What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  When the men who would burn the foolish child came down to the prison cell, they saw the mother sitting. She faced the wall behind which lay her daughter, forehead pressed to the stones as if in prayer. They unlocked the heavy door.

  The girl was gone.

  There was no sign of tampering, no way the door could have been forced. The mother, for her part, was too weak to even stand, and it was deemed impossible that she could have stolen the key from the jailers. The only explanation, it was said, was an old sort of magic, the kind that passed between a mother and her child. The mother’s longing, her sacrifice, her love, had let the girl escape. From that day on, said Mother Farrow, the women of the village, those who sympathized and all their descendants, possessed a special power over their children. Could watch them through barriers as hefty as stone or as far away as death, and could protect them.

  Which meant, of course, my mother might be looking after me.

  “Don’t believe a word she says,” Mrs. Blott told me as we made our way back home. “Don’t let her scare you, lead you on. You are doing a kindness to a lonely old woman, and I know you have enough sense to let that be all.”

  But with Mother Farrow’s stories the seed had been planted: an underground hope. Perhaps I was not a strictly Darwinian divergence; perhaps I too was under a spell. Perhaps my mother was not dead, only waiting. Perhaps one day she might come to me and cure me. The possibility of my mother’s protection spread its roots in my subconscious, ready for the day it would thrust up above the soil.

  TELL A CHILD a tale is not true, give her reason to believe.

  No handsome prince awaits you. No godmother hides in the hawthorn. Those stirrings you hear in the forest are foxes and birds, nothing more.

  Tell her that after death comes heaven, harpists, bare-bottomed babes with sprouted wings. Show her where her mother has been eaten by the earth, where her ancestors lie buried. Tell her that souls float up around her, as she watches rigor mortis of her own pathetic making cover the body of a loved one with its frost.

  Nothing begs question of permanence, of sin, like the power to kill and revive.

  Nothing promises revival like a fairy tale.

  Very Distant Relations, Their Faces Very Grim

  Across hundreds of years and hundreds of Blakelys, there have been six other women like Lucy, in need of the liminal love of the wood. Lucy looks at the others, that first day. They blink back at her. The usual sounds of the forest—plaintive owls, scuttling wood mice, the papery screech and flutter of young bats—have been usurped by the lullaby of ancient temperate trees, a sentient quiet, a deep and subtle whisper. The gray evening has vanished, replaced by a pale sunlight that gilds each of Lucy’s companions. She watches these women, suspicious as they make their salutations—

  Mary is the first to step forward. (MARY ELIZABETH BLAKELY, 1670–1708; “Now she rests with the Lord,” said her brother, though no body graced the grave.) Over one hundred years before Lucy was born, Mary came to this wood, undesired. Here her hatred has calcified, and the sight of this new, younger sister sends fissures through bone. Mary spits out her name in introduction. Lucy’s curling top lip betrays her distaste.

  Next, Helen dips an automatic curtsy, her golden hair tangled, her head cocked to one side, eyes bright and bulging as if even in the wood she still must wear the hangman’s collar. (HELEN MARIA, 1650–1666, immortalized in oil paint; a memorial to a desecrated daughter.) Lucy nods at her, picturing a particular painted profile hung just outside Urizon’s ballroom, the otherworldly whiteness of a clavicle in contrast with the dark frame of the wood. If Lucy’s suspicions are correct, if this is truly that same Helen, she is slipperier in person, her cheekbones less prominent, snub nose less deliberate. Her throat is not white, rather puckered pink and rippling, forever displaying fresh scars.

  Little Emma toddles over, thumb jammed into her mouth. (EMMA CORDELIA, 1812–1817, “What an odd looking child,” “What an ugly little girl.”) The large birthmark that mars her left cheek flares even redder when she’s frightened. She widens her perpetually crossed eyes. “I’m Emma Blakely,” the girl manages through small, sticky fingers. “Welcome to our home.” Lucy laughs, both at Emma’s odd pretensions, and the confirmation of her own strengthening hunch: this one can only be her father’s elder sister, disfigured and disappeared as a young child before he was born, somehow preserved here in the forest. Lucy’s heart beats faster with delight, with wonder. What enchantment has she stumbled into?

  Red-headed Kathryn cannot stop giggling, a mix of nerves and excitement. (KATHRYN, 1206–1223, her only memorial: “Run!”) Kathryn smiles conspiratorially at Lucy, taking and squeezing her hand. “Warmest welcome.” She pulls Lucy’s arm long as she speaks, examining the lace sleeves of Lucy’s nightgown with an undisguised hunger.

  Across the clearing, Imogen frowns at them, face solemn. (IMOGEN, 1468–1486, walked into the wood and was not seen again.) “Don’t mind her,” says Kathryn, grabbing and swinging Lucy’s other hand. “She’ll only try to set you against us, to make you hate your time here. And there’s no use rushing that.”

  Imogen does not contradict Kathryn. The only mother among them, Imogen carries the weight of her second, unborn child beneath her skirts. Imogen’s eyes are filled with unexpected pity. For me? Lucy wonders, and for the first time since encountering these women feels a surge of fear.

  The cold intensifies when Alys steps out from between the trees as if from nowhere. (No one left to remember ALYS, 591–605. Alys, the last of her kind.) Alys’s teeth are honed to knives. At first glance, Lucy thinks her thirteen, perhaps younger, but her eyes display her true age: round and placid, so dark they almost lack pupils. She says nothing, only watches.

  Lucy takes a long breath, banishing her hesitations. She thinks of the book she hid under the floorboard before climbing out her window, the time she has spent praying to unknown old gods, testing her own fantastic assertions, honing ancient desires.

  Lucy smiles at these gathered women, straightens like a queen, her head held high. (LUCY MARGARET, 1867–1888, very slim and pale.) She lets Kathryn and Emma regale her with tales of forest animals, long-remembered friends and brothers, while the other four hover nearby, silent. Helen picks butterwort and tries to weave a garland; Mary watches Helen’s hands, her own mouth puckering. Alys stands still at the edge of the trees, barely blinking. Imogen wrings out her skirts.

  After several hours Lucy pauses Emma mid-description of her favorite dog’s best collar. She asks Kathryn what she might do next, where she might go to find shelter. How she can now take action, channel strength from this new wood.

  “There is nothing to do,” Kathryn tells her with a bitter laugh, brushing her red locks behind one shoulder. “Nowhere to go. Nothing to take from.”

  “Every so often the wood opens up for travelers,” Mary interjects. “You take well enough from them when it does.”

  “Every so often,” repeats Kathryn, sighing. “But it all happens so quickly, and the men who pass through are never quite right. That’s why we’re so pleased to have you here. Finally someone new. It’s been a very long time.”

  THERE ARE NO seasons in this shadow wood, only the low cradle of midsummer. Mellow, drifting sun. Trees choose their deciduousness, shift as they see fit. Light filters in through bowers, dappling the tangled undergrowth; a stream babbles gently over stones. Compared to where the women have been, it is paradise; still, they miss winter. They remember the dry burn of their cheeks in the cold, plump bursting drops of rain, sharp-scented autumn with its pungent decay. Once inside the wood, these women cannot leave it. Once offered its asylum, they may not again defect. Their years in the forest unwind at both ends, ever-rolling scrolls that conceal both the finish and start. Several weeks, they think, sometimes, several lifetimes.

  And what is there to do here, with no fairy feuds to thrill them, no mad kings wandering, no lovers in disguise? The women sit, they weave flower crowns, they dream and remember. T
hey make pets of the immortal squirrels and badgers preserved here beside them, build forts of fallen branches, watch clouds travel the sky. They listen for the outside world, waiting for those rare evenings when men with muddled minds pass briefly by. The women doze in glens and hollows. They sit, unseen, and watch their only entertainment: the evolution of the great house, Urizon. They see its inhabitants come and go. They wonder what it might be like to die.

  AFTER THE POWER she’s discovered, the promise of her books, Lucy is not content to sit idly by, waiting. Something that had begun to shift within her in those final months at home now undertakes its most permanent migration. Lucy will not be locked away. She will not stoop to pick flowers, chase fauna. Lucy wants to move mountains, raise armies, amass followers, be praised. Above all she wants a daughter to continue her singular evolution.

  “Wanting too much will bring you trouble,” says Imogen, a hand atop her ever-swollen stomach.

  Helen, fingering her raised scar necklace, nods. “Much better not to want at all.”

  “We live here now,” says Mary, chewing a birch twig, her eyes narrow and suspicious. “This is your world.” This is their world. So they believe, and so it is, until the day they find the child.

  3

  Mrs. Blott had other duties to attend to—cleaning and cooking, helping Peter with his correspondence—and thus we could not visit Mother Farrow as often as I would have liked. I was, of course, forbidden to go see her on my own. Between visits, I would imagine myself part of the tales that she told me, would stand with my eyes squeezed shut at the border between the wood and our garden and whisper a wish for my own witch’s familiar, for a friend.

  This wish was granted on the morning of my eighth birthday, when I found Marlowe in the wood behind Urizon. He was a puppy then, a fuzzy black cowering little darling, nestled under a downed tree branch, and I heard him before I ever saw him: a high-pitched whimper that I dodged under the foliage at the edge of our backyard to get to, accidentally reviving a rabbit-gnawed shrub. When I finally caught sight of him, soft and downy, his eyes still blue, his coat so crimped he could have been a little lamb, I could not bring myself to leave him. Instead I drew closer. I knew what would happen if I held him. It had happened with Mr. Abbott’s lost terrier when it wandered into our yard: the poor stupid little Scottie was terrified, shaking as it flickered between life and death in my arms.

  This was on my mind when I saw Marlowe, but as I approached he got excited, wagging his little puppy tail, and it was all that I could do not to trip over myself in the getting to him. I prepared myself to reckon with the guilt I would feel upon reaching him, whether it be shame that I could not provide the warmth his young body desired, or remorse at my lack of restraint. He was so precious, so dear, so clearly starved for a companion—I could not resist kneeling on the undergrowth and offering my hand. I had only just turned eight, after all.

  “Hello, pretty puppy,” said I, and Marlowe put his soft, wet nose right on me.

  I flinched and pulled away, expecting him to stiffen at my touch, but he just reached out his candy-pink tongue and licked my fingers. At this point I let out a whoop of joy and gathered him in my arms, savoring the feel of his beating heart and his warm, breathing body, and raced with him back to the house to show my father.

  I remember that first time holding Marlowe as one of the most pleasurable moments of my young life. All humans crave touch, the fundamental feeling that life burns inside another. For me the sustained touch of another living body was like opening a door that had been shut for a very long time, kicking it wide open and letting in the light. It felt like sun against my skin, but better, stronger. If my belief in the old ways and Mother Farrow’s stories had been shrouded like her small and slippered feet, discovering Marlowe seemed proof of the hooves’ existence. Life was mightier, more beautiful, and kinder than I had ever imagined. I could feel Marlowe’s heart pound, the swell of his chest, the shiver of his pleasure as he pressed against my arm. I realized then that the world must be full of things of which I would never conceive unless directly encountered.

  Peter was cautious, but could not bring himself to make me cast my new companion out. “Careful now,” he said when I held out the puppy, who had fallen asleep in my arms.

  “He’s unchanged! No need to be careful. Nothing happens when I touch him, absolutely nothing at all!”

  Peter’s eyes watered behind his glasses. His nose wrinkled and twitched.

  “I’ll keep him outside,” I promised, never intending to do so. “I’ll let him live on the back terrace and I’ll care for him. You’ll never know he’s there.” I held the puppy up to Peter, in hopes the animal’s sweetness might do more to sway him than my own excited face.

  Peter sighed, closed his eyes, rubbed their corners. I knew that I had won. We’d keep the dog. We named him Marlowe, and he accompanied me everywhere.

  MARLOWE QUICKLY BECAME my dearest confidant and friend. He slept with me at night, sat at my feet while I studied. He would race down the dark hallways at Urizon, chasing after a squirrel or a bird he’d seen through the front window, Mrs. Blott racing after him, scolding him for tracking mud. He came with us to Mother Farrow’s, and would sit listening to her stories as if he understood them. He liked to dig in my garden of sand, where sometimes he might bury me a tree branch or a stone.

  At age eleven, I was raking in that garden with my fingers when I came across something tender—something soft and squished and feathery. Clearing away the sand, I found interred a common sparrow, clearly meant to be dead, a sizable chunk of its breast torn away by what I guessed were Marlowe’s teeth. The bird was shivering and convulsing. It cheeped loudly enough that Marlowe heard it fifty yards away, but its shredded chest did not cleave together. Shocked, I did not think to touch it again, and instead watched it hobble about the yard, finding its bearings, readjusting its idea of itself as alive.

  Other than the odd caterpillar or dried snail, I had never before resurrected an obviously dead creature. Foliage, yes, but that was different, more like resuscitation than surgery, simply painting in color to a landscape sadly drained. I had certainly never brought a body back to life and let it linger. Bodies that should not be moving—desiccated bodies, broken bodies—piqued my interest, but frightened me. I would never have intentionally revived one.

  The sparrow hopped off the stone barricade at the lowest tier of garden, and headed for the front line of the trees. I reasoned it was best to go after it, and turn the bird back. But despite reason I sat still in the sandbox, listening to its strangled cheeps, staring at the trail of blood it left behind. I knew that I was breaking Peter’s third rule—If a living or a dead thing is touched, you will immediately return it to its natural state—yet I did nothing. How did the sparrow breathe, I wondered, with its chest so fully open? Could it eat? How long would it survive?

  “Poor thing,” I said to Marlowe, who had come to sit beside me, showing no apparent guilt at having orchestrated the lurid event. “Perhaps a fox will find it. Or a wolf.”

  Both aroused and repulsed by my own fascination, I resolved not to tell Peter of my actions. My intentions had been innocent—all I had done was take a handful of sand—but I was nonetheless complicit, my responsibility heightened by the curiosity that had prevented me from reversing course. Flustered, I told Marlowe very firmly that he mustn’t play a trick like this again.

  Once I could no longer hear the resurrected sparrow, I stood and rolled my shirtsleeves, preparing to go back inside. Mrs. Blott did not like me to track sand through the house, so I sat at the edge of the terrace to brush myself off before I entered. It was there that she found me, shaking grains from my shoes.

  She carried a bucket of water and a pole with a rag tied to the top, and I assumed that she had planned to wash the windows. Rather than starting the work, she came and sat down next to me.

  “Maisie, girl, we’ve had some news,” Mrs. Blott said. Her eyes were swollen into slits. I was suddenly afraid.


  “What?” I asked, thinking of the bird. Had someone found it so quickly in the wood? Did they suspect me? Would I be punished?

  “Mother Farrow, as you know,” began Mrs. Blott, and I released a ragged breath, “has been ill for a very long time. She’s lived a fine life, a long one. We’ve just had a call from the village telling us that she’s passed on.”

  “Passed on to where?” I said, confused.

  “To the next life,” said Mrs. Blott.

  “Do you mean,” I asked slowly, “that Mother Farrow is dead?”

  Mrs. Blott nodded, let out a sigh. Had I been a different child, she might have reached out for my hand. Instead, she laced her own fingers together and regarded me with a tender expression.

  “I’m very sorry” was all I could say in response. My heart was beating quickly, my cheeks flushed. I bit down on my lip, hoping physical pain would delay my mounting emotional distress. “I really didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  “Why, child, you didn’t hurt her. She was sick and very old. It was her time.”

  I kicked Mrs. Blott’s washing bucket, splashing myself with a wave of soapy water, then sat back down and grabbed one of my shoes, smacking it hard against the stone terrace until the final grains of sand flew loose. Though empty, I whacked the shoe again, again, again, then in a fit of frustration hurled it down into the garden.

  “Maisie!” said Mrs. Blott, surprised. “You know a lady does not throw shoes.” Her words were a reprimand, but her tone was soft. She came closer, put a careful hand on my clothed back.

  It was midday, and I could hear the insects buzzing, watched a fat, hairy bumblebee meander toward a single red daylily. The sun was high and bright, but I felt chilled.