by Adam McOmber
I knew far too much about Mary-Thomas’s supposed spirit guide, the Golden Cloud. Nathan loved to regale us with her stories of their correspondence. The Cloud was not a person but an incorporeal field of bright dust that spoke to Mary-Thomas through the aether. “Do you realize Mother’s spirit guide has visited both Jupiter and Mars?” he asked once. “The Cloud apparently prefers Mars because the landscape there is more inviting—beautiful red hills and all that.” At this, Nathan broke down, nearly crying from the hilarity of it.
Maddy expressed her sympathy to Mary-Thomas while I studied the parlor, looking for remnants of Nathan. I was simultaneously excited and filled with dread at the prospect of touching another of his possessions and what I would see next.
In one corner of the parlor hung a painting Nathan had done as a child, showing the Malebolge, the eighth circle of Dante’s Hell. It was an endearing piece of work despite its macabre subject matter. Poorly drawn sinners flailed in the oval-shaped ditches of the Malebolge, waving their clawlike hands in an attempt to get the attention of the viewer. The drawing emitted a low frequency, nothing terribly urgent, and I wondered, for a moment, if perhaps the objects had already shown me all they needed of the painted forest.
“I’m afraid my invitation wasn’t extended entirely for social reasons,” Mary-Thomas said, confirming my suspicions. “I was hoping you girls might help me do a summoning here. If the three of us call out to Nathan together, perhaps he will respond.”
“A séance, Lady Ashe? You’re not saying you think he’s—” Maddy asked, sounding honestly frightened.
“Oh, no,” she replied. “Even the spirits of the living can be summoned under the right circumstance. Lord Ashe doesn’t approve of these irregular habits of mine, of course, but I’ve learned from my years of summoning that such practices are valuable. The human mind can conjure such a wide variety of useful communicants.”
We were compelled to agree to her experiment, though I was fairly sure a séance or summoning would not help our cause. Mary-Thomas asked the maid, whom she called Vicky, to draw the heavy parlor drapes, and we were left in what seemed at first complete darkness. Then slowly my eyes adjusted, and the gray shapes of Maddy and Mary-Thomas appeared. Mary-Thomas produced a knitted scarf and wound it tightly around her hand. I recognized the scarf as one that Nathan often wore at Christmastime.
“We’ll focus on this scarf,” Mary-Thomas said. “Think of pleasant times with dear Nathan. Such thoughts will act as sweet honey to draw his spirit.”
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply and audibly. The clock ticked on the mantel, and somewhere in Ashe High House, a dog barked. We joined hands around the tea set. I touched Mary-Thomas gingerly, attempting to dampen the transference, as I often had with Nathan. But she obviously possessed some element of authentic psychic strength. I could feel my talent being pulled out of me and examined. A brief frown darkened her face, but soon enough she was speaking in a low monotone, asking Nathan to respond.
“We who love you need to understand,” she said. “Come to us, Nathan. Tell us what’s become of you.”
As she spoke these words, I felt movement—a sort of churning pressure—in my stomach. At first, I attributed the feeling to indigestion, but the movement continued and became more persistent. It nearly felt as though something was trying to force itself out of my body. I was glad when Mary-Thomas released my hand and opened her eyes.
“It isn’t working,” she said. “I don’t feel anything. The scarf isn’t strong enough to draw him. Do either of you have anything belonging to Nathan—something more dear to him? He loved you girls so. You might carry an object strong enough to draw his attention.”
I told her I had nothing, and then we both turned to Maddy, who seemed unsure whether she should speak. Finally, she said, “I have this.” She pulled on a silver chain that hung around her neck, and from beneath her blouse she produced the silver childhood spoon that I’d asked to experiment with at La Dometa. I wondered if it had ever been locked in her treasure box at all. The shamed looked on her face told me it had likely been hanging around her neck the entire time.
Mary-Thomas stared at the spoon, and tears brimmed in her eyes. “Nathan gave that to you, Madeline?” she asked.
“I cherish it,” Maddy said.
“He must love you so,” Mary-Thomas said. “Hand it to me, Jane. I’ll take it only for a moment.”
Maddy unfastened the clasp and without thinking passed the spoon to me so that I could pass it on to Mary-Thomas. As soon as I touched the metal that had been warmed by Maddy’s skin, I couldn’t control my reaction. My body was flung back into the chair, and with a thunderclap I was back on the stage in the painted forest, only this time, something was terribly wrong. The whole scene was tilted. Trees, like bony hands, reached up from the stonework of the floor, and the stars stared down like red, rheumatic eyes. I heard inhuman cries, and then a braying scream. In the clearing, the great stag was on its knees. The Red Goddess was on top of the animal, straddling it, and her mouth was fastened on its muscular neck. The stag screamed louder still. Blood ran down its pelt as the Red Goddess drank hungrily. I wanted to run to the creature’s aid, to fight the Red Goddess back. But when I moved, she rose up to look at me, and I saw her face clearly for the first time. Her mouth and chin were soaked in gore. But the face—I knew the face, and I stood awestruck. It was my mother’s own. Her eyes were full of red starlight.
The Mother-Goddess opened her mouth and howled at me in warning.
I cried out in the forest, and I awoke, screaming in Lady Ashe’s parlor. My stomach convulsed again. The smell of Nathan was everywhere; I was drowning in it. Dropping the spoon, I stood up and rushed to the foyer, through the front door, and fell onto the grass of the hill, retching and fearing I would vomit. My stomach calmed just as quickly as it had spasmed, and then Maddy was at my side.
“My God, are you all right, Jane?” she said. “What happened?”
“A vision,” I whispered, breathlessly.
Mary-Thomas appeared at the doorway. “Was it Nathan? Did he contact you?”
Maddy answered for me. “Jane’s ill. She’s not been feeling well all morning.”
“Oh, my dear,” said Mary-Thomas. “You ought to have told me. Should I send for the doctor?”
“I’m fine,” I said feebly, allowing Maddy to help me stand.
“I’m so sorry, Jane,” Mary-Thomas said. “I should have known none of us were ready for this. I’m not feeling myself either. Please come in and rest, at any rate. Take some tea. It will calm you. I’m going to lay down for a bit.”
“Are you strong enough to go back inside?” Maddy whispered.
I nodded, and she helped me back to the parlor.
Before leaving us there, Mary-Thomas paused and said she’d been thinking of Michelangelo’s Pietà, which she’d seen during her travels in Rome with Lord Ashe. I could only half-listen to her story. My mind was still filled with the image of the red and screaming woman who wore my mother’s face. I could see the blood of the stag dripping down her chin and neck.
“The sculpture was there in the basilica,” Mary-Thomas said, “as big as life itself—the Virgin with Jesus in her arms. And I cannot help but think that at least the Virgin had a final moment with the body of her son. What happened to him later was a mystery, but at least she was able to hold him when they took him down off the cross. She felt the weight of his body. She looked at his face. But what am I to do? I cannot hold Nathan. We don’t know if he is alive or dead. Everyone tells me I must be strong. But how am I to gather strength if there is never any force that will close this open door?”
“Vidocq will close it,” I assured her.
“Vidocq is my husband’s solution, not mine,” she said, turning to leave. “I’m afraid my headache is getting worse, girls. My thoughts are scraping against the insides of my skull.” She passed down the hall, leaving us alone.
Maddy turned to look at me. “What was the vision that m
ade you so ill?” she asked me.
I shook my head. The mad image of my mother hovered before me, and I realized I had to lie to Maddy. “It wasn’t so much a vision as an ache in my stomach,” I said.
“Provoked by my necklace?”
“Nathan’s possessions have been particularly agitated recently. I thought that meant something initially, but I’ve realized it doesn’t. You know how my talent is, Maddy. It doesn’t make much sense. I saw colors when I touched the spoon and heard a loud thundering, then my stomach tensed.”
“That’s all?” she asked.
“That’s all,” I replied.
She studied my face carefully. I could feel the trust between us breaking.
“You know what we have to do now,” Maddy said, “if you’re feeling well enough.”
“What would that be?”
“We have to investigate Nathan’s room.”
“Maddy, no,” I said. “I’m sure Vidocq has already made that investigation.”
“Yes, but he didn’t know what to look for or where to look, did he?”
“And apparently we do?”
“Vidocq said it himself. We knew Nathan best,” Maddy replied, “and yet not even we know everything. His room might provide a clue about what he was up to before he disappeared. And there is the fact of the secret compartment, Jane. You know the one. I’m sure Vidocq didn’t find it.”
“What if Lady Ashe returns?”
“She’ll think we’ve merely taken our leave. Nathan’s rooms are on the other side of the house. That’s the downfall of expansive living—one’s house is no longer entirely one’s own.”
I agreed to go, but on the condition that our “investigation” would be brief and that we would alter nothing. Maddy and I left the parlor together, making our way deeper into the mansion.
CHAPTER 14
Nathan’s rooms created a powerful confluence of sensation. The objects there were all so personal to him, and they called out to me. I felt faint in the presence of their chorus. I didn’t want to see the monstrous woman who wore my mother’s face again or feel the horrible pain churning in my stomach—as if something was inside of me that demanded release. I raised the feverfew to my throat and held it there, allowing the silence of it to calm me. But it wasn’t enough. The objects moaned for me, summoning me. They seemed to know their master was in absence, and they mourned him.
“Are you all right here, Jane?” Maddy asked, looking once again concerned.
I nodded. “We passed a vase in the hall,” I said. “Could you go and gather some flowers from it?”
Maddy did as I asked, returning with a bouquet of dripping white lilies. I held them to my chest, finally able to breathe and to see the room as merely a room—more spacious than my own, with wainscoting and low-light gas lamps embedded in the wall. Alongside the lamps were the familiar pen-and-ink drawings that illustrated stories from Arthurian legend, one of Nathan’s boyhood interests. My attention was drawn to a particular piece of art that showed Lancelot in partial armor kneeling in a wood near Glastonbury, apparently praying to a tree. The expression on the knight’s face was one of reverence. Both his elegance and his long hair reminded me of Nathan. Then, of course, there was the tree, a sturdy oak, of the kind my mother said had given birth to me. Thinking of my recent vision, and then of her holding me as she told me that story, made me feel uneasy.
Maddy and I had visited Nathan’s room many times before, though, of course, we were not actually permitted to do so by the rules of the house. Nathan snuck us in during evenings when his parents were in the city and showed us his collections, which were largely composed of objects and talismans of the supernatural. He was especially proud of a stringed lute that once belonged to Percy Shelley, the poet. Shelley had reportedly played the lute on the deck of his boat, the Ariel, as the schooner drifted off the coast of Italy. After the wreck of the Ariel, which killed Shelley and his fellow sailors, the lute was discovered on the shore by a fisherman. It made its way onto the black market and finally into Nathan’s hands. Though not a poet, Nathan considered himself a kind of outsider along the lines of Shelley and Lord Byron, and the lute became an emblem of that connection. “You know, girls,” he said on the day he showed us the lute for the first time, “it’s said that when they dragged poor Shelley’s body from the ocean, he had no flesh on any part of him. He was a skeleton dressed in poet’s clothes.”
“That’s macabre,” Maddy said.
“Sometimes I sit and think of those dead hands strumming these strings,” he continued. “Here, Jane, touch the lute, and tell me if you can feel the presence of Shelley’s hands.”
I sighed and put my hand on the instrument. There was neither music nor death in its soul. What I heard was water, a great abundance of it, moving and crashing through its wooden body. I took my hand away.
“Well?” Nathan asked.
“The lute is cursed,” I replied. “Its owner will meet the same fate as Shelley unless said owner stops acting like such a fool.”
Nathan lowered his gaze, putting his fingers on the strings. “I thought you were serious.”
“Only you would be excited about a curse,” Maddy said. “One day when you stop being so morbid, perhaps you’ll find that people finally enjoy your company.”
More than we cared for curses or his occult collections, Maddy and I were in awe of Nathan’s personal space—particularly his bed and his grooming items. The dolls his mother had made for him in childhood, all in a little line on the windowpane, caused us to coo, and we even liked the smell of the room, a mixture of talc and shaving liniment.
It was during one such adventure in his bedroom that Nathan showed us the piece of paneling above his headboard that could be removed. Behind the panel was a secret compartment that he said not even Lord Ashe knew about. “I made it myself,” he said, “by carving out the wall.”
In the hollow, Nathan kept a wallet of money in case he found he should ever run into an emergency, a picture of both Madeline and I (fully clothed) taken using Adolphus Lee’s daguerreotype machine, a bottle of bourbon, and a pistol.
“Dear God,” Maddy said, “it’s as though we’re looking into the storehouse of an outlaw.”
This pleased Nathan to no end, as it was the exact persona he was going for. We’d each taken a drink from the bottle of bourbon and felt quite wicked because of it.
It was painful then to now return to Nathan’s inner sanctum under such a somber circumstance. The titillation that had occurred in this room prior was driven out by the dark spirit of his absence. The draperies were drawn, and the room was full of silence.
“I can smell him still,” Maddy said quietly.
She went to remove the panel from above the headboard, careful not to make a sound, laying it on Nathan’s pillow. Everything was in its place, even the pistol. But something had been added, something neither of us had seen before—a small leather journal, bound with a piece of rope. It was filthy, nearly ruined.
Maddy took it out carefully, unbound the pages and read the first line.
April 19, 18—Arrival at Malta
“It’s a war journal,” she said. “I didn’t even know he kept one.”
“Nor did I.”
Nathan had written us few letters during his station on Malta. The letters were sparse of actual occurrences and were instead filled with facts about the island. During his tour, Nathan had not seen the front. Through some bureaucratic error, he had not been sent on to Sevastopol in the Black Sea, where his brigade was intended. Instead, he and his brigade had resided on the island of Malta, off the coast of Italy, for months.
He wrote to us that the island fascinated him because it was a wellspring of myth. “Do you realize that the preserved hand of Saint John the Baptist is said to be hidden here? Malta was purportedly where Saint Paul shipwrecked after his missionary journey and began writing his epistles.”
Nathan’s letters became increasingly morose due to his lack of physical activ
ity and general psychological stagnation. His one remaining interest seemed to be the cloister of monks who inhabited the island, known as the Brotherhood of Saint John. “The brothers are all quite Romantic and enlightened,” he wrote, “and I believe they know things that other men do not. They even seem to be involved in some secret task, and it’s my aim to understand it.”
I’d dismissed the notion of the brotherhood’s hidden purpose as just another demonstration of Nathan’s imagination, left to its devices in his boredom.
I’d come to know well that he believed many people possessed secret knowledge, not due to any infirmity on his part but because he’d been raised in a wealthy and stable household with kind parents and had little else to do than allow his thought-life to expand. As a younger man he’d come up with dozens of instances concerning individuals (the Lord Mayor, Lady Maul of Islington, and the bizarre-looking fellow who organized the human curiosities at St. Bartholomew’s Fair, to name a few) who were concealing arcane arts just beneath their modern facades.
I’d argued that people simply weren’t as interesting as all that. The common man worried about his bank account, ate his dinner, and took himself off to bed by nine. The closest this man came to ancient sorcery was the prayers he mumbled under his bedcovers.
My guess was that Nathan’s journal of the war was filled with more of his ponderings about the Brotherhood of Saint John and their secret knowledge, and I didn’t think that would make for useful reading. Maddy, however, thought differently. She wrapped the journal in her handkerchief and handed it to me. “Don’t touch it directly,” she said. “It might produce more stomach pains.”
“We can’t just take it,” I said.