I told myself the tale of the woodcutter’s wife, lost in the forest. Fantasies of fairy princesses fooling their captors. Sudden storms that swept evil tyrants from their reigns. I rehearsed Mother Farrow’s old yarn about a village mother rescuing her daughter with a foolish and fervent insistence, as if it would save me. As if my mother, even now, would save me. But for every story of a mother’s love, there was a tale of blood-drained bodies, of a dumbfounded prince. A story of a disobedient child.
One of our village rumors, a tale no one could place but all insisted must be true, I had heard first from our solicitor, Tom Pepper, during one of his annual trips to Urizon to discuss the Blakely estate. Mr. Pepper, I knew, hoped to frighten me into politeness with his telling, scare away what misbehaviors I had planned. I was never disobedient, always treated his visits with the respect that I felt they—the only regular outside contact I received at the house other than Mrs. Blott and Peter—deserved. Still, he told me this:
There once was a mischievous little girl who was too curious by half, picking the locks of cupboards, eavesdropping, muddying her dresses, throwing massive tantrums that could be heard far from her home. She belched loudly in company. She uprooted garden flowers. She’d run, in the nude, down the main street of the village, her mother chasing after, trying to put her in the bath. This was a common sight to see, said Mr. Pepper, and the village butcher soon learned to time his closing shop with the slap of the girl’s footfalls, the moaning of her poor, flustered mother, bath towel flapping in the breeze.
What to do about the child? How to teach her to obey? The slap of a birch switch could not calm her, nor a stern telling-off from her father, not even a prayer of expulsion to release whatever demon had her heart. All advice was empty, the child could not be tamed. The parents, especially the mother, were at their wits’ end.
There was, at the time, an old wisewoman living by the river, and to her the distressed mother finally crawled.
“What to do about my child?” the mother cawed, once she’d arrived. (Cawed, I imagined, because the voice Mr. Pepper put on for her was high-pitched and crackly, not convincing in the slightest, but distinctive enough to stick in the craw of my memory.)
“Hmm,” said the old wisewoman (in a breathy falsetto, punctuated every so often by manly Pepper throat-clearings and coughs). “A child who will not heed her elders. That is bad news, indeed.”
“But what is to be done?” the mother asked. “I have tried everything.”
The wisewoman gave her a beady-eyed smile. “Take the girl out to the forest,” she said. “Give her a blanket to rest on, and a knife.”
The wisewoman gave the mother a charm to call the wolves close enough to scare the girl, but not so close to hurt her. “Wait at the edge of the clearing,” she instructed, “and when you hear the child scream you must not go to her. Wait, wait, until you hear nothing. You will find her asleep. You can carry her home, and she will never trouble you again.”
The mother found this a strange tactic, but she had exhausted all other options. She took the girl to the wood, gave her a blanket and a penknife, then retreated some distance away, where she would wait. She followed the wisewoman’s instructions, muttered the wolf spell, and listened to the child’s screams until they ceased. Then back she went, to collect her sleeping daughter.
But the girl was not sleeping. The girl was angry, waiting, ready to pounce. She ran full force at her mother, penknife in hand, sounding an otherworldly yawp. She slashed her mother’s right cheek, then the left. With another long cry, she leaped a log and disappeared into the trees.
The mother returned to the village, blood coating her face. In time, the wounds healed into perfectly symmetrical scars, constant reminders of her guilt and of her failure, of her wild little girl lost to the wood. The villagers assured her there was nothing else she might have done, nothing else one could do with such a disobedient daughter, though when she was out of earshot they blamed her for having birthed the demon child in the first place. At times, woodsmen or hunters would remark upon a fearsome forest sight: a small child jumping out from bushes before scurrying away. An angry, feral sprite.
THE MORE TIME passed, the more my rotten core seemed obvious, my complicity clear. My captors knew that I was guilty. “If it hurts, you have only yourself to blame,” Coulton would tell me if I yanked my arm away because my veins were too swollen for his needle. “Almost as if you’re asking for it,” he remarked when he saw I had yet again tried to peel the plaster from the wall. My punishment for this was a quick slap to the cheek; his gloved hands scorched my skin. When he returned to find me itching, my nails drawing blood, he clucked his tongue as Mrs. Blott had when I came in late for dinner. “You’re a menace to yourself, my girl. Can’t imagine what harm you’d do to other folks around you. Lucky you’re here with us, where we can help you. Good thing you had Rafe looking out for you.” Coulton’s words struck me harder than the burn of his gloved palm.
I thought, for the millionth time, on the events that had preceded my capture, but this time I replayed them with a crucial narrative difference. Matthew had been scared to let me go with the girls by the river. For all his talk of camping, I knew we’d spent nights in his car because he worried what would happen if he let me in a house. Peter had held me at Urizon, forbidding me the simplest sorts of travel. It was clear I needed guidance, that everyone I knew and loved had constantly been trying to keep me in line. Rafe’s efforts now were unconventional, were painful. And yet what if his intentions were another thing that I had gotten wrong?
I hadn’t seen Rafe since my arrival, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking of me, watching me. Perhaps, I thought suddenly, the only way to free myself was to prove myself docile. Perhaps I had been set on a path to perdition that Rafe was now trying to counter. Perhaps, in my imprisonment, I really had been saved.
I had spent hours with Rafe, falling asleep beside him, sharing stories. I knew Rafe, and Rafe was no monster. Could all this be for my own good? This bloodletting a cousin to the remedy used for centuries when a patient displayed misaligned humors? Was Rafe using my blood in a way Peter had never imagined, to understand my failings, to cure me? Rafe had told me to trust him, that he knew what he was doing. Was there any way this work was for the best? It fit as well as, if not better than, every other explanation I had previously arrived at to explain my current condition and Rafe’s role in it.
I knew my power to be dangerous, my existence to be a source of shame. I’d killed my mother, driven my father, now Rafe, to what appeared obsessive madness. The trouble, I began to see, was never Rafe, was never Coulton. The trouble was that in the hour that I needed them most I had bristled at the rules Peter imposed, thinking my defiance brave, my disobedience something special. I’d been selfish and stupid. I despised myself.
I deserved this treatment. Maybe it would wash me clean.
I STOPPED STRUGGLING, I stopped sneering. I sat meekly when Coulton came to me.
“She’s a changed woman,” said Coulton, crouching to come level with my seat on the floor, straightening a straw so I could drink the cloudy water he’d provided. “Seems we’ve tamed the beast, eh?”
Tamed. A word for a wild girl made obedient. A word for a hawk with clipped wings, a declawed tiger. A word that made me safe.
One evening a violent storm sent rain leaking in through the windows, and I used a bowl left over from my breakfast to catch the drops. I watched the beads of water as they raced down the wall, chasing each other at first, and then combining as they reached their destination.