Cygnet Czarinas
Jon Jacks
Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks
The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly
The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale
A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)
The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator
Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666
P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque
Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)
Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent
Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak
Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife
Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland
The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens
Text copyright© 2016 Jon Jacks
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Chapter 1
July – and it was snowing in London.
Sandy had never seen anything like it. Had never heard of anything like it.
No, she had seen snow like this, had heard of it: but that was only in paintings or tales of the destruction of Napoleon’s Grande Armée by the Russian winter.
Naturally, being unprepared for such an abrupt and unexpected change in the weather, she wasn’t dressed for it. Her clothes weren’t as ridiculously delicate as most women wore these days, with their ridiculously wide skirts, their bustles – being a painter, Sandy had to be more circumspect, more Bohemian as some would have it, in her choice of clothes – and yet the cold wind was still cutting her to the bone.
Reaching up, she brought the lapels of her jacket together around her neck; yet it made little difference, for the freezing gusts wormed their way into any gaps in her clothing. It was a wind so cold it painfully constricted her chest, her throat, taking her breath away even as it froze her mouth and eyes almost stiffly firm. Worse still, her long skirt was rapidly soaking up the snow on the ground, becoming heavier and colder with every step she took.
And how dangerous were those steps! Thankfully, she wore a decent pair of boots beneath that long, drenched skirt, rather than the dainty little things ladies were supposed to prefer: even so, she precariously slipped on the snow every now and again.
The abrupt evaporation of heat from everywhere about her body staggered her, weakened her. Suddenly, she could hardly walk, fruitlessly struggling for both air and the necessary warmth to keep her muscles supple and responsive.
There was no one else out on the street to help her, despite it being early evening. But she was passing an impressively large white house that was ablaze with light, the sounds of music and laughter seeping out through the larger windows of the ground floor.
Grasping hold of the wrought iron railings fronting the house (thank goodness she had adopted the fashion for wearing gloves! In this cold, bare flesh would have simply frozen to the metal), Sandy used them as a support as she turned into the drive. She similarly used the tops of the low, neatly cut hedges flanking the path to stop herself from falling as she stumbled towards the door.
A narrow porch gave her some respite from the agonising bite of the freezing wind. Even so, she could hardly raise her hand and arm high enough to reach the door’s brass knocker, hardly muster the strength to force it down hard enough to be heard over the music still coming from inside.
Fortunately, the door had been improperly closed after the arrival of the last guest: and so as Sandy leant exhaustedly against it, it swung open – and she fell inside the doorway, lying half in, half out of the welcoming warmth of the hallway.
*
Although she was still partially lying within the snow, the relative warmth of the hallway helped Sandy slowly revive and recover at least a modicum of strength.
Still a little dazed, a little confused, she rose unsteadily to her feet. She was surprised that she was still on her own, that no one had come to the door: even if no one had heard her knocking, surely a servant passing through the hallway from room to room might have discovered her?
The hallway was as large as many an artisan’s cottage, an area of ornate chairs and half-tables set against the walls, the latter decorated with large vases of elaborately arranged flowers. Doors led off from either side, while a graceful oak staircase wound its way up to other floors.
Although the hallway itself was deathly quiet, muffled music and laughter came from beyond an immense pair of closed, heavily ornamented doors to her right. Sandy began to hesitantly step farther into the hallway, raising her head and politely calling out, hoping to explain her intrusion to anyone on another, quieter floor who might have seen or heard her cumbersome entrance.
‘Hello?’
As she called out, the immense doors to her side violently swung open with a thud and an immediate raising of the volume of the music and chatter. A handsome young couple excitedly barged through the doors, almost as if caught still dancing around the floor.
The pair drew to an instant halt, their chuckling and giggling fading away as they gawped in surprise at this bedraggled young woman standing just ahead of them.
It wasn’t just Sandy’s relatively drab, snow-soaked clothes that made them stare. It was the fact that Sandy too was staring open mouthed, her eyes wide with awe, even a near state of bliss.
She wasn’t staring directly at the couple – despite the man’s resplendent uniform, the young girl’s richly embroidered gown – for they were effectively dwarfed within the entrancing scene framed by the soaring doorway.
A vast and wildly coloured ballroom stretched seemingly endlessly beyond them, lit by countless candles, the light and rainbow tones infinitely reflected by glittering chandeliers and towering mirrors.
Naturally, Sandy wasn’t impressed by grand living, by the preposterous world inhabited by the wealthy.
And yet the scene before her not only had a sense of an entry into heaven about it, but also somehow promised a tantalising glimpse of an otherworld reality, the otherwise imaginary realms that her elder brother and his friends were attempting to capture within their paintings; the world of myths, of Arthur’s chivalric kingdom.
The colours here were exactly the same bright and sparkling shades as those they were trying to bring to life in their paintings, the mingling of mediaeval pageantry with the untouched, pure tints of an uncorrupted nature.
And yes, burgeoning green stems and clumps of the brightest of berries curled everywhere about the delicately plummeting chandeliers, the impressively ascending ceiling, as if the room had benefited from Nature’s own input into its design and creation.
Most amazingly of all, however, was an ethereal light, a glossy, silvery moon-like glow emanating from the very centre of the ballroom, such that it enveloped the young couple as if bathing them in angelic haloes.
Sandy felt drawn to, even hypnotised, by that bewitching light, caught up in an irresistible attraction. She started walking towards it unconsciously, perfectly unaware of the way the bemused couple had to briefly part to allow her to pass between them.
&n
bsp; Similarly, the couples on the dancefloor had to whirl to a halt to avoid colliding into her as she walked, still fully in her daze, across the brightly polished wood towards that glistening, entrancing glow.
The music faded, instrument by instrument, many dying out with a pained wail.
The glow was coming from an elegantly draped bier, positioned within the very centre of the vast ballroom.
And the closer Sandy drew towards it, the more she was drawn to it.
For upon that bier there lay the most beautiful young girl Sandy had even seen, laid out as if eternally asleep or – more likely – to eternal rest.
And the glow of the nether realms was emanating from her, from her vast wings of the purest white swan feathers.
*
Chapter 2
‘An angel?’ Sandy breathed, unable to believe she was actually seeing this, believing instead that she must be dreaming, perhaps in a feverish stupor brought on by that freakishly unbelievable cold.
The girl looked too wondrously perfect, her skin too gloriously pink and fresh, for her to be dead. The wings were also delicately exact, too purely accurate to be copies, too perfectly exquisite to be false constructs of man.
Around the body, even scattered across it, such that they caught amongst the feathers of the wings, there lay a large number of gaily painted cards; cards portraying exploding suns, priestesses, moons and knights, conjuring up to Sandy an idea at first that they might be a tarot pack. But there were far too many, while they were of a design she had never come across before.
Around Sandy herself, the gaily dressed dancers who had come to a halt and now clustered curiously about her seemed perplexed by her statement. She could have accidentally stumbled into a fairy kingdom, going by the way they closely observed her as if she were the one who seemed exotically different to them.
‘No, she’s not an angel: not in the way I presume you mean, at least.’
One of the older men attending the dance had drawn close by her, his voice accented, there being an eastern European angular hardness to it.
The man sported a fashionably wide moustache, the hair as mistletoe-white as what little remained on his crown, and setting off the leafy bright green of his uniform. He briefly despondently stared down at the swan-like princess laid out upon the bier, yet when he lifted his eyes towards Sandy once more, they possessed their own particular hardness: a questioning glare that demanded answers from Sandy regarding reasons for her presence here.
‘Please: you must leave,’ he sternly insisted, reaching out to take her arm by the elbow, an undoubted sign that he would forcibly evict her if she attempted to resist.
Sandy was abruptly embarrassed, glancing everywhere about with shame. She hadn’t been invited in here, of course: she had no right to intrude upon what seemed to be some form of wake for a beautiful young girl who had recently passed away.
‘I’m sorry, really sorry!’ Sandy blurted out ashamedly. ‘I…I don’t know what came over me!’
Even as she tried to explain why she had so rudely interrupted the dance, she recognised that this was true: she hadn’t meant to so inconsiderately walk in amongst them, neither announced nor invited. She had been overcome by some form of daze, some type of enchantment even, that had briefly left her completely unaware of her actions or intent.
She sadly turned away from the bier, her eyes lingering for as long as possible upon the poor girl’s remarkable beauty. The angelic wings still seemed so incredibly real, so implausibly realistic, to Sandy; yet quite obviously they were nothing but some odd, customary form of preparing the deceased for her forthcoming journey, there to help her wing her way heavenward.
‘How…how did she…pass away?’ Sandy asked the man as he gently yet nevertheless insistently led her back across the dancefloor between the parting couples.
Again, she realised she was being unfairly discourteous to ask such a personal question of the man: and yet internally, her thoughts were screaming at her that she had to know, that politeness didn’t matter at the present moment.
Thankfully, the man appeared in no way upset by her request for more information, his expression and tone more one of surprise rather than irritation.
‘Pass away?’ he repeated, perhaps even a little bewildered or at least confused by Sandy’s terminology. ‘No: the young czarina sleeps.’
Now it was Sandy’s turn to be left uncertain by the man’s choice of words; was ‘sleep’ just one more euphemism for death?
Fortunately, the man recognised the reason for Sandy’s puzzled, disconcerted frown.
‘She’s not dead, thankfully,’ he said as they drew closer to the ballroom’s immense doors, his gaze once again despondent. ‘But she sleeps endlessly, as if dead to the world.’
As soon as they had passed through the doorway, the double doors softly closed behind them, the music immediately starting up once again.
‘An illness?’ Sandy asked, once again admonishing herself for her unthinking inquisitiveness.
At first the old man shook his head sadly, but as he spoke his eyes narrowed with barely controlled fury.
‘An enchantment,’ he fumed, indicating that their conversation had come to an abrupt end with a wave to a waiting servant to show Sandy out.
*
Out in the snow once more, Sandy should, perhaps, have suffered badly from the intense cold as she had before.
Yet now, curiously, it hardly seemed to affect her.
Her mind was a whirl. Not one portion of it, however, was aware of the cold: indeed, she remained wholly indifferent to the weather.
She had walked into a scene that could have been directly lifted from a painting created by her brother’s group of friends!
It had possessed a sense of being an offshoot or a portion of a world previously and yet falsely thought to be mythical; a sense, even, of an insight into a magical realm.
For this, of course, had been no mythical world, no world, even, of a long-distant past: it existed here and now, in London!
Sandy felt an urgency to get back to her brother’s studio as soon as she could, wishing she had her pastels and paper with her, eager to make a studied portrait at least of the young girl’s stunning face: the scene itself had been unforgettable, but faces can unconsciously change when we rely on nothing but our wholly inadequate memories to conjure them up before us once more.
She was so inspired by what she had just witnessed that she remained completely unaware when the weather abruptly changed for the better – such that by the time she was back home in Cheyne Walk, there wasn’t a single sign that she had walked though those viciously freezing squalls of snow.
*
It was her very first painting to be accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy.
It wasn’t, of course, a pure rendering of the scene she had witnessed.
No one had believed her when she had described her experience in the ballroom, not even her brother Frederick.
Gabriel had laughed; ‘Every Russian exiled to London seems to be a princess or a queen: they’re more common than our dukes and earls – and we have more than enough of them!’
Even Mary, Frederick’s common-law wife, expressed her doubts, if a little more kindly, pointing out that there hadn’t been any snow in London since early January.
Naturally, it didn’t help that Sandy couldn’t recall the journey she had taken after leaving this mysterious house she claimed to have visited. No one seemed to be able to name a house bearing even the remotest similarities to the one she recalled visiting, such that as the months passed, she diligently poured the memories of her experience out into her painting rather than to her increasingly dubious circle of acquaintances.
And so, too (although she felt guilty of some form of betrayal), Sandy accepted the advice of her friends (or, rather, her brother’s friends: they were all, like him, almost twenty years older than her after all!) that her work would be more acceptable as a rendering of the unrecognised, selfl
ess love of Arthurian romance, of Tennyson's Idylls of The Kings.
Of Enid.
*
Chapter 3
The Object of Infatuation
All about the court – and in particular within its many crooks and crannies – worryingly pervasive whispers about Lancelot, about Guinevere, are circulating.
An infatuation, some call it.
Naturally, there’s no proof presented to back up these scandalous rumours.
So many courtiers dismiss it as just that; idle, yet ultimately dangerous, gossip.
Others, however, regard it as being undoubtedly true; one more sign of the slow yet irrevocable deterioration of morality within the court, perhaps even throughout the whole kingdom.
A spreading infestation that, once set in motion, will eventually consume everyone.
Sir Geraint is one of those people who believe this state of affairs is already endemic. And as such, he fears for his own marriage to the beautiful Enid.
Isn’t Enid, after all, one of the queen’s closest friends and advisors?
How much does she know about what is really going on?
Is she aiding the queen in her indiscretions, her treachery?
Does she gain amusement from all this?
Wouldn't that be just like her, to be infatuated with bringing those who love each other together as one?
And will she follow suit, taking her own lover?
Has she already taken one: one from amongst the many admirers of her beauty, wit and elegance?
*
Even on abandoning court and returning to his own, far off lands, Sir Geraint’s heated imaginings continue to plague him.
Enid tries to make light of their leaving of the court. Yet Sir Geraint isn’t one to be fooled by her trickery; he has no doubts that she regrets this move, having been forced to leave her lover behind at the palace.
Now he’s the one infatuated: besotted with his own wild imaginings, enamoured with the sweet pain of his own envious meanderings – granting his jealousies a life of their own as he conjures up irresistibly handsome paramours and secretive, blissful liaisons.