Theodora Goss

It’s night in the Shadowlands. I thought I would sketch for you three portraits, of Mrs. Moth, Miss Lavender, and Miss Gray, so you know what they look like as we gather around the dinner table, or around the parlor fire after dinner. And I thought I would indicate for you, as well, what sorts of being they are, because they are most certainly not like you and me. (Assuming of course that you’re like me. Which you may not be, I don’t know.)

Let’s start with Mrs. Moth. I can’t tell you how old she is. She looks as though she might be a grandmother, but I know she participated in the Eleusinian mysteries, and she describes the armies of Alexander vividly. Her first name is Nemesis, and I’ve asked Hyacinth if she is the Nemesis, but Hyacinth has just said, “We all serve Mother Night in our own ways,” which is exactly the sort of answer you would expect Miss Gray to give. In fact, I’m convinced she got it from Miss Gray. I think it’s safe to surmise that once, long ago, Mrs. Moth was one of the minor Greek deities, which were worshiped not in the cities but in the countryside, where people felt the vicissitudes of fate particularly strongly.

What does she look like? She’s short and plump, and has gray hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head. She looks very kind, unless you skip a class (even to save the world) or it’s obvious that you only started practicing your transformations the night before. And then beware Mrs. Moth!

Miss Lavender is just the opposite, tall and thin, although she also has a bun of gray hair – but much less tidy. Whereas Mrs. Moth is round, she is angular, all bones. She has a long nose and chin, and she looks a little frightening, like a picture of a stereotypical witch. But she is actually by far the more lenient of the two. If you explain to her, very clearly, that you skipped class because you, Tilda, Emmie, and Mouse needed to save the world, she will allow you to make up your homework.

As I think I’ve mentioned, Hyacinth told me that she was once a priestess of Mother Night, in ancient Rome. I don’t know how she went from being a priestess to being a headmistress, but her school seems to have existed at different times, under different names, for most of modern history. (If you count anything after Rome as modern, which is what Miss Lavender taught us in Magical History II.)

And now we come to Miss Gray, who is truly an enigma. “How old is Miss Gray, do you think?” I once asked Hyacinth.

“As old as time,” she said. “Do you know what existed, even before the ancient gods and goddesses?”

“No,” I said.

“The powers of nature. Before there were people to create gods in their image, there were the trees, and the rocks, and the waters. And they had their own powers, emanations of their own consciousness. Miss Gray is one of those.”

She doesn’t look that old. She has very neat black hair in a sort of page-boy (a haircut I think she’s had since the 1920s), and gray eyes, and a small nose. And I have to say, she has a great figure. (She would be very easy to fall in love with. If you dared fall in love with someone like Miss Gray.) If you tell her that you need to leave right now, to save the world, she would look at you disapprovingly, and then point toward the door. “Oh, all right,” she would say. “If you must, you must.”

Mrs. Moth always looks comfortable; Miss Lavender often looks windblown, as though she had dressed in a hurricane; Miss Gray just looks proper. You can’t imagine her wearing anything inappropriate, ever. Tonight she has on gray wool slacks, a silk blouse with a lace collar, and a brooch at her throat. Mrs. Moth has on a brown linen dress with a cardigan over it, and a rather large set of pearls that you would think are false, but aren’t. Miss Lavender has on a pair of faded jeans and a sort of short cotton kimono that she uses for gardening; she was obviously out in the garden and forgot to change.

(Where did Miss Lavender come from, you ask? She just showed up for dinner, walking through the front door and saying, “I’m sorry, am I late?” Sometimes I wonder how she runs a school, but it’s Mrs. Moth who does the accounts, and Miss Lavender really is a brilliant teacher. And brilliant at dealing with parents, even impossible ones like Mrs. Gaunt.)

So it’s Mrs. Moth, Miss Lavender, Miss Gray, Hyacinth, me, and of course Mouse (about whom more later), now sitting by the parlor fire drinking coffee, tea, or sherry. But I’m told that later in the week we will have a dinner party.

And who am I, writing this? My shadow self, Thea rather than Dora, who is similar in many ways but quite different in others. It’s nice to know that while one of me is sitting in a house near Boston, Massachusetts, the other of me is having an after-dinner drink (yes, I chose the sherry) with some of the most interesting beings I know, who are at the moment discussing how Tilda, Emmie, Mouse, and I saved the world. I mean, the first time.

If you’ve read any interviews with me, you’ll know that one of my favorite writers is Isak Dinesen. And one of my favorite essays is her “On Mottoes of My Life.”

When I was young, a teenager, I had a green book in which I wrote down memorable quotations. (Which was, I now realize, an activity popular in the nineteenth century, not so much in the twentieth.) I don’t have that book anymore, I don’t know what happened to it. But there are three quotations from it that I remember distinctly.

The first one was from Dinesen, a motto that she chose for herself as a teenager, and it was this: “Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.” Evidently, this is a quotation from Pompey, who used it to urge his sailors on when they refused to set sail on a stormy sea, to bring grain from Africa to Rome. It means, literally, “It is necessary to sail, it is not necessary to live.” Meaning, it is necessary to set off, even if you’re not at all sure that you’re ever going to arrive. I’ve used this motto several times in my life, to urge myself on to something when I was afraid that I would never actually succeed at it. It was a more elegant way of saying to myself, “For goodness’s sake, just start.”

The next quotation I remember from my book is the following:

“Sail, sayeth the King. Hold, sayeth the wind.”

In other words, all the political powers of the world can command, but they cannot countermand the power of nature itself, or of whatever power lies beyond nature. The power, whether natural or supernatural, that creates our fates, that gives shape and purpose to our lives, that so often allows or does not allow us to set sail.

And the third and final quotation is as follows:

“When two thieves meet, they need no introduction. They recognize each other without question.”

Which I take to mean that people who are in some sense fundamentally alike, not on the surface but underneath, recognize and respond to each other. When I’ve met people who have later become close friends, I have almost immediately known that they were somehow, underneath, like me. And the friendship naturally followed. (Thieves: I have never stolen anything in my life. But thieves are outsiders who observe society, and in that way, writers are also like thieves. And we do steal, don’t we? Not material possessions, but the expressions on people’s faces, place names, particular slants of light, even lines from other writers.)

When Dinesen was in Africa, she took as her motto “Je responderay,” “I will answer,” from the family crest of her lover, Denys Finch-Hatton. Of it, she writes,

“I liked this old motto so much that I asked Denys, an earlier pioneer in African than myself – although all we settlers who had come out before the war looked upon ourselves as one family, a kind of Mayflower people – if I might have it for my own. He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular.

“The first of these was its high valuation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue – you may stroke them or you may strike them, you will get no more echo from them than from a block of wood. And how, then, can you yourself go on speaking?”

I think she’s right; I’ve had many conversations in my life that were double monologues. The person who can hear you and respond to you, that is a precious thing. That is a friend, a fellow-thief.

In her essay, Dinesen writes about losing the farm in Africa, about the death of Finch-Hatton in an airplane crash. That was when she started writing her Seven Gothic Tales. Although she had always told stories: I think of her telling stories to Finch-Hatton, when he would come to her farm after leading a safari – creating characters and plots for her lover, like a more fortunate Scheherazade. In her tumultuous life, it was probably useful to be able to hold on, as a sailor might hold on to a floating spar, to a motto such as “Navigare necesse est” or “Je responderay.”

I hope I choose my mottoes as wisely.

I haven’t told you Hyacinth’s story.

Once upon a time, in the town of Ashton, North Carolina, there was a sweet old woman named Mrs. Randolph. She had gray hair pulled back into a tidy bun, and she went to the Methodist church every Sunday. Her husband had died about ten years before, and every Sunday, after church, she would go to his grave and leave flowers or autumn leaves, whatever was growing that season. She knitted hats for the children of her poorer neighbors, and brought cakes and pies to church functions.

On weekdays, she was a mad scientist.

Her husband had been a lawyer, and while he was alive, she had been an ordinary wife, taking care of the house and helping, in whatever way she could, to run his law office. After he died of a heart attack at a relatively young age (for which we should not blame her cakes and pies, for he was hopelessly addicted to tobacco), she began to wonder what she should do with herself. And then she remembered what had most interested her as a girl: science, but specifically botany.

Mrs. Randolph sold the large house she had shared with her husband and purchased a much smaller one at the edge of town. Although it was smaller, her new house had a large garden. And that was where she started to grow plants. All sorts of plants, common garden plants, rare plants that she collected from the fields and forests, from beside streams. But all of her plants had something in common: medicinal properties. Of course, the medicine is the dose, and some of the plants she grew were quite poisonous.

So, if you were living in the 1870s or so, and you happened to pass through Ashton, North Carolina, you might see a sweet old woman working in her garden, with a straw hat on her head and a wool shawl around her shoulders. It would be Mrs. Randolph gathering nightshade and henbane.

As her knowledge increased and her experiments became more ambitious, she converted most of the kitchen into a laboratory. Plants hung, drying, from the rafters. On a long marble table, she would grind up her dried plants and turn them into powders. Many of those she shipped to places where such things were in demand, earning herself a small income. (For instance, in the 1870s and 80s Miss Lavender’s School had a standing order for a number of substances useful for chemistry classes.) When the postmaster asked her, smiling, what she was sending to Boston and New York and even faraway places like San Francisco, she would smile back and tell him that she was sending cookies and her famous pound cake to relatives.

(It is suspected that she supplied the pharmacy from which an English gentleman, a Dr. Jekyll, purchased certain chemical powders in the late 1870s, but I have been unable to confirm that possibility. The pharmacy ceased ordering from her for a period of several months, thinking that it could obtain its powders more cheaply from a supplier in Prague, but began ordering from her again when it was found that the powders from Prague were merely barley sugar.)

She was very good at what she did, and she offered refunds if her products were not completely satisfactory, which was unusual in those days. So she was very busy. That’s why she finally decided that she needed an assistant. It never occurred to her to ask one of the young women in Ashton to help with her chemical experiments. No, it would never do for anyone to know that the respectable Mrs. Randolph was practicing mad science. So, in what is perhaps her greatest scientific feat, she created an assistant: Hyacinth.

How strange it must have been, to wake up on Mrs. Randolph’s marble table. There you were, growing peacefully in the soil, a pleasantly scented but otherwise unremarkable Hyacinthus Albus, and then there you were, a girl. Hyacinth still smells very nice, without any perfume. I’ve told her that if I could bottle her, I wouldn’t need to check my bank account before I buy a new winter coat. I could buy as many winter coats as I wanted!

She was a very good assistant, and Mrs. Randolph soon came to treat her, and think of her, as a daughter. But human beings die, and for all her mad science (which did keep her both living and looking remarkably young long past the century mark), Mrs. Randolph eventually succumbed to old age, as all of us do in the Shadowlands. Unless we are magical creatures, like Hyacinth. After Mrs. Randolph’s death, Hyacinth wrote to Mrs. Moth, informing her of what had happened. The next day, Miss Gray stepped through the front door (although, a minute ago, she had not been on the other side). She said, “Hyacinth, I’m so sorry for your loss. Mrs. Moth would like to offer you a position as her assistant.” And that’s what Hyacinth became. That’s what she was when I met her, at Miss Lavender’s School, although she also taught chemistry classes.

It’s been a while since I graduated, but she still looks the same: slender, as though she were seventeen or eighteen, with short, curling blond hair, skin of an almost translucent pallor, and green eyes. If you look closely, you’ll notice that her veins, beneath the skin, are also green.

And she’s really very nice. She’s the one who always helped us when we couldn’t figure out our schedules, or when we had boy problems, or when we really desperately needed to get off campus to save the world or something. (Can you imagine talking to Miss Gray about boy problems? As if.)

So, we started with me taking the train to the town where Mrs. Moth’s house is located.  (I can’t tell you its name, because she doesn’t like visitors stopping by without an invitation. If you want to make an appointment, you can contact Miss Lavender’s School. Both Miss Lavender and Mrs. Moth are available for tours and admissions interviews during the semester.) The house is really on the outskirts of town, which is why Miss Emily Gray and Hyacinth picked me up in Miss Gray’s beat-up old car. But I can bike into town from here as well. There are a couple of bicycles in the shed.

Once I arrived, Hyacinth took me to my room, and that’s when I sat down to my computer to tell you the story of the last time I’d been to visit Mrs. Moth, when I got lost on the way to the kitchen and found myself in the Other Country with Cordelia the Annoying Cat. There I met Mother Night, and the Gentleman (who is Mother Night’s – boyfriend? what do you call the guy who hangs out with the creator of the universe?), and Morgan and Merlin. And afterward I told you the story Hyacinth had told me, about how Merlin lost his heart. But just to be clear, all that happened during my last visit.

I’ve visited the Other Country twice now. The first time was on a school field trip. We all go there as juniors, right around the time we decide whether we want to continue our magical studies in a serious way or go to a regular old college. You know me, I went to a regular old college. It’s exciting being a witch and all, walking through walls, transforming yourself into any form you please, advising the president. But I had always wanted to be a writer. (Matilda Tillinghast is the only one of us who went on to become a full-time witch. Emma Gaunt is a Vice-President of Gaunt Enterprises, and Mouse is Miss Gray’s assistant.)

Sorry, give me a minute. Cordelia wants to be let in.

We don’t choose our cats. Our cats choose us. Matilda has a perfectly lovely gray Persian who is never cross and is ridiculously competent. I don’t think she would be as effective a witch without that cat. But I was stuck with Cordelia. Sometimes I think her only magical trait is sarcasm. It rises to the level of the positively supernatural. It’s a good thing she can’t read this – except now she’s looking over my shoulder and says that of course she can read it perfectly well, thank you, and that I am an ungrateful – I’m not going to repeat that. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to find a mouse on my pillow, aren’t I?

Where was I? Sitting here, late at night, after an excellent dinner cooked by Mrs. Moth – some sort of beef stew with lots of root vegetables, thick slices of brown bread with fresh butter (which I like to salt), and apple pie for dessert. This evening it was just Mrs. Moth, Miss Gray, Hyacinth, and me, but tomorrow Mouse is going to be here as well. I haven’t seen her for ages. From where I’m sitting at the desk, typing into the computer, I can see out the window of the tower room into the dark night. Time to draw the curtains (although I always leave them a little open, to let the dawn come in). There’s a fire in the fireplace, and I’m going to sit and read a book. (Maybe T.H. White’s Once and Future King, at least the first part, before it gets all sad.)

It’s nice being here, even though we’re in the Shadowlands. But the Shadowlands have their own charm, you know. It’s nice to see seasons, watch time flow, people learn and age. Even death has a strange beauty, although not as strange as the beauty of the Other Country, where leaves never fall and nothing ever dies.

I wonder what adventures I’ll have this time?

Being here in Virginia makes me wonder to what extent I am a Southern writer. I grew up in Maryland and Virginia, so technically I spent most of my life in the South. And coming back here always feels like a homecoming. It’s as though the air itself feels right. It has a particular softness that the air does not have in the Northeast. I have never felt quite at home in Boston, and although I write about Boston and New York, I do so as though they were foreign countries.

I’ve written a number of stories set in the South: “Sleeping with Bears,” “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm,” “Lily, with Clouds,” “Lessons with Miss Gray.” Two of those are set in the town of Ashton, North Carolina, which is loosely based on Asheville. And I have a whole series of mysteries in mind, the Darcy Chase mysteries if I ever get to write them, that will be based in Charlottesville (which is where I am now). On the other hand, since I’ve been here, I’ve been writing bits and pieces of a new story to be called “Elena’s Egg,” which is set in a UEEC (unidentified Eastern European country). And I have book series I want to set in London and Boston.

So where do I belong? Nowhere and everywhere, I suppose, both as a writer and as just me, the person who lived all over the place all her life, Budapest and Milan and Brussels and Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville and Boston and New York. But I’d like to come back down here – down South – again. If I belong anywhere, I think I belong somewhere around here, between these mountains and the sea. It’s a beautiful place with a troubled past, accepting of artistic eccentricity – a little like Hungary, actually.  A good place to create the writing life that I want so very much. And I have more stories to write about the South – when I have time.

The writer in the South (or a possible Southern writer):

Mrs. Moth’s house is based in part on houses I’ve seen in books, altered by my imagination. But it’s also based in part on the house I’m in now, which is out of sight of the road, set behind a circular drive. It’s in the middle of pastures, and out back there is a forest. To one side there is a garden with a fountain in it. And it’s gray, although gray wood rather than gray stone.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. What I’m writing about is a strange coincidence. I was looking for a book to read, and in the upstairs library I found Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I thought, why not try it, find out what the fuss is about? I can always put it down after a couple of pages. But I liked it, actually. There were stylistic infelicities, I felt them sometimes as I read through the sentences, but I could overlook those. I liked the texture of the book, the level of detail, the Swedish place names that sounded like names from a fantasy novel. At least, I like those things so far. I’ve only read about a hundred pages. But on one of those pages, I read the following description of a man I’ve already decided is a villain, Hans-Erik Wennerström:

“He created Wennerströmgruppen, the Wennerström Group, when they set up offices in London and New York and the company started to get mentioned in the same articles as Beijer. He traded stocks and options and liked to make quick deals, and he emerged in the celebrity press as one of Sweden’s numerous billionaires with a city home on Strandsvägen, a fabulous summer villa on the island of Värmö, and an eighty-two-foot motor yacht that he bought from a bankrupt former tennis star. He was a bean counter, naturally, but the eighties was the decade of the bean counters and property speculators, and Wennerström had not made a significantly big splash. On the contrary, he had remained something of a man in the shadows among his peers. He lacked Jan Stenbeck’s flamboyance and did not spread himself all over the tabloids like Percy Barnevik.”

And at that point I thought, wait, what did I just read? Because I’ve met Jan Stenbeck. He’s a large man, with blond hair down to his collar, and when I met him, he was wearing what was obviously a very expensive watch. I was a corporate lawyer, an associate with a firm in Boston that handled the legal work for some of his American media companies. At that point, I was flying down to New York regularly, to spend the day at his headquarters doing any legal work that needed to be done. I only met him once, and I remember that he threw a pen in my general direction. (I think he was returning it to me, but either he was not very good at throwing or I was not very good at catching.)

It was a useful encounter, for a writer. If I ever need to write a Swedish billionaire, or indeed any sort of billionaire, I now have a sense of what one might be like. I have a sense of how one walks, how one takes up space in a room (which is quite different from how anyone else walks or takes up space). Remembering that incident reinforced something I’ve been feeling lately: how incredibly lucky I’ve been so far to have had a life that is sometimes tumultuous, but that brings me into constant contact with interesting things, with Swedish billionaires and the streets of Budapest and the pastures of Virginia horse country, so I can incorporate all those things in my writing. (There was a time in my life when, strangely, I kept seeing Lani Guinier on the subway. I still remember the way she leaned into the seat, looking out the window.)

I suppose in a way this post is a continuation of my previous one, about living fully and intensely. Except that there I was talking about deliberately experiencing for the purpose of writing, and here I’m talking about those odd coincidences, those experiences you never expect to have, but that just seem to happen. And despite the tumultuousness (which continues, and which sometimes I wish I could have less of), I’m grateful that my life seems to be particularly rich in those.

It seems a silly question. We go to the museum to look at art, to learn about it, to gain pleasure from it. But I think going to the museum is particularly important for writers. It’s part of a writer’s training, in a sense, to experience as much as possible and to store what is experienced away, not as though doing research, but storing it in the mind so that what is most important is retained. The sheen on a particular piece of glass, for example. Because we create a sense of reality by describing our fantasies as though they were real, and in order to do that we need to draw from what is real, from our experiences. That’s why monsters are hybrids: we always draw from and recombine reality, and so our fantastical creatures are recombinations.

But in order to do that, in order to describe our fantasies as precisely as possible, we need to have experienced reality widely and fully, and to (this is where it’s not like research) have incorporated it into ourselves. The sheen of that glass needs to become a part of me, a part of my mental equipment so that when I describe a vase in Mother Night’s house, the image comes to me naturally. I write this because when we teach writing workshops, we talk so often about technique, about what the writer should do on paper. But part of being a writer involves working on the self. It involves filling the self with sights and sounds and smells, going to the museum, to the theater, to other countries, trying strange foods. And it involves doing those things consciously, paying attention.

Every fall, I teach my students Walter Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the Renaissance. What I’m talking about here is not so different from what Pater is talking about: he says that we need to experience each moment fully, to live with a certain passionate intensity that involves continual curiosity, observation. Of course, Pater wants us to do so because someday we will die – we are all condemned to death but with an indefinite reprieve, as he tells us – and he wants us to burn with the famous “gemlike flame,” to come as close to eternity as mortal beings can by living, fully living, every moment. My argument here is more instrumental: the writer should live fully, intensely, experiencing art, food, customs and beliefs, in order to create convincing dreams and visions. So that we can participate in the activity of creation, which is in the end a sort of collaborative activity (Vincent Van Gogh and Henry James both help me, for example), and which is, I believe, the activity that makes us most fully human.

Portraits of the writer, about to go the VMFA and within that temple of rose-red-colored stone (not quite half as old as time):