The Book of Magic, page 27
Margaret asked Vincent and Franny to bring their tea out to a table set up in a splash of sun near the garden. As Gillian began to follow, Margaret caught her by the sleeve to ask if she might help fix the plates. “I can tell you’re a good cook.”
“Oh, no, I’m dreadful,” Gillian assured her.
Margaret reached for her box of recipes. She’d seen the copy of My Life as a Witch in Gillian’s purse and remembered when she herself had gone to see Cora.
“Seriously, I can’t cook,” Gillian told her. “Any recipes would be wasted on me.”
All the same, Margaret handed her a card. It was a very simple recipe that had been used for generations. The ink was red, likely blood. Margaret hadn’t been born with the sight, but she’d been at the Art long enough to decipher what a woman wanted most in the world. “It was given to me by Cora at a time when I was in desperate need.”
“I’m not desperate,” Gillian was quick to correct her.
“Just take a look,” Margaret suggested.
Take two lettuce roots and pour your urine upon them.
If the root shrivels, throw it out. If it germinates, plant it in a pot on your windowsill. Boil garlic each night and eat the entire bulb.
Bake the following cake and feed to the man involved, using eggs, flour, milk, your blood, and honey. Be on top and he will be hungry for more.
“What is this?” Gillian said, gazing up at the cunning woman before her.
“Recite the incantation each night.”
Gillian turned the card over, tears rimming her eyes.
Goddess of the Night, Hecate, honored above all, you are the beginning, you are the end. From you are all things, and in you, eternal one, all things end.
“This is the recipe that worked for me when I wanted a child,” Margaret Wright told her. “I’ve been grateful ever since.”
* * *
Sally couldn’t bring herself to have lunch with the others under her family’s watchful eye. She was falling apart and didn’t want their pity. What was worth living and dying for? How did one go on in the trembling darkness of what might happen next? Women who lost daughters or husbands, women who were skin and bones, who were filled with sorrow, women who couldn’t find their way home, who denied who they were or what they might be willing to do. Instead of joining the others at the table, Sally walked to the marsh. She’d left her boots behind and held up her skirts. The sun beat down on her narrow shoulders. She stopped to watch a cloud of crows soar overhead. With one hand across her eyes she still searched for them vainly even after they’d scattered to perch on the banks, where they couldn’t be seen in the tall grass. She wanted a sign. A voice, a song, an omen. Clouds that turned pink, a vision of another place and time. This was a remote area, one where you rarely saw a person, perhaps the occasional fisherman on a long boat. Sally’s heart lifted when she saw a figure in the reeds. Perhaps it was her daughter, it surely must be, but as she waded forward she observed a dark-haired girl she didn’t recognize treading through the land that was half earth and half water, a leather bag held above her head for safety’s sake. Everything was blue, her dress, the water, the sky.
“Wait,” Sally called. “It’s too deep,” she scolded.
The girl turned and their eyes met across the marsh and then Sally knew it was a shade out there; Maria had steadfastly been repeating her steps for three hundred years, unable to rest while the curse was at work. Sally stood there spellbound as the girl vanished between the bands of shadow and light. Once she had, the crow gave a shrill cry and lifted back into the sky.
“Are you all right?” Ian had come up behind Sally, breathing hard. He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened until Sally turned and he saw the wonder looming in her eyes. “You witnessed the appearance of a shade.”
“It was a girl.” Sally’s palms had grown clammy and panic overtook her. She started off into the water. “I won’t let her drown.”
Ian didn’t wait to hear any more of her explanation. He was vain about his knowledge of the marshes and fens. People drowned by accident all the time and Sally wasn’t going to be among them. “Stop right where you are, Sally. That was not your daughter. It was a ghost if it was anything at all. Something that was mortal and is no longer. I’ve seen her, too.” He’d been high on LSD at the time, but there was no need to mention that. He had seen a shade with black hair, a young girl who vanished as he approached.
Sally continued on until she was waist deep in the water.
“Damn it, stop!”
The urgent sound of his voice made her do so. Despite his knowledge of the hazards of the terrain Ian stepped blindly forward into the water to follow. When he caught up to her he was overcome with inexpressible longing and couldn’t speak. Instead he bent to kiss her.
Sally leaned in, then leaned away. “There’s someone drowning.” She could barely breathe.
Ian laughed and said, “Yes, I know. It’s me.”
There was no girl now, there was only this man who’d come after her without bothering to take off his boots. He was cruel to remind her that she had a heart. And perhaps he felt a fool, for he backed away.
“We call that the Witch’s House,” he said of the abandoned house by an inlet of the shore.
By now, Sally knew the history of Thornfield, how witches were tried here, drowned with no evidence other than rumor and gossip and fears spoken aloud. Even when Ian was a boy, people would stare when his mother rode through town on her bicycle late at night whenever someone fell ill, though most people agreed that she was more reliable than the doctor, who lived forty minutes away and had a temperamental vintage MGB that often didn’t start in rainy weather, of which there was a great deal in this county.
“You’d never live in a place like this,” Ian said, his gaze falling on Sally’s beautiful worried face. She worried a good deal, and he wished he could put an end to that.
“I come from a place like this,” Sally told him. “Have you never been to Massachusetts?”
“New Haven was as far as I got, to do a bit of research at Yale. And New York, of course. I was lost in the public library for days.”
“But you prefer Cat’s Library.”
She’d seen the truth. He was a country boy who happened to live in London. “I do.” Some places got ahold of you, and this one was a landscape he couldn’t go without.
Sally laughed at how seriously he’d said I do. “Do you think I proposed to you?”
Ian was immediately ill at ease. He had kissed her and wanted to do so again. He was burning up, really, though he was standing in the cold, green water. This could not be it. In his mind, his story ended with him alone in his flat in London. Likely, his body wouldn’t be discovered for days. He’d pictured his funeral. His mother, the Poole family, maybe an old girlfriend or two, maybe not. “Do you want a proposal?” he asked, then felt like an idiot. Before Sally could answer he pointed to the shell of an abandoned cottage across the fens. “That’s where I used to hide out. Me and the herons. I did some bad things out there.” Drugs and drink and girls he vowed to love while he knew he’d never phone them up again. All the same it had been so beautiful in the fens, to sit there on the porch that was falling to pieces as he watched the moon rise had saved him in some way.
They went a bit farther, moving slowly. Sally realized how deep the mud was; it could pull you down if you didn’t keep moving. “Are we now trapped here for life?”
Ian wanted to say, I wish, but since they were not stuck and since that would likely offend Sally he turned toward higher ground and a path that he knew would be more earth than mud. When he gestured for Sally she stood there unmoving. “Are you coming or would you prefer to drown?” Ian asked pointedly. He was known to sulk when he didn’t get what he wanted and what he wanted was Sally, and to drop the pretense that there was nothing between them.
“My people can’t drown.” Was she so helpless that she couldn’t find her daughter? She knew this had happened to Maria. Her daughter had disappeared for years, and the loss had nearly ruined her. “We have to find her,” she said.
“We will, Sally. But come with me now out of the water.”
When Ian reached out his hand, she took it, and they were both discreet enough not to exchange a glance.
Look ahead into the trees where a crow has settled, such a wild and beautiful creature. Look up, look away, and if you still see him then you will know. This is the way it happens, on an ordinary day, this is the way the future is revealed.
They were a mess when they reached solid ground and Sally’s breathing was shallow in her chest. She was disoriented and the sun on her shoulders seemed to be burning her; her hand in his was aflame as well, but when she turned back, there was the shade once more. She kept thinking about that kiss. She kept feeling it as if it were happening all over again in a loop of time that failed to stop.
The dark-haired girl had been out in the marshes, in a coil of time in which she made her escape before Hannah Owens’s house was set on fire by the first Thomas Lockland. Perhaps Sally could spy the shade because she was stunned by grief, raw and open to the world in a way she’d never been before. She, who believed her heart to be cold, who had been married twice but had feared committing to anyone, who expected the worst and got it, who’d made a vow when she was not more than ten years old that she would never fall in love, was standing in a muddy dress, barefoot and burning, who instead of walking away did something rash, kissing Ian so deeply they might have vanished into the bog where many had disappeared in the past, but fortunately fate had seen to it that they had reached dry land.
II.
From a distance, Kylie could detect smoke from the fireplace as it spiraled through the trees. Her sister’s voice echoed in her head and, indeed, she considered turning around. Antonia was so often right, turning to logic when other people might panic. Kylie could run back to the village and grab the taxi she’d seen idling outside the inn, but she’d left the book behind, and the curse was still unbroken. She went on, through the ivy and the ferns, the scent of clover filling her head. She was dizzy, she was all alone, she had already made one mistake after another. Everything seemed spun from a dream, and she was a sleepwalker wanting one thing, to undo time and go back to the afternoon on the Cambridge Common before the storm struck. For all she knew, Gideon might be having the very same dream. He wanted to reach her but he couldn’t get to the door. In his dream he saw a shadow just as Kylie observed the very same thing; it was Tom Lockland standing there outside the manor house, waiting, frustrated that Kylie had taken so very long just to go to the market and back.
“About time,” he said.
She saw something inside him then, what he’d been hiding, a dark line, the sort that appears when there is a crack in a china plate.
“I got lost,” Kylie said simply.
“Well, follow me then.”
They went along a path behind the house down to a stream, where they shared their picnic, eating from the packages Kylie had picked up at the shop, cheese and bread and pickles. She found she could eat only a bite or two. Her stomach was a nest of nerves. There was so much power in the curse and it had lasted so long, she feared what disaster a single mistake might cause. There was always a price to pay, although what the price might be was unclear.
“There’s got to be a way to open this damn thing,” Tom muttered.
He leafed through The Book of the Raven as he drank one of the beers, the other bottles kept cooling in the stream. He’d been studying the text while Kylie was off on her errand and had realized that its purpose was to grant the reader their deepest wish, the one desire at the core of someone’s being, worth the price to be paid. He wasn’t interested in ending a curse. It was creating one that was his fervent desire. It was payback to everyone who had ignored him and belittled him. A curse for a curse. He’d brought along the ingredients most often needed to invoke dark magic, and before Kylie had returned, he’d found what he wanted under the section “How to Seek Revenge.” It was possible to summon the Red Death, a plague set upon the town. He wasn’t strong enough to call down so great a curse. This was why he’d brought Kylie over to the dark side. He had a witch with real power. So much the better that she had no real sense of her own capabilities, for he intended to use her skill for his own purposes.
There had been a great deal of rain that spring and the rushing water was high. The banks were slick with heaps of last autumn’s falling leaves, as they dissolved into mulch. It was a warm, still evening and when Tom was done with his beer he pitched the empty bottle into the ferns, then stood and ambled down to the bank, where he stripped off his clothes. He had brought the book with him and tossed it into the tall grass. It was said that whoever carried a fern seed could become invisible as promised by the villain in Henry IV, Part I when a highwayman assures his accomplice, We have the receipt of the fern-seed; we walk invisible. But ferns could also allow a practitioner to find answers, understand birds and animals, discover a treasure. If you have the sight, you can see more clearly wherever there are ferns.
“Afraid?” Tom called to Kylie, teasing her about her inability to swim.
There was, indeed, a twist of fear in her chest. It was the way he threw the book down so carelessly, as if it belonged to him. Still, she couldn’t be waylaid by her fears. Kylie stripped off her jeans and shirt, leaving on her undergarments and shivering despite the warm air. She had a stab of panic. How had she gotten here, so far from home, a black-haired girl in the woods with a man she barely knew?
Tom had plunged into the water and when he arose he shook the drops from his hair. “See what you’ve been missing?” he called. “Nothing to fear.”
She made her way through the reeds into the water, which streamed around her legs, cold as ice. Water calls to water, like calls to like. Kylie went deeper, but when she tried to dive it was impossible, it was as if the surface of the water was a solid wall, and she could only float. This was the proof Tom wanted. This was the reason her mother had never allowed her to swim. Witches couldn’t drown, that was the test that was always used against them, their strength turned into weakness.
Tom was watching her, and she thought she saw a flicker of resentment in his eyes.
“It’s too cold,” she told him, making her way back to the muddy bank, more confused than ever. Who had she been before? Certainly not the person she was now. Or was it only that her true self had always been hidden? As she stepped out, shivering and panicked, she slipped on the wet leaves, and as she lurched to steady herself, The Book of the Raven tumbled into the shallows. She dodged after it, and grabbed it as it floated there. Tom came racing toward her. “What have you done?” He tried to seize the book from her, but she grasped it even more tightly. Before her eyes the paste Jet had used on the last two pages dissolved. All she had needed was water, the element they were drawn to and was most dangerous to them. The last page opened and “How to Break a Curse” was revealed. Tom came to the bank and pulled his clothes on over his wet body as Kylie read the last page. It was what she suspected, a terrible bargain, but the only way to break the curse once her beloved had been afflicted. Someone had to die, and if it wasn’t to be him, the only way to change fate was to take his place.
Tom grabbed the book away, a wary look in his eyes. “Get dressed,” he said, for Kylie was in her sopping underclothes, her black hair streaming water. “You’ll freeze to death before we get anything accomplished.”
Kylie dressed quickly, but while her back was turned, Tom stalked up toward the manor with the book. Kylie ran after him, her heart pounding. Who you trust is everything. Who you trust can save you or ruin your life. Never give your words away. She tracked him to the manor house, following his wet footprints. He had already begun to set out a circle of red madder root around them, mixing in the poison he had used in the robbery in London.
“I want the book,” Kylie said. “It’s mine.”
“It was,” Tom said. “And now it’s mine.”
He used a match to spark the flame and as the first billows of smoke flooded the room, there was the sound of fluttering, birds’ wingbeats, perhaps, or bats that had taken up residence in the chimney now flickering through the treetops as they fled the smoke and fire. Bees flew out from behind the mantel, where the walls were thick with honey. Kylie had heard that bees driven from their hive portend disaster. The smoke drew upward and the fire flamed orange and blue until Tom threw on a handful of russet madder root, which turned the blaze red. Red for magic and for love and for a curse returned. Revenge had taken the place where his heart used to be, coiling and uncoiling, turning darker with every breath.
He couldn’t care less that the first rule of magic was to do no harm. The curse of Red Death would blanket the village of Thornfield, affecting residents before they knew it was upon them. It would slip under doors and find its way through windows and hop from person to person; the more you loved the more you would spread it with a touch or a kiss. Breathe in and it had you, breathe out and you passed it on. Tom Lockland liked the irony of the curse. The closer you were to people, the more likely you were to become ill.
He opened The Book of the Raven to the page upon which the Red Death had been written in blood and ink and spoke the first words of the malediction.
The rain will rise and fall. It will undo you and all who you love. Their souls, their hearts, their livers, their lungs. Use with caution and with care, use only in the most dire circumstances.
There were field mice living in the house, but they had all fled. Nothing living dared to be near. The bats in the rafters were gone as well, out into the darkening net of the sky. Tom brought out a handful of grass poppets bound with black thread meant to represent the people in town. He took a knife and slit his skin so that he might sketch a map with his own blood on the floorboards. There was the church, there was the inn, and the library and the school, the market and the dress shop, and the teahouse. And there were the people, those who had dismissed him, defied him, ignored him. They would get what they deserved, each and every one. Mud and earth, belladonna, lords and ladies, straw and grass, and black thread and horse nettle, so poisonous a user had to wear gloves when handling the herb to make a tincture that would produce the hex. He tore his clothes, then threw the poppets into the fire. It should rage, it should bloom as if it were blood, causing the clouds above to fill with illness.
