The Witchery, page 40
And all that, mind, was written before the weather went red, which development left the next pages of Leo’s Book blank for some days.
Some while after they’d been piloted from New York’s harbor—…and of course Leo had loved the city, save for the snow, to which she was unaccustomed, whilst neither Calixto nor Luc cared much for its bustle and double-pace—a gale came on, and soon the Soror Mystica was pitching and tumbling in the seaways like a spun top, causing Calixto to worry, for the first time, about her long years of wear.
I fear we witches played a not so subtle role in all this; for Calixto, as captain, had come to count upon our protection, and thusly he’d surrendered a bit of…humility, let me say, when face-à-face with the sea. Too, he was less vigilant than once he’d been. Which is to say: Calixto decided to sail for home despite the harbor pilot’s reproval, and despite the words of those crew members, including our much-trusted Simon, who advised that they seek the shelter of Chesapeake Bay once the winds came on and all went squally. Calixto said no. They’d sail. Unwise, perhaps? Arrogant? Yes. But I remain grateful; for if Calixto had taken the Soror Mystica into Chesapeake Bay and not gone to sea, I might never have met Grania Byrne, without whom…Well, suffice to say that I don’t know how I’d have lived—or died—without my Lady of Eire.
She came from Skibbereen in County Cork, but she’d sailed from Liverpool in a “lumber tub” bound for Quebec. Its captain had oh so graciously allowed her and her mother to stow themselves (for fourteen pounds, mind) in a hold that would otherwise have been empty on its return trip. And though winter was no one’s chosen time to cross, the situation in Ireland was already dire, and due to worsen: So said Bridie Byrne, Grania’s Ma, whose gift—“’tis hardly that,” says Grania—was Sight, such that what Bridie Saw of the coming Famine brought on her Blood. So Grania believes.
Bridie, swollen as a tick and already turning blue, drew a last promise from her daughter: She didn’t want to be thrown overboard till Ireland lay far, far behind them. Seeing all she’d Seen, Bridie wanted never to return there, above all not as “bones borne on a tide.” As for England—and the English, for whom she harbored “a murtherin’ hate” —Grania had her mother’s blessings if somehow she could “get hold of one of me old bones,” and with it manage to beat John Bull about the head and neck. “And best to start with your man Trevelyan,” said she, meaning the English lord who’d recently referred to Irish hunger as “the will of Heaven.”
The lumber ship, in the hands of an inexperienced crew, had lost its bearings in the gale; and though Calixto, in ordering a change of tack, told his crew he’d heard shots of distress above the howling wind—unlikely; the more so when later it was observed that the ship had no sizable guns; but the Mystica’s crew, though mortals all, had grown accustomed to the inexplicable—it was, in fact, Léopoldine who told Calixto of the nearby Belleforêt, caring less (frankly) that there was a ship in distress than that there was a witch upon it.
Leo had woken with a start from her “poppy sleep,” and would have considered the presentiment of a stranded sister merely the debris of her dream—…a dream of India, wrote she, from which she woke drippy; for in said dream she’d mounted both an elephant and its handsome mahout—had she not heard tell of how Sebastiana had sensed, similarly, both my distress in Brittany and Leo’s own, in the catacombs of Rome.
So it was that the Soror Mystica sailed not toward the bay but further out to sea, Simon and others being heard to say, sotto voce, that Calixto meant to sacrifice them all; but when the dismasted, bilging Belleforêt suddenly hove into view—by which time they were nearly upon her—all hands readied to do what they did best: wreck, and salvage; and, as ever, they prized people over property.
The Belleforêt had already suffered—at half passage, and but days after the burial at sea of Bridie Byrne—the effects of an electrical storm. I’ve heard tell of such storms; wherein the air falls sultry and takes on a sulfuric smell, and sometimes there is to be seen those globes of phosphorescence, called ignis fatuus, or St. Elmo’s fire, which, ranging in size from apple to pumpkin, alight—all too literally—upon the masts and yards, and there linger long enough to render any sailor superstitious, or rather more superstitious; for the lights are said to herald the devil, and doom. As surely they did for the Belleforêt:
In that same storm, lightning had struck the mainmast, shot down toward the deck, and sped damage to the four quarters of the ship via her chains; such that in the gale she’d dismasted—claiming, in her throes, three seamen—and now bobbed about, helpless as a cat without claws.
The lightning had put beyond use one of her longboats; and another, when launched, shipped so much water that down it went, taking with it an unknown number of unfortunates. Others leapt into the sea when the Belleforêt’s decks tilted well past level and it seemed she’d capsize. These poor souls had not heard, or perhaps had not been able to heed, the crew, who, to a one, had cried that they ought to hold on; for in the sea they’d freeze. Still others, fully half the crew and twenty-some passengers, or a third of those who’d shipped from Liverpool—though not the captain, who did as a captain ought and rode the Belleforêt down—came onto the Soror Mystica by means of her quarter boats, her ropes, speedily rigged gangways and slides, and means even more desperate.
In the course of the rescue—it was not a salvage operation, per se, if the lives saved be discounted—as well as after, when finally she set out for the safety of Chesapeake Bay, the Soror Mystica showed her advanced age. And though she shipped some water herself, she’d survive awhile longer, and sail home to Key West once the requisite repairs were made; which repairs, I should say, delayed the trinity’s return by more than a month, so that by the time they finally sailed within view of my scope, that spring of ’46, they’d already written—not in cipher, mind, despite all my warnings about our supposedly inviolate post—to tell what happened, to say that they were well, and to announce that they’d be bringing home a witch “…whom we think you’ll like.”
If Grania had not shown the Eye, they might well have left her behind, aboard the sinking Belleforêt; for she had refused, refused to let go her hold on both her cauldron and her dog. There she’d stood, mid-storm, arguing with Calixto, who fast assented to the collie, but not the cauldron; which, said he, would fall into the longboat like a cannonball. It was then Léopoldine came topside—against “orders,” ha!—and, deck to deck, the two witches traded the Eye. It was more sensed than seen, I suppose; but it was enough for Leo to announce to Cal, “It is she”; whereupon Grania was let to drop down into the longboat—with both cauldron and collie—to be rowed over a short span of the rudest seas conceivable. Saved, she clambered aboard the Soror Mystica and stepped into a sister’s embrace.
Grania is—irony of ironies—weather-allied; and so she and Leo both, having been tempered at sea, so to speak, took care to work some Craft before allowing a patched Soror Mystica to retake to the sea, setting out from the Chesapeake, and headed home. Each sister read the sky in her own way: Leo by some hastily acquired charts; Grania by the clouds, or neladoracht, as it is called amongst the Celtic sisters. Both Saw a smooth sail home.
Some months prior, Bridie Byrne had Seen a rough sea crossing—Grania, like me, and unlike her mother and my Leo, has limited talent for Sight of that sort—but still she’d insisted; and she and her daughter had set sail. Grania worried that her mother’s mind was unsound, then; for how could all she’d prophesied come to pass? Impossible; or so it had seemed.
In tears, Bridie had told of the Irish being run off their land and onto the streets, there to live in “scalps”—holes dug and topped with naught but turf and sticks. There they’d die like dogs. Nay: There they’d die to be eaten by dogs, themselves starved unto desperation. She’d Seen children rooting about in blighted fields, looking for pratai romhair, whatever potatoes the diggers had missed some season past, which now would be rotten, if found, and unfit for fodder, but which nonetheless they’d roast in ashes and eat.
The blight, you see, borne on the breeze, had blown into the moist and mild west; and Grania herself, in the month they took their leave, had seen whole fields die overnight. And that was well before the worst of it, as later lice would carry fevers just as the wind had brought the blight, and the Irish would die, and die, and die. Of fevers both black and yellow. Of “the bloody flux.” Of diarrhea, dropsy, and other diseases born of starvation.
Bridie had spoken of the coffin ships to come, too; and come they would, come they do, carrying countless Irish into quarantine, into penny-work, and far worse. “And them’s the lucky ones what didn’t ‘go to sea’ midways acrost it,” says Grania, “dying only to be slipped down to the depths with a few words and a ‘here’s your hat’ from your saints Peter or Paul”; for so it had come to pass for Bridie Byrne when the Blood had come mid-crossing.
Yes: Poor Bridie Byrne had Seen the Famine, and the crowded ships, and so had insisted on as fast a sail as she could afford for herself, for Grania, and for their familiar—the calico collie, Cuchulain—and for that cauldron; which was no mere bucket of blackest cannon shot, melted and remade, but rather was Cerridwen’s cauldron, bequeathed to Grania by her grandmother, as it had been bequeathed to her grandmother in turn, and so on, and by the use of which she could…—
Stay. I skip; and I oughtn’t to tell you any more about Grania Byrne’s powers before I introduce her, properly; as now I will:
She stepped off the Soror Mystica—the wear on which was evident, yes, from the bald spots on her hull up to a mainsail that showed as many patches as “a cracker’s underpants”; or so said Simon, who received from his Euphemia, even before she hugged him, a pie so sweet-smelling he had to hold it high, up and away from their two hip-high boys and a passel of dogs, all of whom had run toward our wharf as word spread of the Soror Mystica’s being spotted, and…—
But why do I stall? To savor my first glimpse of the witch Grania Byrne? Perhaps so; for the memory is precious…. But, as strange a claim as it may be for an immortal to make, I haven’t time to stall and savor: These fingers have steadily stiffened round this pen, till now they seem a claw, talons upon a tree branch; and, worse, this body’s blood, which gravity causes to well, has made bluing cushions of these buttocks. And so I speed, and summarize thusly:
Tall, broad-shouldered Grania Byrne stepped onto the wharf at Key West as though she were Queen Maeve returned to Tara.
She wore a black dress that buttoned up the left side of her neck, snug to her square jaw, and her red hair was a nimbus, whipping round in that same breeze that had set the sails to soughing. This I could not hear, of course, but rather saw; just as I saw with my spyglass, from the Witchery’s tower, that cauldron Grania carried as effortlessly as another woman would a purse. It was bigger than a cannonball, and black as her dress, whilst the collie, Cuchulain, standing at heel, was patched with reds that matched his mistress’s hair.
So focused was my scope upon this newly arrived sister, I did not see Léopoldine—or was it Luc, or Calixto?—point to the tower, as surely they must have; for, next thing I knew, there Grania Byrne stood, shading her emerald eyes against the sun and searching. Once she espied me, there, she waved. Waved. Whereupon I let slip the spyglass and, heart hammering, sank back onto my reading sofa, smiling so…wholly that it seemed the panes of the portrait’d dead could not contain themselves, and smiled in their turn.
Chapter Thirty-six
For, tempering each other, heat and moisture engender life: the union of these two produces everything. Though it is true that fire is the enemy of water, moist heat is the creator of all things:
Discordant concord is the path life needs.
—OVID, Metamorphoses, Book I
THAT WAS THE LAST TIME I SAW GRANIA BYRNE IN BLACK. It was all white thereafter, linen and lace, owing to that heat to which the rest of us had become accustomed; though still she favored dresses with high collars, and those being hard to find in a tropical clime, soon she found a tailor to fashion for her a type of under-collar, a wimple-like thing whose buttons ran up her neck to the base of her jaw. “We witches, what with bein’ of a certain age,” said she, in a rare concession to vanity, and in unsought collusion with me, both of us being about forty, “oughtn’t to show our necks so.”
Of course, there was nothing unsightly about her neck: It was long and lean and perfectly pearlescent, just like the rest of her. Indeed, when shortly after her arrival, the Hecate salvaged the ship Clairefontaine off Pickles Reef and we found ourselves in possession of a double string of pearls, I thought straight off of Grania and tried to impress them upon her. I wanted her to wear them. It was odd, how badly I wanted this. To the point where I was cruel in commerce, as I’d never been before, and referenced the Laws of Salvage in response to the marquis whose possession the pearls had been, and who wrote on behalf of his marquise, saying she was “all tears” without her double strand. No, I replied. No, no, no. And when the trinity exempted me, happily, from converting the pearls to cash, as was our custom—whereupon we’d send the cash northward, and to Ireland, as now we’d begun to do—I presented the pearls to Grania as a sort of welcome to the Shadows, to the family, and to the Witchery itself. It was all-hands-on-deck to get her to accept my gift; and once we’d induced her to do so, still she’d wear the pearls only over her high collar, and never against that flesh, that exquisite flesh that so mocked their luster.
Going about town in her white dresses, and with her red hair piled atop her head, well, let me say that it was not long before she bore the nickname Torch. This came into currency amongst the wreckers, especially; though no one dared let her hear it—in fact, she knew of the nickname and found it…droll, let me say, if not original—as the true torch burned in Grania’s eyes, and she’d stand down before no man.
Soon she was well known all along the wharves; and allied as she was to our house—though no one knew how, precisely: sister? cousin? aunt?—Grania was accorded more respect than most newcomers, and far more than was considered an Irishwoman’s due, surely. And her share of respect only grew as she began to work with us upon our wharves, and in our warehouse.
And oh, mon Dieu, ma déesse, that warehouse!
Of late we’d salvaged more than we could stow, or readily sell: perishables we disposed of quickly, of course, but as for the rest…The letters we had to post, the auctions we had to arrange! So very tiresome, it all was; and I’d have withdrawn from the efforts, had it not been for what they funded. The wares did tend to accumulate, yes; and hard as we tried to convert it all to cash, still the warehouse was crowded with cases of this, kegs of that, and more household stuff than Léopoldine could rotate into use at the Witchery. Said wares, mind, were not of the ordinary variety, either, as ordinary people tend not to transship their wares from Catalonia to California, from Marseilles to the mouth of the Mississip’. No: here were mirrors squared to the size of the downy mattresses standing beside them; here were such oddments as vases, vessels, and urns, of porcelain, of plated gold, of faience…the lot of them chipped, it’s true; here, in short, were wares enough to cram to the crenellations another castle for “that Dog-Queen Victoria,” as Grania called her. And in fact it was that very insult that inspired the solution to the sole problem pursuant to Grania’s arrival at the Witchery: What to do with Cuchulain, that russet mutt that had never, ever, strayed more than a mile from its mistress’s side?
Understand: It was not that I disdained the dog more than any other. I just didn’t want him in the Witchery…. He looked at me funny—as all dogs and other animals did, and long had. Too, the dog was too fast to show its temper and its…excess of teeth. Until, that is, Calixto suggested I let slip my spectacles and show the mutt my Eye; whereupon he went all nuzzly, whimpering, and whatnot, and all were pleased. Except me. You see, I’d long avoided all animals—as being Lady of the Beasts was not my chosen role, merci bien—and those few familiars I’d tried to keep had died or wandered off, or worse. And so it was that Cuchulain went to the warehouse, where he lived in royal splendor—in quarters carpentered to Grania’s specifications—and where, courtesy of Simon, he ate better than most men.
Sport that she was, Grania one day decided to make the most of the situation: She whispered something in the dog’s ear, slipped off its leash, and sent it tearing down the wharf toward one of Captain Roberts’s crewmen, the same who, some weeks earlier, had not given Grania the welcome she thought she warranted—it had something to do with his whistling, I believe—and Cuchulain tore from the man’s right buttock a steak-length piece of flesh; whereupon word spread, as Grania had intended, and we found ourselves in possession of a watchdog. Then, finally, we were all satisfied—excepting, of course, he of the halved buttock;…mais, c’est la vie.
Only later would I see that it was part of the trinity’s unspoken plan to have Grania become…well, the public part of me. And it’s true: There were things, related to the wrecking, that I was either unable or unwilling to do, more so since the trial; and these Grania did—and did well—when she was not furthering our work in the witchery proper…. Though, in truth, Grania’s talents wanted not the witchery but the tower.
At first, Grania did not see the glassy dead surrounding her. When finally she did, she started, falling back from those windows through which she’d begun to read the weather, exclaiming, with one hand on her heart and the other her pearls, “Goddess go well! Who in Hades are they, that lot there, there?” And she pointed with a still-trembling finger.
