“Coward,” hissed one of the remaining two women, who I had quite forgotten in my mother’s embrace. I looked past my mother’s shoulder to see her. She was beady-eyed, older, with a strong scent of the animal about her. In fact, I realized that my mother was emitting a less-than-choice odor as well, and as I recovered my composure I found myself trying not to gag as she tucked me to her rank, dirt-stained breast. I was no rose myself, still stank of sweat and blood and horses, but this was nothing compared to the aroma of my mother. I was torn between the wonderful new touch of her, and her stench.
I pulled away but kept hold of her hands, marveling at their marble smoothness, their unearthly chill. From this angle I could see her more clearly, and was startled to find that she looked nothing like me. She was porcelain-skinned and veiny, her nose was peaked, her nostrils high and thin. Her lips were the color of crushed blueberries, chapped purple with small white whorls of flesh. Her hair was black and very straight.
I felt I recognized her, and yet she looked nothing like the pictures of my mother I had seen in Peter’s albums, a rosy woman, large-breasted and happy.
I fought to create reason around this discrepancy. I supposed this was what death would do.
I was awkward. “Shall I call you . . . Peter, my father, has me call him . . . Peter. Shall I call you Laura?”
The older, hissing woman laughed unkindly. The third, between the other two in age—solemn-faced and sad-eyed, perhaps seven months laden with child—opened her mouth but did not speak.
My mother petted my wrist. “Why, no, my dear.” Her fingernails were long and tickled my flesh. “My name is Lucy.”
THE ROOM SEEMED to slip one way, then the other, as if the house was balanced on a fulcrum point that had suddenly shifted. I yanked my hands away from the woman and whistled for Marlowe, who awoke to stand beside me, lending me strength.
“Who are you?” I managed, my fingers gripping Marlowe’s coat, shivering despite the dry heat of the fire. I glared at the strangers surrounding us. “Why are you burning our library? What are you doing in my house?” Turning to face the blue-lipped, long-nailed woman who had lied to me: “And how dare you pretend to be my mother?”
“Not pretending,” she said at once, backing away from me slightly. “A simple misunderstanding. I’ll explain.”
The oldest woman sucked her teeth and smiled. The third stepped forward and said, “Lucy, that’s enough.” She positioned herself to block the others from my view, sending the shadow of her swollen stomach across the empty bookshelves. “I’m Imogen,” she told me. “These are Lucy and Mary. We’ve come from the wood because we need your help.” She bowed her head as if in supplication, and tendrils of dirty brown hair grazed her cheek. “There is a danger in the forest,” she continued, looking up at me, “a creature that will kill us. A creature that means this place harm.”
I stared at her, my lower lip fat with incredulity, withholding a laugh. I was finally home after a miserable few months. My father was missing, perhaps dead. My house was destroyed. An impostor had posed as my mother. I felt, in that moment, too tired and spent to fight my own slew of battles, never mind one for these women from the wood. I wanted only to tidy a small space for myself, make a hot cup of tea, and fall asleep.
Still, I was my father’s daughter, and I could not stanch his influence rising within me—his need to understand, despite the bitter cost of knowledge, his will to find out facts, with no regard for food or rest. I knelt to collect Peter’s remaining papers, scattered at Imogen’s feet, with the thought that I might get a sense of him and what he would advise me to do: a memory of his hand on the pen, a recollected smell. There was nothing.
The fire crackled. I felt the women’s eyes on my lowered head, my back. I had to say something. I positioned the last of Peter’s papers into an orderly stack. Now that I knew Lucy was not actually my mother, my shyness had abated. I stood and peered around Imogen to find her.
“What do you mean, misunderstanding?” I asked slowly. “The matter of motherhood should be perfectly clear.”
Lucy stepped out from where she’d been corralled and reached for my hand. I snapped it back.
“Don’t touch me.”
“My daughter—”
“I said, don’t.” If she had been a usual life I would have touched her, silenced her, left her there with hardly any guilt and gone to curl under the quilt in my bedroom. “Just tell me what you meant,” I said. “Quickly. No more games.”
Mary, silent all this while and still maintaining her watch by the west library entrance, smirked at the lot of us. Lucy seemed shocked. I supposed she was not used to being spoken to in this manner. She opened her mouth twice, closed it both times, and crinkled her forehead in thought. Finally, she spoke.
“It was I who found you—the true half of you, in the wood,” she said. “I who wanted you. True, I did not birth you, but in this, I am a mother as surely as any who did.”
“Found me?” I asked.
“Dug you up from the oak tree.” I saw Lucy’s long-nailed fingers twitch toward mine.
I guffawed. It was an odd, cryptic answer.
Imogen agreed. “You must tell her the full story,” she said, frowning.
So they did.
ONCE UPON A time seven women lived hidden in the forest, trapped by rescue, separate from the world. After centuries of sameness these women discovered a child, a small woodland savior buried under an old oak. They tended to her, loved her. When they first entered the wood, the women had all passed through a veil that marked their old lives from the new, a veil that held them in eternal stagnation. This girl was different. She had grown out of the oak in this strange forest—she was of the forest, unlike the others, and continued to grow while the others did not. She looked like me. She grew as I grew. She was also tied to the world outside through me. These women in the wood saw she was different, a break in the pattern of their entrapment. They had come to believe that someday she’d possess the power to set them free.
But although she was a Blakely—the last of their line—this girl was foreign to them. Frightening. The seven women realized they could not tame her. She was ravenous, and fed on the creatures of the wood. She made the wood ravenous, spilling outside its former borders. Some of the women had given themselves to the black-eyed girl willingly. These three in front of me had escaped, but they still felt her hunger. They could not flee far enough; they knew she would come for them. The girl would not heed them, but they thought she might heed me.
“For the longest time,” said Lucy, “we thought that she’d not only set us free from the forest but defend us from the evils of this house, from those within it who had harmed us.”
“Not all,” corrected Imogen. “Not all of us thought she would help us.”
Lucy ignored her. “But it’s you, my dearest, you who have the power. Your fates are intertwined—I don’t know how I didn’t recognize it sooner. You can break the spell that’s bound us all.”
IN MOMENTS OF shock one is advised to be seated, to breathe slowly, maintain whatever calm one can. I had always found it odd that this advice made no mention of the calm that asserts itself without maintenance, settles like a frost over the windows of old knowledge, and obfuscates the former view from the new.
I was very calm. I sat on the chaise longue and curled my hands to fists. The stories made sense now—the tales of Blakely’s curse, of women missing. Here were my ancestors, in front of me: the women whose portraits I’d studied.
Lucy stood before me, flanked by Mary and Imogen. The fire popped behind them as if nothing had changed, not the house, not my history, when, in fact, we’d all been born anew.
“Are you surprised?” Lucy asked me. “Are you pleased?”
I was neither.
I had always had the sense that I did not belong entirely to myself, that because of my affliction I owed something to the forces that had made me. A year ago, I promptly would have honored any debt. But now, I had grown tired of obligations.
“I don’t know why you’ve dared to call yourself my mother.”
“My darling,” said Lucy, “I’m the one who found you—”
“You aren’t a parent. And you’ve made no effort to help me find mine.”