AFTER THE POWER she’s discovered, the promise of her books, Lucy is not content to sit idly by, waiting. Something that had begun to shift within her in those final months at home now undertakes its most permanent migration. Lucy will not be locked away. She will not stoop to pick flowers, chase fauna. Lucy wants to move mountains, raise armies, amass followers, be praised. Above all she wants a daughter to continue her singular evolution.
“Wanting too much will bring you trouble,” says Imogen, a hand atop her ever-swollen stomach.
Helen, fingering her raised scar necklace, nods. “Much better not to want at all.”
“We live here now,” says Mary, chewing a birch twig, her eyes narrow and suspicious. “This is your world.” This is their world. So they believe, and so it is, until the day they find the child.
3
Mrs. Blott had other duties to attend to—cleaning and cooking, helping Peter with his correspondence—and thus we could not visit Mother Farrow as often as I would have liked. I was, of course, forbidden to go see her on my own. Between visits, I would imagine myself part of the tales that she told me, would stand with my eyes squeezed shut at the border between the wood and our garden and whisper a wish for my own witch’s familiar, for a friend.
This wish was granted on the morning of my eighth birthday, when I found Marlowe in the wood behind Urizon. He was a puppy then, a fuzzy black cowering little darling, nestled under a downed tree branch, and I heard him before I ever saw him: a high-pitched whimper that I dodged under the foliage at the edge of our backyard to get to, accidentally reviving a rabbit-gnawed shrub. When I finally caught sight of him, soft and downy, his eyes still blue, his coat so crimped he could have been a little lamb, I could not bring myself to leave him. Instead I drew closer. I knew what would happen if I held him. It had happened with Mr. Abbott’s lost terrier when it wandered into our yard: the poor stupid little Scottie was terrified, shaking as it flickered between life and death in my arms.
This was on my mind when I saw Marlowe, but as I approached he got excited, wagging his little puppy tail, and it was all that I could do not to trip over myself in the getting to him. I prepared myself to reckon with the guilt I would feel upon reaching him, whether it be shame that I could not provide the warmth his young body desired, or remorse at my lack of restraint. He was so precious, so dear, so clearly starved for a companion—I could not resist kneeling on the undergrowth and offering my hand. I had only just turned eight, after all.
“Hello, pretty puppy,” said I, and Marlowe put his soft, wet nose right on me.
I flinched and pulled away, expecting him to stiffen at my touch, but he just reached out his candy-pink tongue and licked my fingers. At this point I let out a whoop of joy and gathered him in my arms, savoring the feel of his beating heart and his warm, breathing body, and raced with him back to the house to show my father.
I remember that first time holding Marlowe as one of the most pleasurable moments of my young life. All humans crave touch, the fundamental feeling that life burns inside another. For me the sustained touch of another living body was like opening a door that had been shut for a very long time, kicking it wide open and letting in the light. It felt like sun against my skin, but better, stronger. If my belief in the old ways and Mother Farrow’s stories had been shrouded like her small and slippered feet, discovering Marlowe seemed proof of the hooves’ existence. Life was mightier, more beautiful, and kinder than I had ever imagined. I could feel Marlowe’s heart pound, the swell of his chest, the shiver of his pleasure as he pressed against my arm. I realized then that the world must be full of things of which I would never conceive unless directly encountered.
Peter was cautious, but could not bring himself to make me cast my new companion out. “Careful now,” he said when I held out the puppy, who had fallen asleep in my arms.
“He’s unchanged! No need to be careful. Nothing happens when I touch him, absolutely nothing at all!”
Peter’s eyes watered behind his glasses. His nose wrinkled and twitched.
“I’ll keep him outside,” I promised, never intending to do so. “I’ll let him live on the back terrace and I’ll care for him. You’ll never know he’s there.” I held the puppy up to Peter, in hopes the animal’s sweetness might do more to sway him than my own excited face.
Peter sighed, closed his eyes, rubbed their corners. I knew that I had won. We’d keep the dog. We named him Marlowe, and he accompanied me everywhere.
MARLOWE QUICKLY BECAME my dearest confidant and friend. He slept with me at night, sat at my feet while I studied. He would race down the dark hallways at Urizon, chasing after a squirrel or a bird he’d seen through the front window, Mrs. Blott racing after him, scolding him for tracking mud. He came with us to Mother Farrow’s, and would sit listening to her stories as if he understood them. He liked to dig in my garden of sand, where sometimes he might bury me a tree branch or a stone.
At age eleven, I was raking in that garden with my fingers when I came across something tender—something soft and squished and feathery. Clearing away the sand, I found interred a common sparrow, clearly meant to be dead, a sizable chunk of its breast torn away by what I guessed were Marlowe’s teeth. The bird was shivering and convulsing. It cheeped loudly enough that Marlowe heard it fifty yards away, but its shredded chest did not cleave together. Shocked, I did not think to touch it again, and instead watched it hobble about the yard, finding its bearings, readjusting its idea of itself as alive.
Other than the odd caterpillar or dried snail, I had never before resurrected an obviously dead creature. Foliage, yes, but that was different, more like resuscitation than surgery, simply painting in color to a landscape sadly drained. I had certainly never brought a body back to life and let it linger. Bodies that should not be moving—desiccated bodies, broken bodies—piqued my interest, but frightened me. I would never have intentionally revived one.
The sparrow hopped off the stone barricade at the lowest tier of garden, and headed for the front line of the trees. I reasoned it was best to go after it, and turn the bird back. But despite reason I sat still in the sandbox, listening to its strangled cheeps, staring at the trail of blood it left behind. I knew that I was breaking Peter’s third rule—If a living or a dead thing is touched, you will immediately return it to its natural state—yet I did nothing. How did the sparrow breathe, I wondered, with its chest so fully open? Could it eat? How long would it survive?
“Poor thing,” I said to Marlowe, who had come to sit beside me, showing no apparent guilt at having orchestrated the lurid event. “Perhaps a fox will find it. Or a wolf.”
Both aroused and repulsed by my own fascination, I resolved not to tell Peter of my actions. My intentions had been innocent—all I had done was take a handful of sand—but I was nonetheless complicit, my responsibility heightened by the curiosity that had prevented me from reversing course. Flustered, I told Marlowe very firmly that he mustn’t play a trick like this again.
Once I could no longer hear the resurrected sparrow, I stood and rolled my shirtsleeves, preparing to go back inside. Mrs. Blott did not like me to track sand through the house, so I sat at the edge of the terrace to brush myself off before I entered. It was there that she found me, shaking grains from my shoes.
She carried a bucket of water and a pole with a rag tied to the top, and I assumed that she had planned to wash the windows. Rather than starting the work, she came and sat down next to me.
“Maisie, girl, we’ve had some news,” Mrs. Blott said. Her eyes were swollen into slits. I was suddenly afraid.
“What?” I asked, thinking of the bird. Had someone found it so quickly in the wood? Did they suspect me? Would I be punished?
“Mother Farrow, as you know,” began Mrs. Blott, and I released a ragged breath, “has been ill for a very long time. She’s lived a fine life, a long one. We’ve just had a call from the village telling us that she’s passed on.”
“Passed on to where?” I said, confused.
“To the next life,” said Mrs. Blott.