"At the Edge of the Wood" by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

At the Edge of the Wood

by 

Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

She kept her given name secret, the name which had come just short of christening her. She kept this even from him, even as she married him, before she ran from them all. There was no reason to show them the paper the foundling’s home signed to give leave to this near-nameless sixteen-year-old and place her in the hands of this man of means and breeding. His family name would serve as his most gracious wedding gift. All she brought with her, as hidden as her name, was the token of a satin ribbon, the color of a summer’s clear sky, cut into a chevron, stitched against fraying, so that it might one day meet its mate, the other half of the ribbon cut into a “v.” The institution asked these tokens of the women who left their children there in the hopes a merciful god would reunite them in better days. Such a day never came, at least not for her.

The day in fact never came for anyone in all her time there, though it was spoken of with reverence, like a remote prophecy that might yet come true. The children did often leave, but rather with their scrawny bodies in cheap pine boards cobbled together. Sickness dogged them. Meager meals, threadbare blankets, thin winterwear, and grates bare of wood made quick work of what little health they arrived with. The littler ones she would hold close to her heart and sing to, songs she didn’t even know she knew. Sometimes they made it till morning again, sometimes the song simply eased their passing.

Her husband had chosen her, had lifted her from this. That he had, came up against any sense she could make of it. Unquestioning, for a time she felt for once one of the blessed elect, who are chosen for love, to be surrounded by the warmth and the protection of a family. They shared with her the stories of their lineage, as though she too now partook of their greater destiny, almost, even, of their finer blood than the common. If they had asked her to cease singing her songs, if she must listen to tales of grand forbears instead, it seemed but a mite to pay in terms of that belonging. That she was expected never to speak of her life from before was a foregone conclusion.

At her first confinement they flattered and insinuated that the fortune of the dynasty she held in her hands. They coddled her with possets and pillows and a second feather mattress. They brought in portraits of armored and ruffed gentlemen to inspire her to bring forth heroes in their cast. No attention seemed too small. They asked after he favorite flowers and it was these that now graced her bedside table each morning, fresh.

Later though it seemed clearer. When miscarriage followed upon miscarriage ending in the death of a stillborn, she thought she had been chosen as a blank slate upon which to write the traditional Christian names of his family’s legacy, those taken from the flyleaf in his great grandmother’s Bible. This was the only rhyme or reason she could find. He must have reasoned she had little enough yet in her own mind in the way of comprehending the ways and means of the wider world and calling it for what it was, for, in short, naming. A girl without so much as that in her possession must be fair game indeed for imposing one’s own discernment fully upon her, one’s own self and character. She grew to understand that she was to fall in line and obey by bringing the family new blood with no rival line for heirs or even a past that a name might carry with it. Or so she imagined.

The child she brought dead into the world was the final test against the enchanted circle of family. The stillbirth strained its spell to breaking. Cruelty of the body, of the soul followed shortly upon this last unforgivable sin. Under the guise of worry over her health, they forbade her daily walks about the gardens, where she would wander to the wood. They kept her inside, insisting she must be suffering some illness that prevented her from fulfilling her duty to grow from wife to mother. A doctor came to open the vein at the crook of her arm. Not once, not twice, but over and over. Meanwhile, half sleeping off her weakness, she could overhear them at the door. They spoke of curses foretold, condemning some unspecified nonsense, of bringing in a girl of unknown blood, of rubbish children as so much refuse. Someone murmured something about a children’s tale she could not entirely decipher. Then, at her bedside one among them said outright: if her own mother could not love her, how could she in turn expect to bring healthy children into the world.

The moment she was on her feet again, she broke free of them and ran away one night. She packed few things, some clothes, a pair of shoes, a few toiletries, some papers, her scraped together allowance, and finally the ribbon she had preciously guarded throughout all those years. Not that she hoped it might conjure her mother back, but its inverted arrow form pointed inwardly to a belonging beyond this strange, proud, cold clan. She sealed the ribbon in the binding of the books whose weight was her one luxury. And so, with her life bundled in one small valise, she fled. They gave chase of course because in their power and might, no one escaped them, no matter how despised.

Escape she did however, alighting for a stay here or a rest there. Never remaining long in one place, she realized, was the secret. Through the family’s prominence, she did hear tell of her husband’s death: his heart one day giving up all pretense of working in the way a heart should. A timid peace came to her, but she kept apace of any possible effort to flush her out of what shelter she found. After that, with the passing years, the others who had held her bastardhood and her barrenness against her at every turn left this earth, one by one, each to abide in their eternal destiny. The fate awaiting them left her indifferent. Of these deaths, though, she learned through a solicitor’s letter that had found her, despite her running, despite the family and their stable of lawyers, despite the very difficulty of tracking her from one brief haven to another. It long lay unopened, the seal itself taunting her in the poisonous old voice of his mother. The day did come however when curiosity if not courage bade her to find out what it had to say. Reading it she learned that through the vagaries of oddly worded and ancient wills, and much against the surviving family’s wishes, their old hunting lodge had come to be hers.

The solicitor forwarded her the deeds and key and left the rest to her luck, and godspeed. Cramming her in with other travellers, the coachman followed public roads as far as he could, changing horses first in this city then in that village like a ritual repeated over and over. The cramping in her legs, her unsettled dreams as the coachman called out the names of stops in the night like an incantation in the dark (“..Tallifer’s Run, Pardoe, Harehill..”): all this penned her in the threshold between waking and sleep till sunrise. On it continued through the following day when she changed from diligence to gig and trap. The nearest this barely-mapped web of pathways brought her to the address, at the end of the final line: a tavern named the The White Hart.

A few coins bought her something warm and a dry place to drink it, as the heavens poured down portents of autumn fast on summer’s heels. Her strange face brought looks, and finally, first from the innkeeper and then the others, questions marked more by what was not said than what was. They knew the road, yes, and that name, too. Yes, they knew the family, or of them. The white-haired man in the corner recalled something of tales of splendid hunting parties, “in my grandfather’s day, or was it my great-grandfather…?.” Curious, someone offered to take her in his cart as far as the gates, where he left her with wishes of luck, turning back the way he came.

The half-twisted, rusty gates held together only by dint of a huge chain and lock. She brought out the key. She might never have opened it had she not learned the trick of such things in her many foster placements and how to go half widdershins and stop and turn again against the wrist, a sort of sleight of hand of door-opening. Even with the rust fighting her, staining her hands like dried blood, the gates gave and opened on the road leading to the house. She walked toward the door set into a large stone cottage bookended by chimneys on either side, and carefully picked her way around the broken steps leading up to it. Still, she tripped, her knee pearling red.

She set her thin suitcase on the stone flags when a drop of water fell on her head. She looked up. Curses and blessings shift so easily, one to the other and back again. Still, it was a roof, or part of a roof, and did something of what roofs are meant to do, most of it, though rain and cold came through chinks. In the front parlor a fireplace covered one wall. Some few bookshelves covered the others. Elsewhere the walls were discolored where paintings had hung. A fine dark mist of mold veiled the plaster. All this surrounded a haunting of shrouded furniture. She shook those sheets and scattered their dust, thinking of mortal remains and the destiny we all come to. Underneath she discovered a settee, some bergère armchairs, a cherrywood desk, a card table. A pair of riding boots slumped at the door, waiting to no purpose for untold decades. The mold also made its dim black presence felt through the hallways. She passed through them, peeking into the rooms they opened upon. The beds had taken the hollow shape of a petal or a birdbath – night tables and candles on tarnished sticks, bath stands, and mottled mirrors garlanded with cobwebs. Books lay scattered in the odd corner. There were no curtains, but shutters pulled close against a return that never came to pass.

A glance into armoires revealed the residence of moths mostly and some of what the moths had been feeding upon for who knew how many generations. They flew up in a cloud. (A matron had told her that moths were the souls of the dead come back. This is also how she knew that they fed on tears, as they fed on cloth). There were counterpanes and duvets and various shawls and mittens and slippers and such. She thought of the fast-approaching cold and that it was a blessing that this place had been inhabited mainly in the autumn and winter. Eventually, however, the family had left the cottage to disintegrate on its own. As their fortunes rose, so did their access to town and to grander seats for the hunting season. With their desertion, creature comforts left between the cobwebs and sheeted furniture were few.

She chose the southwest room, thinking of warmth, and brought in all the covers from every room and piled them on the swaybacked bed. Moths gathered around the candle. Upon blowing out the flame, she fell to sleep.

In the days and weeks that followed she settled in. She learned to take her bathwater from the bucket catching rainfall from the leaking roof. This she would heat from what kindling she could gather. The tinder gasped and sickened, its flames quickly flickering out. Though she had found an axe, its dull edge and her little strength were proof against storing much wood for the coming season. She dusted and polished and washed what she could. Slowly this small broken-down shelter became tidy and cosy, a place a lonely running bastard girl might put down her bags and make a home. She even managed makeshift patches against the holes in the roof and went to drawing her water from the well. In spite of all this, every trick she knew against the mold was in vain.

She knew she would be able to eat, at least for a time. Across the field grew the ruins of a once-rich orchard from which she could tease nourishment. Then she coaxed the remains of a kitchen garden back into the habit of giving, wrestling against the overgrown thorn with the same dull axe, ripping her skin up to her forearms. That she might share its scant bounty with the forest’s inhabitants gladdened her heart, alone as she was. That forest was also a source of sustenance. A musty book told which mushrooms in the wood were for eating and which for dying. As summer passed away, she made her daily trek through the thicket seeking under leaf for the tender-fleshed growth, especially on a day of sun after a rain, as both grew colder and shorter. Here and there rotted rabbit snares and traps for larger beasts tripped her up. She would gingerly but joyously dismantle them, bringing in the nets and iron jaws back to the cottage and the rubbish heap, if she could think of no other use for them. Powder horns and muskets of another age met the same end, for under her aegis this land, she resolved, would turn to a place of asylum for the furred or feathered beasts of the wood.

The country all around was prime ground for boar, stag, pheasant, and fox, and more. But the quarry seemed to know that this given acreage’s first purpose had long been abandoned. She would hear them creeping at night amongst the overgrown bindweed and the choked roses, knowing themselves safe. She pruned what she could, so that the deer might have something to eat. She would hear them again of a morning at the last of September’s offerings on the thorn, but she would catch only their tails dashing away at the creaking of the shutters. A life of running and hiding had left her inured to solitude, but she would be damned before she would leave another creature hungry, were it in her power to help, and a hunted creature at that. Her tools being improvised, the thorns tore at her fingers and stained sometimes the bush and the windowsill with blood until rosehips replaced the roses.

The sun’s rays gathered a greater slant by the day, as a more burnished yellow fell over the pond beyond the orchard. For one moment each afternoon, a flash of golden glow over the water came like a painful blessing to her eyes. The leaves slowly formed a sort of vegetable quilt of a winding sheet atop the cold ground.

Then came the frosts that melted into downpours. Autumn settled in, with winter foretold. Wet wood made for choking fires and the room smelled of smoke. She smelled of smoke. Sometimes she wondered if she had become smoke, so long had it been since she had spoken to another living soul. Daily her store of apples and onions and potatoes dwindled, and what remained withered. The moths continued to feast on the comforters. She shivered by the fire and struggled to read but her eyes swam from hunger. The moon swelled and the wind rose. As the first and early snow fell like a bridal veil, there came a knock at the door.

Her first thoughts were that she had imagined the noise, for how and why might a traveler make way through the snowy road to her door, and to what possible end? She thought herself of lore learned she knew not where or how: lines etched on palms, the properties of leaf and tree, a spider in the evening. The final lesson was that if we are called, we are called. So then as the muffled rapping came a second time, she lifted herself from the fireplace carpet and opened the door. To nothing. Nothing but soundless snowfall. She looked outward into the dark, and stepped further into it, closing the door against the cold. The moon was dark and there was no chance of spying what had made the noise, only as far as she could see snowfall on trackless white. Then looking downward to the doorstep, on the stone, a small red puddle.

She bent down, swept her first and second finger through the dark fluid. She brought it to her nose. The old coppery smell gave it away as blood. She couldn’t think how she might have left it herself. The roses had long blown; there was nothing to prune. Moreover, it was fresh and warm. Wondering at this, she cleansed her fingers of the stain with the snow in her other hand. She closed the door and turned to face the fire.

If it seemed to have grown brighter, warmer, as was to be expected after looking out into the blackness and spectral snow of the winter’s night. But then when she blinked in the soft glow, she noticed in the basket to the left of the fireplace a knee-high stack of thick dry logs cut just the size of the grate. She turned around and saw on the table a row of gourds, leeks, barley, beets, parsnips, piles of walnuts and new troves of apples.

She grabbed the lamp and turned up the wick as her feet felt carefully for a purchase, stepping into the dancing phantoms of snowfall, and peered into the darkness through and beyond it. Leaving the door open she walked a few steps further down, but carefully as she went further into the flame-gilded black. No powers of vision could be equal to such a midnight though, so she turned back with a vow to see to it the next morning. Inside the fire roared and she set about preparing to cook with hesitant joy and barely mastered hunger that would brook no questions.

Next morning, she arose to unabated snowfall. Making her way from the cupped hand of her bed to the front room, she put an old riding coat over her nightgown with mittens and a shawl and went to see outside. Any tracks there might have been were by this time hopelessly lost, though she swore she hadn’t spotted any the night before either. The blood was there, a small spill of frozen red. Three crows perched on an oak tree - spots of blackness haunting her vision from staring too long into the dark of the night before. Or perhaps the midnight had returned to stare back into her own eyes. She could not long bear their gaze and returned to the cottage to prepare the day’s fire.

The kindling took quickly -the scent named it as applewood- and soon the flickering licking of flames at the wood warmed the room and perfumed it with the ghosts of the season’s last harvest. Tea and bread were in the pantry now and she warmed and nourished herself against the cold snow tapping at the windowpanes.

She hummed that old song again, as moth-eaten as her shawl, the one she sang in the orphanage. How this musical relic remained to her, alongside her half ribbon for all inheritance, she never could tell, but would sing it to herself under her breath at night before the family came to take her from the orphanage and her song from her. Or again, later, to the smaller children if they were crying. It seemed to calm the lonely soul, even those whose bodies would be found cold in the morning. She knew some of the words, most of the words, but verses escaped her. At these moments she would make up lyrics, often weaving the child’s name into the rhyme. And so, it worked upon the distraught minds of the little ones and on herself too as she would comfort them. It stole now upon her mind along with the apple scent and the tea warming her body, damming back the memory of what the family had forbidden her. She looked out the window. The crows stood guard, black on the branch and still looking back at her against the snow, cawing in counterpoint to the sweet melody she knew, time out of mind.

"Blood on the snow” she murmured to the tune and made nonsense rhymes to fill in the blanked words against the notes, “Blood on the snow waking the roe …. and how he longs for his love.” The tune faded from her lips slowly to a hum then silence but for the fire crackling. She wondered if this were a story a matron had long ago told her and she’d forgotten. She shivered -but not now for the cold- and nestled into her coiled shawl.

It was too cold this day to continue her months’ long battle against the forces of the house’s remaining disrepair. So now that the fire was strong enough to free her movements from its strict circle, she went toward the books, mostly volumes of venery, handwritten records of what noble had assassinated what beast of the wood before they abandoned the place, and the creatures knew it to be safe to return. It was an odd collection of tomes alongside the hunting books overwhelming the collection. Hidden in a nook here and a cranny there were a psalter and cookery books, what looked to be a children’s tale, chapbooks and other volumes strange to find for this family whom she knew to be lacking in curiosity as much as piety. Surely none had ever needed to poke about a stove or read a child a bedtime story. There were servants for that. Nor could she imagine any of them ever lover enough to read a poem for courting. Thus she wondered what some of the other members might have been long before her fate was caught up in theirs. She took up the Bible and rubbed the dust from her hands against her skirts. “And so we shall return,” she sighed, recalling the words from so many interments of tiny pine caskets which marked her time at the institution. She reshelved it, however, and picked up a small book next to it, a genealogy of the family. Her first instinct was to put it back as well, as she surely knew it by heart at this point after long, long lectures of ancestors and of high deeds lost in legend. This family tree however unfolded to embrace distant cousins and gnarled branches (she could almost see the crows perched upon them staring), names crossed out or rubbed off. They might still perhaps have been legible but for the early-falling winter gloom. But even squinting did no good and she put the book back and picked up the one next to it, the fire flickering over the embossed title: “The Dancing Heart,” the children’s tale, and brought it back to the hearth. Here she read of a white hind killed by the scion of a great household and the curse of barrenness that descended upon the family, “until such time as a child-bride of sorrow, the orphan of unknown family, to drown the curse…” She didn’t know the story, but she knew few enough of childhood’s usual narratives. Suddenly sleepy, she let the book fall to the side of the armchair as she stared into the flames thinking again of the black of the crows.


One for sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy

Amongst all her miscarriages, she had birthed one child though the creature had never drawn breath, and that was a girl. The family -- who had made clear their relief that the loss was only of a female-- had a boy’s name prepared out of the Bible fly leaf. In her heart, though, she had named her something else and, while her confinement still smiled, swore she would call her that, her own given name—her only gift to give save a blue ribbon and a song— no matter what was written down by the priests. She called her that still. Certainly, there was no one to dispute it. No one else, not so much as a tombstone, would ever call her anything.

And then she called to mind that other version of the rhyme :

One for sorrow

Two for mirth,

Three for a funeral

And four for birth.


Either way, she thought, the old rhymes spake true. She recalled a day in autumn, finding a crow's corpse pond-side, past the curtain of birch and the sky flurried with the black of its kith and kin, their throats uttering their outcries of guttural grief and disbelief. She remembered his weight on her hands as she took him away. He was not unmourned, nor should he remain without proper burial. She rose to the window to see if the birds were still on the oak, but with night fallen so fast it was impossible to tell.

She looked up through the chill-blurred pane and wondered at how it doubled the simple stars in the deep velvet of the skies, the constellations we made into our fates. She laid her cheek against its icy surface and drew back, her breath fogging it like the foxed mirrors in the bedrooms. The wind grumbled and rattled at the casements, moaning like the sad angry ghost children that she had borne but not given life. The clamor left her unsure what she was perceiving, beyond that, for, once more, a muffled knocking seemed to ask entry at the door. And yet the road must be impossible to follow, after a day and a night of this snow. Last night’s impression was still so strong it might yet be her own mind quickened with the wind’s moaning blasts.

But then she thought of her stomach filled with soup and tea and bread, her warmed flesh by the firelight, and went again to answer the call, caught somewhere between dread and gratitude. The door stuck in its jamb as the knock came again. She pulled to no avail as though against the will of the wild, soaring gusts of wind. The rattling and the rapping were hopelessly bound up one into the other until finally the door gave, but long after all had gone silent.

There on the doorstep the crows just visible in black on black, like a dreamless sleep. She slammed the door upon them, wanting no part of whatever they augured.

When the knocking came again on the third night she did not hesitate but went to the door. It gave now with ease. She set forth into the dark under a sickle moon. When she slipped on the ice, she grabbed the rosebush for balance and bloodied her hand. Against the black distance, a white deer came forth, pale as the just-birthed orb between his antlers. He stepped slowly out of the corvid darkness once, then twice more, paused then came towering above her as she sat on the doorstep. How long he stood over her, gazing into her own eyes (she seemed to hear his heartbeat), she could not have said then, or ever. Nor could she have told what was passing through her mind or why. She began, however, to sing her orphan’s song. As slow and soft as that song, he inched closer and lowering that majestic head, nudged at her right palm, licking off the blood from it. She did not think it strange. She went on with her song until she no longer had any words, only the tune -- a serenade? a lullabye? Between these hummed verses, the creature disappeared again into the darkness and the wood.

One sole force drove her, more than a desire, more than a need: to sing to him as far into the wood as he might allow her to follow. She went forth into the snowy forest running and running to breathlessness, thinking that surely she would catch his hoary form against the raven trees. Finally, her frozen skirts slapping at her ankles limped her progress, numbness overtaking her legs. This, and the pain of the cold air in her lungs, brought her back to her right mind again and the understanding, more importantly still, that she was hunting something that was not to be hunted.

Crossing back over the threshold to her home, she stumbled over to the fire. She stripped down before the flames, drying and warming herself and saving her frozen feet. As she eased back into the chair she noticed her the plaster gone pristine white, entirely clear now of any trace of the dark mold. The play of her shadow against the pure wall turned inside out her chase of the pale beast through the dark wood.

Her dreams that midwinter’s night jumbled up past and present: cradled by fragments of melody, the little foundlings she sang to were somehow the tiny souls she had miscarried, and then bore their remains to the burial ground, dust to dust. The tombstones turned to trees, and she was running through the forest with bare feet tracking the deep snow when an arrow pierced her heart. She lay bleeding, until the swelling moon came into view between two high-branched antlers. The white buck she had been running after now pulled the arrow from her heart with its teeth as she arched in screaming pain and the beast licking once more at her wound until, under his gentle tongue-lapping, the wound closed up.

She awoke to an aching heart. Whether this were the melancholy of her dream or the memory of its wounding she could not tell. All the day long it held her fast in its grip and she could eat none of the bounty piled up in the pantry—persimmons, pears, and a single pomegranate.

The phantom numbness of her feet tripped her. So she layered on thick stockings and the dusty riding boots along with the coat and shawl and went out, grabbing the pomegranate from the table. Since she could not bring herself to consume anything, she took the fruit as an offering. She might as well make friends with them, she thought, if friends they could be. Returning to the doorstep, she sat down and tore open the red to the fleshy cushions around the seeds. The crows were there on the bough, watching her -for good or ill she could not figure. She plucked out one pale blood ruby, then another, and tossed them onto the settled snow. Soon the crows flew closer, still three, (a girl, a funeral) and took her offering, two with bravado and a last one, smaller, shy, finally came forth and pecked at the sweet jewels she tossed toward them.

The pomegranate regularly reappeared in the cupboard so that this became a ritual, even after her own appetite returned. The knocking never did, however, and the hart only in her dreams. But the feeding of the crows with the pomegranate kept up as the snowfall came steady and regular.

She would bring out books and read them in the wan sunlight and throw the pomegranate between two glances at whatever volume she had brought out. Today she realized she had brought out the family tree. Her finger followed the names and boughs of what she knew until she reached those vestigial lines that had been rubbed out from the mere pencil of their tracery, out on one far limb generations back. She stared at the ghostly grey and tried to make out the names, curious as to who, like herself, had been struck from the memory of the elect. The light was always too dim for success.

It was only one frozen day where the snow blazed brightly back the reflection of the sun that she could seem to make out some letters that slowly turned to syllables. As she puzzled through them, she heard her mouth repeating the sounds of the names that she had given her unborn children, the last for the daughter who had never drawn breath, her own hidden name. She threw the book from her with such force that it flew clear to the well and fell into its depths, a watery grave for the effaced and forgotten.

Then one cold morning she came out and found on the doorstep a topless acorn, a breadth of bone, a shard of glass. They were aligned along the flagstones. Her first thought raced to the knocking but then her eyes found the crows, not now perched upon the oak branch but themselves in a row near the bottom step. The bigger two squawked. That they were offerings in kind became clearer as the days passed: a silver ring recalled a full moon, then a bit of shell, though the sea was nowhere near. She imagined the tides she might never know and how they obeyed, she knew, the pull of that orb. A sliver of mirror recalled that newborn crescent shining between antlers. In waking hours, she struggled to believe it had happened at all. The daylight cast it only as a dream presage of the nightmare that had followed of miscarried children and an arrow through the heart.

This continued well past the breaking up of the snow into the first green buds shooting forth against a shy cerulean sky. The stag had not returned. Neither had her monthly blood courses.

Finally, from the crows there came with a small button in the form of a heart in mother of pearl, and a bit of ribbon which she took into her hand trembling. Pale blue and frayed, it ended cut into a “v” shape, and lay over the lines on her palm, cutting across life and heart.

END

“At the Edge of the Wood” first appeared in Shelter of Daylight, July 2023, Hiraeth Publishing (ed. Tyree Campbell). 

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