Both of the boys grabbed the colored pencils on the table and ignored the mention of prose, despite the fact that this was my favorite medium. I frowned but said nothing, remembering that their late mother had created the majority of the artwork that decorated the walls of Everton.
Paul began scribbling furiously without hesitation. He paused every few minutes to look out the window, and continued drawing, in fine detail, a meticulous landscape of Everton from a bird’s-eye view. James had more trouble deciding what to draw. He had many dreams every night, and so choosing the most exciting and violent one to illustrate was no small task. Eventually he settled on what he knew best and began sketching the hulking black thorax of the Spider Queen.
When the boys had finished, I led them back to their desks and asked them to present their artwork. James, who always demanded to go first and threatened to throw a magnificent tantrum if he didn’t get his way, had found no purchase with me by using this tactic, despite a glorious performance involving impressive physicality with thrown chairs, toppled tables, and broken vases, during which I clapped and cheered him on as if I had paid for the privilege of his outburst, and eventually he relented to alternating turns with his brother. Nevertheless, it was his turn to present first. He stood from his chair and moved to the front of the room beside the desk.
“I drew the Spider Queen.” The paper contained a black blob of a body with eight spindly appendages, but the face of the creature was very much like that of a young woman, with curly silver hair and pretty features. “She lives in a cave beneath my bed and eats up the goblins whenever they try to steal my breath. Sometimes she has me over for tea, and sometimes we’re friends, but other times she sends her children after me because I’ve stolen some of her treasures.” He stopped and clutched his stomach again in an effort to remind me of his delicate and very hungry condition, but I did not let him return to his seat.
“But why would you steal from her? It sounds as if she’s doing you a favor by gobbling up the goblins.”
James looked at me as if I were quite slow. “To buy back Mother’s soul from the Goblin King.”
My heart sank, and for a moment I did not know how to respond. What was there to say? It was a beautiful, sad sentiment, but I quickly recovered. “Why would he have your mother’s soul? She went to Heaven.”
The boy thought about this and shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno. It was just a dream I had.” I nodded to him that he could return to his chair.
Paul stood up and took his place before the blackboard. He held up his re-creation of Everton, which now resembled something like a treasure map.
“Last night I dreamt that I went to Mother’s house.”
I took a deep breath and wrung my fingers together. This was not going at all the way I had expected. But then, what did I expect? The boys had lost their mother. Of course they were dreaming of her. I knew that they were dreaming of her. I had lost my mother nearly fifteen years before and still dreamt of her. It was not something that ever truly went away. The three of us would perhaps always be bound by our grief, never truly finished with the long nightmare of loss. But if that were true then we were also bound together searching in our dreaming for new memories of the mothers we lost. Children need their parents in whatever form they’re available, and I shivered for a moment as I thought back to one of my dreams the night before.
Children need their mothers.
Paul continued to explain his drawing.
“She came for me in the night and led me through a wood.” He pointed to his illustration of the old-growth forest behind the house. “The wood turned into an orchard, and there was a great house. Mother said we couldn’t go inside just yet, that we had to do it in person. She’s waiting for us.”
The specificity of his dream was unnerving. I folded my hands on the desk and peered carefully at the young man. “Why would she do that?”
He looked down at the ground, his large blue eyes fixated on nothing particular but still lost in thought. He spoke without looking up. “She misses us.”
With those three words he nearly reduced me to tears. I felt the years of built-up sorrow at the loss of my own mother materialize as a tightening in my chest and the prickling sensation behind the eyes that heralded the impending arrival of tears.
“Paul”—my voice almost broke—“your mother is gone.”
He finally looked up, his face creased in a pleasant, knowing expression that should have been impossible for someone who had just turned thirteen. “I know. But every now and then, when we’re in the village, and I see the back of a lady with long black hair, I always hope that it’s her; that everything I remember is wrong. That she didn’t die. It was all just a misunderstanding.”
It was almost identical to what his father had told me that first night in the music room. We stared at each other in silence for what felt like a long while, until James grew tired of not being the center of attention and spoke up.
“Can we go?”
“Lunch isn’t for twenty more minutes,” I reminded him.
“Not to eat; into the woods.” He pointed at his brother’s map.
“Whatever for?”
The boy shrugged, and his older brother spoke up. “Aren’t some dreams true?”
While I wanted the boys to find solace in the idea that their dreams were not real, I hadn’t anticipated them finding so much relief in the notion that they were. If I took them into the woods, they would find nothing there and be forced to face the fact that their mother was truly gone. If I did not, then it was likely they would find some way to use the map when I wasn’t looking, and the last thing I wanted was for the boys to go off into the wilderness on their own, especially in light of the fact that whoever had killed Nanny Prum was still at large. There was only one option: I would take them, show them the reality of death, and deal with the consequences as they came.
“I suppose we could take our lunch outside this afternoon; I do enjoy picnics.”
At the mention of a meal James clutched his stomach again and did his best to look pathetic. Paul looked over his handmade map with a frown, but said nothing.
“Does that sound like something you’d both enjoy?”
The older boy folded the map carefully and placed it in his pocket. “Yes, thank you.” He smiled placidly. I was beginning to notice that he was unreadable when he wanted to be. It was an unnatural quality in one his age, and I made a note to watch him more carefully.
“Can we go now?” James whined, taking my hand before I could respond and leading me down to the parlor, where I had them wait as I negotiated our picnic with Mrs. Mulbus. Luckily, Jenny was in the village running an errand, and so the usual shouting and arguing that accompanied a visit to the kitchen was replaced with complaints from Mrs. Mulbus about the scullery maid’s tardiness and general laziness. As I provided a sympathetic ear to the cook’s woes, she had no trouble procuring a basket full of finger sandwiches, slices of roast chicken, bread, cheese, pork pies, and fruit for our afternoon adventure. She even supplied a sturdy blanket for the occasion.
After I’d collected the boys, we set out from the back of the house and found a patch of grass at the edge of the forest still awash in sunlight. It was unseasonably warm despite the impending arrival of winter. I spread the picnic blanket over the ground and laid out the contents of the basket. As we filled our stomachs, the shadows of the tree branches marked the length of the meal like a sundial, and when we finished, I fell back into the tall grass. The children danced around me in circles like giants among the dying wildflowers, happy and full, finally collapsing into a breathless, red-faced heap of tousled hair and grass-stained shins.
“We all fall down!” James giggled into the hem of my dress as Paul tugged at his leg in an effort to twist it off. The little boy squealed, and I sat up with a dramatic sigh.
“Paul, must you do that to your brother’
s leg?”
“It wouldn’t come off when I pulled.”
“I imagine it might be difficult to continue the day’s activities if you have to carry your brother’s leg around.”
“Maybe, but he won’t give me back my map.”
“James?”
“But I want to look at it!”
“It seems to me that I’ve done a very poor job of teaching you the importance of sharing, and it may be time for a precocious little song.”
James scrambled up and serenaded me with a series of high-pitched screams, a sound that, despite the ringing it left in my ears, spoke of the intimacy and affection that had quickly formed between us in the weeks since the loss of Nanny Prum. Paul put his hands over his ears and attempted to trip his brother.
“Yes, you should run! You’ve heard me sing! But by now you must also be aware that I happen to find threats and subterfuge a much more effective means of communicating with inscrutably dense children.”
James stopped running and turned to squint back at me. “What’s dense?”
I leapt from the ground and snatched the paper from the young boy’s hands. I was so quick he barely had time to register what had happened before I handed the homemade map over to his brother.
“Paul, what does dense mean?”
“That we still have a lot to learn about the world.”
“That will do for now, I suppose.” I kissed James on the head and lifted him into the air, placing his legs so they straddled my waist. He scowled but put his arm around my neck anyway.
“Now, where does it say to go next?”
Paul held the map close to his face. It was eerily accurate as he compared it to the landscape, looking across the field toward the overgrown forest up ahead.
“Over there, into the woods.”
“Off we go then.” I set James back on the ground next to his brother and gathered up the remains of the picnic into the basket. As we marched away from the field, the sun slid behind the twisting, knotted tree branches and the ground swelled with half-buried roots and rocks, both big enough to trip over and small enough to get trapped at the bottom of a shoe.
“Paul, how much farther?” I asked, becoming a bit nervous as the shadows grew longer.
“It was just ahead in my dream.”
I said nothing for a moment, prepared to let reality speak for itself as it tore away the curtain of hope to reveal the cruel actuality of death, which had been unable to grab hold of the children, even though James, at least, had been at their mother’s side when she had passed on—a prime example of the power of the heart to overwhelm the mind. “And what do you expect to do if there isn’t anything there?” I said after a while.
“I’ll keep dreaming.” Paul said this matter-of-factly, without turning away from the task at hand, stepping over underbrush, moss-covered boulders, and rotted logs with complete determination. I held James’s hand and continued my minor lecture as we walked.
“Dreams are my favorite things in the world. Sometimes they even come true, but sometimes we must learn when to wake up.”
Paul ignored me and pointed excitedly at something up ahead. “There!”
The path ended at a small fallow creek, but began again on the other side to disappear around a dark, massive cage of roots at the base of an ancient oak tree. Whatever lay beyond the magnificent tree was obscured in a thick, roiling patch of fog. James wrenched himself free from my hand and leapt over the creek, bounding into the mist before I was able to stop him.
“James!”
I quickly hoisted my dress up to my waist and jumped over the brook, glancing back at Paul to wave him on. Together we chased his brother into the mist.
The air around us grew heavy with a dampness that remained even as the fog subsided, and we found ourselves in the middle of a vast orchard. While it had been daylight mere moments before, the moon now hung low in the sky, larger than I had ever seen. It was so vast and oppressive I felt that if I were to reach toward the sky I might be able to push the orb back where it belonged, high above on the black velvet mantle of the night.
“It’s nighttime here.” Paul was behind me, hugging himself against the cool air.
“Perhaps I misjudged the time . . .” I said with uncertainty as I took his hand very tightly into my own and began to march between the rows of squat orchard trees. “We must find your brother.”
Paul was silent as he walked, his knuckles white as he peered between the trees at the shadows that stretched out to us when we passed, sensing us with hungry anticipation.
“Is this the place you dreamt of?”
Paul shivered against the chill in the air, observed the heavy moon in the sky, and shook his head slowly. “No. There was an orchard, but it was different.”
Normally, I would have been very interested in such a sudden change of landscape—and apparently, time—but I was anxious to find James. My heart began to pulse in my ears, throbbing so intensely that my body seemed to reverberate with each beat. I refused to panic. Instead, I felt a heightened awareness of the atmosphere around me, of the curling fog behind a distant tree, of the rustle of branches around us, the movement of the shadows in our direction as we passed, of the very alien nature of the place that Paul’s map had led us to.
“James!” My voice did not echo through the air, nor could we hear the sounds of our footsteps on the hard, cold earth. Still, I continued to call out until I was hoarse. Paul dragged behind me, gasping every time he looked back to where we had come from, seeing nothing but a gloom as opaque and tangible as the fog that had heralded our arrival to this strange, dark land. It was building around and behind us, pushing us toward a destination neither of us wanted to think about.
“Charlotte . . .”
“We’ll leave as soon as we find your brother.”
I stopped at what appeared to be the main thoroughfare and peered in both directions, trying to decide which way James might have gone. Behind me, Paul pressed himself against the nearest tree, as if to block the creeping darkness from his line of vision. Thin branches and twigs cracked and broke around his body, and his head grazed the bottom of a low-hanging piece of fruit with enough force to knock it free. It dropped down into his hands.
It was about the same size and shape as a grapefruit, but before he could get a good look at it, he glanced up at me, clearly frightened, sensing that something was wrong. The fruit quivered, and with a wet, tearing sound it began to unroll from the inside out, the air laced with the scent of peaches as the thing in his hands untwisted its arms and legs from the pulpy interior of its body and wrenched its head free from its shell. A baby’s face blinked at us with pale blue eyes as Paul dropped it onto the ground with a look of utter terror, backing away, his gaze transfixed on the thing as it fell onto its back, protected by what was formerly the leathery skin of the fruit.
It smiled at him with thin, sharp teeth.
Paul let out a manic, consuming scream that frittered away the last remaining edges of his youthful courage and curiosity and exploded into his legs. He ran past me, past the trees, never looking directly at them, at the fruit, perhaps afraid that it might look back; his voice never breaking through the air as he shrieked, never echoing, but rather circling back in on him like a vulture, an eater of dead things, pecking away his every last hope, every rational thought, every instinct but the one that told him to run for as long as it took to escape.
I trailed behind him, struggling to follow his voice, which was quickly muffled by the rows of trees, but as he was running in a straight line I was able to catch up to him when he stopped, panting and heaving at the edge of the orchard before a great house as grand as anything either of us had ever seen before.
The doors of the house stood open, and silhouetted against the light that streamed over the threshold as vibrantly as the darkness churned in the orchard was a woman, tall
and regal, even at a distance. James was at her side, clinging to her waist as she descended the steps leading up to the house with slow deliberation, almost gliding to the ground, a beautiful phantom with a small, worried smile as she approached Paul and gently touched his face. He collapsed against her and sobbed so loudly into her shoulder that I was unable to dispute the name that he immediately and distinctly gave her:
“Mother!”
CHAPTER 5
Bargains with the Dead
For a moment, I could only stand at the foot of the great house in an attempt to catch my breath, my mind reeling, searching for some way to escape with the children. Lily Darrow was dead. There had been witnesses and a funeral and a painting commissioned to hang over the desk in her husband’s study, a portrait of a raven-haired creature with glittering eyes like cracked jade and a playful expression of mock superiority, which he stared at for hours on end when he didn’t think the servants were watching. And yet . . . the likeness was so startling that I had to shake myself of the very notion that the woman before us could possibly be the late Mrs. Darrow.
They had mourned her. What kind of wife and mother would allow her family to feel the things that her death had inflicted upon them if she were not well and truly dead? It was unfathomable. This was some act of trickery, a cruel impostor toying with the emotions of children. I would not stand for it.
Paul sobbed into the woman’s shoulder, crying and apologizing—“I’m sorry I wasn’t there, I’m so sorry”—as she stroked his head and cooed away his sorrows. I stepped forward, stopping as I happened upon the crinkled hand-drawn map of the forest left behind on the ground of the orchard, a thing crafted from the scraps of dreams. How could anyone have influenced the boy to lead us into the woods? Was such a thing even possible? There were so many questions, all of them overshadowed by the one thought I could not ignore:
“No one ever comes back,” I said.
James pulled his face away from the skirts of the mystery woman, and looked her over carefully before returning my pleading gaze with a confused expression. In his eyes I could see that there was no doubt the woman he clung to was his mother.
Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling Page 5
