So Enchanting

by Connie Brockway

  He nodded. “You are infinitely qualified, Mrs. Walcott. You have received a lady’s education, you clearly have a cool and unexcitable nature, and you have polish and address,” he said.

  Cool and unexcitable. Yes. Of course, because she did not dare be anything else.

  “Surely you ran your husband’s household?” he suggested.

  She had, actually. Alphonse had claimed he was too spiritual to deal with the mundane matters of daily life and so left them to her. She had enjoyed it tremendously, not only the managing of the household, but dealing with the tradespeople, who, being less gullible than their gentrified counterparts, assumed she was a fraud and treated her accordingly, with a knowing wink and an admiring grin for “tuppin’ the toffs right smart.”

  Those had been her happiest hours as Alphonse’s wife, because even though she knew the tradespeople thought she was a swindler, she was just a normal swindler. How wonderful it had been. Though she did wonder what tup meant…

  “Whatever else you need to know, I can teach you. I did have a garrison under my command, you know,” Colonel Chase was saying. He studied her approvingly. “I suspect you would have made a first-rate lieutenant.”

  A lieutenant? The idea surprised a smile from her. Yes. She would have liked to be in a position of command, to have a say over the direction of her life. It would be a pleasant change.

  “But most important, you are like Amelie.”

  Her smile faded. “No, sir. You are wrong. I am not like your daughter, and if you hope I can teach her how to control what power it is you imagine she has, I cannot. Inanimate objects do not take flight in my vicinity.”

  A trace of desperation flickered in the colonel’s eyes, and Francesca noted how tired he looked. Her heart went out to him. He truly loved his daughter.

  “The poltergeist activity is currently the only manifestation, but she is barely twelve, Mrs. Walcott. I do not know what the future holds. I need someone who is familiar with such things, who will not be unnerved by them. Someone with a good heart.”

  She looked away. It had been a long time since she’d examined the condition of her heart.

  “I remember seeing you when you were a child,” he said softly. “You always seemed such a happy, high-spirited girl. It was a pity. Not only what happened to your brother but what it did to you. Amelie is like you were before… I don’t want her to change.

  “I need someone who has insight into what my child might be experiencing, who can prepare her for the world before she is put into it.”

  The phrasing struck Francesca as odd, but she was too intrigued by his proposition to question it. She was so tired of being alone. Even married to Alphonse, she’d been fundamentally different, separate. Lonely, an inner voice whispered. Colonel Chase was offering her much more than employment. Still, she had to be forthright.

  “I doubt I am the example for which you are looking,” she said regretfully. “I have hardly made a smashing success of my own entrance into society.”

  He was kind, a little pitying. “You haven’t been in society, my dear. You have been one of its many sideshows.”

  Well, that was bluntly spoken.

  He heard her involuntary inhalation and reached out to pat her hand. It had been years since someone had offered her the comfort of a simple touch. “I am a confoundedly plainspoken man. I am sorry, my dear.”

  “Don’t be.” She met his eye. “I am sick to death of subtlety and equivocation.”

  She meant it. The colonel’s candor was like a cleansing plunge in icy water. Every word Alphonse had uttered, both to his clients and to her, had been framed to suggest rather than affirm, to evade rather than illuminate.

  “Allow me to return the favor,” she said. “I was a willing participant in that sideshow. I helped my husband deceive his…our clients.”

  For a long moment, the colonel did not reply. He stared down at the coffee in his china cup. Fanny did not interrupt his thoughts, reflecting on her past.

  She’d come to terms with her part in Alphonse’s schemes. She’d been desperate to believe only good of the boyish-looking man who’d arrived at her family’s country estate while her family was in London for Jeanne’s debut. He’d claimed some nebulous family connection, and her elderly cousin hadn’t questioned him too closely, but neither had she.

  He began wooing her almost at once. He’d heard of her through mutual acquaintances and been struck by their similarities. He himself had the power to speak to the spirit world. She wasn’t a freak; she was exceptional. She needn’t hide her affinity with God’s creatures; she must celebrate it. He would teach her how. Such abilities as they possessed were gifts to be used to serve mankind.

  The idea seemed revelatory to Fanny. Here was someone who embraced his affliction, saw it as a boon rather than a curse. It never occurred to her that he was lying. How credulous she’d been at seventeen. Even though credulous, she hadn’t been a fool. She knew her parents would never agree to the match. So they eloped.

  Despite his promises, it was quickly clear that Alphonse had had no better idea than she of how to control her affinity with animals. He was disappointed when he realized that it was only when her emotions were completely engaged that creatures answered her call. He bullied, pestered, begged, and cajoled her to find some way to make use of her “gift.” She owed it to him. She owed it to people “waiting for a sign of grace in this graceless world.”

  When she had finally managed the briefest of voluntary connections, Alphonse had been overjoyed. Within weeks he’d figured out a way to put it to use, having her call creatures to the room while he was holding séances, then suggesting to their credulous clients that the sounds they heard had otherworldly origins. A brilliant bit of marketing.

  She hadn’t protested when Alphonse had explained that they were simply aiding the faithless to believe what he knew for a certainty to be true: that angels surrounded the living. Why? Because she was a fool who had for four years pretended she believed him because she desperately wanted to think her life had value.

  “There is no possible way anyone would willingly put an impressionable child in my care,” she murmured. Looking up to find Colonel Chase’s gaze on her, she added, “You should look elsewhere for your daughter’s companion.”

  He studied her intently for a few moments before his expression relaxed. “I think not,” he said. “I long ago discovered that experience is the best teacher. You have had experiences that can help guide my daughter. Imagine, Mrs. Walcott, if you had had the benefit of your current knowledge at Amelie’s age. What would you do differently?”

  Never, ever allow anyone to know what I am.

  He saw her indecision. “You will be well compensated, I assure you. I am a very wealthy man, and when your term of employment is ended, you will have the wherewithal to do whatever you want with the rest of your life. Come now, Mrs. Walcott. You are still a very young woman. Barely a decade older than my daughter. Think of your future.”

  She was, but she also was thinking of Amelie Chase’s future. “Colonel Chase, you cannot want your daughter’s prospects tainted through an association with me.”

  “Bah.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Give London a new sensation and you will be forgotten. Why, in a few years no one will even recall your name. Time will have its way, Mrs. Walcott. I guarantee it. I’m counting on it. Come, my dear. Name your price.”

  A few years? How dearly Fanny would like to have a reprieve from her past. Some time to figure out her options. Time to start again. She was still young. Barely twenty-one.

  She hesitated. Colonel Chase’s proposal had planted a seed of hope in her heart. If he agreed to her price.

  “I tell you what,” he cajoled. “Give me your terms and I’ll consider them while we go meet Amelie. If, having met my daughter, you decide you won’t suit, then that’s the end of it. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “Now, tell me what it is you want.” His eyes were ki
ndly interested, but there was a resolute determination there, too. He would have his way. “Anything. You have but to name it.”

  “A clean slate.”

  He blinked, then grinned broadly. “My dear, as far as I’m concerned the past few years never happened.”

  “No. I mean, a clean slate to present to the world. Should I agree, from this day on I am an unremarkable woman without a hint of anything unusual in my past. No one is to know to whom I was wed, my maiden name, or any part of my history other than that which I, and I alone, choose to disclose.” The waiter came over to replenish their coffee. She waited until he’d left before continuing.

  “So that if I accept your offer, when the time comes for us to part, I shall have established an identity that begins today, as…” She hesitated, making it up as she went along. “As the widow of one of your junior officers, Fanny Walcott. Francesca Burns, your neighbor’s fey child, will be no more.”

  “Done!” he agreed, slapping his palm against the table. “You’ll find Amelie a most discreet child.”

  She shook her head, holding his gaze. “The list of those exempt from knowing my past includes your daughter.” She would not set herself up as some sort of mystical mentor, some Merlin in modern dress. If she were to have any chance for a normal existence, she must start now to re-create herself as a normal woman. She must be a normal woman.

  He frowned. “But that will defeat the entire purpose of retaining you,” he argued. “If she doesn’t know that you share a similar condition to her own, how can you help her understand it?”

  “I won’t because I can’t. Colonel Chase, you have been forthright with me. I will be equally so with you. I have no understanding of why animals respond to me. You want the advice that comes from experience? Your daughter should not seek to comprehend this thing that besets her, but ignore it and focus instead on those things she has in common with her fellow man rather than those that set her apart.”

  “But,” Colonel Chase protested, “she’ll wonder why I chose you to be her companion.”

  “Tell her you chose me because I am not impressed by evidence of the supernatural. Tell her I am a modern woman who assumes that once in a great while, through no offices of their own making, people are born with characteristics of an inexplicable nature. Such a happenstance of birth does not, however, give those people license to pretend to powers they do not have.”

  Colonel Chase’s malleable face pleated with compassion as he read her guilt. “My dear, I did not know you well as a child, but I am a good judge of character, and I knew your parents. I would not seek to employ you had I any doubts as to your integrity.”

  She felt a surge of gratitude, but waved aside his comfort. “I am not blameless. But I am guilty more of stupidity than of malice. Those are my terms.”

  “I don’t know,” Colonel Chase said, troubled. “I was hoping Amelie would find in you a unique confidante who shared her magical abilities.”

  Her lips twisted into a half smile. “There is no such thing as magic, Colonel Chase. Just outré phenomenon and curiosities. And those of us unfortunate enough to be oppressed by them.”

  But Colonel Chase was not ready to give up yet. “I have lived most of my life in exotic places, Mrs. Walcott, and I’ve seen things no proper Englishman would credit.” He leaned forward. “There is magic in the world, my dear.”

  She regarded him pityingly. He wore the same earnest expression as did the visitors to her husband’s salon, and spoke with the same heartbreaking need to believe. The same men and women who were convinced the mouse running over their sleeve was their son’s hand, the brush of a bat’s wing in the still air above the sound of angels, the clatter of the cat in the attic overhead the rapping of their ancestor.

  In the end, he was simply another superstitious old man hoping to find some divine reason for his daughter’s affliction.

  There was no use arguing with him. “That may be, sir, but this is not India,” she said gently. “No one in London wants to dine with a witch except those looking to entertain their guests with a curiosity. That’s not the life you want for your daughter, is it?”

  “I want her safe and happy. In that order,” he said.

  He did, bless him.

  He searched her countenance and, finding nothing there to suggest she would reconsider, sighed. “Well, if those are the only terms under which I can persuade you, so be it. You and I will be the only ones who know you were once Mrs. Francesca Brown.”

  “Or Francesca Burns?”

  “Or Francesca Burns.” He stuck out his hand. “Agreed?”

  But she’d learned caution over the last years, if nothing else. “I’ll meet the girl first.”

  He laughed, lumbering to his feet. “Then our agreement is a fait accompli, m’dear. You won’t be able to resist Amelie.”

  He was right; she couldn’t.

  Chapter 4

  Six years later

  It was noon in Little Firkin, Scotland. Not a traditional witching hour—midnight being considered more conducive to mayhem and maledictions—but as the townsfolk were always fast asleep by midnight and unwitnessed mayhem was generally acknowledged amongst witchly communities to be a wasted effort, it would have to do.

  Besides, every indication suggested that noon was the new midnight. To wit: At exactly twelve o’clock a cock crowed, the bell tower clock struck thirteen times, and a weird sound (which later would be identified by a certain skeptic as the Bristol-Fort George train but right now was pretty much universally recognized as the cry of a soul consigned to hell) echoed mournfully through the tiny hamlet.

  Otherwise it was a perfectly lovely spring day. The sun glimmered on the river dancing along the town’s eastern boundary and shimmered on the snow-capped mountains encircling the small valley that sheltered Little Firkin.

  Lovely day or not, what with the clock, the cock, and the eerie moan, the people of Little Firkin—no strangers to portents, portents being their bread and butter, so to speak—stopped what they were doing and paid attention. Those leaning over their back fence for their daily chin-wag hurried to the front yard, while those inside poked their heads out of their front doors. Half a dozen shopkeepers and an equal number of tavern owners—Little Firkians having long ago discovered that living in close proximity with the supernatural was a thirsty business—crowded their windows to see what Something Wicked This Way Came.

  On cue, a wind nickered to life in one of the town’s few alleys and skittered forth, kicking up a dust devil of leaves and halfpenny candy wrappers as a voice like a strangled cat pealed through the town center.

  “Aieeeee!”

  Little Firkin rubbed its collective hands together in anticipation. Women with small children shoved their tots behind them, while those with older brats squawked and flapped their arms, shooing them off the street like hens quarantining chicks before a storm. The old geezers in town towed their stools out to get a ringside seat at the anticipated proceedings.

  They were not disappointed.

  An ancient crone with a face like a withered apple appeared at the end of the town’s main thoroughfare amidst a swirl of dust, her raggedy multicolored skirts shedding bits of decaying lace along with the crumbs from her morning’s biscuit.

  “Aieeeee!” The hag’s screech broke into a coughing fit that ended only after she expelled a bit of cat hair.

  She hoisted an oak bole over her head on stringy little arms and cried, “I come to take Little Firkin!”

  A collective gasp of consternation and pleasure rose from the onlookers. A witch-off sounded just the thing for a fine spring day, and this promised to be a right doozy of a witch-off.

  For half a dozen years, the old crone at center stage, Grammy Beadle, had been trying to lay her witchly claim over Little Firkin. She lived in Beadletown, twenty miles away up in the mountains, and not a town at all but a ramshackle collection of disreputable crofts populated entirely by Beadles—a race of cattle thieves and malingerers.


  About ten years ago one of Grammy Beadle’s grandchildren, in what was doubtless an attempt to find something other than her family with which to occupy the old hag, had convinced Grammy that she oughtn’t hide her light under a bushel and should think of extending her reign of terror—or, more succinctly, reign of annoyance—to the other hamlets in the vicinity. It shouldn’t be too hard, this same sanguine grandchild had explained, there not being many witches anymore. And as for the upkeep on Grammy’s potential realm, it would involve only a bit of travel now and again to check up on the constituency.

  Grammy Beadle liked the idea. Within a year, she was not only the Witch of Beadletown but the Witch of Ben’s Tavern (Ben and his way station, even by Grammy Beadle’s admittedly liberal definitions, not being worthy of hamlet status) and a year after that the Witch of That Pisshole East of Where All Those Damned Beadles Live.

  From there she had turned her malignant gaze south toward the metropolis of Little Firkin, population 217, and it was here that her March of Irritation abruptly stopped. Coming out of the post office at the far end of town was the person who’d stopped her: a red-haired, very pretty, and very young lady dressed in the height of Parisian fashion.

  Her appearance gave even Grammy pause. Hundreds of miles from the nearest city, cloistered by ringing mountains and raging rivers, marooned in a backwater of time and place while the rest of the world charged ahead with industrial fervor, a fashion plate was as unexpected as a kootchie dancer at a church social.

  A rakishly tilted scrap of straw was perched atop an ingeniously arranged pile of flame-colored hair, while an ostrich feather, dyed to match the periwinkle braid edging a close-fitting velvet jacket, caressed a softly rounded cheek. Her skirts molded snugly about a womanly derriere before belling out into extravagant yards of green plaid that brushed the plank sidewalk. The open parasol resting on her shoulder dappled her pretty face with sunlight.