threads.
My white tie was missing from my damp neck. When I turned back to the river, I could see it floating some way off by a patch of reeds. But, within seconds, a caramel hand slunk out of the water and grasped it with long, elegant fingers, pulling it down into the impenetrable darkness below. I stepped back a few paces, listening to my own damp feet squelching along the tired wood, watching for any other signs that she was still waiting nearby. When none came, I exhaled a nervous breath, turning on shaking legs to return to some semblance of normality.
“Will you come back for it?”
Her voice echoed on the water, babbling in every trickle of the river behind me. I didn’t slow my pace or even look back to find her. There was no n
eed.
She already knew the answer.
The Glassman’s Promise
The year of Our Lord 1826.
That’s what they call it, the people of the house. All week, since the eve of New Year, they’ve been saying those words to me. I don’t understand them. He is not my lord, but I must pretend to accept him as my master, just as I pretend that his grace, the Duke, is a righteous and honourable man.
It is wise to pretend such things. The Duke owns my body and uses it to serve his house. I clean his floors in the early morning, a time when his family doesn’t have to gaze upon the shameful colour of my skin. I shine his shoes and wash his dogs in my annexed room, forever unseen, living by candlelight and inspecting myself in a broken mirror. A mirror that the Duke smashed when I attempted my first defiance of him. I can remember the shards cutting into my skin as they were shattered by his fist. Since then, I have not questioned him. He thinks that every part of me is his to command. He does not own my soul, but I’d rather he didn’t discover that fact whilst I am trapped within these walls.
My soul belongs to Africa: my mother, father, family all. The land from which I was torn as an infant, fourteen years ago. I was too young to remember its blazing sun and desert sands, but I know in my heart that I was not made to be ripped from its plains and condemned to servitude in the London rain. It is unending: a grey, wet world outside my window from dawn until dusk.
I am lucky, they tell me, to have a place in the house of the Duke. I could have been sent to hoe the soil with the other girls my age, in the English fields far north of this wretched city. I can’t say I would have preferred it; I would prefer not to be in this country at all.
I look down at the shining blade in my hands. Perhaps I won’t have to be here much longer, if promises are all that they seem.
*
If the sight of a fourteen year old slave girl holding a knife above her sleeping master seems strange to you, then the circumstances which have led me to this moment will appear totally fantastical. I met a man, you see. A man who isn’t really a man, but I know of no other word to describe him. He looked like a man, save for the colour of his skin, and he smiled like a man when he promised to deliver me back to Africa.
It was early in the morning on January the second when he first appeared. After a vigorous day of celebrating the prospect of a successful new year, the Duke and his family had retired to late beds and left the main parlour in a state of ruin. The white-skinned maids wouldn’t lower themselves to the task of scraping the Duke’s drunken vomit from the carpet, so at four o’clock I found myself in pitch darkness, scrubbing until my fingers bled. That was the moment that I noticed the light behind me.
A pale blue glow was reflected in the mirror over the fireplace, an antique glass and gilded frame emblazoned with roses and thorns. I gave it little more than a passing thought until my cleaning work was done, assuming that a light from somewhere outside the parlour had caught in its reflective surface. It was only when I used the mirror to check myself over that I realised there was something strange afoot.
I could see my face within it, inspecting the oval of my forehead and jaw, my black curls scraped back under an ugly white cap that only served to highlight the deep brown of my skin. In the darkness of the parlour, I should have looked like a shadow in the glass, but my hazel eyes were lit bright blue. The light I had worked by was no illusion or reflection: it was shining straight at me.
The light was coming from inside the mirror, from an impossible distance within the glass. I didn’t dare remove the heavy, priceless frame from the wall to see if there was some hollow or secret place behind it, but I did put my hand to the mirror’s surface to try to make sense of the illusion. My palm was flush against the reflective pane, but the light shone out around my splayed fingers, casting a shadow onto my face.
“Dirty, bloody fingers on my mirror. Tsk, tsk.”
I turned instinctively to the parlour door, but saw no-one who the voice could have belonged to. I had expected as much. The voice had come from a direction I wasn’t willing to admit to. I could feel its vibrations on my palm as it spoke again.
“Take your hand from my glass, Aberash.”
I obeyed, but shook my head at the light in the mirror.
“That isn’t my name,” I whispered.
“You take the name that your oppressors give you,” answered the voice in a lightly mocking tone. It was rich and masculine, deep as oceans I had never seen, but always wished to. “Aberash is the name your mother cried the day you were stolen from her dying body.”
Dying. The words haunted me. The Duke had often told me that my mother was dead; it helped me to remember that there was no other place for me in this world than to serve his will.
“How can you know that?” I demanded. My skin prickled with gooseflesh, hairs standing on end at the back of my neck. “Show yourself, demon!”
“I am not demon-kind,” said the voice. “I am djinn.”
The light in the glass grew brighter, a beam so dazzling that I shielded my brow, no longer able to see my face in its reflection. When it dimmed again, I squinted hard, waiting for the shadow of light to clear behind my eyes. I gasped, stepping back from the fireplace and tripping over my cleaning rags. I landed hard on the wet carpet with a thud and froze there, my heart pounding as I looked back up into the ornate frame.
His skin was the same pale blue shade that the light had been, but he glowed with such ferocity that I thought his insides must have been lit like a lamp. His cheekbones were high and regal, so sharp I fancied he could cut through the mirror with them and let himself loose on the parlour in an instant. His eyes were a darker shade of blue, pure iris without white or pupil. He looked as though he was blind, but I knew by his stature that he was looking straight at me where I cowered on the floor.
Why should I cower? The djinn was on the other side of the glass, and his thin, mocking lips were drawn taught and patient. He beckoned me with a long, bony finger that glowed when he waved it. I rose again, looking around the dark parlour for fear that my tumble had awoken anyone else in the house. If I was going to inspect this fearful apparition, it was best to do it alone. I could scarcely imagine the black magic the Duke would accuse me of if he happened to come downstairs.
“I am the Glassman,” the figure said. He inclined his glittering head in a courteous bow. In spite of my nerves I curtseyed back as I’d been taught. “Now we are acquainted,” he added, his smile widening.
“Why have you come to this place, Glassman?” I asked, keeping my distance from the mirror’s surface as I watched him move within it.
Light coiled in tendrils like smoke behind his body. His torso was covered in a bright coat of gold and green jewels that switched hues every time he swayed one way or the other. He was swaying too often, a hypnotic motion that stopped my eyes from really focusing on him for any length of time. The Glassman extended his strong arms outward, his fingertips pressing on his side of the glass, as though it was simply a window pane.
“I am burdened with an offer for you, Aberash.”
“What offer?” I asked, my mouth growing dry as my palms grew damper.
“I bring you freedom,” he soothed.
The Duke would have said that temptation was the basest sin. It was for that reason that I approached the mirror again, inches away from the Glassman’s hands, but no longer connected to the pane. Freedom was a tempting thought indeed.
“You have magic?” I questioned.
“See for yourself,” he replied, blind eyes glowing brighter as the seconds sped by.
The gold and green of his clothing blurred with another sway and suddenly the vivid colours morphed into some new apparition. Inside the mirror, I saw a scene forming. It was of a bright sunlit plain with a gentle swell of dust rising from the ground. Great green leaves sprouted from dry, brown trees that baked contentedly in the embrace of a distant sun. The glowing orb was high in a perfectly blue sky, as pale and blinding as
the Glassman’s skin. Africa. Exactly as I pictured it in my head, exactly as every painting I had ever seen showed it to me.
There was more to the djinn’s powerful vision, for the more I stared into the mirror, the more I felt that I was standing on that dusty plain. My feet grew warm in my broken cleaners’ shoes as the sun-drenched ground ate away at them. I could feel the breeze filled with temperate air, catching dust and swirling a playful cloud around my legs. Above me, the heat of the bright orb of sun gave me fire that burned in my veins, my blood calling to the land which I so desperately wanted to call my home.
And, in less than a moment, it was gone. All that sensation hung around me as I sank away from the mirror, lost and blinded by the darkness of my return to reality. It had felt so lifelike, as though I could have just stayed on that plain, or walked out beyond those trees to seek the life I’d always dreamed of. My fear was gone, replaced by anger as I pawed at the glass, knocking my knuckle on the smudged pane.
“Come back,” I pleaded, watching my own sorry face in the reflection.
He did. The Glassman emerged in a new burst of light, even more resplendent than before in a new waistcoat of crimson stones. They danced beneath my fingertips, glittering in his light. He smiled down at me with a kindness as warm as his vision, and put his fingers to the glass to meet mine.
“You will be delivered to Africa, Aberash,” he said, “if you will take one last command.”
“Anything,” I said, my eyes welling with tears as I mourned the loss of a land I had only known for seconds. “What would you have me do?”
“Your master the Duke is a cruel man,” the Glassman said, his perfect face twisting to a displeased grimace. “He smashes mirrors. I dislike those who do not respect my home.”
I thought of the shards of broken glass in my annex room and the fury in the Duke’s face when he had ruined my mirror out of vengeance and spite. My features softened; the djinn had pain in his rich tone.