Chapter Text
Jezabel
Morning has returned to the forest. The sheep have begun to stir in their pens, and so I release them into the pasture, running a hand along the oily wool of a Devon Closewool. Soon they'll want for a shearing. How strange that time continues on, unencumbered by its own weight.
As I survey my little flock, idly scratching the ear of a dog rescued from the vivisection table, I wonder if anyone from the Anti-Vivisection Society is stopping by today. The Brown Dog affair has stirred up the country, and perhaps public opinion can be swayed in favor of a ban on vivisection. Given that the affair has divided the abolitionists and medical students, I thought it prudent to offer my own opinion, as a medical professional, and promptly sent copies of my opinion to five separate papers. (I did not, of course, mention that I am not opposed to the practice in the least on people.)
Rubber against the gravel of the drive announces Mary's arrival. She hops off her bicycle, unencumbered by her long skirts, her hair still girlishly unbound, even as societal standards dictate that, as an adult, she ought to wear her hair up. A little shriek announces that Florie has spotted her mother from her place near the fence: she races to her mother, having arrived earlier with her nurse, who has grown quite frustrated with keeping track of a child keen on petting all the animals. Mary spins her daughter around, holding her close. Shrieks of joy and laughter fill the air.
Breathless but smiling, Mary turns to me. "How's Noah's arc?" She surveys my form briefly, checking if my physical state has worsened. It never got better, but I became accustomed to my new weakness.
"We haven't two of every animal."
"Not yet," she corrects, smoothing Florie's ginger hair. "Give it time." She casts a quick glance over the animals, searching for her brother, and for a moment, worry lines her face. I suppose she'll always have a twinge of fear that her brother will never come back.
"Cain's in the garden," I answer.
"Has he brought—"
"Of course. He can hardly be parted from it."
"What?" Florie interrupts. "What did uncle Cain bring?"
"Not what," Mary replies, scooping her up. "Who. Did you forget already?"
Balancing Florie on her hip, Mary makes her way back to the garden, making idle comments on what I should consider naming the latest rescue (Gabriel if a boy, Alice if a girl), what I ought to do with the surplus wool (give to her so that she can knit a sweater for Basil the goat, he always seems so cold), and have I seen the papers? Yes, I've read that they've taken down the tribute in Battersea to the poor terrier that died on the vivisection table. A horrid thing to do.
Her chatter, meant more to establish the presence of comradery than actual conversation, ceases when she spots Cain. Her gaze falls to the infant next to him. Gripping his father's still slender, still pale finger, the child toddles in the grass, raising his foot absurdly high before letting it fall, as if he is a prancing horse. The sunlight catches in his dark hair—his Hargreaves hair, I cannot help but bitterly notice, as if family can be distilled into a few repeating characteristics. A hair color, an eye color, the shape of one's jaw.
And in those moments, I am acutely aware of the unseen scars on my back. The scars that do not fade.
"Oscar's been giving me parenting advice," Cain says wryly. "I told him I'd rather ask Jezabel's sheep."
Mary snorts. "Oscar wouldn't know children from sheep anyhow."
Florie picks her way through the flowers, folding aside daisies and larkspur, to Cain's son. "What's her name?" she asks, clasping her arms behind her back.
"His," Cain corrects gently.
Florie frowns. "But he's got a dress on."
"Florie," Mary begins. "He's too young to be breeched yet."
'What does that mean, mama?"
"That means that he can't wear trousers yet."
The child stomps along in the grass, before falling. One of the newborn lambs wander over to him; with a shriek, he extends a chubby outstretched hand, dimples along his knuckles. I don't want him to hurt the lamb, and I intervene, undoing his feeble grip on the lamb's coat.
A strange hush descends, as if Cain and Mary are suddenly afraid I will dash out the child's brains in a fit, but nothing of the sort occurs. For all her friendliness towards me, Mary has never left Florie alone in my presence, and I doubt Cain will leave his son to my care either. Old habits seldom die.
"You can pet the lamb," I tell the child, who stares at me with Suzette's—with Augusta's—large blue eyes. "But be gentle with her." Taking the warm hand, I run it over lamb's coat a few times. "Like that. Don't grab."
Ever seeking the spotlight, Florie joins in, petting the lamb as well. "Like this," she admonishes the infant, before glancing at me for approval, suddenly hesitant.
Cain's son watches me, gurgling a little, tilting his head, before snatching at the frame of my glasses, partially yanking them off. The world goes blurry, as Mary untangles us. When the world has returned to its regular state, Cain has placed his son on his lap, rubbing his little shoulders.
"That was a naughty thing to do," he says lightly, although his admonition does not darken the smile on his lips. A warmth soften his eyes, and a fleeting moment of jealousy burns in me.
Florie turns to me, eyeing me mischievously, swaying from side to side. "I'm bored," she whines. "I want a story."
"What sort of story?" Cain asks, still not taking his eyes off his child. I hope he's not seriously hoping to tell his misadventures of cross-dressing to a five-year-old.
Florie pauses. "Tell me about when you were a girl," she says to me, brightly.
This takes me aback. "A girl?"
"Florie," Mary begins again, patiently. "Your uncle is a boy."
Florie turns to her mother. "But you said, when he was very small, he wore dresses. That makes him a girl."
I sense that I'll have to explain things when she's older. "I'm very much a boy," I say, "but I'll tell you that story when you're older."
"How old," Florie asks, with the air of childish bargaining, her hands on her hips. "I'm five and a half now."
"True," I concede, coughing a little. That seems to be a permanent part of my life now; I was correct about my lungs scarring. "Ask your mother."
Mary flashes me a concerned look, before settling on a sweet smile for Florie as she turns towards her, expectantly. "I'll let you know," Mary says.
Florie groans in frustration, stamping her foot. "Well, then, tell me another story. I'm so terribly bored."
"Does she remind you of anyone?" I ask Mary, with a grin.
Mary laughs a little. "I suppose it runs in the family."
Florie stares at me, clearly expecting her story. The task seems to have fallen to me. I'm not sure when I became the designated storyteller.
Reluctantly, I begin, fumbling for the remnants of a favorite childhood story. "Once, there was—"
"Properly," Florie interrupts, settling on the grass. Freckles dot her nose. "Like mama does. Once upon a time..."
I frown, annoyed at being corrected. "Once upon a time—" I try again, only to pause, suddenly unsure how to proceed. What was the beginning? Once upon a time, there was a boy who was born a ghost. Was Cain the beginning? Once upon a time, there was a little lamb. But it didn't begin with Snark, only ended. Once upon a time, there was a lonely boy made out of glass. This, as much as it pains me, didn't start with me. Once upon a time, there was a man who was not real. No, that's not still it. Riff was not the beginning. Once upon a time, there was a man who had a peach-pit for a heart, who was loved but loved no one. Is Father the beginning? Is it Augusta? Even as I fumble with the story, unable to find the starting point of it all, the lines come to me.
Once upon a time, there was a man, who was born a boy.
Yes. I'll begin there.
As I assemble the fragments I remember of Cassian's story, softening them for Florie, I wonder why I even bother to tell it. Stories are impermanent, after all. Some survive, but they change in doing so. The ordinary ones, the stories of the ordinary people who live and breathe and die and are forgotten within a few generations—they only fade with each successive generation. Years from now, Florie might tell her daughter about her two uncles and her parents, but who will tell her daughter's daughter? Or will she live out her life blissfully unaware of the curse that her blood has ended?
Cain will have his descendants, his Enoch and Irad, Mehujael, Methusael, Lamech, and a thousand more. And a hundred years from now, no one will remember how we came to be and feel and breathe. It is both a terrifying and reassuring thought, in that it means that life is both meaningless and meaningful. My bones will return to the soil, everything will return, and everything will be reborn ceaselessly. Life will continue, as it has, rushing towards an unknowable end.
And yet, looking at Cain's child, I am aware that there will be a future. The curse has ended, morning has come. The curse has ended, because I will it to do so. I will not continue it, nor will Cain, and perhaps that is the value of my life. To survive, we mutilate part of ourselves, but that part never dies, only aches, and it demands an accounting—to be seen and heard and felt. And perhaps, this is another way for that part to be heard: once upon a time, there was a lonely boy who lived in the forest. He thought he was happy, until his only friend died and he died, and he was reborn as a man with a heart as cold as glass. And that man was very foolish. Because he couldn't bear the present, he lived in the past and in his head—and those are two dangerous places to live.
And because he hurt so badly inside, he did wicked things to ease that pain. Because he felt powerful for the first time in his life, and power is such a tempting mistress. He killed people, because they were inconvenient, because they had the life he was exiled from, because he couldn't go back to the time when he was loved, and pain is better than nothing. Pain means something.
Then, he found out that he was loved, only not by the man he wanted such a love from. And he made the first mistake of his new life: he let the man go free, because freedom means something too. It meant that he was not sure if he had enough of pain, because the pain meant that the past had happened, and leaving the past meant leaving his only friend and his old self. But freedom also meant that a new path had emerged, impossible and untreaded, but still there, still inviting. And so, unable to decide, he kept himself from wondering if he had been wrong all these years, and if home was not in the arms of the man he could never please, not in a thousand years.
The cage door was open, but freedom meant loss. It always does. I pause in my thoughts. But did he come home? I'm still not sure if this is home, but it is a home.
And perhaps, that is enough.
"Did you know him?" Florie asks, thoughtfully propping her chin up with her hand. "The man who died, and God gave him the body of a dog."
I nod, my throat suddenly thick after all this time. I found his little, deflated body next to the sheep pen years and years ago. Shot soon after I tried to make the house less of a ghost, as the uneven blood trail and the matted, glistening wound indicated. He must have dragged himself back as his last act, to let me know what had happened, rather than let me agonize over the possibilities.
I don't recall much after that, only coming back to my house in a blind, sobbing rage, his body heavy in my arms again. The butler tried to reason with me, tried to pry the body from me for burial. I suppose I looked frightful, with blood and fur over my clothes. In the end, he succeeded only in draping the body in an old sheet and bundling me straight into bed. (I am beginning to suspect that that is his favorite remedy.) He immediately telephoned Cain that he needed to come over, as this was an emergency.
And Cain came.
That's the strange point of it all. Cain came on the next train, and lay next to me in the bed, threading his fingers through my hair. It wasn't that hurt diminished when he arrived, but that it became bearable. Anything, perhaps, is bearable with another. He didn't offer any false consolation, but just waited beside me as I fought the urge to destroy everything in sight. And I knew that he would never leave me, that he intended on keeping his word, and it was such a frightening feeling to know that I was not alone in the world again. That if Cain had made a family for himself, then I have done so as well, and life crept in, as it does. As it has. As it will do.
Cain lays a warm hand on my wrist. "He was a good man," he says quietly.
Was he?
I'm not naive. I know what he did for Delilah, the fresh bodies he brought to my laboratory. No doubt, he ruined more than one life, but he saved mine.
(And when he said goodbye for the last time, when he shed his body and, incorporeal, met me in the hallway, he hummed a little circus ditty to let me know he was going now. That's how I knew to look for the body. How typical. He always leaves abruptly. And I knew he wouldn't be coming back, not now, because he finally could leave me with my family.)
What does that add up to, in the grand algorithm of love and sin? Is that what it means to be God's child? To be heir to the pain and suffering and resplendent joy that is all too much to bear? To live, no matter how briefly, and to know that life will carry on, despite everything?
Florie and her descendants can forget my story, the way I try to recapture Cassian for myself. What matters is that the story existed no matter how briefly, and because it was told, the past existed, albeit in a different form, neatly divided along narrative lines that do not exist in reality. It is for a not-dissimilar reason that I first told Cain my story, when hatred and despair and the knowledge that I could not carry on made me blind. Because I told him my past, I made it real, even if Father would never acknowledge it, even if Cassandra never let me forget. Another person knew what happened, and even if I couched it within the realm of what I thought was justice, I made it real on my own terms.
It's not that my burden was split in half at that moment; pain likes to remain whole and untouched. It's not that I found part of myself in him. What had haunted me for all those years, what had slowly destroyed my body when I tried to ignore it, had only wanted to be real, even if what it had to say was unspeakable. The part that I had mutilated to survive had persisted, stubbornly, foolishly, dogging my heels, asking me to not recoil from the past, but to see it, to feel it, and to know that it will not be again. That the horror had an end, that it does not persist forever.
And that perhaps, is enough, simply to fear and feel and be.
Cain's hand travels to mine, and he gives it a gentle squeeze. Against the fence, the jasmine has thrown itself into bloom, white and sweet-smelling—God has returned.
Yes, it is enough.