The White Forest (9 page)

I wondered if it was the Red Goddess who pursued the stag through the woods, and if so, what did she want from the poor, suffering beast?

B
y week’s end, Maddy’s prediction had come true, and I’d received a summons to meet with Inspector Vidocq at his makeshift office, set up in the second-floor parlor at Ashe High House. It was on the very morning of the interview, while I was still in my dressing room, donning my gloves and steeling myself for the encounter, that something unexpected and unwanted occurred. It was an event which shook me enough that I wondered if I’d be able to navigate the upcoming interview at all. A knock came at my dressing room door, and when I answered it, I found Miss Anne standing in the hall looking rather flummoxed. “A messenger brought this for you, Jane,” she said, holding out an envelope that had been sealed with dark wax. “He says he’ll wait for your reply. I didn’t let him in the house. He’s . . . well, a rather ragged-looking fellow, and I was afraid he’d track dirt or something worse inside.”

“Who would send me a message?” I said, more to myself than to Miss Anne. The fact was, I didn’t really have any acquaintances other than Maddy and Nathan. Even Father’s relations rarely spoke to me anymore.

“I wouldn’t know,” Miss Anne replied. “But if the master is anything like his messenger, I doubt very much this could be anything good.”

I broke the wax seal and found the letter within written in a florid script—a hand that I did not recognize.

My Dear Miss Silverlake,

Please accept my apology for not introducing myself at an earlier date. Now that I finally take up my pen, we are both involved in such desperate affairs that you will likely think me some opportunist. But I assure you, I have been making my way toward an audience with you for longer than you can know. In all honesty, I’ve been working toward this meeting for most of my life—though I did not know your name or even if you existed.

You are aware of my group in Southwark, I assume, and our failed attempts at reaching what religious men call transcendence. I assure you, this failure is not the product of a misguided philosophy as some would argue. We have failed, quite simply, because we lack the necessary means to achieve the outcome we seek.

I believe all of that is about to change, Miss Silverlake, because of you. Before his disappearance, young Nathan Ashe told me a great deal about your nature and led me to believe that you may, in fact, be the key to my lifelong quest. I must admit I am somewhat concerned about the veracity of his claims, especially in light of recent events. Nathan Ashe was not precisely what any of us believed him to be. But I would very much like to meet with you and come to some deeper understanding of your situation.

Please do not think I’m being mysterious here. I know I have a reputation for such a manner, but I assure you that I come to you in a spirit of sharing what I know. If what Nathan says is true, we may be able to help one another greatly. In fact, together we may be able to help the entire world. Send word with my boy as to when you would be willing to come and speak with me at the Temple of the Lamb in Southwark.

In Earnestness,

Ariston Day

I lowered the letter to my side, all too aware that Miss Anne was watching me, waiting for me to speak. Sweat had broken out across my brow and the morning sun streaming through the bedroom window seemed all too bright. Ariston Day was writing to me about my
nature,
which meant that Nathan had not only spoken to him about the Empyrean but revealed my talent to him as well. I realized the hand I held the letter with was trembling, and I willed it to stop before Miss Anne noticed.

“What response should I give the boy waiting in the courtyard?” she asked.

I cleared my throat. “I don’t know,” I said, honestly. Day was a charlatan and a false prophet. He couldn’t possibly understand anything about me that I myself did not already know. Yet I couldn’t deny there was a hope buried deep in my consciousness that said I should go to him. That he might actually hold some sort of key.

“Tell the boy to go back to where he came from,” I said finally. “I need time to think.”

She nodded curtly. “As you wish.” She turned to leave and then looked back at me. “Jane, are you involved in something your father should know about?”

“There’s no need for questions, Anne. I can take care of myself.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose you can at that.”

After she’d closed the door, I went to my dressing room window, which overlooked the courtyard. I waited for a moment as Miss Anne spoke to the messenger, and I felt a chill as the boy stalked off down the stone drive. He was tall and threatening-looking, no more than eighteen, with a hard thin mouth and dark circles under his eyes. His black hair stuck up in whorls and spikes, making him look like something that had been dredged from the bottom of the Thames. This was surely one of Ariston Day’s Fetches, for he wore the required red coat, a mockery of the Queen’s Guard. Just before he passed behind the hedge at the end of the drive, he turned to look back at Stoke Morrow and caught me spying on him. His shining black eyes were so cruel, and before I could close the curtain, I saw the flash of
an awful grin on his face. It was a grin that said he knew I’d come around. Sooner or later, I’d fall in line.

•   •   •

On my walk across the Heath to my interview at Ashe High House, I felt a new instability in my world. Nathan was gone, Maddy was overcome, and now a veritable monster was sending his minion to knock at the door of my home. I was exposed and too weak for any of it. I thought again about the final night Maddy and I had spent with Nathan. I remembered the grief I’d suffered, running through the woods, finally falling in the field of shale where Mother had perished. It was a place of death, and there was a part of me that wanted to die. I wept there, pounding my hand on the rock and finally putting my mouth against the fissures in the earth that had poisoned my mother. That night I’d whispered prayers into those fissures—prayers to the dead.

I attempted to put these memories out of my head and prepare myself for the interview. Vidocq’s questions would require my utmost attention, not because I wanted to answer truthfully but because I needed to decide which details to reveal and which to obfuscate, as Maddy had instructed. My goal was to keep Nathan’s reputation as clean as possible, even though he himself had endeavored to put a number of stains on it since his return from the war. Being at Ashe High House would also put me in close proximity to Nathan’s belongings, and if I remained focused, I might be able to find time to make another experiment.

Nathan’s family home rose dramatically on Parliament Hill. It was not a decrepit Gothic manor like Stoke Morrow or so many other of the shambling wrecks at the edge of the Heath. Nor was it Italianate cottagery, like Maddy’s own whimsical La Dometa. Instead, Ashe High House was a full-fledged Tudor mansion, lofty and majestic. The Tudor had no fewer than sixty-seven rooms, including drawing rooms, bedchambers, a chapel, a china room, a servants’ waiting hall, two dining rooms (one for summer and one for winter),
three libraries, and even a postal office for Lord Ashe’s mailings. There was a tree-lined inner courtyard accessible through the house’s sunroom. The courtyard included a lake big enough for two rowboats to give each other chase. Being at the mansion generally made me feel I was in a small and bustling city, though with Nathan gone, the city had grown solemn. And on the day of my interview, it felt nearly abandoned.

I was escorted to the upper parlor by one of Vidocq’s dark-suited assistants. Lady Ashe had a predilection for Egyptian decor, precipitated by Napoleon’s conquering of the Africas, known in London as “Egyptomania.” An onyx bust of the jackal-headed god Anubis glowered from one corner of the room—and the god’s association with guiding lost souls to the underworld disturbed me. After Nathan’s disappearance, I did not want to think too deeply of souls that were “lost.”

The curtains were drawn, and Vidocq himself sat at a desk in near darkness, smoking a finely rolled black cigarette. I was unaccustomed to the acridity of his tobacco, so my first impressions of the detective were through a veil of tears. His image wavered and pulsed as he studied me with colorless eyes. His high collar seemed to support his head by bracing his neck, and he kept his large, square hands above the desk, glancing at my own hands from time to time. I’d read that Vidocq spent his younger years as a petty thief (an occupation that later helped him understand the minds of the criminals he sought), and I wondered if this checking of hands was a remnant of a thief’s paranoia.

To the left of the desk stood a bronze ashtray with a carved hunting dog poised at the center of the bowl. When Vidocq balanced his cigarette on the tray, the dog seemed on point, and the cigarette, a felled pheasant.

“I have been told you have some knowledge of my history, Mademoiselle Silverlake,” Vidocq said, tapping ash into the tray. His voice was terribly deep, though his accent still made it mellifluous.

“How could one not?” I replied, glad my nerves were somewhat intact. “I’ve read the stories by the American writer. ‘The Purloined
Letter,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and, of course, his ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ They are based on your exploits, I gather.”

“Ridiculous embellishment,” he said. “If there was any truth to them, it was altered by Mr. Poe’s opiates. My actual cases tend to be mundane—misguided and angry young men doing harm to one another. No ghouls and certainly no
orangutans
.”

“Reality,” I said, attempting humor.

“Nathan Ashe wasn’t much a proponent of reality, was he, Miss Silverlake?”

“How do you mean?” I asked, trying for an innocent tone.

“He was experimenting in the
unreal
before he disappeared, with the help of one Ariston Day.”

“I know very little about Nathan’s private affairs, especially those which coincide with Mr. Day’s.”

Vidocq raised his cigarette again, and I could tell from the look in his eyes that he didn’t entirely believe me. “I met Mr. Poe a few years ago when he was traveling in France. Did you know that, Miss Silverlake?”

“I did not.”

“At the time, I was still head of Napoleon’s police, and we met in my office on the Rue de Terre. I’d heard from a literary friend that Poe wanted to find out if I was anything like the detective he invented—Auguste Dupin. He’d only read about me, you know.”

“And were you like Dupin?” I asked.

Vidocq attempted a smile, though his thin lips weren’t good at making one. “I suppose not. Nor was Edgar Allan much like the writer I’d envisioned. He was quiet, well spoken, a bit hollow around the eyes. The meeting was little more than small talk. I expected him to produce a raven or a bloodred mask at any moment, but Mr. Poe was simply an educated man, interested in hearing about the new cases I was pursuing.”

“As models for stories?” I asked.

“He was beyond mysteries then, I believe. He was working on his novel about seafaring. Near the end of our conversation, he spoke of some scientific principles he’d been contemplating—a cosmology I
could not much understand, other than that he thought that the universe went through cycles of expansion and contraction, and that we are currently in an age of contraction. All matter wishes to be unified as it was before creation divided it.”

“Creation undone?” I asked, feeling my skin prickle. Such topics were a favorite of Nathan’s and, so I’d heard, of Ariston Day’s.

“Quite so. Speaking of this was the only moment where I believed I was in the presence of Edgar Allan Poe, but I did nothing to make him feel he was in the presence of Vidocq. My point here is that the actual body, the physical form, is not anywhere as interesting as the mind. There is no
real
in the human mind, is there, Miss Silverlake? There are only a variety of shifting phantasms. In order to rediscover the physical Nathan Ashe, I must come to understand something of his phantoms. Do you take my meaning?”

“Of course,” I said.

“So what do you know of his phantoms, Miss Silverlake?”

I was taken off guard, and when I couldn’t answer promptly, Vidocq offered a semblance of a laugh. “Mr. Poe had one thing right in his stories of Dupin. Deduction plays out exactly as it sounds—it’s a system of subtraction. We remove this and remove that until all that is left is the truth or as close to the truth as we can come.”

“I can assure you I know very little.”

“And that’s why I’m merely working to
remove
you.”

I felt relieved at this and attempted a bit of flattery. “Lord Ashe assures us that if anyone can find Nathan, it’s you, Inspector.”

The tip of his cigarette crackled as he inhaled. “Lord Ashe puts a great deal of stock in an old man,” he said. “Perhaps he would do better to name you as his detective, Miss Silverlake. I think men might answer your questions and forget guile entirely.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“One could simply ask: Did you abduct or aid in the abduction of Nathan Ashe?”