by Julia French
“The waitress lives in Maddington, but the man with the thorns was cursed just outside of Yarwich. I think Joshua’s moving around, looking for information on the Sea Queen anywhere he can, and those people just got in his way.”
“The only clues we have are in this letter, and we’re lucky to have it.” True stood up abruptly. “It’s late. We can’t do anything tonight. Tomorrow I’ll see what I can find about that ship.”
“Mark’s out of town on business. I don’t have to go yet,” she replied, then blushed up to the roots of her hair. Hadn’t True just dismissed her? Also, she had things to do—important things.
“Stay for supper, Rachel.”
There it was again, that odd note of shyness that was in his voice the day she’d come to drop off a copy of her interview. She didn’t know what it meant, but his voice told her that he did want her to stay.
Why shouldn’t she? She wasn’t on Mark’s timetable any more.
* * * *
An irresistible perfume floated forth from the kitchen, and Rachel’s mouth began to water. Evidently herbal potions weren’t the only things True could cook. To distract herself she turned to the books in the bookcase, counting them and examining the titles. Some of them appeared normal: The Life of Francis Bacon, Two Years Before the Mast, The Compleat Gardener. Others seemed to radiate an air of disquietude, although she couldn’t pin down why: The Long-Lost Friend, Melissa Unbound, Grimoire for the Ages (what, or who, was Grimoire?). Her hand hovered over the rows of crumbling spines and paused in front of a fat volume with the title stamped in gold leaf: The Practitioner’s Almanack.
The scarlet cover was smudged with fingerprints and faded in places as if it had been handled many times. Inside the front cover an inscription was written in thick lead pencil: For Rob’t Gannett my best frend dont ever loose this book 1944. The handwriting was labored, as if the signer weren’t accustomed to writing. On the facing page above the title a printed admonition appeared: Knowledge Without Practice Goes Begging. Right enough, she thought, and turned the page. The publisher’s imprint was unfamiliar: Ludchester Press, England, 1704, and she wondered if the date was a misprint.
The book wasn’t badly worn. As a matter of fact, it was in better condition than it had any right to be. How could the cheap paper and binding have lasted so long without falling apart? On the next page another motto appeared over the table of contents: Power Unused is Power Unrealized. The table of contents could have come out of the pages of a twentieth-century New Age magazine: The Locations of Power, Objects of Power, Influence and Control, Attack and Defense, Divining the Future and the Past, The Power of Names, Herbs and Their Divers Uses, Gems and Metals, Phases of the Moon, Calling the Dead, Calling the Living, Hermetic Wisdom, The Solomon Key.
Undecided what subject to explore, Rachel closed the book, let it fall open again, and traced her finger down the page:
In the matter of trees it is by far the best to request rather than to demand, for trees take offense sooner than any other living creature. To win their respect a gift is welcome. If there is nothing at hand to make a suitable gift, a sweet song will suffice, for all the trees in the world love music. If no song can be found a pint of good red wine will prove pleasing. Then make your request. If your request is heard but not answered look not to the trees themselves but to your manner of asking, to see whether you have given offense. The ill-will of trees, once gained, is not easily dispelled.
A smile crept across her face as she imagined True asking the trees which lined his drive if they would mind not being so hostile. It was puzzling that he hadn’t done anything about it already, but with the protective influence of the rowan tree in front of his house he might have felt that he didn’t have to bother. Rachel, however, disliked being on bad terms with anyone or anything, and couldn’t help but speculate. What would happen if one day she were to pour a glass of “good red wine” over the roots of the meanest-looking maple?
The Practitioner’s Almanack snapped shut with a crisp, indignant sound. What on Earth was she thinking? Just because she had seen what seemed like magic work one time didn’t mean she had to accept everything uncritically. Clearly, she was projecting her anxiety about her own life onto the external symbol of True’s trees. Wasting good wine wasn’t going to solve her problem, and neither were the rest of these ridiculous things. What other half-baked superstitions lurked within the musty pages of this book? She had to find out in order to arm herself with rational arguments against them should True try to teach them to her.
Absorbed in Phases of the Moon, the gentle clinking of silverware in the background gradually penetrated her concentration and brought her back to her surroundings. She put the book down and followed her nose to the kitchen, where upon the table were two smoking platters. One held crisp fried pork chops, the other sliced apples fried in the same pan as the pork and flavored with savory pork drippings.
“True, I’ve never smelled anything so good.”
“I can make more if you want.” He handed her a plate.
“There’s enough for four people here.”
“You’re too skinny. Don’t you eat?”
“Of course I do…mmmm, cinnamon.”
“Cloves, too.”
“It tastes apple pie, with pork.”
Dinners in the Jeffries household were awkward. Most of the time Rachel was too nervous to do more than pick at her meal. Tonight the food seemed to disappear from her plate of its own accord. Neither of them spoke during the meal but it was a companionable quiet, not a cold one. When they had finished, True set the empty dishes in the sink.
“I’ll wash, you dry,” Rachel offered, but he demurred.
“They’ll still be there in the morning. Tonight I have company. I don’t have any dessert, but do you want coffee?”
“Yes, thank you.”
While True made coffee Rachel wandered back into the living room and picked up the Almanack. What a strange book it was, a few fragments of genuine wisdom hidden within a confusing compendium of pretend-truths and outrageous lies. True wasn’t educated but he was intelligent, and he could have made his way through the text from beginning to end with little trouble. Did he believe any of this “information?” What did he want her to believe?
As before, she let the book fall open again on her lap, and the leaves parted at Divining the Future and the Past. Divining seemed a safe enough topic. Feeling confident, she turned the page and was greeted by a painstakingly detailed woodcut of a naked man hanging upside down by one ankle, hands bound behind his back. Swollen like sausages, the man’s entrails protruded from the gaping slit in his abdomen and dangled in front of his contorted face. A robed figure, indifferent to the dying man’s agony, stood over the entrails with one finger extended as if to prod them. Her gorge began to rise.
“Oh, I don’t do that anymore.” True set a cup of black coffee at her side and took the Almanack in his hands. “It’s messy, and the kinfolk ask too many questions. Tea leaves work better anyway.”
“Don’t joke about that unspeakable picture!”
“That one’s nothing. Did you read very far?”
“Only a little. This book belonged to your great grandfather, didn’t it? For Robert Gannett, my best friend.”
“He passed it on to me when he was eighty-nine years old. He wouldn’t mind you reading it. He would’ve liked you.”
They drank their coffee in silence, broken only by the rattle of sleet against the window.
“It’s a bad night,” True observed after a time.
Rachel agreed.
“There’ll be ice on the roads.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Driving that thing?” He was referring to the Behemoth’s bald tires, upon which the tread was a distant memory. “Stay here tonight. You can drive home in the morning.”
He wasn’t asking her to sleep with him. He was merely concerned for her safety. Rachel didn’t hesitate. “Thanks, True, I think I will. If I had known a storm was coming I would have stayed home.”
Another burst of sleet rattled against the window. A chill draft crept down the chimney and stirred the glowing wood coals into deceptive life, but a minute later they died and she and True were left almost in darkness. True got to his feet, took a box of matches from the mantel, and in a moment had a fresh fire built up from the remnants of the old. Rachel turned off the lamp and they sat in the expanding glow of the new fire.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the light cast flickering shadows around True’s head and shoulders. One moment he looked exotic and dark, almost menacing, but in the next second he was bathed in a halo of reddish-gold light like a saint in an illustrated Bible.
He’s just a man, she thought, and in that moment the core of fear buried in her heart dropped away. True wasn’t Mark, and he would never turn into Mark. She trusted him completely.
“Rachel, you know about me but I don’t know anything about you.”
The open-ended question surprised her. “What do you want to know?”
“Where you grew up, where you went to school, brothers and sisters and suchlike.”
“There isn’t much to tell. It’s boring, and some of it is sad.”
“Tell it to me anyway,” he urged.
She wasn’t being falsely modest. There wasn’t much to tell about her life, but True seemed genuinely interested. She kept back from him the trouble in her marriage because she didn’t need his pity, and she was confident that sharp as it was, True’s intuition hadn’t led him to guess her unhappy secret.
By the time she finished talking, the new fire had dimmed to red streaks in a half-burned log. She fought against a yawn, and True showed her to the tiny, sparsely furnished guest room. She closed the door, lay down on the bed and shut her eyes, and the memory of his face illuminated in firelight rose up in front of her. How would it feel if he had put his arms around her, held her close? What if he had turned her face up to his, put his lips on hers and kissed her slowly, passionately? After that, what if he had…
What you’re thinking is adultery, the logical part of her brain reminded her. You’re still married.
Not for much longer, replied another, deeper part of herself.
Rachel’s eyes sprang open and she stared into darkness, trying not to think of possibilities.
* * * *
True rolled over once more and again the blanket slid to the floor. He gave up, folded his arms behind his head and listened to the sleet falling outside.
Tonight, sitting by the fire, the time had been right. Why hadn’t he opened his heart to her, told her he loved her, asked her to come to him? But even as the question formed in his mind he already knew the answer-it was the right time for him, but the wrong time for her. If he’d asked her tonight to leave her husband and cleave to him she might have said yes, not out of love, but because she needed comforting. Without true love, in time she might grow tired of him, even hate him, a thing far more hurtful than a simple I’m sorry, I don’t love you back. If he truly cared about her, he had to wait with his feelings until she was strong enough to be certain of her own.
Then there was Joshua Lambrecht, the witch man. How was he going to keep Rachel out of Joshua’s way? True started to wish she had never left Yarwich, never met him—but no, he didn’t honestly wish that. They should have met a year from now, on a sunny warm day with a breeze rippling the tall grasses, and he would have taken her hand and they would have walked along the trail by the river, talking about nothing, getting to know each other and falling in love…thinking of this, he slid gently into sleep and dreaming.
* * * *
The Great Fire…Sea Queen…a ship with passengers…seasick passengers, most likely with lice and fleas. Every time Rachel tried to hold the idea in her mind and follow it to its logical conclusion, it slipped away and swam back into the invisible depths of her drowsy brain like a minnow hiding in murky water.
Yarwich Historical Society…you yourself would be the only vector…I wash my hands of the whole thing…
Finally the idea surfaced again, and she held her breath so as not to scare it off. The blood pounded in her head as she realized it.
In 1666 the Great Fire of London had burned a large portion of the city, but had spared almost all the people. It had killed huge numbers of rats, however, and the fleas infesting the rats had been vectors—vectors for—
“Hellfire‘n damnation!” True’s startled voice was muffled by the bedroom door.
Her fist stopped in mid-pound. “I’ve got it! I know what Joshua’s going to do.”
The bedroom door creaked open an inch. “You got—what?”
“I know what the letter means.”
There was a long pause and the sound of clothes rustling. “Are you sure?”
“Hurry up!”
True emerged in jeans and a shirt thrown around his shoulders. He pressed the folded square of Joshua’s letter into her hand. “Tell me,” he ordered.
“I think Joshua’s planning to infect people with bubonic plague, the Black Death. I think he wants to make himself a carrier.”
He ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair. “You figured this out from what, now?”
“In 1666 the Great Fire of London stopped an outbreak of the plague because it killed the rats that carried the fleas that spread the disease from person to person. The fleas were the vectors, the carriers of the plague germs.”
“EH told Joshua he’d be the only vector now.”
“But I haven’t figured out why Joshua would be looking for the ship’s records or whose remains he wants to find.”
“If Joshua could get hold of the remains of the people who died of the Black Plague, he could make those dead folks tell him how to become a carrier.”
Rachel wrinkled her forehead in puzzlement before it occurred to her. “Necromancy! Calling the Dead.”
“Joshua’s got the power to do it, and if the Sea Queen sailed here from England before that fire in London broke out, it could’ve had people on board who were already sick or dying. He would want to find out their names. That’s why he’s looking for the ship’s records.”
“Why would he bother with names?”
“For their souls to come back from the other world, he’s got to call each one of them by name.”
“So Joshua can’t call up those dead people without the passenger list from the Sea Queen.”
“He could,” True amended, “but it would be harder. He’d have to have a piece of bone or hair or some grave dust from each resting place. I’d like that list too-without it I can still put a spell on all the dead people to keep them from talking to Joshua, but it’s always more powerful with the names.”
“If the list hasn’t been destroyed, and if we can get to it before Joshua does,” she reminded him.
Outside, the sleet and wind had died down. There was no noise in the room except for their breathing. I’ll be able to drive home in the morning, she thought, and her stomach contracted. Home to Mark’s house.
“There’s another way to stop this. If Joshua were dead…” True gave her a sidelong glance, and the look on his face resembled the devilish shadow the fire had cast upon him earlier. “It would be a clean kill, no evidence. I don’t even have to touch him.”
She thought of Joshua Lambrecht hanging upside down, his intestines like swollen sausages. “You can’t murder him.”
“He’d kill me if he could.”
She couldn’t deny it. “That doesn’t make it right.”
A frown creased his brow. “Some people do evil because it gives them pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with teaching them to leave others be. Joshua’s no di
fferent.”
He’s done it before. A shiver went through her. “You can’t hurt people because you think they deserve it. Even if they do deserve it, you don’t have the right to make that decision. What if you’re wrong? What if we’re both wrong?”
“I know I’m right.” He told her grimly. “Do you think Joshua deserves to go on living just to make people die? If you don’t think so, then let me stop him for good.”
“We’ve got to stop him, but how could hurting or killing him be the right thing to do? There’s always a better way.”
“What better way would there be, ma’am? I would be much obliged to you if—”
“Stop it! Don’t you know anybody who could help us?”
“Who? The witch-police? There’s a powerful lot of evil in the world that can’t be understood by ordinary folks, and if we can’t prove that Joshua is up to no good, nobody will help us stop him until he’s done something, and then it’ll be too late.”
“You sit in judgment, but you have no right to punish somebody simply because they don’t fit your notion of what’s good.”
He exploded. “What’s your notion of good? Doing nothing and hoping things turn out all right? You’re living in misery because that bully husband of yours likes for others to bend to his will, especially you. I saw it in his face, and you know it too, I can see that in yours. Does he raise his hand to you, Rachel? Why don’t you leave him? Or if you don’t want to leave him, why don’t you protect yourself from him? Why don’t you do what’s right?”
Thrown off balance, she floundered. “It-it’s not that simple.”
“If you won’t fix it, if you’re too scared to fix it, I’ll fix it for you. You know I can.”
“Leave Mark alone.” Her hypocrisy clamored in her brain. “Let me handle him in my own way.”
“Then let me handle Joshua in mine. Sometimes to do good, you have to do bad, something you don’t understand.”
“You said you could put a spell on the dead people to keep them from speaking to Joshua. I’ll find the list from the Sea Queen so your spell will work right. Try that way first, True. Please, please.” Her fingers toyed with the chain around her neck.
