by Betina Krahn
A Certain Magic
Betina Krahn
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
About the Author
Chapter One
Devonshire, England
October 1887
Darkness crept into the room at the top of the ancient stone tower, dragging with it the chill of night. In the deepening gloom, three old women sat huddled before a red-glowing hearth. Their aged countenances did not catch the firelight; it fled past their circle to dance around the shadows they cast on the cluttered walls, shelves, and workbenches behind them.
"For seven years she has been ours," one said in a voice like leather brushing leather.
"Bright as sunshine, fresh as dew," came a second voice.
"Sweet as buttercups, fragrant as rue," supplied the third.
An age-thinned hand reached for the fire iron and prodded the log. The fire flared golden and wheezed in the lengthening silence.
"Season upon season, she unfolded before us," murmured the first.
"Warm as a meadow, soft as a sigh," said the second.
"True as an arrow, earnest as a cry," added the third.
The log popped loudly and spit a shower of red-gold sparks out onto the worn stone of the hearth. One after another, three long sighs issued forth.
"The promised tomorrows have all been spent," the first declared.
"Nineteen now and a woman full grown."
"Time to find her a life of her own."
A life of her own. The three old women glanced dolefully at one another and shifted in their heavy, claw-footed chairs. A pall of silence settled over them as each sank into her private store of memories.
Moments later, there was a scraping noise from the shadowy region near the door. The spell of the moment was broken as a tall, dark-skinned manservant clad in Housed silk breeches, an English tailcoat, and a turban emerged from the darkness carrying a tea tray.
"Here, Shaddar," ordered tall, rail-thin Miss Caroline Asher in her wizened voice, waving him into their circle before the hearth. "Place it here, so that we don't have to move away from the fire."
The manservant shifted a small table into their midst and deposited the tray before them. As he bowed and withdrew, short, rotund Miss Phoebe Asher took immediate charge of the pouring and of their council.
"We shall have to find her a husband, of course."
"A husband?" Caroline looked down her hooked nose.
"Well, I believe you have to have one if you're to be married," Phoebe asserted, looking to the third member of the trio for verification. Miss Flora Asher nodded solemnly.
"Well, who says she has to be married?" Caroline demanded. "We've never married, and we've gotten on quite well."
"We are a different story," Phoebe insisted, "and you very well know it. Miranda is a lovely young woman… with hopes and dreams of her own. And needs."
"Needs?" Caroline's wiry eyebrows shot up.
"Tell her, Flora," Phoebe insisted.
Flora nodded rueful agreement as she stirred her tea. "Phoebe is right, Caroline," she said in a thin, reedy voice. "Of late I've seen Miranda walking the old tower ramparts in the evening, staring off into the distance… with such a look of longing. And more than once, as I've worked late in my laboratory, she has risen from her bed, unable to sleep, and come to sit with me while I work."
"See there," Phoebe crowed, plunking the teapot down on the tray with a flourish. "Longing looks… sleepless nights." She leaned forward with a determined squint. "Needs, Caroline."
"I think it would be lovely for Miranda to have a daughter of her own someday," Flora mused wistfully. "Remember how we always wanted one? And I understand marriage is absolutely essential for having children, in society."
"Besides," Phoebe added in somber tones, "we won't be around forever. She'll need someone else."
The force of Phoebe's and Flora's doleful looks and the weight of their arguments overwhelmed Caroline's resistance. At length, she sighed and nodded.
"We're agreed, then," Phoebe declared in a satisfied tone. "Miranda is to have a husband."
As they sipped their tea, Caroline brightened and announced firmly, "Well, if she must have a man, I know exactly the one she should have."
"You do?" Phoebe paused, mid-sip. "Who?"
"That Mister Bruno, in the village. He's industrious, well-fixed financially, and"—she fairly glowed as she announced his most important qualification—"he has the most astonishing way with metals."
"Metals?" Phoebe harrumphed. "He ought to, he's a blacksmith."
Flora shuddered. "Imagine our little Miranda with that great, grimy-fingered brute…"
"He's not a brute. I've spoken with him… he's perfectly capable of speech," Caroline declared, pushing to the edge of her chair, her mouth a thin line of resolve. "And he has a positively splendid animal magnetism about him… the strongest I've ever witnessed."
"You and your animal magnetism." Phoebe's nose curled with distaste. "I knew it was a mistake, letting you run off with those Mesmer fanatics back in the teens. Them with their coils and electrical thingumabobs and trances— you've had a few tiles loose on the roof ever since, Caroline!"
"Mesmerism and the enhancement of the body's natural animal magnetism are the answer to all mankind's difficulties." Caroline lifted a gnarled finger into the air as her voice rose stridently. "Constitutional weaknesses, mental deficiencies, and the moral ills of humankind could be utterly eradicated by the proper magnetic and electrical applications—"
"Not again." Phoebe rolled her eyes, and Caroline twitched as if spurred.
"Well, there's a word or two to be said about your humiliating little stint with that Franz Joseph Gall and his lunatic cohorts in Paris!" Caroline retaliated furiously. "Running higgledy-piggledy up and down the continent… feeling every old lump and bump on every available head—"
"Phrenology is a recognized science, Caroline Asher, and you know it!" Phoebe rose to the challenge as she wriggled to the edge of her chair. "The contours of a person's head tell the whole of his character… his capacity for 'construction,' his 'ideality'… 'ambition,' 'suavity,' 'amativeness,' 'benevolence'—"
"Pure bunkum!" Caroline announced with a snort of derision.
"I'll have you know—"
"Sisters!" Flora interrupted Phoebe's hot rebuttal, reeling forward and depositing her cup on the tray. "This argument is decades old and not at all helpful in deciding what sort of husband to get for our little Mimi. I think we should consider what sort of man would complement her nature… what sort of man would make her happy."
Both Caroline and Phoebe colored and huddled back in their chairs. Happy? What sort of man would make their beloved Miranda happy? They hadn't thought of that. They exchanged looks of consternation as Flora hurried on.
"Our Mimi is a gentle and refined young girl. She should have a gentleman of some sort." Her habitually dreamy look was replaced by a serious, contemplative frown. "A gentleman who could appreciate her sweet fragrance… the natural purity of her virgin essence. Someone who knows heliotrope from verbena… someone who appreciates the perfect accord of the scents of sunflower, vanilla, and orange blossom." She brightened and gestured with a lilting hand. "A perfumer would be ideal… or a florist… or even a chemist.
Phoebe leveled a dubious look on her sister. "And where, pray, do you propose we get this gentleman perfumer-florist-chemist?"
Flora thought deeply about that for a moment. "Perhaps an advertisement in the Times?"
Phoebe wrested about on her chair with a hiss of disgust. "I very much doubt that an advertisement in the Time
s will yield up a gentleman whose cranial capacity and protuberances of the head—"
"Bumps," Caroline corrected darkly.
"Yes, bumps, to the vulgar and uninitiated," Phoebe declared, her plump cheeks flushing like fierce pomegranates. "Someone whose cranial bumps will be compatible with our Mimi's. Make no mistake about it… I shall give no consent to any marriage unless I have personally felt the fellow's head and determined his suitability."
A footfall across the door sill and a bloom of light against the aged stone walls startled them, and they twisted about in their chairs. Coming through the doorway, dispelling the darkness with a double candlestand and her own sunny presence, was their Miranda. Her cheeks were rosy from her trip up the long flight of stairs to the tower room, and her golden-hazel eyes fairly sparkled as she paused just inside the door.
"I thought I'd find you here. Whatever are you doing, sitting here in the dark?" she chided good-naturedly, turning to search one of the cluttered workbenches behind her.
"You've said we should conserve candlewax," Caroline answered for the threesome as they watched her locate a candlestand among the old pipes, crocks, and contraptions on the workbench, and light the stubby tapers.
She moved like flowing water, effortless, graceful, un-studied, their Miranda. Her hair was dark and lustrous, auburn kissed with a hint of gold and pulled up in a mass of unruly ringlets that cascaded from the crown of her head to past her shoulders. She was softly curved, marble-skinned, and delicately boned, but there was nothing fragile in her frame, her countenance, or her spirit. She set both candelabra on the mantel and turned to them. Wrapped head to toe in the rosy glow of hearth and taper, she was at that moment the very essence of warmth and life.
"Conserving candlewax does not mean sitting in the darkness." Miranda broke into a winsome smile. "Our household accounts will certainly stand for a few tapers here and there." She scrutinized the three old ladies and frowned at their pensive mood. After a light supper, they had retreated to the ancient tower room as they always did when they had weighty matters to discuss. "Ah, you've been in council. And what is it that furrows your brows and clouds your countenances so?"
Aunt Phoebe shifted a bit straighter in her chair, glancing at her sisters and smoothing her black bombazine over her rotund knees. "Mimi, dear," she said experimentally, as if testing an idea in her mind. "Suppose—now just suppose—that you were to marry. What sort of man would you wish to have for a husband?"
Aunt Flora and Aunt Caroline came bolt upright in their chairs, their attention riveted on the surprised heat flooding her face. "By all means," Aunt Caroline took it up. "Do you have any particular preferences?"
"Tall or short? Merchant… professional man… or gentleman?" Flora asked.
"Someone strongly magnetic, perhaps," Caroline proposed.
"Or with particular cranial protuberances," Phoebe suggested helpfully.
The notion astounded Mimi. Preferences for certain characteristics in a husband? That's what the old dears had been up here discussing in grave and heated council? A husband for her? She bit her bottom lip to squelch a laugh—and to contain her reaction to the unexpected twinge in her chest that followed it.
"I have known very few men besides my father. And I've formed no particular preferences…" She squared her lovely shoulders and donned a very authoritative expression. "But whether I have or have not is quite irrelevant, since I have no intention of marrying and leaving you."
"B-but, M-Mimi, dear—" Aunt Phoebe sputtered, casting a glance at the others. "It's time to think of your future."
Miranda gave them a blithely determined smile. "Whatever is there to think about? I'm reasonably certain I shall have some sort of future. And if I don't have a future, then thinking about it would be perfectly useless. Either way, the time and effort spent on such stuff is probably better used elsewhere." She finished with an irresistibly impish shrug, her own unique gesture of stubbornness. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do on the accounts before I retire. Good night, Aunt Phoebe… Aunt Flora… Aunt Caroline." She kissed each of the old aunts' weathered cheeks, picked up her candlestand, and was halfway to the door before she felt the crinkle of vellum in the pocket of her apron.
"Oh, I nearly forgot. A messenger brought a letter for you late this afternoon." She hurried back and held out the envelope to them. "It's all the way from London," she offered brightly, hoping to generate a spark of interest in their downcast faces. When none of them showed the least bit of curiosity about it, she sighed quietly and placed it on the edge of the tea tray.
On the way out, she paused at the door and glanced back at them, finding them sagged in their chairs. She knew she had disappointed them just now, and the thought settled a hard lump in her stomach. She hated disappointing the old dears in anything. She turned reluctantly and started down the long, steep set of stone steps that were built into the walls of the ancient stone tower.
Her three great aunts, spinster sisters of her long-deceased grandmother, had taken her in when her father died several years ago. She had arrived at their rambling old mansion a somber and earnest child, her spirit weighted by the serious business of life and death. Aunt Caroline had read to her by the hour, Aunt Phoebe knitted her outrageous purple stockings, and Aunt Flora taught her to make daisy chains. Slowly, they peeled away the layers of hurt and the silent, respectable despair that imprisoned her girlish heart. And for that—for the way they released her from her sober, stifling shell—she would always be devoted to them.
But in the matter of her future, she knew she had to be firm with them. Imagine them trying to find her a husband… marry her off!
She slowed and paused before the great, iron-bound door at the bottom of the stairs. Her future. She had spent several sleepless nights of late, imagining that very thing—a future, a marriage—and had finally set such pointless thoughts aside. How could she even think of taking up a life outside the walls of Asher House when her old aunts needed her so?
She tugged hard on the heavy door and stepped through it into the upper hallway of the little-used west wing of the house. The sight of faded furnishings, laden with the dust of genteel neglect, was all she needed to bolster her determination. If she weren't diligent, the center hall and the east wing of the house would probably look the same as these forlorn chambers.
Her aunts were precious old dears, but their minds were rarely fixed on practical, or sometimes even earthly, considerations. Tall, imperial Aunt Caroline, a devotee of Anton Mesmer's theories of animal magnetism, was constantly in her workroom, tinkering with her magnets, electrical coils, and static generating devices. Plump, impulsive Aunt Phoebe was obsessed with creating the first instrument for objectively measuring the potential in a human head—her "cranial mapper." She spent her days rummaging about the house; cannibalizing old clocks, parlor stools, and piano strings for parts; and giving the occasional "phrenological reading" to moonstruck young girls from the nearby village. And sweet, soft-spoken Aunt Florabunda, whose sense of smell would put bloodhounds to shame, was usually closeted in her glass-domed conservatory or her "perfumery," where she pored over botanical journals for word of newly discovered "aromatics" and produced wonderfully exotic perfumes and pomanders.
None of them gave a serious bit of thought to the tasks of cleaning, laundering, cooking, dealing with tradesmen, or repairing leaks in the roof. Thus, in recent years, the role of ordering and maintaining the aging household had fallen more and more on Miranda and on their eminently capable manservant, Shaddar. And it never occurred to Miranda that it should be otherwise. The old aunts were her family; she owed them her very heart. And she was determined not to abandon them to their decaying house and eccentricities, even if it did cost her a "future."
"Oh!" A movement nearby startled her. Poised at the top of the center hall stairs, she looked up to find their bronzed Indian manservant looming before her.
"Shaddar. You gave me a start." She melted with relief and smiled into his
dark features. "I think my aunts are finished with their tea. Once it's cleared, I think that will be all for the night."
The manservant bowed and moved off as silently as he had come. Miranda smiled, watching his rolling, effortless stride. Whatever would she do without Shaddar?
With an unsettled sigh, she gazed out over the dimly lit center hall, toward the drawing room and the cramped study which lay beyond. The ledgers and stacks of "payment due" notices that awaited her there suddenly seemed too much to face, just now. She tucked her arms around her waist and chewed the corner of her lip as she considered the alternatives. Perhaps a warm shawl and a brisk walk in Aunt Flora's garden instead, she decided. A bit of fresh air might help her sleep better tonight.
Far above, in the ancient tower room, the old ladies stirred in their chairs and stared balefully at one another.
"Who would have guessed she'd be so dead-set against having a man?" Phoebe said, bewildered. "I know it's been a while, but I don't recall men being that bad."
"They're not bad," Flora said emphatically. "In fact, they can be quite delightful. Unfortunately, our little Mimi doesn't know that."
"Well, what shall we do about it?" Caroline said in her no-nonsense tone. Then she straightened, her face alight with inspiration. "Suppose we invite that marvelously magnetic Mr. Bruno to come for dinner…"
"He smells like horse sweat, Caroline." Flora sniffed. "I'll not take dinner in the same room with a man who reeks of animal effluvia. I'd positively suffocate!"
"Here, here," Phoebe put in.
"Well, we could always ask him to bathe," Caroline insisted stubbornly.
"Caroline—" Flora's face filled with uncharacteristic choler.
"Sisters, please!" Phoebe insisted. "We're all at sixes and sevens here. Perhaps we'd better wait until we're better rested and clearer-headed."
As Caroline muttered mutinously and settled back in her chair, her gaze fell on the envelope Miranda had left for them. She snatched it up and squinted at it, trying to make out the engraved lettering of the return address.