What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  “You didn’t know that we lived here? That Mrs. Blott helped us with the house?”

  Matthew shook his head. “Not when I was younger. There were rumors, of course, but she always denied them. Said I was imagining things when I thought I’d seen a kid here. Back then she said that she cleaned houses around town.”

  “And now?”

  “When I came a few months ago, she admitted she was working for the Cothays. Painted your father as . . . unfriendly. Never even mentioned you.”

  “Because of my curse.”

  Matthew played three crashing, tuneless chords, then slammed the cover. His eyes met mine. “I don’t believe in curses.”

  If I’d been too distracted by my father’s disappearance, my time in the wood, to reflect on the fact of being alone in my house with a boy, the bluntness of this comment and the directness of his gaze brought me immediately to my senses. The tops of my ears burned. I could not think of a response.

  My embarrassment was heightened when Matthew opened the door to my bedroom, moving quickly ahead of me before I could inform him that we’d find nothing of value in my unmade bed, the clothes strewn on the carpet. He realized at once the room was mine, and stepped awkwardly to the side, his back hitting the picture frame that held Peter’s rules for me, sending it crashing to the dresser.

  “I’m sorry.” Matthew winced. I shrugged, and tried to direct him away, but he lifted the frame by its edges and turned it over to investigate the damage.

  “You don’t have to . . . ,” I started, then gave up when I saw that he had read the text immediately, his lips pursed in thought.

  “They’re only guidelines,” I mumbled.

  “So you aren’t allowed to touch anything.”

  “It’s from when I was little.”

  “You’ve lived your while life without holding hands, or hugging. Without picking flowers or pulling leaves off trees. Without petting a dog or—”

  “I have a dog,” I interrupted. “I have Marlowe. I can pet him.”

  “Still,” said Matthew. “I can’t even imagine what that must be like. To never be held. To always have to worry. You’ve got remarkable restraint. Mind-blowing control. It’s truly impressive.” He looked at me, but though his words expressed awe, his eyes held pity.

  “Can we just leave it? We need to stay focused on Peter.” I knew that I’d been rude, but was not sure how to correct it. I swallowed. “Let’s just go back into the study. Maybe there’s something else there. He likely wouldn’t leave a note, but we might find some clue as to his whereabouts.” I sighed. “Or he could very well just pop up in the morning. He’s not the type to think of . . . details. Or of how I might worry. Not to say that I am.” The last I blustered through, aware that the force of my teeth had started my lip bleeding, that the fierce red taste of it likely now colored my gums.

  “Hmm,” said Matthew. He yawned. It was very late, and I remembered that I’d woken him. I knew I should relieve him, thank him for his help, suggest he best be on his way back to the cottage, but could not bring myself to do so. Avoiding his gaze, I chewed a thumbnail, keratin clicking against my lower teeth.

  “I could stay here for the night,” Matthew said carefully, not entirely successful in masking the white lie that followed: “It would be easier than having to drive all the way back. It’s very late. And we can do a better search of your father’s office in the morning, when we’re fresh. I can sleep in that purple bedroom upstairs.”

  “It’s violet,” I corrected automatically, then closed my eyes and nodded, afraid to display the depth of my gratitude.

  “The violet bedroom, then.” Matthew moved toward the door. “You should try to get some sleep. We’ll find a way to reach your father in the morning.”

  My stomach dropped as I watched him go, the shuffle of his feet, the cowlick at the back of his blond head. I didn’t think to guide him to the bathroom, find him clean towels, perform any of the tasks I knew from reading books of etiquette a good hostess should. I was pleased to have Matthew stay with me, unsure of what I would have done without his kindness. Still, I was anxious. His questions were reasonable, hardly disrespectful, yet there had been something about them that unhinged me. Of all that had occurred the past few days, all of the strangeness I’d encountered since Mrs. Blott’s death, Matthew was clearly the least of my troubles. And yet my body found him most unsettling.

  The Dirtied Family Crest

  Mary, 1708

  As a young girl, Mary Blakely was quiet. Shy not in the alluring way of the prudish, those women whose reticence men sense and prod like a dog tracking fear, but rather gauche in her detachment. Chewing her fingernails and mumbling. Staring too intensely at those parts of her companions they would rather go unnoticed: a rector’s bursting pimple, a country gentleman’s long nose. What suitors her father found were not lured by her dowry, not even when increased by half.

  Mary despised her own awkwardness, the sharpness of her elbows, the bulge of her gut. She watched her younger sisters married off and sent away. She watched her younger brother Frederick take a wife.

  THE YEAR WAS 1707. Jane Mulhollan, now Jane Blakely, had been at Urizon six months but did not yet know how noises carried, the echoes allowed by the curvature of stairwells, the hollow panels that cradled small sounds, ferrying her words from where she sat in the library with Frederick to the place where Mary stood listening at the top of the front stairs.

  “So you must find a way,” said Jane, a plump, dimpled thing in a blue sack-back gown, already secure in her role as head of household. Twenty years Mary’s junior, and given to ejecting sympathetic little sighs each time she settled in a chair or a divan. “We haven’t the money to keep her. And it is foolishness to think that at her age . . .”

  A murmur as her husband, Frederick, spoke in an undertone. Then her reply:

  “You’ve had years to look. She has had years to become ready. All women know the time will come when they must either—” A thump as the library door closed.

  That night, Mary combed her hair one hundred strokes with the silver-backed hairbrush that had once been her mother’s, but belonged now to Jane. The furniture was Jane’s now, the table settings, the firewood, the old Blakely heirlooms. The flower beds in the garden. The chambermaid. The cook.

  Soon, the house itself would be taken from Mary, given to Jane. All its thick walls, its firm foundations. The nursery, where she’d played with her young sisters. The kitchen garden she’d planted with such care. The turret, where she’d sat gazing out at the road, daydreaming of the prince who would see past her sallow face, her thinning hair, the wrinkles that framed her small eyes. All given to Jane.

  That haughty girl of seventeen, waving a hand like a queen, as if she were the lady of some far finer house. Mary wished Jane a painful end, such suffering as she herself had suffered when watching Jane stand in the door of the church, listening to wedding bells knell, seeing Frederick touch Jane’s shoulder, hearing the moans they made at night. Mary could no longer breathe for the air that Jane sucked from Urizon. She sat daily with her needlework, waiting for Jane’s dress to tighten and Jane’s skin to flush, for the day Jane would announce that she was carrying Frederick’s child.

  Jane dismissed the valet who had been with the Blakelys since before Mary’s birth. “He’s much too old,” the girl tutted. “Imagine him encountering our guests! He’d surely scare them.”

  Jane cleared all the tallow candles out from the cellar. “That smell!” She giggled, unable to consider a future in which the family might need them for light.

  Jane rearranged the front sitting room, removing the tasteful draperies Mary’s mother had chosen, installing gaudy replacements. She sent the settee out to become firewood, bringing in a hideous new piece painted to look as if it were made all of gold.

  Mary watched the changes unfold—fists clenched, fingernails scarring her palms—unable to prevent them.

  Without a husband, Mary’s choices were few. She mig
ht be a nursemaid to her brother’s children, live in a cold room at the back of the house, wear plain dresses and hide from the guests. She might go to the church and spend her days cloistered, praying to a God she did not trust. Perhaps one of her sisters would take her.

  In the mirror, Mary’s face was so white with powder as to appear ghostly. The black with which she’d tried to paint her eyebrows in the fashion of the day, as Jane did hers, had smeared onto the bridge of her sharp nose. Lines creased her forehead, sliced the sides of her mouth. Old maid. Unwanted.

  I should eat the child’s heart when Jane births it, thought Mary. I should seek out the waters of youth and drink my fill. Spin the years backward. Unfair, to have just one attempt at ripeness, a few brief years of possibility before sweetness turns to rot.

  FREDERICK AND JANE did have a child, a little girl, golden and plump. Mary held her at the christening, and though Jane’s own sister was named godmother, it was Mary who knew instinctively to bounce the baby, whisper her to sleep, support her soft skull with a bent elbow. If dropped, that tiny skull would crack, its small brain spilling out onto the floor. Mary felt such power standing over the cradle, the ornate wood carved like a coffin, the infant swaddled so intensely she appeared to be embalmed.

  Jane’s mother and sister came to live at Urizon, claiming that Jane needed help with mothering, though all of the unpalatable aspects of her role had been assumed by a girl from the village soon after the child’s birth. The Mulhollan family filled the estate with activity, and filled Jane with a greater sense of her own importance.

  Frederick shared his sister’s lack of initiative, and had thus far avoided the unpleasant task of casting Mary out. Yet it was coming. Drawing her new motherhood as weapon, with the support of her nearest relations, Jane pressed Frederick to act.

  Again, Mary stood at the top of the stairs, and heard the group of them gathered in the library.

  “. . . enough of this silliness . . .”

  “. . . propriety to think of . . .”

  “It must happen at once, without delay.”

  The trilling of one voice replaced by another, each new instrument taking up the tune so its fellow could rest. Mary heard Frederick yield, heard them formulate a plan.

  She went to the wood.

  SINCE JANE’S FAMILY had arrived at Urizon, making far more of a hassle than two medium-sized women had the right, Mary had taken to long walks out in the forest. That evening she kept to the edge of the tree line, nervous of losing her way in the dark. She debated her dwindling options. She did not speak out loud, but the wood heard.

  8

  The next was to be a day of disappointment—in myself, as I could not access Peter’s computer, and in Matthew, who, incurious the night prior, now struggled to focus on the task at hand. He appeared full of questions, but midway through would bite his lip and swallow each one down, casting me sidelong glances and a furrowed brow instead of further conversation.

  “When you get sick, do you— Never mind.” He ducked his head, diving into a file cabinet.

  “If you eat meat, does it— Sorry.” He scratched his neck.

  “Has it been since birth—” Matthew stopped himself, punctuating the abrupt silence with the click of a pen cap.

  “Just ask me,” I said.

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll stop. I’m sorry.” He blushed, busying himself with Peter’s computer for a moment before jerking up again. “It’s just—I’ve been around babies. I can’t even imagine how you could have been an infant, and then raised with this . . . condition. Let alone how your mother could have carried out the pregnancy.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “She didn’t carry out the pregnancy. She died.” I scrubbed my voice of all inflection, but felt a surge of frustration toward Matthew for having been the first to make me say the words aloud. I’d always known that my gestation killed my mother, but speaking it gave the fact a new, tangible weight.

  Matthew blinked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That must still be very hard for you.”

  I shrugged. He watched me, waiting for me to say more. When I was silent, he busied himself at Peter’s desk, trying to hack my father’s files.

  “Could the passcode be a birth date?” he asked, face lit by the computer monitor’s unnatural glow. I remained in the doorway of the study, my hands folded under my armpits, embarrassed and afraid. Each false start of Matthew’s had made me feel more like an artifact, alone in a forgotten museum, abandoned by my caretakers. Each stifled question made it clear that I was nothing like the other girls that Matthew had encountered. I’d known that I was different, but with his curiosity thus piqued, I fully felt it.

  My father had rarely followed through, but I’d lived always under threat of his punishment. Who would tell me, without Mrs. Blott or Peter, when to brush my hair, to tidy, how to behave around others? Who would comfort me when I awoke, sheets sweated through from nightmares? Who would fend off nosy Mr. Pepper, bring our mail in from the village, start the fire in the library in the evenings, quiz me on my reading, tell me not to play with Marlowe in the hall? Equally important, who would make sure that Peter had eaten enough dinner, remembered to bathe, to take some time away from books? Who would make him laugh when he was mad at a rude colleague or upset he’d been passed over for a departmental award?

  Who else out there would love him? Who here would love me?

  If my world had been a painting hung flat across a wall, its frame had fallen and its canvas now curled inward, rolling and distorting the image I had known.

  “When was your father born?” Matthew asked.

  I shrugged, pressing myself into a corner, where the edge of my ear struck a bookshelf. The wood shivered. I felt sick. The trouble with bookshelves, with assembled wood in general, was the paneling—if two unrelated pieces had been grafted together postmortem, once revived they would express immense dislike. Peter had once described such craftsmanship as comparable to a postcolonial nation, borders drawn without regard to indigenous rule. This particular shelf wrenched itself from its wooden backing, sending stacks of books and papers to the ground. I touched it again, and turned to find Matthew looking from the files spilled across the carpet to the lowermost shelf, to the upmost, to the hand I had used to correct my mistake. He seemed thoughtful.

  “Are you afraid of me?” I asked him.

  He smiled and shook his head, pushing back from Peter’s desk to kneel beside me as I straightened up the mess. To tidy was a feat of engineering, transfiguring my skirt into a mitten, shimmying to straighten the stacks.

  “What, then?” I kept my eyes down on a set of plans, drawn to scale, of a medieval jailhouse, feigning interest in Peter’s handwritten aside about the improbability of its size.

  “I know my questions are the last thing you need right now. I’m sorry for prying. It’s just that from a biological perspective, you’re phenomenal,” he told me. I felt my chest expand, though I could not tell if I could claim the compliment, or if he’d meant it toward some higher, unknown force. “I’d love to study you.” He stared at me intently, then flushed. The color suited him, warming the few freckles on his cheeks. “I mean the things you can do,” he corrected. “From a scientific perspective, of course.”

  It was his turn, now, to fuss with Peter’s papers. He flipped through a dog-eared pamphlet, a schedule for an academic conference, a few pages that were dated like a diary, a handwritten recipe. I struggled to make sense of the ache in my chest.

  “Wait,” Matthew said. “What’s this?”

  He had come across a map, creased and fat from having been folded incorrectly, and pushed aside a file cart to spread it across the carpet, unveiling a full, miniaturized depiction of our region. A mug stain made a waxing crescent moon over a row of squares that stood for Coeurs Crossing. To the west was labeled Matthew’s university, to the south the city, surrounded by suburbs, fading out into moorland and small farms. Peter had drawn a st
ar to represent Urizon, his wide hand designating it and the surrounding forest as home.

  Peter’s handwriting was everywhere—crammed into corners, covering geographic landmarks, crawling all around the compass rose. It was largely indecipherable, but I could make out a few mathematical formulas, a proper noun or two. A select list of Blakely women’s names with birth and death dates scribbled next to them had been erased and rewritten so often that the paper had ripped and been patched at the back with clean scraps and tape. I didn’t recognize them all, though Lucy, born in 1867, had to be that great-grandaunt whose picture hung in our hallway, Helen, born in 1650, the pale subject of the painting nearby. The final name and birth date was my own. This last was written in the rich blue ballpoint pen Peter had received as a gift from a colleague just a week before, and the writing made him seem both far away and still close by. The diffusion of him frightened me.

  Still, what gave me greatest pause were the three spiraling circles that my father had drawn across the full length of the map, all connected by a single, careful pen stroke. Three twisting snail shells. Six snakes, each pair entwined, converging in the center of the wood beside Urizon. Looking at them made me dizzy, like those hypnotic mazes that would hide inside my eyes if I stared too long at their patterns without blinking, imposing their ghosts onto the next plain space I’d see.

  Matthew ran a finger along the uppermost circle, whose middle curled to a peak south and west of Urizon and then spun out to encompass Mr. Abbott’s land, along the west edge of the wood. There were, I realized, two ways of looking at each spiral, impossible to catch concurrently except for at their centers, where, if I squinted, the curls looked like small clasped hands. Another optical illusion, the lumpy vase that hid between the lovers, forcing distinction between shadow and light. One path in toward the center, Matthew’s index finger turning, and the opposite path out.