What Should Be Wild Read online

  FORTUNATELY, NONE OF the uproar surrounding my nativity was known to me. Despite the demands of the doctors, my father spirited me away as quickly as he could, hiding me from gossip at my mother’s family home, a large country estate called Urizon.

  The house was set back nicely from the main road, necklaced by a wide front stretch of lawn that led to two cracked red brick pillars flanking a sturdy iron gate, appended by a three-tiered formal garden. Tall hedges grew across the perimeters of the property and presumably at one point they’d been pruned, but as I knew them they were wild, overgrown and prickly, a veritable sleeping beauty’s bower. Ivy curled, unfettered, over everything—the stern face of the house, the brick chimneys, the gate.

  By the time my parents were married, my mother, Laura, was the last in the family line of once-abundant Blakelys who had made their home at the lip of the wood. Once filled with servants, houseguests, extended relations, in my time it housed only my father and me. We had very few visitors, which I was told had been the case even before I was born.

  Urizon’s facade was severe—rough stone, spindly turrets, heavy doors, and shut windows—and it had a reputation for tragedy. The estate was over three hundred years old, built at the height of the Blakely fortunes, an attempt to launch the clan into the upper stratum of elite society. Some minor feat of engineering in the mid-seventeenth century, dull to discuss but apparently vital to the direction of the empire, had landed the first in a subsequent series of William Blakelys a windfall. It had to do with waterwheels, ushering in industrialization, the dawn of a new age. I confess I never studied his advances—far more interesting to me was the drama of the domestic: this founding William had failed to cement an important alliance for his daughter, the result of which, it was said, condemned the family to centuries of misfortune and malice.

  According to the villagers, ours was a bedeviled family line. Better to be dirt poor and hideously ugly than a Blakely. The house was full of ghosts, claimed some. Cursed, said others. So as not to attract its bad luck, you were best to stay clear. Through the generations Blakelys had supposedly gone missing, suffered falls from great heights, been born with scaly tails or extra fingers. Though none could confirm the veracity of these rumors, which had long plagued Urizon’s previous occupants, their existence served Peter and me well, granting the privacy Peter desired.

  The main house was large, so we’d closed off all but the areas used regularly, covered furniture with dust sheets, and sealed certain doors. Of Urizon’s fifty rooms, we occupied just ten: two bedrooms, the kitchen, a study for Peter, the library, sitting room, nursery turned lab, two full baths and one half. This single wing was easier to maintain, both for Mrs. Blott, who kept the house, and Peter, who protected it from me.

  I required a particular environment. To avoid constant disruption, all visible wood had been heavily varnished, plaster applied, carpets laid, tapestries hung. The project of rearranging and inoculating had taken Peter months, but served its purpose. As a child I was little threat to our upkept bit of manor.

  Generally I stayed within my boundaries. As a small child I thought these rules would not last very long; initially I thought all children like me. I believed that together we would grow out of the phase in which physical contact was fatal, and into the examples of adulthood all around me. I’d seen Peter shake the hand of our solicitor, Tom Pepper; I’d seen Mrs. Blott check for fever against Peter’s flushed cheek. Prior to the awakening that proved my theory false, I obeyed with a sense that mine were common restrictions, a phase to sigh and smile through, my path to human touch. Once I learned that this was not so, that I was alone in my destruction, my obedience was born of my fear.

  When the weather was fine, I was usually content to spend my mornings in the kitchen or the library, take lunch out on the terrace, busy myself in the backyard. But on dreary days, or maddeningly hot ones, I grew restless. Then, I did like to explore. Careful to cover myself fully, I would venture into far parts of the house, my anthropologist’s eye ready, my historian’s hat tied tight. To me, the unadulterated rooms throughout Urizon were a mystery, a menacing, silent shipwreck preserved in the deep. Ancient carvings begged subtle interpretation. Locked chests longed to be picked, stuck drawers shimmied open.

  The hallway that circled our dust-laden ballroom was lined with Blakely portraits: very distant relations, their faces very grim. Peter had walked me through the few who he knew: Founding William, of course, taller in paint than he could ever be in life. His wife, pinch-faced, much smaller. The portrait nearest to the east entrance was my great-grandfather’s sister, a pretty thing, though very slim and pale, so much that I imagined her tubercular or struck by other illness. She hung next to her brother, my great-grandfather, a bulbous man who seemed much older than she, though it may have been simply that he’d sat down for his portrait some years later. She was Lucy Blakely; he was John. Their lineage was easiest to trace to mine, their images most recent, and they seemed realer to me for it. I sensed a look of longing in Lucy’s dark eyes, a dash of devilry in her brother’s, that contrasted with the rigidity of their postures.

  With them hung Frederick Blakely; several Marys; a man called only General who sat atop his horse; golden-haired Helen, eyes cast downward toward the single white lily in her equally white hands; Marian, with the name of a woman but the stern stance of a man; a Katherine and an Alice and three other Williams, all rather boring; a little girl called Emma drawn in silhouette; a ragged black dog. Compared to the works of the old masters whose lives I read in our library’s art books, and whose images seemed ready to lift off the page and offer a taste of their capon, a feel of their furs, these painted relatives rang hollow. There was a pettiness about them that unnerved me—I could not imagine myself thinking it worthwhile to stand still in these poses for hours for the sake of such hack-handed preservation. I saw these Blakelys all to be inscrutable, whispering about me, judging my behavior as the last of their line.

  WHISPERING LOUDER, IF more difficult to understand, was the neighboring forest: a mass of black poplars and conifers and wise old English oaks, yews with trunks like waists of giants, tangles of tree root that twisted together like veins. Trees that to the saplings in the cities were like tigers to a house cat, their breed older, deeper, blessed.

  Peter did not like the forest. When I was small he’d had built a shoddy wooden fence to divide the trees from our backyard, fearing I might wander off into the old growth and be lost. That fence stood proudly just a season before weather took its toll, but Peter never did remove it, instead letting the splintered, rotting wood disintegrate back into the line of trees. I could slip through or over it in several places, and though I’d often been told not to leave the yard, I did grow restless. At times I could have sworn the trees were beckoning me. I caught glimpses of a den that had once belonged to foxes, a young tree split by lightning down its center, a poplar overcome by a colony of nests. An entire world, begging to be explored. Were it not for the old stories of villagers gone missing in that forest, stories that magnified the darkness of its depths—were it not for my own darkness, so carefully avoided—I surely would have succumbed sooner.

  But I did know the stories. They were part of me. They scared me. This was one:

  Many years ago, a woodcutter lived in Coeurs Crossing, the village near Urizon, with his wife, who was pregnant, and their very small son. They were happy together, this family, or so the tale goes—the woodcutter would wake early and kiss his wife goodbye, go off into the forest with his axe and work hard chopping wood through the morning, then return to dine with his family before making his rounds for delivery. People liked him. The family did well. Until one day, having gone off to the forest at his usual time, the woodcutter did not return.

  His wife was worried, and when by evening he still had not come, she set off into the wood to go and find him. Someone in Coeurs Crossing reported seeing her tromping through a layer of thin snow, the child toddling behind. A farmer said he called to h
er from the inside of his barn, as he was brushing down his horses, but she must not have heard him.

  She was not seen again.

  Her husband, the woodcutter, emerged from the wood before dawn. The same farmer who had watched the wife depart played witness to the husband’s return. The woodcutter’s face was haggard, all his clothing ripped to shreds, and in his arms he held his little child, whose face was chapped and blue from a night spent in the cold.

  The next day, the woodcutter could be found in the village center, babbling on about the trees, swearing that the forest had kept shifting shape around him. No matter how he tried, he said, he could not find his way home; night poured in and icy winds blew, and yet the wood that he had known so well just hours before, the wood he had grown up in, made his livelihood, had changed.

  The woodcutter fought valiantly, then at last sank to despair. He gave up all hope of escaping. He lay down on the cold floor of the forest, and he closed his eyes and cried. When he opened them, he said, a path appeared as if from nowhere. He’d followed and it led him to his son, seated shivering in the snow, all alone.

  The villagers thought that he was crazy. Some said perhaps the madness had been in him all along, that he’d lured his wife away and then he’d killed her. Others swore that the grief of his loss drove him wild, the disappearance of his lover and with her his unborn child had simply been too much for him to take, his mind had cracked under the pressure. No one could explain where the wife had gone. They never saw a trace of her, nor did the woodcutter recover from this episode. He spent the rest of his days in a garbled, milk-eyed trance, wandering Coeurs Crossing, his beard grown long, his feet unshod, warning its other residents of the terrors of the forest.

  I heard this story many times from old Mother Farrow, who lived by the river. I was also told a version by Tom Pepper, our solicitor, and even once a very brief account by Mrs. Blott. I thought it was a wonderful story, mysterious and dark, a good tale to tell when huddled by the fire or when snow fell unexpected late at night. It frightened me, although I did not know if I believed it. The story was too old and deeply rooted to demand my belief; it existed outside acknowledgment, needed no credence, asked for no faith. Its proof was the height and the breadth of that clandestine, hulking forest, lying just beyond my reach.

  The Tarnished Emerald

  Lucy, 1888

  At twenty-one, Lucy Blakely climbed out of her bedroom window, slipped down the siding of that choking house, Urizon, and ran barefoot through the wet grass to the wood.

  She had been a sickly child. When she was born—during a late winter snow in the year 1867, her blue veins visible through thin, pale skin—a cousin muttered something to her father about his misfortune at having sired first a veritable demon, then a ghost. Thomas Blakely chuckled, watching through the frosted library window as the governess attempted to prevent his young son John, the demon in discussion, from heaving hard-packed clumps of ice at the gardener.

  “She’ll be a hale one, old boy, you wait and see,” said Thomas.

  “She’ll have to be,” murmured the cousin.

  When the doctor was called a week later to examine the newborn, who despite a hearty appetite would not put on weight, he noted that her skin tasted of salt, her bowels moved strangely. He told the Blakelys that they would be lucky to see Lucy through the next six months, at which Lucy’s mother, having lost four prior infants, collapsed onto the giltwood settee. Her husband offered a rote hand on her trembling back, whispering a word or two of vague consolation, and then went to confer privately with the doctor. The servants tried to ply the grieving mother with teacakes and clotted cream while young Lucy, oblivious to her declared deficiencies, cooed up at them from her cradle.

  Hovering in the doorway, John Blakely saw his sister curl her little fingers, flex her tiny feet. John was seven years Lucy’s elder and already pinching servants and smashing priceless antiques. He watched the specialists gather around his sister and heard his mother bemoaning yet another child lost, his father’s unfounded reassurances that this one would be different. Eyes slit with envy, John dragged his rocking horse out of the nursery to where the new baby was sleeping, riding the toy animal hard against the floorboards. Later he would plunge the poker into the sitting room fire until it shone orange with heat, reveling in the glow it cast on Lucy, contemplating its power. He waited for his sister’s death, the necessary mourning, the attention that would then be redirected to his every whim, as he, the firstborn son, felt he was warranted. But the years stretched on and the little girl grew, each wheeze and cough a call to action, each shiver stymied by a slammed window, new blankets, each breath defying the doctors’ expectations, necessitating care.

  A queen among her china dolls and pillows, little Lucy lay under the thick canopy of quilts in her vast featherbed, her bedroom fire never quite fulfilling its threat to cross the boundary of the cantilevered hearth. Her semipermanent prostration allowed a view of the wide lawns, the ornate gardens, her brother and his playmates running wild on their holidays from school.

  When the weather was just right, when her breathing was stable, Lucy was allowed to leave her bedroom—to socialize in the ballroom or parlor with family or guests, to take in sunshine on the terrace. But if a storm cloud marred the sky, if the sun shone too brightly, if Lucy sniffed or coughed or scratched, she was whisked back up to the bedroom and instructed to be very still, and silent.

  Her mother practiced the doctor’s early warnings as religion: Lucy was not to overexert herself, not to sit too close to the windows, not to call too loudly for the servants, not to interact with children her own age.

  “It’s for your health,” her mother cautioned. Lucy would smile and nod: Of course it is, yes, Mother. And yet what good, she wondered privately, was health, a life extended, if that life was spent beholden to a body that betrayed her? Her mother deemed the library too dusty for her phlegmy lungs, the servants’ hands too dirty, even bouquets of flowers too heavy for Lucy’s weak limbs to sustain. By the time she’d lived eleven years, Lucy felt she had lived seventy confined to her bedroom, unable to influence even the squeeze of lemon in her tea, the closing of the lush brocade curtains.

  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.