27. November 16, 1817 Lancaut, England
It happened so suddenly that Beatrix knew it must have happened slowly.
Too slowly to notice, to cause alarm, to repair the damage, until the day it threatened to sink her. A single detail she should have known—has always known—until she no longer did.
She has forgotten the door to St. James’s.
She can’t be certain of the shape of it, the shade of it, how it sounds when it opens.
The scent of that first breath of stale air and stone.
She assured herself she did remember it, that she could close her eyes and feel the wood beneath her palm.
But doubt crept in. Was it St. James’s she remembered or St. Paul’s?
The old farmer’s cart rattles beneath her, up a narrow, rutted dirt track.
Her heart thuds against her ribs, drums a warning, but she had to come back.
She has to remember. The sounds of the forest instead of the city.
The Wye, carving its path through the white cliffs.
The color of the sky over the trees as the sun dips below the horizon.
She breathes in the scents of the countryside: woodsmoke and crisp air and moss growing among oaks.
Sweet and earthy, and nothing at all like the stench of London alleys.
The cart slows to a stop. The farmer gestures toward the scatter of cottages silhouetted on the horizon. “Lancaut.”
At this distance, in this dying light, it looks exactly like it did on the day she fled. An illusion. Time cannot have been so kind to it.
Beatrix slides off the back of the cart, brushes the straw and dust from her wool skirt. She reaches into her pocket and pays the old farmer a few pennies for his trouble.
“Sun’s settin’ soon. You’ll want to hurry,” he says.
“Of course,” Beatrix replies with a dip of her head.
He gives her one last appraising look before urging his mules forward.
She watches the cart disappear and thinks of her mother for the first time in decades.
She used to tell Beatrix a lady never hurried.
To which Beatrix would reply that she was no lady, usually while dashing out the door.
Still, she doesn’t hurry to Lancaut now.
Not because her mother’s lessons have finally taken hold, but because after so long away, it’s like walking through a dream: hazy and unreal.
At first, it was her daughter that kept her away, a desperate need to protect her, even from afar.
She stayed away through her childhood, stayed away when she was grown enough to marry and have her own children, stayed away even when she would have been old and gray.
Until she would have been gone. Then it was the whispers that kept her away, the fear that stories survive longer than people, stories of changelings and faeries and cursed girls with uncanny, mismatched eyes.
But it is fear that has kept her away the longest, fear that always won out whenever she considered coming back. Fear that she has been away for so long there would be nothing left for her to come back to.
It would have been easier to forget, to let her memories of Lancaut decay into some blurred imagining: a Lancaut reflected back at her in a puddle or a watercolor painting to be admired from a distance. But she needs to remember. She needs to have something the faerie hasn’t stolen from her.
The mirage of a village unchanged by time melts away as Beatrix draws closer, passes sagging roofs and crumbling walls and gardens grown wild. A handful of stubborn cottages stand amid the disrepair, refusing to accept their reality: Lancaut is dying. A slow, withering death.
Beatrix follows the lane to the edge of the forest. It has crept closer, reclaimed the dirt track, inch by inch.
Trees spring from the earth where her cottage once stood, casting shadows over a garden overgrown by choking vines and creeping moss.
She gazes up at the canopy of leaves sprawling over her head where a thatched roof once was.
She places a hand against the trunk of an oak, rough and solid beneath her palm, and she can almost picture William grinning down at her from the crook of its branches.
How could she have been so naive, to hope she would find anything else here? Had she forgotten what time is capable of, how everything vanishes under the weight of it? Mountains and cities and bones all turned to dust.
She turns her back on her lost home and heads down the track. She wonders how long it will take the forest to reclaim the village when there is no one left in Lancaut to walk its pathways.
St. James’s Church still stands sentry over the Wye. Beatrix takes in its single arched door, the oak wood cross displayed proudly in the yard. She can almost pretend she’s back in her village, back in her old life, if she doesn’t let her gaze drift to the cemetery behind it.
The headstones have changed. There are more of them: graves of people she knew and loved, and those she never met at all. Her parents are there. So are Isabella and Alice and their families. William. Their daughter.
The door is unimportant now, the cemetery the only thing that matters. She needs to know exactly how long she has been without them. She needs to see their names in stone.
Beatrix’s epitaph is fading. She traces along the shallow indentations with the tips of her fingers, as if she were learning the shape of her name for the first time.
But this is different from the inn on the Thames, where she struggled through letters and sounds. This is her name. This is her grave.
It’s strange to read William’s name carved beneath hers.
She thought he would have married again, would have buried their past and built a new life.
Stranger still to read that word, died. But it’s the other inscription—clear and bold, as if it has escaped the flow of time—that sends her heart plummeting to her guts.
Amor vincit omnia.
Love conquers all. William spoke those words to her the day they were married at this church. She spoke them to him the night she died, begging him to listen to her, even if he couldn’t understand. He carved them into her ring. Into their headstone.
Her hands tremble with the anger pulsing through her. She clenches them into fists, laughs so she doesn’t scream. Is she finally going mad? Her love had conquered death. Her love brought her back to him. And he turned his back on her.
She wonders if it is illegal to desecrate your own grave.
She should have let time take Lancaut from her. Maybe, if she is lucky, it will take William from her next, slowly unravel her past until she forgets she ever had this life.
Beatrix turns from her grave, and her gaze snags on the name carved into the stone across from hers. Her name, but not. She sinks to her knees, claws the leaves from the earth around the marker. She needs to read every letter etched into it, every word. Her heart hammers against her ribs.
BEATRIX GRACE BECKETT
Born Woodward, June 13, 1505
Died February 16, 1584
He named their daughter after her.
Tears spring to Beatrix’s eyes. Her heart swells and shatters, like it did the first—the only—time she heard her daughter’s cry. She lived a long life. Beatrix hopes, with every fiber of her being, that it was a happy one. The happiest one.
She brushes the moss from the stone. She wishes she had come in summer, that she could gather flowers to leave, some proof she has been here. But the earth is barren, waiting to wake.
The other graves in the row bear the name Beckett, too.
Her daughter’s children, maybe, or grandchildren or beyond.
She wanders through the stones, wonders who these dead are to her.
She reaches the low wall and stops at the place she stood with William on their wedding day.
The last light of day dances across the river’s surface far below her.
She had come back to remember. As if she could ever forget.
She is Beatrix Atwood of the village of Lancaut.
She was born in 1481.
Everyone she has ever known is gone. Everyone she has ever loved is dead. But she is still here, still twenty-three, still Beatrix. She will exist forever and always, and not at all.