Page 3 of As Many Souls as Stars
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,anyonewould 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’tchangeanything, 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.
2
Three months before Cybil’s twenty-third birthday, she was pressing herself against a window on the first floor, watching the fog of her breath stretch across the glass. It was evening, and the sun was setting. In the orchard below, a sparrow flitted from tree to tree. The apples were coming in, despite the unseasonable chill of this year’s autumn. Cybil amused herself by pinching her fingers together around each fruit, imagining that she could pluck them in miniature from the branches.
‘Greensleeves was my heart of joy,’ Cybil sang to herself, voice sharper than a knife. She always sang loudly, to see if someone would come and complain; no one ever did. She drew a jagged line in the condensation left on the glass by her breath. ‘And who but my Lady Greensleeves?’
There was movement in the garden. Lifting herself onto her toes, Cybil saw a procession of horses marching down the gravel path.
Visitors. Cybil was so astonished she almost laughed. It had been years since anyone of consequence had stopped at Harding Hall. Her parents had not told her anyone was coming, but then again, why should they? She hadn’t seen either of them in days; they ate at different times, in different rooms, and the Hall was large enough that their paths rarely crossed. When she would press her ear to the door of her father’s study, she could hear him mumbling in languages she did not understand, and there was an awful smell that seeped from the gap over the threshold: burnt hair and vinegar andsalty sea air, as if Christopher had bottled up the ocean then spilled it upon the floor.
One of the horses in the garden whickered. It had heraldry on its saddle: the Harding three-headed hawk, black-eyed, wings outstretched. It was as familiar to Cybil as her own face, a symbol that was carved into every mantel and stained into every window.Three heads, for past, present, and future, her mother had once told her.The Hardings persevere. Was this a relative, then? She knew there were more members of the family, scattered through England, although few bothered to come to the Hall.
Cybil went back to her chambers, where she painted her lips red with cochineal and put powder on her eyelids. She wrapped her neck in pearls, and studded her fingers with rings. After pulling a few strands of red hair from their pins to frame her lead-white face, she dripped belladonna into her eyes to dilate her pupils. They blew so wide she could hardly see the gold-brown of her irises—could hardly see anything but the pupils themselves, staring back at her, wide and dark as the bottom of a well. The belladonna made her vision cloudy and uncertain. The walls trembled, the glass of the mirror distorting her reflection.
