Elizabeth and Zenobia

by Jessica Miller

  ‘Good morning, Miss Elizabeth,’ said Mrs Purswell as I backed away stammering apologies.

  ‘It’s quite remarkable the way she does that,’ said Zenobia.

  ‘Does what?’ I whispered.

  ‘Just appears. Out of nowhere. The art of the sudden and unsettling entrance is not an easy one to master. Believe me. I’ve tried.’

  Mrs Purswell cleared Father’s empty plate and folded his napkin over her arm. She set a place for me and one beside me, without my having to ask, for Zenobia.

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmured. But my thanks were addressed to thin air, because Mrs Purswell was gone.

  ‘Remarkable,’ breathed Zenobia. ‘Now’—she turned to me—‘I’ve been thinking about last night’s séance.’

  It would’ve been nice to have finished buttering my toast before the talk came round to séances.

  ‘It was not a success,’ continued Zenobia.

  ‘Perhaps not.’ I spread the butter carefully up to the crust and then reached for the marmalade.

  ‘It was presumptuous of me to expect to commune with our Spirit Presence straightaway.’

  ‘So you do still think there is a Spirit Presence?’ It had been foolish of me to hope the failed séance might spell an end to Zenobia’s ghostly quest.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you do want to keep looking for it?’

  ‘We will continue to seek it out, yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ I bit down on a toast triangle.

  ‘But I now believe we are dealing with what Madame Lucent terms a Recalcitrant Spirit.’

  ‘And what is that exactly?’

  ‘I’m glad you asked,’ said Zenobia. She opened her book and began to read:

  ‘Some Spirits like to Reveal themselves Immediately. It is on Account of Spirits such as these that we hear Tales of Rapping and Moaning, Tales of Respectable Elderly Aunts being Possessed by the long-drowned ghosts of Cornish Sailors and uttering Strings of Foul Profanity, and calling for Rum to be added to their Tea. But there are Other Spirits—Spirits that are Shy, Unsociable, even Secretive. They are Loath to make contact with our Waking World. But! With care it is Sometimes Possible to draw them out. I myself have—’

  ‘She likes talking about herself, doesn’t she.’ ‘Fine,’ said Zenobia. ‘We’ll skip that part.

  ‘Other guides to the Spirit World give only the Vaguest Clues to Locating the Shy and Secretive Spirit. They suggest the Seeker hope to be struck by such Vague and Tenebrous Phenomena as a Feeling of Acute Sadness or an Itch at the Nape of the Neck—both things which might indicate the Presence of a Spirit but which might equally indicate the Presence of a Scalp Condition. Fortunately, I Myself have developed a Strategy which has been Praised—’

  Maybe Zenobia saw me rolling my eyes because here she closed the book and said, ‘Well, in essence, Madame Lucent says we are to walk through the house, room to room, carrying with us a single flower—a flower in bud or very early blossom—which will act as a kind of divining rod, alerting us when we are near the Spirit.’

  ‘It’s very…poetic,’ I said carefully. ‘But I don’t see how it works.’

  ‘Well this is the clever part,’ Zenobia said. She went to the sideboard and she plucked a bud from an arrangement of roses and ferns. ‘If, when we enter the room, the flower withers and dies, then we know that the Spirit Presence is…near.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s scientific! It’s a known fact that an arrangement of flowers cannot stay alive in a room inhabited by a Spirit Presence. Madame Lucent proves it in this very book—Chapter Nine: “Eleven and a Half Incontrovertible Proofs for the Existence of Spirits”!’

  ‘Well’—I looked at the roses on the sideboard, blooming and fragrant—‘there’s no ghost here.’

  ‘No Spirit Presence,’ corrected Zenobia. ‘Which means we’ll have to look elsewhere.’

  ‘We will?’

  ‘We will.’ She looked pointedly at my plate. ‘As soon as you’ve finished your toast.’

  I am not a fast eater, but I was especially slow finishing my last toast triangle. I had even planned to spend some time wiping crumbs and marmalade globules from my plate with my fingers, but as soon as I had taken my last bite, Mrs Purswell materialised to clear the table and Zenobia, armed with a creamy rosebud on a long green stem, started for the door.

  ‘The house is a lot cleaner looking,’ sniffed Zenobia. ‘That lovely layer of dust has been whisked away. I had been planning on taking some for my dust collection. Still, it retains a pleasant sort of dinginess.’

  We stood at the place where the entrance hall opened out into the front room, the same room Mrs Purswell had ushered us into when we arrived yesterday.

  ‘Now,’ Zenobia said. ‘I wonder where might be the best place to start. We could begin in there.’ She pointed at a half-open door that showed a room partly filled with an arrangement of taxidermied animals. ‘Or there’s an intriguingly dark corridor on the second floor that looked promising? But perhaps we should be methodical. Yes.’ She strode to the foot of the staircase. ‘We’ll go up to the top floor and work our way down.’ And she led the way up the stairs.

  We came to a heavy wooden door and Zenobia stopped. I stopped behind her, feeling fear start to prickle along my scalp and down my spine and wondering why I had followed Zenobia on her ghost hunt.

  ‘It’s not a ghost hunt, Elizabeth. It’s a search for a Spirit Presence. And I’ll tell you why you follow me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You follow me because there is one thing you’re frightened of more than ghosts or the black keys on the piano—truly pathetic things to be afraid of, if you ask me.’

  ‘It’s just that the black keys always sound so much more ominous.’

  ‘You’re afraid of being ignored. Of being alone.’

  That’s not true, I wanted to say. But it wouldn’t have been entirely accurate. So I said instead, ‘That’s not nice.’

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t,’ Zenobia replied, and she tested the door with outstretched fingers.

  It swung open.

  Sometimes I wondered why I was friends with Zenobia.

  She walked into the room with her arms straight out in front of her and the flower in her hands.

  ‘Well,’ she asked over her shoulder, ‘are you coming?’

  I told her I supposed I was.

  I took a small step through the door. As soon as I did there came a sharp shrieking sound. I covered my face with my hands. I felt the blood beating in my fingers and my heart beating against my ribs.

  ‘A loose floorboard,’ Zenobia said.

  ‘Oh.’ I tried the floorboard again with the tip of my shoe. It produced the same shrieking sound. Slowly, stepping around the loose board, I went through the doorway and into a small room with pink walls and a hard-looking sofa covered in pink velvet, the colour of tongue.

  I came up behind Zenobia. ‘Has the flower—?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ she said.

  The bud was closed tight. Its leaves were a fresh pale green, and it smelled of springtime. There was no Spirit Presence here.

  We went from room to room, and in each one Zenobia held the flower out in front of her. In each room the petals stayed white and fresh. And, as room after room proved itself free from ghosts, I began to feel easier.

  I started to enjoy exploring my new house. In the ballroom, I turned my face up to see my reflection in the mirrored ceiling. In the games room, I ran my palms over the green felt of the billiards table. I found, in some rooms, secret doors, covered over to look like part of the wallpaper, to linen cupboards or dumbwaiters.

  We came through a narrow corridor into a large room with a domed ceiling and walls lined with bookshelves.

  Zenobia started forward, but I caught her sleeve and tugged her back.

  ‘This is the library,’ I whispered. ‘Father could be at work. We don’t want to disturb him.’

  Zenobia stuck her neck around the door. ‘We won’t distur
b him,’ she said. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I curled my fingers around the door frame.

  ‘Quite sure.’ She beckoned me across the library to the window and pointed down to the garden, where Father was walking. He looked, from the third floor window, very small.

  ‘He must be collecting specimens,’ I said at last.

  ‘It doesn’t look like he’s collecting anything,’ said Zenobia. ‘See the way his hands are jammed into his jacket pockets.’

  ‘But he’s looking for specimens, at least.’

  ‘Shouldn’t he be looking at the ground, then? Looking for flowers and ferns and not staring off into the distance like that?’

  ‘In any case,’ I said firmly, ‘a refreshing walk will be doing him good.’

  I moved away from the window and looked about the library, breathing in the old-book smell that filled the air. In one corner was a stack of gramophone records. Near the top, one record stuck out: The Magic Flute. I eased it out of the pile and hid it carefully under the carpet.

  The library shelves were only half filled. Some books were still in boxes and others were piled on the floor. I read the titles on their spines.

  Ascomycota: From Spore to Stem

  Linnaean Taxonomy: A Modern Approach

  Cactaceae Considered

  Adventures with Anemones

  I picked up one book, a heavy brown one with the title etched in green. The Plant Kingdom by Dr Henry Murmur. This was Father’s first book, though he must have written hundreds by now. I flipped it open. Its pages were filled with small black type interrupted now and again by colour plates depicting plants. They were linked with lines and arrows like the branches of a family tree, showing how this dandelion was related to that nettle and so on.

  ‘What’s that?’ Zenobia looked over my shoulder.

  ‘It’s Father’s book,’ I said.

  ‘I thought it must be,’ she said, ‘on account of it looking impossibly dull.’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ I said. ‘I’ve never read it. But it’s funny—’

  I stopped.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Only that when I was young, Father used to read to me from his book. But he didn’t read the words written on the page. He made it into a story, instead. The story of the Plant Kingdom. It was a real place with a King and a Queen, and it was filled with strange plant-people with roots instead of feet. The Queen had rose-petal hair and the King had branches instead of hands. Do you remember?’

  It was hard to believe, now, that Father had ever told such stories, and yet he had. Some nights he had stayed up until midnight with me, telling me of adventures in the Plant Kingdom.

  ‘I remember the story was incredibly boring,’ said Zenobia, ‘all sunshine and flowers and talking hedgerows. But I liked the Plant King, with his tiny twisted eyes, like knots in wood, his beard of slithering worms and his mouth full of black beetles.’

  I shuddered. I had never liked the Plant King.

  ‘It wasn’t boring at all. It was—not that I’d expect you to understand—it was nice. Really nice. It used to be my favourite thing, Father reading to me from The Plant Kingdom at bedtime.’

  I flipped to the back of the book, then to the front. My eye caught on the first page. ‘I didn’t know it had a dedication. To dearest Tourmaline, it says.’

  Zenobia sucked her breath in slowly. ‘Elizabeth—’

  ‘Tourmaline. Tourmaline? That’s not Mother’s name. I wonder who Tourmaline could be.’

  ‘Elizabeth!’

  Zenobia grabbed me by both arms and spun me around to see Father standing in the doorway. The shoulders of his black jacket were beaded with raindrops. His face was clouded. His voice, when he spoke, was dark.

  ‘Who were you talking with just now, Elizabeth?’

  He stood, tall, over me. His shadow, even taller, spread across the carpet.

  I looked at Zenobia, guilty for what I was about to say.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘I see,’ said Father. At the same time, the open book snapped shut on my fingers, and I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to stop myself crying out.

  ‘I’m nobody now, am I?’ hissed Zenobia.

  I would need to take extra care to be nice to her later. Maybe if I found Father’s Complete Works of Poe and listened to her recite from her favourite poem, ‘The Raven’, she might forgive me.

  Father wriggled his arms out of his coat and lay it over the back of his chair. ‘I won’t join you for lunch,’ he said and he sat down at his desk. ‘Ask Mrs Purswell to send me up a tray.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  He turned in his chair so that his back was toward me. ‘You are excused.’

  I edged out the door and into the hallway. I caught up with Zenobia, who had already stormed away in a huff. We were halfway down the stairs before I realised I still held the book in my hands.

  That evening, I sat on the guest bedroom’s worn blue carpet and watched Zenobia launch into her third recitation of ‘The Raven’. I looked down at the blue flowers—tulips, I thought they were—covering the carpet whenever the poem grew too scary. ‘The Raven’ is a poem about a man who receives a midnight visit from a hellish talking raven, so I spent a lot of time looking at the blue carpet-tulips.

  Zenobia’s voice grew louder and the candle flickered lower with each stanza she recited.

  ‘“Be that word our sound of parting, bird or

  fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting—’

  And she did shriek and she upstarted as well, springing up onto the washbasin.

  ‘“Get thee back into the tempest and the

  night’s Plutonian Shore!

  Leave no black plume as a token of the lie thy

  soul has spoken,

  Leave my loneliness unbroken! Quit the bust

  above my door!”’

  For this last line, she stopped to take hold of a perfume bottle, and she hurled the bottle over my head and against the wall. It shattered, leaving an oily stain on the blue paper. And she yelled:

  ‘“Take thy beak out of my heart, and take thy

  form from off my door!”’

  Then she crouched low in the sink, one heel sinking into a cake of soap. She held her black skirt out around her to look like a pair of black wings and she made her voice into something like a croak.

  ‘Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”’

  ‘Very…nice,’ I said and I clapped for a polite amount of time.

  Zenobia stepped out of the sink, wiped the soap off her shoe, and made a sweeping bow. ‘I’m afraid that concludes my recitation,’ she said. ‘I’m too exhausted to perform further.’ And she lay stretched out on the carpet. ‘I think I’ll spend some time reading Mr Poe before bed.’

  She brought the candle close to her. I reached, in the absence of anything else to read, for The Plant Kingdom by Dr Henry Murmur. I sat by Zenobia in the small pool of candle light and tried to pay attention to what Father had written, sounding out the words (genus, stamen, anther, anemophily—I thought anemophily sounded particularly nice) that I hadn’t heard before. But soon my eyes were following the words down the page without my mind keeping up, and I had to go back to the top and start again. And again. And then again. Each time I started over, my eyes grew heavier. At last they fell closed.

  I crawled into bed half-asleep. When I woke, it was dark and Zenobia lay, breathing heavily, beside me. I sat up, listening to the creakings and murmurings of the house and the murky chiming of the clocks, different clocks in different rooms and none of them quite keeping time with the others. Quarter after eleven. Half past eleven. Quarter to midnight, and I was still lying awake. With small quiet movements, I lit the candle and took my book from the table by the bed. It had put me to sleep earlier and I hoped it would have the same effect now.

  It almost did.

  When the clock struck twelve, I had yawned my way three pages into a chapter on Asteraceae Taxacarum, the dandelion genus. My eyes f
elt gluey. My fingers fumbled clumsily over the pages.

  But the next page I turned to was not like the ones that had come before it. It was filled with looping green letters that unfurled across the paper like a vine growing over a trellis. I wondered if my tired eyes were tricking me. I moved the page closer to the candle. But the letters stayed the same. And now I could see that they spelled out a story:

  This tale begins in the way these tales often do. With a Kingdom. One full of green and growing things. And a King, who had branches instead of hands, and a Queen with rose-petal hair. The King and Queen were good and just, and they ruled their kingdom well. But they were not happy. They could never be happy. For they had no child.

  Until one day, a small miracle. The Queen sat on her throne. The Head Gardener churned through the soil on his roots towards her, unrolling a long petition as he did.

  ‘The Union of Roses and Carnations,’ said the Head Gardener, ‘requests permission to extend the northern perimeters of their flowerbeds.’

  ‘Approved,’ said the Queen.

  ‘The caterpillars,’ continued the Gardener, ‘request an amnesty from predatory avian parties during the larval season.’

  But the Queen didn’t reply. Instead, she brought one celery-green hand very close to her face. Then she spread her leafy palm wide and held it out to the Gardener.

  ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘It’s like—’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Gardener. ‘It’s very like—’

  It was very like a cocoon. Gossamer-soft. And with something growing inside it.

  The cocoon was placed under a lamp in the nursery to keep it warm day and night. Each day it grew, until one day it tore and split, and out tumbled a tiny boy with grassy hair and a healthy set of roots.

  And the King and Queen were happy at last.

  Here the page ended, and the story ended with it. The next pages showed only the small black print and the same precise diagrams that had come before it.

  In the morning, after a fitful sleep, I opened the book to the chapter on Asteraceae Taraxacum. The page with the green letters wasn’t there. I went to the start of the book and worked my way to the end. Nothing.