A Bitter Magic

by Roderick Townley

I give him my famous stare.

  “Different. You know. More going on upstairs.”

  What does that mean? I step on the ottoman to reach a silver decanter on a shelf. There’s something in the bottom of it. “Cole. Come here.”

  He climbs up next to me on the ottoman. In my open palm lies a gold ring.

  “Hello,” he says.

  I hold it up and squint to see better. “Looks like an inscription.”

  I feel his breath on my cheek. I’ve never been this close to a boy before. I wobble a bit, and he steadies me with an arm around my shoulder.

  “To M,” he reads, “with love…”

  “From P,” I finish. “This is a wedding ring!”

  “M would be Marina.”

  My breath lightens.

  “But why,” he continues, “would she hide it?”

  I can’t think with him so close. But there’s another excitement as well: the letter P. My father? This is the first clue I’ve ever found. Paul? Philip? Peter? What else? Phineas?

  A loud door slams behind me. “Just what is going on here?”

  I practically fall off the ottoman. Uncle Asa stands by the entrance, stiff as a fireplace tool. Cole lowers his hand from my shoulder.

  “I’ll take that, if you don’t mind.” Asa reaches up and snatches the ring.

  He turns a cold eye on me. “And the key.” He holds out an impatient hand.

  I stare back, fighting panic.

  The hand stays out.

  With a sigh, I dig in my pocket and give him the key.

  “Sorry, sir,” says Cole. “I got lost in the maze, and Cisley—”

  “I’m not speaking to you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anyway, you’re not lost.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No,” says Asa, his voice dead cold. “You’re fired!”

  “No!” I cry without thinking.

  Asa looks at me. “Actually,” he says slowly, “yes.”

  He turns to Cole. “Now get out!”

  PART TWO

  Nobody Sings at the Castle

  Chapter Fourteen

  There are problems with having a keen sense of smell. Uncle Asa’s laboratory, with its vials of chemicals, pots of dying flowers, cages of lizards, and bins of compost—it’s making me a little sick. After days of tests, I can hardly take it.

  Or is it him I can’t take? He fired my only friend! I should never speak to him again, yet here I am cooperating. The main reason is to find some clue, something that could lead me to Mother.

  Asa, of course, thinks I’m here because I’m just wild to learn about my special abilities. Well, all right, yes, I am. Of course I am, now that I know I have them. But I’m not so sure I want him to know about them.

  Working up here hasn’t been fun, and it’s gotten less fun as days go on and I keep failing his experiments. He’s angry that I can’t hear whispers through brick walls. Or see through brick walls. Or see around walls.

  “Here,” he says, taking a mallet and smashing a glass vial, “put that together. No hands.” I’m supposed to reassemble it through mental effort alone.

  Now, there’s a power I’d like to have, especially around Miss Porlock. It would save her so much embarrassment—and so many teacups.

  “Why can’t you do this?” snaps Asa. “Marina could do it when she was five years old.”

  “You told me yourself. Different people have different abilities.”

  “Yes. You can smell at a distance.” His voice is acid.

  The tests go on.

  I’m bad, it turns out, at regressing butterflies to their pupal stage. Worse at making plants sprout before my eyes. Worst of all at making red rose petals darken to black. Asa is really disappointed by that one. He made me take that test three times. Each time, I saw him gritting his teeth.

  I’m starting to feel disappointed in myself. There are so many things I can’t do. Things it never occurred to me to do.

  Levitation?

  “That would be lovely,” I tell him. (My feet remain firmly on the ground.)

  Controlling the weather?

  “That would be really useful in this rainy town. But no.”

  Turn invisible?

  “I could walk out the door. Does that count?”

  Ultimately, all the experiments lead back to the rose. Half the books on the shelf are about cultivation, hybrids, horticulture. I’m just the fallback. If he doesn’t succeed with the rose, he might be able to use me in his act. He’s practically said as much.

  I’ve told him I’m not interested. It’s fine that he wants to restart his career, but it’s not for me. Not with him.

  Most people would be flattered by all this interest, and I admit I’m excited. If only Asa weren’t the one doing the tests. Asa is interested in Asa. I’m interested in Mother—learning if she’s alive, getting her back safe. Uncle Asa has hardly mentioned her; and that piece of black glass I saw on the worktable last week is nowhere to be seen.

  It’s been a long afternoon after a long week—test after test—but for now, in one of those rare moments, I’m here by myself. Uncle Asa has been called downstairs to attend to “a servant problem.”

  I wonder who’s getting fired.

  Wandering around the lab among vats and bins, I have the odd feeling I’m looking at a picture of my uncle’s mind, but jumbled, like a scattered puzzle. If the pieces were fit together, what would they show?

  A thought zings through my head. It’s one I’ve had before but discounted. If he is not trying very hard to find out what happened to his sister, maybe it’s because he already knows!

  No, he couldn’t. Not his own sister. Could he hate her that much?

  Now I’m hurrying from one table to another, pulling out drawers, looking on sills and shelves. It’s got to be here somewhere. I pull down a tall leather-bound book. Nothing behind it but dust balls.

  He should empty his trash barrel. My nose wrinkles at the mingled smells of rotting flowers, dead lizards, and who knows what else. I look closer, and a wink of glass catches my eye. I reach in. My God, there it is! A piece of broken mirror, ten jagged inches of blackness. He threw it out!

  Breath catches in my throat. Footsteps!

  I slip the glass into my cloth shoulder bag.

  “Well,” Asa says, easing the door shut, “that was interesting.”

  A sound of ripping fabric—the glass is tearing through my bag! I lower the bag carefully to the floor.

  “You sound cheery,” I say.

  He smiles, not nicely. “It always bucks me up to fire incompetent servants.”

  “Not Strunk, I hope.”

  “Oh no.” He pulls on rubber gloves and searches around in a terrarium, pulling out a white mouse. “I’d be lost without Strunk.” He looks at me, his mouth tightening. “Well. Are we ready for some more tests?”

  I’d rather face the Latin ablative. “All right.”

  “Good. Heal this!” he says, and neatly slices off the mouse’s tail.

  “That’s horrible!”

  The creature writhes on the counter, blood dribbling from its stump.

  “Well, heal it!”

  “I don’t like you.”

  “Just do it, before it dies.”

  I bend over the creature, hold its severed tail against its frantic body, and blink away a tear. Concentrate! My hands grow warm. The wriggling diminishes. Now my hands feel actually hot. The smell of blood is strong as I let go of the mouse. The tail is fused to the body—but the animal is dead.

  Asa pushes me aside. “Clumsy child! You cooked him! Come now,” he says, seeing me turn away, “this is no time for squeamishness.”

  The look I shoot him is poisonous. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “You can’t be soft if you want to be a magician.” With his left hand, he brushes the dead rodent into the rubbish bin. “What is it?” he says. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “What way?”

 
“Never mind. We have time for one more experiment. Let’s get to work.”

  “No thanks.”

  “I promise not to slice up any more rodents.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “This next one’s interesting. It’s all set up.” He goes over to the apparatus he’s built. It’s meant to test my ability to “precipitate,” as he puts it—to make writing appear on a blank page. “Shall we give it a try?”

  I’m a little startled by the idea. Writing tricks are one of Mother’s specialties, as I saw last winter in Trieste, when her letter to Asa unwrote itself before my eyes.

  Is it possible I could do it, too? I’d love to find out. But I wouldn’t want Asa to know about it. He knows too much about me already. “I do better when I’m fresh.”

  He sighs. None of today’s experiments has worked. “All right, get out.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I want you back at seven tomorrow morning. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Very carefully I lift my bag, hitching it on my shoulder. The glass clinks. He looks at me curiously. I give him a weak smile.

  Hugging the bag against my side, I ease out the door, shut it gently behind me, and head for the stairs.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It’s not like me to pace about like this, but back in my rooms, I can’t stay still. Each time I pass the table, I glance at the jagged glass I’ve laid there. A blotch of nothingness. A spill of black ink. An absence.

  I stop to examine it for the tenth time. What do I think I can learn that Uncle Asa couldn’t, with all his cleverness?

  The glass, pitch-black, has a sinister look. Turning it on edge, I see that the backing is thick lead. Why so thick? Protecting against what? I wish Cole were here to help puzzle it out. He may be a “commoner,” as Uncle Asa has reminded me several times since that awful day in Mother’s room, but he’s smart. Also, for some reason, he seems to like me. (Does that mean he’s not so smart after all?)

  I see Miss Porlock has left a pot of tea for me, and more out of duty than anything else, I pour a lukewarm cup, swirling it absentmindedly as I circle the table. The mirror belonged to my mother and to her mother before her. There’s another mystery. What did they use it for?

  I set my cup down on it and stare out the window. In the late afternoon sun, the firth is blinding, as bright as the mirror is dark. I toy with a tortoiseshell hair clip, turning it around in my hands as I watch the first fishing boats return to the harbor. Directly below me, someone is leaving the castle, a woman lugging a suitcase.

  From this distance, it looks like Anna.

  Anna!

  Suddenly I realize what I’m holding: Anna’s hair clip, the one I gave her. She returned it!

  I run for the door, down the curving staircase, and out through the atrium, only to find the labyrinth still blocked off. Reversing myself, I race down the great hall and burst through the door to the kitchen. Mrs. Quay looks up from the turkey she’s basting, but before she can speak, I’m out the back door.

  At the crossroads, I finally catch up with Anna. Her big eyes widen as I stand before her, gulping for air.

  We don’t say a word.

  Uncle Asa’s “servant problem.”

  She sets down the suitcase.

  Silently, I hold out the hair clip. No reaction. I take her wrist and place it in her hand and close her fingers around it. The same as her gesture, I realize, when she gave me the key. She looks at me steadily, but I can’t read her expression. Slowly, she gathers her long hair and snaps the clip in it.

  What am I supposed to say? I’m sorry? She can see that.

  I pick up her suitcase, and together we start off. She glances at me sideways. After a few minutes, she takes over. We trade the suitcase back and forth along the dusty road that circles the town.

  The Gypsy caravan lies on the outskirts—four canvas-covered wagons drawn in a semicircle. With the nearest wagon still twenty yards off, we stop to rest.

  A distant wrinkle of sound—someone’s guitar. People mill about; a woman in a blue head scarf tends a cauldron over flames. The distant reek of work clothes mingles with wood smoke, the tang of cabbage with the savor of baking bread.

  A figure separates itself from the others and hurries toward us. A little boy. Anna doesn’t wait for him to reach her, but runs and grabs him into her arms.

  “Hanzi,” she moans, finally giving way to tears.

  The music stops. The woman in the blue head scarf takes Anna in her arms, but no one comes near me. How different they look from people I know. What would Strunk make of their wind-burned faces, some with mouth sores, their burning eyes, their brightly patterned but flimsy dresses, with a chilly night coming on?

  Anna sets her hand on the head of the boy and speaks in a language I have never heard. Hanzi tries to lift the suitcase, but it’s too much for him. He gives it a yank, and the catch breaks, spilling Anna’s sad possessions on the ground. For a moment, no one moves. Then Anna falls to her knees, grabbing at things and throwing them back in. I don’t really want to see her rolled-up dresses, boots wrapped in newspaper, books, underclothes, crucifix.

  An older boy comes over and kneels to help her.

  She pushes at him. “Nicolae, go away!” He ignores her, slaps the suitcase shut, and hefts it under one arm. He shoots me a look that scares me. No one is happy, and I remember what Anna once told me: I cannot lose my job.

  She speaks briefly to her mother, then turns to me. “You eat with us?”

  My surprise must show, because she adds, “She want to tank you.”

  “Thank me? I’ve been nothing but trouble.”

  Anna shakes her head. “You are not trouble. Mr. Tummel, he don’t like us. The key Nicolae makes…” Another shake of the head. “Is just a reason he gives.”

  She’s right. If it weren’t the key, there’d be something else. These are the kind of people Uncle Asa has warned me about.

  “I don’t understand. You’re such a good person, Anna.”

  “We are Roma. Gypsy. People don’t like us for tousand year.”

  I look around at the unsmiling faces. Well, one of them is smiling. Little Hanzi. He’s holding on to Anna’s leg and grinning up at her.

  People, trying to exist.

  “So you eat? Yes?” says Anna.

  “I’d like to stay. I would. But…”

  The woman in the head scarf holds a hunk of bread in her dirt-hardened hands. “Mamaliga?” she says. Her voice is harsh, her face creased leather, but her eyes are bright.

  I look to Anna for help.

  “Corn bread,” she says. A small smile starts along her lips. “Mamus wants you to eat.”

  I nod to the woman. “Thank you.” Yes, her hands are dirty, but the bread is warm, the smell good. I break off a corner. “Well,” I say, “maybe I could stay just a little while.”

  Immediately, the atmosphere lightens. People talk, children tumble and run, chickens scuttle. A boy pulls out a guitar. Lots of minor chords. An older man pulls out a harmonica and joins him. Then the boy starts to sing. A strange tune, but I like it. There’s a yearning in it that I recognize, although I don’t understand a word.

  Nobody sings at the castle.

  Mamus calls out, and the clan convenes for dinner.

  What a difference from my solemn meals in the castle’s dining vault, with the crisp white linen and throne-like chairs. Here, we are outdoors, sitting on the ground, with a steaming pot in the center. There are a lot of questions directed at me; luckily, I have Anna to interpret. How many shoes do I own? Did I ever eat that lobster? Can my uncle really turn children into mice?

  Anna’s mother ladles a steaming concoction into wooden bowls, which get passed around the circle. “Sak te mas,” she says in answer to my questioning look.

  “Meat and cabbage,” Anna explains.

  I don’t know when I’ve had such an appetite. A big loaf of mamaliga is passed around, hand to dirty hand, and each person breaks off a piece.


  I whisper to Anna, “Don’t people use plates and forks?”

  She shrugs. “We have saying. Food taste better from your hands.”

  I try to imagine what Uncle Asa would think about that.

  Anna’s mother comes up and speaks in a low voice. Anna frowns, looks around.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “Nicolae is not here. I don’t know where he goes.”

  I remember that Nicolae was the only one who wouldn’t speak to me. “He doesn’t like me.”

  Anna looks at me gravely. “Is not you. Is Mr. Tummel. He is not nice. Also…” She pauses. “Also your modder.”

  “My mother?”

  Anna looks down. “I should not say.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “She has magic. But the Roma, we have magic also. Tousand-year magic. She don’t like it.”

  “She don’t? Doesn’t?”

  “I do not say more.”

  “Anna.”

  She tilts her head. “She make tricks on us. One time, she change Mamus’s shoes. She make for same foot. We are not laughing.”

  I don’t know what to say. I’ve seen some of the tricks she’s played on Uncle Asa.

  A dog barks. Anna stands up. Then I hear it, too—a rumble of wheels over the rutted road.

  Now everyone is standing, watching a coach roll up and stammer to a stop. The door opens, and a familiar head pokes out.

  “Cisley!”

  If ever I didn’t want to see Miss Porlock…

  “Come, Cisley. Your uncle is worried about you.”

  “I’m having dinner,” I call to her. “Come and meet my friends.”

  Miss P. isn’t about to step out of the coach. “Cisley, come right now. You can have dinner at home.”

  It occurs to me that I could refuse. I look around at Anna and her family. They’re looking away. I’m once again that girl from the castle.

  I turn to Anna, but she glances down.

  “Anna.”

  “You better go.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  She looks at me directly. “Your uncle will be angry.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “At us.”

  I stare at her. Would my uncle really make more trouble for these people?