In the Forest of Forgetting

by Theodora Goss

  Genevieve did not much care, but the habit of obedience was strong, particularly to Nanny’s comfortable voice, so she rose from the settee, kicking aside Pilgrim’s Progress. This, although unintentional, sufficiently expressed her attitude toward the book, which Old Thwaite had read to her and Roland every Sunday afternoon, after church, while her father slept on the sofa with a handkerchief over his face. When she read the book herself, which was not often, she imagined him snoring. More often, when she was in a “mood,” she would simply hold it open on her lap at the picture of Christian in the Slough of Despont, imagining interesting ways to keep him from reaching the Celestial City, which she believed must be the most boring place in the universe.

  As she clattered down the stairs after Nanny, speculating that her father would not shout or send her to her room in front of the new governess, she began to imagine a marsh with green weeds that looked like solid ground. From it would rise seven women, nude and strategically covered with mud, with names like Desire and Foolishness. They would twine their arms around Christian and drag him downward into the muddy depths, where they would subject him to unspeakable pleasures. She did not think he would escape their clutches.

  III. THE BOOK IN THE CHIMNEY

  It was not what she was, exactly. She was not anything, exactly. Genevieve could see her now, through the library window, sitting in a garden chair, embroidering something. Once, Genevieve had crept up behind her and seen that she was embroidering on white linen with white thread so fine that the pattern was barely perceptible.

  Her gray dress was always neat, her white face was always solemn. Her irregular verbs, as far as Genevieve could judge, were always correct. She knew the principle exports of Byzantium. When Genevieve did particularly well on her botany or geography, she smiled a placid smile.

  It was not, then, anything in particular, except that her hands were so small, and moved so quickly over the piano keys, like jumping spiders. She preferred to play Chopin.

  No, it was something more mysterious, something missing. Genevieve reached into the back of the fireplace and carefully pulled out a loose brick. Behind it was an opening just large enough for a cigar box filled with dead beetles, which was what Roland had kept there, or a book, which was what she had kept there since Roland had left for Harrow and then the university. No fire had been lit in the library since her mother’s death, when Genevieve was still young enough to be carried around in Nanny’s arms. Her mother, who had liked books, had left her Pilgrim’s Progress and a copy of Clarissa in one volume, which Genevieve read every night until she fell asleep. She never remembered what she had read the night before, so she always started again at the beginning. She had never made it past the first letter.

  Out of the opening behind the brick, she pulled a book with a red leather cover, faded and sooty from its hiding place. On the cover, in gold lettering, Genevieve could still read the words Practical Divination. On the first page was written,

  PRACTICAL DIVINATION FOR THE ADEPT OR AMATEUR

  BY THE RIGHT REVEREND ALICE WIDDICOMB

  ENDORSED BY THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

  She brought the book to the library table, where she had set the basin and a bottle of ink. She was out of black ink, so it would have to be purple. Her father would shout at her when he discovered that she was out of ink again, but this time she could blame it on Miss Gray and irregular verbs.

  She poured purple ink into the basin, then blew on it and repeated the words the Right Reverend Alice Widdicomb recommended, which sounded so much like a nonsense rhyme that she always wondered if they were strictly necessary. But she repeated them anyway. Then she stared at the purple ink until her eyes crossed, and said to the basin, as solemnly as thought she were purchasing a railway ticket, “Miss Gray, please.”

  First, the purple ink showed her Miss Gray sitting in the garden, looking faintly violet. Sir Edward came up from behind and leaned over her shoulder, admiring her violet embroidery. Then it showed a lane covered with purple mud, by a field whose fence needed considerable repair, over which grew a purple oak tree. Rain came down from the lavender sky. Genevieve waited, but the scene remained the same.

  “Perfectly useless,” she said with disgust. It was probably the purple ink. Magic was like Bach. If you didn’t play the right notes in the right order, it never came out right. She turned to the back of the book, where she had tucked in a piece of paper covered with spidery handwriting. On one side it said “To Biddy, from Alice. A Sovereign Remedy for the Catarrh.” On the other side was “A Spell to Make Come True Your Heart’s Desire.” That had not worked either, although Genevieve had gathered the ingredients carefully, even clipping the whiskers from the taxidermed fox in the front hall. She read it over again, wondering where she had made a mistake. Perhaps it needed to be a live fox?

  In the basin, Miss Gray was once again working on her violet embroidery. Genevieve frowned, rubbing a streak of purple ink across her cheek. What was it, exactly? She would have to find out another way.

  IV. A WEDDING ON THE LAWN

  How, and this was the important question, had she done it? The tulle, floating behind her over the clipped lawn like foam. The satin, like spilled milk. The orange flowers brought from London.

  Roland was drunk, which was only to be expected. He was standing beside the tea table, itself set beside the yew hedge, looking glum. Genevieve found it in her heart to sympathize.

  “Oh, what a day,” said Nanny, who was serving tea. She was upholstered in brown. A lace shawl that looked as thought it had been yellowing in the attic was pinned to her bodice by a brooch handpainted, entirely unnecessarily, thought Genevieve, with daffodils. Genevieve was “helping.”

  “The Romans,” said Roland.

  Genevieve waited for him to say something further, but he merely took another mouthful of punch.

  “To think,” said Nanny. “Like the woman who nursed a serpent, until it bit her bosom so that she died. My mother told me that story, and never did she say a truer word. And she so plain and respectable.”

  Miss Gray, the plain and respectable, was now walking around the garden in satin and tulle, on Sir Edward’s arm, nodding placidly to the farmers and gentry. In spite of her finery, she looked as neat and ordinary as a pin.

  “The Romans,” said Roland, “had a special room where they could go to vomit. It was called the vomitorium.” He lurched forward and almost fell on the tea table.

  “Take him away, won’t you, Nanny,” said Genevieve. “Lay him down before he gives his best imitation of a Roman.” That would get rid of them both, leaving her to ponder the mystery that was Miss Gray, holding orange blossoms.

  When Nanny had taken Roland into the library—she could hear through the window that he had developed a case of hiccups—Genevieve circled behind the hedge, to an overgrown holly that she had once discovered in a game of hide and seek with Roland. From the outside, the tree looked like a mass of leaves edged with needles that would prick anyone who ventured too close. If you pushed your way carefully inside, however, you found that the inner branches were sparse and bare. It was the perfect place to hide. And if you pushed a branch aside just slightly, you could see through the outer leaves without being seen. Roland had never found her, and in a fit of anger had decapitated her dolls. But she had never liked dolls anyway.

  Miss Gray was listening to Farmer Thwaite, who was addressing her as Lady Trefusis. She was nodding and giving him one of her placid smiles. Sir Edward was looking particularly satisfied, which turned his face particularly red.

  The old fool, thought Genevieve. She wondered what Miss Gray had up those capacious sleeves, which were in the latest fashion. Was it money she wanted?

  That did not, to Genevieve’s disappointment, seem to fit the Miss Gray who knew the parts of the flower and the principle rivers of Cathay.

  Security? thought Genevieve. People often married for security. Nanny had said so, and in this at least she was willing to concede that Nanny might be rig
ht. The security of never again having to teach irregular verbs.

  Genevieve pushed the holly leaves farther to one side. Miss Gray turned her head, with yards of tulle floating behind it. She looked directly at Genevieve, as though she could see through the holly leaves, and—she winked.

  I must have imagined it, thought Genevieve a moment later. Miss Gray was smiling placidly at Amelia Thwaite, who looked like she had stepped out of a French fashion magazine.

  She couldn’t have seen me, thought Genevieve. And then, I wonder if she will expect me to call her mother?

  V. A MEETING BY MOONLIGHT

  Genevieve was on page four of Clarissa when she heard the voices.

  First voice: “Angel, darling, you can’t mean it.”

  Second voice: Inaudible murmur.

  First voice, which obviously and unfortunately belonged to Roland: “If you only knew how I felt. Put your hand on my heart. Can you feel it? Beating and burning for you.”

  How embarrassing, having one’s brother under one’s bedroom window, mouthing banalities to a kitchenmaid.

  Second voice, presumable the maid: Inaudible murmur.

  Roland: “But you can’t, you just can’t. I would die without you. Don’t you see what you’ve done to me? Emily, my own. Let me kiss this white neck, these little hands. Tell me you don’t love him, tell me you’ll run away with me. Tell me anything, but don’t tell me to leave you. I can’t do it any more than a moth can leave a flame.” A convincing sob.

  How was she supposed to read Clarissa? At this rate, she would never finish the first letter. Of course, she had never finished it on any other night, but it was the principle that mattered.

  Genevieve put Clarissa down on the coverlet, open in a way that would eventually crack the spine, and picked up the pitcher, still full of tepid water, from her nightstand. She walked to the window. It was lucky that Nanny insisted on fresh air. She leaned out over the sill. Below, she could see the top of Roland’s head. Beside him, her neck and shoulders white in the moonlight, stood Emily the kitchenmaid.

  Except, thought Genevieve suddenly, that none of the maids was named Emily. The woman with the white shoulders looked up.

  This time it was unmistakable. Miss Gray had winked at her. Genevieve lay on her bed for a long time, with Clarissa at an uncomfortable angle beneath her, staring at the ceiling.

  VI. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

  “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.”

  “He was so handsome,” whispered Amelia Thwaite to the farmer’s daughter standing beside her, whose attention was absorbed in studying the pattern of the clocks on Amelia’s stockings. “I let him kiss me once, before he went to Oxford. He asked me not to fall in love with anyone else while he was away, and I wouldn’t promise, and he must have been so angry because when I saw him again this summer, he would barely speak to me. And I’m just sick with guilt. Because I really did think, in my heart, that I could love only him, and now I will never, ever have the chance to tell him so.”

  “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.”

  “There’s something behind it,” whispered Farmer Thwaite to the farmer standing beside him, who had been up the night before with a sick ewe and was trying, with some success, not to fall asleep. “You mark my words.” His neighbor marked them with a stifled yawn. “A gun doesn’t go off, not just like that, not by itself. They say he was drunk, but he must of been pointing it at the old man for a reason. A strict enough landlord he was, and I’m not sorry to be rid of him, I tell you. The question is, whether our Ladyship will hold the reigns as tightly. She’s a pretty little thing in black satin, like a cat that’s got into the pantry and is sitting looking at you, all innocent with the cream on its chin. But there’s something behind it, you mark my words.” His neighbor dutifully marked them.

  “Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my soul? and why art thou so disquiet within me?”

  It was inexplicable. Genevieve could hear the rustle of dresses, the shuffle of boots, the drone of the minister filling the chapel. Each window with its stained-glass saint was dedicated to a Trefusis. A Trefusis lay under each stone knight in his stone armor, each stone lady folding her hands over stone drapery. A plaque beside the altar commemorated Sir Roland Trefusis, who had come across the channel with William the Conqueror—some ungenerously whispered, as his cook.

  “We must believe it was an accident,” Mr. Herbert had said. “In that moment of confusion, he must have turned the pistol toward himself, examining it, unable to imagine how it could have gone off in his hands. And we have evidence, gentlemen,” this to the constable and the magistrate of the county, “that the young man was intoxicated. What is the use, I put it to you, of calling it suicide under these circumstances? You have a son yourself,” to the magistrate. “Would you want any earthly power denying him the right to rest in sacred ground?”

  Nanny sniffed loudly into her handkerchief, which had a broad black border. “If it wasn’t for that woman, that wicked, wicked woman, your dear father and that dear, dear boy would still be alive. I don’t know how she done it, but she done it somehow, and if the good Lord don’t smite her like he smote the witch of Endor, I’ll become a Mahometan.”

  “By his last will and testament, signed and witnessed two weeks before the unfortunate—accident,” Mr. Herbert had said, “your father left you to the guardianship of your stepmother, Lady Emily Trefusis. You will, of course, come into your own money when you reach the age of majority—or marry, with your guardian’s permission. I don’t suppose, Genevieve, that you’ve discussed any of this with your stepmother?”

  Miss Gray turned, as though she had heard Nanny’s angry whisper. For a moment she looked at Genevieve and then, inexplicably, she smiled, as though the two of them shared an amusing secret.

  “There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High.”

  “I am quite certain it was an accident,” the minister had said, patting Genevieve’s hand. His palm was damp. “I knew young Roland when he was a boy. Oh, he would steal eggs from under a chicken for mischief, but there was no malice in his heart. Be comforted, my dear. They are in the Celestial City, singing hymns with the angels of the Lord.”

  Genevieve wondered. She was inclined, herself, to believe that Roland at least was most likely in Hell. It seemed, remembering Old Thwaite’s Sunday lessons, an appropriate penalty for patricide.

  She sniffed. She could not help it, fiercely as she was trying to hold whatever it was inside her so that it would not come out, like a wail. Because, as often as she thought of Mary, Queen of Scots, who had gone to her execution without hesitation or tears, she had to admit that she was very much afraid.

  “For so thou didst ordain when thou createdst me, saying, dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. All we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia.”

  It must, of course, be explicable. But she had hidden and watched and followed, and she was no closer to an explanation than that day on which, in a bowl of purple ink, she had watched violet clouds floating against a lavender sky.

  For a moment she leaned her head against Nanny’s arm, but found no comfort there. She would have, she realized, to confront the spider in its web. She would have to talk with Miss Gray.

  VII. A CONVERSATION WITH MISS GRAY

  “. . . and this prayer I make,

  Knowing that Nature never did betray

  The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,

  Through all the years of this our life, to lead

  From joy to joy: for she can so inform

  The mind that is within us, so impress

  With quietness and beauty, and so feed

  With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

  Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men,

  Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

&nb
sp; The dreary intercourse of daily life,

  Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb

  Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

  Is full of blessings.”

  Miss Gray shut her book. “Hello, Genevieve. Can you tell me what I have been reading?”

  “Wordsworth,” said Genevieve. Miss Gray always read Wordsworth.

  She was sitting on a stone bench beside the yew hedge, dressed in black with a white collar and cuffs, looking plain but very neat. The holly was now covered with red berries.

  “In these lines, the Poet is telling us that if we pray to Nature, our great mother, she will answer us, not by transporting us to a literal heaven, but by making a heaven for us here upon earth, in our minds and hearts. I’m afraid, my dear, that you don’t read enough poetry.”

  Genevieve stood, not knowing what to say. It had rained the night before, and she could feel a dampness around her ankles, where her stockings had brushed again wet grass.

  “Have you been studying your irregular verbs?”

  Genevieve said, in a voice that to her dismay sounded hoarse and uncertain, “This won’t do, you know. Talking about irregular verbs. We must have it out sometime.” How, if Miss Gray said whatever do you mean Genevieve, would she respond? Her hands trembled, and she clasped them in front of her.

  But Miss Gray said only, “I do apologize. I assumed it was perfectly clear.”

  Genevieve spread her hands in a silent question.

  “I was sent to make come true your heart’s desire.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Genevieve, and “I don’t understand.”