Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

“It makes the play a catch-22,” said Joanna. “Play it to the hilt, capture the essence of the conjuring, and even without the exact rite, you’ll half-wake forces beyond most people’s control, without any safe place to contain them. Fail, though, and you invoke Macbeth’s curse.”

  I frowned.

  “End of the cauldron scene,” said Joanna. “I will be satisfied, the king screams when the witches warn him off pursuing more knowledge. Deny me this, and an eternal curse fall on you! So you see, in the hands of the untrained, either the magic half-works, in a terribly dangerous way, or it doesn’t, and the production pulls a curse down on its own head.”

  “If you believe in magic,” I said. “If it exists,” said Joanna, “it doesn’t matter a toss whether you believe in it or not.”

  Lady Nairn had said something very similar. “No,” I said. “What matters is what Carrie believes.”

  “If she’s Corra ravensbrook, she believes in magic. Death magic.”

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and buried my head in them. Dee had spent years and most of his treasure invoking angels, trying to rediscover the language that could bring force to a statement like “let there be light”: Fiat lux.

  Now someone was out there grasping toward something much darker. “Fiat mors,” I whispered. “Let there be death.”

  Was that what she wanted? And meant to have, via some ancient rite of cauldron magic?

  It was a power she’d already grasped. Images and sounds slipped through my head. Auld Callie in the tree, the rope creaking against the oak. The blue gown pattering down across Sybilla’s body, tied and bloody. My own hands, smeared with her blood. Killer, or consecrated victim? for all I knew, she’d foisted some of the killing off on me.

  And Eircheard. Rollicking, irreverent, kind Eircheard, his face twisted in agony, his heart, for Christ’s sake, ripped beating from his chest. The bitch had torn out his heart.

  And now she was toying with Lily.

  If she’d been present, I think I might have torn her limb from limb like a Maenad. If I’d been on the ground, I might have run screaming into the night sea, or crowds, or wide empty fields spreading under the moon. Somewhere large enough to hold the grief and anger pent-up within me. In the tin can of a plane, all that passion had nowhere to go but into tears. I wrapped my arms more and more tightly around my knees, trying to hold it in, but the sobs welled up and out all the same.

  Beside me, Joanna gathered me in her arms and let me cry.

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, I slept. I woke in darkness to Joanna’s gentle shaking. We’d arrived at Teterboro Airport, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. It was three in the morning, local time. The meeting wasn’t till seven-thirty, but I saw no point in waiting; I had no hours to waste.

  I glanced in a mirror. My eyes were bleary, still rimmed with red, but nothing that someone who didn’t know me might not chalk up to being awake at a preposterous hour. I ran cold water over a couple of washcloths and brought them with me, to cool down my face. It was the best I could do.

  “You think he’ll just invite us in at this hour?” asked Joanna. “I don’t intend to give him a choice.”

  A limo was waiting at the foot of the stairs. We drove through suburban New Jersey, into the glazed glare of the Lincoln Tunnel, and up into the cement canyons of midtown Manhattan. Past the Empire State Building, past the darkness of union Square, down toward the Village, and left into Astor Place, where the cab drew up to a graceful Romanesque building in terra-cotta brick, its windows soaring up six stories to curve in semicircular arches. Up ahead, a few giggling tourists were spinning the famed Cube sculpture on its axis, but at half past three the open space—not quite a plaza, though it seemed to aim in that direction—was otherwise mostly quiet.

  In the lobby, the doorman was hunched over a computer screen, watching a third-rate horror film, judging by the soundtrack. Hearing that we were old friends of Clifton’s, he glanced up with heavy-lidded eyes. “The professor’s expectin’ ya?”

  I gave him a wide, giggly smile. “With shots of tequila.”

  He waved us on with a smirk.

  I phoned Clifton from right outside his door. “God, this better be good,” said a luxuriant voice into my ear.

  “Come to your door and you tell me.” reaching into my bag, I pulled the mirror I’d taken from Joanna from its black velvet wrapping and held it up before the peephole.

  Behind me, Joanna stirred. “Is that mine?” she whispered. I nodded. “This will drain its power,” she hissed.

  “I’m sorry,” I mouthed. “I owe you.” If I had to lie naked in a field with the disc of cold black stone lying on my belly at every full moon for a year to recharge it, I would. Meanwhile, if it could help show the way to the manuscript and Lily, it would be magic mirror enough.

  A few moments later, I heard an intake of breath over the phone. In the door, bolts turned in their locks.

  39

  THE DOOR OPENED on a willowy woman with short dark hair tousled with sleep. She wore a silk robe of multicolored stripes that made me think of Joseph and his Technicolor dream-coat. In one hand she held the phone on which she’d been talking to me. I stood in the hall, blinking in surprise. Jamie Clifton was a woman.

  The promise, dangled before her, of learning more about the mirror whisked us inside, where we perched on an uncomfortably low but doubtless very cool leather sofa, while Jamie padded around the kitchen, making coffee. The condo was a model of sleek urban chic, a loftlike space with high ceilings, exposed brick walls, and a lot of gleaming steel and granite. Almost one entire wall was a window overlooking the plaza below. The glass coffee table before us, though, was piled with papers to grade, and the kitchen island was scattered with takeout cartons, which cluttered the image.

  “How’d you know about the lettering around the rim?” asked Joanna as Jamie set mugs of coffee down in front of us. “There’s nothing visible in the image you sent Owen.”

  “He showed you?” she shrilled in annoyance. “Asshole.” Sinking cross-legged into an armchair in a cloud of striped silk, she breathed in the steam rising from her mug. “Explain to me again why I should help you?”

  .

  She could play coy all she wanted, but she’d let us in at a ridiculous hour of the morning. She was interested. I leaned back against the sofa. “Because you’d like to know what it spells.”

  “You’ve seen it?” There was an eager catch in her voice.

  I smiled. Knowledge, the oldest temptation.

  She disappeared down a hall and came back with a hinged frame, folded closed. “The image I sent…it was only half the picture. Not quite aboveboard, maybe, but I wanted to give the Brits a reason to take my inquiry seriously without giving the game away. The daguerrotype you’ve seen—it’s freakin’ gorgeous, of course, but it’s the companion shot that’s really fabulous. Taken at the same sitting. They’re both by Matthew Brady, the Civil War photographer. He had a studio in New York before he went down to Washington. Did you know that? He did society portraits. Very solemn, most of them. But he convinced some of his clients who were actors to experiment with emotion and action.”

  She’d hardly taken a breath since she started, her words tumbling out in a quick staccato patter. Opening the frame with a flourish, she set it down on the table before us. On the left was the daguerrotype she’d sent Owen. On the right was another, again showing forrest in the same kilt and plumed bonnet. But this pose was more akin to a still from a silent film than to the Victorian solemnity of the other portrait. A woman, turned away from the camera, faced him, holding the mirror as he leaned back in exaggerated horror. What he saw in the mirror remained unseen. But in the woman’s hand, a few letters were visible in reverse around the rim of the disc: .

  “Daguerrotypes flipped images left to right, like mirrors,” said Jaimie.

  Reversed back, the letters read NGISBU. They were from the middle of Arthur Dee’s identifying phrase, NOTHING IS BUT WHAT IS NOT, minus the first five l
etters of “nothing” and everything after the “u” in “but.” I glanced up at Joanna.

  “It’s Dee’s,” she confirmed.

  Jamie looked from me to Joanna and back. “No shit? You can tell? Just like that?”

  My voice raspy in my throat, I quoted Arthur Dee: “You will knowe the Mirror by its black surface, and by a Posie around its edge: Nothing is but what is…not,” I added. “It’s the mirror that was originally used in Macbeth.”

  “The mirror that originated the curse,” said Joanna.

  “Well, then it came into play on May tenth, 1849.” Jamie shook her head. “He had it the day of the riot. Did you know that? Forrest carried it the day of the riot.”

  “But it was Macready who was acting at the opera house, wasn’t it? forrest’s fans were on the outside, throwing stones.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Some say he was there.” She walked to the window. “There,” she snorted. “Here. It was here. This building rose from the ashes of the Astor Place Opera House…. Imagine twenty thousand people down there, throwing paving stones and oil-soaked torches. And then cavalry and infantry marching in behind, squeezing them ever closer into the building, filled with a standing-room-only crowd.”

  Her voice seemed to people the night with the cries of men and the screams of horses, the roaring of flame and echoing volleys of gunfire. “Who knows where forrest was? He might have been in the crowd, or even in the building. Probably idle speculation. But the suspicion was there.”

  I tried to keep my mind on the photos. “Who’s the woman?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jamie. “At first I thought she might be his wife, Catherine. She was an actress herself, you know. But this can’t have been her. They’d already parted by the riot. Sad story, that. Forrest could be a real bastard. With regard to his wife, he became a character out of one of his plays. Henry the Eighth, maybe. Or even worse, Othello.”

  The person Ellen Terry had her story from had been a woman, a fellow denizen of the drama, she’d written, whose personal tale is as tragic as any role she might encharacter on the stage.

  “What happened?” asked Joanna.

  “Catherine Sinclair was beautiful and vivacious, the daughter of actors, and Edwin swept her off her feet when she was very young and he was already an international star. For twelve years, they had a blissfully happy marriage—as happy as one can be, at any rate, that endures the death of every child born into it. She bore four children to full term, but none of them lived more than a week.”

  “Jesus,” said Joanna.

  “In the spring of 1848, he took Catherine on tour with him. One afternoon he returned unexpectedly to their hotel room and found her in what he regarded as a compromising attitude with another actor, a known ladies’ man. Then, in the early months of 1849, he went snooping among Catherine’s things and found a letter from the same man. A ridiculous letter, really. Completely over the top in declaring his passion for her—and no proof that she returned it. But that was it for forrest. He decided his wife was a fallen woman and he was a wronged man. There was one bitter fight that went on all night, apparently, and then six icy weeks of silence. And then he threw her out.

  “Beyond all understanding, she seems to have still loved him. She jumped through all kinds of hoops for him and signed some really humiliating letters that he dictated. It wasn’t until he tried to cut her off without enough money to live a respectable life that she began to fight back. In an era both phobic of publicity and fascinated by it, any sensible person would have settled matters out of court, for his own pride, even if he couldn’t muster the tiniest crumb of sympathy for a woman he’d adored for twelve years. But Edwin had become a vengeful god. He forced Catherine into court for a divorce trial and accused her, in open court, of adultery with numerous men. It became one of the sensations of nineteenth-century America.”

  Had Ellen Terry’s “poor soul” who regarded herself as the guardian of a Macbeth manuscript been Catherine forrest? I am hoping that you can glimpse the Forest through the Trees, she’d written to Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

  “What happened to her?” I asked, gripping the edge of the sofa.

  “Remarkable woman, actually,” said Jamie. “After the divorce, she went west to run theaters in gold-rush California: San Francisco, Sacramento, the gold camps. Toured Australia, then London, and then traveled through Scotland on her own. Her parents were Scottish by birth. Same as forrest’s.”

  “She went to Scotland?” I asked. “You’re sure?” Sir Angus had believed that Terry’s informant was the dark fairy of Dunsinnan legend.

  “Twice, that I know of,” said Jamie. “Can’t pinpoint the date of the first trip, but the second was 1889. She saw Ellen Terry’s Macbeth.”

  Plucking the frame from the table, I examined it, but there was nothing to be seen that we hadn’t seen already. At the back, both sides were sealed with brown paper. Picking it up, I walked into the kitchen, found a knife, and slit one side open.

  “What are you doing?” cried Jamie. “They’re sealed in the original frame. It’s half of what makes it valuable.”

  “Not so valuable as a life,” I said, lifting the daguerrotype plate from the glass. It was the one with the date. There was no other inscription. No mark of any kind. I slit open the other side of the frame.

  To the back of the plate, someone had fixed a note written from Hells Delight, California, in 1855:

  Mr. Forrest,

  Not for your sake, but for posterity’s, I must beg you to read one further missive from me.

  When you were in Edinburgh last, a singular opportunity came my way regarding Macbeth, the very play that you and Mr. Macready had chosen to make your battleground. I acquired a curiosity I intended as a surprise for you, but never delivered.

  Tho’ wonderful, it was a dark gift that I trembled to look on. More than once, I have wondered whether its presence, even in secret, may have poisoned our love, as I believe the mirror did.

  You will find it beneath our sweet fountain on the hill. Or, if you do not, it is at least safe, under the watchful eye of heaven.

  Farewell,

  Mrs. Edwin Forrest

  At the last sentence, Jamie rose in excitement. “The fountain hill. Fonthill. The castle on the Hudson that Edwin built for Catherine.”

  “Does it still exist?” I asked.

  Jamie laughed. “It does. He sold it, in 1855, to some nuns.”

  “Under the watchful eye of heaven,” said Joanna.

  “They originally ran a school in what’s now Central Park. After the nuns moved their school north to Fonthill, it became the College of Mount Saint Vincent…. Where I’m on the faculty. The building’s just called the Castle now. It’s where I teach.”

  I had no time to wait for bells to ring. “We have to go now!” I fairly shouted at her.

  I could see, though, that there would be no hesitation. It took Jamie no more than five minutes to throw on jeans, a sweater, and a jacket. Downstairs, we stepped out into the cold darkness of early morning. I looked at my watch as we slid into the car. It was a quarter past four.

  40

  WE HEADED WEST through Greenwich Village, winding through tree-lined streets that sprouted at odd angles. At the tail end of a cold night at the edge of winter, the streets that refused to sleep looked either sad or seedy, even in Manhattan, the haunt of garbage trucks and revels gone on too long. At the drive lining the island’s west side, we turned north.

  Fonthill, Jamie told us as we drove, had been named in homage to fonthill Abbey, in England.

  “A church?” asked Joanna.

  Jamie laughed. “Sounds like it, but no. It was a preposterously grand home erected by one of the wealthiest Brits of the eighteenth century. Inherited money from Jamaican sugar—slavery, in other words. Damn near bankrupted himself, though, building fonthill.” She shook her head. “He was one strange dude, was William Beckford. Wrote a weird Gothic novel called Vathek, about demons and human sacrifice and the un
bridled need to know everything. He said it was a response to some things that happened to him at fonthill one Christmas. So maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising that the Forrests’ little fonthill is at least as much in line with the occult as with the church.”

  “Do you think the forrests knew that?” I asked. “Don’t know if Edwin did. But Catherine almost certainly knew. Ran with a Bohemian crowd, when occult investigations were all the rage. She was into Spiritualism later. Trying to contact her dead babies. And she seems to have forged a psychological link with Lady Macbeth. Did a lot of research on Elizabeth Stewart, at any rate.”

  Elizabeth Stewart, the original Lady Macbeth.

  I pulled my jacket tighter around me. Off to the right, the city’s skyscrapers clawed upward into the sky and then subsided again. The George Washington Bridge swooped off left to New Jersey. Trees lurched up and swallowed the road. In the darkness it seemed as if we were gliding through some primordial forest, in a world made only of road, trees, and the shimmering waters of the Hudson.

  The parkway crossed a small, ordinary bridge as it emptied into the Bronx, and the city slipped into view, battling back the trees. After a while, we shot past a long low stone wall edging tall trees to a traffic light, where we turned in. “Welcome to the College of Mount Saint Vincent,” said Jamie. We wound back to a gatehouse, where a guard looked up sleepily from his book, saw Jamie, and waved us on.

  The road carved through trees, between brick buildings, mostly dark, and back to a wide expanse of lawn out of which rose a small knoll topped by a castle. A toy castle, next to Windsor or Caernarvon or Edinburgh. But for all that, a castle: octagonal towers of rough-hewn gray stone huddling together, raising battlements like fists into the night.

  “Our sweet fountain on the hill,” said Jamie. “fonthill.”

  The driver stopped the car at a tall pointed archway filled with double doors, and we got out. Wind whistled around the building. Jamie avoided the steps up to the great door, darting off into the darkness to the right. Skirting some rhododendrons, we came to a steep stairway leading down. In the wall, half aboveground, was a door. Unlocking it, Jamie beckoned us inside.