“Don’t believe a word she says,” Mrs. Blott told me as we made our way back home. “Don’t let her scare you, lead you on. You are doing a kindness to a lonely old woman, and I know you have enough sense to let that be all.”
But with Mother Farrow’s stories the seed had been planted: an underground hope. Perhaps I was not a strictly Darwinian divergence; perhaps I too was under a spell. Perhaps my mother was not dead, only waiting. Perhaps one day she might come to me and cure me. The possibility of my mother’s protection spread its roots in my subconscious, ready for the day it would thrust up above the soil.
TELL A CHILD a tale is not true, give her reason to believe.
No handsome prince awaits you. No godmother hides in the hawthorn. Those stirrings you hear in the forest are foxes and birds, nothing more.
Tell her that after death comes heaven, harpists, bare-bottomed babes with sprouted wings. Show her where her mother has been eaten by the earth, where her ancestors lie buried. Tell her that souls float up around her, as she watches rigor mortis of her own pathetic making cover the body of a loved one with its frost.
Nothing begs question of permanence, of sin, like the power to kill and revive.
Nothing promises revival like a fairy tale.
Very Distant Relations, Their Faces Very Grim
Across hundreds of years and hundreds of Blakelys, there have been six other women like Lucy, in need of the liminal love of the wood. Lucy looks at the others, that first day. They blink back at her. The usual sounds of the forest—plaintive owls, scuttling wood mice, the papery screech and flutter of young bats—have been usurped by the lullaby of ancient temperate trees, a sentient quiet, a deep and subtle whisper. The gray evening has vanished, replaced by a pale sunlight that gilds each of Lucy’s companions. She watches these women, suspicious as they make their salutations—
Mary is the first to step forward. (MARY ELIZABETH BLAKELY, 1670–1708; “Now she rests with the Lord,” said her brother, though no body graced the grave.) Over one hundred years before Lucy was born, Mary came to this wood, undesired. Here her hatred has calcified, and the sight of this new, younger sister sends fissures through bone. Mary spits out her name in introduction. Lucy’s curling top lip betrays her distaste.
Next, Helen dips an automatic curtsy, her golden hair tangled, her head cocked to one side, eyes bright and bulging as if even in the wood she still must wear the hangman’s collar. (HELEN MARIA, 1650–1666, immortalized in oil paint; a memorial to a desecrated daughter.) Lucy nods at her, picturing a particular painted profile hung just outside Urizon’s ballroom, the otherworldly whiteness of a clavicle in contrast with the dark frame of the wood. If Lucy’s suspicions are correct, if this is truly that same Helen, she is slipperier in person, her cheekbones less prominent, snub nose less deliberate. Her throat is not white, rather puckered pink and rippling, forever displaying fresh scars.
Little Emma toddles over, thumb jammed into her mouth. (EMMA CORDELIA, 1812–1817, “What an odd looking child,” “What an ugly little girl.”) The large birthmark that mars her left cheek flares even redder when she’s frightened. She widens her perpetually crossed eyes. “I’m Emma Blakely,” the girl manages through small, sticky fingers. “Welcome to our home.” Lucy laughs, both at Emma’s odd pretensions, and the confirmation of her own strengthening hunch: this one can only be her father’s elder sister, disfigured and disappeared as a young child before he was born, somehow preserved here in the forest. Lucy’s heart beats faster with delight, with wonder. What enchantment has she stumbled into?
Red-headed Kathryn cannot stop giggling, a mix of nerves and excitement. (KATHRYN, 1206–1223, her only memorial: “Run!”) Kathryn smiles conspiratorially at Lucy, taking and squeezing her hand. “Warmest welcome.” She pulls Lucy’s arm long as she speaks, examining the lace sleeves of Lucy’s nightgown with an undisguised hunger.
Across the clearing, Imogen frowns at them, face solemn. (IMOGEN, 1468–1486, walked into the wood and was not seen again.) “Don’t mind her,” says Kathryn, grabbing and swinging Lucy’s other hand. “She’ll only try to set you against us, to make you hate your time here. And there’s no use rushing that.”
Imogen does not contradict Kathryn. The only mother among them, Imogen carries the weight of her second, unborn child beneath her skirts. Imogen’s eyes are filled with unexpected pity. For me? Lucy wonders, and for the first time since encountering these women feels a surge of fear.
The cold intensifies when Alys steps out from between the trees as if from nowhere. (No one left to remember ALYS, 591–605. Alys, the last of her kind.) Alys’s teeth are honed to knives. At first glance, Lucy thinks her thirteen, perhaps younger, but her eyes display her true age: round and placid, so dark they almost lack pupils. She says nothing, only watches.
Lucy takes a long breath, banishing her hesitations. She thinks of the book she hid under the floorboard before climbing out her window, the time she has spent praying to unknown old gods, testing her own fantastic assertions, honing ancient desires.
Lucy smiles at these gathered women, straightens like a queen, her head held high. (LUCY MARGARET, 1867–1888, very slim and pale.) She lets Kathryn and Emma regale her with tales of forest animals, long-remembered friends and brothers, while the other four hover nearby, silent. Helen picks butterwort and tries to weave a garland; Mary watches Helen’s hands, her own mouth puckering. Alys stands still at the edge of the trees, barely blinking. Imogen wrings out her skirts.
After several hours Lucy pauses Emma mid-description of her favorite dog’s best collar. She asks Kathryn what she might do next, where she might go to find shelter. How she can now take action, channel strength from this new wood.
“There is nothing to do,” Kathryn tells her with a bitter laugh, brushing her red locks behind one shoulder. “Nowhere to go. Nothing to take from.”
“Every so often the wood opens up for travelers,” Mary interjects. “You take well enough from them when it does.”
“Every so often,” repeats Kathryn, sighing. “But it all happens so quickly, and the men who pass through are never quite right. That’s why we’re so pleased to have you here. Finally someone new. It’s been a very long time.”
THERE ARE NO seasons in this shadow wood, only the low cradle of midsummer. Mellow, drifting sun. Trees choose their deciduousness, shift as they see fit. Light filters in through bowers, dappling the tangled undergrowth; a stream babbles gently over stones. Compared to where the women have been, it is paradise; still, they miss winter. They remember the dry burn of their cheeks in the cold, plump bursting drops of rain, sharp-scented autumn with its pungent decay. Once inside the wood, these women cannot leave it. Once offered its asylum, they may not again defect. Their years in the forest unwind at both ends, ever-rolling scrolls that conceal both the finish and start. Several weeks, they think, sometimes, several lifetimes.
And what is there to do here, with no fairy feuds to thrill them, no mad kings wandering, no lovers in disguise? The women sit, they weave flower crowns, they dream and remember. They make pets of the immortal squirrels and badgers preserved here beside them, build forts of fallen branches, watch clouds travel the sky. They listen for the outside world, waiting for those rare evenings when men with muddled minds pass briefly by. The women doze in glens and hollows. They sit, unseen, and watch their only entertainment: the evolution of the great house, Urizon. They see its inhabitants come and go. They wonder what it might be like to die.