Chapter 2 #2
‘You believe that will save us? Considering what you have done?’ Gilbert laughed, coldly and cruelly.
He glanced quickly to Cybil, and that glance was an indictment: there was a First Daughter sitting at the table, and he was clearly no more convinced of her father’s ‘cure’ than she was.
‘Among the first imprisoned for witchcraft in England was a duchess. Merely two years ago, an earl in Scotland was convicted.’
‘We are not witches, brother. Our family carries a heavenly gift.’
‘That has always been your opinion, but that does not mean it is that of others. You have been living in denial for so long, you refuse to see the danger within your very home.’ Gilbert did not look again at Cybil; he did not need to.
His steepled fingers rippled back and forth in vexation.
‘If you had done what I had suggested, we might not be in this position. The curse—’
‘Not here,’ Christopher barked, and stood up from the table. ‘Come. We will speak in private.’
Cybil rose, also. ‘But—’
‘No,’ her father told her, voice thunderous. ‘Sit down, girl, and be thankful your insolence has for so long gone unpunished.’
She sat back down.
Her uncle followed Christopher out of the room.
Bess watched them quit the dining hall without comment, then looked back to Cybil. The white paint she had applied to her face, combined with the ashen colour of her hair, made her mother look skeletal and sickly.
Cybil said, ‘What does Gilbert suggest Father do? Why has he never before come to Harding Hall?’
There was a glimmer of something in her mother’s expression—was it fear?—and she said, ‘I must rest, Cybil.’
‘It is only just past sundown,’ Cybil replied. ‘Mother, I beg of you. He mentioned the curse. Surely he is referring to me?’
Bess shook her head and laid a bone-coloured hand across her chest. ‘I am very tired,’ she murmured, voice nearly too faint to hear. ‘I will go to bed.’
Bess stood up, then paused.
‘Your father cares for us, Cybil,’ she said in quiet resignation, her head bowing. ‘In his own manner. We are women, and thus we cannot know the burdens of such a man. But we might support him as he carries them himself.’
‘You believe love is submission,’ Cybil replied. ‘If that is so, then how can he ever love you back?’
Bess did not reply. Instead, she turned, head held high, and left the room. Cybil watched her go without protest; it would be futile to press her any further. It was already the longest conversation they had shared in years.
Once she was certain her mother had reached her rooms, Cybil left the dining hall and ascended the main steps.
She had climbed this staircase so many times; she had seen a man die here.
She knew with great familiarity the echo of her steps upon the marble, the smooth chill of the oak balustrades beneath her hands.
The walls of the upstairs corridors were painted blue to resemble the sky, an illusion broken by numerous portraits and tapestries that floated in mismatched scatterings of faces, frames, and fabrics.
These portraits, shrouded in the gloom, regarded Cybil with detachment and dismissal, their pale skin and gold eyes mockeries of her own.
A servant had lit the lamps, casting formless patterns of shadow and light across the floor.
There was a suit of armour on display at the top of the steps, worn by an ancestor at Bosworth, its helmet plumed with green feathers, its breastplate showing the three-headed hawk in gold.
As Cybil reached it, the suit’s shadow shuddered, then moved: pointing right, towards Christopher’s study.
Cybil took an instinctive step back. ‘That way?’
The shadow pointed again, more insistent.
She was wary, but she did as she was bid.
Instead of returning to her chambers, she stopped outside her father’s study.
The door was closed—it was always closed—but she could hear voices within.
The wood of the door was carved with angel markings, the strange, spiralled letters her father used in his rituals.
Cybil ignored these, pressing her ear against the door to listen.
‘… had listened,’ Gilbert was saying.
‘It was not an option. I lifted the curse.’
‘You truly believe that? Christopher, you must see sense. Every time there has been a First Daughter, the house has seen terrible consequences. The last time—’
‘That was centuries ago.’
‘We nearly went extinct. The pestilence took all but the very woman who had caused their deaths.’
‘All England suffered then.’
‘And who is to say she did not cause their suffering, too? Our father told us the stories, how shadows followed her and suffering came in their wake.’ Gilbert sighed, loudly enough Cybil could hear it through the door.
‘I reminded you when she was born what was necessary, and you had not the strength to do it. No—you had not the humility. You were so convinced you could resolve it in another manner.’
‘I did what I could.’
‘You know your measures did not work. If all is well, then why is Cybil not at Court? Why is she not betrothed? It is known that Christopher Harding has a daughter—who, I remind you, is heir to this estate—’
‘The queen’s law prioritises children over siblings, Gilbert. You know that as well as I. If she has no children, your son will inherit—’
‘God’s teeth, Christopher,’ Gilbert spat.
‘That is not the issue. You have kept her here her entire life. Of course there are suspicions. People say she must be mad, or diseased. And we both know why she cannot be seen. Now is the time to admit—to yourself, to me, to her—that you did not save her. That you did not save us.’
There was a long moment of silence. Cybil heard her own heartbeat, loud and insistent as a war drum.
‘You think I know not my own folly?’ Christopher said.
He sounded defeated. ‘After all these years? You think I do not look at her, every day, and know that I failed? She is a shade, a shell. She has been since she was a child. The shadows follow her, and her magic manifests only in cruelty. I will always remember… when she was six, she fell into a bramble patch, and her legs were covered in scratches. But still, she did not cry. She just stared at the wounds as the blood dripped onto the ground. And where that blood pooled at her feet, days later, I found a sprig of deadly nightshade—grown from the soil as if it had been there for months.’
Gilbert muttered an oath.
Cybil’s father continued. ‘I tried to fix her, to transmute her into something purer, but it did not work. I accept, now, that it has not worked. I accept that God has forsaken our family, and we are cursed as you say. And so, I must turn to other solutions.’
‘Other solutions?’
‘Yes.’
Gilbert’s horror was hushed, the words only barely audible. ‘You cannot mean…’
‘I am using a greater quantity of henbane, and more repetitions of the incantations; it is certain to work.’
‘When?’ Gilbert asked.
Cybil had never heard such determination in her father’s voice. ‘Next week. The equinox.’
‘I will have returned to Court by then.’
‘I know.’
‘It is ill-advised,’ came Gilbert’s answer, his tone sceptical. ‘It has been largely accepted such a summoning would require too dear a price.’
‘Too dear for some, certainly. But I will pay it. I have no choice.’
‘The girl—’
‘If this attempt fails,’ Christopher said, ‘then I shall do what must be done.’
Cybil bit her lip so savagely it bled. Her hand pressed more firmly against the door, the tips of her fingers whitening. The grooves of the angel markings dug furrows into the skin of her palm.
Christopher continued. ‘To end the curse, I must become greater than my forefathers, greater than all those who lay claim to magic. I require assistance. The only path to surpassing Faust…’
Cybil stepped back from the door. There was something hot and furious burning in her chest; it grew brighter and brighter, as if she could bring the walls of Harding Hall down with the heat of her anger, and beneath her feet, darkness gathered, the candles on the wall beside her flickering.
I shall do what must be done.
She imagined her father within the study, stooped over his ritual circle—regretting Cybil’s birth, regretting her life, regretting he had not killed her while she was too young to fight back.
In an instant, she saw all the little cruelties she had endured beneath him: the callousness and dismissal; the disappointment and anger; staring at the tree as he screamed; watching him pour mandrake down her mother’s throat.
Cybil imagined sending the shadow of the suit of armour into that room, commanding it to swallow him whole, to break his neck, to suck the life from him like marrow from a bone.
She felt the fire within her intensify—it was painful; it was glorious, burning and sharp and alive.
It was almost wonderful enough to bear. Almost.
Desperate, fearful, Cybil reached for the shards of her self-control.
She breathed a deep, shuddering breath. She told herself, Enough, Cybil, enough.
She took that ember of fury in her fist and encased it in ice, layer upon layer of it, making it colder and colder and harder and harder, until her anger was dimmed and the shadows had retreated.
She turned around and walked in a measured pace back to her rooms. At the basin, she scrubbed the paint from her face.
The shadow at which she had thrown her cochineal had returned; it had taken a form to mimic the shape of the lady on the tapestry, albeit with a neck long enough to curve like a snake.
It watched her as she wiped the water away.
‘You wished to warn me,’ she said to it. ‘You wished me to know what my father was planning.’
The shadow did not react.
Cybil went to the window. Breathing on the glass, she began to draw a symbol in the fog with the tip of her finger, thinking of her father saying, I shall do what must be done.
‘Ah, Greensleeves, now farewell, adieu,’ she sang again, not minding that her voice was not beautiful, that it was as distorted as the shadows on the wall. ‘To God I pray to prosper thee; for I am still thy lover true…’
She finished the drawing on the window: it was a noose around her own neck.
Cybil’s finger dropped. ‘Come once again and love me.’