The Blakely Family

KEY

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indicates a lapse in time and lineage

Epigraph

Mrs. Lattimore let out a deep rich sigh, laughed her weak indulgent laugh, and said: My God, I wouldn’t be a girl again for a million pounds. My God, to go through all that again, not for a million million.

—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Contents

Cover

The Blakely Family

Title Page

Epigraph

The Weight of Those Who Made Me

Part I

Chapter 1

The Tarnished Emerald

Chapter 2

Very Distant Relations, Their Faces Very Grim

Chapter 3

My Shadowed Double

Chapter 4

Part II

The Dark to Logic’s Light

Chapter 5

Shifting Galaxies

Chapter 6

The Silver Necklace

Chapter 7

The Dirtied Family Crest

Chapter 8

The Promise Ring

Chapter 9

The Wedding Band

Chapter 10

The Bit of Braided Wire

Chapter 11

The Brooch of Hammered Iron

Part III

Chapter 12

The Undiscovered Country

Chapter 13

A Few Brief Years of Possibility

Chapter 14

The Ceremonials

Chapter 15

Your Mother, Waiting

Chapter 16

The Cycling of the Seasons

Chapter 17

A Bedeviled Family Line

Chapter 18

Part IV

Inaccurate Translations

The Shimmering Thing

Chapter 19

My Father’s Hand

Chapter 20

An Ink of Her Own Blood

Chapter 21

A Body Drained of Blood

Chapter 22

Toymaker and Child

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part V

Symmetry and Balance

Chapter 25

A Flood

Chapter 26

A Rope Around Her Neck

Chapter 27

Insatiable Hunger

Chapter 28

Merciless and Wild

Part VI

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

A Fruit in Its Fecundity

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

To Be Whole Again

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Weight of Those Who Made Me

Deep in the wood there is a dappled clearing, a quiet, carved space between two hills heavy with trees. A prickling bower joins the fists of land, letting through a single shaft of dusty light. Muffled birdsong can be heard, if you are quiet, carried on the whispering breeze. Old oaks cast heart-deep shadows. Alders bow their branches low.

Naked, but not cold, a young girl lies in a crude wooden casket at the center of the glade. Her eyes are black and blinking. Her glossy hair is wreathed with bone, her small fingers heavy with rings: a wedding band, a tarnished emerald, a dirtied family crest. A promise ring, scratched with the letters H and S. A brooch of hammered iron. On her wrist, she wears a bit of braided wire. At her throat, a silver necklace, marked with E.

She cannot move her slender arms, her legs, cannot twist her neck to see all of the women gathered around her, the women in whose jewels she’s been adorned. She senses them, but all she sees is Lucy, bending over her, stroking her hair with sharp fingernails, blue lips forming a kiss.

Do not be afraid, coos Lucy.

As if the black-eyed girl could know fear.

Part

I

1

They grew me inside of my mother, which was unusual, because she was dead. I developed in a darkness that was not the eager swaddle of her enveloping organs, a heat that was not the heat of her heart-pumped blood. My mother’s life burst like a fruit in its fecundity and it was only after, once she was rotted and hollow and still, that I was born.

SHE HAD BEEN keeping me a secret, so you can imagine my father’s response when the doctor approached him to discuss the viability of the fetus.

The fetus? I can picture Peter in this moment, face rendered expressionless by shock and grief, socks likely sagging and mismatched under his pant legs. He had been jolted out of an idyllic and coddled existence by the sudden collapse of my mother, and it would be years before he truly grasped that fact. There must be—I’m afraid I don’t—

It seems strange to even be discussing, given the recentness of your wife’s pregnancy, but in this case the circumstances do appear to be . . . miraculous.

Miraculous, I am told Peter repeated, swaying slightly in the saccharine light of the emergency waiting room. He was steadied by a kindly, gray-haired woman who had witnessed the scene and risen from her hard-backed chair to help him. This was Mrs. Blott. Within thirty-two hours her own husband, one Harold T. Blott, aged sixty-seven, would be pronounced dead from cardiac arrest. Mrs. Blott did not yet know this.

She patted Peter’s back and said, There, there, my dear, it seems you’ve had a shock, and led him to a vacant chair before turning to address the doctor. Please continue.

The doctor scratched his temple. Behind him, the hospital doors continued to swing as his colleagues rushed from one patient to the next. Peter could hear the high-pitched beeps of the medical machines and smell the iodine.

Yes, said the doctor. Right. Remarkably, the fetus seems so far to be unharmed, despite the cessation of your wife’s vital activities. With your approval, we would like to continue to monitor its growth. There is a small chance we can provide the proper nutrients and simulate the role of the mother until the fetus becomes viable outside of the womb.

Well, said Mrs. Blott, squeezing Peter’s shoulder. Well, isn’t that the sun just now coming through the clouds?

PETER DID NOT know how to be a father to a little girl. He showed up every day of those thirteen months in hospital once I was freed from the corpse of his wife, but when they took me from the incubators, bundled me and placed me in his arms to bring home, he was at a loss. We were lucky to have Mrs. Blott, who by the end of their first meeting had taken a vested interest in our plight, and who would check in on my father to be sure that first he, and then the two of us, were fed and cleaned and rested. Peter was not conventionally handsome, but there was something charming about his unkempt hair, the way his cheeks colored when he was excited. He had a way of blinking his hazel eyes and adjusting his glasses that inspired the women around him to take pity.

I had, for lack of a better term, been born prematurely, and as such there existed an impenetrable medical bubble around me during my first few months of life. The nurses had worn gloves at all times; even the small kisses Peter planted had been through layers of first incubator glass and then waffle-patterned blankets. Afraid their interventions might endanger my fledgling immune system, the doctors took no chances with their miracle, would not have me infected or exposed to human germs. Consequently luck and science conspired to hide my true affliction until I was safely at home. Not until Mrs. Blott laid me on my back to show Peter how to refasten my diaper did it happen: she’d unpinned the one side and was starting on the second when her bare fingers brushed against my thigh. She froze, suddenly, and swayed to the side. I continued gurgling and kicking.

Peter, eager pupil that he was, blinked at us both for a moment before stepping in to catch her. Ignoring the mess I was making as I wiggled my way out of my soiled diaper, he turned Mrs. Blott one way, then the other, pinched her arm, searched for a pulse. When she did not react, he propped her stiffened body against the changing table. A housefly buzzed over me. My father stood, smacked it between his hands, and watched it fall onto my changing pad. My foot brushed against its body. The buzzing resumed.

The nursery was painted pale pink, with little stenciled flowers on the trim up by the ceiling, and must have been a strange place for Peter’s first supernatural encounter. This did not faze him. He brought my fluffy teddy, the cream-colored one with the giant red bow that had been a birthday present from the nurses, and touched it lightly against the bare skin of my stomach. Nothing happened. He touched his hand against my layette. He watched the flattened housefly veer across the nursery, searching for a window through which to escape. I could not yet smile, but Peter swore that if I could, I would have beamed at him.

Standing directly behind Mrs. Blott, Peter took hold of her arm at the elbow and stretched it out until the fingers grazed my leg. Immediately she coughed and stepped back, almost tripping over his feet in their fawn-colored slippers.

Ah, he said.

What is it? asked Mrs. Blott, expelling bits of afterlife from her recently roused lungs.

We’ll just be careful not to touch her, then, I think.

And so they were.

STILL, I KILLED my father three times before the age of eight, and caused the demise of over a dozen small animals. We lived at my mother’s old family home in the country, far from our nearest human neighbor, but the forest around us was filled with wild beasts. I generally managed to avoid the larger—squirrels, rabbits, deer—yet found no way to spare gnats, midges, or houseflies.

Even the plants could not resist me. This I learned early on, toddling barefooted outside our house, leaving a comet tail of crackling, yellowed grasses where there once had been lush green. Peter, in his odd, dreamy way, simply placed his gloved hand in my chubby one and led me to retrace my steps, watching the color seep back into the landscape.

It’s just that we don’t know its full effects, you see, he would say sorrowfully. In an ideal world, Maisie, my girl, I would encourage you to have your fill of touching. Touch everyone and everything. The skin is a marvelous organ, marvelous indeed. Yet unfortunately, with your condition, I must insist that you refrain. From touching. We just don’t know enough, you see.

To his credit, Peter endeavored to know more. He set me up with homeschooling once I’d turned five, and steered me on my own course of studies while continuing with his. I was an early, avid reader. Though I learned little about social interaction, I studied philosophy and history, poetry and science, learned mathematics and the phases of the moon. I especially loved mythology and literature—stories of adventure, tests of fate. From the kitchen where I sat turning pages, I dreamed of one day embarking on an adventure of my own.

While I was immersed in my studies, Peter would write letters and journals and books about my case, none of which led us any closer to my own diagnosis, but did earn him some prestige among his colleagues. He developed a devoted following of those who were hungry to believe—men and women who’d grown tired of the tedium of peer review and soulless academia, who themselves studied parapsychology and extraterrestrials and uncertain religious phenomena. Peter omitted my name in his recountings, referring to me only as the Child, and rerouted our mail so that the curious could not find us. Yet for one who figured so prominently in such a large branch of Peter’s studies, I took a distinctly small role in their direction. It was unheard of to voice my own suggestions, anathema to strike out on my own. He published his ongoing case study under the nom de guerre the Toymaker, a reference to an old fairy tale. I belonged to my father. We were family. All that was mine was also his.

Are you ready to play? Peter would ask me, and I, knowing no other sort of group play, would drop my occupation and race up to the old nursery, which since I’d grown out of my cradle had served us as lab. I was to sit very still, to be silent, while Peter took note of our conditions: the hour, the weather, how much I’d slept and what I’d had that day to eat. In his notebook he would draw whatever object was to be that morning’s focus, some liminal thing, neither thoroughly alive nor clearly dead: a carved wood figure, a bit of cotton, a glass of juice.

Very good, he would say with a smile once done with his sketch.

I’d beam back at him, pleased as any other child would be to receive candy, or a gift. Because I was deprived of physical affection, words meant much to me. I could live on a Well done from my father for weeks, siphoning the fatty bits of it like a camel drawing food from its hump.

I did not want to sit still, to be studied. I was a little girl constricted, and I wanted to touch everything in sight. There were moments when I thought the utter force of need within me would burst, that my quivering little body would explode, unless I gave in to temptation. Still, I contained myself. I knew that Peter’s rules would make me safer. I recognized—from the panic Peter could not conceal when I asked about my history, from the absence of my mother since my birth—that my natural dispositions were dangerous. If I were to indulge myself and run my bare hands over unvarnished hardwood, to sneak up behind my father with my fingers made a mask to hide his eyes, to give a full examination (as Mrs. Blott had once caught me attempting and curtailed) to the warm lips of my pelvis, any number of awful things might happen. There was a badness in my body that had cursed me.

As such, I did not trust my instincts. It was safer to heed Peter. I thought that if I tried very hard to do exactly what he asked of me, my father would forgive me all my failings. I forced myself to sit and smile, and each time I felt an impulse I would fold it in my mind, a sheet of paper that creased easily at first, and then required more muscle as desire took on thicker, complex layers.

THE EXPERIMENTS THEMSELVES were methodical, practical, and conducted only after weeks of theoretical research. Good, scientific experiments, Peter assured me, though I was not the one who needed convincing: despite his best efforts, my father never garnered the respect of the established scientific community. Say our subject was a glass of juice. While I watched, Peter might slice an orange, squeeze it into a cup he had sterilized with alcohol once taken from the kitchen, cover it quickly with a cheesecloth or wax paper so the subject remained pure. A drop of juice might travel into the crook between his thumb and forefinger, and reflexively he would bring the sticky hand to his tongue. He would look at me with a troubled expression, embarrassed at having interfered with our results.

After licking his fingers or coughing (or whatever other action he’d performed that day that could dilute his findings), my father would become very serious, atoning for his lapse in judgment, his misplacement of mind, by being even more exacting.

Not yet, not yet, he would warn me if I scooted to the edge of my plastic folding chair. Let me set my watch and then precisely on the hour . . .

Tempted by the bracing scent of orange, the softness of fleece, my small body would tremble as I resisted the urge to indulge. I’d hold my breath, squeeze my eyes shut.

Patience, said Peter, and temperance are a lady’s most valuable assets. And you do want to be a lady, Maisie, I know.

He had me there. I very much wanted to be a lady. To be a lady, I imagined, meant welcoming visitors, making trips into the nearby village of Coeurs Crossing, perhaps being courted by gentlemen.

Now Maisie, Peter would say, finally, come forward. Dip the tip of your littlest left finger . . . no, my dear, your other left, into the very top of the . . . shallow, very shallow, just a . . . no, no, a lighter touch, a light one, and pull up, up, quickly up, and come and blot against this . . . no, darling, not the paper but the . . . there you are, the towel. Yes. Good.

I’d close the rest of my hand to a fist and stretch out that little finger, inhaling citrus that would not be wiped away. My tongue might dart out, I might lean forward, and Peter would make the sort of sound one makes to a young child, not a true word but an escalating, disapproving vowel. I’d sit back.

Has the color of the sample changed, my dear?

Most often it had not.

Do you feel a slight sensation in your fingertip?

Never.

The rest of your body feels well?

Very well, although once I had the hiccups and Peter spent a long while speculating on their cause.

These experiments were never ambitious. We could have tried to cure diseases, prevent species extinction, combat the injustice of the world. Instead, we practiced small, controlled behaviors, tests whose most unpleasant outcomes had little effect on all parties involved. Occasionally we would see something unexpected: a bit of polished wood would writhe, a seed would shake, try to take root. Peter would watch with wide eyes for a moment, then instruct me: Be a good girl, now, Maisie. Correct it. And I wanted to be a good girl, so I would.

THERE WAS NO way to correct what I’d done to my mother. This Peter had recognized at once. Beyond the matter of her body’s deterioration, which prevented any practical resurrection, her death had been public, headlining the news, putting our small county on the map. Reporters swarmed the hospital after my birth, stalking the doctor who’d delivered me. Religious fanatics declared a second coming, of precisely what they were not certain, but they knew I was divine. Candlelight vigils were held. Sainthood proposed. My admirers wrote numerous notes, all intercepted by Peter. As the years passed, my story would appear in public life in passing, a question of how the baby born from death had fared with chicken pox, how her math skills were progressing, whether she could speak in tongues. They did not know where I’d gone off to, but most respected the decision to hide me. They did not connect the pseudonymous researcher’s bizarre account of his young case study’s skin condition to that sweet, blanketed babe.

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 her 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