Page 16 of As Many Souls as Stars
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Cybil found Charmeuse nearby, trembling at the storm, eyes rolling wildly with confusion; she had to lead her back by the reins, knowing that if she tried to mount her, the horse was likely to bolt.
At Harding Hall, Cybil went to her bedchamber and undressed, shucking her silks and pearls from her body, discarding them on the ground like peeled potato skins. Then she changed into her nightshift and wandered the Hall: attempting to take comfort, perchance, in its familiarity. But this night, the corridors and yawning windows of her childhood seemed cruel, not kind. In the Long Gallery, eight enormous windows greeted partly faded tapestries with a starlit gloom—the faces of Troilus and Criseyde changed from lovers to ghouls, grinning at each other with drooping woollen mouths. The windows looked out onto the gardens. Cybil peered into the dark at the empty aviary, its gates open and shuddering in the wind.
When Cybil had been small, she and her mother had often visited the aviary to see the brightly coloured birds her grandparents had purchased from abroad. Bess had even talked of purchasing a peacock from the East Indies, a bird she had described to a delighted younger Cybil as a mythical beast: a purple swan with a fan of eyes, the emperor of all creatures, God’s own hand upon the earth. But then Bess had become unwell, and the peacock was abandoned, and Cybil’s father had emptied the aviary of its songbirds to use them in his rituals.
She went to the aviary now, clutching a lantern. Behind the bars of the half-open gate, there was only darkness, the stink of rottingrushes and stagnant water. Then there was a flutter—a movement—and Cybil thought there might have been a bird within, after all. Then a great rush of shadows burst out, a half-shapeless mass of wings and whispering voices she could not understand. Cybil cowered, covering her head with her arms, dropping her lantern to the ground. The light went out. She waited there until she was certain the shadows were gone, and then, gasping and half blind, she stumbled back into the Hall.
Cybil went to bed. In her dreams, there was a woman reaching out to her. She had uncertain features, a shadow of a shadow—Cybil reached out to take her hand, but she could never quite stretch far enough, could never quite grasp it.
‘For I am now thy lover true,’ the woman sang, and her voice echoed in a chorus: ‘Come once again and love me.’
Cybil woke up bathed in sweat, lying on top of the covers. The dawn sun laid a gentle hand over her thighs. She turned her head toward the window to find that she had left the curtains open. A crow was sat on the sill outside, staring at her through the glass.
She stood. The crow flew away.
Unnerved, Cybil splashed her face in the basin, then scrubbed the rest of herself with cold water until she felt new and raw. Once she was dressed, she ventured into the Hall.
Cybil went to Bess’s door. Knocking, she called, ‘Mother?’ quite gently, and then more loudly when there was no response.
There was only silence. ‘Mother,’ Cybil repeated, ‘will you not come to the dining hall for breakfast?’
After a long pause, Bess replied, with a reedy, thin voice, hardly audible through the door, ‘I am tired, Cybil.’
‘Then I shall bring you your bowl as always.’
No response came.
Cybil stepped away. Something swelled in her throat, something aching and bitter. She swallowed it down.
She ate in solitude at the dining table, with only the great portrait hung above the table for companionship. It depicted an ancestral Sir Harding who had led armies at Bosworth. Cybil imagined himemerging from the painting and sitting across the table from her, and then she imagined him another man entirely: a vague visage of curling hair and dark eyes, who called her ‘dear wife’ and danced with her at Court. Cybil took a curious delight in this image. She had never much considered marriage before, but then she had never met such a man as she pictured now, so different from her father or the gardener or the villagers. She knew little of Court, save that it was grand and rich and full of people; that they had extraordinary feasts and pageants and hunts. Mayhap it had been a lie, but Bess had once told her that the queen had called for a tiger all the way from Cathay, and had it released near her lodge so that she could hunt it down. Cybil imagined now riding beside all the ladies of the Court, the wind whipping through her hair; the freedom of it and the joy, hearing the tiger roar in the distance and knowing that such a beast could be conquered. She and her husband would peel away from the others, find a clearing somewhere, and speak words of love beneath the sun. He would take her in his arms and press his mouth to her neck.I want you, he would say.I have wanted you from the moment I first saw you—
Cybil pushed the image from her mind, horrified. She finished her breakfast, stomach churning, and then made her way to the study.
She always prepared her mother’s pottage herself, and served her, also—the mandrake tincture was too dangerous to leave in the hands of a servant. On occasion, she found that Jane or another housemaid had attempted to bring Bess food on their own initiative. Cybil would reprimand them until she was certain they would not do so again, despite her guilt at the fear upon their faces. They did not understand—to give Bess food without the tincture, to cut off her supply that immediately, was very likely to kill her. Her father had made that clear enough to Cybil each time she had asked him to stop drugging Bess; and she believed it, seeing how sick Bess had become whenever doses were delayed.
Since Christopher had died, Cybil had been using the tincture he had left behind. Each time she added it to the food, she lessened the dosage, just enough that her mother might not notice the change. Eventually, she might wean her off it entirely, bring Bessback to sanity, and thus make her dreams of leaving for Court a reality.
Apart from Cybil’s occasional visits, the study had remained untouched since Christopher’s death. The books on his shelves were beautiful: all gilt pages and tooled-leather bindings. Before, Cybil had not been permitted to look at them, but there was no one to stop her now. She had time before her mother required feeding, so she idly flipped through instructions on alchemy, how to call on angels and summon demons. Circles of salt, pacts of blood. Cybil had attempted some of these rituals before, but they had always failed. The shadows had gathered, that burning pain had begun, and she had been too cowardly to continue.
Cybil retrieved the family grimoire from a locked drawer of the desk. It was bound in black leather, the cover embossed with the omnipresent Harding three-headed hawk. Early pages were written in a curious, primitive form of English, almost impossible for her to parse, all vowels and unfamiliar letters—but some passages had more modern translations scribbled in the margins or pasted in on additional scraps of parchment. One page was particularly well thumbed. It had a translation pasted beside it in her father’s handwriting.
If the first seed is that of Eve, ruin shall take root, the translation read.The branches of the House of Harding shall wither and fall.Let not her grow,lest the Inheritance be corrupted by her weakness, and that corruption spread—
Cybil snapped the grimoire shut. She put it back in the drawer, fingers white with the force of her grip, and she went instead to the alchemy cupboard to retrieve her mother’s tincture. Unlocking the doors with a key she kept chained around her waist, she held her breath instinctively as the glass vials greeted her—even stoppered, the stink of them was acrid, somehow malevolent.
The vial of mandrake tincture was almost empty. Cybil lifted it to the half-light coming through the curtains to inspect it, chewing her lip. She could brew more herself—her father’s instructions were in the grimoire, and she had seen them a handful of times: low heat applied to water that has reflected the full moon, the mandrake carved withangel letters and sliced lengthwise. She could not bring herself to do magic, but such potions did not require the gift.
The issue would be retrieving more mandrake in the first place. It was an expensive ingredient because it was difficult to handle; the story went that the root screamed when it was pulled from the ground and killed those who heard it. Cybil knew that her father had sourced it from an apothecary in Ipswich, but she had neglected to make an order after his death. She was furious with herself for that now.
To Ipswich, then. Why not? It was hardly as if she had much else to do. She would give her mother her pottage and then take Charmeuse to town. It was barely an hour’s ride, if that. Her father was not there to forbid it; the servants were not brave enough to call out the impropriety. Cybil could do what she wanted.
That realisation was enough, for a brief moment, to make her smile.
It was a cold day. Cybil wore her silver riding habit lined with white fur, sleeves puffed so wide they resembled pauldrons, her red hair pinned up and tucked into a feathered black cap. She did not whiten her face—the cold would freeze the paint, make it flake away. But she reddened her lips, and dripped belladonna into her eyes, and she told herself she looked the picture of a respectable lady. She told herself no one would see any darkness where they should not.
She took the path through the woods. The earth was wet and spongy, carpeted with decaying leaves, beneath Charmeuse’s thundering hooves. The sun leaked watery beams of gold light through the gaps in the clouds. There was an autumnal rot in the air, and an owl hooted softly from overhead. Every autumn Cybil had ever lived had looked and sounded and smelt exactly as this one did, and for a moment, she wondered if her encounter with Richter the previous night had simply been another nightmare. Cybil had never seen the woman before, even though everyone knew everyone in the village, and the forest then had seemed hostile and alien; a different place entirely from this familiar wood, with its burnished trees and dappled sunshine.
