Page 36 of As Many Souls as Stars
‘You are mine now,’ Richter said. ‘In this life, and the next.’
The shadows surged, the darkness coming to greet them. They slipped beneath it, submerged themselves into the nothing. With that, all light was doused—and Cybil Harding, finally, was gone.
Intermission
Manila, 1762
‘Do you believe, Don Miguel,’ Miriam said, blood running in rivulets down her extended forearm, ‘that there is a difference between love and hatred?’
Don Miguel de Valdez, prone and trembling upon the floor before her, made no reply but to continue his fervent muttering of the Lord’s Prayer.
Outside, there was the sound of cannon fire—that of the Spanish or the British, Miriam didn’t know; it made no difference to her—and the muffled screaming of dying soldiers. The Englishman who had traded her his soul an hour earlier was likely dead by now, so he would never see the fruits of his labour. Those fruits were the dozens of corpses that draped themselves across the wooden furniture of the garrison house, the iron tang of their blood thick in the air. The heat was oppressive—Miriam could not feel it, but through the window she could see the way the air shimmered on the distant, tree-lined horizon—and the flies were already beginning to swarm.
Before her, the Spanish man had been reduced to tears and entreaties for deliverance. This really had been a pointless deal, in the end—helping one conqueror displace another—but perhaps the people here, those who had been forced to suffer such brutality, could take some comfort in Miriam’s having delivered their oppressors brutality in turn. Miriam had watched as blood had run through the streets of Manila, had seen the tears and the fury of those who had for so long called it home. This was nothing less than what was deserved.
‘Love and hatred,’ she repeated, advancing nearer. ‘It is all desire, in the end. No doubt many men have thought the same.If she thinks of me, she is mine; whether or not it is with affection. A fair assumption, no? I’ve been considering it for some time.’
Don Miguel shook his head mutely and skittered back from her. There was a severed leg on the table above him, dripping blood, and his hands slipped in the puddle that had formed. He fell onto his back, whimpering.
‘You do not agree?’ Miriam asked, curiously. ‘Well, there is a counterargument. Perhaps we should prefer to be forgotten than resented. At least that allows the possibility of future acceptance.’
He clasped his hands in a prayer position. ‘Spare me,’ he said. ‘I beg you.’
Miriam clicked her tongue. ‘You have been a dull conversation partner,’ she replied, in the tone of a long-suffering parent speaking to a child. ‘It isn’t that I amlonely, mind, but rather that I am bored. You are responsible for so many atrocities, I thought that at least you would be interesting—but you are not.’
‘B-bored?’
‘Bored,’ she repeated, shooting the word from her mouth like a bullet. ‘I have been waiting centuries for a First Daughter, and I must admit’—here she bent over and plunged her hand into the man’s chest—‘I am growing’—she closed her palm around his heart, admired the speed of its beating, and then pulled it out—‘impatient.’
Don Miguel did not respond.
Miriam put the organ in one of the trenchers on the table, next to a hunk of stale bread. The blood saturated the flesh of the loaf immediately, turning it from white to scarlet. Idly, she pressed her finger into the bread, listening to it squelch. As she did so, she felt the insistent pull of the deal she had made with the English soldier that morning disappear.
Miriam took the form of a crow and flew out of the garrison house window. Outside, the South China Sea glowed cerulean, pockmarked with galleons and plumes of smoke from cannon fire. Souls glimmered within the whitewashed walls of the Intramuros, and—further, shining along the winding dirt roads of the town’s outskirts—therewere souls brighter still, inflamed with conviction and fury. Miriam smiled to see them. Revolt would soon be coming to Manila, and with it a feast of desire, of hope and dread and ambition. Miriam would stay there for the next few decades and gorge herself.
Love, hatred—Miriam didn’t see much need for the distinction. Both were simply hunger, in the end. And that was all her existence was: hunger and consumption, in an endless cycle. Past, present, future. No matter how full she became, she would always be hollow again.
You ought to hurry, my dear, she thought, recalling Cybil’s face.I grow so weary of a world without you in it.
Part II
London
11
Esther Harding was born on Christmas Eve, 1790, under inauspicious stars.
Not that anyone cared they were inauspicious—her father had never been interested in that sort of superstitious nonsense. But Esther’s dim uncle, who had always had a fascination with the family lineage, solemnly informed his brother that his daughter would be cursed.
‘Balderdash,’ Reginald Harding said, sucking on his cigar. His fair hair curled insouciantly over his forehead; his gold-brown eyes were the same shade as his child’s. ‘My daughter is perfectly normal, thank you.’
Esther found out when she was six. On one of his visits, her cousin Thomas had let it slip that his father called her the cursed girl, the misfortunate one, awitch. Thomas said that she was a ‘bad seed of Eve, like the apple but worser,’ and would kill them all if they weren’t careful. He said this with the same little vindictive smirk he always said everything with—Thomas was like that. He was younger than Esther, but he had always treated her like she was a baby.
For some reason, Esther did not find this knowledge surprising—but she found it upsetting, all the same. She felt the truth of it in the same instinctive way she felt pain when the darkness was near, or when she was made to eat sprouts. She was cursed. Of course she was. Her mother had died of consumption when she was only one; her father had chosen to abandon England rather than remarry. Now hewas on an East India Company appointment far away, leaving Esther in the hands of the help: eight servants housed in the base of their townhouse in Brunswick Square, replaced so often by her uncle that Esther hardly ever learnt their names. She was surrounded by lovely things: frosted-glass chandeliers and paintings of insipid courtesans; silk gowns and gold-framed mirrors; a lavender-coloured rocking horse she had named Charmeuse. But every joy she had seemed coupled with sorrow. Consider the little songbird she’d received as her fifth birthday present from her father: she’d found it dead at the bottom of its cage the next day. Think of the shadows that swarmed around her when she was angry, the way she heard whispers in the dark.
She was a First Daughter, and she was cursed. That was simply how it was.
After that, after she knew about the curse, it only seemed to get worse. Her governess, Harriet, took her out on an excursion on the lake in Hampstead Heath that summer; upon seeing shadows dancing on the water, she had taken such fright that she had fallen into the lake and drowned. Her successor had apoplexy. By the time Reginald returned from his appointment—another squirming baby in his arms, the product of an affair in Penang—Esther was feared by everyone in the household.
