Inheritance

I must report the passing of Lady Inglewood, March 31^st 1880, two weeks prior now, due to a sudden and unexpected illness whose rapidity of onset was only exceeded by that of her decline. Had the doctors who were called arrived in time, there would have been little they could have offered her. The exact nature of her illness remains unknown, except that the household staff inform me it was preceded by a growing disturbance in her usual behavior and emotional equilibrium. Setting aside the issue of her demise, Inglewood’s estate, including the library and extensive collection of magical, legendary, or otherworldly artifacts, now lies in my possession.

There is much that I do now know about the Lady – including how she came to carry her title and acquire the means to her own independence. Eventually, I will read my way through her journals, which I am to understand begin in her childhood and were maintained until her passing. I am writing this entry in her journal, picking up where she left off, as per the terms of the inheritance.

News of Inglewood’s death shocked and saddened me. Many of my peers would be refuse to ascribe to me any such emotion or sensitivity. But the fact that I am the (sole) beneficiary did not surprise me. I was her student, and I have always understood myself to have been her only student. I was young – really still a child – having just arrived into womanhood, when I first came into her tutelage. I say “student”, but I suppose “apprentice” would be equally appropriate. My few encounters with her extended family suggested they considered me nothing more that an assistant to her eccentric preoccupations. The current state of affairs vindicate of my own understanding. Inglewood made no effort to spare me her disdain her relatives, or indeed much of the English upper classes.

We went on adventures – I really see no other way of describing them. They remain with me like vivid dreams, often the memories of them returning to me in actual dreams, and when I rouse myself from sleep the realization is not that it was all dream, but that it really had all happened. The places we went and creatures we saw were like nothing I have encountered since on Earth, certainly not here in England nor, despite my habit of reading the accounts of our greatest explorers, anywhere else. I have lived with these memories, but I have only just realized how unexamined these memories are.

I arrived here in a carriage with the three large trunks that contain all my worldly possessions strapped to the roof. As we entered the courtyard to the house I immediately recognized the Hillow tree. When I left two decades ago the tree must have been little more than a seedling. Now reaching what must be the early stages of maturity, it is in full blossom. As I hitched my skirt and stepped down onto the running board and then the gravel, I was hit by the full power of its scent. I should be grateful that I didn’t stumble and fall, so dizzy did the sudden rush of memories leave me; memories of that dark excursion in the Blessed Forest searching for the Sacred Grove. A new memory returned to me: Inglewood holding the acorn aloft, the fruit of months of study and legwork. I could feel again the sickening, unpleasant, distaste I had felt at that moment.

Arriving in the house, I found everything as I remembered it. The staff were as I remembered them, only older, and many have ascended in status. The butler used to be the hall boy. The library had been reorganized, but that is the most drastic change I have discovered so far. The silver astro-naughtical navigation tools Inglewood had once taught me to use were waiting for me, laid out in the study beside the maps and books. An invitation to strike out on my own.

I will take my own apprentice, someday. It is not among the conditions of this inheritance – which that awful attorney Gifford read out to me in his London office – but it is certainly in the spirit of it. I will adopt the title of Doctor, although no university in England will ever grant it to me. Such are my endeavors in science and scholarship that I have most certainly earned the title several times over, so I will feel no shame when I inform the household staff how they should refer to me. It will be no great loss to me to sever what few ties I have worked hard to establish within the academic associations that attracted my interest. There was such casual contempt for my contributions, and what little appreciation I received was insulting in its deficiency. I can only hope that the 20^th century, when it arrives, will bring upheaval and the end to these backwards attitudes.

I can smell the Hillow tree now, as I write this evening. The staff told me that this year the tree bloomed in quite extra-ordinary fashion, surely a sign of it reaching maturity. They did not say so explicitly, but they seemed to be inviting me to draw a connection to Lady Inglewood’s distemper preceding her illness. I did not realize it how much the scent permeates the house until they mentioned it.

I had not thought over our acquisition of those seeds in quite some time, and thinking about it unsettled me. I spent the last couple of days neglecting my new duties as the head of the household to search the basements. I found what I was looking for this morning, on my third day of searching. A large ball jar, like you might imagine keeping an unusually large amount of marmalade in. It was hidden away underneath a sheet on a very crowded shelf, forgotten, between two rather vulgar mahogany cabinets. I would never have thought to look were it not for the Hillow tree stirring up my memories. It certainly wasn’t listed on the inventory I was given. I wonder what else might be lurking in this house.

It is the potent property of Hillow blossom to reanimate memories. I know a poet, a rather supercilious fellow, who despite his casual attitudes nevertheless impressed me with his verse. He is a man whose eyebrows never seem to descend to a frown, and whose confidence far exceeded his actual charms. He described to me once, as we walked the Thames when I visited Oxford, that memories return to us like echos bouncing off the far depths of the caves of soul. I was rather taken by his imagery – no doubt better expressed than I recall it here – but I now feel like it was the wrong metaphor. Rather, I feel like memory is a large traveler's trunk, packed up for some kind of long voyage, crammed to the limits of its capacity. And the moment you start digging around in it, you will be turning up and pulling out far more than you anticipated.

Inglewood trained me to organize my memory: how to quickly memorize a map, learn a magic incantation, or recall precisely the back and forth of a classical dialogue on metaphysics. This all came into great effect in my scientific and scholarly endeavors, and allowed me to quickly impress the poet when I was able to recite back to him the twelve stanza poem he had just read out. But these tricks do not allow you to carefully store feelings, experiences, or epiphanies – all the things I now realize to have far greater value. And precisely the things I suspect the scent of the Hillow tree stirs up.

The techniques of memorization I was taught were tricks, allowing me to collect up facts, curios, bibelots, and string them all together like beads. There is no implication or consequence to anything memorized in this way. Nothing to reconsider. This journal I am writing in now is a different kind of memory – one that is easy to ignore. Reading it will reveal more than its owner expected to covey. The ball jar sitting at the end of my writing desk testifies to an even more complicated and difficult kind of memory.

There was a leather strap that Inglewood used to hold the jar aloft as she led us through the the hallowed forest. The strap is missing now, as is the light that once poured forth from it.

The actual name of the Hallowed Forest belonged to an ancient language I never learned. “Hallowed” was Inglewood’s loose approximation to its actual significance. I know now that “cursed” may well have been a more suitable for trees and the void that wove among them. Last night I dreamed of Inglewood and myself deep in that cursed forest. We were lost in the darkness, but Inglewood had come prepared. When she pulled the jar out from her bag, it was bound tightly in cloth. As she unwrapped it, beams of light throbbed out, piercing the darkness. This alarmed me, aware that we were provoking the forest. When it was completely unwrapped and my eyes adjusted, I found the jar’s aura was like standing in daylight, and I could see the tiny winged figure trapped inside. A sprite, Inglewood explained.

“How does it breathe,” I had asked, knowing such ball jars to be airtight.

Inglewood laughed and explained that sprites were not animals that needed to breathe, but more like an embodiment of magic, mischief, and secrets.

“But won’t it starve in there,” I asked again, clearly not understanding the point Inglewood had just made.

“No. It will not starve. Or Suffocate. Or die. Maybe you need to give the jar a little shake to reinvigorate it every couple of decades or so. Just to pep it up.” The pixie seemed to have no lack of pep as it threw itself, wings buzzing, furiously against the side of the jar. As if to illustrate the point Inglewood shook the jar violently in front of me and the glow intensified furiously. “This is our guide through the forest to the sacred grove. This sprite knows the way.”

Even with our reluctant guide, our hike was long and I did not enjoy it. As we rested I remembered staring up through the treetops into the sky of strange stars.

“Are you going to free it when we are done?” I asked, trying to sound plainly curious, inquiring as I might about a certain herb we had just picked, or a map we were consulting. And not like I was upset.

Inglewood turned to face me, a cold determination in her face. “Of course not. That would be a silly and sentimental waste. You should learn to shun sentimentality.”

Or at least that is how I remember the exchange. She may have said more and said it differently. What I cannot remember is how, after the jar was wrapped up again and set away in her bad, my concern for the creature moved slowly to the back of my mind, and eventually forgotten.

At the time I considered what happened to be a singular and horrifying experience. But now I understand that such casual cruelty and secrets are quite common. I think of the house staff who I always assumed to be cheerfully oblivious to the adventures that Inglewood took me off on. But now I wonder at what they might have turned a blind eye to.

Now I have a final discovery to make. Was I lied to as well? Inside the jar, if you peer through all the grime that has built up inside, you can see a set of delicate wings and the desiccated rag of a tiny body. As I carefully carried the jar up here to the study, I thought about what Inglewood had told me. To discover the truth, all I have to do is give the jar a shake.