THERE WAS NO way to correct what I’d done to my mother. This Peter had recognized at once. Beyond the matter of her body’s deterioration, which prevented any practical resurrection, her death had been public, headlining the news, putting our small county on the map. Reporters swarmed the hospital after my birth, stalking the doctor who’d delivered me. Religious fanatics declared a second coming, of precisely what they were not certain, but they knew I was divine. Candlelight vigils were held. Sainthood proposed. My admirers wrote numerous notes, all intercepted by Peter. As the years passed, my story would appear in public life in passing, a question of how the baby born from death had fared with chicken pox, how her math skills were progressing, whether she could speak in tongues. They did not know where I’d gone off to, but most respected the decision to hide me. They did not connect the pseudonymous researcher’s bizarre account of his young case study’s skin condition to that sweet, blanketed babe.
FORTUNATELY, NONE OF the uproar surrounding my nativity was known to me. Despite the demands of the doctors, my father spirited me away as quickly as he could, hiding me from gossip at my mother’s family home, a large country estate called Urizon.
The house was set back nicely from the main road, necklaced by a wide front stretch of lawn that led to two cracked red brick pillars flanking a sturdy iron gate, appended by a three-tiered formal garden. Tall hedges grew across the perimeters of the property and presumably at one point they’d been pruned, but as I knew them they were wild, overgrown and prickly, a veritable sleeping beauty’s bower. Ivy curled, unfettered, over everything—the stern face of the house, the brick chimneys, the gate.
By the time my parents were married, my mother, Laura, was the last in the family line of once-abundant Blakelys who had made their home at the lip of the wood. Once filled with servants, houseguests, extended relations, in my time it housed only my father and me. We had very few visitors, which I was told had been the case even before I was born.
Urizon’s facade was severe—rough stone, spindly turrets, heavy doors, and shut windows—and it had a reputation for tragedy. The estate was over three hundred years old, built at the height of the Blakely fortunes, an attempt to launch the clan into the upper stratum of elite society. Some minor feat of engineering in the mid-seventeenth century, dull to discuss but apparently vital to the direction of the empire, had landed the first in a subsequent series of William Blakelys a windfall. It had to do with waterwheels, ushering in industrialization, the dawn of a new age. I confess I never studied his advances—far more interesting to me was the drama of the domestic: this founding William had failed to cement an important alliance for his daughter, the result of which, it was said, condemned the family to centuries of misfortune and malice.
According to the villagers, ours was a bedeviled family line. Better to be dirt poor and hideously ugly than a Blakely. The house was full of ghosts, claimed some. Cursed, said others. So as not to attract its bad luck, you were best to stay clear. Through the generations Blakelys had supposedly gone missing, suffered falls from great heights, been born with scaly tails or extra fingers. Though none could confirm the veracity of these rumors, which had long plagued Urizon’s previous occupants, their existence served Peter and me well, granting the privacy Peter desired.
The main house was large, so we’d closed off all but the areas used regularly, covered furniture with dust sheets, and sealed certain doors. Of Urizon’s fifty rooms, we occupied just ten: two bedrooms, the kitchen, a study for Peter, the library, sitting room, nursery turned lab, two full baths and one half. This single wing was easier to maintain, both for Mrs. Blott, who kept the house, and Peter, who protected it from me.
I required a particular environment. To avoid constant disruption, all visible wood had been heavily varnished, plaster applied, carpets laid, tapestries hung. The project of rearranging and inoculating had taken Peter months, but served its purpose. As a child I was little threat to our upkept bit of manor.
Generally I stayed within my boundaries. As a small child I thought these rules would not last very long; initially I thought all children like me. I believed that together we would grow out of the phase in which physical contact was fatal, and into the examples of adulthood all around me. I’d seen Peter shake the hand of our solicitor, Tom Pepper; I’d seen Mrs. Blott check for fever against Peter’s flushed cheek. Prior to the awakening that proved my theory false, I obeyed with a sense that mine were common restrictions, a phase to sigh and smile through, my path to human touch. Once I learned that this was not so, that I was alone in my destruction, my obedience was born of my fear.
When the weather was fine, I was usually content to spend my mornings in the kitchen or the library, take lunch out on the terrace, busy myself in the backyard. But on dreary days, or maddeningly hot ones, I grew restless. Then, I did like to explore. Careful to cover myself fully, I would venture into far parts of the house, my anthropologist’s eye ready, my historian’s hat tied tight. To me, the unadulterated rooms throughout Urizon were a mystery, a menacing, silent shipwreck preserved in the deep. Ancient carvings begged subtle interpretation. Locked chests longed to be picked, stuck drawers shimmied open.
The hallway that circled our dust-laden ballroom was lined with Blakely portraits: very distant relations, their faces very grim. Peter had walked me through the few who he knew: Founding William, of course, taller in paint than he could ever be in life. His wife, pinch-faced, much smaller. The portrait nearest to the east entrance was my great-grandfather’s sister, a pretty thing, though very slim and pale, so much that I imagined her tubercular or struck by other illness. She hung next to her brother, my great-grandfather, a bulbous man who seemed much older than she, though it may have been simply that he’d sat down for his portrait some years later. She was Lucy Blakely; he was John. Their lineage was easiest to trace to mine, their images most recent, and they seemed realer to me for it. I sensed a look of longing in Lucy’s dark eyes, a dash of devilry in her brother’s, that contrasted with the rigidity of their postures.
With them hung Frederick Blakely; several Marys; a man called only General who sat atop his horse; golden-haired Helen, eyes cast downward toward the single white lily in her equally white hands; Marian, with the name of a woman but the stern stance of a man; a Katherine and an Alice and three other Williams, all rather boring; a little girl called Emma drawn in silhouette; a ragged black dog. Compared to the works of the old masters whose lives I read in our library’s art books, and whose images seemed ready to lift off the page and offer a taste of their capon, a feel of their furs, these painted relatives rang hollow. There was a pettiness about them that unnerved me—I could not imagine myself thinking it worthwhile to stand still in these poses for hours for the sake of such hack-handed preservation. I saw these Blakelys all to be inscrutable, whispering about me, judging my behavior as the last of their line.
WHISPERING LOUDER, IF more difficult to understand, was the neighboring forest: a mass of black poplars and conifers and wise old English oaks, yews with trunks like waists of giants, tangles of tree root that twisted together like veins. Trees that to the saplings in the cities were like tigers to a house cat, their breed older, deeper, blessed.
Peter did not like the forest. When I was small he’d had built a shoddy wooden fence to divide the trees from our backyard, fearing I might wander off into the old growth and be lost. That fence stood proudly just a season before weather took its toll, but Peter never did remove it, instead letting the splintered, rotting wood disintegrate back into the line of trees. I could slip through or over it in several places, and though I’d often been told not to leave the yard, I did grow restless. At times I could have sworn the trees were beckoning me. I caught glimpses of a den that had once belonged to foxes, a young tree split by lightning down its center, a poplar overcome by a colony of nests. An entire world, begging to be explored. Were it not for the old stories of villagers gone missing in that forest, stories that magnified the darkness of its depths—were it not for my own darkness, so carefully avoided—I surely would have succumbed sooner.