Chapter 1 #2
But Cybil’s father did not believe it was an accident.
He believed it was magic. Not the wild, uncontrolled power of a curse—of course not; to admit as much would be admitting defeat—but perchance something more useful.
Perchance Cybil did have the powers he and his forefathers laid claim to: not doomed and uncontrollable, but the sort that could be honed and applied—the stuff of miracles, the blessings of a saint.
So, for one extraordinary year, Christopher Harding had cared for his daughter.
He had permitted her to read from the grimoire.
He provided her incantations and elixirs, and showed her strange dances to do around ritual circles, teaching her an alphabet of angel letters that squirmed upon the page like leeches.
Then he had taken her to the gardens, standing her before the apple trees in the orchard.
‘Break the bough, Cybil,’ he would say, watching her with wads of parchment notes crumpled in his fists. ‘Break the bough.’
But nothing ever occurred. When Cybil saw the darkness begin to surge beneath her feet like floodwaters swelling across a plain, when she felt the furious, hungry tug of those shadows reaching within her, eager to swallow her whole—Cybil had feared the power too much to allow it purchase.
She felt the burning of magic within her, and she made herself douse it.
The pain was too much, as if a wound deep within her were being opened anew—and even more so, the possibility was too much, the sense that if she gave the darkness what it wanted, she would set the world itself aflame.
She closed her eyes and pulled her light within her until it was smothered.
She was not a saint—she was a First Daughter.
Cybil had seen the grimoire, and she knew the legacy she carried.
Cybil felt the hunger of the shadows; she heard the voices in the dark.
Her father may have believed the curse was gone, but Cybil knew that he was wrong.
Once it was clear his daughter had no talent for magic—or, at least, none that she could control—Christopher ignored her once more.
No more local lords sent their sons for courting.
Cybil told herself she did not mind. She had never liked the manner in which young men observed her, as if she were ripe fruit on the turn, as if they wanted to both eat her and throw her away to rot.
Better for her to be alone, surrounded by her books and her mother’s love, without any distractions within the walls of Harding Hall.
That winter, the winter of her fourteenth year, Cybil’s mother bought her a marchpane-and-jam dollhouse for her birthday.
It was a reproduction of the Hall: a perfect confection of quince-paste brick, blown-sugar windows, oozing black-red raspberries from its foundations and almond-studded roof.
There was even the orchard in miniature, the marchpane trees growing comfits for leaves and fruit: sugar-glazed seeds of fennel and caraway, stained red and orange with beet and turmeric.
Cybil did not like sweet things; she never had.
Bess continued to hope she would, for loving sugar was that most basic of childhood traits, a last hope of Cybil’s normalcy.
So, she pretended to like it, pretended she would eat it later, but then she brought the entire thing down to the servants in the hopes it might make them like her better.
It turned out the jam was tainted. Many fell sick, and one man died—Cybil would never forget his limp face, the manner in which his body had spasmed. ‘Terrible,’ Bess had said, pale and weeping. Christopher Harding examined the corpse before returning to his study, silent.
The servants had been wary before, but now they were frightened.
Although Cybil had never been close with them—she was a lady, it would not have been right—these were among the few faces who were familiar: Mrs Verney, the ruddy three-toothed laundress with a cloud of grey hair, who on occasion had taken pity on her, and listened to her play the virginal; Mr Stapleton, the gardener, who hummed tunes as he trimmed the hedges; even Jane Lennard, a young housemaid the same age as Cybil, who had once smiled at her and complimented her hair.
All of them now blanched to see her, turning away after stuttered bows to busy themselves with chores.
Jane did not smile at her anymore. Once, she dropped a glass in the same room as Cybil, and apologised so profusely, so fearfully, that she began to cry and had to flee to another room.
Afterwards, Cybil went to her mother.
‘She despises me,’ Cybil said to her. ‘Mother, Jane despises me. What should I do?’
Bess’s face collapsed in sympathy and regret.
‘My dove,’ she replied, ‘there is nothing to be done. There is a Great Chain of Being that determines how each of us is born and lives and dies. Jane stands below us on the chain; your father stands higher. We must not worry ourselves with those who live on a different link than ours.’
‘What if I wish not to be chained?’ Cybil asked.
‘You must be,’ Bess said.
And Cybil imagined this chain, the Great Chain of Being, wrapping tighter and tighter around her, until her flesh was bruised and she could not breathe.
When Cybil was fourteen, Bess became pregnant once more.
A miracle at her age, past forty, with no sign of another child since Cybil.
Every morning, the two of them prayed at their private chapel, and every night, Cybil washed her mother’s swollen feet and rubbed soothing tinctures into her shoulders, then pressed her ear to Bess’s belly to hear the baby move.
‘Your little brother,’ Bess told her. ‘I cannot wait for you to meet him, my dove.’
Cybil told herself, He will be perfect. We will be happy.
He was born a week before Cybil’s fifteenth birthday. He was born silent and unbreathing, with an extra finger on both hands, and gold-brown eyes the same colour as Cybil’s own.
The last time Bess Harding ever left the Hall was to stand over her son’s grave as he was buried.
After that, she became a different woman.
Whenever she tried to pass the threshold, she trembled in fear and turned back.
She stopped brushing Cybil’s hair, stopped reading to her.
She began to have screaming nightmares and fits of terrible, overwhelming grief.
After one night when she went to the roof and stood on its edge, Cybil’s father had had enough.
He brewed a tincture of mandrake and forced it down his wife’s throat.
Cybil would never forget the manner in which her mother’s eyes had gone matt and dark the moment the tincture hit her stomach, a beatific smile spreading across her face.
Bess soon started taking mandrake every day, and Cybil—alongside everything else—was forgotten.
Cybil soon grew accustomed to solitude: her own link on the Chain, iron, unmoving.
Each morning, she checked the accounts for her father and brought her mother her mandrake and pottage.
Upon her own initiative, Cybil siphoned funds to purchase more books, taught herself Greek and Latin and the basics of mathematics.
She even arranged for singing lessons with a music master who was too intimidated by her to tell her she was awful at it.
She knew she was awful—she had ears—and sometimes she sang badly on purpose, to see if he would complain, if someone, anyone would be honest with her.
But still, he never did. And after their lessons were done, she would return to her mother’s room to play her the virginal.
Sometimes, Bess would even smile when the song was finished.
But on the worst days, the days when her mother refused to even wake up, Cybil could feel the burning again.
She would feel a grief that was as much anger as sadness, and as she swallowed her tears and her fury, she could sometimes see a curious light that leaked out of the tips of her fingers and the corners of her eyes.
And around her, the darkness would deepen in response, just as the sun at noon casts the starkest shadows: her light made it stronger.
The shadows would follow her, form strange shapes on the walls, mime curious plays of grinning devils and screaming women.
They would stretch out their hands to her, and, in a trance, Cybil would follow.
They would lead her to the orchard, to the stillness of the Suffolk night.
Break the bough, Cybil, they would whisper to her. Break the bough. A familiar pain, bright and searing, would build—until Cybil broke from her trance, and realised where she was. She would close her eyes and tell herself, Enough, enough, douse the flame, enough.
And so, the bough never broke, except just once: on the evening of her eighteenth birthday.
On that day, Cybil stood there for hours in the silence and the rain, and she realised that she had not seen her father for ten days; that her mother had said nothing to her for just as long; and, with a sudden shriek of anger, she lunged at a tree and tugged and clawed and strained until a branch came away in her hands.
The next week, her singing master tried to kiss her.
She pushed him away, screaming curses at him.
As he scrambled away, he slipped at the top of the stairs and cracked his skull open.
The corpse skidded halfway down and laid there sprawled out, feet pointing to the sky.
She stood there for too long, watching the blood drip down, down the lower steps, looking into his vacant eyes.
Cybil went to her father to tell him what had happened.
Christopher Harding’s response was to instruct her—while he was elbow deep in a bowl of powdered antimony—to return the next day, he was busy now, Cybil, couldn’t she see he was busy?
But it didn’t matter in the end; when she returned to the staircase, the body was gone.
All that remained was a flickering shadow in the shape of a dead man, twisting its head to look at her and raising its hand to wave.
She received a letter from the singing master’s family the next week: he had gone missing on the way back from their last lesson. They knew bandits frequented the path—would the Hardings, in their wisdom and mercy, be willing to make a donation to aid the search?
Cybil made the donation, but there was little doubt after that.
Her father’s ritual hadn’t worked; Cybil was a First Daughter, and Cybil was cursed.
The realisation didn’t change anything, of course.
The seasons continued to turn, and Harding Hall—as eternal and stoic as a Saxon rune stone—remained silent upon its hill.
Cybil was alone.
Cybil would always be alone.