The Witch in the Lake

by Fienberg, Anna

  ‘Magnifico!’ he cried when she finished. He clapped so hard his hands were crimson.

  Merilee laughed with delight. When Leo looked at her like that, with such enthusiasm and admiration, she felt different, clever, spectacular—why, maybe she truly could do anything! She might travel the world with troubadours, play at court, compose new harmonies that no one had ever dreamt of before.

  ‘Maybe one day soon I’ll be good enough to earn my living this way,’ Merilee said. ‘And then we’ll just run away, we’ll escape like two birds out of a cage, and fly!’

  ‘Mamma mia, Merilee,’ Leo grinned, ‘you’re beginning to sound like me! Why don’t you play another song and we’ll pretend we’re in Venice, in that grand Piazza San Marco, with all the gondolas gliding up and down the canals—’

  ‘And the fat merchants in their silk robes strutting around the streets like pigeons—’

  ‘Calling out, “Who’s that pretty musician in the square, I’ll pay her 1000 lira for a song!”’

  And so Merilee played on until the air amongst the thick trees grew cold and sunlight hardly glimpsed through the leaves.

  ‘Oh, Leo,’ Merilee groaned, when they both came back to the world of the forest and looked about them, ‘why do we always do this?’

  ‘Because we never have enough time, that’s why.’ Leo suddenly looked fierce again, like he had last Wednesday coming back from the lake, and Merilee’s heart sank.

  ‘I told Aunt Beatrice that I was late last time because I was looking for her wretched rosemary and thyme,’ Merilee said. ‘So now I’ll have to go and pick some. Only I’m going to be late again.’

  Leo sprang up. ‘I’ll help you. We’ll do it together, it’ll be quicker.’

  But just then, as Merilee was packing her recorder into her bag and Leo was putting on his hat, they both heard a noise. It sounded like a branch snapping, further up the path.

  ‘Quiet!’ hissed Leo. They both held their breath. Merilee’s heart was pounding so hard she couldn’t hear anything else.

  A whiff of perfume, thick and spicy, drifted up. Merilee’s stomach tightened. She smelled dried herbs, rosemary, marjoram. A feeling of dread so deep settled in her that her body felt bound to the earth, as if she’d grown roots and could never get up.

  A thick-bodied woman in a long black dress strode out of the bushes.

  ‘There you are, you sneaky little wasp!’ Aunt Beatrice cried. She dived at Merilee, pulling her up by her long dark hair.

  ‘Leave her alone!’ cried Leo. He tried to catch hold of Merilee’s hands but Beatrice swung around to face Leo. Scarlet rose up into her face, colouring it completely the way a drop of paint colours a glass of water in a second.

  ‘You devil!’ she spat. ‘You dare to talk to me like that? What are you doing with my niece, sneaking around like the viper you are!’

  ‘Aunt Beatrice,’ Merilee whispered. Her voice shook with shock. ‘We just happened to meet here in the forest. I was looking for more herbs, because the ones I collected the other day were not good, not—’

  Beatrice let out a bark of laughter. Her mouth opened so wide that Leo and Merilee could see the great black gaps where her rotting teeth had been pulled.

  ‘More lies you’re going to tell me? Come on then, give me some more rope to hang you with!’

  Merilee was silent. Her legs trembled so much she was sure they’d just fold under her, and she’d sink to the ground like someone in a stupor.

  ‘I knew you hadn’t been looking for herbs, my girl,’ Aunt Beatrice hissed. ‘Since when have you ever interested yourself in my work? I ask you to learn the slightest thing about it, the slightest thing, and you sigh and tap your foot and the next day forget anything I said.’

  Glancing up at the crimson Beatrice, Merilee found it hard to remember how such a face had ever broken into a smile.

  ‘So when you told me you were out late collecting herbs,’ Beatrice went on, ‘I wanted to laugh in your face. And sure enough, you left none on the table, and there was not a hint of them in your room.’

  Merilee looked down at the ground. She noticed a small brown cricket hop near the toe of her sandal. Aunt Beatrice is about to squash me, she thought, and I’m as helpless as that little insect. Only it can leap away and I can’t.

  ‘Oh, why don’t you find someone else to bully!’ Leo burst out. ‘What does it matter to you if Merilee has a little fun sometimes—’

  ‘Fun?’ Aunt Beatrice spat the word, like water hissing over hot coals. ‘You think she has fun with you, son of a murderer? What can you offer her—you, with your family of failures! You come from the loins of a dribbling madman, from a demon whose name I won’t speak, and you want to stand in the company of my Merilee?’

  ‘Aunt!’ cried Merilee. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘What demon?’ asked Leo. ‘Who?’

  ‘You take her here, to the forest, down near the lake—you don’t think about her safety, oh no, only your fun.’ She bent down with a grunt and picked up the recorder left lying on the ground. ‘I heard this silly noise from the top of the forest. Enjoyed your concert, did you? Nice to be entertained.’

  Merilee stared at her recorder lying in Beatrice’s plump hand. She thought of the sweat of her aunt’s palm on the smooth wood, the smell of her heavy skin on the mouthpiece. ‘Please give that back to me,’ she said, trying to control the disgust in her voice. ‘It’s mine.’

  Aunt Beatrice swung round to face her. ‘You can’t be trusted, Merilee. You’re a deceiving little liar, and liars don’t deserve to own anything. You’re going to be punished, my girl,’ and she grabbed Merilee’s arm and began to pull her towards the path.

  ‘She’s not your girl, Signora,’ Leo cried after them. ‘It’s not up to you to make the rules. You’re not her mother!’

  Beatrice stopped on the path. ‘How dare you speak to me like that, you vermin. I’ll see that you’re punished too—and santo dio, you’ll wish you’d never been born.’

  ‘You can’t touch me,’ Leo insisted. He was almost dancing with rage. ‘You’ve no right. Merilee’s parents are the ones to decide her fate and mine.’

  Beatrice shook her head. ‘Ah yes, poor Francesca.’ She sighed, her face settling into mock-sad lines. ‘My sister, who’s so wrung with grief she can hardly get up from her bed. You think she can make a decision about anything? Pah!’

  As Leo glared at Beatrice, he slid without thinking into seeing her. It was as easy as diving into a pond. And there at the bottom, at the heart of her, sat a little girl. She was curled with her knees drawn up to her chest, her head lowered against them. As Leo looked further, he saw she was all closed up like a clam, except for her hands. Her arms drooped beside her, and her palms lay open, empty, like bowls waiting to be filled.

  Leo felt a stirring of pity. She was the loneliest thing he had ever seen. But then Beatrice moved, giving Merilee a yank, and suddenly a shadow dropped over the little girl. She looked up and he glimpsed her face. A sickness rose at the back of his throat. The girl stared at him with snake eyes, yellow, flickering. Her green scales glittered and her forked tongue darted in and out of her mouth like a warning. She had a snake’s head.

  Leo closed his eyes.

  ‘You’re coming with me, my girl,’ Beatrice said as Merilee struggled to pick up her sheet of music and push it into her bag. ‘We’re going away for a while.’

  ‘Where?’ cried Leo and Merilee together.

  Merilee tried to hang onto Leo’s glance, but Beatrice was pulling her up the path, through the thick-growing trees. He stumbled after them, their voices drifting up the hill away from him. He caught snatches of words, but his own terror was jumbling everything he heard.

  ‘For how long?’ Merilee asked. ‘How long will I be away?’

  Leo heard no reply.

  The last he saw of Merilee was her cloth bag, flapping open and empty against her shoulder as she ran.

  Chapter Six

  Leo crouched on the forest floor. He kep
t thinking about the bag. He couldn’t think of anything else. As soon as Aunt Beatrice came into his mind, or Merilee’s tear-wet face, he thought of the bag. The soft canvas, the black clasp undone, the way it had hung open, empty.

  He began to run through the trees, back down to the path where they’d met. He had to find Merilee’s song. It seemed so important suddenly that he could hardly see the bushes, dull and matted with dusk.

  Leo arrived home just as his father was lighting the lamps. The room looked cosy and unusually tidy—papers stacked in orderly rows on the shelf, the stone floor swept, the table laid with a fine embroidered cloth. And there at the head of the table sat Signor Aldo Butteri.

  He raised his glass of wine to Leo as he came in. ‘Buona sera, Leo,’ he greeted him, ‘come and sit beside me!’

  Leo glanced over at the fire where his father was ladling pasta into three white bowls.

  ‘Go, go,’ cried Marco happily, ‘go and sit. Look what our friend has brought. Accidenti!’ Marco sucked his finger where he’d splashed a drop of boiling pasta.

  ‘Porcini pasta, wine, guests,’ said Leo slowly, ‘this must be some kind of celebration.’

  ‘You could say that!’ cried Marco as he brought over the bowls. He filled their glasses. ‘Tonight Signor Butteri has brought us a gift that holds the most important discovery in the world.’

  Signor Butteri gave a little cough, waving his hand a little as if to say ‘oh, it’s nothing,’ but he was glowing with pleasure and pride, his face lit up like a ripe red pepperoni.

  ‘Look!’ Marco pointed to a book that lay open on the table.

  ‘Fabric of the Human Body,’ read Leo, ‘by Andreas Vesalius, 1543.’

  ‘Yes!’ cried Marco. ‘Can you believe it? At last a book of human anatomy is published, and here we have it lying casually open on our own dining table! Hah! Look, Leo, drink it in, turn the pages, read, study, be amazed, but make sure your hands are clean first.’

  Leo looked. In the centre of the title page there was an illustration of Vesalius dissecting a corpse. Leo grimaced. His father’s favourite subject.

  He pulled a stool up to the table. There was nothing to do but sit and listen. Maybe he would think of something—something heroic and brilliant—while the talk washed over him.

  ‘I was lucky enough to be present at a lecture Vesalius gave in Padua, last year,’ Marco said. ‘He was dissecting a forty-year-old male—dropped dead after choking on a turkey bone—and a hundred students were watching the operation. They couldn’t believe their luck.’

  Aldo Butteri took a sip of wine. ‘I hope this book doesn’t encourage your strange ideas, Marco. I only got it for you because you insist on this kind of thing, but I don’t hold with the temple of the body being invaded by heathens, as you well know.’ He clicked his tongue in disgust. ‘It’s quite against the law to use a human subject. Before this bold fellow Vesalius came along, dogs or pigs were good enough.’

  Marco gave a hoot of laughter. ‘Yes, and it was while watching pigs being slaughtered that the great Leonardo da Vinci discovered the heart is a mere muscle—’

  ‘Preposterous nonsense!’ cried Aldo, choking on his wine. ‘The heart is too noble—it’s the centre of the life force, you savage! The heart heats the blood, filling it with the glorious vital spirit!’

  ‘You should attend one of Vesalius’s lectures yourself, Aldo,’ Marco replied, grinning. ‘I’m sure he’d convert you.’ He turned to Leo. ‘Lecturers before him always got a barber to do the cutting, only pointing to organs with their nice clean wands. But with Vesalius you get the real thing!’ Marco was rubbing his hands together, eyeing his friend cheekily. ‘He walks into the lecture room holding up a real kidney in his hand for everyone to see, or a liver, or a piece of stomach—’

  ‘Ah, but the vital spirit isn’t something you can see,’ Aldo pointed out solemnly. ‘Not like the stomach,’ and he patted the mound under his girdle.

  ‘Well my stomach is about to jump up through my mouth,’ Leo said, pretending to stick his fingers down his throat. ‘Can we talk about something else during dinner?’

  Marco gave him a playful push. ‘Oh Leo, the stomach is the most extraordinary organ. And the intestines—see the large one?—it’s so long that if you unravelled it, maybe you could wind it twice around the courtyard outside!’

  Leo put his fork down.

  While the two men ate and argued, Leo turned the pages. It was a startling book. Every first letter of the page was illustrated to show some stomach-churning activity of the body. He was looking at L, where a group of children were pooing happily over the lower bar of the letter, when Marco leaned over and cried, ‘Aha! That’s where all this good pasta is going to end up, isn’t it!’

  Leo rolled his eyes and the two men roared with laughter. Signor Butteri poured another glass of wine and Leo knew that soon Marco would be reminding him that he’d had enough for a man in his condition and Butteri would protest and they’d go on discussing the body and its problems until midnight.

  Leo looked at his father’s face, flushed with wine and excitement. He loved Marco’s enthusiasm, but so often it meant he neither heard nor saw anything else. He was like a river rushing through its course, not stopping for anything, taking branches or trees or people with him as he tumbled towards his destination.

  Marco would be no help.

  Leo fingered the sheet of music he still had in his pocket. He thought of Merilee as she was dragged along through the forest. ‘Your family of failures,’ Beatrice had said to him. Leo winced.

  ‘Indigestion?’ asked Signor Butteri. ‘You should take an infusion of fennel. I got some yesterday from the apothecary—Signor Eco. Very soothing to the stomach, it was.’

  Leo sat up straighter. ‘Was Signora Beatrice there? I mean, when you went to see the apothecary?’

  Signor Butteri chuckled. ‘No, but she might as well have been. Old Eco was in a rage about her. “Always bossing me around,” he told me, “as if I worked for her!” She sounds like a fury, that one. Works hard, mind you, Eco said, and she has the knowledge of a Wise Woman, but sometimes he wonders if it’s worth all the agony of having her around. Always fussing, shouting orders at him in front of customers, telling him off.’ Signor Butteri shuddered. ‘Couldn’t stand it myself.’

  Marco got up suddenly and took the empty plates. His face was no longer vivid and happy. But two round spots of colour still highlighted his thin cheeks.

  ‘Still, when I saw him tonight,’ Butteri went on, ‘he was full of smiles. He’d just seen Beatrice—’

  ‘When?’ cut in Leo.

  ‘Oh, a couple of hours ago, just before I came here. Anyway, he said she’d dropped in, in a great rush and dither as usual, to tell him she was going away. Imagine! Eco could hardly stop smiling!’

  ‘Did she say where she was going?’

  ‘Yes, now let’s see if I can remember. It’s in Tuscany—’

  ‘Well, here is some fresh prosciutto and cheese,’ Marco said loudly, clattering down the plates in front of them. ‘The gorgonzola is particularly good.’

  ‘Fiesole—that’s where it was. You know, the little town, not far from Florence.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Marco savoured his cheese, ‘it’s so strong that it stings the back of your throat. Try some, Aldo!’

  ‘Did she say why she was going there? Or for how long?’

  ‘Mm, the gorgonzola’s good,’ Signor Butteri said, loosening the cord around his waist, ‘but the parmigiano I had yesterday was better. Now let me see, Eco said she was going to some meeting of Wise Women, and he was glad to be rid of her for a while. He’d make up the aromatic posies himself now and—’

  ‘Did she say how long she’d be away?’

  ‘Well, not really, but he did say these meetings only happened every few years. They exchange recipes and potions and there’s some kind of initiation ceremony for new candidates.’

  ‘New candidates?’

  ‘Yes, girls who want to become t
rained in the art of herbal cures. Some of them stay on forever—they’re the Wise Women of Fiesole, haven’t you heard of them? Often they’re the first to find a herbal medicine for some sickness or other, cures apothecaries take for granted now.’ Signor Butteri helped himself to some more cheese. ‘Take lavender, for instance,’ he went on, leaning back in his chair. ‘Excellent for back ache—using the essential oil, of course—and it eases my gout pain too, I can tell you. Of course some people, ignorant villagers, you know, think the Wise Women do the devil’s work, mixing witch’s potions and the like. Scared of them, they are. But that’s all a lot of rubbish. You know how stories spread around here . . .’

  Marco winked at Leo and slapped a huge piece of cheese onto his son’s plate. ‘Eat up, boy!’ he cried, but Leo noticed that he’d only had one small bite of his own.

  Leo sat quietly, letting the men’s talk float around him. He was trying to remember. The Women of Fiesole—he had a picture in his mind of a huge stone wall, of women behind it, quiet, studious, like nuns in a nunnery. Merilee’s mother had once told him about it.

  Anxiety filled Leo’s body. The wall towered in his mind. How could he ever get her out of there? He couldn’t imagine his Merilee cooped up like that, like a bird in a cage. What kind of a life was that? He felt alarm pinging through his body. Wildly, he wondered if Anxiety was there in that book, under A. Which organ would it affect? The heart? His was racing so hard he felt dizzy.

  He wondered if Merilee was still at home. Was she packing? Could he catch her before she went? His stomach dropped. He saw Beatrice’s face as she stood over him, mottled and angry like a hunk of salami. He saw the sly snake of a girl inside her. And he saw himself, puny as a mouse, squeaking at her feet.

  He kicked the table leg. All those stupid fantasies he’d had—how one day he’d save Merilee from robbers, savage wolves, cut-throat pirates—and look, he couldn’t even face up to her aunt.