“Ursule,” Nanette murmured. She cast a glance over her shoulder to be certain the aunts were occupied elsewhere. “Listen to me.”
“Oui, Maman?”
“English, please.”
“Fine, but they’ll know we’re keeping secrets if they hear us.”
“Just the same.”
“What is it, then?”
“I have to warn you, Ursule. I know you don’t believe me, but we’re your elders, and we know the truth. There’s danger for us.”
“That’s what you wanted to tell me?”
“Isabelle had a dream that you betrayed us.”
“I would never betray you. I would never betray any of you! Surely you know that.”
“She didn’t want me to tell you.”
“Well, now you have, and now I’ve promised.”
Nanette crossed to the peg rack, where the thick coats hung like shapeless bodies on a gibbet. She stopped there, turning to her daughter with a worried look. “The stories we told you are true, Ursule. Women like us are persecuted because we’re different.”
“You don’t have to be different. Tell your sisters to learn to speak English. To go into the village and talk to people, the way I do. Instead they huddle out here like sheep on the moor.”
“They’re afraid.”
“Why should they be afraid?”
“Because if anyone suspects the truth about them—about us—” A shadow crossed Nanette’s face and she shivered. “That priest, that Father Maddock—”
“He’s just a superstitious old man.” Ursule shrugged into a coat. “I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, Maman,” she said, as she reached for her boots, “but all I see is an old crystal, and all I hear is a lot of old stories. You observe the Sabbats, and I do it with you, because I suppose one ritual is as good as another, but nothing ever changes. That’s the truth.”
Nanette’s eyes glistened suddenly, and Ursule tapped an impatient toe. “Maman, I promised! What else can I do? Whatever all that is, up on the tor, it’s your secret, and I will keep it. Don’t worry.”
Nanette averted her gaze and pulled on her own coat.
Ursule plunged one foot into its boot. She had to tug at the top to pull the boot on, and she scowled at it, wondering if she could still be growing. She was already taller than her mother. She stamped her other foot into the second boot. “I’ll be taller than Louisette if I keep this up.”
“No doubt.” Nanette sounded like her usual self, which was a relief to her daughter. “Your father was one of the tallest men I ever saw.”
Ursule was pulling her knit cap down over her thick hair. She cast her mother a challenging glance. “When are you going to tell me about him?”
Nanette shrugged, avoiding her eyes. “There’s nothing to tell. He came, he gave me you, and he left.”
“Why did he leave?”
Her mother didn’t look up from putting on her own boots. “He didn’t belong here.”
“Or you drove him away.”
Again the Gallic shrug. “I summoned him. It was never my intention to keep him.”
Ursule, with her hand already on the latch of the door, stared over her shoulder at her mother. “What do you mean?” she hissed. “You summoned him?”
Nanette started toward the door. Ursule held it open for her and watched her pass through. Nanette’s face revealed nothing. With the milk bucket swinging from her hand, Ursule followed her down the path to the byre.
She waited until they were inside the byre, where the air smelled of fresh straw and hay and the clean, warm smell of the she-goats. They pressed around her, nosing at her pockets for the bits of carrot and twigs of parsley she carried for them. She put the treats into the trough, and, as the goats put their heads through, closed the stanchions. “Tell me what you meant, Maman,” she said, as she pulled her stool close to the first doe. She sponged off the udder with a damp towel, then began to milk. The she-goat gave a contented groan and moved her hind leg a little to allow Ursule better access. Ursule’s fingers automatically stripped the doe’s teats, and the milk sang a sweet tune as it splashed into her bucket.
Nanette reached for a broom and began to sweep the floor. The dirt was packed so hard by generations of feet that it was nearly as solid as stone. “There’s no point in telling you, Ursule,” she said, as she swept the broomstraw back and forth. “You won’t believe me anyway.”
“You’re going to tell me you cast a spell?”
Nanette moved the broom faster. “Isabelle dreamed he would come, and I used my power to make her dream come true.”
“How?”
“I asked the Goddess, and she heard me.”
“I don’t see that the Goddess has any more to do with us than the God they call upon at All Saints’.” Ursule sat down and began to milk the second doe. “It’s pretense. Making things up because you want to believe them.”
“If you had seen Grand-mère work, you wouldn’t doubt.”
Ursule heard the distress in her mother’s voice, and she sighed. “Well, then. Perhaps there once was power. But it’s gone now.”
“We’re not as strong as Grand-mère, that’s true. You know our small talents, Anne-Marie and her potions, Fleurette’s simples, Isabelle’s dreams. I had real power, for a while, a power beyond recipes from the grimoire. It didn’t last, but before it faded, it brought your father to me.”
Ursule looked up from her stool. “Is that what you think?”
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
Ursule moved more slowly now, settling herself beside the third doe, frowning as she began to milk. She didn’t want to look at her mother any longer. She hated the idea of Nanette’s chanting a spell, waving her arms around, burning magical candles. It was embarrassing. Ursule could accept that the old aunts placed their faith in such nonsense, but Nanette was her mother. The closest person in the world to her. Part of herself.
Nanette spoke in a low and passionate voice. “I can’t be sorry, ma fille. I knew one day the old ones would die, as they have begun to do, and I was frightened. I was lonely.”
Ursule sighed. Her mother loved her, and she loved her mother in return. She had no wish to hurt her. She took the brimming milk pail out from beneath the doe’s udder, and set it carefully on the stone ledge that circled the byre. She opened the stanchions to release the goats, and they trotted cheerfully out into the twilight. “Leave the sweeping,” she said. “I’ll scrub down the stalls after I put the milk in the cellar.”
“I’ll take the milk.” Nanette reached for the bucket, lifting it carefully so it swung by her side. “The ice is getting low, though.”
“It always does by autumn. We’ll put all this into the cheese vat.”
“Your uncle was right, ma fille, may he rest in peace. You’re a born farmer.”
Nanette stooped to pass under the low lintel of the doorway. When she was outside, she bent to glance back. “I know you don’t believe me about the spell, but it’s true.”
Ursule had picked up the broom again, but she made herself meet her mother’s gaze. “No, Maman. I don’t believe it.”
“It happened, nonetheless.”
“You loved him?”
“There was no time for that. I saved my love for you, little one.”
“But, Maman—did he know there was a child? Was he kind to you, or did he—”
Nanette waved a hand. “None of that matters, Ursule. It doesn’t matter now.”
She straightened and set off into the dusk with the milk pail swinging beside her. Ursule gazed after her, broom forgotten in her hand. She couldn’t make the pieces fall into place. The life of Orchard Farm was one of crops and seasons and livestock. It didn’t lend itself to fantasies. Her aunts, though they were so advanced in years, labored for hours every day, and had few entertainments. Her mother, the storyteller, told tales of real men and women, never of anything mystical. She had taught Ursule to read with a single book of fables, but they both knew the
y weren’t true.
Ursule set the broom aside and went out to the washhouse pump to fill a bucket. As she worked the handle, she glanced up past the kitchen garden to the lighted windows of the farmhouse. Shadows moved this way and that behind the curtains as her aunts prepared the meal, soup and bread and their own cheese. They seemed no different from the other farmwives of the county, except that they so rarely left Orchard Farm.
As she dipped her scrub brush into the cold water, Ursule tried to imagine her mother at eighteen. Pretty, she supposed. She was still pretty, though she was thirty-four now. And the man? Ursule tried to imagine what he must have been like—dark, no doubt, because she herself was as dark as Nanette. Tall, though, so probably not a Cornishman. What kind of man bedded a lonely girl and then abandoned her?
When the billy goat covered the nannies, he butted them away the moment it was done. Had it been like that with her father? Did Nanette care?
Ursule groaned in frustration. She understood no more now than she had before.
She didn’t go in to supper until the milking stalls were scrubbed spotless and the goats settled on beds of fresh straw for the night. The ponies, six of them at the moment, blinked sleepily in their paddock, chins resting on one another’s withers. Stars glimmered to life in the east, chasing the sun down over the western sea. A warm night breeze stirred up tiny opaque dust devils that spun across the dirt road separating the farm from the moor.
Ursule paused on her way through the garden to look down the road, thinking of where it led. Marazion, of course, where she had been countless times. On to Penzance, and then St Ives, where she had been only once, with a pony to sell. If a traveler kept on, he could go right through the west country, on to the River Tamar that separated Cornwall from England. Her cousins had taken that road, cousins she had never met. They had fled, and left her to deal with the remnants of the clan on her own.
She would hate to leave Cornwall, and Orchard Farm. She reveled in her knowledge of the paths and swales and hillocks of the moor, so certain she could have walked them blindfolded. She loved her goats, and the ponies and their foals. She savored the solitude of the tor and the vista of Mount’s Bay.
She could understand, though, her cousins wishing to leave the dour company of the Orchiéres. Louisette scowled, and Anne-Marie fussed. Florence stalked between the stove and the pantry as if she were the very Beast of Bodmin Moor. Isabelle clattered pottery and clanged flatware. Fleurette spoke only if she had to, and then in a hoarse whisper.
Nanette had said she feared being left alone on Orchard Farm. Her daughter, though she wished no one into the grave before her time, looked forward to it.
4
Despite herself, Ursule learned to think of the year in Sabbats, as her aunts did. Samhain, which the Cornish churchgoers called All Hallows’ Eve, was a particularly welcome one, marking the end of the labors of the harvest season.
All the women, and especially Ursule, with her strong young back, had labored harder than ever during the summer and fall. It was the only time, as far as Ursule could tell, that anyone missed the uncles. Despite their age, and the stooping of their shoulders, the three men had done a prodigious amount of work. Now all of it fell to the women. They scythed hay, dug potatoes and beets and carrots and garlic, stored preserved foods and cheeses and their home-brewed ale in the cellar. Ursule repaired chinks in the stone walls around the byre and filled the loft with hay and straw against the cold season, when neither ponies nor goats could find much to eat on the moor.
By the eve of Samhain they were all weary to the bone, but the aunts insisted they would make their observation. When Ursule protested, her mother pinched her arm and hissed at her. “You must come, or Louisette will say she was right all along!” Ursule, with a resigned sigh, promised she would.
At supper, before they climbed the tor, Isabelle laid three empty places on the far side of the kitchen table. When Ursule came in from the byre, she cast the empty bowls a curious glance.
The other women were busy at the stove and the stone sink, but Florence took notice. She said, “For the ones who have passed, Ursule. Always set places for them at Samhain, to show we have not forgotten.”
“Like the Catholics,” Ursule said. Florence gave her a blank look. “All Saints’,” Ursule told her. “That’s what they celebrate in this season.”
Florence shrugged her disinterest. Ursule frowned, but Nanette, coming toward the table carrying the breadboard with a sliced loaf, shook her head. Ursule glanced across the room at Louisette, who was scowling at the pottage as if it had let her down in some way.
It would be, Ursule thought, a long and tiresome night.
Now that the uncles were gone, there was no need to slip away from the house in secret to observe the Sabbats. When the hour arrived, the materials were gathered and packed, coats and boots were found and put on, and a lamp was left burning against their return. The six women and one girl trooped out through the garden and turned up the path to the tor. They were mostly silent, but that was from habit rather than necessity. Anne-Marie had taken to carrying a small lantern to light the way, since there was no one to notice their progress.
On Lammas, the Sabbat of first harvest, the breezes sweeping down from the moor had been mild, but by Samhain the wind had a bite, snapping at coats and scarves. To Ursule the women looked like great crows flapping their way up the hill. She felt the chill the moment she stepped onto the path, and gave serious thought to turning back, leaving her aunts to their nonsense. Only loyalty to her mother kept her moving. Eight nights a year, she told herself. She could make that sacrifice for Nanette’s sake.
When she stepped inside the cave and out of the wind, the sudden warmth enveloped her like an embrace, relaxing her chilled muscles and freeing the breath in her cold lungs. Seated cross-legged in a corner, she grew drowsy as the aunts chanted and the candle flames painted specters in shadowed corners. Ursule’s eyelids drooped as water was sprinkled, scarves draped and fluttered, reverences made to Grand-mère’s crystal. As before, it lay quiescent, showing nothing but the dancing reflections of candlelight.
The ceremony wound to its close. Ursule joined the circle when she was asked, linking hands with her mother on one side and Fleurette on the other. The night seemed far gone to her when they finally gathered their things, but once they were outside, she saw by the stars that the night had not advanced much past one. A half-moon lent brightness to the path, and Anne-Marie carried her lantern unlit as the women filed downhill.
When they arrived back at the farmhouse, everyone but Ursule went straight to bed. She climbed the stairs to her room, but once she was in her nightdress and dressing gown, she decided to go back to the kitchen for a cup of warm milk. The house was quiet except for faint snores here and there. The kitchen was filled with moonlight. Ursule stoked the fire and fetched milk from the pantry. As it warmed, she stood gazing out at the garden and the byre, shining silver beneath the moon. She wondered what it would be like to have Orchard Farm all to herself.
When the milk began to steam, she lifted the small saucepan from the stove and stirred in a teaspoon of the honey they had collected only the month before. She measured it carefully, knowing it had to last the winter. She was just tying the cloth cap back over the jar when Fleurette appeared in the doorway, tugging her nightcap lower against the chill air.
Ursule nodded toward the saucepan. “Du lait, Tante Fleurette? Avec du miel?”
Fleurette nodded and brought a second mug to the table. Ursule tipped the saucepan to pour out the sweetened milk. She sat down, cupping her palms around the warm mug, and gazing into the faint cloud of steam rising from it.
When Fleurette spoke, Ursule started.
“Nanette won’t tell you,” her aunt said in her whispery voice. “But you should know.”
Ursule lifted her head to gaze at Fleurette. The slanting moonlight from the window made furrows in her aunt’s wrinkled cheeks, and shadowed her eyes so they looked as if they
were closed. “What should I know?” she asked softly.
“Spells are not free,” Fleurette said, and stopped.
Ursule waited. After a moment Fleurette stirred and spoke again.
“Everything has a cost. Magic, too.” Another pause, while tendrils of steam curled up into the silvery light. “Especially magic.”
Ursule shifted in her chair. Fleurette’s heavy-lidded eyes glittered faintly in the moonlight. “You doubt us.”
Ursule blew out a small breath. “I’m sorry, Tante Fleurette. It’s true. I do.”
“You are mistaken.”
“Witchcraft? I don’t want to be disrespectful, but it makes no sense.” She brought her mug to her lips and drank.
Her aunt’s own milk waited untouched on the table before her. She said, pursing her wrinkled lips, “Seventeen. An age at which a girl knows everything.”
“Of course I don’t. But I don’t believe in magic.” Ursule did her best to speak kindly. Fleurette lived in the shadow of Florence, her twin, indeed in the shadows of all the clan, as if she had no individual life. This was the longest conversation the two of them had ever had.
Fleurette said, “Your gift with animals.”
“That’s not magic.”
“It’s power. The same thing.”
This thought intrigued Ursule, and for a moment it was she who sat in silence, contemplating the white shimmer of milk in the gloom and considering the idea.
Fleurette leaned forward so the ribbon on her nightcap trailed in the mug before her. “Your mother still longs for him.”
A Secret History of Witches Page 9