‘Her silent heart is a trap,’ the king’s mother whispered to her son. ‘My heart is better. Time to burn her so she finds her words. Time to burn her until she shouts and screams.’
The morning the queen was to be burned, she walked down to the courtyard. She’d been up all night sewing as fast as she could for, several weeks earlier, she’d found a secret place to hide the tunics. This time they hadn’t been destroyed, and now she had enough. She carried five tunics made of flowers and a sixth nearly complete but with one sleeve missing. As the fire was lit, she threw the tunics into the air and six swans appeared on the horizon. They swooped down and pulled on the tunics and immediately turned back into her brothers. The sixth still had a swan arm attached to his human body, which he flexed and admired in the light of the sun.
With the spell broken, the mute queen was able to speak. She told her husband how his mother had murdered their children. How she’d chopped them into pieces and baked them into pies. The king clasped his chest and declared his mother a witch. They tied her to a tree and burned her at the stake. Her skin melted in the heat, and her blood began to boil but her heart was so cold that the fire couldn’t touch it.
The king pulled his mother’s heart from the flames and put it in a jar.
He placed it on the mantelpiece where it shone blue in the dark.
Then the swan boys danced, and the silent girl sang, and the king wondered at the strangeness of the world.
I keep Cora’s hearts in the basement.
They hang, suspended, in vases of alcohol.
Her original heart is on the far left, vaguely purple.
Then the wolf heart, glistening silver.
The deer heart, turning blue.
The fox heart, shrinking slowly.
And her most recent, the bear heart, growling quietly to itself.
Is it terribly clichéd to think of this as a room filled with love? Failed love, obviously, but love nevertheless. I like to come here when I need reminding that everything can be fixed. That the world just needs medicine, and people can change. People do change. I’ve seen it. I’ve made it happen.
It’s not unusual to keep hearts. Royals once demanded their hearts be buried apart from their bodies, and butchers and cooks were hired to cut them free. When Henry I died in Normandy after eating poisonous eels, his heart was sewn into the hide of a bull and taken back to England. The rest of him was left in France to rot under the ground.
Home is where the heart is.
I found Cora ten years ago. We both had articles published in the same journal. Hers was on the history of fairy tales, mine on the poetry of the Romantics. In my essay, I’d touched on the death of Percy Shelley. How, when he was cremated, his friend Edward Trelawny had reached in and pulled his heart out from the flames. His wife, Mary Shelley, took him to court and fought hard to get the heart back. She won and she kept it in her writing desk until the day she died.
And people wonder where Frankenstein comes from.
That evening, as Cora listened to me, not saying a word, I could see her good heart shining out through her chest. Thundering and garbling like some underwater train. Vines sneaking up to block out the world and her homemade floral dress glowing amber in the dark.
In the Middle Ages, people believed that a heart contained a person’s soul. That all of their beliefs, thoughts, feelings and memories lived inside there, as though written inside a book. God was thought to have a copy of everyone’s hearts, with records of how good or bad they were scribbled inside. Sometimes, he would write on these records, and this writing would transmit to the replicas in human bodies on earth. There are legends of saints who were said to have images drawn on their organs by divine power. Touched by the hand of God.
So, when we say we are ‘turning over a new leaf’, we are referring to the book of our heart. It means we are starting over. Making fresh starts. New hearts.
This swan heart will be Cora’s fifth heart in ten years.
Her fourth in the last two.
The fox heart made her nocturnal.
The deer heart made her flee.
The bear heart made her possessive.
The wolf heart gave her rage.
The swan heart clamours in its case.
I head back upstairs. The house feels like it’s breathing. This is home. This is home. This is home.
My mother’s heart sits on the mantelpiece. Baby blue, encased in glass.
Next to it, my wedding present to Cora. A replica of a French tapestry from 1400, called ‘The Offering of the Heart’. It shows a man giving his pulsing heart to a woman as a symbol of his devotion.
Love as an art form.
In 1956, Erich Fromm wrote a book called The Art of Loving. In it, he argued that the active character of true love requires four basic elements: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.
Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever … Love isn’t something natural … It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.
Cora said my mother loved me an unhealthy amount. Whilst the world was running out of love, my mother was trying to hoard it. She clung to me so desperately, Cora deemed it unnatural. For that is what love is. She told me I’d better deal with it or else she’d leave forever.
So I did.
I admit it felt strange, holding a pillow over my mother’s face like that. How, when I carved her open to extract her overflowing heart, her body was still twitching. How I used five bottles of washing-up liquid to get the blood off the kitchen floor. How I burned her body in the back yard, and sprinkled her ashes on the orange trees.
When I came home, carrying my mother’s heart, Cora screamed.
She claimed she’d never meant for me to go that far.
She yelled she’d only meant that I should talk to her.
She cried that just the thought of what I’d done made her sick.
That’s the first time she tried to leave.
Despite Cora’s protests, all her academic research into fairy tales had shown that, for love to flourish, parents needed to die. And as I grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her back inside the house, I reminded her of that very fact and spat: ‘Aren’t all of us just trying to find our happily ever after?’
Hundreds of years ago, when French kings and queens died, their hearts were mummified in silver urns and hidden in various cathedrals across the city of Paris. During the French Revolution, these were stolen by revolutionaries, and some hearts were sold in secret to artists. They liquidised them, mixed them with myrrh and created a highly sought-after paint called ‘mummy brown’.
They say a mother’s love is truly unconditional.
If these factory-created animal hearts keep failing, perhaps I can put my mother’s heart inside Cora.
Perhaps that is the answer.
I take the swan heart out of its case and place it on top of Cora’s cold skin.
It twitches, as though trying to get back to me.
It’s wondering where I am.