Elizabeth and Zenobia

by Jessica Miller

  I did as I was told.

  In a voice that was soft and solemn, Zenobia addressed her questions to Tourmaline.

  ‘O Tourmaline, what Troubles have you Seen?’

  ‘O Tourmaline, what Impels you to Wander these Halls?’

  ‘O Tourmaline, do you have a Message of Great Importance for us?’

  Each question was answered with silence. The ring stayed motionless in the air.

  I peered at Zenobia over the candle.

  ‘Fine then,’ snapped Zenobia. ‘If you think you can do better—’

  ‘I never said I thought I could do better—’

  ‘You didn’t need to,’ said Zenobia. ‘Here.’ She passed me the book.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I thought I might ask my own questions.’

  ‘These are the questions that Madame Lucent specifically recommends. Madame Lucent, may I remind you, is a Famed and Celebrated Clairvoyant with over forty years’ experience in dealing with the World Beyond the Veil.’

  ‘I know that, but—’

  Zenobia raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Perhaps you are also a Famed and Celebrated Clairvoyant?’

  ‘You know I’m not, but…But these questions are all wrong!’ I burst out. ‘Please, let me talk to her in my own way.’

  ‘Oh fine, then,’ Zenobia relented. ‘One question.’

  I let my mind go blank. When I opened my mouth, the words flowed.

  ‘Tourmaline,’ I said, ‘I’m Elizabeth. And I’d like to talk to you, if you’d like to talk to me. You see, you’re very special to someone who is very special to me. And this person is very sad to have lost you, but… but he won’t tell me any more than that. And I need to know more. So I was hoping that you might tell me. What happened to you, Tourmaline?’

  In the silence that followed my question, I looked at the ring. It stayed perfectly still.

  But the candle guttered. Long dark shadows spilled over the nursery’s walls. And the wallpaper seemed to move, only for an instant. But in that instant, I saw the plants and trees rustling and swaying, as if bent by a strong wind. And I saw shadowy leafy figures that moved like people between the plants. The mirror turned murky. The dark green shapes reflected in its glass were not shapes I could find anywhere in the room.

  My skin prickled.

  And then the candle flame glowed steady again. The wallpaper was still. And the mirror showed the nursery—the rocking horse, the cots, the Ouija board—once more.

  I leaned across the Ouija board. ‘Did you feel that?’ I asked.

  ‘Feel what, exactly?’ asked Zenobia.

  I stared at her in confusion. ‘Why, Tourmaline,’ I said. ‘She was all around us.’

  ‘Elizabeth, be serious,’ Zenobia snapped.

  ‘Are you saying you didn’t see the wallpaper? It was moving!’

  ‘I am trying to make contact with the world Beyond the Veil, Elizabeth. I am trying to speak with a Spirit Presence. I won’t be distracted from my purpose by… by wallpaper.’

  ‘But,’ I sputtered. I had no way of proving that what I had just seen was real. Still, I felt at the very bottom of my stomach that something had happened. Something important. I searched for the words to explain this feeling to Zenobia, but they didn’t come.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘if you’ll kindly hand the book back to me, we can continue the séance properly.’

  It was late in the night, now—perhaps even early in the morning—and our candle had burnt down to a pool of wax. Zenobia had asked every question in Madame Lucent’s book. Some she had even asked twice.

  None of the questions had received a response. But I remembered how the wallpaper had sprung to life and the feeling that Tourmaline was nearer than ever before, and I didn’t lose hope.

  Zenobia clapped her book shut.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘You can’t give up!’

  ‘I should have given up a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I’ve followed Madame Lucent’s instructions to the letter, and I’m no closer to making contact with a Spirit Presence than I was when I first arrived at Witheringe House.’

  ‘But it’s not just some Spirit Presence we’re trying to make contact with now, it’s Tourmaline. And I know she’s here, Zenobia. If we can just find the right question—if we can just ask it in the right way.’

  Zenobia shook her head firmly. ‘This’—she waved the book in front of my face—‘is a waste of my time.’ And she hurled the book into the corner of the nursery. ‘All my efforts trying to contact a Spirit Presence,’ she said bitterly, ‘when I could have been learning hieroglyphics, or refining my telekinesis technique—doing something useful!’

  My insides turned cold. This was how it always was with Zenobia. One day, she’d spend hours poring over the shape of tea-leaves at the bottom of an empty cup, wondering what message they held for her. The next day, she’d tire of tasseomancy—she’d move on to taxidermy, or necromancy. And she would never try to read a fortune in a teacup again.

  Normally, I didn’t mind. Normally, I was even relieved when Zenobia finished with one of her phases. After all, they usually became tiresome to me far sooner than they became tiresome to her. But if Zenobia was giving up on clairvoyance, she wasn’t just giving up on Madame Lucent. She was giving up on Tourmaline. And it felt, in a small way, that she was giving up on me.

  ‘But what about Tourmaline?’ I pleaded. ‘What about the Spirit Presence you felt in this room?’

  Zenobia got to her feet and stalked over to the door. ‘Sometimes spooky old rooms are just that, Elizabeth—spooky old rooms. I’m going to bed.’

  The door clicked shut behind her.

  I stayed where I was. I felt numb.

  Slowly, I gathered up the Ouija board, the melted candle and the silver ring.

  The World Beyond: One Famed and Celebrated Clairvoyant’s Guide to the World of the Spirits lay splayed open in the corner where Zenobia had flung it. I bent to retrieve it. But halfway to the floor, I stopped. I stared.

  A pair of wide eyes stared back at me.

  The wallpaper girl.

  She was crouched just above the wainscoting in the corner, by a bush covered in flowers with petals that were long and curved and sharp-looking, like swords. Her hand was stretched out as if to pluck one of the spiky flowers before her.

  But the last time I had seen her, she had been by the windowsill. Hadn’t she?

  I brought the candle to the window. I looked all around its sill. There was no wallpaper girl there.

  I went back to the corner. There she was, with a ribbon coming loose in her wild tangled hair and the striped fabric of her pinafore bunched at her knees.

  I must have misremembered where I had seen her last.

  I tucked the book under my arm.

  With my hand on the doorknob, I stopped and looked back at the nursery. The two narrow cots against the wall. The bookshelf filled with fairy tales. The dappled grey rocking horse that shone silver in the moonlight. The wallpaper girl in her far, dark corner.

  Yes, I must have misremembered her place in the wallpaper.

  8

  THE NURSERY

  ‘Did you know, Elizabeth, that the chief ingredient in green dye was once arsenic?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I guess I didn’t.’ I poured milk into my cup and blinked sleepily at the white cloud it made over the surface of my tea. I hadn’t slept last night. Every time I had closed my eyes, I’d seen the bright green wallpaper of the nursery, and the vines and the plants and the twisted tree that covered it.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘arsenic is deadly poisonous.’

  Zenobia was reading a large blue book. Its title was embossed in gold letters: The Poisoner’s Alphabet: An Amateur’s Guide to Common Toxins and their Dreadful Effects.

  Clearly, she hadn’t read past ‘A’.

  ‘It was arsenic green,’ she said, ‘that was used to dye the silk for emerald ball gowns. More than one young girl came home after
a night of dancing in her bright green dress and dropped down dead!’

  ‘Where did you find that book?’

  ‘I happened upon it in the library.’

  ‘So you’re not reading The World Beyond anymore?’

  ‘As I said last night,’ Zenobia explained, ‘Madame Lucent has, regrettably, overstated her knowledge of the Spirit World. I haven’t lifted the Veil to the World Beyond. I’m starting to think Madame Lucent hasn’t, either. So, I’ve given up on clairvoyance, at least for the time being.’ She looked, briefly, disappointed. Then she brightened. ‘I’m all about toxicology, now. Toxicology,’ she said, in answer to the question that formed in my mind, ‘is the study of poisons. One never knows when a knowledge of deadly substances might prove useful.’

  ‘No,’ I said sadly, ‘I suppose one doesn’t.’

  So Zenobia really had given up. Perhaps she was right to. I had been foolish to think we might have contacted Tourmaline. And even if we could have—what would be the point? Tourmaline was long dead and, whatever I did, she was going to stay that way.

  I sipped my tea and grimaced. It was cold.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Elizabeth?’ Mrs Purswell appeared at my elbow and raised an eyebrow in the direction of my breakfast. ‘May I take your plate?’

  I nodded. ‘Thank you, Mrs Purswell.’

  She balanced my teacup and saucer on the plate and lifted them from the table. I waited for her to ooze back into the shadows.

  But she stayed where she was. She reached a hand into her apron pocket and then placed a square of paper on the table before me.

  I looked down at the paper for just long enough to see that it was a photograph.

  When I looked up, Mrs Purswell was gone.

  I held the photograph in my hands. It must have been crisp once, but it was faded sepia now, and creased and crinkled at its edges.

  It showed a boy sitting in a stiff-backed chair. He held a butterfly net in his hands and he looked into the camera with a serious expression. Beside him stood a girl, resting her hand against the back of the chair. She wore a lace dress and her short hair was curled into ringlets. She was smaller than the boy and blurred around her edges, as if she hadn’t been able to stay still long enough for the camera to capture her. But her face was clear enough. She had a wide smile. More of a grin than a smile, I thought, tracing its curve with my little finger. A freckle on her left cheek had almost the same shape as a heart.

  I turned the photograph over to see, written in copperplate, Henry aged nine, Tourmaline aged seven.

  Tourmaline. I sucked in my breath and drew the photograph close to my face. I studied Tourmaline.

  There was something about her—her face, or her eyes, or the way she seemed to move even as she stood still—that made me feel I had seen her before. Perhaps, I decided, I recognised in her some family resemblance.

  I went to pass the photograph to Zenobia, who was absorbed in The Poisoner’s Alphabet. But something stopped me.

  I remembered the way the wallpaper had moved in the nursery last night and the ghostly presence I had felt all around me. And I remembered how Zenobia had dismissed it all, as if it was nothing.

  I slipped the photograph into my pocket.

  I would find Tourmaline, I thought to myself, without Zenobia’s help.

  Miss Clemency’s hand flew across the blackboard. A blue chalk Pacific Ocean appeared beneath her fingers. She clapped the chalk dust from her hands and opened her geography book.

  ‘I have been very much looking forward to this lesson,’ she announced, ‘for in it we learn about the deepest, darkest, most mysterious part of the ocean: The Mariana Trench.’

  The Mariana Trench, Miss Clemency explained, is a deep ditch in the ocean floor—so deep, no one knows how deep it truly is.

  I tried to keep my thoughts anchored there, to the very bottom of the ocean floor. But no matter how hard I tried, they always floated away. To the nursery. To Tourmaline.

  ‘And just think, Elizabeth!’ The sound of my name pulled me back into the classroom. ‘There’s no light at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It’s so dark that all the fishes who live there sprout cunning little lanterns out of the tops of their heads, to light the way before them. Doesn’t that sound festive?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I agreed in a dull voice. ‘Very festive.’

  Miss Clemency closed her book. ‘You seem very far away, this lesson,’ she said, and she pulled her chair close to mine. ‘I know the last few days haven’t been easy for you. Is there something you’d like to talk about, Elizabeth?’

  I looked into Miss Clemency’s kind, questioning face. I wanted to tell her everything. About the strange wallpaper and the blurry girl in the photograph and the hurt I felt when I saw Zenobia hunched over The Poisoner’s Alphabet, absorbed in the entry for belladonna, with her back turned to me. But how could I tell it to her in a way that made sense?

  I stared at my hands and said nothing.

  ‘I think you have a lot on your mind,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘When I have a lot on my mind,’ she continued, ‘I find there’s only one reliable remedy. Poetry.’

  ‘Poetry?’ I asked doubtfully.

  She gave a firm nod. ‘Poetry. Tell me, Elizabeth, have you ever learned a poem by heart?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘When your heart is beating too quick with nerves, there’s nothing like the rhythm of a poem to bring it right again. When you fill your mind up with words—beautiful words, stirring words—those words drive away your other worries.’

  I thought guiltily of Tourmaline. ‘But I don’t want to just forget my worries,’ I said. ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Miss Clemency. ‘But if you’re to tackle those worries you’ll need a clear calm mind. I think we should come back to geography another day. For now…’ She stood on tiptoes and brought down a heavy volume of poetry from the shelf. She riffled through its pages.

  ‘Wordsworth?’ she muttered. ‘Hmm. Byron? Best not. Aha!’ She laid the book open on the table in front of me.

  ‘“The Lady of Shalott”,’ I read, ‘by Alfred Lord Tennyson.’

  ‘It is a beautiful poem,’ Miss Clemency said, ‘melancholic and suspenseful. And the words! The words are like a current you can float away on! It’s a poem about a girl who lives under a fairy curse, until—’ She stopped. A small secret smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. ‘Well, perhaps I shan’t tell you—you’ll find it all out for yourself.’

  I bent my head over the book and read the first stanza:

  On either side the river lie

  Long fields of barley and of rye,

  That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

  And thro’ the field the road runs by

  To many-tower’d Camelot.

  Miss Clemency was right. Reading the poem, letting its words fill my ears and my mind, calmed me. I read it over and over, until our lesson ended.

  Later, in the blue guest bedroom, I lifted the mattress a little and eased the sepia photograph underneath it. Then, sitting propped against pillows, I opened the book again. I was in Witheringe House, still, but in my mind, I was with the Lady of Shalott in her island castle:

  The little Isle is all in-rail’d,

  With a rose-fence, and overtrail’d,

  With roses: by the marge unhail’d

  Filling my head with poetry stopped my thoughts circling around Tourmaline. I was thinking about the Lady instead, imprisoned in her room, away from the world. I was thinking about the words—Isle, overtrail’d—and how well they sat in my ears.

  The shallop flitteth silken sail’d,

  Skimming down to Camelot.

  A shallop, I thought, was a type of boat. Zenobia looked up from The Poisoner’s Alphabet, where she had been studying an illustration of a sharp-leafed plant, and fixed me with a withering stare. ‘How am I ever to learn the difference between common hemlock and poison hemlock with you muttering away about boat
s?’

  ‘Miss Clemency set me a poem to learn. I think you’d like it, Zenobia. It’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’. It’s all about a girl who lives in the turret of a beautiful island castle—’

  Zenobia gave an exaggerated yawn.

  ‘And she’s under a terrible curse.’

  Zenobia brightened. ‘Oh?’ she said.

  ‘She’s not allowed to look out her window. She can only see the world through the mirror above her bed. But one day, a knight rides past the castle. He sings so beautifully that she rushes to the window to see him—’

  ‘And does it end badly?’ asked Zenobia greedily.

  ‘Oh yes, very badly.’

  ‘How badly?’

  ‘With her pale corpse floating on a raft down the river to Camelot.’

  ‘Well, that part does sound agreeable.’

  ‘I already know it almost all by heart,’ I said, and I passed her the book. ‘And besides, it’s late.’ I turned over and closed my eyes, ready for sleep.

  But later, I woke up.

  Moonlight streamed through the window. It was too bright to sleep. I looked around for a book to read. Zenobia had fallen asleep over the Tennyson and I couldn’t pull it out from under her head without waking her.

  I reached instead for The Plant Kingdom by Dr Henry Murmur.

  I read about rushes and dillweed until my eyes fell slowly closed. I put the book away and turned to go to sleep. As I did, my eyes caught on the clock. Eleven fifty-nine.

  I wondered.

  I took the book and opened it on my lap again. And I waited for the stroke of midnight.

  When the clock chimed, I turned the page. And there were the looping green letters:

  After the little Prince died, the Plant Kingdom fell into mourning. The leaves on the trees turned dry and brown. The grass wilted. The flowers were too sad to bloom and the insects too mournful to buzz or fly or bite. Saddest of all was the Queen. Every day she sank her roots into the earth under a bare tree in the palace gardens and cried. After many days her tears made a deep, silver pool. And still the Queen cried, and the pool grew deeper and more silver.