Then two things happened in rapid succession.
The first was that Abingdon, sensing my distress, had come to comfort me. Without my noticing he had climbed the kitchen counter, pushing off his back legs to catapult toward me, his front paws brushing against the strip of bare skin above my collar. Even as it happened I berated myself for not being more careful. Abingdon’s hair shocked out as though he had been electrified. He stiffened and fell to the floor with a thud.
The second vital thing was that Matthew had made it down the stairs in time to see the whole affair. He looked from Peter to me to the now-still Abingdon, then back at each of us in turn. The lines of his forehead crinkled in concentrated thought.
He turned to me. “Did you just kill that cat?”
“I did not,” I said, pursing my mouth into a frown. “He simply fell.”
“It certainly looked as if—” While Matthew spoke I crouched down next to Abingdon, causing Peter to cut in and interrupt.
“Maisie, please do not touch that animal.”
“I hadn’t planned on it!” I snapped, although I did not know if this was true. All I knew was that I had now lost two friends in the course of a few short hours, thus lowering my count by exactly half.
“Cats are meant to land on their feet, though,” Matthew continued, standing on the lowest step and speaking toward the ceiling. “A bad jump shouldn’t kill a cat.”
“Let’s leave off the cat for the moment,” said Peter, taking off his suit coat and wringing it out with his hands. “How is our good friend Mrs. Blott?” He was leaving a large puddle. I hoped no one would slip.
“Well,” I said, sniffing, still squatted down by Abingdon, “Mrs. Blott seems to be deceased.”
“Surprising,” said Peter, “because she’d seemed in perfect health—”
“There’s a reason that it’s the cat who is said to have nine lives—”
“—just last Friday when we saw her. I would have guessed that she’d—”
“It is the cat, isn’t it, who is said to have—”
“—another several years at least.”
Despite the noise, my mind was racing. I’d been lied to—or at least misled—about Matthew. My dog had developed a disposition for the dead. Mrs. Blott and Abingdon had each crossed to a less preferable plane of existence, and I was feeling sick over all of it. I reached down to Abingdon and stroked him deliberately with a finger. He shuddered back to life, yawning and stretching.
“There,” I said, “now we’ve dealt with the cat.”
Matthew’s voice faded. He swayed a bit, but caught himself on the wooden banister and lowered himself slowly into a seated position on the stairs. He stared at me.
“Maisie,” said Peter. “We’ve discussed this.”
“I’m sorry, but things were getting rather overwhelming. It was necessary that someone take control.” Control was not a word I used with Peter. It felt dangerous and delicious to do so now. I turned to Matthew. “Wouldn’t you say?”
Matthew blinked. His mouth moved without emitting sound. He kept jerking his head as if his memory was a magnetic drawing board that given a good shake would be swept clean. He tugged a lock of hair. “If you’re asking me,” he said finally, slowly, “I don’t know that I . . . I wonder . . . Could you show me that again?”
There was a new sort of reverence to him, and I liked it. With the tip of my finger I touched Abingdon’s tail. The cat froze, and keeled over.
“Marvelous!” said Matthew.
“Maisie!” said Peter, stepping between me and the now-inert tabby. “You know better. That’s enough.”
“But you must let me bring him back now,” I said. “One last time.”
“I am under no such obligation. I think the animal has already been through quite enough.” Peter positioned his body to hide the cat from my view. He knelt and placed a firm yet gentle hand on my shirt. “I know it’s difficult, darling. But we’ll let things rest as nature intended. We are not supreme beings. We mustn’t allow ourselves the hubris to think we can bend nature without consequence. We will bury the cat with Mrs. Blott.”
Upstairs, Marlowe was whimpering. I felt that I, who rarely cried, might do the same. “You can’t bury both of them,” I blubbered. “Nature did not intend for us to be so completely alone.” I saw Peter lift his thumb as if to mitigate my sniffling, then carefully pull back. He dug into his pocket for a handkerchief.
“Darling,” he said, holding it out to me.
I bit down on my lip, taking his offering and blowing my nose loudly. I was embarrassed to have made such a display in front of Matthew. I thought that he would see me as a child. But I turned to him to find his eyes sparkling.
“You know,” he said, mostly to Peter, who had straightened, “she’s right. This trick of hers . . . if this is something she can do, then it can’t be unnatural. It necessarily must be as . . . nature intended. At least as much as nature intends anything.”
I was crouched, looking at the clean and tiled floor. Matthew and Peter both stood over me, one on either side, each his own colossus of experience and thought. Peter gave me a tender look; Matthew’s eyes were sharp.
I felt then that I had two distinct choices. I could lower myself further, let my weight down off my ankles, sit on Mrs. Blott’s recently mopped tiles, and let Peter try to comfort me. Or I could rise, push up on the balls of my feet until I’d straightened, lay my hand in blessing over Abingdon, climb up the stairs to revive Mrs. Blott, then step into my wellies and out of the door. I took a deep and careful breath.
As I exhaled, Marlowe came prancing through the kitchen with Mrs. Blott’s shinbone in his mouth. His jaws were clamped around her ankle and the rest of it, up where it had once joined to make her knee, was being dragged across the floor, straws that I assumed must be her tendons leaving a slimy red wake to show his path. He made for the kitchen door, the inner part of which Peter had absentmindedly left cracked. Marlowe prodded with his nose, and it swung open.
“How the devil did he detach it from the rest of her?” said Peter.
I watched my dog, tail wagging, disappear into the mist. The trail he left behind him was softened by the rain, but still visible.
I stood, my body burning with a new, frightening decision.
I took my coat from its hanger and slipped my feet into their boots. I looked at Peter, who looked back at me, slightly shocked, and at Matthew, expression inscrutable. I belted my raincoat around me and stepped out the door.
Part
II
The Dark to Logic’s Light
In the wood, the years pass like hours, the hours like centuries. Rabbit kits born at the start of long-lost springs maintain their downy ears, pinched noses. Young deer wobble for decades on matchstick legs, baby hedgehogs who have shed first sets of quills do not, for all their effort, grow into the next set. But the frozen girl ages: her breasts bloom, dark hair lengthens, cheekbones sharpen.
What is this girl? All of the Blakely women wonder. Is she a demon, biding her time? Some sort of savior? The dark twin of the girl at Urizon? One of their own, unborn, daughters made flesh? The girl was born within the wood, not taken later, like the rest of them. There is nothing of the outside world upon her. Nothing broken. No scarred flesh.