Annis could see she was not going to like Englishmen. This one hadn’t even told her his name, and all she wanted was a closer look at his horse, perhaps a chance to bargain for her.
The horse and her tall rider were already gone. Annis stepped out into the path to watch as the mare moved from the trot into a smooth canter, her pretty tail rippling in the breeze. Annis’s breast throbbed, first with desire to possess that wonderful horse, then with a surge of irritation over yet another man refusing to acknowledge her competence.
“Piffle,” she muttered at the man’s retreating back. “Who cares what some English stuffed shirt thinks, anyway?”
Frustrated, she stamped out of the park and back toward the Swan.
Velma met Annis at the door to the suite, and the relief on her face at seeing her mistress whole and safe filled Annis with compunction.
“Oh, Velma! You mustn’t worry so. I just went out into the park. It’s beautiful. When you have a moment you should go.”
“Yes, Miss Annis,” Velma said, in a voice that threatened incipient tears. “I didn’t know where you was.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. Where’s Frances?”
Velma pointed at the door to the dressing room Frances had claimed for herself. “She’s bin in that little room for ages. Don’t know what she’s doing, but Antoinette and me was getting awful hungry. Antoinette went to the kitchens to see if they will give us something.”
“Frances is in there alone?” Suddenly brimming with curiosity, Annis started toward the dressing-room door.
Velma hissed a warning. “She said no one goes in there, only her! Don’t, Miss Annis. She said!”
Annis stopped where she was, wondering what Frances was about. There was a smell in the suite, something like incense burning. And was that candle wax? It must be. But why should there be candles here? The hotel was fully electrified, though the lamps were so heavily shaded they cast hardly any light.
She took another step, hoping to hear something from the little room, but Velma’s fresh gasp of horror stopped her. It wasn’t worth upsetting the poor thing, so she turned away to her own bedroom. “All right, Velma. Come along. I need to dress for dinner.” Still, as she and Velma went into her room to sort out an ensemble, she looked back, burning with curiosity about what Frances could be doing.
12
Frances
The little room was too small to be of much use. Its walls were too close, and the dressing table nearly filled the space. Though it was meant to be a dressing room, it was impossible for Antoinette and Frances to occupy it at the same time. It was perfect.
Frances locked the door before extracting her things from the string bag. She lifted out a pottery saucer and an unburned beeswax candle. There was the little vial of her blood, which would need refreshing. The tarnished compact with its trove of nail clippings came next, then mandrake root, dried mistletoe leaves, and stems of dried barrenwort, complete with the flowers, their lavender color faded to gray.
Last of all, carefully wrapped in tissue, was the manikin.
It had not been easy to hide the bag from Antoinette on the journey. Antoinette had packed Frances’s valises and trunks and knew every item they held. Frances had been forced to slide the string bag into a small valise without Antoinette seeing, then remove it before her maid began the unpacking.
Now, on their first day in London, she made her start. She planned to choose her target as soon as possible, and she needed Annis to be in the perfect frame of mind when the moment came.
Such work took time. It had taken her six weeks to magic George, administering her philter when they dined together. Here in England she had a scant eight weeks to bend Annis to her will. To force her, Harriet would say, but Frances didn’t care what Harriet would say. A philter would not work, not in these circumstances. But Frances knew what would.
The maleficia.
“The maleficia may win a practitioner what she wants,” Beryl had said. “But she pays a terrible price.”
Frances smiled to herself, gazing down at the manikin. She remembered saying to Beryl, “Why do you keep saying ‘practitioner’? Why don’t you just say ‘witch’? Isn’t that what we are?”
Beryl had looked down that formidable nose. “We told you at the beginning, Frances. We take care with our words because we are at risk from the ignorant and the weak-minded.”
Frances rolled her eyes. “I remember what you said.”
“Yet I can see you’re not taking it seriously. Have you heard of Blackwell’s Island, the lunatic asylum?”
“Of course. It’s a hideous place, but nothing to do with us. It’s for—well, Blackwell’s is for lunatics!”
“I know of at least three practitioners languishing there, women of our own kind imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island. They were careless. They practiced the maleficia, and it redounded upon them in the worst way.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were committed for ‘aberrant behavior.’ One was turned over by her husband, who paid a doctor to diagnose her as a hysteric. Another was reported by her neighbors for selling an abortion potion, and she was convicted under the Comstock Laws. Someone decided the asylum was better than prison, although I doubt that’s true.
“The third, I’m sorry to say, was your grandmother. That was why your mother was terrified of the practice.”
As Frances digested this bit of history, it occurred to her that Harriet and Beryl were afraid of the maleficia, too. That, she decided, was the real reason they refused to teach it to her.
But she, Frances, wasn’t afraid of anything. She took pride in that and set about studying the maleficia on her own.
She spent hours in the library in Beryl’s house, reading and memorizing the books assigned to her. She spent even more hours, when she was left alone, searching through the other books, the ones she wasn’t meant to read but that she had known must be there somewhere.
They were older than any other books in the library, with cracked bindings and fading script. Someone—perhaps Beryl, perhaps someone even older—had hidden them behind less remarkable volumes, shelving them so high she had to climb on a chair to reach them. Their fragile pages held the secrets she wanted, the recipes for philters and the instructions for making poppets, also known as manikins. Some bore the initials of witches long dead. Some were so blurred with age they were impossible to read, but others—others were a treasure trove of forbidden knowledge. Of the maleficia.
Frances took great care with those books and always replaced them exactly as she had found them. Since Harriet often looked over her book of recipes, she wrote nothing down. She committed what she found to memory and then began to experiment.
She made a neighbor’s cat follow her for days, tagging at her heels whenever she stepped out of the house. She caused a hummingbird to fly in manic circles, as if it had lost its little mind. When the bird bashed itself to death on the window glass, she felt a moment’s regret before she told herself she had to learn somehow. Once she made a manikin of the rag man, just for the practice, and gave him a lame leg for a week.
After that success she decided it would be best to resist the compulsion of the maleficia. She had learned enough, and she resolved to do no more.
Stopping was more difficult than she had expected. The use of the power, the thrill of wielding her magic, was better than any drug she could imagine, more intoxicating than any wine she could drink. She struggled against it, pretending to be content producing the simples and salves her cousins wanted to teach her.
It was when she met the wealthy widower George Allington that her resolve failed. Fate had handed her exactly the prize she craved. She had only to reach for it, and the transformation of her life would begin. She would no longer be the poor relation from Brooklyn, destitute, dependent. She would be a lady.
She used everything she had learned to create the perfect philter. Persuading George to drink it had been simple, and its effect was gratifyingly swift.<
br />
The first step of her plan had been a great leap. The second step, acquiring a title in the family, was now within her reach. The third would be her acceptance into the Four Hundred, after which she meant to give up magic altogether. She would no longer need it.
It was unfortunate that she was having to bring Annis to heel through magical means, but the girl left her no choice. Surely Annis would be grateful, in the end. She would have a wonderful life, titled, privileged. It would be, indeed, the very life Frances would have wished for, had the opportunity presented itself. Since it hadn’t, her stepdaughter would be the beneficiary of her ability.
She dropped three of her fingernail parings into the pottery saucer and dripped a bit of the blood and wine from the glass vial over them. She shredded three leaves of dried mistletoe and crumbled the flowers, stems, and leaves of barrenwort on top. Finally she shaved a half inch of mandrake root, diced it fine, and mixed it in with the other ingredients.
She put a match to the candle and held the saucer above the flame until the mixture within began to bubble. When it had reduced to a speck of thick dark syrup, she scooped it up on her fingertip. She lifted the skirt of the manikin and rubbed the syrup on the little figure, down its belly, between its makeshift legs, whispering the cantrip she had devised for this purpose:
The power of witch’s blood and claws
Bends your will unto my cause.
Root and leaf in candle fire
Invest you with impure desire.
It was at such times, she knew, that Harriet sometimes experienced the knowing. Frances had waited for years for it to happen to her, but she had been forced, finally, to admit it wasn’t coming. She didn’t have that particular gift.
Still, each time she completed a rite, so carefully prepared, her intention hard and clear as diamond, she closed her eyes, hoping. It seemed terribly unfair that Harriet should have the gift and not she. It didn’t help that Harriet said it was not often a blessing. It was knowledge, and knowledge was power.
Frances needed power above all else. How else was she to erase the memory of the poverty-stricken girl from Brooklyn? How else was she to achieve her ambition, a lowly female in a world of men?
The simulacrum began to grow warm beneath her probing finger. Five minutes passed, then ten, until, ever so slightly, the thing wriggled under her hand.
Frances’s eyes flew open. The manikin still stared up at her, its eyes empty, its little fluff of hair and its red painted mouth just as before. It lay still beneath her hand.
But it had moved. There could be no doubt. It had vibrated under her fingers, and the magic of it brought a deep ache between her hip bones, a pain like that of childbirth. The pain surprised her, stealing her breath and making her fingers shake.
Carefully she set the manikin down so she wouldn’t drop it. She had not felt this way in the past, but she was wielding a far greater magic than she ever had before. She pressed a hand to her stomach. She had never given birth, but she thought this must be what it felt like, a sensation redolent with blood and pain and, in the end, triumph.
And sometimes death, of course. But Frances had no intention of dying.
She heard the outer door of the suite open and close, the voices of the maids chattering with Annis about dresses and dinner, cloaks and shoes, ribbons and necklaces.
Frances, breathing shallowly above the pain in her belly, rearranged the handkerchief dress on her manikin. She stoppered the vial and blew out the candle. When everything was restored to the string bag, its top securely tied with a knot only she knew how to undo, she tucked it into a drawer of the dressing table, closed the drawer, and locked it. She stood, smoothing her skirts and tidying her hair, waiting the few moments it would take for her eyes to cease their gleaming and her belly to ease its ache.
When she was sure nothing untoward would show on her face, she went to the door and opened it.
“Antoinette,” she said. “We will have to dress in the bedroom. This room is far too small for both of us.” She turned to see that Annis was already in her dinner dress, her pearls around her neck, but she was stretched full length on a brocade settee. “Something wrong, Annis?”
Annis made a face. “I don’t know exactly. I felt fine, but suddenly—it’s my stomach. I feel a bit queasy. Achy.”
Frances schooled her expression into one of sympathy. “Ah, poor thing. I don’t believe you ate a thing at lunch, did you? What you need is a good dinner. I will hurry to dress. The dining room is expecting us at eight.”
It had taken a bit of persuasion and a substantial sum of money for Frances to acquire the letter of introduction to Lady Whitmore, who lived in Mayfair. “Not precisely on Grosvenor Square,” Frances explained to Annis as they rode in the hired carriage for their first London call. “But close enough, I think, to be considered a good address.”
Annis appeared to have recovered from the first effects of her rite. She was cheerful this morning. She liked the open carriage, which allowed her a good view of the stucco-fronted houses facing the park and a glimpse of the Gothic facade of the Houses of Parliament ranged along the river.
Annis protested at first over making a social call instead of going to the British Museum, but then, under the influence of Frances’s newly established authority—Witch’s blood and claws—she subsided. Frances smiled to herself and wondered why she had not made this happen sooner.
She thought Annis looked rather well, thanks to the choices she had made for her. She wore a visiting dress of white cotton trimmed with pink lace. Frances had personally overseen the dressmaker’s work, and she was pleased with the results. There was a matching pair of gloves. Annis’s waist was not as small as Frances’s own, of course, but she was a good bit taller, and that was to be expected. Frances would have liked wider, more fashionable sleeves, and tighter at the wrist, but Annis had insisted she needed to be able to use her arms. Her hat was wide brimmed, with a plume of the palest pink Frances could find. There would be no more bent and stained straw hats.
Frances’s own appearance was perfect. Her waist was tiny beneath her creamy printed cotton, the corset cinched as tightly as Antoinette could manage. Her hat was also of cream, with curling feathers that grazed her cheek, and her gloves were cream silk with threads of gold. She looked, she felt certain, expensive. A proper lady. No one would guess at her origins.
The carriage swept along the road at a good clip. The driver, a man recommended by the hotel, was respectably dressed in a long-skirted coat. When they reached the Whitmore house he jumped down to hand the ladies and their maids out of his carriage.
Frances shook the creases out of her skirts as Antoinette adjusted the feather on her hat. Velma stood idle, staring at nothing, making Frances snap at her. “For pity’s sake, Velma! Don’t just stand there. Check Annis’s buttons. Tuck her hair back.”
Velma’s sallow cheeks went scarlet. She poked at Annis here and there, not to much effect, then stood back again, her head hanging. Annis stood limply, not even intervening to protect Velma from Frances’s temper as she usually did. Frances gave an impatient click of her tongue as she turned to survey the house they were about to visit.
This one wasn’t Georgian, like the homes nearest Regent’s Park. It was newer, narrower, built of colored brick, with a bow window and an elaborate set of double doors.
Frances’s catlike smile curved her lips. Allington House was much bigger than the Whitmore house, and far grander, with more elaborate ironwork and generous gardens. She would not feel intimidated in the least.
She straightened, patted her purse, where her letter of introduction waited, and said, “Come, Annis. Let us try our luck in London society.”
13
James
Not Americans, Mother,” James said. “Please! They’re so vulgar.”
She pursed her lips. “Tell me, Rosefield, when have you met any Americans? Do you have a social life I don’t know about?”
His mother had recently taken to ca
lling him by his title. James knew other families did it, but it irked him just the same. It intensified his awareness that the title was not so much a mantle laid on his shoulders as it was a burden he could never lay down.
He and Lady Eleanor were alone, seated at the breakfast table in the morning room. There was no reason she couldn’t call him by his Christian name, as she had always done.
He sipped his coffee and held his tongue. If he complained, she would lose her temper, scold him for lack of respect for his heritage, spoil the bright June morning, and still call him whatever she wanted to call him.
He swallowed the mouthful of coffee. He could have said that his social life was his own, but he didn’t say that, either. “It was hardly a social encounter. As it happens, I met an American in Regent’s Park. I was riding Breeze, and she was quite taken with her. We—”
“It was a woman?”
“Yes. Well, a girl. I have to say, Mother, she was distressingly blunt.”
“About what?”
He set down his cup. “I don’t care to repeat it. It would embarrass you. I was embarrassed.”
“Well, of course one must have standards, but I think you will find the young lady I met at Lady Whitmore’s to be quite modest. She hardly said a word, to tell you the truth, but her appearance was… acceptable.”
Her hesitation was not lost on her son.
She went on, “Lady Whitmore knows a great many Americans, Rosefield, and not one lacks a healthy fortune.”
“Gloria Whitmore has made an occupation out of introducing Americans to London society. She must make hundreds of pounds simply by holding tea parties.”
Lady Eleanor chuckled. “I know, my dear,” she said. “One might prefer she be less obvious about it, but since she isn’t, we must take advantage.” She put one plump hand to her throat, where she wore a cameo on a black ribbon. She was in deep mourning, a black shirtwaist and black skirt, black gloves when she went out. She seemed more comfortable today, though. She had evidently not felt the need to cinch her corset so tightly for breakfast at home.
The Age of Witches Page 11
