She thought of shrinking back into the pantry and locking the door, but her temper was higher than ever. “What do you want?” she demanded. Little Ursule cried harder, and she lifted her to her shoulder.
For answer, Maddock held up a battered and filthy object in his free hand.
For a few seconds Nanette stared at it, uncomprehending. When she realized what it was, a chill spread through her chest, damping her temper. The babe’s tears drenched her shoulder, and the little body shook with sobs as Nanette sank back into her chair. She covered the child’s soft head with her hand, as if the priest might bite her. She said in a shaking voice, “What is that?”
But she knew.
He had dropped it when he fled. It must have lain there ever since that ugly day, its shape dissolving under the weight of the weather, its color faded by the mud, but it was still recognizable. Especially to one who wore one so much like it.
The witch hunter’s hat.
She felt the blood drain from her face. “You can see I have a babe to feed, sir! I pray you leave me to it!”
“He was here,” Father Maddock said. He shook the object in his hand, spattering the flagstones with crumbs of dirt. “He was here the day he died!”
“I don’t—”
“I know it!” he shrilled. “He told me he was coming, and he did, but he never made it back!” He leaned forward, fat cheeks quivering with anger. His bad eyes seemed to find their focus as he brought his face much too close to hers. “What did you do to him—” He spit the last word, as if it was the foulest thing he could say: “witch?”
Nanette, with a wet and weeping babe in her arms, drew one deep, steadying breath. She had nothing to fight him with but her power. She drew it around her like a shield. A weapon.
Deliberately she came to her feet. The blood returned to her face, and the ache of magic began deep in her body, where her womb was still tender from childbirth. As if she felt what was building in her mother, little Ursule ceased sobbing.
“Listen to me, priest.” Nanette took a step around the end of the table. Maddock fell back, the dilapidated hat dangling from his fingers. “We are an old and honorable clan, and we protect our own.” She felt the words charged with her power, her body singing with it. It was a building wave, gathering strength and volume, rising to a crest. “If you threaten us, priest—” She took another step, and she could see he felt it. Her magic was a comfort to her babe, but it struck terror into the heart of her enemy. “If you threaten us—if you threaten my child—we will destroy you.”
From nowhere, as it seemed, the gray cat appeared, his tail slashing back and forth, his yellow eyes fixed on Father Maddock. The priest paled when he saw it.
“How—you can’t—” he tried to cry, but his voice strangled in his throat. His hand, holding the dilapidated hat, shook wildly.
She reached for it. “Give me that thing.”
His mouth opened and closed like that of a gasping fish. He released the hat, and it fell into her waiting hand. The cat arched and hissed, and the priest’s face grew even whiter, until it looked like one of Isabelle’s batches of bread dough.
Nanette tossed the hat toward the open hearth, where it landed in the half-burned coals, limp and defeated. The ache in her belly swelled and rose into her chest. She could have sworn she grew taller and broader, and the register of her voice dropped to match. “Go, priest,” she intoned. “Before something happens to you, too.”
The hat improbably caught fire, blazing up to fill the room with acrid smoke.
Father Maddock gasped and backed toward the door, crossing himself as he went. The cat followed him on mincing paws, snarling. “Harlot!” the priest croaked. “Jezebel!”
The cat pounced at him.
The priest gave a wordless cry as he crashed through the door and onto the porch. He scrambled out into the garden, nearly falling, staggering toward the gate with his whip flailing beside him.
The moment the gate swung shut behind the priest, the cat turned back with his tail high. He walked calmly to the hearth and lay down on the warm bricks. The smoke that had billowed out from the fire a moment before shrank and disappeared up the chimney, leaving the air as clean as if the winter breeze had blown right through the house. Nanette stood where she was for a few moments, feeling the power subside around her.
Ursule stirred against her shoulder and mewled. Nanette blew out a breath, went back to her chair, and settled in it to give her babe the breast once again.
She felt victorious, and she savored the feeling, but she knew it was a treacherous emotion. It was not over. It would never be over while women like her wielded their power over men like that.
She looked down at Ursule’s face, savoring the line of her tiny nose, the curve of her downy cheek. “I would die for you, Daughter,” she whispered.
On the hearth, the cat’s tail switched an irritated rhythm.
THE BOOK OF URSULE
1
1847
Ursule Orchiére loved growing up on the Cornish coast. She had a paddock full of moor ponies to ride, a henhouse busy with chickens, and a flock of goats who crowded around her whenever she appeared, eager to be scratched under their chins.
The only animal who wouldn’t come near her was the ancient gray cat who slept in her mother’s room. When she asked why that might be, Nanette shrugged, and said that was a cat who did just what he wanted and no more.
Ursule understood that. Animals had their own reasons for doing the things they did. She did, too.
“Maman,” she asked once, when she was still small, “why won’t Tante Louisette and Tante Anne-Marie and the others speak English? No one in Marazion speaks French.”
“Shhh,” Nanette said. “They’ll hear you.”
“That makes no difference! They won’t understand me anyway.”
“You’d be surprised. They understand more than you think.” Nanette flashed her little daughter a look, then seized her up to tickle her. She was the only one of the Orchiére sisters little Ursule had ever heard laugh.
Ursule’s curiosity grew as she grew older. “What’s the matter with the family, Maman? They never leave the farm if they can help it. They hide when people come to look at the ponies or buy cheese. They’re like—like ermites!”
“You mean hermits, Ursule. Don’t mix your languages.”
Ursule put her small fists on her hips and tilted her head, a gesture she had learned from Nanette herself. She demanded in her childish voice, “Well?”
Nanette tweaked one of her curls. “Be respectful of your elders, Ursule. That includes your mother!” Ursule wrinkled her nose in answer, and Nanette gave in. “I think they wish they were still in France, sweetheart. None of them—not Louisette or any of them, including the uncles—wanted to leave.”
“Why did they, then?”
“It’s a sad story.”
“Tell it to me.”
They were in the garden, where Nanette was hoeing a row of potatoes. She paused and leaned on the hoe as she gazed out beyond the cliff to the uneasy gray sea. The silhouette of St. Michael’s Mount lifted above the horizon, separated from the mainland now by the high tide of midday. “I was only four years old when we fled,” she said. “But I was old enough to understand that everyone was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“People. Angry people.” Nanette took up the hoe again. “We were Romani. Gypsies. The people didn’t like that.”
“Why?”
Nanette shrugged. “People take notions.”
“That’s not an answer!”
“There aren’t always answers, sweetheart,” Nanette said, serene now. She moved down the row, chopping at the soil. Ursule followed her, bending now and then to pull a weed from the softened ground. From time to time she piped another question, but her mother didn’t answer.
When Nanette reached the end of the long row, she straightened, one hand on her back. “Well, at least that’s done. I’m tired, but it’s milking time.”
&
nbsp; “Non, non, Maman! The goats are mine. I’ll milk them.”
Nanette smiled behind her hand. Ursule knew she had been tricked, but she didn’t mind. By the time she was ten she had taken charge of the little herd of goats, milking them, guiding them up to the moor to graze, seeing to their hay and mash through the cold winter months. More than once she’d spent a night in the byre, helping one of the she-goats deliver a kid.
Unlike her aunts and uncles, Ursule thought of herself as Cornish. She loved their old farmhouse, with its long, low roofline and her cramped bedroom tucked under the eaves. She spent hours rambling across the moor, trying to coax the wild ponies to come to her. She dug clams from the rocky beach below the cliff, carrying them up the steep path in a bucket for the aunts to boil for dinner. She rode along in the jingle when Nanette took cheese and soaps and vegetables to the markets in Marazion, and there she chattered away with housewives and farmers, speaking English or Cornish as they preferred. She played with the other children who came, especially Meegan’s, and sometimes she went to Mass with Meegan and her family.
Nanette smiled at all of this, except on the day she saw the priest of St. Hilary Church put a hand on Ursule’s shoulder and speak to her, wagging his finger in her face. On that occasion Nanette called her daughter abruptly away.
“Why did you do that?” Ursule cried, when they were back at the jingle. “That’s just Father Maddock, from the church.”
“Stay away from him,” Nanette said.
“But I like going to church with Meegan. They have sweets after.”
“That’s fine. Meegan will look out for you. But don’t be alone with him.”
“Why?”
“He doesn’t care for our kind.”
“What kind is that? You mean Gypsies?”
“For once, just do as you’re told, Ursule,” Nanette said, in a tight voice Ursule barely recognized. “Father Maddock is dangerous to us. Trust me.” She would say no more, and Ursule, in time, gave up.
Ursule was even better at bartering and business than her mother was. Each time they returned home from the market, she would pour out her earnings onto the kitchen table and stand with arms akimbo, awaiting the praise of the clan. She was certain, young though she was, that one day she would make Orchard Farm the most prosperous in the county.
The aunts and uncles were Nanette’s older sisters and their husbands, but they seemed so ancient to Ursule that she thought of them as her mother’s aunts and uncles, too. The women were tall and gaunt, especially the eldest. Tante Louisette wore a habitual scowl, something her next sister, Anne-Marie, chided her for. Isabelle was smaller than her sisters, and softer hearted. Florence was fussy and prim, and often spoke for Fleurette, her twin, who could go days without saying a word. The uncles, tall and bony like their wives, spoke in monosyllables. To Ursule the three men seemed interchangeable, though when Claude, Louisette’s husband, decreed something would or would not be done, everyone obeyed him.
One of the uncles startled Ursule, one night after supper, by putting down his pipe and fixing her with a muddy gaze. “How old are you now, girl?”
“Twelve, Uncle Jean.”
“Huh. Twelve. Natural farmer, you are.” He thrust his pipe back between his teeth, and around its stem he grated, “Vagabonds, the rest of us. Not our choice to be here. But you—you’re at home.”
2
Ursule was thirteen when she began to change. She felt that she was shedding the innocence of childhood the way a garden snake might wriggle out of its old skin and leave it behind. She wondered if the snake sensed things differently, if its new skin felt raw and sensitive, if the ground beneath it seemed rougher, the sun above it more intense.
That was the way she felt, especially after her monthlies began. The taste of food was more layered. The scent of her goats was sweet and subtle, but the smell of barn soil repelled her. The homespun clothes she had always worn scraped at her so she felt itchy and hot. She was impatient with everyone, even her mother. She looked about her with harder eyes, and saw, with surprise and some sadness, that her clan was aging.
Her uncles were much like other old men, with swollen joints, drooping shoulders, grizzled hair. They appeared to be wearing away a bit more each year, as if the endless work of the farm carved away their substance, much as the wind and rain sculpted the granite boulders on the tor. Her aunts seemed stronger, their hands not so gnarled, their skin not so weathered. Their hair was gray—even Nanette’s black curls were frosted now with silver—but their eyes remained the same shining black they had always been.
They behaved strangely, though. Ursule couldn’t think why she had never noticed before. The aunts whispered together when the men were outside. They slipped one another small objects when the uncles weren’t looking, tucking them into apron pockets or hiding them in sleeves. When Ursule caught glimpses of these things, they seemed unremarkable—a candle, a sprig of thyme or rosemary, a paper twist of salt—nothing that needed to be kept secret. These bits of furtiveness irritated Ursule, and she found herself stamping away with unnecessarily loud footsteps whenever it happened.
Her attic room had a small window tucked under the slanting ceiling. It faced north, to the rising flank of the tor and the changing colors of the moor beyond. She was in the habit of kneeling beside the sill for a last look at the stars before she got into bed, or savoring the wash of silver moonlight on the tor.
One spring night, when the heather had just begun to green, she settled beside her window in her nightdress. She meant to try to catch a glimpse of the new moon, but she saw instead the six Orchiére sisters creeping through the dark garden, tiptoeing past the washhouse.
Mystified, Ursule stared after them. There was no sound in the house but the distant growl of one of the uncles snoring. The swaying figures of the aunts and her mother faded into the darkness, shadows into shadows, and disappeared. Ursule pulled a blanket around her and stayed where she was, watching for the women to come back.
After an hour, as the stars moved and the new moon climbed the sky, there was still no sign of them. Her knees ached on the cold floor. Her eyelids grew heavy, and she rested her chin on her fists, half-asleep.
She gave up at last, and went to bed. She told herself she would listen for their returning footsteps, but sleep was a deep, enveloping thing for the young Ursule. Once it took hold of her, she heard nothing until the cock crowed at daylight.
She startled awake when she heard him, and sat up. Everything seemed as it always did in the mornings, a murmur of voices downstairs, the bleating of the goats from the byre. She hurried to wash her face and hands and tie back her hair. With her boots in one hand, she slipped barefoot down the narrow staircase, glancing around her for some clue as to what had taken place in the night. She saw nothing. When she reached the kitchen, she found all the adults at the table, eating bread and cheese in silence, just as they did every day.
Ursule waited, on that morning, for her mother to be alone in the garden, pulling weeds from a patch of lettuces. Nanette heard her footsteps and glanced up. “Oh, Ursule, good. Fetch a hoe, will you? Some of these have stubborn roots.”
Ursule stood where she was, gazing down at her mother. When Nanette raised an inquiring eyebrow, Ursule put her hands on her hips. “Where did you go, Maman?”
Nanette sank back on her heels. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oui, you do!”
“Ursule,” Nanette said sternly. “One language at a time.”
“Tell me where you went. You and Tante Louisette, and Anne-Marie, and the rest.”
“How interesting,” her mother said, tilting her head. “You remember your aunts’ names.”
“Maman!”
Nanette clicked her tongue, and rocked forward to her knees again. She seized a weed and pulled on it, but it wouldn’t loosen its hold on the earth. “A hoe, Ursule. If you please.”
“I’m not going until you tell me.”
“I’m not telling you until
you bring a hoe.”
Ursule blew out a frustrated breath, but she spun on her toes to dash to the garden shed. She knew her mother well. When Nanette said a thing, she meant it.
She pulled the shed door wide to let a shaft of sunlight brighten the dim interior. She found the hoe on its peg, hanging among the mattocks and sickles. She carried it back to her mother, who was tossing weeds into a wicker basket with an air of unconcern.
Ursule held out the hoe. “Voilà.”
“English, Ursule. Or Cornish. Or French. Not a bit of this, a bit of that.” Nanette took the hoe and used it to help herself stand. She grimaced and put a hand to the small of her back.
Ursule suffered a pang of guilt, which she tried to assuage by taking back the hoe and beginning on the weed that had resisted her mother’s efforts. “I want to know where you went. All of you, in the dark, when the uncles were asleep.”
“You were supposed to be asleep as well.”
“Where did you go?” Ursule repeated, even as she wielded the hoe in one smooth motion, cleaving the root of the weed in two. She bent to retrieve the severed head of the plant and tossed it into Nanette’s basket.
Nanette sighed and touched the basket with the toe of her dirt-encrusted boot. “I’ll tell you one day, Ursule. When you’re old enough.”
“How old is that, Maman?”
“Well … I learned of it when I was just your age, but that was a different time …”
“Bon. I mean good. You can tell me now.”
Nanette sighed again and pointed to another weed. Deftly, with the ease of young muscles, Ursule chopped it out of the ground. Nanette picked up the remnant and tossed it into the basket. She pointed to another weed, but Ursule leaned on the hoe, shaking her head. “Not till you tell me.”
“I can’t, sweetheart,” Nanette said. “In any case, it’s better to show you.”
“You’ll show me where you and the others went, then?”
“Yes, but not now. When the time is right.” Her mother turned to gaze beyond the cliff to the sea. Wind-whipped whitecaps glinted in the sunshine. Ursule’s hair blew about her face, and Nanette pulled her wool jacket tighter. “And you will have to promise, ma fille, that you will never speak of it to a living soul. It is a matter of life and death.”
A Secret History of Witches Page 7
