But I did know the stories. They were part of me. They scared me. This was one:
Many years ago, a woodcutter lived in Coeurs Crossing, the village near Urizon, with his wife, who was pregnant, and their very small son. They were happy together, this family, or so the tale goes—the woodcutter would wake early and kiss his wife goodbye, go off into the forest with his axe and work hard chopping wood through the morning, then return to dine with his family before making his rounds for delivery. People liked him. The family did well. Until one day, having gone off to the forest at his usual time, the woodcutter did not return.
His wife was worried, and when by evening he still had not come, she set off into the wood to go and find him. Someone in Coeurs Crossing reported seeing her tromping through a layer of thin snow, the child toddling behind. A farmer said he called to her from the inside of his barn, as he was brushing down his horses, but she must not have heard him.
She was not seen again.
Her husband, the woodcutter, emerged from the wood before dawn. The same farmer who had watched the wife depart played witness to the husband’s return. The woodcutter’s face was haggard, all his clothing ripped to shreds, and in his arms he held his little child, whose face was chapped and blue from a night spent in the cold.
The next day, the woodcutter could be found in the village center, babbling on about the trees, swearing that the forest had kept shifting shape around him. No matter how he tried, he said, he could not find his way home; night poured in and icy winds blew, and yet the wood that he had known so well just hours before, the wood he had grown up in, made his livelihood, had changed.
The woodcutter fought valiantly, then at last sank to despair. He gave up all hope of escaping. He lay down on the cold floor of the forest, and he closed his eyes and cried. When he opened them, he said, a path appeared as if from nowhere. He’d followed and it led him to his son, seated shivering in the snow, all alone.
The villagers thought that he was crazy. Some said perhaps the madness had been in him all along, that he’d lured his wife away and then he’d killed her. Others swore that the grief of his loss drove him wild, the disappearance of his lover and with her his unborn child had simply been too much for him to take, his mind had cracked under the pressure. No one could explain where the wife had gone. They never saw a trace of her, nor did the woodcutter recover from this episode. He spent the rest of his days in a garbled, milk-eyed trance, wandering Coeurs Crossing, his beard grown long, his feet unshod, warning its other residents of the terrors of the forest.
I heard this story many times from old Mother Farrow, who lived by the river. I was also told a version by Tom Pepper, our solicitor, and even once a very brief account by Mrs. Blott. I thought it was a wonderful story, mysterious and dark, a good tale to tell when huddled by the fire or when snow fell unexpected late at night. It frightened me, although I did not know if I believed it. The story was too old and deeply rooted to demand my belief; it existed outside acknowledgment, needed no credence, asked for no faith. Its proof was the height and the breadth of that clandestine, hulking forest, lying just beyond my reach.
The Tarnished Emerald
Lucy, 1888
At twenty-one, Lucy Blakely climbed out of her bedroom window, slipped down the siding of that choking house, Urizon, and ran barefoot through the wet grass to the wood.
She had been a sickly child. When she was born—during a late winter snow in the year 1867, her blue veins visible through thin, pale skin—a cousin muttered something to her father about his misfortune at having sired first a veritable demon, then a ghost. Thomas Blakely chuckled, watching through the frosted library window as the governess attempted to prevent his young son John, the demon in discussion, from heaving hard-packed clumps of ice at the gardener.
“She’ll be a hale one, old boy, you wait and see,” said Thomas.
“She’ll have to be,” murmured the cousin.
When the doctor was called a week later to examine the newborn, who despite a hearty appetite would not put on weight, he noted that her skin tasted of salt, her bowels moved strangely. He told the Blakelys that they would be lucky to see Lucy through the next six months, at which Lucy’s mother, having lost four prior infants, collapsed onto the giltwood settee. Her husband offered a rote hand on her trembling back, whispering a word or two of vague consolation, and then went to confer privately with the doctor. The servants tried to ply the grieving mother with teacakes and clotted cream while young Lucy, oblivious to her declared deficiencies, cooed up at them from her cradle.
Hovering in the doorway, John Blakely saw his sister curl her little fingers, flex her tiny feet. John was seven years Lucy’s elder and already pinching servants and smashing priceless antiques. He watched the specialists gather around his sister and heard his mother bemoaning yet another child lost, his father’s unfounded reassurances that this one would be different. Eyes slit with envy, John dragged his rocking horse out of the nursery to where the new baby was sleeping, riding the toy animal hard against the floorboards. Later he would plunge the poker into the sitting room fire until it shone orange with heat, reveling in the glow it cast on Lucy, contemplating its power. He waited for his sister’s death, the necessary mourning, the attention that would then be redirected to his every whim, as he, the firstborn son, felt he was warranted. But the years stretched on and the little girl grew, each wheeze and cough a call to action, each shiver stymied by a slammed window, new blankets, each breath defying the doctors’ expectations, necessitating care.
A queen among her china dolls and pillows, little Lucy lay under the thick canopy of quilts in her vast featherbed, her bedroom fire never quite fulfilling its threat to cross the boundary of the cantilevered hearth. Her semipermanent prostration allowed a view of the wide lawns, the ornate gardens, her brother and his playmates running wild on their holidays from school.
When the weather was just right, when her breathing was stable, Lucy was allowed to leave her bedroom—to socialize in the ballroom or parlor with family or guests, to take in sunshine on the terrace. But if a storm cloud marred the sky, if the sun shone too brightly, if Lucy sniffed or coughed or scratched, she was whisked back up to the bedroom and instructed to be very still, and silent.
Her mother practiced the doctor’s early warnings as religion: Lucy was not to overexert herself, not to sit too close to the windows, not to call too loudly for the servants, not to interact with children her own age.
“It’s for your health,” her mother cautioned. Lucy would smile and nod: Of course it is, yes, Mother. And yet what good, she wondered privately, was health, a life extended, if that life was spent beholden to a body that betrayed her? Her mother deemed the library too dusty for her phlegmy lungs, the servants’ hands too dirty, even bouquets of flowers too heavy for Lucy’s weak limbs to sustain. By the time she’d lived eleven years, Lucy felt she had lived seventy confined to her bedroom, unable to influence even the squeeze of lemon in her tea, the closing of the lush brocade curtains.