Haidée’s first thought was that the thing in her basket was a rat. Or maybe it was a squirrel. Slowly, she got back up on the rock, not even bothering to dust off the dirt sprinkling the hem of her dress. The creature had climbed out of the basket to sit on the ground next to it. It held the biscuit between its paws and nibbled on it as it watched her curiously. She had the odd sensation that actual thoughts were going on behind its beady black eyes. Maybe it was planning on eating the rest of her lunch.
She grabbed her bottle of tonic and twisted off the cork. She took a swig, heedless of whether or not that was really a lady-like thing to do, and let the sweet liquid trickled down her throat. Then she corked the bottle and put it back into the basket, all the while not taking her eyes off the creature. It definitely did not look like a rat or a squirrel. The creature’s coat was a shiny brown and its body and tail sleek—the perfect shape for crawling through narrow holes.
“You’re a marten,” she said aloud. “How on earth did you get into the basket without me noticing?”
Of course, the marten didn’t reply. It simply cocked its head while it ate, giving the impression that Haidée’s question had been quite ridiculous. No one asked how martens got into things. They just did.
“Go away. Shoo.”
The marten didn’t budge.
Haidée sighed loudly and slumped over. Half-heartedly, she began flicking the dirt off her hem. “That was my food, you know. Did you eat everything else as well?” She didn’t even pause to see how the creature would react to the question. “My God, look what I’m resorting to—talking to an animal just because there is no one else around to talk to! I hate this vacation. You know, I’m half tempted to jump into the sea and to swim back to the mainland despite what they say about the riptides.”
The marten finished the biscuit and then scuttled back to the basket to peer inside.
“Signe is wrong, you know. I am not stressed out. I’m not burned out. I think he was blaming me for his own bad choices of plays. Perhaps when I get back to Paris, I’ll hire myself out to a different theatre company.” She cupped her chin in her hand and stared, unfocused at the land in front of her. “That is, if the letters have stopped. But I suppose there is one good thing about this island. You only get mail from the mainland about once a month when the tide goes out.”
There was a chirp in the vicinity of the basket. Haidée glanced at it and found that the marten had crawled back in and had curled around a glass jar of cherries to take a nap. She didn’t have the heart to drag it out. Besides, the thing could bite her if it suddenly decided that it didn’t like her.
“I should have brought a book,” she murmured. “Books pass the time. And if I finish all the ones I brought with me, I could raid the observatory library. This reminds me, I should ask Monsieur Davenport where exactly it is located.” The observatory itself still seemed like a collection of confusingly twisted corridors after her few days of stay. She knew where the dining hall and kitchen were in relation to her room. And she knew how to get to the front door of the place. But elsewhere? She’d probably need a golden ball of yarn to mark her passage.
But instead of heading back down the path to get on the main road to the village, she picked up the basket—with the sleeping marten still inside—and headed further down the path towards the wall that bordered the farmland.
The wall was perhaps two feet tall and made of large loose stones fitted together like a very complicated puzzle. Haidée leaned over to place the basket on the ground on the other side before hiking up her skirts and hopping over the wall herself. Once on the other side, she brushed the dirt off the nearby stony ground before sitting down and leaning against the wall. The air seemed marginally warmer. Or perhaps it was because it was later in the day. The sun was overhead—Haidée guessed it was noon although she had the suspicion that she was an incredibly bad judge of time.
On the farm land side of the wall, the land rolled downward, the grass becoming more yellow as it grew toward the nadir point of the island. There were more trees here, but it wasn’t the kind of threes over on the other side of the wall. These were squat, almost dwarf-like in their domesticity and their leaves a dull red, almost brown in contrast to the wilder trees. All the possible beauty these trees could have had was channeled into the fruit, large red and green apples that hung by their stems like small, fat desperate children still clinging to their mothers.
Haidée leaned back until her head was tilted up to the sky to look at the clouds. She fancied that she saw the shapes of ships and ladies with tremendously large gowns.
She had been fifteen and it had been a few months before she had managed to find a position herself at a wealthy bourgeoisie household as the caretaker of children even though she still had been a child herself. She was still living with Madame Zéphyrine at the time. It had been in the early hours of the morning before the sun had risen and the fog of the late night still lurked a few inches off the cobbled streets. A small boy had pounded on the door and had demanded the services of Madame Zéphyrine because his master was dying.
Haidée had been used to these unusual calls for Zéphyrine. She had never asked what the gypsy woman did on these jaunts out for these emergencies—she had simply assumed that Zéphyrine did what she had taught her to do at home—the drawing of certain protective symbols. But this time, the gypsy woman had roused her from her own bed because she needed an “assistant.”
She involuntarily shivered although there was no breeze. Haidée closed her eyes, wishing that she didn’t have to remember.
The boy who had called on Zéphyrine had led them through the alleyways with nothing more than a single lantern held aloft. Haidée remembered it as a harrowing journey in which she imagined every flickering shadow as a lurking cutthroat simply waiting for the opportune moment. The house of the boy’s master had been a townhouse—obviously that of the wealthy, but the decay of the older, smoggier parts of the city had begun to eat away at the edges.
A cadaverous butler had greeted the trio and they were soon ushered towards the master’s bedroom. Meanwhile, Zéphyrine had taken out a folio from the sack that she had carried and was holding up an odd parchment—the color of bone—before they entered the room.
The first impression Haidée had had of the master bedroom was that it was dark—unnaturally dark—darker than the streets outside. There had been only a single candle burning weakly at the bedside and it took a while for her vision to adjust.
But after a moment, she had begun to notice more things—like the wardrobe in the corner and a broken mirror leaning against the wall. And then there had been the bed, a huge cavernous thing covered by black curtains. But they had not been completely black—something had shimmered in the folds of the fabric and the dark bedposts, something that had appeared to be a strange, unnatural shape. A creepy feeling had skittered across her skin as the implications slowly sunk into her brain. But before she could actually grasp what those symbols could be, Madame Zéphyrine had stepped forward to drag the bed curtains away.
Haidée suddenly stood up and paced away from the wall, feeling quite restless and disturbed. A bit beyond the small orchard was a stone farmhouse with a roof of gleaming red tiles. She saw no person or animal around. At the nearest tree, she picked an apple and then hiked back to the wall. By the time she climbed back to the place where the basket was, the marten had awoken from its nap and was watching her as she sat down and took a napkin from the basket to wipe the apple.
This time, though, the marten didn’t appear to be very interested in food. Instead, the animal hopped out of the basket to explore its new surroundings. Haidée watched the creature out of the corner of her eye as she bit into the stolen fruit. The flesh was crisp and sweet and the juice cool upon her tongue. The taste washed away some of the horrifying tang of her old memories—but not all.
Later, after the sweat-drenching ordeal of what had happened at that decaying Parisian town house, Haidée and Madame Zéphyrine had finally gone back to their own home for breakfast. At the time, Haidée hadn’t wanted to eat. She had simply wanted to stumble back into bed, into an exhausted heap, and to sleep the horror away. But she had known that Madame Zéphyrine did not suffer laziness, so she had gone ahead to warm up some porridge.
It had been then over breakfast that the gypsy woman had seen fit to explain to her the significance of the markings upon that bed in the master bedroom.
“Those marks are forbidden,” the gypsy woman had begun without preamble.
Haidée had been about to spoon some porridge into her mouth, but the spoon had halted halfway there and the porridge had dribbled back into her bowl.
“They’re used for the dead,” Zéphyrine’s eyes had flashed with warning. “They’re used for harnessing a life. Or giving life where there isn’t any.”
“Those marks are against the natural order, then?” Haidée had said.
The gypsy woman had nodded. “And as using your abilities to tend a dying fire might exact a toll, you can imagine what kind of price one would have to pay if one tried to bring a person back to life.”