WHEN BOTH PARENTS died unexpectedly in a carriage accident the year she turned twelve, it was John, then just twenty, who was named Lucy’s guardian. He explicitly forbade Lucy to leave Urizon, a restriction she’d hoped would be lifted at the loss of her mother, who had at least meant well with her insistence on confinement. John’s decree was not well meaning. Lucy had contracted a terrible fever the last time she’d ventured into Urizon’s garden, and John cited this as impetus for keeping her indoors. The twist of his mouth told her differently. John taught Lucy to be spiteful.
“What would you have me do?” Lucy asked her brother, and in answer she was given books on household management and rules of entertaining, poor substitutes for poetry, cruel in their suggestion that prepubescent Lucy, not the long-tenured, capable housekeeper, would fill her mother’s role. Lucy had never been instructed in the usual comportment of young ladies—her mother said such activities were too taxing. And unspoken, but always understood: Lucy would likely never reach the age at which such education would prove useful.
How many years did John expect to be his sister’s warden? How long did he think Lucy had to live? She was not sure, but tried her best to please him, as she’d tried to please her parents, the doctors, all who visited the house. John was not impressed with her mastery of table settings, her research on the peerage. Lucy spent more and more of her time in Urizon’s library, seeking the knowledge that might justify her middling existence, might prove to her brother her worth.
She sorted through her father’s private collection, a varied assortment befitting his lifelong dilettantism, the diversions of a man who had never needed work. Beside the scraped skull of a rodent, Lucy found the work of one Charles Darwin, a manuscript subtitled “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” She took the text out into the front parlor, where John chided her for reading it.
“That book is not meant for women,” he said, laughing. “Hard to say who it was meant for, really. Certainly not churchgoers, certainly not anyone who trusts natural theology. Regardless, you won’t understand a word.”
But Lucy took John’s dismissal as a challenge. Lucy read the whole thing through. From the lengthy tracts she came to two firm conclusions. The first: that she herself was an anomaly—if each generation of life was somehow better than the one that came before it, her body must hold some hidden key. She was not pitiful in her long staving-off of sickness but rather the beginning of a new and better breed. A favored race of woman.
The second certainty, a natural extension of the first: whatever child Lucy bore would be magnificent. She imagined a little girl with her own impossible resilience, trapped not in a feeble body but supported by a strong one. She imagined a little girl who’d tell John off, who would not only grasp the complications of new science but propose more of her own. A miracle child, who’d preserve Lucy’s legacy far better than the middling portrait that now hung outside the ballroom. The doctors told her that a child was inconceivable—yet they had also claimed she’d never reach age ten. Having conquered one such dire impossibility, surely Lucy could manage to overcome another. There would be a daughter, Lucy was certain. But how, without that first marker of womanhood, menstruation, without access to the world outside Urizon, was Lucy to make her?
AT EIGHTEEN, SHE found her answer in the library, hidden in a far more ancient book. The text was pressed so close against the shelf that a bit of its cover clung to the wood, ripping when Lucy removed it, scarring both book and bastille. At first she understood little of its enigmatic content, a strange series of symbols: a tree drawn out of lines much like Darwin’s, with what seemed to be a child emerging from its trunk; an odd series of overlapping arrows; a melting shield; a cross. But Lucy recognized the image of the spiral—a maze to death and back again—and one small, crested bird. Both had been carved crudely onto a stair rail deep within the house. Symbols, the housemaids whispered, of old powers and resurrection. The remnants of the Blakely family curse.
The road to death seemed obvious to Lucy, a constant if meandering journey already begun. But back again . . . For a cloistered young woman long past her predicted expiration, “back again” was a raft to cling to on a sea that threatened to drown her more each day. Understanding the book became Lucy’s obsession.
JOHN WATCHED HIS sister study the manuscript, pore over charts and runes, whisper incantations. Lucy had a particular red chaise longue she’d curl up on, accompanied by her favorite of the family hounds. The library fire cast her face in flickering shadow; all was quiet but for its popping, the heavy wheezing of her chest. She had always, John sensed, been angry, but her frustrations had simmered below the surface, directed at her failing body, only an occasional flash of fury in the eyes that suggested her displeasure was with him. Now Lucy seemed finished with hiding, with obedience. More than any new scientific paradigm, this book had changed her.
Imperious, Lucy informed John that she’d no longer be joining him for dinner. She would not perform at the piano, or help the cook map out the menus, would not even change from her thin nightdress into the proper attire in which to greet his guests. She had other matters to attend to, exercises more important than arpeggios, plans more imminent than meals. At first these refusals escaped from Lucy’s lips like belches, her eyes wide with her own impertinence, her hand flown up after to cover her mouth. Her brother laughed at her, belittling. When his scorn failed to persuade her, John swore mightily, and threatened to lock Lucy in her room, refuse her dinner. Still, she continued. She would not return to the girl she had been. As Lucy studied her new text, she grew more sure of each decision, more attuned to what she wanted, what she knew. There was a promise in the pages of this ancient tome; a promise, and a secret.
Eventually Lucy opened the French doors that surrounded the ballroom, disregarding the wind’s bellow and bite. She knelt amid lit votive candles, arranged in a triangle. Muttered and wailed. Scratched her arms until they bled. Lucy preserved a tooth she’d lost as a child in a small sphere of amber, and held it to the light, humming a low-throated tune.
The servants whispered about her. The postmaster spread gossip. When John hosted a hunting party at the house, the guests remarked upon Lucy, her flights of fancy, her rituals, demands. It was humiliating. They asked John what, in good conscience, he planned to do about his sister. Suggested an institution in the city that was known for resolving just such hysteria, run by revered men of science.
It was the fashion, then, to declare one’s woman hysterical. John liked to appear fashionable. He announced his decision once his final guests had left, told Lucy very brusquely over cold sausage and tea that she had one hour to ready her things and settle minor household matters. He went out to smoke a cigar on the back terrace.
Lucy heard the doctors approaching, the horses’ whinnies, the patter of the carriage wheels on the drive. She ran upstairs, bolted her bedroom door from the inside, and stepped out onto the roof. Once there she crept across the cupola, the turret a tightrope, shingles scratching her palms. When she jumped she landed strangely on her ankle. From the lawn Lucy could hear the men yelling and pounding, the angry demands that she stop all this silliness and let John and the doctors in at once.
It was quiet for a moment, before they realized she was missing. Then it was chaos. The servants were enlisted to spread out and search the grounds. Lucy remembers John’s voice bellowing, the doctors’, disguised, calling in deceptive treacle tones. She’d been so young then, cold with fear, struggling to catch her breath. She’d limped through the forest, looking for the proper place to pause in supplication, praying the old stories and her own interpretations of the book’s symbols were true. Skittish at the shrill cry of an owl. Shivering.
The last light drained from the low autumn sky.
Now, Lucy pleaded, now. Now it must happen.