A Secret History of Witches

by Louisa Morgan

  Nanette slipped into her room and collapsed onto the edge of her bed. She stared blindly at the small round mirror above her bureau, not seeing her own tangled hair or pale cheeks, but a pair of dimples and two blue, blue eyes. Her body was sore in the hidden places. Her thighs burned, and her lips felt bruised, but the ache in her heart overwhelmed those small hurts.

  When she went down for the milking, Michael and his big wagon and skinny mare were gone. He had driven down the lane to the cliff road, setting off for his next destination, no doubt his next encounter with a lonely farm girl.

  The magic of the night was over. Come and gone in the space of a breath.

  She wondered if there was any left.

  4

  At the breakfast table Louisette spoke to Claude in a strong voice. “The witch hunter is gone, and tonight is the eve of Beltane. We want to go to the temple.”

  He didn’t bother looking at her. “Non.”

  Anne-Marie said, “No one will know.”

  “That redheaded devil is not the only priest in Cornwall, nor is he likely the only witch hunter. Why risk us all?”

  Paul said, “You heard Claude, Anne-Marie. Leave the craft in the past, where it belongs.”

  Louisette set her cup down with a bang. “We will never abandon the craft. It’s what brought us here.”

  Florence said, “It’s what sustains us.”

  Claude’s “Pfffff-fft!” sent spittle over the pottage in his bowl. “Sustains you!” he growled. “Your line is dead. Why don’t you see that?”

  “What do you mean?” Louisette demanded.

  Her husband turned on her, his face suffused with resentment. “Not a one of the six of you could produce a daughter, despite your ceremonies and potions. Ursule was able to do anything she set her hand to, but not a one of her granddaughters can work the plainest spell!”

  Nanette had been listening with her head down, her hands linked tight in her lap. At Claude’s pronouncement she lifted her head. In a level voice she said, “Ce n’est pas vrai.”

  “How is it not true?” Paul snapped. “Soaps and simples!”

  Louisette threw her youngest sister a warning glance, but Nanette ignored it. “I,” she announced in a strong voice, “worked a spell of diversion.”

  Claude’s voice rose in confusion and anger. “You lie!”

  Nanette lifted her chin. “Why do you think the priest left Marazion, Claude? After all this time, you think the witch hunter just gave up?”

  “Oui!”

  “Non!” Nanette laid her two palms flat on the table and pushed herself up. She leaned a little forward, holding her brother-in-law’s black-eyed gaze with her own. “You know nothing of the craft, or of the power of Ursule’s blood. Of my blood.” Her temper rose, and her words spilled out of her like boiling water from a kettle. “You see a girl good only for milking goats and speaking English and driving the jingle to market. Pffft!” She pushed away from the table and turned her head to hide the furious tears burning her eyes. “You men! You all go on about Ursule this and Ursule that and you don’t see what’s right in front of you!”

  Nanette stamped out of the kitchen and through the porch. Without pausing for a coat or even a scarf, she ran through the garden and out the gate, then across the lane to jump the ditch beyond. She ran for ten minutes or so, the winds tugging at her hair and clumps of heather tangling her skirt. She didn’t know she was weeping until, ribs aching and lungs afire, she collapsed on a hillock and buried her face in her hands.

  She had always hated tears. Of the Orchiére sisters only Fleurette wept easily, the soft tears sliding down her cheeks like raindrops. When any of the others cried, it was ugly to see, distorted lips, swollen eyes, sobs that tore at the throat. Of course the men never shed tears. Nanette thought of them as too dried up to cry. She doubted they had tears to spare.

  She would have liked to cry over Michael, to sit by her window and look out over the sea, sorrowing for her lost love. She felt Isabelle’s eyes on her sometimes, the knowing look that invited confidences, but Nanette refused to indulge herself, or to talk about him. She was a witch. She had power Michael couldn’t guess at. She would not give in to girlish weakness.

  But now Claude’s clumsy accusation had tipped her over the edge, like one of the boulders losing its balance to roll over the cliff and crash to the rocks beneath. She wept loudly, wetly. Her face felt raw, and she supposed her cheeks would be chapped. Her whole body felt as tender and vulnerable as a newborn kid’s. She wrapped her arms around herself against the whirling wind, tucking her hands into her armpits. Her breasts ached under the pressure.

  Slowly she opened her arms and stared down at herself. Her tears dried as she gazed in alarm at the expanded shape of her bosom beneath her bodice. It seemed her breasts had swollen to twice their size. That couldn’t be. Surely she had finished growing these three years past?

  She got to her feet, not with her usual lithe ease, but gingerly. Every bone and muscle felt fragile, as if she had been ill with a fever. She turned away from the distant sea view and gazed up at the moor, greening now with spring. Beltane, known to Marazion as May Day. Michael had come at Ostara. If she’d had a calendar, she could have counted exactly how many weeks that was, but she knew, all at once, that there was no point in doing it. There was nothing to be gained by trying to remember her last monthlies.

  She was breeding.

  The clan would be furious.

  “How?” Claude demanded.

  A week had passed since Nanette recognized her condition. Isabelle had noticed the changes in her, and they had decided together it was best to tell them all at once.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake!” Louisette snapped. “How do you think? You do know how it’s done, Claude!”

  “But she knows no one! Goes nowhere!”

  Anne-Marie, usually the peacemaker, had been leaning on the cold stove. Now she straightened and glared at her brother-in-law. “You like it that way, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean by that?” he spit. They were gathered in the kitchen, but there was neither food nor drink on the table. They stood or sat about the room, postponing the workday as they took in Nanette’s shocking news.

  The window was open to the spring air, redolent already with the sweet smells of freshly turned earth and heather yearning to bloom. By contrast, especially to Nanette, the kitchen reeked of rendered fat and oil smoke, and it turned her stomach. Isabelle had promised her it wouldn’t last. “Three months for that,” she said. “One month from now, you’ll feel better.”

  Isabelle stepped forward now. “She means,” she said to Claude, and included the other men in her gaze, “that you’re all content for Nanette to be at your service, year in, year out. For her to have no friends, no time for herself—no fun.”

  “Fun?” Paul said. He was sitting across the table from Claude, their dark, grim faces nearly mirror images of one another. “When did any of us have fun?”

  “She’s eighteen years old,” Anne-Marie said.

  “You had Louis when you were eighteen,” Paul said.

  “That was before we came here. We were able to meet people, make friends—”

  “Obviously Nanette had one friend,” Claude said sourly.

  Nanette, leaning against the wall beside the window, pressed her hands over her queasy stomach as the talk swirled around her. It was disorienting, hearing the kitchen, usually so silent, resound with voices growing louder every moment. She stopped listening and closed her eyes against the angry faces. She let her mind drift out to the moor, where the wild ponies would be wandering down from the high country to nibble the new grass, and the foxes would be peeking out from beneath the brambles. She didn’t notice when the family stopped arguing.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, then around her waist, and opened her eyes. It was Florence, guiding her to the table. The men had gone off about their chores, and only the sisters remained. Fleurette emerged from the pantry with one of her small dark bott
les. She uncorked it and poured a measure of its contents into a clay tumbler.

  “Drink,” Florence said quietly. “A simple to ease your stomach.”

  Obediently Nanette downed the sour liquid, wrinkling her nose at its taste, then sighing with relief as her nausea receded.

  “Better?” Isabelle came to sit beside her, taking her hand. Nanette nodded.

  Florence busied herself putting wood in the stove, filling a kettle, setting out cups. Fleurette went down the hall, and when she returned, she carried the homespun sack they kept the grimoire in. She set it in the center of the table and pulled out the ancient book, taking care with its cracked leather cover. She opened it and turned the leaves of parchment. Some were clearly marked in sharp script. On others the ink had begun to fade, the handwriting to grow spidery and faint. She pulled the oil lamp nearer and bent to squint at the page.

  “What are you going to do?” Nanette asked.

  “That depends on you.” Fleurette’s disused voice creaked. “Your babe. Your choice.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Isabelle patted her hand and released it. The copper kettle began to boil, and Florence prepared the tea and covered the pot with a cozy while Fleurette brought each of them a cup.

  The twins settled across from Nanette and Isabelle, and the four sisters sat in a gentle silence. Tears glistened in Fleurette’s eyes. It was Florence who put their thought into words.

  “Nanette, you don’t have to bear the child.”

  “I—What?” Nanette’s head jerked up. At the same moment she felt the cat’s weight on her toes, his warmth winding around her ankles. He had learned to avoid the men, and demonstrated an uncanny knack for knowing when they left the farmhouse. The sisters ignored him, for the most part, except for Isabelle. She made sure there was always something for him to eat in the pantry, where Claude and the others wouldn’t see.

  Florence said, “There is a potion. You would miscarry.”

  “It would hurt,” Fleurette whispered.

  “Childbirth hurts,” Isabelle said.

  Nanette stared at each of them in turn. She saw no judgment in their faces, nor anger. They gazed back at her, waiting.

  Deep in her belly Nanette felt the stirrings of fresh magic, the energy of new life flickering through her bloodstream, speaking to the future. “I want to keep her,” she whispered.

  “You won’t be able to hide it from people,” Florence said.

  “Who will care?”

  “Claude. Paul. Jean.”

  “Why? They never see anyone.”

  “Because,” Isabelle said, “they want us to quit the craft. A baby means—maybe—the Orchiére line continues.”

  “I thought Claude might send me away from Orchard Farm.”

  “He would if he could,” Florence said. “We would never allow it. You’re an Orchiére. He is not.”

  “Orchard Farm belongs to us,” Isabelle said. “Ursule made it so.”

  “Is that why he is always angry?”

  “That’s part of it,” Florence said.

  “They hate it that their own names are forgotten,” Isabelle said.

  “After all this time?”

  She lifted one shoulder. “While Ursule was alive, there was no question of taking their names and giving up our own. Our father knew that, and never complained once. But since Grand-mère is gone—and the power with her—”

  “But I have the power.”

  “Do you have enough?” Florence asked.

  Nanette looked past her sisters’ faces to the freshening sky, and gave a tired sigh. “I didn’t have enough to keep Michael, though I would have liked to. But I have enough to keep his babe, and I will.”

  “Perhaps the babe will have the power,” Isabelle said.

  No one answered, because none of them knew.

  As Nanette’s condition grew obvious, the citizens of Marazion began to look askance at her when she went to the market. The housewives whispered as she passed. The men scowled and stepped aside, as if her swelling belly might contaminate them. Only Meegan, her own belly increasing once again, gave her friendly greetings as always, and chose the Orchard Farm cheeses over any others.

  “You could claim to be wed,” she told Nanette one day, as the two of them rested side by side, perspiring in the unseasonal October heat. “Or widowed.”

  “Why should I? I don’t care what they think,” Nanette said. “As long as they buy.”

  Meegan sighed at that. “Your things are the best, or they wouldn’t. For sure and certain, you’re not going to sell that one anything.” She nodded toward a fat farmwife standing beside a wagon piled high with unsold vegetables. The red-faced woman had tucked her hands under her apron and was glaring at the two of them.

  Nanette glanced at her and then away. “That one? No, not even if she was desperate. She’s making the sign against the evil eye.”

  “The cow,” Meegan said. “She doesn’t even know you.”

  Nanette smiled, grateful for her loyalty. “She can’t hurt me, Meegan.”

  “I hope you’re right about that.”

  Nanette suffered no doubts. She brimmed with confidence these days, just as her body brimmed with the miracle of new life. Her babe was growing apace, her wares selling better than ever. It was no wonder other farmers resented her.

  Of course, Meegan wouldn’t know of the spells she had cast over her wares, the charms Anne-Marie had created and hidden in the corners of the jingle, nor the protective amulet Fleurette had made for Nanette to wear around her neck. When the amulet moved against her breast, she felt an answering stir in her womb. Magic surrounded her. She felt invulnerable.

  Even at home, though Claude had stopped speaking to her altogether, and though the men who came to look at the famous Orchard Farm ponies looked over her head to pretend they didn’t see, she wore her pregnancy proudly.

  “It’s not,” she said to Isabelle one morning, “as if I’m the first unmarried Cornish girl to conceive a child.” She squirmed on the milking stool, trying to ease the weight of her stomach onto her thighs.

  “They don’t see you as Cornish, Nanette.”

  “I’ve lived here since I was four!” She grunted a little as she reached for the nanny’s teats. “I speak their languages, I talk to them, I do business with them …”

  “It’s because of us. We’re foreign to them, and you’re one of us.”

  “That’s hardly my fault,” Nanette said pettishly, and then clicked her tongue. “Sorry, Isabelle. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “I know, ma chère.”

  “I’m just out of sorts. It’s hard to catch my breath.”

  “Let me finish the milking. You go and rest in the kitchen.”

  Samhain was well past, and Yule coming up swiftly. There was a long list of things to be done before winter closed in. Nanette hated to give in to her weakness, but the thought of putting up her swollen feet and resting beside the warm stove was irresistible. “You don’t mind, Isabelle?”

  “Non, bien sûr. I remember how it is. By the time George was born I could barely walk.”

  “Merci.” Nanette handed her sister the milk bucket and walked out of the byre and up through the garden. She felt like a waddling duck, and she was sure her face was as swollen as her breasts. She yearned for one of Fleurette’s simples, especially the one she made with lemon balm to rub on her feet and her distended belly.

  She was halfway to the house when she heard the clatter of wagon wheels on the cliff road. It wasn’t a particularly remarkable occurrence, but the moment the sound reached her ears, a slow ache began in her belly. It spread swiftly, between her hip bones, up into her diaphragm, sharpening to a near pain. She touched Fleurette’s amulet beneath her bodice, and the ache intensified. A warning, then. Something was wrong.

  The appearance of the cat, awaiting her at the door to the porch, convinced her. He was arched and spitting, his patchy gray fur standing up, his tail whipping back and
forth so fast she could barely see it. The hoofbeats slowed as they reached the lane, and drew close.

  She tried to hurry her steps, to reach the farmhouse before whatever it was reached her.

  “Mademoiselle!”

  Too late. Feeling ponderous and awkward, she turned.

  He had changed in the year and more he had been gone from Cornwall. His gingery hair had begun to fade, and his thin cheeks had grown thinner, making his eyes look pinched together above his drooping nose. He was driving a pony cart. He reined in the pony and jumped down from the seat in one movement.

  Evil glittered in the witch hunter’s eyes as if a devil hid behind them, a devil born of hate, and fear, and fanaticism. Instinctively Nanette covered her swollen belly with her hands.

  As he drew close to the garden gate and leaned over it, her nostrils twitched at the miasma of rotten eggs that clung to his dirty black cassock. When he spoke his breath was even more foul, surely the smell of true brimstone. He addressed her in French. “I see you are paying for your sin, mademoiselle.”

  Nanette drew herself up, straightening her spine as much as her belly allowed. The ache began to ease, and she made herself look directly into his face. She realized for the first time that one of his eyes wandered wildly, first looking into her face, then rolling away. “Did you drive your poor pony all this way in the cold just to tell me that, sir?”

  “Call me Father.”

  “You are not my father, and I am not one of your flock. You have no power over me.”

  His sneer revealed gaps in his rotten teeth, and his rolling eye found her face once again. “You are mistaken,” he said.

  “You don’t have a church here,” she said. She felt better for facing him, for speaking her mind. Her womb quivered, reminding her of the power she held. “You have no authority.”

  “I have God’s authority,” he said. “And Father Maddock and his congregants are God-fearing Christians, upright soldiers of the Lord. They know what is right.”