• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 588 0

that Isabella was still pregnant. Nixon-Knox, shocked by Alexander’s suicide, or troubled by some religious scruples, eventually took pity on poor Isabella, and instead of forcing her to get rid of the child, made her swear secrecy and sent her off to exile on distant Melville Island. After this, he seems to have fallen under the influence of a French religious fanatic, Father Calixte, who condemned with the utmost virulence any attempts to reach the pole as a sin against God and, dabbling in visions and prophecies, predicted that New Venice would be doomed because of these attempts. Nixon-Knox, from that point onward, is said to have busied himself with curious medical experiments that bordered on the unwholesome, until finally he was engaged, or so the story went, in stealing the corpses of dead explorers from the Gallery leading to the Boreal Grounds. He was eventually denounced by a young doctor named Douglas Norton, who had conducted his own strange experiments in the field of animal hybridization so far that Nixon-Knox, though he was a longstanding friend of the Norton family, had him expelled from the John Snow School of Surgery. On the grounds of Norton’s public accusations, the Council of Seven could no longer shield Nixon-Knox, and he finished his life as a miserable inmate of the dreaded Haslam Hospital.

But let us go back to Isabella Nixon-Knox, née d’Ussonville. As you remember, she was supposed to sail to Melville Island. But it happened that her small ship, blocked by the ice near Cape Turnback, had instead been forced northward, until after weeks of hardship she was rescued by chance by the inhabitants of our island, which was not yet known to explorers as Crocker Land, or more accurately, the Crocker Land Mirage. This island, which can mostly be seen from above, and only at certain times of the year, is known to those who inhabit it by a secret name that can only be pronounced when the Island is invisible to the outer world. Its people pretend, or believe, or pretend to believe, that they are descendants of the Irish Tuatha Dé Dannan, mixed with ancient Arctic Tunit people and, many many centuries later, with the remnants of the Norse colonies of Greenland. Lost or wrecked Westerners, and whatever their cargo consists of, are traditionally welcomed, so much so in fact that the deliberate wrecking of foreign ships has been, at certain times, the tradition itself. Certain legends even mention, in that respect, a certain mysterious woman who used to mislead sailors and travellers toward the island. The inhabitants call her Oene, the fallen Queen of the Arctic.

Isabella’s rescue was, accordingly, regarded less as a duty than as a gift. There, upon her arrival, and while her husband considered her lost at sea, Isabella gave birth to a little girl, whom, to honour both the father and his death, she had baptized Myrtle Isabella Alexandra Harkness. Thanks to her kindness and distinction, Isabella quickly found her place in the community, so much so that she was chosen as the Lady of the Castle, a purely honorary but much respected title granted only to foreigners by the Island dwellers.

Myrtle grew up, educated by her mother and by the library that Isabella had brought with her in a trunk. But there was among those books one that especially fascinated the young Myrtle: a little octavo entitled Snowdrift & Reliance, written by the uncle of Douglas Norton, Edward Hilbert-Norton. The Hilbert-Nortons were on excellent terms with Isabella, and Douglas had offered a strange pet straight out his laboratory to keep Isabella company and “remain in contact” with her, while his uncle, an eccentric bachelor and Isabella’s longtime séance partner, had dedicated and offered this book of his to her just before her departure.

Part melodrama, part Elizabethan tragedy, Snowdrift & Reliance has little to recommend it to the reader’s benevolence, the bewildering intricacies of its plot being further shrouded by unfathomable esoteric symbolism, not to mention an amphigoric style whose only coherent trait is its consistent lack of