Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully

by Megan Tayte

  Behind me, Luke was talking now – asking why we were all waiting around for Evangeline’s say on the matter.

  ‘Because she’s the Mother,’ said Jude. ‘She knows more than any of us.’

  ‘No,’ I said, turning. ‘It’s not only her who knows. Gabe knows something. But he won’t talk, he won’t tell us what he knows, until she confirms it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I asked him. All he’d say is, “I must be wrong. She has to tell me I’m wrong.”’

  Jude launched into a furious tirade against Gabe – ‘What is he doing, sitting on some suspicion? He should tell us all right now!’ – and I didn’t want to hear this voice that was not his, didn’t want to argue, defend, rationalise. So I turned away again.

  And like my eyes knew what my mind, my heart, did not, I saw him straightaway.

  Michael.

  He was standing in the graveyard and looking right at me. I was too far away to see his expression, but the gesture he made was clear enough. He beckoned: Come to me.

  No one saw but me. There was no cry from behind – ‘There he is! Get him!’ – only Jude’s ranting.

  I took a step forwards. Michael’s arm fell to his side. I took another step.

  ‘She’s awake!’ announced a breathless voice behind me. ‘Evangeline’s awake!’

  At the first ‘awake’ Michael began blurring. By the second, he was gone.

  ‘Are you coming, Scarlett?’ said Nathaniel behind me. ‘Gabriel and Sienna are waiting. Not very patiently.’

  ‘Scarlett?’ said Luke, coming to stand with me and following my gaze to the desolate graveyard. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, taking his hand and turning away.

  It wasn’t a lie. Michael was nothing again: gone, lost. There was no point chasing a ghost. Right now, the living mattered more.

  Nathaniel had prepared Evangeline for her visitors – her hair was brushed, her nightgown was clean, and she sat propped upright on a pile of pillows. But he hadn’t prepared the visitors for Evangeline.

  It wasn’t the deathly pallor, or the blue veins visible through papery skin, or the apparent shrinking of her form, or even the rasping breaths she took that brought Gabe and Sienna and me to a standstill a mere pace into the bedroom. It was her, the woman within the failing body, the woman who looked at us through watery green eyes and was so clearly in agony.

  Nathaniel had been euphemistic in telling us his wife was ‘distressed’. This was beyond distress. This was torture of such appalling intensity that my first thought was, Why are you holding on? Let go – die – be at peace.

  My father appeared to be having no such empathetic thoughts. After the very briefest of hesitations he strode forwards to stand over the dying woman – the woman who should have been his ‘Mother’, but who’d condemned him and cast him out for saving and avenging my mother, her granddaughter.

  ‘Michael has hurt Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Michael has tried to hurt my daughters. Michael has taken my grandson and run. Michael is in trouble. Michael.’

  Nathaniel had warned us that Evangeline was frequently lost. But by her reaction – the rattling breathing ramping up a gear and the tears spilling down her cheeks – it was evident that she was here, right here.

  Unmoved, Gabe leaned down, so his face was level with Evangeline’s, and he growled not ‘Why?’ or ‘How?’ as I’d expected, but: ‘Who? Tell me now, and tell me truthfully: Who. Is. That. Boy?’

  Evangeline’s breathing was so laboured now that Nathaniel rushed forward, saying, ‘Too much for her… perhaps a little later?’

  But Evangeline’s hand fluttered up and he stopped. Her hand remained in the air, trembling, and her dry lips formed the word: ‘No.’ She looked up at her husband. ‘My sewing room. Loose floorboard. Under desk.’

  He remained frozen, reluctant to leave her. Irritation flashed across her face, and no further instruction was required – Nathaniel turned and hurried from the room.

  Sienna and I had remained in place, standing at the end of Evangeline’s bed, but now Sienna surged forwards and fell to her knees beside Evangeline, grabbing her hands.

  ‘Please,’ she rasped. ‘Please.’

  She couldn’t get the words out, but she didn’t need to. We all knew what she meant: If you know where Jack is, please tell us.

  Evangeline shook her head.

  Sienna took back her hands and buried her head in them. Her shoulders shook.

  Evangeline’s eyes slid to Gabe, standing at the other side of the bed. ‘So… very sorry,’ she gasped.

  And then it was Gabriel sinking down, slumping onto the bed beside her, and when he spoke his voice was hollow and it reminded me, oddly, of Hugo’s when he’d told me my sister was dead:

  ‘Is it him? Please, did you… is that why?’

  Evangeline took a great, shuddering breath and nodded.

  Gabriel shot up and backed away from her, until he collided with the wall.

  On her knees, Sienna sobbed silently.

  I looked from my great-grandmother to my father to my sister and was hit by an overwhelming need for my mother.

  Then Nathanial was back, a yellowed envelope in his hands. His eyes locked on Evangeline.

  ‘I don’t know what this is, love,’ he said. ‘But are you sure…?’

  Her eyes roamed the room, flitting from my bowed sister to my rigid father and, finally, to me. Her hand lifted off the bed, pointing.

  Nathaniel held the letter out to me. I didn’t want to take it.

  ‘Please.’

  Not Evangeline’s plea, but my father’s.

  I took the letter.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Nathaniel told Evangeline.

  She shook her head.

  ‘But it was hidden, love. From me. You don’t have to –’

  She grabbed his hand, clung to it.

  He leaned over then and kissed her on the cheek. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m here.’

  Nathaniel settled beside Evangeline on the bed. Sienna remained huddled on the floor. Gabe sat on a wooden chair and wrapped his arms around himself.

  All eyes turned to me, to the envelope wavering in my hand. The flap was loose I saw; the seal had failed. I took a deep breath and slid out the sheets of paper within. I unfolded them. I read aloud.

  I have done a terrible thing.

  I cannot bear it, not another second of knowing, alone. My little secret. But there is no one I can tell. No Cerulean can know this. It is between me and God; but God has been so silent since. So I am writing it. I am writing it down. Then it will be out of me, and I will be able to let it go. I have to let it go.

  It began with Gabriel, that wretched boy with his self-formed principles and his big ideas. To fall in love with a human girl was bad enough. But to fall in love with Peter’s child… It was history repeating itself. I thought he would follow Peter’s path, and I could not stand that sacrilege. John fought against me Outcasting the boy, ‘just for loving a human,’ he said. But it was about more than that. It was about loyalty, the path of the righteous.

  And then Gabriel made the choice not to serve, and there was no arguing any more. He had taken a life. He had restored a life. He was not one of us. He was not worthy.

  I was glad to see him go. I was vindictive, even. He must have hated me. He must have wished never to see me again.

  And yet it was me he called, that dark night months after he’d left. Me he begged to come, to help. There was so much blood, he said, and he didn’t know what to do, and he didn’t trust a hospital, he only trusted us.

  Us.

  I remember noting the word and thinking, ‘How dare he, after everything, think that he is one of us?’

  I thought about abandoning him. It shames me to write the words but I must be honest now. I thought about putting down the phone and going back to my needlepoint. But I could hear Elizabeth crying out, and I told myself that no good Cerulean could ignore such pain.

  He took me to a tiny ho
use, entirely isolated, out in the wilds of Dartmoor. She was in the kitchen, in front of the oven, which was lit – the one source of heat. The floor was sticky with blood and she was wild with pain and fear; the baby was crowning.

  I set Gabriel to work laying hands on her, and I coaxed and soothed and instructed, and Elizabeth stopped screaming and she started pushing, and then… there she was, in my hands. Sienna. She was tiny and she was outraged, and her squalling turned her pink at once. She went straight to her mother’s breast and quietened there.

  I looked on them, the little family of three, as they had their moment. I think even then, even before what came next, the ice in me was melting. Gabriel – he was lit up from within, watching over the two. Such light inside that man.

  But quickly the pain was back, and I was telling Gabriel to take the baby, and I was back in position, confident now that we were on the final straight and that Elizabeth knew what to do. And she did. But this time, it was different. She was screaming, clawing at me, and when I checked between her legs I saw it, a little foot.

  I tried to calm her – I’d delivered breech before, of course – but she was out of her mind. I made Gabriel lay the baby down and come help me change Elizabeth’s position. We got her on all fours, and he held her and infused her with his light, and together we told her to push, and with her every push I manoeuvred. Until, after a long time – such a long time – there he was.

  He was tiny and perfect, just like his sister. But his eyes were not open. And his skin was not pinkening. And he was limp in my hands.

  I wrapped him quickly in a towel and I turned away, so they could not see, and I flooded him with light.

  He did not move.

  Elizabeth was calling now – ‘Is it a boy?’

  I willed the child to stir.

  He did not move.

  I felt Gabriel beside me, registered more hands on the baby, more light, so much light it was blinding to me, but not to the new mother behind, who was crooning to her daughter, oblivious yet, happy yet.

  He did not move.

  Some hours later I left the house on the moor and the little family within, too little, so new and yet already fractured. I took the baby with me. It was a kindness I’d offered to Gabriel and Elizabeth – the customary burial in Cerulea for one of us. Yes, us. I could offer a grieving father that much for his son. No need to go through all the unfeeling procedure of death in the human world: sirens, questions, morgues, coffins, certificates. Just a quiet, dignified honouring of life. They could come visit the grave, I told them. In a peaceful field, in a place of beauty. It was Elizabeth who’d made the decision then. She wanted that. She wanted peace for her son.

  It wasn’t a lie I told them. I meant what I said.

  I took the little blue baby back to the island. It was the middle of the night and everyone was asleep. I took him to the Birthing Place, and I washed him clean, and I dressed him as I would any of my own: nappy, vest, sleepsuit, mittens, hat.

  Then I swaddled him in a blanket and I sat in the rocking chair, the chair I used to feed my own, and I rocked him and I sang to him and I cried for him and I wished he’d had a chance. A little light leaked from my fingers, and it seemed fitting somehow, against the blue skin and the blue blanket, so I let it.

  I don’t remember making the conscious choice to do it. I just remember sorrow giving way to anger – at God, for taking such an innocent. The little blue baby was lying on a mound within which my own son was squirming and hiccupping and fidgeting, and the idea struck me: God could take my baby too. And then I was furious. I’d never felt that way before.

  I don’t know how I did it. I don’t remember. An hour, maybe more, is lost to me.

  John found me there, in the nursery. He peered at the bundle in my arms and he smiled. It was the smile that did it: shocking, out of place.

  I looked down. The baby’s eyes were closed still, but his cheeks were pink and tiny breaths were buffeting the blanket.

  He had been dead. There was no doubt about that. Gabriel would never have let me leave with him unless he knew his son was gone. But now he was alive.

  Gabriel had tried to resurrect him, back in the house on the moor, of course he had. But he had failed. Why I had been able when Gabriel had not I do not know. How I did it I do not know. Why I did it? That I do know, though it shames me to admit it: because for just a little while, I thought I was right and God was wrong, and I could not bear to do nothing, to hold a dead baby in my arms and let him go.

  I told John that the baby was a gift from God. He asked no questions. I think he assumed that the child was the result of one of our own men coupling with a human woman.

  I told the other mothers that we must share in the rearing of this child, this poor orphan. I cleared out a room for the baby far away from the others. I drew up a rota for his care.

  I wrote to Gabriel and Elizabeth and told them that I’d buried their son in the graveyard in Cerulea, and that they may come to visit him there, by arrangement, if they wished. They have not come. Perhaps the reality of doing so is too painful. Or perhaps, in the cold light of day, Gabriel regretted allowing me to take his son to the island. Elizabeth did write, to thank me. All she asked was that I inscribe the grave marker with the name ‘Noah’.

  I did as she asked on the grave, but I called the baby Michael. In Hebrew the name means, ‘Who is like God?’ A rhetorical question, and a reminder to me. No one is like God. No one may act like God.

  No one can know that for one weak moment I acted as God. No one. If they know what I did, what I am… Every time I see that child, I am reminded of the wrong in me.

  I am Evangeline. I am Mother. I uphold all the virtues and the rules of Cerulea. I believe in them, now more than I ever did.

  But I have done a terrible thing.

  Forgive me. Please.

  Forgive me. Please.

  Evangeline’s final words – in her letter, and to each of us, her long-time enemy, her great-granddaughters and her husband, before she was insensible with sobs.

  I repeated them to Luke now. I’d told him everything, the two of us huddled together on a sofa in the deserted living room of the big house. Through the conservatory doors, Jude and Sienna were visible outside, sitting similarly on a garden bench. I guessed, by the look of shock on Jude’s face, that my sister was also whispering Evangeline’s secret.

  ‘And did you?’ said Luke. ‘Did you give Evangeline forgiveness?’

  I shook my head. ‘Gabe shooed us out. Said he needed some time with her.’

  ‘Was that wise? I mean, we’re talking Gabe here, who once killed a man who hurt someone he loved.’

  ‘Gabe wasn’t angry, I don’t think. He was devastated. And besides, Evangeline’s dying. Today, tomorrow – soon. That was her deathbed confession. What’s the use in hating her now?’

  ‘But what she’s done…’

  ‘What would have been right, Luke? Leaving the baby dead?’

  ‘Of course not. But the lies!’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know. Gabe: all this time, painted as the villain when Evangeline knew they weren’t so different. Mum: no wonder she was always struggling; no wonder Sienna’s “death” crippled her. Evangeline: obsessed with obeying the rules of this place – penance, to make up for her own “mistake”, as she saw it. And that mistake – Michael. What a life for him. When he found that old letter…’

  ‘You think he’s read it?’

  ‘I know he has. He freely admitted to me that he snooped about in Evangeline’s papers. Can you imagine, the day he found that – how he felt, reading it?’

  Luke thought about it. ‘Confused,’ he said eventually. ‘Angry. Hurt. But the beauty in those paintings… maybe he was also hopeful. He had a family.’

  ‘A family who shut him out. A family who cared nothing for him.’

  ‘Because you didn’t know!’

  ‘That doesn’t excuse it, Luke. Michael was alone. He’s always been alone. And God knows what
’s been going through his head, what he wanted from me, from Mum – why he has Jack.’

  That feeling I’d had before but been ashamed to acknowledge, I was claiming it now. Empathy. Michael was no comic book villain, two-dimensional, evil. He was complex. He was hurting. He was desperately in need.

  ‘If he’s a monster,’ I said, ‘then he’s a monster of our making.’

  It was a relief to have got to this point. Since I’d found my mother hurt, since I’d realised I had it in me to punish the mysterious ‘him’ who’d hurt her, I’d been living in fear of who I really was deep down. But now I knew. I was me; I’d been me all along. I wasn’t a Vindico. I wasn’t a Cerulean. I was on my own path, and it wasn’t black and it wasn’t white, it was the kaleidoscope of colours between the two, and that was right for me.

  Luke, however, didn’t look remotely relieved. ‘Scarlett,’ he said seriously. ‘You can’t get lost in feeling sorry for Michael. What he’s done is no one’s fault but his own. You’re not responsible. None of you – even Evangeline. Only him.’

  A raised voice made me look to the garden. Sienna was pacing angrily, shaking her head, and Jude was on his feet, trying to reason with her.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ said Luke, tugging on my hand until I focused on him. ‘We’ll find him, and we’ll get Jack back, and then…’

  ‘And then what?’

  Fragments of hoarse cries filtered through the glass doors, followed by a crash. I turned to look. An angel statue was prone on the ground, Sienna was hopping about clutching her foot and Jude was trying to catch hold of her.

  ‘She doesn’t get it,’ I said. ‘And neither does Jude. Michael has their son. They can’t see past that – how could they? But…’

  I turned back to Luke. ‘But he’s my brother.’ The word felt strange on my lips, but I carried on: ‘Whatever he’s done. Whatever he is. I thought once that blood meant nothing. But I was wrong. It does.’

  ‘I know,’ said Luke quietly.

  I relaxed a little then, leaning my head on his shoulder. He understood. He had Cara and he’d do anything for her.