They were bad men, and they grew worse as the war worsened and the coal ran dry. They burned through their own profits and dug deep into my mother’s coffers. They drank more and slept less. They came to resent every bite of food I ate at their table, every stale crust I slipped into the birdcage, and they punished me for it.
My father was the worst of them, if only because he was the oldest, and had six more years of practice in cruelty. I took to sleeping as many hours as I could, wrapping myself in dreams of teeth and blood, blades and arsenic. I was sleeping when my uncle came to tell me my father had drowned.
I didn’t do it. Half the town suspected me, and I almost wish they were right—I assure you he deserved it—but the other half of Eden blamed the miners. The mist had risen that night, and when it cleared my father was dead, and there were no more slaves in Eden.
I did not mourn my father, of course. My uncle John stood beside me at the graveside, twisting the flesh at the backs of my arms so viciously it was purple and green the following morning, but I refused to shed a single tear for him. Maybe that’s when the rumors began, about that cold, strange Gravely girl.I heard she killed him,they whispered.I heard she only smiled once, when the first shovel of dirt hit her father’s coffin lid.
If I had been smiling, I soon stopped. In the absence of a will I inherited my father’s remaining fortune, which had belonged first to my mother, and should have belonged to me. But, as I was not yet of age, my circumstances changed very little except that my guardianship transferred from one bad man to another.
John Gravely was the second-oldest brother, and the second-meanest. I thought I might at least survive him, but slowly I became aware that he was watching me more closely than he used to. He studied me as if I were a difficult equation that needed solving. He asked me twice when my birthday was, and drummed his fingers restlessly on the table each time I answered.
That night I counted on my fingers and realized I would turn eighteen in twenty-three days. And on that date my money would be my own, and my uncles would have nothing but a few failing mines, a filthy birdcage, and a wealthy niece who no longer belonged to them. I was a songbird in a den of foxes, and they were so hungry.
I thought he might poison me, or drown me. I thought he might lock me away until I signed everything over to him and his brother, or have me shipped off to an asylum. He wouldn’t even have had to bribe the physicians; I was quite unwell by then. I chewed at my own lips until they scabbed. I never brushed my hair. I no longer sang to the little black birds, but only spoke to them in hoarse, mad whispers. I slept and slept, because even nightmares were preferable to reality.
My uncle John did not poison me or lock me up. He came to a different solution, one which I berated myself for failing to anticipate. It was, after all, the same solution that occurred to my father when he met my mother. He was a poor man and a bad one, and she was a wealthy woman and a weak one; what could be easier, or more obvious?
But, at seventeen, I must still have possessed some childish, idiot faith in the rules of society. Yes, they were bad men. Yes, I had heard the weeping from the mines and seen my uncles return from the cabins late at night. But that was different, that wasallowed.I was a young white woman of good breeding, and I still believed there were some lines they would not cross.
So when my uncle John summoned me to breakfast one morning and told me I was not to call him Uncle any longer, I didn’t understand. He picked up my left hand and shoved a cheap tin ring on my second-smallest finger, and I still didn’t understand. I felt heavy and strange, as if I was sleeping. I looked at my uncle Robert, the youngest and least cruel of the Gravely men, and saw the look of faint disgust on his face, and only then did I understand.
Our engagement was announced in three separate papers. My name was listed differently in each one. Eleanor Grand, Eleanor Gallows, Eleanor Gaunt. Perhaps my uncles thought it would help people convince themselves they’d heard my name wrong.That girl was never a Gravely,they could tell themselves.She must have been a foundling, an orphan, some stranger we let into our midst.
Because that’s what they did, of course. They didn’t march up to our big white house and drag my uncle John into the streets. They didn’t damn him or castigate him or even take away his place in the first pew at church. They simply told themselves a different story, one that was easier to believe because they’d heard it before: Once there was a bad woman who ruined a good man. Once there was a witch who cursed a village. Once there was an odd, ugly girl whom everyone hated, because it was safe to hate her.
I kept waiting for someone to object, but the most I got was a pitying glance from the neighbors’ maid, an awkward grimace from my uncle Robert. Everyone else drew away from me, like hands from a hot coal. They averted their eyes from evil and, in so doing, became complicit in it. I watched my uncles’ sin spread over the town like night falling, and finally understood that no one was going to save me.
So, on the morning of my wedding, I took my father’s birdcage into the woods behind Gravely Manor and opened the door. A rush of iridescent feathers and clever black eyes, a few piercing trills, and they were gone. I didn’t know if they’d survive out in the wild, but I’d grown too fond of them to leave them alone with my uncles.
I chose two stones, smooth and heavy, and slipped them into my skirt pockets. Then I walked down to the riverside.
I would have done it, if I hadn’t met the boatman. A hare, I called him later, because he had a sly, sideways manner of regarding a person. He stopped me, and then he listened to me, and then he gave me an even greater gift: he told me how my father died. He told me Hell was real, and so were its demons.
I did not walk into the river that day, after all. I went back to the big white house on the hill and let them dress me in white lace and ribbons. I let my uncle Robert walk me down the aisle of the empty church. I could not make myself say the words, but I let my new husband kiss me, his lips damp and thin.
I don’t remember the rest of the day, but I remember the light changing: noon to dusk, dusk to twilight, twilight to night. My uncle John stood up from the dinner table and held out his hand, as if I would take it, as if I would follow him to his bed like a sow to slaughter.
I ran. He followed.
He followed me to his own mine, and hesitated at the edge of the dark. I heard him calling after me, cajoling, pleading, cursing, demanding, but I did not stop. I went down, and down, and down.
I found the river. I drank the smallest sip, like the boatman told me, and fell into Underland. And there were the creatures from my nightmares, animals made of teeth and claws, fury and justice. They looked at me as if they’d been waiting for me. I wept with joy, with terror, with awful love. I told them about my uncle and showed them the ring on my finger, and they ran into the darkness. When they returned, their muzzles were wet and red. I wiped them clean with the muddy hem of my wedding dress. Then I slept, at peace.
I woke up at the bottom of the river. I crawled to the shore, retching, coughing. I was too frightened to return to the mines—what if it had all been a lovely dream? what if my uncle was still alive, calling for me?—but the boatman had told me there was another way out. A natural cave that twisted up to a sinkhole on the north side of town. I didn’t know till later it was on Gravely land.
It was a hard climb back to the surface. By the time I saw the sun again my palms were raw and my dress was ragged. I crawled out into the dusking light and lay in the wet grass. I saw five birds cross the sky above me. All birds are black at that hour, but I decided they were my birds. Starlings, my father had called them, purchased only because he liked the look of caged things. But they were free now, and so was I.
They say I was laughing when they found me. I don’t recall. I don’t recall much of the court proceedings, either. All of it felt mystical to me, a series of rituals that led to my own metamorphosis. I had been a nameless little girl, and now I was a rich widow. I had been trapped, and now I was not.
I could have gone anywhere in the world, do you know that? I could have run away from Eden and lived off my mother’s stolen fortune until I forgot the sound of the river above and the taste of the river below. But I stayed. God help me, I stayed.
As my uncle’s widow, I had a claim on Gravely land. I let Uncle Robert skulk off with the more valuable half—the mines and the big house—but I kept the acreage on the north side of the river. They made out the deed to my married name first, but the sight of it sickened me, so I tore it up and had them write another.To my maiden name,I said.Eleanor Starling.The name tasted clean in my mouth.
I hired an architect as soon as the deed was signed. I’d never had a home, you see. My mother and I had moved from rented room to wayhouse, dodging rumors and surviving on what little my father left us, and the white house on the hill was merely a place I couldn’t leave. So I built myself everything I’d ever dreamed I would have: drawing rooms and ballrooms, libraries and parlors, hallways full of doors that only I could unlock.
It was more than a home, of course. It was a labyrinth, with the way to Underland at its heart, and high stone walls all around. I couldn’t tell you whether I was more terrified that someone would find their way down there, or that something would come crawling out. All I know is that I dreamed of the Beasts every night, their teeth stained with my uncle’s blood, and that I was often woken by the noises I made in my sleep. I could never tell if I’d been laughing or screaming.
I thought I would be happy there. I had a name and a home of my own, and enough money to keep both for as long as I lived. But instead I was a ghost haunting my own house. I wondered sometimes if I’d drowned that night, and just didn’t know it.
