The Rosemary Spell

by Virginia Zimmerman

  “I’m Adam.” He tries to sound cheerful. “This is Rosemary.”

  “Rosemary? Father is magical with rosemary. He says—”

  “I live in your house.” I cut in. “The house on Pear Tree Lane. The one you lived in after the flood.”

  “After the flood?” She shudders. Closes her eyes.

  “Let’s go,” I mouth. This is too awful.

  Adam holds up one finger.

  Constance opens her eyes. “Hello,” she says with a slight smile. “Would you like some candy?” She reaches an impossibly thin arm out toward a nightstand, where a porcelain dish holds a few battered peppermints.

  “No, thank you.” I swallow the urge to cry.

  Adam looks at me, his eyebrows arched. What now?

  Maybe the diary is still there, clinging to her memory. When I’m old, I’m sure I won’t forget the books I’ve loved. I couldn’t.

  “Do you remember hiding a book in a cupboard? A very old book?” I ask.

  She folds her hands in her lap. “An old book? Perhaps you mean Father’s false codex?”

  “I—I don’t know.” I look at Adam.

  “What’s a false codex?” Adam asks.

  “He’s magical with rosemary, you know,” she sighs. “Less magical with Shakespeare.” She makes a breathy sound that might be a laugh but quickly becomes a cough.

  “Is the false codex about Shakespeare?” In my head, Mr. Cates reminds me that we breathe Shakespeare like oxygen.

  “Father believes . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “What did your father believe?”

  “Nothing to do with me,” she says. “Would you like some candy?” She gestures again toward the sad peppermints.

  Adam nudges me. “Show her the book.”

  “But it might . . .” I was going to say hurt her, but how could it? I pull the diary from my bag. “Do you remember this?”

  She takes it from me, and her arms collapse onto her lap with the weight of it.

  She rests a translucent hand on the burgundy cover. “It took him away,” she whispers. She looks from me to Adam, her eyes wide.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Father is always working,” she whimpers.

  “Mine too,” Adam says in a low voice.

  She opens the cover and strokes the list of names. “I wrote my name. I knew I shouldn’t . . . I was angry.” She frowns. “But these others . . . do I know them? Rosemary Bennett. Adam Steiner.” She pronounces our names phonetically as if reading a foreign language. “Do I know them?” She looks up at us with wide eyes and an aimless smile.

  “I’m Rosemary,” I answer. “He’s Adam.”

  “It’s so very nice to meet you,” she recites.

  “You were telling us about the false codex,” Adam prompts.

  “Was I?” Her tone is bland.

  “And something about Shakespeare,” I add.

  “Yes.” She nods. “It’s always about Shakespeare.”

  “We wondered if you know . . .” The name escapes me. Who did we want to ask her about?

  Constance turns pages. The Diary of a Poet. The list of herbs. Blank and blank and more blank. She keeps turning.

  Adam says, “It seemed like there wasn’t any more writing in the book, and then there was . . .” He trails off, confused.

  The image of blotchy cursive haunts me, but what did it say? “Writing appeared,” I affirm. “And then it was gone.”

  Constance nods sympathetically as she turns page after page. “Yes, it happens like that.”

  “What happens?” Adam and I ask together.

  She keeps turning pages. “Nothing and more nothing, and then words come and you remember . . .”

  “What?” Adam asks. “What do you remember?”

  “Nothing,” she says in a monotone. “It disappears.”

  “Is she describing the diary or her mind?” I whisper.

  A yellowed page rests against Constance’s palm. “So old,” she murmurs. “You can feel that this page was once something living. It has life in it still, but also decay.”

  “You remember the book,” Adam observes.

  “The false codex,” she murmurs. “How could I forget?”

  “What’s a false codex?” I ask.

  “A foolishness more than a lie,” she sighs. “If there is a bear in Shakespeare and here is a bear, would you conclude that it must be Shakespeare’s bear? Of course not. Foolishness.”

  “Bear?” I frown at Adam. “Where is there a bear?”

  She tips her head up and searches my face. In the searching, she seems to lose her way, and her eyes drift to the dish at her side. “Would you care for some candy?” Her arm extends toward the dish.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Rosie, look.” Adam points to the open book. My notes, unchanged, easy to read, sit at the top of the page. Juvenilia. Mom died in flu pandemic.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I exclaim. “What I wrote is here, but the other writing . . .”

  Constance presses her skeletal hands against her eyes and breathes out, a long slow exhale. “Void and nothing,” she says through her breath.

  “What is that?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

  She doesn’t respond. She starts turning pages again. Slow. Steady. The only sound in the bright room is the gentle movement of parchment, a dry sound, like dead leaves.

  “My hands remembered the way,” Constance says, quietly triumphant. Her bony fingers scrabble against the page.

  “It’s folded in!” I cry out.

  Adam and I huddle over the book. I reach into the crease of the binding and fumble for an edge. Find it. I peel the page open. Like one of those foldouts in a little-kid book that opens up to show a bigger picture or a map, only there’s no picture here.

  There are words. Six lines of faded handwriting. A poem.

  “I’m sorry,” Constance whispers.

  “No!” Adam grins. “This is amazing! Thank you!”

  The poem is in the same old-fashioned writing as the list of herbs. It will take some work to figure out what it says.

  “Did you write this?” I ask.

  Constance shakes her head. Her green eyes swim with tears. “I’m sorry. I knew better.”

  “It’s okay,” I reassure her, though I’m not sure what she means.

  “My hands remembered the way,” she says again, and she turns her hands over and stares at them with wonder.

  Six

  IN THE CAR, Mom pumps us for information about the visit.

  “You were right,” I tell her. “Her memory is really bad. She was nice to us . . .”

  “Kept offering us candy,” Adam interjects.

  “But she didn’t make any sense. She said this really weird thing about a bear in Shakespeare—”

  “Did she?” Mom perks up. “That actually does make sense. There is a bear in Shakespeare.”

  “There is?” Adam and I exclaim in unison.

  “Yes, it’s in The Winter’s Tale. You know there aren’t a lot of stage directions in Shakespeare’s plays?”

  “No, but okay.” She always imagines I have the same random information taking up space in my head that she has in hers.

  “Well, I think it’s in Act Three. One of Shakespeare’s rare stage directions is exeunt, pursued by a bear.” She smiles. “So perhaps Constance Brooke was making more sense than you realized.”

  “What’s exeunt?” Adam asks.

  “Exit in the plural,” Mom says.

  “So people were being chased by a bear?” I ask.

  “Yup!” Our actually wanting to talk about Shakespeare has delighted her into forgetting about the depressing report of our visit to River House.

  “Do you think she was trying to tell us about a bear?” Adam puzzles.

  “No.” I watch the ruin of Constance’s old house whiz by as we drive down River Road. “It was more like a metaphor.”

  “For what?”

  “No clue,” I sigh.
>
  “Does false codex mean anything to you, Claudia?” Adam asks.

  Mom’s eyes snap to meet mine in the rearview mirror. “She didn’t really mention the false codex, did she?”

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  She does that sniff laugh she uses when something’s not really funny. “It’s the reason we came to Cookfield.”

  “Sorry?” This is the last thing I expected her to say. “I thought we came because you got a job at the university.”

  “We did, but I wanted the job because Arthur Brooke, who taught English here and who was Constance’s father, did a lot of research on a book—a codex—that he believed belonged to Shakespeare. Most scholars think he was wrong—that’s why they call it false—but I was enchanted by the idea that there might be something to discover about Shakespeare in Cookfield, so here we are.”

  “Did you get to study the codex?” I clutch at my bag.

  “No,” she answers. “Brooke left all sorts of interesting notes in the university archive, but the book was lost long before I showed up. It was a disappointment, but of course, it can’t really have belonged to Shakespeare, so it’s no great loss.”

  Adam and I sit on my bed, a pizza box between us.

  “I kind of feel like we stole the book from your mom,” Adam says through a mouthful of cheese he’s pulled off the pizza. He always does this. He eats one piece. For the second piece, he pulls off the cheese and toppings and eats them as a gooey handful. Then last he’ll just pick at the toppings. It would drive me crazy if he hadn’t been doing this since we were two.

  “She never knew it was in the house.” Guilt swells up, and I set down my half-eaten slice. “I felt like we could take it, you know, because it was in my room, and no one wanted it. It had been left behind, forgotten. But . . . my own mother was looking for it!” I drop my head onto my knees. I can’t tell her we found the diary—the codex—and wrote in it. But not telling her has suddenly become an enormous lie. I want to go back and find the book again and make a different choice.

  “But, Rosie.” Adam reaches for some way to make this better. “It can’t really be Shakespeare’s book. I mean, what are the chances? How could it be?” He picks pepperoni off the pizza.

  “But what if it is?” I moan.

  “Okay,” he says in a firm voice. “Even if it is Shakespeare, all it has is a list of herbs and a short poem, so it’s not like it’s . . . important.” He trails off as we both hear how lame this sounds.

  “Maybe the disappearing writing was Shakespeare too, and we made it disappear!” Panic swirls around me. “Adam, we didn’t just write in Shakespeare’s diary. We somehow erased it!”

  He wipes his hands. “Let’s figure out the poem. Then we can decide what to do.”

  I push the pizza box to the floor and set the diary in its place. Unfold the page Constance’s hands remembered. There are the six lines of old-fashioned writing.

  “I can’t read it at all.” I squint at the loops and curls, faded to a thin gray shadow.

  “Me either. Is it the same handwriting as the list of herbs?” Adam asks.

  With the page unfolded, we can look at the poem and the list side by side. “Does the poem have those f/s things? I mean the s’s that look like f’s.”

  “Yes!” Adam exclaims. “Look at the second line. There are a bunch of those f’s. S’s. Whatever.”

  “And look at the third line. That’s a capital S, I’m pretty sure, and it has that same loopiness as those ones. Look at Sage.”

  Adam pulls his graph paper from his pocket. “The person who wrote the list also wrote the poem.”

  “And that person might be Shakespeare,” I whimper.

  “Might be.” He stresses might, but he writes Shakespeare on his grid.

  I reach across him and add a question mark: Shakespeare?

  “And Constance also wrote in the book, but she didn’t write the poem,” I say. “So it might have said Diary of a Poet before it was hers.”

  “Or before she was even a poet,” Adam adds.

  We shift around so that we’re lying on our stomachs with the book in front of us.

  It takes almost an hour to figure out just the first two lines of the poem, and then Adam has to go because it’s late and we have school tomorrow.

  We stand in the foyer, and I hold the graph paper while he bundles into his coat. I read what we’ve figured out so far, printed neatly on the right side of the paper, each letter poised precisely on the line.

  Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;

  For ears of fam’ly, friend, or willful foe.

  Fam’ly took us forever, and we had to look up treble, which means anything multiplied three times. Adam thought it had to do with music, which it does, but that’s a different meaning. Or maybe both meanings matter. If we’ve learned nothing else from Mr. Cates, it’s that words in poems often mean a bunch of things all at one time.

  With his coat zipped up and his hat pulled down over his forehead, Adam looks like a little kid. “Rosie, could you wait till tomorrow to figure out the rest of the poem?”

  “Of course!” I promise, in a gush of warmth for the little-kid Adam who’s part of thirteen-year-old Adam. Both of them, all the Adams I remember, are my best friends. “Maybe Shelby will be able to come too,” I suggest.

  “I’ll ask her,” he promises as he heads out into the night.

  Shelby doesn’t have rehearsal, and she doesn’t have plans with her friends, but we don’t get to work on the poem. Mom needs some super-special old book from the big used bookstore in Lionville, and Shelby and Adam and I always love going there, so we’re off on an unexpected excursion. In the car, we sing along to Matilda like we always used to, and I don’t mind that the poem has to wait. Mom and Shelby try to outsoprano each other, while Adam experiments with his new baritone, and I hang out happily in the middle.

  Eliot Books is the best kind of used bookstore. They always have what I’m looking for, as well as books I didn’t even know to look for but that seem to have been looking for me. The irregular piles of books leaning in unsteady towers all over the place promise surprises. One time Shelby found an old novel called To the Island, and it seemed like it had been written just for us.

  Mom heads to the back office to pick up the book she’s come to get, and Adam and Shelby and I stand just inside the front door, breathing in the musty, sweet smell of the old books. The same smell as the diary.

  The tall shelves form nooks. In some, the owners have put random chairs, here a hard-backed old-fashioned desk chair, there a small overstuffed armchair. The three of us like to crowd into the chair-and-a-half that fills the middle-grade-young-adult nook, and we wend our way past fiction and biography to get there. At English history, I realize we lost Shelby in fiction.

  I turn back. “You coming?”

  She doesn’t look up from the book she’s pulled from a pile propped against the E’s and F’s. Her long hair looks almost golden compared to all the browns and burgundies and greens of the old books that frame her. I have my phone. I could take a great photo of her. But I don’t want a picture of Shelby in adult fiction.

  “I thought maybe I’d tackle The Mill on the Floss,” she murmurs.

  Our teachers are always mentioning The Mill on the Floss. It’s about a small town on a river that floods, like ours. But they say we should read it when we’re older. When we’re adults. Once you cross over to The Mill on the Floss, you don’t belong in the middle-grade nook anymore.

  “Not yet, Shelby,” I plead.

  “Michelle,” she corrects me absently, but she puts the book back on the stack and follows me to our spot.

  Adam’s already claimed the cushiest corner of the chair, and he holds a tan hardcover book with a title in gilt letters.

  I squeeze next to him, and Shelby perches on the arm of the chair.

  “What’d you find?” she asks.

  “The Story of the Amulet, by E. Nesbit,” he replies.

  “I’ve n
ever heard of that one.” I read over his shoulder. There were once four children who spent their summer holidays—

  “Why is it always summer holidays?” Shelby wonders. “Can’t people have adventures in winter?”

  “We’re having an adventure in winter,” I counter. “You know, the diary.”

  “Did you bring it?” She lowers her voice.

  “No. I didn’t want my mom to see it.” Guilt pokes at me again.

  Adam explains as best he can what Constance said, and he tells Shelby about the poem. I tune them out and sit, miserable with self-reproach.

  Mom brought me to this bookstore. She brought me to books, period. She’s the reason I even care about the diary, or the false codex, or whatever it is. All the books in the nook seem to be scolding me, and I shove myself out of the chair and move away.

  “Rosie?” Adam calls after me.

  “I want to see if they have anything by Constance.” I made this up on the spot, but it’s actually a good idea, and I pick my way around piles of books to the poetry section.

  I step back to look up at the second-to-the-top shelf, well above my head. Brontë. Brooke. There are two books with Constance’s name on the spine.

  “What are you looking for?” Mom appears at my side, clutching a brown-wrapped package to her chest.

  “Constance Brooke. For our poetry project,” I answer. Gratitude and shame jostle each other. Gratitude that she didn’t show up when we were talking about the diary. Shame that I’m grateful. “Did you get what you needed?”

  She pats the package. “It’s a rare eighteenth-century edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets with some slight alterations. Most scholars have dismissed its authenticity, but I want to decide for myself.” She’s all lit up.

  “I hope when I grow up I love my job as much as you do,” I say.

  She puts a hand on my cheek. “I hope so too, Rosie.” She nods to the ladder. “See what you can find.”