by Adam McOmber
Such memories of my naïveté are painful even now.
• • •
Nathan left us there in the ruin that spring evening after our discussion of Ariston Day’s Temple, cigarette smoke trailing behind him as he made his way toward the path that led through the southern woods. I followed him with my gaze for as long as I could, watching as his red uniform coat dimmed and finally disappeared in the shadows of the trees. The air was becoming cool as dew set in, and I felt my consciousness drifting, mingling with the old gods. I wondered about Nathan and the trouble he was involving himself in at the Temple of the Lamb. I wondered about Maddy too—what would become of her should anything happen to him?
“We have to do something, Jane,” she said quietly behind me. There was a new desperation in her voice.
“What do you suggest?” I asked.
“Is tying him to a heavy piece of furniture out of the question?”
I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath of spring air. “I don’t know, Maddy,” I said finally. “Do you really think we could catch him?”
CHAPTER 2
In the weeks after Nathan disappeared from the Temple of the Lamb, Maddy fell into a depression, and I became lost in a state of strife unlike any I’d ever known. My uncanny talent, which had possessed me since my mother’s death, was stirred into a frenzy. I experienced odd sensations at every turn, and no matter how much concentration I applied, I could not quell the clamoring. Maddy and I no longer took pleasure in walking the bright arcades at Regent Street, arms linked and skirts rustling. No longer did we enjoy the yellow warmth of shop windows or the shining surfaces of black carriages as they passed by on fog-damp streets. Everywhere, we heard the desperate nature of Nathan’s case, and we wondered what we might have done to save him.
Maddy couldn’t make it any farther than Shaftsbury one dark afternoon as we attempted a stroll through fashionable St. Giles. Cinders rained from a darkening sky, and newsboys, caked in brick-colored mud, chanted their terrible mass: two weeks out and still no sign—Inspector Vidocq confounded—Is Nathan Ashe in the river?—Will it be murder in Southwark? We were near the poulter’s stalls, where plucked chickens were displayed on benches, smooth flesh glowing beneath flaring jets of gas. We’d intended to visit the shop called Indigo to see a line of afternoon dresses known as the New Transcendent, a title that brought to mind shimmering gauze and a profusion of blossoms, which Maddy, at one time, wouldn’t have dared to miss. She leaned against the filthy wheel of a cart selling oranges and pomegranates while the fruit monger, a man with boils, leered at her. “Make the newsboys stop, Jane,” she said. “I can’t hear any more about poor Nathan.”
I glared at the nearest boy, a large child in a ruined hat from the previous century. “You’re making my friend sick,” I said. It pleased me to protect Maddy so. In the shadow of a passing hackney-coach, the newsboy’s face became a dark idol, impenetrable and streaked with ages of dirt. His mouth opened, and though I couldn’t hear his reply over the clatter of the coach, I could feel its meaning. Two weeks out and no sign: Nathan Ashe, our dearest friend, was likely dead or worse.
Though Nathan had become a figure of questionable character due to his affiliations with the Temple, the mystery of his disappearance was something of a local sensation because of his father’s prominence. Men discussed the case in such establishments as The Unicorn, a weather-stained coffee house where Nathan himself had once spent hours alone, smoking and pretending to contemplate the pastorals of Barrett Browning. These idle men drank black Italian coffee from bone china cups and sifted through discrepancies that might prove to be clues. Why, for instance, hadn’t Nathan taken a pint at his regular spot, the Silver Horne, before going to the Temple of the Lamb on the evening of his disappearance? And why was he seen with a male nymph in Southwark—a petite and foreign-looking youth?
Outside the coffee house, rent girls and other lowborn ephemera regarded the details of Nathan’s face inked on posters that fluttered from black iron lampposts—his high pale cheekbones, architectural brow, and eyes that seemed, even on paper, like holes that lead to a system of tunnels in the earth. Nathan Ashe was becoming more myth than man, and everyone in London was touching him, running their fingers over the contours of his absent body. They knew his list of qualities. He was the well-born son of Lord William Ashe. He’d been a soldier in Lord Wellington’s brigade in the Crimea and was adept at archery and fond of pistols. He possessed a kind of ethereal Saxon beauty, and when he entered a room, those present—no matter how they felt about him socially—paused to admire his stature. Nathan disliked the law and abhorred his father’s House of Lords. He was a free spirit who read poetry and, on more than one occasion, was found curled on a doorstep after a drunken night at the Silver Horne. But none who could make such a list knew the true Nathan Ashe that Maddy and I came to know. He was filled with the sort of fret and despair that needed tending. At the same time, he acted as though we were his equals, taking us on adventures most would have considered too dangerous for young women. We were the ones who truly loved him, and yet we too were left without him.
• • •
After Maddy had composed herself at the fruit cart near Shaftsbury, we managed to continue our walk, passing dress shops and smoking salons in St. Giles with barely a glance as we attempted to avoid coming within earshot of another newsboy. We ducked into one of Maddy’s favorite tea shops, the Queen’s Host, a setting that normally provided quiet respite in the busy shopping district. The interior was decked in white Italian marble and gold trim. China cabinets lined the wall, displaying saucers and cups painted with scenes of waterfalls and gilded pine forests. Maddy had great appreciation for the linen-clothed tables that were placed at discreet distances, so one could keep conversations private.
Only a handful of customers were in the Queen’s Host that day, and there, sitting near the window over an untouched cup of Darjeeling, was Pascal Paget, Maddy’s French ward. Though younger by a few years, Pascal had become a kind of confidant for Nathan, Maddy, and me. She tensed at the sight of him now though, as recent events had altered her opinion of him. “Did you know he would be here, Jane?” she asked.
“Of course not,” I said.
“I want to leave.”
“You can’t keep avoiding him,” I said. “We’ll go and say hello.” I gave her a slight push to start her moving across the white marble floor.
The story of their friendship and Pascal’s eventual dependence on Maddy for both room and board was straightforward enough. Maddy first made his acquaintance outside a small French-style café near Charing Cross. He’d been using a piece of charcoal to draw a picture of a street in the walled city of Nimes where white chickens wandered on cobblestone and irises made silent observance from tilted window boxes. She’d found his long artist’s hair and wistful manner so picturesque she simply had to stop and speak with him.
One of Maddy’s greatest gifts was that she could seemingly extract the heart and history of a common stranger using only a modicum of effort. People often lost their guard in the beguilement of her presence and spilled forth stories that they would have hesitated to tell even a boon companion. Pascal was no exception, and soon enough, Maddy was sitting next to him at his easel, and he was telling her how he’d lost his love in France and had come to London in order to find the boy again.
Maddy prided herself in being as progressive as her father, and she acted as if it didn’t surprise her that Pascal’s interest d’amore was a young man instead of a young woman. She elegantly crossed her legs at the ankle, took a sip of her demitasse, and told him in no uncertain terms that he must tell her everything.
Pascal had met his beloved friend, Alexander Hartford, at the Musée du Vieux in the French city of Nimes. Alexander was a student from America, son of a wealthy shipping magnate, who was making a study of medieval art as a way toward earning his degree. The boys struck up a conversation in front of a painting called Sleep and Death in which two dark-haired yo
uths lay on a bed, entangled in each other’s arms. Sheets were twisted into a hectic landscape, and the figures in the painting appeared as though they were not brothers, as stated in the myth, but lovers.
“Isn’t it interesting that we supposed Christians are often drawn to pagan imagery?” Alexander said to Pascal. “It seems that a showing of a god—any god—will stimulate.”
“What sort of stimulation should this produce?” Pascal asked, pointing toward the painting of Sleep and Death.
“That depends on your disposition, I suppose,” Alexander said.
Pascal gave him a sheepish smile. “Sleep and Death appeal to me greatly.”
“Which of them do you imagine yourself to be?” Alexander asked, trying for an academic tone and drawing closer to Pascal in the process.
The French boy took a moment to look at the two shirtless youths in their frenzy of bedclothes. “I’m not sure. They seem very much alike—nearly twins.”
“You must be Sleep, then,” Alexander said. “Sleep is, at times, indecisive. Death, however, always knows his aim and purpose.”
During the days that followed, the boys became fast friends, and a feeling rose between them, the sort of emotion that triumphs over dust. They walked arm in arm down the narrow streets of Nimes, drinking red wine in midnight cafés, and spending nights together in small, rented rooms, reenacting the scene of Sleep and Death. What came between them was Ariston Day himself. Alexander found a pamphlet, tucked into a street corner kiosk, promising enlightenment. The pamphlet called for young men of intelligence and means to come to London and gather at a hall called the Temple of the Lamb, where a great man would provide means to experience what they’d only heard about in myth. “The winds of the cosmos will blow through your very soul,” the pamphlet read. “And your heart will become the gateway to a new Paradise.” As a student of theology, Alexander found he could not resist such a calling; he came to the Temple to see if true enlightenment could be achieved, and Pascal followed him there to London, hoping to rekindle what they’d once had. He was, in fact, the puckish nymph mentioned as being seen with Nathan in Southwark on the night of the disappearance.
• • •
After the formalities of greeting in the Queen’s Host, Pascal ventured, once again, into the story of Nathan’s final night. He seemed to believe that the very act of repeating the tale provided penance for his imagined sins. I tried to signal him with my eyes that it was an inopportune moment to tell the story, with Maddy in such a fragile state, but Pascal was too agitated to pay me any mind.
“How do I explain it in English?” he said, searching the room, never looking at us directly. “I feel I am en purgatoire, going over that night in my mind, wondering what I might have done differently.” He adjusted the cuff of his plum-colored suit—a brazen garment brought from France where, he assured us, everyone believed meringue and alabaster were colors of a hopeful future. Pascal had a lovely face, so delicate and soft that I found myself often wanting to touch his cheek and offer kindness.
“Master Nathan was behaving so strangely,” Pascal continued. “He was complaining that his hand had gone numb and then his leg, so I decided to remain at his side. But just before whatever theatrical event they had planned for the evening was about to commence, I was escorted out of the Temple by two rough boys—two savages—who said it had been decreed that I didn’t have what it took to be a Fetch. I was no longer welcome.”
“Fetches,” Maddy said, the flesh around her eyes red from her tears. “I don’t think I can hear another word about them.”
Fetches were what the followers of Ariston Day called themselves, a name that I gathered alluded to a double-self or doppelgänger. Nathan had been a Fetch since his return from the Crimean War.
Pascal said, “It doesn’t matter what you call them, mademoiselle. It’s all a foolish game. I tried to get the attention of Alexander as I was being dragged out, but he wouldn’t come to my aid. He’s become so brutish, like all the rest of them. And then I looked for Nathan, and he was nowhere to be found. Soon enough I was on the street, staring up at the plume of yellow smoke rising from the awful Southwark glue factory and wondering how I would get home to Hampstead.”
Pascal seemed so small and helpless there in the busy tea shop. He had the dark appearance of the French, black hair and shadowed eyes, and he smelled of the wilting chrysanthemum he wore in his lapel. His hands, clasped and resting on the table, looked as though they were made of fragile porcelain.
“Nathan has a way of escaping when he wants to,” I said, attempting comfort. “It isn’t your fault, Pascal dear.”
“Don’t defend him, Jane,” Maddy snapped. Her face was drawn, and her dark hair was wound tightly in a braided bun, a glittering pin stabbed through its center. “If Pascal and his beloved Alexander hadn’t dragged Nathan down to Southwark in the first place—if they hadn’t indoctrinated him into that unholy theater, that cult—then we’d all be here, safe.”
Pascal nearly crumbled at her words. As for a rebuttal, he could only muster, “Alexander is not my beloved. He will no longer even speak to me. He says if I cannot be a Fetch with him, he has no use for me.”
I was particularly sensitive when it came to Alexander Hartford, as I knew how much Pascal cared for him. “Alexander will come around,” I said. “And Nathan is his own man. These were all his choices. We shall simply have to wait for news.”
My calm was a facade that I feared would crack at the slightest jarring. I was, perhaps, more worried about Nathan than anyone else because I knew the extent to which our experiments with my abilities had exposed him to unnatural forces, making him susceptible to their influences. I felt nearly as culpable as Ariston Day for leading him astray. And then there was also the last terrible evening Nathan spent with Maddy and me. So much had happened there in the southern woods on that final night. I only half-remembered most of those events, and I wasn’t ready to consider my own actions. Not yet.
I ordered a cup of Chinese tea for Maddy and me, to soothe our nerves. When the host returned, she brought not only the tea but also a newspaper neatly folded on a tray. Pascal had apparently requested the paper before our arrival. It seemed even in the Queen’s Host, Maddy and I couldn’t escape the tangle of London ink. At least the paper was the Herald, which primarily printed the truth about Nathan’s case. The Magnet and the Athenaeum, two lesser rags, claimed to provide interviews with so called intimates, though most such interviews proved to be creative pieces of fiction. Nathan had very few intimates, after all. His disposition prevented such things. The Herald came closest to fact, describing fragmentary reports of the events leading up to Nathan’s disappearance.
Night workers from the Southwark glue factory gave testimony as to having seen Nathan Ashe enter the Temple of the Lamb on the evening of June 16, but none could likewise attest to seeing him leave. The Temple, as the Herald reported, was a defunct pleasure dome on the docks of the Thames and home to a sprawling, disreputable tavern as well as a recently born sect known as the Theater of Provocation. Little was understood about this “theater” other than that it was open only to select members, and its proprietor, Ariston Day, was fond of pulling the rebellious sons of wealthy and prominent families into his fold. It was there that Day showed them what one of the youths described as “new geometries with which to measure the earth.”
These young men, like Nathan, wanted to dissolve their bond to tradition and the confines of rational human experience. Mr. Day reportedly had interests in dream theory as well as what was being called “immersive reality,” in which a subject’s mind was manipulated in a false environment for the possibility of reaching an ecstatic state, an opening of the soul.
Before Nathan was fully indoctrinated into the theater and began refusing to divulge information about its secret rituals, he told us some of Day’s theories. “Mr. Day says the soul of London is diseased like a body can become diseased, and one day we Fetches will be the ones to heal it.”
&n
bsp; “That sounds rather ominous,” Maddy said.
“Not at all,” Nathan replied. “It’s a pure thought—maybe the only pure thought in the whole city.”
“How does one go about curing a city?” I asked.
Nathan smiled the big rakish smile I was accustomed to, but there was something different this time, as if an edge had broken off of it. “The only way to cure a city,” he said, “is to make it stop being a city.”
“And what do you expect that to look like?” Maddy asked.
“A garden,” Nathan said, “untouched by human hands.”
Beyond descriptions of Nathan’s final evening, the Herald also reported the details of the search through the slums of Southwark conducted by the aging Inspector Vidocq, cofounder of Scotland Yard and famed model for the rational detective in the stories of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Vidocq, a dominating presence and an old friend of Nathan’s father, Lord William Ashe, had come out of retirement to pursue the case. Before leaving his home in Paris, he was said to have gone to the nave of Saint-Denys du Saint-Sacrement and prayed to St. Simeon, patron of detectives, for strength and wisdom. But when he’d arrived in London he found himself shaken by our Babylon. Our city proved a language untranslatable.
Reporters documented Vidocq’s comings and goings across the city as he questioned owners of pubs and shops. He was said to be surprisingly broad shouldered for one so old and wore a black coat and a dark hat, not adhering to the frivolous styles of France that Pascal described. His face was graven and white, and he had nearly colorless eyes. His air was of one who gazed at life through a lens of death, and Maddy told me we needed to take care, lest he discover the secret compartments in Nathan’s character. She was adamant that only she and I should know the true Nathan. As always, it seemed she wanted to keep our boy’s heart in a treasury box, untouched and free from harm.