The Witch in the Lake

by Fienberg, Anna

  But Leo couldn’t help smiling. He’d been standing there for five minutes already, and his father hadn’t even noticed him. The fire hadn’t been lit for supper, and the big iron pot that hung over the hearth wasn’t yet filled with water for their minestra.

  When Leo crept in, Marco had been huddled over his notebook, glancing feverishly at sheets of paper scrawled with diagrams of the human body. He’d been making frantic notes, muttering to himself in excitement, sharpening his quill and saying ‘si, si!’ every few seconds.

  Marco saw the smile and grinned sheepishly back at his son. He waved in the direction of the fireplace and shrugged. ‘The thing is, Leo,’ he said, ‘there’s so much work to be done. Important work.’

  Leo nodded. He began to bundle up the kindling and dried leaves.

  ‘See, I’ve got hold of this extraordinary manuscript. You should see some of the drawings.’

  Leo chose a log and placed it on the fire. He looked up at his father’s face. His dark eyes were sparkling with lamplight and his silver hair was curling up in wiry spirals where he’d been winding it round and round his finger. Merilee had often said that Leo was just like Marco.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Leo had sighed, ‘it’s the hair.’

  ‘No,’ she’d grinned, ‘it’s much more than that.’

  It was true, thought Leo, looking at him now, we can talk about anything—anything except Merilee and the witch in the lake.

  ‘I’ve never seen this before, Leo.’ His father swung round his chair to face him. ‘Probably almost no one has. Look, here are the little vessels of the heart. Can you imagine? The diagram shows what it looks like, right inside a human heart. Come and see!’

  Leo came and pored over the drawings with his father. He’d let him talk, he decided, and marvel with him, and soon Marco would forget that Leo had ever been late and then they’d get hungry and eat and add more wood to the fire for the morning, and Leo would go to bed. From his dark corner of the room, behind the tapestry curtain from Florence, he’d hear the sounds of late-night Marco—the whispering, the trickle of the water being added to his glass of wine, the riffling through pages.

  Marco never went to bed before dawn. He’d done that ever since Leo was a baby, when his wife had died of fever, and Marco had begun a life’s study to find out why.

  Leo’s father had been born with silver hair. It was the first sign of wizardry, and it ran in all the males of the Pericolo family, just like brown eyes or bad temper runs in others. Marco told Leo that he was a wizard on his fifth birthday.

  ‘Good,’ said Leo. ‘Are you a wizard too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marco. ‘But I was never a very good one. I don’t have the twin signs, and then . . . I think you’ll be a much better wizard, Leo. Maybe, one day, you’ll be as good as my grandfather. He—’ Marco frowned suddenly and raked his hand through his thick bush of silver hair. ‘Anyway,’ he went on brusquely, ‘let’s not dwell on the past—we’ve got your future to think of, my boy. I’ll teach you the little I know, and guide you as you grow.’

  ‘I’ll be a better wizard than you?’ asked little Leo in wonder. He looked at his father with the big face he couldn’t even hold in his hands, and felt a shiver of delight.

  Then his father had taken him by the shoulders and looked deep into his eyes. ‘My magic is weak,’ he said, ‘it’s untutored and without power—I have never saved anyone. But you, Leo, you will be different. You have the two signs of wizardry, my boy—silver hair and golden eyes. You have the sun and moon within you.’

  Leo often remembered that day. The day his father had told him about the two signs, the way he’d looked into his face. ‘You can do anything,’ he’d said, making Leo’s stomach rumble with pride and terror.

  Since then Leo had often comforted himself with those words of his father’s. Because it was hard to keep faith. The exercises they practised every Thursday were hard and often boring. For a whole hour, sometimes, Leo would have to sit on the wooden stool, staring at an object so that he ‘understood its true nature’.

  On Leo’s seventh birthday, Marco told him that the Pericolo family specialised in a particular brand of magic—the magic of Metamorphosis.

  ‘That’s where one thing is changed into something else altogether,’ Marco explained. ‘It’s perhaps the most powerful kind of magic. It can create all that is good, but it can call into being the most unimaginable evil.’ Marco’s face closed in then, darkening around some secret storm.

  Leo had stared into his face. ‘Tell me.’

  They were hunched close together at the table, sharing the circle of lamplight and their long shadows had danced across the walls. Leo kept silent, holding his breath, desperate with wanting to know. He could see there was some private landscape behind his father’s eyes—a time before he, Leo, was born, and Marco had had this whole other life, where maybe, just once, he’d touched evil. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered again.

  But Marco shook himself, making the shadows shudder. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he’d said abruptly. ‘But I’ll warn you, Leo. Although you may go way beyond me with your magic, you must always stop when I tell you. You must listen to me. I don’t have the power you do, but I have the years and the wisdom to know—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To know the places you mustn’t go, the forests of wizardry that are too dark to explore.’

  Leo didn’t answer. He felt hushed, in awe, as if someone had touched his naked back with a drop of ice.

  ‘You must always obey me,’ Marco said. ‘Otherwise you will get lost. Is that understood?’

  Leo had nodded. He had never seen his father so serious. His voice was deeper, so certain—it didn’t jangle with outrage or passion the way it often did. And strangely, from then on, Leo found the lessons more interesting, absorbing even, and hours floated by while he sat, mesmerised on his stool, his mind travelling to other places entirely.

  To practise the art of Metamorphosis, Marco told Leo early on, you have to be able to see.

  ‘Well of course!’ Leo laughed. ‘What do you think I am, an idiot?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ smiled Marco. ‘But there are ways of seeing, son. In order to transform something, you have to see it first. You have to look straight to the heart of that thing, before you can change it.’

  ‘You mean if you only see its outside, then only that will be changed when you do the spell? I mean, it will look changed, but the heart of the thing will be the same.’

  Marco gave a little jump of excitement. ‘Yes, Leo, that’s it, bravo! The object’s real nature has to be understood, all its history, its deepest soul, even the making of it, has to be seen and held in your grasp. Once you do that, you may learn to change its deepest nature. And then, Leo, you will be practising the Metamorphosis of the Pericolo family.’

  Leo glanced around the room, thrumming his fingers on the table. ‘What about Pidgy? Could I change him, say, into a wolf?’

  Leo’s pigeon, which he’d rescued in the forest two years ago, perched on the arm of a chair. He blinked back at Leo, as if amazed at the suggestion.

  ‘Consequences,’ said Marco. ‘Think of the consequences first. Ask yourself, what will happen if I do this? Would I rather have a pet wolf? Should I take the power of flight from my good friend?’

  Leo watched Pidgy flutter his wings. ‘Oh, no,’ said Leo, in sudden horror. ‘Pidgy would hate being a snarly, earthbound creature. Oh, Pidgy, I wouldn’t do that to you,’ and Leo put out his finger for the bird to perch upon.

  ‘One of the first things to learn,’ said Marco, his voice suddenly deep and heavy, ‘is that you never use your power for its own sake. It’s not a toy to be played with—and you must never discuss it with anyone. It . . . annoys some people.’

  Leo stared at his father.

  Marco sighed, spreading his hands. ‘There are very few of us. And the authorities fear magic. The Church says we are devil worshippers—’

  ‘But that’s silly—’
/>   ‘We know that, but the consequences of being discovered, Leo, could well be death.’

  There was silence for a moment and then Marco leaped up to close the shutters. ‘I think it will take many years before you’ll have the power to perform transformation. And I pray to God that by then you will have the wisdom to use it well.’

  Now that Leo had started looking, he found it hard to stop. He practised ‘seeing’ everywhere, not just on the wooden stool near the fireplace. To his delight, he found it easy. Without even trying he discovered new worlds nestled inside such familiar things. He saw trees that remembered the wind in their branches inside firewood and benches and shelves. He saw little boys curled up in men’s hearts; a disappointing dream in the eyes of his neighbour. Soon it came as naturally as his next breath. But sometimes it was almost too much. He saw double, triple of anything that other people saw—his mind became crowded, his eyes flooded with private truths. Secrets lay there before him like landscapes behind a fog, and he only had to breathe on them for the cloud to clear.

  When Leo was eight, he went with his father to visit a merchant who sold brooms. Marco was looking at a fine, thick straw broom, when Leo whispered into his ear. ‘There’s a hungry wolf in that man’s heart. When he smiles, I can see its teeth bared to bite.’ Marco, who had no money to spare, and didn’t want to get bitten, decided not to do business with the merchant, and later bought a good, cheap broom on his travels to the city.

  Marco was very pleased with Leo. ‘I knew it,’ he exclaimed, ‘you have great talent. Your vision is your strongest magic. I’ve only had a thimbleful. You have a river. Just like your great grandfather—’

  ‘Who, not Manton?’ Leo shuddered.

  ‘No, his father—Illuminato—he had the twin signs, too.’

  ‘Did he look like me, what magic did he do?’

  But Marco waved his hand. ‘Let’s walk quickly. Tonight we’ll have supper early, because tomorrow I must leave for Florence at dawn.’ He rubbed his hands together at the thought of it.

  Leo never heard all the history of the great Illuminato, and it is a pity because if he’d known more about him, he might never have thrust himself into danger, unarmed and ignorant, in the years to come.

  Leo’s village was quite a distance from the great walled city of Florence. Most days except Sunday, Leo waved to his father as Marco set off for the two-hour walk to the city. Only a few of the men from the village worked in Florence, in the busy workshops where they sold wool and silk, cut hair, made looms, built furniture. Most villagers thought it too far to venture, and preferred to stay within the slow secluded world of the village, working in the olive groves and vineyards, or curing pigs for the market.

  Marco was a wood carver and worked in the back of the shop owned by Signor Butteri. When he was younger, Signor Butteri did his own carving and selling, but now he suffered from gout—a disease that caused his legs to swell and his temper to sour. But he was fond of his assistant, because Marco often came to work with a new remedy to try for his illness, and was always interested in discussing his latest symptoms. Even though Marco was sometimes late to work, he was an excellent carver. The workshop specialised in wedding chests, where brides placed their linen, and Marco’s chests were very popular, with their smooth satin finish and careful decoration.

  Marco quite enjoyed wood-carving—it was a living, he told Leo—and it allowed him to roam about in the city he loved most.

  Marco finished work at three in the afternoon. But he never walked straight home. He lingered. He liked to talk with people—merchants, apothecaries, lawyers, labourers—and hear the heartbeat of the city. He’d drink a glass of wine at the markets, visit the other workshops where artists were painting or sculpting or inventing. The bustle of Florence was so different from the secretive stillness of the village. Marco liked to listen to people’s news, and news about medical discoveries was his favourite kind.

  Marco was like a detective, searching for clues that would help him solve the mystery of the human body. He wanted to know how it looked inside, how the blood flowed in the veins, how the bones stayed attached and didn’t float all about. If he’d had to remain in this small village all his life, he often said, he’d go to the grave believing that the arrangement of the planets above caused the plague down here on earth.

  ‘In the city of Florence men are searching for truth,’ he’d sigh. ‘Here there is only superstition and fear.’ And that never saved anyone, he’d mutter to himself.

  When Marco came home late from work, he was often lit up, as if he were a lamp someone had kindled. He glowed with hope, talk, new information. ‘This is a wonderful time we’re living in,’ he’d beam to Leo, ‘we are discovering so much—it seems every day we know more about life, about us!’

  And Leo would beam back, knowing he was about to hear news that belonged only to a handful of people in the country.

  In Florence, only twenty years ago, there had lived Marco’s hero, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was best known for his art, but Marco was more interested in his investigations of the human body. The great man had kept private notebooks—no one knew how many, most people knew nothing about them at all—and he’d sketched drawings, made notes, scribbled ideas that had never been thought of before in the history of the world.

  Leo had stayed up with his father many nights until dawn, when Marco had just returned from the city. He’d tell Leo how he’d got talking with someone, a scholar who’d known another, whose father had assisted the great Leonardo.

  ‘The man had a passion for truth,’ Marco would begin in a hushed, awed voice, ‘and he didn’t care what danger that put him in.’ Leonardo had opened up human bodies, Marco said, to study them.

  ‘Ugh!’ cried Leo. ‘Che schifo!’

  ‘Well, he wanted to get the anatomy right,’ Marco explained. ‘How can you draw a leg properly, with all its strength and power, if you don’t know how it looks inside? What’s under the skin, how does the muscle pull? So you know what? Leonardo went to hospitals at night, with a lantern, and dissected corpses. He’d cut open the body, and draw what he saw inside.’

  Leo, listening to this in the flickering light, couldn’t help shuddering. He’d looked at his own leg, tracing the muscle under his skin.

  ‘He even followed criminals on the day they were to be executed, to see their faces and how they looked at the point of death. But then,’ and Marco’s face darkened, ‘the Pope stopped him cutting up bodies. Leonardo wasn’t allowed to even set foot in a Roman hospital any more—or he’d be sentenced to death.’ Marco snorted. ‘Didn’t he just want to discover the truth? Who else ever had the courage to do it!’

  Marco kept his own notebooks in a locked box under his bed. He faithfully recorded conversations he’d had, word for word, with people in the city. He’d copy drawings, and compare them with others he’d made, trying to build up his own library of knowledge about anatomy.

  But on the night that Leo came home late, with the ghostly echo from the lake still throbbing in his head, Marco was perhaps the most excited that Leo had ever seen him.

  ‘This is truly amazing,’ Marco was exclaiming to himself as he tried to copy from the sketches lying in front of him. ‘The human heart on the table.’

  Leo silently cheered. Wasn’t it lucky that Marco’s remarkable discovery had occurred on the very same night as his own? But as Leo built up a fire, and filled the pot with water and slices of turnip and onion, he felt a tug of anger that his discovery could never be discussed, whereas the next two hours would be devoted to Marco’s.

  ‘See?’ Marco thrust a drawing into the lamplight. ‘This is a copy—but a person who I won’t name told me it’s a faithful copy of a sketch made by Leonardo some twenty-five years ago. It’s only just been found.’ Marco wiped his hand over his face. ‘If we know what’s inside us, we can find a cure when the sickness comes!’

  Leo peered at the drawing. There was a cluster of wiggly lines inside the heart, and lots of tiny ar
rows and writing that all looked like it was written backwards.

  Marco chuckled as he watched Leo’s puzzled face. ‘Mirror writing,’ he explained. ‘Leonardo wrote like that for secrecy.’ Marco picked up a small lady’s pocket mirror from the table, and held it close to the drawing.

  ‘He’s done cross-sections of the heart,’ murmured Marco, ‘you can see all the cardiac vessels. Leonardo says it’s the heart that pumps the blood all around the body! What do you think of that?’

  Leo had a turn with the mirror, and was excited too when real words leaped out of the jumble of mirror writing. But even as he looked and admired, he wished he could talk about what went on inside his heart, and not just about the look of it.

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed, Papà,’ he said at last, and got up wearily from the table. But Marco was still under the spell of the drawing. Leo was putting on his nightshirt when Marco finally looked up and answered him.

  ‘What? You’re going to sleep already?’

  Leo pulled the curtain back.

  Marco looked like someone who has been underwater, coming up suddenly for air. ‘You’re not having any supper, Leo? Is there any supper?’

  Leo sighed. He watched Marco trying to remember something as his mind came slowly back into the room, into the present.

  ‘La minestra,’ answered Leo. ‘You know, the soup—onion and turnip. But I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you feel well? What is it?’ Marco was alarmed. All at once he was on his feet, coming over to feel Leo’s forehead.

  Leo grinned. If he’d ever wanted his father’s whole attention, Leo had only to mention a slight headache, a sore throat, a stomach ache, and Marco would be there, bending over him, consulting his notebooks for treatments. ‘No, no I’m fine,’ Leo waved his hand away.

  Marco straightened up. His face was set.

  He’s remembered, thought Leo.

  ‘Did something happen tonight that made you so late?’ asked Marco. ‘Or were you just careless?’