The Charmed Wife

by Olga Grushin

  Also by Olga Grushin

  The Dream Life of Sukhanov

  The Line

  Forty Rooms

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Olga Grushin

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Grushin, Olga, author.

  Title: The charmed wife / Olga Grushin.

  Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020017241 (print) | LCCN 2020017242 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593085509 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593085516 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Paranormal romance stories. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.R85 C48 2020 (print) | LCC PS3607.R85 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017241

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017242

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Tal Goretsky

  Cover images: (woman) © Nikaa / Trevillion Images: (wall pattern) Stephanie Cabrera / Offset

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  To my mother, Natalia Kartseva, and the memory of my grandmother Tamara Tomberg—the first storytellers in my life

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Olga Grushin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Story with No Ending

  Part One

  The Scissors: Close to the Beginning of the End

  The Cauldron: Closer Still to the Beginning of the End

  The Spell: At Last, the Beginning of the End Proper

  The Beginning of the Beginning (After the Happy Ending)

  The End of the Beginning

  The Beginning of the Middle

  The Middle of the Middle

  The End of the Middle’s Middle

  The Beginning of the Middle’s End

  The Middle’s End

  Part Two

  In the Forest Clearing

  At the Woodsman’s Cottage

  At the Manor

  At the Log Cabin

  At the Seaside

  At the House in the Pines

  In the Suburbs

  In the City

  What Happened at the End

  The Fairy-Tale Ending

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Cinderella and the prince

  lived, they say, happily ever after,

  like two dolls in a museum case

  never bothered by diapers or dust,

  never arguing over the timing of an egg,

  never telling the same story twice,

  never getting a middle-aged spread,

  their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

  Regular Bobbsey Twins.

  That story.

  Anne Sexton, “Cinderella”

  Even a fruitful magic by degrees

  Can wrap us in a dubious spell;

  Tales that articulated mysteries

  Now offer only ways of looking back,

  As though across the ocean’s swell,

  Or down alleys through the pine and tamarack.

  Timothy Steele, “Summer Fairytale”

  A Story with No Ending

  Once upon a time, there lived a man who had a wife and a daughter. His wife was loving, his daughter sweet-natured, and his trade successful, and for a while all went well with him. But one day all his ships sank in a storm, then his wife took ill and died, and he had nothing left but his little girl. He wanted to do right by her, and so, after grieving for a year, he married again to give the girl a new mother; but his second wife turned out to be haughty and cold. Soon the merchant himself fell sick and died, and his daughter was left all alone in the world, with no one but her stepmother to take care of her. The woman had two daughters of her own, from an earlier marriage; like their mother, they were proud and unkind, and disliked the pretty little girl on sight. While her father still lived, they had been afraid to abuse her openly, but one week had not passed since his funeral when the three of them began to treat her like a servant, forcing her to clean the house and cook for them. She never complained but worked at her menial tasks with a smile and a song, and in a few years blossomed into a beautiful maiden, yet so dirty and ragged was she from her daily labors that her sharp-tongued stepsisters gave her a mocking new name.

  “Cinderella!” my daughter would always cry at this point in the story, beaming at me, and I would smile back, right her sliding blanket, and go on. The rest was soon told: years of drudgery and obedience passed, none too quickly, and then came a fairy godmother, and mice that turned into horses, and a pumpkin carriage, and, at long last, a ball with its handsome prince. In due course the palace clock chimed midnight, and the glass slipper was lost and the lovestruck admirer gained; but before I could come to the royal wedding itself, my daughter would ask about the dresses of the guests at the ball, and did the ladies’ skirts have those long puffy trains that looked like meringues, and if so, didn’t the cute little pages with their scarlet stockings and silver trays trip over them and fall and spill the drinks all over everyone, and what kind of sweets did they serve anyway, did they have the peach ice cream, her favorite, or make do with the lemon sorbet instead, which tasted like sour water—and not once could I arrive at the ending, for amidst the giggles she would soon drift off to sleep.

  She never wanted any other story told, only this one, and she never wanted it told in any other words. She had learned it by heart by the time she turned five years old, and would catch me out in any verbal departure, no matter how trivial, and demand the “real truth” on the verge of tears. After a few slip-ups, some accidental, some less so, I knew not to alter a single sentence. I must have told it dozens, no, hundreds of times; but while the story stayed exactly the same, her questions changed. When she was six, she no longer asked about the ruffles and the desserts but wanted to know if the glass shoes were not terribly uncomfortable to dance in and whether the stepsisters were not upset to have been tricked. Those I could answer, smiling still; but one night shortly after her seventh birthday, she told me: “Nanny Nanny says that love is like a plant, it grows little by little, it needs to have light and water and time to get tall and strong. So how was there enough time to fall in love if it was only one ball?”

  Her west-facing bedroom was aglow with the setting sun, everything pink and sweet. I could hear a lonely siren crying far away. My daughter was looking at me with no trace of her usual smile, eyebrows raised in a triangle of expectation. I bent to adjust her rose-tinted pillows as I scrambled for the right words in my mind, thinking all the while that if I were able to be more forceful in my dealings with hired help, I would chide Nanny Nanny most severely.

  W
hen I straightened, I took her small, hot hand in mine. A second siren had joined the first by now, and then another, and yet another—familiar wails heralding distant disasters, fires or wrecks or even death somewhere out there—but not here, not in my world, for everything was tranquil, everything was special, everything was charmed in my world.

  “Love is not always like a plant,” I said to my child in a measured tone. “Sometimes it is, but other times, it is more like lightning, it strikes all of a sudden. You look at someone, and there you are, in love.”

  “But isn’t lightning a bad thing?” asked Angie, frowning.

  And in that moment, I had no answer for her.

  Her younger brother, at two years old, required much supervision, so I began to use my exhaustion as an excuse for ceasing my nighttime visits for a while after; I would only come by the flaming room at sunset, to kiss her forehead and wish her pleasant dreams, then depart with a rushed swish of silk. And when, some months later, I was finally ready to resume the telling of the story, I found that she had moved on.

  “Tell me of Cousin Jack and the Giant Beanstalk,” she chanted as she bounced up and down on her bed. “I like Jack, he’s so much fun, we should have him over for a playdate.”

  I tried telling the story to her brother as well when he was little. He tolerated it briefly, although with him, too, I could never reach the ending before he interrupted, curious about the colors of the mouse horses’ coats and the uniforms of the guards at the palace gates. But after only a few times, he started to grow impatient with it.

  “Really, don’t you know any other stories?” he drawled one evening, bored, his eyes wandering over the painted clouds of the nursery ceiling.

  I knew that my children could be cruel just like any other children, in spite of having been blessed by the fairies in manifold ways, but it came as a painful pang all the same. Perhaps I should have chastised him, but I merely smiled in silence, as I tend to do when I am truly hurt, and thought: Well, but maybe he’s right, maybe it simply isn’t the kind of story that bears a lot of repetition. So I told him about a vagabond soldier and three magic dogs. I did not omit any of the frightening bits, and Ro fell asleep with a look of satisfaction on his face.

  After that, I never mentioned the slipper or the ball to either of my children, nor indeed to anyone else—for whenever I tried, my daughter’s small voice would ring out clear and merciless in my ear: “Love is like a plant, it grows little by little.” I thought of other replies I could have given her. Love for a child is nothing like a plant, I could have told her; it is instant and complete, a full and sure surrender, like falling into deep, deep waters that close over you. At times the waters are warm and tranquil, familiar like an all-enveloping blanket, a one-eyed teddy bear, a worn-out bedtime story, the milky smell behind a baby’s tiny seashell of an ear, and they carry you through your days in somnolent, animal peace; and at other times, they turn roiling and fierce, taking your breath away with fears and worries, tossing you about on sleepless nights—yet this love is always there, always whole, needing no light to feed it.

  But whenever I thought this, another voice, much older than that of a seven-year-old, would steal into my mind. Ah, but love for a man is nothing like love for a child, it would say in a sly, silky whisper. It is more like the sun that burns bright in your eyes, is it not—and when the sun is gone and you close your eyes, defeated, its afterimage is blackness.

  The afterimage of this kind of love is hate.

  Part One

  The Scissors: Close to the Beginning of the End

  Hate is a clenched fist in my heart. It keeps my nerves numb as I lie in the dark, pretending to be asleep, waiting for my husband’s breathing to grow slow and even. It takes some time; he tosses and mumbles before falling still at last. Once I know the draught I poured into his wine has done its work, I slide out of bed and dress as soundlessly as I can, and oh, I can be very quiet indeed—I am well practiced in silence. I do not light a candle. The room is pitch black, for the fire has long since died in the fireplace, but I have no need of sight to find my clothes, to skirt the perils of invisible corners: this has been my bedroom for the past thirteen years—thirteen and a half, to be precise—and I have measured its every inch in hours of wall-to-wall pacing. And a candle might wake Brie and Nibbles, who are such nervous sleepers.

  The shoes, the lightest among a hundred ballroom pairs I own, are lined up by the dresser, and the borrowed cloak, the color of shadows, is waiting folded on the chair. As I put it on, I grope for the sewing scissors I slipped into its pocket earlier in the day, and the touch of cold metal reassures me. Ready at last, I tiptoe to my husband’s side of the bed—and at once, without warning, I am rattled by a memory of our wedding. The moon was enchanted that night, white as the richest cream, bright as the brightest candle, as is traditional on similar momentous occasions; once he slept, I stared at his profile, outlined by the moon’s brilliance against the pillow plush with the Golden Goose down, and cried tears of joy at my great fortune. But tonight, there is no moon, and all I can see is a pool of denser darkness in the dark. For a minute I stand unmoving, just listening to him breathe, until I become aware of the scissors’ edge cutting painfully into the palm of my hand. And now I want to cry again, if for a vastly different reason. I do not cry. I bend lower instead and feel amidst the moist swirls of satin sheets. When I alight upon his curls at last, the perfumed waviness of his hair is soft, so very soft, under my fingertips.

  I swoop down upon him with the scissors.

  The mice do not stir in their walnut-shell beds as I creep out of the bedroom, the snipped lock of hair tucked away in the pouch concealed at my hip, next to a few other things already there: a bunch of dried flowers tied with a fading lavender ribbon, a miniature portrait in a bejeweled locket, a sapphire brooch that I will hand over as payment when all this is over, and fingernail clippings from my husband’s left hand.

  “It must be the hand he uses to shoot,” the witch told me the night I went to see her.

  “Shoot?” I repeated, confused. “Shoot what?”

  “How should I know?” she snarled. “Stags, swans, sirens, whatever it might be his pleasure to shoot. They all shoot something, dearie.”

  I stayed quiet then, because the echo in the witch’s cave filled all words with a cold, hollow menace and I felt afraid of the treacherous sound of my own voice, and also because I never like to contradict anyone, but I thought: My husband doesn’t shoot, he just signs papers—still, as some of them are execution orders, perhaps it comes to much the same thing? And at dawn of the fall equinox, as instructed, I gathered the yellowing crescents of his left-hand nails off the floor of his changing room before the Singing Maids got to them, hoping it would be enough.

  I carry my lantern unlit under the plain gray cloak as I hurry along the corridors. Out of the corner of one eye, I catch the reflection of an escaped blond strand and a pale cheekbone in the glass of a grandfather clock, and pull the hood lower, so no one will wonder where I am going at this late hour. But the hallways are deserted, which is just as it should be, for here, all things run on schedule. Every afternoon, at five o’clock on the dot, porcelain teapots bustle through the palace, knocking on doors with their gleaming spouts, splashing tea into dancing teacups wherever required, after which chandelier crystals begin to tinkle in all the ballrooms, chamber orchestras commence playing repetitive waltzes, and courtiers twirl, one-two-three, one-two-three, and gift one another with fatuous smiles, and dine on roasted quail and little cakes with apricot icing, and talk about the new fashion for pastel-colored gloves. Then the music winds down and they curtsy and part ways until breakfast the following morning, when the busy flock of teapots flits through the hallways once more, steaming with tea, not too strong, plenty of cream, plenty of sugar, every day, every month, every year, over and over again. At this late hour, so close to midnight, everyone is long since in bed. Only once do
I meet a solitary candle sprite hurrying to an assignation with a candle burning somewhere, but it is too aquiver to pay my passage any heed; for love makes everyone blind, as simpering court storytellers are forever fond of intoning, quite as if blindness were a happy circumstance in which we all long to share.

  Storytellers are dangerous fools, and my eyes are wide open now.

  I sweep past dim expanses of reception chambers, past mirrored staircases leading down into multiplied shadows. As I near the Ancestor Gallery, I slow my steps, but the portraits are dozing, the kings snoring mightily, their beards rising and falling, the queens making thin, delicate noises through dusty smiles. No ancestors of mine, I tell them soundlessly as I slip by. In the Great Hall, candelabra are ablaze along the walls and two guards stand flanking the iron-bound doors. I freeze, my heart lurching, then see that they, too, are asleep, helmets drooping over ceremonial lances, the gargantuan visitor log book sprawling unattended between the ostentatious flower arrangement and the old-fashioned apparatus on the slumbering concierge’s desk. Sliding a little on the marble floor, I steal across to the doors, lean on them with my shoulder, gather all my strength, and push.

  The doors do not creak. The guards do not wake.

  I step over the threshold.

  Light from the hall has fallen onto the ancient slabs of the terrace in a great rectangle the color of honey. Beyond it, autumn lies in wait, chilly and damp. I can just see the ivy-clad banisters of the Grand Staircase starting their descent into the garden and the stone arms of a nymph holding out a mossy basket of primroses, the rest of the statue lost to darkness. I pause to light my lantern, and now my hands begin to shake. It takes four tries and a burn on my finger before a tiny wild flame careens into being.

  The lantern lit, I linger in the golden doorway for yet another minute. The night before me smells of leaves and rain—and something else, too, a troubling yet exciting smell I fail to recognize. The palace at my back smells of all things small and familiar—candle wax, cakes, parquet polish. This is all I know, all I have known for thirteen long years—thirteen and a half, to be precise—and I feel sudden fear at the thought of walking away. Then I notice my shadow lying on the ground, and the shadow is dark within the light, cut from the same cloth as the night beyond. All at once I say to myself: Oh look, my shadow is growing impatient with me, it wants to go home to its own kind. And somehow this poor little jest gives me courage, so I draw the cloak tight against the chill and push the doors closed behind me. They come together with a dull, heavy thud, like some massive volume slammed shut when the story is over.