The Twelfth Enchantment

12

LUCY HAD CONSIDERED MR. BUCKLES A POSSIBLE SUSPECT, BUT IT had been an abstract sort of speculation, and she had not really believed that her sister’s husband, no matter how much she might dislike him, could have taken part in such a mad scheme. But now to hear it said aloud, to be told it was true—it was more than she could endure. She began to cry, first a stream of silent tears, and then convulsive waves. Her face was in her hands, and without knowing how it had happened, Miss Crawford was holding her, one arm around her shoulder, and Lucy sobbed into the sleeve of her gown.

“Shh,” said Miss Crawford. “We shall make everything right.”

“No, nothing will be right.” To steady herself Lucy took another sip of wine. And then another. Her cup was empty, and Miss Crawford was refilling it. Lucy could begin to feel the effects of the drink. A soft cloud of indifference gathered around her thoughts. What did any of it matter? “I must marry a man I do not like while I know I have been cheated out of what is mine. It is a nightmare, and I can do nothing.”

“It is not so,” said Miss Crawford. “I beg you to hear me. You have been much abused, but you are not powerless. I will show you that you can have everything. You can have your freedom, your inheritance, justice for those who have harmed you, and whatever else you desire.”

Lucy stared at her as though she were mad. “I am not a child to believe that. I have so oft felt that my life is not my own, that I am where I do not belong, doing things I have no business doing, and now I find that it is so. The life I was supposed to have was stolen from me. And not only from me, but from my sister. Would Martha have married Mr. Buckles if she’d inherited her share of my father’s fortune? Everything has been taken from us, and the courts provide no recourse. How can you lie to me so?”

“I tell you the truth. You can have what is yours and you can have justice, and you can set everything aright, but first we must speak of what transpired with that man—Lord Byron.” Miss Crawford said his name as though testing out its feel in her mouth.

“What of him?” The last thing Lucy wished to think of was Byron. She hardly felt equal to discussing anything about him, and yet there was something in Miss Crawford’s tone, in her manner, that she could not ignore.

“I believe you can help yourself with the same skills you used to help break that curse. I have no talents in that regard myself, only an interest, much as a person might be an indifferent singer or player, and yet also be a great enthusiast of music. Indeed, I came to Nottingham because it was predicted by another cunning woman, a very good one I met along the Scottish border, that I must come here. I was told that in your county I would find someone remarkable, and now I know I came here to find you.”

Lucy hardly knew how to respond. Her cup of wine was empty again. She set it down behind her so Miss Crawford would not fill it again. She was beginning to feel things differently, sharper and more dull all at once. She liked it, but at the same time, she hated it. And she noticed things, as if for the first time. The wind blew a comfortably warm breeze across her face. The sun, which had been too bright a moment ago, vanished behind a cloud.

When Mrs. Quince had tried to teach her to read the cards, she had also said that cunning craft was like music or painting or acting. Everyone could do something, and, as in the various arts, only a few were possessed of sufficient talent to do a great deal. There were those for whom all the application in the world could produce only a mediocre result, and then there were those who hardly needed to apply themselves at all to achieve much. However, Mrs. Quince had come to the conclusion that Lucy was singularly ungifted. She called Lucy a clumsy oaf, too foolish and muddleheaded to grasp even the most basic of principles. Mrs. Quince’s efforts to help Lucy learn to read cards had marked the end of those early days of friendship and the beginning of the long period of enmity.

“What is it you tell me?” Lucy asked. “That I might become a cunning woman? I know something happened with Lord Byron, and there were more strange events at Mr. Olson’s mill. These things seemed real at the time, but then, that feeling fades, doesn’t it?”

“Only because we wish it to,” said Miss Crawford.

Lucy shook her head. “Do you suggest I might use magic to reclaim my inheritance?”

Miss Crawford nodded. “I believe that if you apply yourself, you will be able to master all aspects of your life. No one will ever command you again.”

Lucy wondered what it would be like to no longer fear her uncle or poverty or her future, to have the means to right the injustices of her life. The thought of such power and freedom thrilled her, but it was a childish dream that she must abandon. To let Miss Crawford lead her down this path would only open her heart to despair.

Yet at that moment, Lucy forgot to be cautious. She forgot to protect herself and to be too cynical to believe. She even set aside her fear and rage. The possibilities all seemed so real when Miss Crawford spoke of them. Her eyes were wide and bright and inviting, and Lucy was ready to believe anything she said.

“We have a selective notion of truth. Look at this mound here.” Miss Crawford took a sip of her wine. “Do you know what it is?”

“It is a fairy barrow.”

“And do you know what a fairy barrow truly is?” asked Miss Crawford.

Lucy looked at the hill, green and bright. A butterfly hovered above it, not ten feet from where she sat. “A hill. No more.”

“It is more, but also less. That is a story for another time, I think.”

Lucy thought of what she had seen at the mill, what she thought she had seen in her uncle’s house. “You don’t mean to suggest there are actual creatures, do you?”

“In the mound? No.”

“Because I saw something,” Lucy continued. “I feel so foolish even mentioning this, but you seem to believe in these things, and I have told no one else. At Mr. Olson’s mill, there were workers chanting the same strange words Lord Byron spoke. And there were creatures, dozens of them, made of shadow. And there was a man, a strange man, and he seemed made of shadow too. I sound mad. I know I do, and yet I saw all these things.”

Miss Crawford rose to her feet. She walked away from Lucy and then back again. Her fingers moved, as though adding sums, and then she wiped her hands on her skirts. “You have already seen so much, and you have no training.” She sat down again. “Can it be that you have truly never studied any sort of music?”

“I have read Mr. Francis Barrett’s book, The Magus,” Lucy said, referring to a popular book that had been published perhaps ten years earlier. After the unpleasant incident with Mrs. Quince, Lucy had sent off to London for a copy, spending money she could hardly afford. She had believed in a moment of weakness that if she could master magic, she would have a friend once more. It had been a silly notion.

Miss Crawford appeared amused. “Have you, now? All of it?”

“Some of it.” Lucy felt her cheeks grow warm.

Miss Crawford did not respond to her embarrassment. She was, on a sudden, quite businesslike. “Have you attempted to make any of the talismans therein, or to cast any spells?”

She shook her head. “It all felt silly. Like I would be playing childish games.”

Miss Crawford nodded. “And you would have been. Barrett’s is a popular book written for a general readership. His spells are fabricated or extracted from tawdry volumes meant for the ignorant. And such books are always obsessed with love magic, which you must never practice.”

“I thought that was nearly the whole of what cunning women do,” said Lucy. “Make this one fall in love with that one.”

“Those spells are for dabblers with little skill. For someone with talent, it is a vile thing to make someone believe he feels what he does not, to induce him to make commitments that stand even after the effects of the magic fade. I cannot tell you how many unhappy matches, how many ruined hopes and lives, are the result of cunning folk playing with love magic.”

Lucy nodded, though she might as well be promising not to fly too close to the sun with her waxen wings.

“If there is anything of value in Barrett,” Miss Crawford continued, “it is cribbed from other writers, principally Agrippa. I daresay these are the sections you chose not to read.”

“But I have read of Agrippa. My father had me read some histories of his life. I found them extraordinarily dull, but my father thought him important.”

Miss Crawford’s expression remained neutral. “Indeed he is. But you will have to know more than his biography. You will have to read and understand Agrippa’s thinking, along with the ideas of a number of other writers even more impenetrable. Yes, I see the look upon your face. No one wants to spend her days and nights buried in dusty old tomes, especially those that are designed to confound, confuse, and defeat the reader, but there can be no true greatness without sacrifice. And, let me assure you, before I ask you to read anything too dull, you will have seen things, done things that will make you hungry to read the most tedious books in the world if they will advance your craft. Let me give you something.”

Miss Crawford reached into her picnic basket and removed a little book, a duodecimo, and put it in Lucy’s hand. It was hardly bigger than her palm, though it was heavy. It smelled of old leather and mold, and all at once it reminded her of her father. How at home she felt with Miss Crawford. A warmth spread over her, for here was another great protector, like her father had been, who loved her books. The thought of it made her feel safe, and for the first time in many years, it made her feel like she was somewhere she belonged.

“Are you well?” Miss Crawford asked her. “You have gone quite pale.”

“I am well,” said Lucy, who felt her eyes beginning to moisten. “It is just that I suddenly felt—I know this will sound odd—but I felt as though, for a moment, I was living my own life.”

“I understand you—more than you can know.” She took Lucy’s hand and squeezed it. They sat like that for a moment until Miss Crawford let go and invited Lucy to examine the book.

The first fifty or sixty pages contained densely written arguments about magical theory—Lucy could see that from the most casual of glances—but the rest of it was nothing more than various charts. Here were chessboards filled with letters, sometimes English, sometimes Greek, sometimes Hebrew. Some stood alone, some of the squares were embedded within circles, and these circles contained writing as well.

“You may recognize this sort of thing from Barrett,” Miss Crawford said. “These are charms and talismans collected from major works on magic. Many of the charms included in those books are false, deliberately false, to deceive dabblers. There has never been a book of spells that was not at least three-quarters nonsense. In that book you hold, one of the better ones I could obtain, there are perhaps three hundred charms, and it may be that forty are genuine. Before you begin to read through material you will find challenging, why don’t you attempt to discover which charms are real and make some of them work?”

Lucy examined the book. As she had when looking at the charms in The Magus, she felt vaguely silly, but at the same time she could not help but respond to Miss Crawford’s gravity, and she held the book as though it were a piece of delicate and rare china. On the pages, the charms had labels indicating what they did, and most involved some sort of manipulation of another person. To make another cleave to you in loyalty. To drive another from your presence. To inspire feelings of love in another. Many required no other work than to copy out the charm and to hide it in the clothes or things or upon the person of the subject. Others required a small ritual or manipulation of objects.

“How will I know which are genuine?”

Miss Crawford merely said, “You must determine that for yourself.”

“Must I choose now?” she asked, feeling slightly panicked and inadequate.

Miss Crawford laughed and her eyes appeared to turn darker, and then grow pale once more, like the moon appearing from, and disappearing behind, clouds. “No, I shall not make you perform for me, Miss Derrick. You take the book as a gift. Do not object. It is not rare.”

Lucy hardly knew what to say, but she clutched the book to her chest. She wanted to bask in this new sensation of feeling special and important and of being someone of whom great things were expected. She had learned that very afternoon that she and her sister had been cheated out of their father’s money, that their liberty had been stolen from them, and yet this awful knowledge was somehow mitigated by what Miss Crawford promised. This very notion of magic was foolish, but Lucy could hardly dismiss what she had seen. It was silly, she knew that, and yet she also knew it was real and suddenly all set out before her. With Miss Crawford, her friend, to guide her, soon everything would be different.