Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  She pushed herself to her feet, waved apologetically, aind strode off to find her coveners and rebuckle her skirt.

  What the heU?

  So Ned had more experience than Belle'd thought, or at least more than she'd told me. As a factoid, it sat there in a nonrele-vant lump. So he did. So what?

  Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me, I thought, chanting my mantra. I wished I'd remembered to mention Ned's surprise to Xharina. Maybe she'd know what it was.

  When I got back up to the top of the hill the party was pretty well rolling. More people had arrived, food was being passed. Xharina was going to be popular—the ice chests contaiined two five-gallon drums of ice cream, kept rock hard in dry ice that smoked upon exposure to air like the proverbial witches' cauldron.

  "Yo! Bastr shouted a familiar voice.

  Lace forged through the crowd, beer bottle in one hand, someone else's wrist in the other.

  Lace is short for Lacey, which is Lace's honest-to-Goddess legal middle name. Lace works down at Chanter's Revel, which is the Wiccan, eco-feminist bookstore voted Most Likely To Be At The Opposite End Of The Pagano-Political Spectrum From The Snake — which makes it particularly odd that Lace, herself, is strictly a studs-and-leather dyke-type.

  Of course, she is a vegetarian.

  "Hey, girl, where you been keeping yourself? Isn't this a hoot?" Lace waved her Bud longneck at the immediate vicinity. "I got someone here I'd like you to meet."

  The wrist in Lace's hand proved to be attached to a corporate-looking lass wearing a mint-green polo shirt and deeply impeccable khaki gabardine slacks. Her hair was cut in one of those expensive and severe earlobe-length designs. Her ears were

  186 Bell, Book, and Murder

  pierced (once) and contained chaste gold knots. She was wearing pale pink lipstick and a smudge of taupe eyeshadow. In short, Gentle Reader, she was normal.

  'This is Sandra," Lace said happily. "Sandra's a lawyer. Sein-dra, this is Bast."

  Somewhere in the vicinity of this time last year Lace's lover had died, and it looked like Lace was ready to love again. I was glad of that, even if this particular relationship appeared to be doomed.

  "I'm so pleased to meet you. Bast," Sandra said. She had one of those well-bred accentless dictions that was nearly a cliche. "Georgina has told me so much about you." She extricated her wrist from Lace's grip and held out her other hand.

  Georgina is Lace's front name. Sandra and I shook hands.

  "I hope it wasn't accurate," I said.

  I valiantly resisted the temptation to ask her what her position was on Mary, Queen of Scots. Sandra looked polite but wary, as if at any moment I might do something horribly artistic.

  "I hope you enjoy the picnic, Sandra," I said, with what would probably pass for sincerity. "Lace, it's good to see you again; I like the new color."

  Lace's hair was bright cobalt blue. I saw Sandra dart a look of faint resignation at it. "But I'd better go see if Belle needs any help," I finished, before I said something stupid.

  "See you," Lace said, happily oblivious. "C'mon, Sandy, let's go get something to eat."

  I went off in the other direction, feeling as if I'd just avoided booking passage on the Liisitania. Why do people who already know it isn't going to work always find each other and try? I could not imagine Sandra and Lace even making it through the ninety-day trial period.

  Of course, I might be wrong.

  "Hey, Bast!" Glitter. She'd gone home this morning to change for the picnic, and the effect was blinding. "Seen Ilona yet?"

  It took a moment to shift mental gears. Ilona. Lothlorien Books.

  "She coming?" Odd. Not quite her scene, to quote the patois of my youth.

  "She's supposed to be. I talked to her yesterday. She's bringing someone with her. Nephew."

  "Who?" It was hard to imagine Ilona Saunders related to anyone.

  "New partner in Lothlorien, she said," Glitter amplified. "Be-

  cause she's buying the building. Don't know his name. She wants to introduce him 'round."

  "I'll look for her—them," I said.

  "Sure. Boy, did you see what Xharina was wearing? I'd never have the nerve." Glitter roUed her eyes and waved her glitter-lace batwing sleeves. Everything is relative.

  I went off and collected a beer, a tofu burger, and a handful of oatmeal walnut chocolate chip cookies sprinkled with silver star-shaped jimmies certified edible. Nothing like a balanced diet, and this was certainly nothing like one.

  And then I saw Ned coming up the hiU.

  He was wearing a black T-shirt blazoned with "The Goddess Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot!" in silver and carrying a white bakery box big enough to be holding a couple of pounds of cookies. I waved to attract his attention. He caime over.

  "Welcome to the Ecumenipicnic," I seiid. "I can show you where to put what you brought."

  He looked hopeful and . . . not young exactly, but curiously un-aged. As if he hadn't yet done much with his life, although he must be my age.

  "Sure," Ned said. "Is everybody here?"

  I felt ghostly warning bells go off at the question. One of the few points of etiquette nearly everyone in the Community observes is a healthful lack of curiosity about each other. People looking that hard for personal information are usually planning to use it, and not in any way you'd like, either.

  "Well," I said cautiously, "we don't know exactly who's coming, and of course people show up and leave whenever."

  Ned nodded sagely, as if I'd answered his question.

  I herded him in the direction of one of the two picnic tables up here, which served as a sort of central depot for everybody's potluck offerings. Ned continued to explain as he walked.

  "I Wcint everybody to be here when I make my announcement," he continued with happy officiousness. He set his box on the table and opened it. Bakery cookies, as I'd suspected.

  I felt a pang of alarm, and not at the cookies.

  "Ned, could I have a word with you?" I said carefully.

  He let me lead him off to an area that, if not uninhabited, was at least out of the main traffic pattern.

  "Do you think you could tell me what you're planning to announce?" I asked.

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  Ned stared at me, his expression gradually changing from suspicion, to pleasure, to cunning.

  "So you want an advance preview?" he said archly.

  As opposed to the usual sort of preview?

  "Well," I said, being driven, as Lord Peter Wimsey says in Busman's Honeymoon, to the inestimable vulgarity of reminding him who I was, "it is my coven putting the event on, so I'm one of the people responsible for making it run smoothly. So I sort of need to know." I gestured to the green armband.

  "Oh." To my surprised relief, Ned seemed to think this was reasonable. "Well. You know the Book of Shadows?"

  For one stomach-turning moment I thought he was confessing to stealing Glitter's, and then I realized he was speaking generally. I nodded, although it had to be a rhetorical question.

  "Let me tell you a story," Ned said. He leaned toward me like he was trying to sell me cheap real estate. "No. Let me ask you a question. You're a Witch. You know that they're saying that guy made it all up; that Wicca isn't a real religion and all. What if I could prove that the Craft was hundreds of years old? No, thousands."

  I suppressed an impulsive rejoinder along the lines of having taken a religious vow never to buy any beachfront property in Florida, or bridges, or antique Books of Shadows guaranteed to have been passed down from ancient Atlantis.

  "What if you could?" I said pacifically.

  Ned frowned. I hadn't given him the einswer he was expecting.

  Oh, I won't say that it didn't matter passionately to any number of Witches, just that I wasn't one of them. If the sainted Gerald B. Gardner, founder of the feast, had been able to impeccably document his antecedents in his lifetime he might have done so or he might not, but the fact remains he didn't
, nor has anyone who came after produced Wiccan documents that can be dated earlier than the late thirties, including that guy on the Left Coast who had the bad taste to publish the ones Gardner did leave.

  And I was just cynical enough to think that any "proof that surfaced after this long was proof that had been faked when there'd finally be money in it. New Age having become big business once eveiyone'd caught millennial fever.

  "So you don't believe me?" Ned said, starting to look sulky.

  "I thought it was a hypothetical question: What if you could prove it?" I said. Oh Goddess, don't let this be Ned's big an-

  nouncement. I could choreograph the fights that would break out from here, and none of them would improve Ned Skelton's standard of living.

  "Well, I can prove it. I've got an original Book of Shadows —a real one, an old one from before Gardner! I've got the real Book of Shadows —and I didn't have to be initiated to get it," he added smirking.

  "Okay," I said. "So you've got a Book of Shadows." I wanted to tell him that I didn't care, but I doubted he wanted to hear it.

  "You don't believe me!" Ned accused. "You don't think I've got it. But I do. It's called The Book of Moons. "

  Ned watched me sideways, to see what impact this revelation had on me. The answer was none in particular, except that something called The Book of Moons sounded familiar.

  Ned monologued on. Having gotten him started, I now realized, it would be almost impossible to shut him up.

  "Now everyone will know all your nasty little secrets. I'm going to have it published. I wasn't going to. Books of Shadows aren't supposed to be published; you keep them secret so the rituals won't fall into unauthorized hands and lose their power. Everybody says Gardner made it all up, but I knew that wasn't true, because the Craft is thousands of years old, only there's no way to prove that it's real, because the rituals are supposed to stay secret. Except now I have the proof. And it's where you and everyone else can't get their hands on it and suppress it, and—"

  I sighed.

  "Ned," I said.

  He stopped. He looked at me.

  "Listen to me. I don't know you all that well, but I've been in tlie Craft a lot longer than you have aind I don't wish you any harm. If you get up on a rock here at this picnic today and make an announcement like that, people are not going to be impressed. They're going to laugh at you. It doesn't matter whether you're telling the truth or not."

  Ned goggled at me like Fd just kicked his puppy. "That isn't true," he finally managed to say. His ears turned red, like the ears of laboratory mice.

  "Yes it is," I said. 'Talk to some people privately. Talk to Lx)relli Lee; you know her, the priestess at the Snake? Nobody will believe you. And the way to convince them isn't—"

  "But it's true!" Ned interrupted indignantly. "It's real. It's the

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  spellbook tJiat used to belong to Mary Stuart—the queen. She was a Witch, see, and this is her book."

  That settled it. I was being haunted.

  "You have the Book of Shadows of Maiy, Queen of Scots," I said, just to be sure I had it right.

  Ned nodded. He rocked back on his heels. The smirk had returned.

  "And where did you get it?"

  "I—bought it," Ned said, hesitating a little over the obvious lie. I did my futile best to hold on to my temper. Why does every new-bie feel compelled to reinvent the wheel?

  When love and all the world were young (1963 or so), there was a "tradition" of setting oneself up in the Craft not through a process of training and initiation, but through theft of someone else's ritual book. The person with the stolen book then covered his tracks by inventing a provenance for his version of the Craft that backdated it to somewhere around ancient Atlantis, a pretty good example of one-upmanship in a religion that can only reliably document its roots back to, say, 1947, if you really stretch a point.

  This form of spiritual cattle-rustling fell out of fashion after about fifteen years, when everybody suddenly decided it was much more chic to be creating a new religion than to be curator of a survival. And at any rate, how you got your BoS stopped being a big deal with the widespread dissemination of xerographic technology and the computer disk. But here was Ned, trotting out that old chestnut about somehow acquiring a legitimate antique Book of Shadows just as if no one had ever heard it before.

  "You must think we're all pretty damn stupid around here," I said to Ned in my most courteous tones. 'The only cliche older than that is sajdng that your grandmother initiated you into a secret family tradition. Nobody is going to believe you, Ned. I promise."

  He stared at me, slowly going red. Probably nobody he'd ever spoken to had been so blunt. We in the Community tend to avoid confrontation, as a rule. We don't argue. We just go away.

  "If you want to be a Witch, okay, you're a Witch," I went on. "Now all you —"

  "You can't threaten me!" Ned blustered. "You don't know what you're talking about—aind you're wrong, too!" He stalked off, ears flaming.

  I sighed. I hadn't handled that particularly well, but maybe I'd

  at least bullied him into shutting up. I didn't particularly give a damn—and besides, he'd thank me for it someday, providing he stayed in the Community.

  And if he didn't, he'd be even less my problem than he was now.

  Or so I thought at the time. As it turned out, 1 was wrong straight across the board.

  ^'^^ SUNDAY, MAY 1, CONTINUED

  I walked—or stalked—back through the picnickers, heading for the beer. I wondered what Beaner would do if I told him that Mary Stuart was Queen of the Witches. Or Daffydd, who could at least tell me whether she'd been mixed up with sorcery according to Official History.

  Her cousin Elizabeth had been. Lizzie's court sorcerer was that learned Rosicrucian Doctor John Dee, who worked with that highly suspect Irishman, Ned Kelley. Most historians agree that Dee, no matter what else you may say of him, was devout and sincere —and managed to survive the experience of casting a horoscope for both a reigning queen and the princess in waiting.

  Ned Kelley (not the Aussie Bushranger of similar name popularized by Mick Jagger, trust me) is another story entirely. Profane, irreverent, and Irish, he was constantly implicated in shady deals and criminal acts, escaping prosecution due to his Court connections. Kelley's claim to fame and Dee's patronage is that he is alleged to have been a medium: he saw, so he said, angels in a "shew stone," or speculum, that he had given Dee directions on how to build. Evidence suggests Kelley was not entirely fraudulent, at least not all the time: Dee's creation of the glorious and abstruse system of Enochian Invocation from the stuff of Kelley's visions is the jewel in the crown of Elizabethan sorcery.

  I doubted that Ned Kelley (who vanishes from history as mysteriously as he appears) had ever felt left out and awkward and socially maladroit.

  I

  Or had been on the outside wanting in. Or back in. Like Ned Skelton. Like Mary. Who, according to our Ned, was a Witch, with a genuine Book of Shadows that had somehow managed to escape the notice other inquisitors and jailers at the Fotheringay Resort for Inconvenient Queens.

  Damn Ned, anyway; the woman was dead four hundred years and change and I couldn't escape the spookily persistent feeling that she was someone I'd spoken to this morning—that she was someone I could still advise. / know how you feel I know how you hurt. But there's no cure; there's never any cure once they've shut the door. You can't trust other people for your happiness, Mary — people are Just too damn fickle.

  But no. And if not Mary, how much more so not Ned? Their problem was exactly the same: If there's something you think you need to have to survive as the person you think you are, what price is too high to pay for it?

  Is any price too high?

  I tried to put all webby ethical brain-twisters out of my mind, and succeeded reasonably well with all the distraction on offer. I even talked myself into a reasonably good mood, or at least a better one. What with one thing an
d another I knew most of the people here; I wandered through, collecting greetings and invitations and information about this, that, and the other gathering. Reaffirming old friendships, laying groundwork for new ones.

  And I heard tales. Tales that slowly, oh so slowly, started to frighten me.

  Otterleaf was a Gardnerian High Priestess who rain a training coven in Astoria. She was trying to figure out how to get in touch with her Queen, who'd moved to Arizona, because she couldn't find her Black Book and needed to get a new copy.

  Crystal had braided her hair with knots of ribbon and had painted both cheeks with rainbows for the picnic, but despite the Sparkle Plenty affectations she was a pragmatic Faery Trad of the Victor Anderson stripe (Victor being another of the Grand Old Men of the Craft) who ran Starholt Coven and the Cyberfae BBS. She was sure her book must be around somewhere, although she hadn't seen it for the last month.

  Lord Amyntor, the Minoan HP from downtown who'd opened the picnic with Belle (he had "friend of the family" status because Beaner'd dated him for a while last year) was talking about the new book he was putting together to replace his old one.

  Now that I knew what I was listening for, the undercurrent was

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  everywhere: not outright admission, but an uneasy sort of "here comes the hangman" humor. Having your book stolen had become a black joke that everyone understood.

  As in: "And then there was this funny-mentalist who was so dumb he burned a blank Book of Shadows."

  Glitter's wasn't an isolated incident. It was the leading edge of a plague.

  But no one was fingering anybody for thief. We — the Community at large—had no suspects. None. And that was odd in a bunch famous both for getting its exercise jumping to conclusions and for having an Official Summer Feud each year to wile away the time till Hallows.

  I looked around. I saw people with bubble pipes, people with balloons, people with flutes and guitars and Celtic harps (live music later), and people carrying hula hoops and ferrets. There were people wearing chain mail and wearing chiffon and wearing full Klingon battle dress and wearing baseball caps with stuffed antlers attached.