Our engagement was announced in three separate papers. My name was listed differently in each one. Eleanor Grand, Eleanor Gallows, Eleanor Gaunt. Perhaps my uncles thought it would help people convince themselves they’d heard my name wrong. That girl was never a Gravely, they could tell themselves.She must have been a foundling, an orphan, some stranger we let into our midst.
Because that’s what they did, of course. They didn’t march up to our big white house and drag my uncle John into the streets. They didn’t damn him or castigate him or even take away his place in the first pew at church. They simply told themselves a different story, one that was easier to believe because they’d heard it before: Once there was a bad woman who ruined a good man. Once there was a witch who cursed a village. Once there was an odd, ugly girl whom everyone hated, because it was safe to hate her.
I kept waiting for someone to object, but the most I got was a pitying glance from the neighbors’ maid, an awkward grimace from my uncle Robert. Everyone else drew away from me, like hands from a hot coal. They averted their eyes from evil and, in so doing, became complicit in it. I watched my uncles’ sin spread over the town like night falling, and finally understood that no one was going to save me.
So, on the morning of my wedding, I took my father’s birdcage into the woods behind Gravely Manor and opened the door. A rush of iridescent feathers and clever black eyes, a few piercing trills, and they were gone. I didn’t know if they’d survive out in the wild, but I’d grown too fond of them to leave them alone with my uncles.
I chose two stones, smooth and heavy, and slipped them into my skirt pockets. Then I walked down to the riverside.
I would have done it, if I hadn’t met the boatman. A hare, I called him later, because he had a sly, sideways manner of regarding a person. He stopped me, and then he listened to me, and then he gave me an even greater gift: he told me how my father died. He told me Hell was real, and so were its demons.
I did not walk into the river that day, after all. I went back to the big white house on the hill and let them dress me in white lace and ribbons. I let my uncle Robert walk me down the aisle of the empty church. I could not make myself say the words, but I let my new husband kiss me, his lips damp and thin.
I don’t remember the rest of the day, but I remember the light changing: noon to dusk, dusk to twilight, twilight to night. My uncle John stood up from the dinner table and held out his hand, as if I would take it, as if I would follow him to his bed like a sow to slaughter.
I ran. He followed.
He followed me to his own mine, and hesitated at the edge of the dark. I heard him calling after me, cajoling, pleading, cursing, demanding, but I did not stop. I went down, and down, and down.
I found the river. I drank the smallest sip, like the boatman told me, and fell into Underland. And there were the creatures from my nightmares, animals made of teeth and claws, fury and justice. They looked at me as if they’d been waiting for me. I wept with joy, with terror, with awful love. I told them about my uncle and showed them the ring on my finger, and they ran into the darkness. When they returned, their muzzles were wet and red. I wiped them clean with the muddy hem of my wedding dress. Then I slept, at peace.
I woke up at the bottom of the river. I crawled to the shore, retching, coughing. I was too frightened to return to the mines—what if it had all been a lovely dream? what if my uncle was still alive, calling for me?—but the boatman had told me there was another way out. A natural cave that twisted up to a sinkhole on the north side of town. I didn’t know till later it was on Gravely land.
It was a hard climb back to the surface. By the time I saw the sun again my palms were raw and my dress was ragged. I crawled out into the dusking light and lay in the wet grass. I saw five birds cross the sky above me. All birds are black at that hour, but I decided they were my birds. Starlings, my father had called them, purchased only because he liked the look of caged things. But they were free now, and so was I.
They say I was laughing when they found me. I don’t recall. I don’t recall much of the court proceedings, either. All of it felt mystical to me, a series of rituals that led to my own metamorphosis. I had been a nameless little girl, and now I was a rich widow. I had been trapped, and now I was not.
I could have gone anywhere in the world, do you know that? I could have run away from Eden and lived off my mother’s stolen fortune until I forgot the sound of the river above and the taste of the river below. But I stayed. God help me, I stayed.
As my uncle’s widow, I had a claim on Gravely land. I let Uncle Robert skulk off with the more valuable half—the mines and the big house—but I kept the acreage on the north side of the river. They made out the deed to my married name first, but the sight of it sickened me, so I tore it up and had them write another. To my maiden name,I said. Eleanor Starling. The name tasted clean in my mouth.
I hired an architect as soon as the deed was signed. I’d never had a home, you see. My mother and I had moved from rented room to wayhouse, dodging rumors and surviving on what little my father left us, and the white house on the hill was merely a place I couldn’t leave. So I built myself everything I’d ever dreamed I would have: drawing rooms and ballrooms, libraries and parlors, hallways full of doors that only I could unlock.
It was more than a home, of course. It was a labyrinth, with the way to Underland at its heart, and high stone walls all around. I couldn’t tell you whether I was more terrified that someone would find their way down there, or that something would come crawling out. All I know is that I dreamed of the Beasts every night, their teeth stained with my uncle’s blood, and that I was often woken by the noises I made in my sleep. I could never tell if I’d been laughing or screaming.
I thought I would be happy there. I had a name and a home of my own, and enough money to keep both for as long as I lived. But instead I was a ghost haunting my own house. I wondered sometimes if I’d drowned that night, and just didn’t know it.
It was the loneliness, I think. The townsfolk hated me and kept hating me, with an intensity that comes from shame. The only company I had was my starlings, who bred and multiplied until they rose sometimes from the sycamores in great black clouds. I used to watch them from the attic window, the flock lifting and falling, writhing like a dark ribbon in the sky, and think of my poor Beasts trapped under the earth.
I was too frightened to go back into Underland and find them, but I loved them too well to leave. So I studied them. I had the twin privileges of time and money, and I poured them all into Underland. I ordered books on history and geography, mythology and monsters, folklore and fable. I taught myself Latin and puzzled through the Cherokee syllabary. I made charms and wards, forged four keys and a sword guided only by myth and mysticism. There was nothing in my library that precisely resembled Underland or the Beasts, but I saw their shadows in every tale of demons or monsters, every story about teeth waiting in the night.
Yet their origins eluded me. Where did they come from? How could I dream them before I even knew they existed? I wouldn’t understand until much later that they existed only because I dreamed them, that all my studies were merely a snake swallowing her own tail.
I began to draw in the evenings, dark, ugly sketches of a girl with dark, ugly dreams. I wrote my story down, softened a little, because I already knew no one cared for the hard facts of it. I don’t remember making a decision to publish it, but I remember sliding the prints into an envelope and mailing them north. Maybe I was a little proud of my work. Maybe I wanted to see my chosen name immortalized in print, to erase my given name like a wrong mark on a chalkboard. Maybe I simply wanted people to know the truth, even if they mistook it for a children’s book.