Read Online The White Forest by Adam McOmber - Free Book Online Page B

dressing room but looking at some distant shape. Then she composed herself. “I had quite a spell,” she said, laughing. “I get a bit foggy sometimes, Jane.”
    “It was—” I started. I was ready to reveal my true nature because I already felt close to her.
    “A terrible spell,” she said. Was there a tone of warning in her voice?
    We slipped from Stoke Morrow into my father’s garden, a place where we would spend much of our time, as it was so isolated from the main house and any vigilant eye. The cold gods of Rome presided from their pedestals. Dionysus in a pair of stone antlers studied the two of us with interest as Maddy instructed me (the first of many instructions) on the components of an eighteenth-century “perfect garden.”
    “There must be an orangerie, which you have,” she said, approvingly, pointing to the greenhouse on our property where black branches of lemon trees pressed at steamed glass panes. “They are everywhere in France, you know. Beautiful glass houses where the citrus trees are kept. The smell is dazzling in midwinter. I’ve always thought I’d like to live in an orangerie and sit among the citrus groves in the sunlight all day.”
    “That’s lovely,” I said, still feeling shy.
    “And then of course there must be a menagerie, ” she said. “I’ve been begging my father to purchase a few animals that I could tend. Imagine feeding a miniature Chinese deer from one’s own hand. Wouldn’t that be darling, Jane?”
    “I suppose it would.”
    “They have such tiny, gentle mouths. I’ve heard one can even teach them to kneel in one’s presence, as if they are at worship. I would feel like the goddess of the deer, you know.”
    We both laughed. It had been a long time since I’d felt such levity, and this was the moment I decided I should never let go of Madeline Lee. She acted as though she didn’t notice my admiration. Instead she went on with her lecture. “And then, of course, you need a folly—and though yours is lovely, there is more to life than Rome. Have you ever thought of including a ruined abbey or perhaps even a Tartar tent?”
    “I have no control over the folly,” I said. “It belongs to my father.”
    “Fathers,” she said. “They do have their follies.” She paused here, weighing a thought in her mind. “I might as well tell you, Jane. Idon’t think you’re going to shun me like those other girls. You don’t seem the type. My father’s folly is that he makes pictures using a daguerreotype machine, or at least he did before he took ill. In Mayfair last year, he made pictures of nude women.”
    “Nude?” I asked.
    She nodded, solemnly. “Prostitutes, mostly. He took hundreds of such images. Perhaps he was too naive to know what would happen, but then again maybe in some way he wanted this. He always said that Mayfair and even the London Society of Art was full of arrogant philistines. And he was right, of course, the philistines judged him for his pictures. Father isn’t well, and he couldn’t properly defend himself against those fools. There was gossip that he’d caught his sickness from those lowborn women—that it’s some disease of the liver. I don’t believe that, but I suppose it doesn’t matter what I think. Here I am, and here is not such a bad place, is it, Jane? Tell me it’s not.”
    “The Heath?” I said, looking toward the southern woods. “I rarely venture out of my house. Father thinks it’s dangerous.” I didn’t tell Maddy of the black shale with the fissures that led into the earth where my mother had been poisoned. That was perhaps too singular a bit of information for such a sunny day.
    “Oh, but we must go walking!” she said. “That’s the whole point of the Heath, isn’t it? To take a lovely walk. Perhaps I can find us an appropriate escort to take us adventuring.”
    “Yes,” I said, wondering what kind of escort she could provide.
    Maddy nearly took my hand again but then seemed to think better of