“Do you mean,” I asked slowly, “that Mother Farrow is dead?”
Mrs. Blott nodded, let out a sigh. Had I been a different child, she might have reached out for my hand. Instead, she laced her own fingers together and regarded me with a tender expression.
“I’m very sorry” was all I could say in response. My heart was beating quickly, my cheeks flushed. I bit down on my lip, hoping physical pain would delay my mounting emotional distress. “I really didn’t mean to hurt her.”
“Why, child, you didn’t hurt her. She was sick and very old. It was her time.”
I kicked Mrs. Blott’s washing bucket, splashing myself with a wave of soapy water, then sat back down and grabbed one of my shoes, smacking it hard against the stone terrace until the final grains of sand flew loose. Though empty, I whacked the shoe again, again, again, then in a fit of frustration hurled it down into the garden.
“Maisie!” said Mrs. Blott, surprised. “You know a lady does not throw shoes.” Her words were a reprimand, but her tone was soft. She came closer, put a careful hand on my clothed back.
It was midday, and I could hear the insects buzzing, watched a fat, hairy bumblebee meander toward a single red daylily. The sun was high and bright, but I felt chilled.
“We all pass on, in the end,” said Mrs. Blott. “After a long, full life, we all want peace.”
I WAS NOT consoled by Mrs. Blott’s words. Mother Farrow’s death had been an omen, I was certain. Whatever force was watching me was telling me, Take care. I knew my guilt, I wore it as my skin. For weeks I could not close my eyes without seeing that sparrow, its guts protruding, its feathers matted with blood. While waiting for sleep I’d be accosted by an image of a horse’s legs nailed to a woman’s body, Mother Farrow’s gruesome feet. I did not think I’d replaced her life with the sparrow’s. I knew that the rules were not so simple, the logic not so clean. But I had interfered with something. The bird’s new life timed so exactly to the news of Mother Farrow’s death was no accident. It could not be. Of this I was certain.
“What you do,” Peter had told me, “who you are, goes against nature. You must be vigilant. Be cautious. Take care.”
Chastened, I took care for five years straight.
My Shadowed Double
At the start of the first new millennium for all except Alys—although how could they know it? Why would they care?—Lucy spots a sparrow tripping through the forest. The bird’s chest is mangled, exposing a sagging crop heavy with predigested food, a tattered purple liver, a pulsating heart. Its gruesomeness fascinates her.
Lucy follows as the sparrow hops a bloody trail; she tracks it over hills, through undergrowth, past groves and under roots, until it leads her to the base of an old oak tree, where a single slender finger rises like a sapling from the dirt, pointing toward the trees above, the sky. Lucy stoops and grasps, expecting some ingredient for enchantment, a dried-up digit, the severed finger of a birth-strangled babe. She is surprised to realize that her discovery has roots. Digging, Lucy finds that it attaches to a hand, the hand to an arm, the arm to a young girl, approximately eleven, pale but miraculously breathing.
“Emma,” pants Lucy, “come and help me.”
Her young cohort, eternally age five, has followed both Lucy and bird, then tried to hide behind an oak tree. Emma steps cautiously out to where Lucy is kneeling, raking her hands through the soil.
“It’s dirty,” Emma says through the thumb stuck in her mouth, positioned so that her closed fist nearly covers her large birthmark. Her other hand twists the tarnished locket that she wears around her neck. “Mother said not to get dirty.”
Lucy looks Emma over, taking in the ripped tiers of her skirt, her mud-caked hemline, her twig-ravaged sleeves. She resists an exasperated sigh. “Go fetch the others, then,” she orders. “Quickly!”
Alone with the buried child—the sparrow having achieved its goal and fallen into a sleep suspiciously like death, Emma off to seek assistance—Lucy looks on her discovery. The girl, as yet, is just a dirty face, a bit of bare chest, an arm and elbow, but Lucy has every reason to believe that the rest of her is there under the clod, equally pale, equally motionless. Lucy is already staking her claim to the girl—to her mind, discovery is tantamount to birthing. But this girl has spent years waiting. She has grown here in the forest’s rich earth. Lucy reaches a long-nailed finger toward a cheek, removing an unhappy earthworm, the traces of fungus. The girl’s skin is quite cold, but electric.
IS THIS WOODLAND girl alive? The women hear her breathing as they carefully unearth her, the same slow and steady rhythms of the breathing of the trees. A heart is beating. But the eyes remain closed; the body does not twitch.
“Careful not to let her neck drop,” instructs Lucy, having stepped back to direct her companions. Kathryn rolls her eyes at Helen, who shrugs and positions her hand at the base of the girl’s skull, as if she were a newborn. Alys takes one arm, massaging the small fingers, and Imogen carefully takes the other. Emma wrinkles her nose as she brushes clumps of dirt off the girl’s icy body. Mary struggles to lift her unshod feet.
The women set their newfound treasure on a makeshift wooden dais in the center of a glen, position her hands atop her chest, comb out her dark hair. The frozen girl’s nose is narrow, her veined eyelids large and far apart, so that once opened they will overcome the rest of her small face, those permanently pursed lips, her high, pronounced cheekbones.
“She looks like my sister Marian,” mumbles Emma.
“She looks like an evil spirit.” Imogen crosses herself quickly.
“She looks like the girl at Urizon,” says Helen. “The girl with the powers. The one that they hide.”
4
Mrs. Blott died on a Sunday evening. I was sixteen. She was eighty years of age. Because she never came to us on Mondays (those were her days, and hers alone), it wasn’t until Tuesday at approximately ten in the morning that I knocked on the door of Peter’s study. He was seated at his massive fir desk, his back curved downward at an uncomfortable angle so that he could examine whatever was laid out before him, a magnifying apparatus strapped over his glasses and extended such that its rotating lenses practically touched the yellowed paper. He was muttering something to himself about inaccurate translations and pigheaded students.
He hadn’t heard me. I cleared my throat. When he looked up, the magnifier covering his eyes spun and retracted.
“Maisie,” said Peter, “have you come with my tea?”
It was obvious that I was not holding anything remotely tea-like, so I ignored his question and walked a few feet into the room, dodging piles of books and a sad, sticky plate with the remainder of last night’s dinner.
“Mrs. Blott hasn’t been by yet,” I said. “It’s three hours after her usual time.” I think he blinked at me, but it was difficult to tell behind the goggles.
“Well, then”—Peter stifled a yawn—“might you start the kettle?”
“Yes,” I said, “I will. But the point is that I’m worried about her.”
“I’m sure you’ve no cause to be worried,” said my father, who rarely was, “but if it makes you feel better, you could pop round. After the tea.”