“Gott in Himmel,” he says to himself, a childhood habit he has kept from nostalgia, for Wolfgang Magus is a reluctant atheist. He knows it is not God’s fault but the King’s, who pays him so little.
If the King were to pay him, say, another shilling per week—but no, that too he would send to his sister, dying of consumption at a spa in Berne. His mind turns, painfully, from the memory of her face, white and drained, which already haunts him like a ghost.
He picks up a volume of Goethe’s poems that he has carefully tied with a bit of pink ribbon and sighs. What sort of present is this, for the Princess’ christening?
He enters the chapel with shy, stooping movements. It is full, and noisy with court gossip. As he proceeds up the aisle, he is swept by a Duchess’ train of peau de soie, poked by a Viscountess’ aigrette. The sword of a Marquis smelling of Napoleon-water tangles in his legs, and he almost falls on a Baroness, who stares at him through her lorgnette. He sidles through the crush until he comes to a corner of the chapel wall, where he takes refuge.
The christening has begun, he supposes, for he can hear the Archbishop droning in bad Latin, although he can see nothing from his corner but taxidermed birds and heads slick with macassar oil. Ah, if the Archbishop could have learned from Herr Doktor Ambrosius! His mind wanders, as it often does, to a house in Berlin and a laboratory smelling of strong soap, filled with braziers and alembics, books whose covers have been half-eaten by moths, a stuffed basilisk. He remembers his bed in the attic, and his sister, who worked as the Herr Doktor’s housemaid so he could learn to be a magician. He sees her face on her pillow at the spa in Berne and thinks of her expensive medications.
What has he missed? The crowd is moving forward, and presents are being given: a rocking horse with a red leather saddle, a silver tumbler, a cap embroidered by the nuns of Iona. He hides the volume of Goethe behind his back.
Suddenly, he sees a face he recognizes. One day she came and sat beside him in the garden, and asked him about his sister. Her brother had died, he remembers, not long before, and as he described his loneliness, her eyes glazed over with tears. Even he, who understands little about court politics, knew she was the King’s mistress.
She disappears behind the scented Marquis, then appears again, close to the altar where the Queen, awkwardly holding a linen bundle, is receiving the Princess’ presents. The King has seen her, and frowns through his golden beard. Wolfgang Magus, who knows nothing about the feelings of a king toward his former mistress, wonders why he is angry.
She lifts her hand in a gesture that reminds him of the Archbishop. What fragrance is this, so sweet, so dark, that makes the brain clear, that makes the nostrils water? He instinctively tabulates: orris-root, oak gall, rose petal, dung of bat with a hint of vinegar.
Conversations hush, until even the Baronets, clustered in a rustic clump at the back of the chapel, are silent.
She speaks: “This is the gift I give the Princess. On her seventeenth birthday she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die.”
Needless to describe the confusion that follows. Wolfgang Magus watches from its edge, chewing his mustache, worried, unhappy. How her eyes glazed, that day in the garden. Someone treads on his toes.
Then, unexpectedly, he is summoned. “Where is that blasted magician!” Gloved hands push him forward. He stands before the King, whose face has turned unattractively red. The Queen has fainted and a bottle of salts is waved under her nose. The Archbishop is holding the Princess, like a sack of barley he has accidentally caught.
“Is this magic, Magus, or just some bloody trick?”
Wolfgang Magus rubs his hands together. He has not stuttered since he was a child, but he answers, “Y–yes, your Majesty. Magic.” Sweet, dark, utterly magic. He can smell its power.
“Then get rid of it. Un-magic it. Do whatever you bloody well have to. Make it not be!”
Wolfgang Magus already knows that he will not be able to do so, but he says, without realizing that he is chewing his mustache in front of the King, “O–of course, your Majesty.”
IV. THE KING
What would you do, if you were James IV of Britannia, pacing across your council chamber floor before your councilors: the Count of Edinburgh, whose estates are larger than yours and include hillsides of uncut wood for which the French Emperor, who needs to refurbish his navy after the disastrous Indian campaign, would pay handsomely; the Earl of York, who can trace descent, albeit in the female line, from the Tudors; and the Archbishop, who has preached against marital infidelity in his cathedral at Aberdeen? The banner over your head, embroidered with the twelve-petaled rose of Britannia, reminds you that your claim to the throne rests tenuously on a former James’ dalliance. Edinburgh’s thinning hair, York’s hanging jowl, the seams, edged with gold thread, where the Archbishop’s robe has been let out, warn you, young as you are, with a beard that shines like a tangle of golden wires in the afternoon light, of your gouty future.
Britannia’s economy depends on the wool trade, and spun wool sells for twice as much as unspun. Your income depends on the wool tax. The Queen, whom you seldom think of as Elizabeth, is young. You calculate: three months before she recovers from the birth, nine months before she can deliver another child. You might have an heir by next autumn.
“Well?” Edinburgh leans back in his chair, and you wish you could strangle his wrinkled neck.
You say, “I see no reason to destroy a thousand spinning wheels for one madwoman.” Madeleine, her face puffed with sleep, her neck covered with a line of red spots where she lay on the pearl necklace you gave her the night before, one black hair tickling your ear. Clever of her, to choose a spinning wheel. “I rely entirely on Wolfgang Magus,” whom you believe is a fraud. “Gentlemen, your fairy tales will have taught you that magic must be met with magic. One cannot fight a spell by altering material conditions.”
Guffaws from the Archbishop, who is amused to think that he once read fairy tales.
You are a selfish man, James IV, and this is essentially your fault, but you have spoken the truth. Which, I suppose, is why you are the King.
V. THE QUEEN DOWAGER
What is the girl doing? Playing at tug-of-war, evidently, and far too close to the stream. She’ll tear her dress on the rosebushes. Careless, these young people, thinks the Queen Dowager. And who is she playing with? Young Lord Harry, who will one day be Count of Edinburgh. The Queen Dowager is proud of her keen eyesight and will not wear spectacles, although she is almost sixty-three.
What a pity the girl is so plain. The Queen Dowager jabs her needle into a black velvet slipper. Eyes like boiled gooseberries that always seem to be staring at you, and no discipline. Now in her day, thinks the Queen Dowager, remembering backboards and nuns who rapped your fingers with canes, in her day girls had discipline. Just look at the Queen: no discipline. Two miscarriages in ten years, and dead before her thirtieth birthday. Of course linen is so much cheaper now that the kingdoms are united. But if only her Jims (which is how she thinks of the King) could have married that nice German princess.
She jabs the needle again, pulls it out, jabs, knots. She holds up the slipper and then its pair, comparing the roses embroidered on each toe in stitches so even they seem to have been made by a machine. Quite perfect for her Jims, to keep his feet warm on the drafty palace floors.
A tearing sound, and a splash. The girl, of course, as the Queen Dowager could have warned you. Just look at her, with her skirt ripped up one side and her petticoat muddy to the knees.
“I do apologize, Madam. I assure you it’s entirely my fault,” says Lord Harry, bowing with the superfluous grace of a dancing master.
“It is all your fault,” says the girl, trying to kick him.
“Alice!” says the Queen Dowager. Imagine the Queen wanting to name the girl Elaine. What a name, for a Princess of Britannia.
“But he took my book of poems and said he was going to throw it into the stream!”
�
�I’m perfectly sure he did no such thing. Go to your room at once. This is the sort of behavior I would expect from a chimney sweep.”
“Then tell him to give my book back!”
Lord Harry bows again and holds out the battered volume. “It was always yours for the asking, your Highness.”
Alice turns away, and you see what the Queen Dowager cannot, despite her keen vision: Alice’s eyes, slightly prominent, with irises that are indeed the color of gooseberries, have turned red at the corners, and her nose has begun to drip.
VI. THE SPINNING WHEEL
It has never wanted to be an assassin. It remembers the cottage on the Isles where it was first made: the warmth of the hearth and the feel of its maker’s hands, worn smooth from rubbing and lanolin.
It remembers the first words it heard: “And why are you carving roses on it, then?”
“This one’s for a lady. Look how slender it is. It won’t take your upland ram’s wool. Yearling it’ll have to be, for this one.”
At night it heard the waves crashing on the rocks, and it listened as their sound mingled with the snoring of its maker and his wife. By day it heard the crying of the sea birds. But it remembered, as in a dream, the songs of inland birds and sunlight on a stone wall. Then the fishermen would come, and one would say, “What’s that you’re making there, Enoch? Is it for a midget, then?”
Its maker would stroke it with the tips of his fingers and answer, “Silent, lads. This one’s for a lady. It’ll spin yarn so fine that a shawl of it will slip through a wedding ring.”
It has never wanted to be an assassin, and as it sits in a cottage to the south, listening as Madeleine mutters to herself, it remembers the sounds of seabirds and tries to forget that it was made, not to spin yarn so fine that a shawl of it will slip through a wedding ring, but to kill the King’s daughter.
VII. THE PRINCESS
Alice climbs the tower stairs. She could avoid this perhaps, disguise herself as a peasant woman and beg her way to the Highlands, like a heroine in Scott’s novels. But she does not want to avoid this, so she is climbing up the tower stairs on the morning of her seventeenth birthday, still in her nightgown and clutching a battered copy of Goethe’s poems whose binding is so torn that the book is tied with pink ribbon to keep the pages together. Her feet are bare, because opening the shoe closet might have woken the Baroness, who has slept in her room since she was a child. Barefoot, she has walked silently past the sleeping guards, who are supposed to guard her today with particular care. She has walked past the Queen Dowager’s drawing room thinking: if anyone hears me, I will be in disgrace. She has spent a larger portion of her life in disgrace than out of it, and she remembers that she once thought of it as an imaginary country, Disgrace, with its own rivers and towns and trade routes. Would it be different if her mother were alive? She remembers a face creased from the folds of the pillow, and pale lips whispering to her about the lily maid of Astolat. It would, she supposes, have made no difference. She trips on a step and almost drops the book.
She has no reason to suppose, of course, that the Witch will be there, so early in the morning. But somehow, Alice hopes she will be.
She is, sitting on a low stool with a spinning wheel in front of her.
“Were you waiting for me?” asks Alice. It sounds silly—who else would the Witch be waiting for? But she can think of nothing else to say.
“I was.” The Witch’s voice is low and cadenced, and although she has wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and her hair has turned gray, she is still rather beautiful. She is not, exactly, what Alice expected.
“How did you know I was coming so early?”
The Witch smiles. “I’ve gotten rather good at magic. I sell fortunes for my living, you see. It’s not much, just enough to buy bread and butter, and to rent a small cottage. But it amuses me, knowing things about people—their lives and their futures.”
“Do you know anything—about me?” Alice looks down at the book. What idiotic questions to be asking. Surely a heroine from Scott’s novels would think of better.
The Witch nods, and sunlight catches the silver cross suspended from a chain around her neck. She says, “I’m sorry.”
Alice understands, and her face flushes. “You mean that you’ve been watching all along. That you’ve known what it’s been like, being the cursed princess.” She turns and walks to the tower window, so the Witch will not see how her hands are shaking. “You know the other girls wouldn’t play with me or touch my toys, that the boys would spit over their shoulders, to break the curse they said. Even the chambermaids would make the sign of the cross when I wasn’t looking.” She can feel tears where they always begin, at the corners of her eyes, and she leans out the window to cool her face. Far below, a gardener is crossing the courtyard, carrying a pair of pruning shears. She says, “Why didn’t you remove the curse, then?”
“Magic doesn’t work that way.” The Witch’s voice is sad. Alice turns around and sees that her cheeks are wet with tears. Alice steps toward her, trips again, and drops the book, which falls under the spinning wheel.
The Witch picks it up and smiles as she examines the cover. “Of course, your Goethe. I always wondered what happened to Wolfgang Magus.”
Alice thinks with relief: I’m not going to cry after all. “He went away, after his sister died. She had consumption, you know, for years and years. He was always sending her money for medicine. He wrote to me once after he left, from Berlin, to say that he had bought his old master’s house. But I never heard from him again.”
The Witch wipes her cheeks with the back of one hand. “I didn’t know about his sister. I spoke to him once. He was a kind man.”
Alice takes the book from her, then says, carefully, as though each word has to be placed in the correct order, “Do you think his spell will work? I mean, do you think I’ll really sleep for a hundred years, rather than—you know?”
The Witch looks up, her cheeks still damp, but her face composed. “I can’t answer that for you. You may simply be—preserved. In a pocket of time, as it were.”
Alice tugs at the ribbon that binds the book together. “It doesn’t matter, really. I don’t think I care either way.” She strokes the spinning wheel, which turns as she touches it. “How beautiful, as though it had been made just for me.”
The Witch raises a hand, to stop her perhaps, or arrest time itself, but Alice places her finger on the spindle and presses until a drop of blood blossoms, as dark as the petal of a Cardinal de Richelieu, and runs into her palm.
Before she falls, she sees the Witch with her head bowed and her shoulders shaking. She thinks, for no reason she can remember, Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable . . .
VIII. THE GARDENER
Long after, when the gardener has grown into an old man, he will tell his grandchildren about that day: skittish horses being harnessed by panicked grooms, nobles struggling with boxes while their valets carry armchairs and even bedsteads through the palace halls, the King in a pair of black velvet slippers shouting directions. The cooks leave the kettles whistling in the kitchen, the Queen Dowager leaves her jewels lying where she has dropped them while tripping over the hem of her nightgown. Everyone runs to escape the spreading lethargy that has already caught a canary in his cage, who makes soft noises as he settles into his feathers. The flowers are closing in the garden, and even the lobsters that the chef was planning to serve with melted butter for lunch have lain down in a corner of their tank.
In a few hours, the palace is left to the canary, and the lobsters, and the Princess lying on the floor of the tower.
He will say, “I was pruning a rosebush at the bottom of the tower that day. Look what I took away with me!” Then he will display a rose of the variety called Britannia, with its twelve petals half-open, still fresh and moist with dew. His granddaughter will say, “Oh, grandpa, you picked that in the garden just this morning!” His grandson, who is practical and wants to be an engineer, will say, “Grandpa, people c
an’t sleep for a hundred years.”
IX. THE TOWER
Let us get a historical perspective. When the tower was quite young, only a hovel really, a child knocked a stone out of its wall, and it gained an eye. With that eye it watched as the child’s father, a chieftain, led his tribe against soldiers with metal breastplates and plumed helmets. Two lines met on the plain below: one regular, gleaming in the morning sun like the edge of a sword, the other ragged and blue like the crest of a wave. The wave washed over the sword, which splintered into a hundred pieces.
Time passed, and the tower gained a second story with a vertical eye as narrow as a staff. It watched a wooden structure grow beside it, in which men and cattle mingled indiscriminately. One morning it felt a prick, the point of an arrow. A bright flame blossomed from the beams of the wooden structure, men scattered, cattle screamed. One of its walls was singed, and it felt the wound as a distant heat. A castle rose, commanded by a man with eyebrows so blond that they were almost white, who caused the name Aelfric to be carved on the lintel of the tower. The castle’s stone walls, pummelled with catapults, battered by rams, fell into fragments. From the hilltop a man watched, whose nose had been broken in childhood and remained perpetually crooked. When a palace rose from the broken rock, he caused the name D’Arblay to be carved on the lintel of the tower, beside a boar rampant.
Time passed, and a woman on a white horse rode through the village that had grown around the palace walls, followed by a retinue that stretched behind her like a scarf. At the palace gates, a Darbley grown rich on tobacco plantations in the New World presented her with the palace, in honor of her marriage to the Earl of Essex. The lintel of the tower was carved with the name Elizabeth I, and it gained a third story with a lead-paned window, through which it saw in facets like a fly. One morning it watched the Queen’s son, who had been playing ball in the courtyard, fall to the ground with blood dripping from his nostrils. The windows of the palace were draped in black velvet, the Queen and her consort rode away with their retinue, and the village was deserted.
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