Eleanor tilts her head, her tone cooling. “If this river had a name like its sisters in the underworld, it would be Phantasos, or maybe Hypnos, and it would belong to Morpheus.” I’m flipping through threadbare memories of Edith Hamilton and Metamorphoses,trying and failing to understand, when Eleanor says, softy, “It is the river of dreams.”
The word “dreams” strikes me like a thrown stone. It sinks into my mind easily, as if I were expecting it, leaving no ripples behind.
“What does that mean?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“It means these waters give form to our dreams, however foul. It means the only monsters here are the ones we make.” Eleanor looks at her Beast again, her small hand vanishing between the white blades of its hackles. The look in her eyes is almost tender, as a mother to a child, or as a dreamer to their favorite dream.
Repulsion rises in me, and anger. “You made them? You—why?”
Her head twists on the fragile stalk of her neck, uncannily quick. Her eyes are mean slivers. “You don’t care.” It sounds like a well-worn complaint, whetted by years of use. “No one ever did before, no one does now. None of you know the truth of it, and you prefer it that way.”
The words strike an uncomfortable resonance in my skull. I swallow twice, dry-mouthed, and say, “So tell me.”
“You won’t listen.” Her tone is still low and vicious, but there’s a new emotion rising from the mean depths of her eyes. An old and desperate hunger, a want she tried and failed to bury.
I walk across the floor, which doesn’t creak here, and kneel beside the bed. “Tell me, Eleanor. I’ll listen.”
She fights it, but the hunger wins in the end.
This is my story.
No one listened to it before, and if they listened they did not believe it, and if they believed it they did not care. I am certain you are the same, but I will tell it anyway, because it has been so long since I had anyone to tell.
My story begins with my mother’s story, like everyone’s does. It goes like this: Once upon a time there was a rich young woman who thought she was in love. But as soon as the marriage license was signed—or, more specifically, as soon as all her accounts were placed in her husband’s name—the young man vanished. He left her lonely and laughed-at, further along than she ought to be.
I was born in the spring of 1851. She named me Eleanor, after herself, and never spoke our surname aloud.
My mother died young—a cancer, the doctors said, but I think it was bitterness—and the courts sent me to live with my only living relation. I took the train to Bowling Green and a flatboat to Eden. My father had never seen me before, so he stood on the shore while the passengers stepped off the ramp. Every time a young woman passed by he asked: Eleanor Gravely?It was the first time I heard my own name spoken aloud.
My father lived well off my mother’s money. He and his two younger brothers—my uncles—had started their own company, Gravely Brothers Coal & Power, and now they owned a few hundred acres, a dozen men, five black songbirds imported from Europe, and a big white house on the hill. I thought at first I might make a tolerable life in that house—might spend my days sewing and reading, teaching new songs to the birds—but my uncles and my father were bad, bad men.
(You want to know more. You want every miserable, gruesome, ordinary detail. But surely you can imagine the sorts of sins that hide under the word “bad,” like grubs beneath a stone. Surely the precise shape of the wounds doesn’t matter as much as how much they hurt, and whose hands dealt them.)
They were bad men, and they grew worse as the war worsened and the coal ran dry. They burned through their own profits and dug deep into my mother’s coffers. They drank more and slept less. They came to resent every bite of food I ate at their table, every stale crust I slipped into the birdcage, and they punished me for it.
My father was the worst of them, if only because he was the oldest, and had six more years of practice in cruelty. I took to sleeping as many hours as I could, wrapping myself in dreams of teeth and blood, blades and arsenic. I was sleeping when my uncle came to tell me my father had drowned.
I didn’t do it. Half the town suspected me, and I almost wish they were right—I assure you he deserved it—but the other half of Eden blamed the miners. The mist had risen that night, and when it cleared my father was dead, and there were no more slaves in Eden.
I did not mourn my father, of course. My uncle John stood beside me at the graveside, twisting the flesh at the backs of my arms so viciously it was purple and green the following morning, but I refused to shed a single tear for him. Maybe that’s when the rumors began, about that cold, strange Gravely girl. I heard she killed him, they whispered. I heard she only smiled once, when the first shovel of dirt hit her father’s coffin lid.
If I had been smiling, I soon stopped. In the absence of a will I inherited my father’s remaining fortune, which had belonged first to my mother, and should have belonged to me. But, as I was not yet of age, my circumstances changed very little except that my guardianship transferred from one bad man to another.
John Gravely was the second-oldest brother, and the second-meanest. I thought I might at least survive him, but slowly I became aware that he was watching me more closely than he used to. He studied me as if I were a difficult equation that needed solving. He asked me twice when my birthday was, and drummed his fingers restlessly on the table each time I answered.
That night I counted on my fingers and realized I would turn eighteen in twenty-three days. And on that date my money would be my own, and my uncles would have nothing but a few failing mines, a filthy birdcage, and a wealthy niece who no longer belonged to them. I was a songbird in a den of foxes, and they were so hungry.
I thought he might poison me, or drown me. I thought he might lock me away until I signed everything over to him and his brother, or have me shipped off to an asylum. He wouldn’t even have had to bribe the physicians; I was quite unwell by then. I chewed at my own lips until they scabbed. I never brushed my hair. I no longer sang to the little black birds, but only spoke to them in hoarse, mad whispers. I slept and slept, because even nightmares were preferable to reality.
My uncle John did not poison me or lock me up. He came to a different solution, one which I berated myself for failing to anticipate. It was, after all, the same solution that occurred to my father when he met my mother. He was a poor man and a bad one, and she was a wealthy woman and a weak one; what could be easier, or more obvious?
But, at seventeen, I must still have possessed some childish, idiot faith in the rules of society. Yes, they were bad men. Yes, I had heard the weeping from the mines and seen my uncles return from the cabins late at night. But that was different, that was allowed. I was a young white woman of good breeding, and I still believed there were some lines they would not cross.
So when my uncle John summoned me to breakfast one morning and told me I was not to call him Uncle any longer, I didn’t understand. He picked up my left hand and shoved a cheap tin ring on my second-smallest finger, and I still didn’t understand. I felt heavy and strange, as if I was sleeping. I looked at my uncle Robert, the youngest and least cruel of the Gravely men, and saw the look of faint disgust on his face, and only then did I understand.