by Eva Alton
Leaving my books on the bedspread, I sat down next to the three of them and mussed my daughters’ hair, noticing the intricate plaits Francesca had managed to braid on their heads―yet another thing she seemed to be better at than me. I patted myself on the back mentally, thinking that maybe, bringing the children to The Cloister hadn’t been so reckless after all―Francesca had all the time in the world, and she was doing very well, even without cartoons, tablets and videogames. And after work, I would be able to spend the whole afternoon running with the girls in the park, which was right over our heads, just a few corridors and a staircase away.
“What was the title of that book you read together?” I asked, feeling intrigued.
“I don’t remember,” Katie answered, pursing her lips, “but we made a drawing about it!”
While Katie searched for her drawing, I sat closer to Francesca, in case she felt inclined to share a couple of her secrets with me. “You really seem to be a good governess,” I said casually. “What was it like in your day?”
“I taught Italian, music and history to a pretty little girl, not unlike yours,” she said, her eyes lost in memories.
“Did you enjoy your job?”
A darkness seemed to veil her eyes for a second, and her delicate knuckles became white around the wooden block she was holding, but she recovered her poise immediately and answered with her accustomed coolness. “I enjoyed the hours I spent teaching,” she said, in what sounded like an unfinished sentence to me.
Katie had been rummaging in the crowded shelves and came back holding a bunch of aged paper. She picked out two sheets and handed them to me. “Look, mommy! My drawing about Francesca’s story!”
On the paper, sketched in the simplified and irregular fashion of a five-year-old, I beheld the picture of a red-eyed man lying in a―wait, was that a coffin?―while his fellow stick woman rested on the floor with her limbs sprawled over a blotch of... red ink?
“Francesca?” I said, my voice several octaves higher than I would have wanted. “Did you, by any chance, read Dracula to my daughters?”
Francesca batted her impossibly long eyelids at me in slow motion. “I thought you might appreciate it if I introduced the girls to our culture,” she said, tilting her head with innocence. “Storytelling is a great way to help children cope with real-life challenges.”
Her arguments were hard to dispute.
“Would you mind checking with me first before starting your next story?” I said, holding her mesmerizing blue gaze.
“Certainly, Alba,” she said with refinement, then pointed at a folded piece of paper on the floor. “That fell out of your binder, by the way.”
The paper had my name written on it in black ink with a quill pen, and a brief message waited for me inside in the most delicate penmanship I had ever seen:
My beloved Isolde,
I’m leaving town for two days, but would you join me for dinner again on Thursday evening?
Enjoy the evening with your delightful girls.
PS: You did wonderful today at the meeting.
The letters were intricate and round, with elongated strokes which twisted around the words like ivy, and I couldn’t help but imagine the man who had written them, taking enough time to form each shape with care and patience long extinct. Feeling a bit childish, I folded back the paper under Francesca’s stoical scrutiny and slipped it in my pocket, well aware that half of my blood must have rushed to my cheeks. Francesca had read the note over my shoulder, and she would probably recognize such unique handwriting: it could only belong to one single charming, maroon-eyed vampire.
Francesca sighed and shook her head. “This is going to end badly,” she said, standing up and heading to the door. “Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”
THE GIRLS AND I ATE a takeaway dinner I had picked up for us during a brief break Elizabeth had allowed me during the morning. I also brought a couple of snacks and breakfast foodstuffs for the next day.
As a bedtime story, I read them the least traumatizing book I could find among Francesca’s selection, which ended up being Hansel and Gretel. I told myself that at least there were no coffins in that story, then realized too late why not: the witch from that tale didn’t really have a need for a casket―she always ate up the children she caught after fattening them with candy, leaving no leftovers to bury. Maybe Francesca had chosen that book with the purpose of chastising me for my hypothetical witch-roots; or perhaps the concept of cannibalism was simply too foreign to creatures like her to frown upon such storylines.
Katie and Iris were satisfied with our cozy bedtime routine and ended up falling asleep, curled up like kittens right by my side. Along the corridors outside our bedroom, I heard the steps of vampires as they paced the corridors and headed to the main exit of The Cloister, but I took a deep breath and decided not to think where they might be headed.
After I covered the girls with a light cotton sheet, I sat at my mahogany bureau desk with Julia’s diary, eager to discover what the previous assistant had been able to do about her origins. Would I ever become a real witch? Was such a thing possible... at all?
The diary started in July 1946. The first pages had been ripped out, and so had been many others in the middle and toward the end. It almost seemed like Julia had changed her mind many times while writing it, or she had wanted to hide some of her memories from prying eyes.
Lady Elizabeth kindly sent me this diary so I could immortalize my memories and experiences while working in The Cloister. She used that word―immortalize―which I found thought-provoking, as this might be my only real possibility to attain eternal life. I’m going to write about work and whatever I can discover about my witch ancestors. As a postwar widow, I’ll be eternally grateful for the opportunity Lady Elizabeth has given me to start a new life with her clan, and I’ve decided to honor her and follow her advice always. She’s a remarkable woman, and I deeply admire her despite her curse.
No wonder Elizabeth was so eager to give me that diary when Julia had only words of praise for her.
I skipped a bunch of pages which talked about her husband, who she hadn’t seen since he was deployed for World War II. There were also lots of accounts of Julia’s visits to banks and stores, and whether the people she met there were nice or not. Then I found something interesting:
February 13th, 1948
Today, I slipped on a slab of ice on the sidewalk and ruined my coat. Not only that, a man made a nasty comment about the pose I fell in. I was so angered, I wanted to kill him, but of course, decency and law didn’t allow me to. I muttered an improvised curse, and the most unexpected thing happened: the man slipped on the ice and very probably broke his arm, while the snow around me melted and disappeared. I’m not sure whether everything happened by chance, or I made it happen with my words. I’ll have to try this again.
That part was interesting. Feeling sleepy, I decided to stop reading; but first, I noted the words Julia had muttered at the disrespectful passerby:
“May you be cursed and may the worms devour your putrid flesh.”
For the first time in months, I fell asleep and had sweet dreams of Mark being eaten by maggots, and the next morning woke up fully refreshed and eager to face another day of training.
Chapter 15
Alba
Wednesday was a blur of paperwork and new information, as Elizabeth kept filling me in on the rest of my duties and I started to get the hang of my new life in The Cloister. I enjoyed the evening playing hide-and-seek in Saint Anne’s park with my beautiful daughters and spent the rest of the night leafing through the Memoirs of Viorel the Mage. As promising as the title was, it soon became clear that this was no magical treaty, but more the romanticized biography of a medieval courtier who had served the princes of Moldavia in the 16th century, written long after his death by someone else entirely.
On Thursday morning, Elizabeth declared she was too busy to accommodate our accustomed meeting in her schedule. I decided to spend the da
y outside and hit the specialized bookstore to get her the law books―with paper pages―which she had been longing for.
I had coffee in a lovely café with extravagant couches, all while I waited for my phone to charge and read my emails in blissful peace. There were at least five messages from Mark, all of them full of ciphered threats of finding out where I was and killing me―he was too sly to incriminate himself, but the loving excerpts about sending me flowers didn’t escape my attention, especially when the accompanying pictures weren’t of ordinary bouquets, but of funerary arrangements instead. He may be eager to buy me flowers indeed, only just the kind you lay on a beautiful walnut casket. As terrified as I was of him, his threats weren’t so perturbing now that I had a safe place to hide.
After breakfast, I had a pleasant walk to the law bookstore and thought about Francesca, who had promised to spend the morning teaching my daughters to play chess―no stories, just in case.
Emberbury was bright and fragrant on that morning, and I felt like a different person from the Alba Andersson who had paced those same streets not long ago, headed to yet another failed job interview. The brief days spent away from Mark’s shadow felt like shedding a really weighty, sodden woolen coat from my shoulders. It tasted like freedom. Like being alive again.
The bookstore smelled of new printed paper and fir tree-shaped air freshener. I walked down the narrow aisles, holding Elizabeth’s list in my hand. It was possibly the first time I had stepped into a bookstore dedicated solely to law manuals, and I felt flabbergasted at the amount and average thickness of the volumes. Just looking at them made me wonder what kind of society needed so many regulations to keep functioning, and how on earth it was possible that anyone remembered all of that stuff. As far as I knew, they only had five rules in The Cloister, and they seemed to be doing just fine.
I searched for letter B in the Tax Law section, and I found it on top of a metallic bookshelf, right under a flickering fluorescent tube about to draw its last breath. I tried to stand on my toes to reach the book, but it was too high for me, so I set up to find a stool I could step on. Unexpectedly, a stranger’s hand appeared from behind my back and took the book, placing it kindly on my hands.
“Thank you,” I said absentmindedly, reading the title and verifying whether it was the right one―it was. I then turned around to thank the friendly newcomer, and my heart nearly stopped.
He was no ordinary shop assistant.
My soon-to-be ex-husband, Mark, was standing next to me, formidable with his wide frame clad in a navy tailored suit, dirty blond hair slicked back with gel, and his jaw twitching in the most menacing way I had ever seen in another human being so close.
Mark seemed as surprised to see me as I was, only much more thrilled.
“You. Stealthy. Slut.” he muttered between his teeth, so quietly that I had to read his lips to make out the words. His iron hand grasped my wrist like a cuff, and I twisted my arm, trying to escape his clasp. “You aren’t going anywhere until you tell me where you are hiding the kids,” he said, and his tone told me he was absolutely serious about it.
TERRIFIED OUT OF MY mind, I spun on the spot and bit Mark’s hand, right next to his exclusive watch. Startled, he released his grip, and I managed to run out of the bookstore, throwing the law book on a counter to avoid setting off the theft alarm. Mark went running after me. I was certain he would catch me before I could say runaway bride. I had spent most of the last decade holding babies and refilling milk bottles, while he had never skipped a day at the gym. That, together with his superb genes, should be enough for him to cover the few yards between us in a matter of seconds.
As I evaded a delivery truck, I tried to remember Julia’s curse, wondering whether it would work for me as well.
“You maggot! I hope the worms eat you!” I yelled, summarizing Julia’s words as best as I could. Of course, nothing happened. That is, apart from Mark becoming even more vicious, and me losing a couple of precious breaths I should have rather put into running faster.
That wasn’t one of the districts of Emberbury I knew best, so I kept running blindly, not sure where to go. I turned a couple of streets, hoping to find a hiding spot before Mark caught me. Maybe a restaurant, although he had already proved to be perfectly capable of cornering me in a public place. I kept pushing people away and apologizing, but Mark got closer and closer.
“Where are they?” he shouted at me. His extended arm could almost reach me now.
“Leave me alone! You never cared about them in the first place!”
Mark grabbed me by the back of my blouse, but I managed to get away. I took an abrupt turn left and found myself trapped in a dead-end street.
A few parked cars, a couple of trash cans and two metallic doors with no handles surrounded me. There was nowhere to flee, and Mark was blocking my way out of the cul-de-sac. I let out a choppy breath, aware of what Mark was capable of.
Once he realized my stupid move, Mark stopped running and sauntered leisurely in my direction, as a smug smile started to form in his lips. The prowler had secured his prey, and now he was ready to enjoy his victory.
“Mark, please, let’s discuss this in a civilized manner,” I pleaded, staggering backwards toward the wall behind my back, without taking my eyes off him. I slid my open palms over the concrete, trying to find a notch, an open window or anything which would get me to the other side and out of his reach.
“For a start, you could stop sending pictures of funerary wreaths, okay? It’s getting annoying.” I said, to give myself some time.
“How dare you leave like that,” he roared, clenching his fists.
“You filed for divorce weeks ago, have you forgotten? Excuse me if I thought you meant it.”
“Oh, yes, I meant it, and how. I wouldn’t waste my life with someone like you.”
“But why, Mark? Why do you treat me like that? I thought we loved each other. I did everything I could to please you. What did I do wrong?”
“Why not ask what you didn’t do wrong, Alba?” He was so close now I could smell the coffee on his breath. “You are a liar. And a loser. And you know what happens to losers? They lose everything.”
“I’ll be home on July 1st, as promised. I will bring the girls back. We can then agree on a schedule...” I kept babbling mindlessly, just to keep him distracted. “I could have them from Monday to Friday and you could have them during the weekends. You work too much to be with them during weekdays.”
Maybe I could negotiate with Mark. Keep him entertained until someone came.
“Or... tell me what you want,” I continued. “We can talk, okay? Just... just move out of my way. You are making me uncomfortable.”
Mark laughed. “You don’t have a say here―we’ll play by my rules. Can you afford an attorney at all? Or do you expect me to come to your rescue?” He grabbed the back of my hair and tangled his fingers in it, pulling me painfully against him. “Because, this time, good old Mark won’t be there to bat for you.”
“Was he ever?” I said, sounding more confident than I felt, and he tightened his grip. “Don’t worry about that, Mark. That’s my problem. I’ll manage.”
As soon as I got my first salary from Elizabeth next month, I was going to find someone able to smash this bastard’s head with the full weight of the law―there was no way Mark could be the only capable lawyer in the whole city.
I tried to escape his grip once again, but this time, he was better prepared, and he held my neck with one hand and my arms with the other one.
I gulped. “Look. I need to leave now. Someone is waiting for me.”
That was a really unwise thing to say. Naively, I thought he might retreat if someone was searching for me. But, as soon as I said it, Mark went completely berserk.
“Who is waiting for you? Your lover?” he said, jerking his head left and right, like he expected a man to appear out of thin air.
“Are you crazy? What are you talking about?” I moved sideways, wondering whether I’
d be able to sneak out if I ducked my head really fast.
“I saw him. You were shameless enough to bring him to our door on Friday night. I can imagine where you have been going all those times you told me you were chatting with the neighbor.” He let out a bitter spurt of laughter. I couldn’t understand why on earth Mark would be jealous of me, if it was obvious he didn’t want me anyway. “I know you are having an affair. How long has it been going on? Are you staying with him now?”
“Mark! No! That was the first time I saw that man in my life!”
Technically, the second one. But still, there had been nothing foul going on. If I had depended on Mark, I would have been robbed and who knows what else that evening.
“I was attacked on the street. That man passed by and helped me, then he escorted me home to make sure I was safe. You didn’t even bother to ask how I ended up with a black eye.”
“I supposed you must have deserved it.”
“Come on, Mark,” I said, extending my neck over his towering figure in search of a blunt object to hit him with. “What do you want from me? No, I’m not having an affair if that’s what you think. And even if I did now, would that matter? We are about to divorce, for goodness’ sake! I took the girls on a vacation, you have to work, and I’ll see you in July, okay? Now leave me alone!”
“You’re sexy when you’re angry,” he said, spitting out one of his favorite chauvinistic lines, which in turn made me even angrier. I realized with disgust that a hard bulge had started to grow in his pants, and he started to rub himself against me.
Even though we had been married for a long time, it made me want to throw up.