A Secret History of Witches

by Louisa Morgan

  Irène sat back on her heels. “Who’s here?”

  Ursule cried joyfully, “Sebastien!”

  “How do you know?” Irène asked, but her mother was already on her way to the gate in the stone wall. It was a foolish question in any case. Ursule often, she suspected, consulted the stone alone in the root cellar, following Sebastien’s progress, searching for hints of where he might be. She often knew he would arrive before the sound of his footsteps reached their ears.

  She stood up and scraped the worst of the mud from her boots before following her mother. Three hens clucked at her ankles, and she shooed them away before she slipped through the gate. Ursule, who hadn’t bothered to so much as take off her disreputable hat, had thrown her arms around Sebastien, knocking her hat off into the mud of the lane and smudging his coat with garden dirt.

  Irène shut the gate against the chickens and paused to watch her parents embrace. The contrast between them had always surprised her, but now it filled her with suspicion.

  Sebastien wasn’t tall, but he was slender and fine featured, youthful even in middle age, with an unlined face and fine pale hair falling to his shoulders. Ursule was … Ursule. Her shoulders were broad, muscular from a lifetime of manual labor. Her skin was weathered, and darkened by the sun. Her hair was still thick and curly, but salted with gray, and her dark eyes had developed a squint from working outdoors. Her hands, twined now with Sebastien’s, had long, strong fingers, swollen knuckles, and nails she could never get clean. Irène supposed her mother might have been pretty in her youth, but now … How could such a person hold a man like Sebastien? Was this the way she used her power? Was it possible to use magic for such a thing?

  Irène looked down at her own hands and experienced a clutch of panic. They were smoother than her mother’s, and her knuckles had not begun to thicken, but they were Ursule’s hands, the fingers long, the palm broad, the veins already showing in the wrists. She pressed her palms to her cheeks, wondering if her skin, too, had begun to brown, and if the first betraying threads of gray were woven into her own hair.

  “Irène!” Sebastien called, and held out his free arm to her. “Ma fille!” She pulled off her hat and did her best to shake the garden soil from the ends of her hair as she crossed the lane to meet her father, but she carried her doubts with her.

  That night, after Ursule and Sebastien had retired, and the cottage was dark and quiet, Irène set a fresh candle in a candleholder and dropped a box of sulfur matches into the pocket of her coat. She slipped out the door on stockinged feet, silent as a cat, and made her way around to the root cellar. She lifted the slanting door slowly, slowly, to avoid the squeak of the hinges. Only when she was safely down the stairs, the door pulled shut above her head, did she strike a match and set the flame to the candlewick. It flickered in the cobwebbed corners and made her shadow shudder against the walls as if a specter were watching her.

  She didn’t uncover the stone, but crouched beside the stool it rested on, and pulled out the wrapped book that lay among the three legs. She set the grimoire on the work counter, and in the light from the candle she folded back the burlap that protected it and opened the age-darkened leather cover.

  Under Ursule’s strict eye she had spent hours huddled at the kitchen table with the grimoire. The book had no particular order or organization, just a collection of recipes for charms, simples, potions, and spells. She had read through every page many times. She remembered the title of the spell she was looking for because it had been so devilishly hard to translate:

  A Philter to Persuade the Reluctant Lover

  She also remembered it because it was the one recipe Ursule had wanted her to skip. Her mother had snatched the book away before she could touch the page. When she asked why, her mother said, “This may be the most dangerous spell in all of the grimoire.”

  “But why? It’s only a love potion, is it not?”

  “Irène, love is the most perilous emotion there is. When you force it—when you use it as a weapon—terrible things can happen. You cannot create real love with a potion or a spell.”

  “Let me read it, at least. Let me see how—”

  “Non! Absolument pas!” As Ursule switched to French, her voice hardened. “You are playing with things you don’t understand, Daughter.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  Ursule had startled her by pulling her hand away from the page and slamming the book closed without her usual care for its fragile pages. “Don’t argue!”

  Ursule supervised every session with the grimoire, and she saw to it that it never lay open to the forbidden page. Irène wondered, now, if this was the reason. Perhaps Ursule had lied to her. Perhaps her mother had worked a spell on her father, binding him to her not through love, but through magic.

  If it was true, it was a demonstration of stunning power, and Irène wanted it for herself.

  In the unsteady light of the candle she found the page and bent over it to decipher the straggling handwriting. It was all but impossible for her to read. She could make out the required herbs, coltsfoot, lovage root, lady’s mantle, mullein, mistletoe. The instructions made no sense to her, a jumble of antique words too hard to see in the darkness. She needed more light. And a dictionary.

  She lifted her hands from the page and turned them over. There was grime on her palms, black and sticky, the dust of decades. As she looked at it, the first stirrings of her power began to ache in her belly. She pressed her hand to her middle, wondering at the sensation, and at the same moment she knew, with bone-deep certainty, that her mother had never used this page. Someone had, or Ursule would not be convinced of its danger, but it had not been Ursule herself.

  Irène closed the book with care and replaced its burlap covering. She slid it beneath the stool, blew out her candle, and felt her way back to the stairs. Once she was out of the root cellar and safely hidden in her room again, she stripped off her clothes and pulled on her nightdress with hands that shook with excitement. It was far past midnight, but she lay wakeful on her bed, curled around the ache in her belly, wondering when the rest of her power would reveal itself.

  Never in all the long line of Orchiére witches, she thought, had a girl wanted more to be a witch. A real witch, like the great Ursule or the prophetess Liliane. A powerful witch, who could bend people to her will. A subtle witch, who could rise above her lowly roots to become a lady.

  She hugged her knees and savored her pain. It was coming. She sensed it. The power was coming.

  She could hardly wait.

  4

  You should treat your maman with respect,” Sebastien said. “She nearly died saving you.”

  “Oh, Papa, I’ve heard the story a thousand times! Please don’t tell it again.”

  “Then don’t make me remind you.”

  Irène grimaced and pushed away her bowl of mutton stew, appetite forgotten. She hated being criticized by her father. He was the one person in the world whose opinion mattered to her.

  “You should go after her. Apologize.”

  Apologizing was another thing she hated. None of this seemed fair, not on this day. “I only said I wished we had something nicer than mutton stew today.”

  “Then perhaps you should have cooked it yourself.”

  “It’s my birthday!”

  “Yes. Seventeen. No longer a child.”

  “You’re taking her side, aren’t you? That’s what you always do!”

  Sebastien was silent for a time, crumbling a piece of brown bread between his elegant fingers and gazing into the fireplace, where yellow flames danced, mellowing the drabness of the cottage and its dark old furniture. When he spoke, his voice throbbed with sorrow. “It’s not a question of sides, you know,” he said, speaking French with her as he always did when they were alone. “Your mother has been faithful to you from before your birth, and almost all on her own. I’m hardly a father to you—”

  She drew breath to object to this, but he put his finger to his lips, and she sub
sided. “A good father would be here always. Could provide you your own harp to practice on. Would see that your husband is a good, hardworking, honest man, better than he himself has ever been.”

  “Papa! A husband?”

  “You’re of an age. It could happen at any time.”

  “I know no one I would want to marry.”

  “This is a fine village. I’ve seen more than one strapping young fellow plying his trade or plowing his fields.”

  “In Tenbury? I would never marry one of these yokels!”

  He looked up at her, his silvery eyes like aged pewter in the firelight. “Why, then, Daughter, whom do you think you should marry?”

  She meant not to answer, but the words erupted from her with the force of a volcano’s flow. “I will marry a lord. I’m going to be a lady.” As she spoke, the ache returned to her belly, a confirmation of her own prediction.

  Sebastien didn’t laugh at this, though they both knew it was an outrageous thing to say. He considered it for another space of silence. At last he said, “So long as you don’t forget your maman, and what you owe to her.”

  Irène thought of how ill her mother would fit into a fine house. “She prefers the company of the beasts to mine, Papa. I think you know this.”

  “You’re wrong about that, ma fille.”

  “How would you know? You’re never here! You know nothing about my life!”

  He gave her a long, mournful glance and made no effort to argue. On the table between them lay her birthday gifts, a secondhand book on herbs from her mother, a pair of lace gloves from her father, pretty things she could never wear on the farm. She eyed them and gritted her teeth in frustration.

  Sebastien was off the next morning, striding away with his harp over his shoulder and his rucksack on his back. He lifted his hat at the turn to say farewell, and his long hair fluttered in the breeze and glinted gold in the sunshine. Irène and Ursule watched him go, Irène with her hands clasped before her, Ursule already tying on her canvas apron.

  When he was gone, Ursule said briskly, “Better get on with those spuds, I suppose.”

  Irène shuddered with distaste. She was tired, full of impatience. She had hardly slept the night before, tossing from side to side on her pillow, gazing out her window at a full moon that called to her and made her heart burn with wanting.

  Wakeful, she had risen at midnight to kneel beside the sash and gaze down at the stone wall around the garden, made silver gilt by moonlight. The distant bulk of the Grange was outlined by stars, imposing and elegant, remote as any castle. It symbolized everything she dreamed of, and as she yearned toward it, the ache returned to her belly. The pain was intensifying, as if her body was giving birth to her power. She sensed the crystal calling to her from the dank and dark of the root cellar.

  Did Ursule hear it? Or was she so mired in the constant creeping dirt, the humiliation of mucking out stalls and fussing over filthy animals, that the magic had abandoned her?

  Irène went back to her bed, but still she lay sleepless, worrying that the drudgery of the farm would destroy her growing power.

  Now, as she thought of all this in the bright morning light, the ache in her belly expanded into her chest, and she couldn’t help pressing her hands over her heart.

  Her mother said, “Are you ill?”

  “Monthlies,” Irène groaned.

  It wasn’t true, though it felt much the same. It was her magic, coming upon her in full spate, like a river threatening to overflow its banks.

  “Are you feverish?” Ursule put out a hand to test her daughter’s forehead.

  Irène, with a shudder of revulsion, drew away from the hand with its black-rimmed nails and calloused fingers. Ursule snatched it back. “What troubles you now?” she demanded.

  “Your hand is dirty, Mother.”

  “You’re too fine and clean to be touched by your mother, then?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, you did. Of course you did. Your meaning was perfectly clear.” Ursule’s eyes shone suddenly. Irène had never seen her mother shed tears. “You think because you’re seventeen, and pretty as a summer sky, that you will never be faded and gray as I am now. You think—”

  “I think,” Irène burst out, “that you could do something about all that if you tried! What good is your power, your craft, if you waste it in a barnyard?”

  “Chut!” Ursule hissed, switching languages. This time she thrust her palm over her daughter’s mouth before Irène could pull away. “If you must speak about the craft where people might hear, at least do not speak in English!”

  Irène, in an act of rebellion such as she had never dared before, jerked herself free. Glaring at her mother, she deliberately spit into the dirt at her feet.

  A dark fire blazed up in Ursule’s eyes. She drew back her arm, opened her hand, and slapped Irène’s cheek so hard it sounded like the crack of a farrier’s hammer. She was as strong as any man from years of digging and hauling and lifting. The blow hurt.

  Irène, nearly blind with pain and the rush of magic in her blood, covered her burning cheek with her hand and screamed, “I hate you! Hate you! You disgust me!”

  The fire in her mother’s eyes died away in the instant, drowned in very real tears. They brimmed against her eyelids and spilled, one at a time, down her cheeks. Irène sucked in her breath at the sight of them. Ursule spun away, canvas apron fluttering at her ankles, and marched to the garden gate. She was through it, gone, before Irène could gather her thoughts.

  She stood where she was in the lane, trembling with shock even as she seethed with rage. What had just happened? She felt like a pot on the boil, juddering and rattling this way and that. When she could take it no longer—and when Ursule did not come back to apologize—she picked up her skirts and ran toward the forest to seek the solitude and comfort of the trees.

  The forest that encircled the Grange was old, yew and elm and rowan trees with great spaces between them. Cast-off leaves softened the ground, and great mushrooms grew among the massive roots. Irène ran until the flame of her fury burned down, then stumbled to a walk. When she reached the unnamed thread of water that wound through the woods to the River Ritec, she knelt on the bank and bent to splash water on her burning face.

  She caught sight of herself and gasped in horror. Even in the uncertain mirror of the brook, her left cheek bore the clear imprint of Ursule’s hand. She glared at her reflection for long minutes, and her anger flared anew. What had she done to deserve such an attack? She had spoken the truth! Her mother had wasted her life, wasted her gift! She wasn’t so powerful a witch as her namesake, perhaps, but she was strong enough. She could scry, which Irène knew many in their line could not. She could make a simple to ease a mare in foal or a cow with mastitis. Sometimes when the soup was too salty or the bread failed to rise, she would flick her fingers, mutter a few words, and remedy the fault.

  When Irène asked for those spells, Ursule invariably said, “Wait. Wait till your power comes in.”

  And now, Irène was certain, it had arrived. She felt it in her belly and in her blood, and in the throb of wanting that thrummed in her chest, but she no longer wanted to make simples. She would never waste this power digging potatoes and shoveling manure. There must be a way. She would demand it of the Goddess.

  She sank back into the duff, heedless of the stains of leaf and dirt that would mark her skirt. All she owned were work dresses in any case, and they were never clean. She circled her knees with her arms and rested her forehead there, thinking hard. She was seventeen, slender, bright eyed, smooth skinned. She would never be more beautiful than she was at this moment. There was no time to waste.

  Her mother would be no help. Irène suspected her mother was jealous of her because she was still pretty, still young, with her life ahead of her instead of nearly over.

  A rustle on the opposite side of the brook startled Irène. She raised her head.

  A rowan tree, bent nearly sideways by age and the we
ight of its splaying branches, leaned into the little stream of water. On its trunk, peering through a tremulous curtain of leaves, perched a magnificent fox, redder than any Irène had ever seen, with a snowy breast and sharp black muzzle. Its slanting yellow eyes gleamed through the forest shade, and its peaked ears turned toward her as if it was waiting for her to do something. To say something.

  Or to think of something.

  Suddenly the recipe appeared in her mind’s eye, as clearly as if the grimoire were open before her, and now she remembered how it began:

  Take three leaves and two flowers of coltsfoot, along with an inch of the root; add three inches of lovage root, well dried; flowers of lady’s mantle; three spikes of mullein; and a twig of mistletoe, crushed.

  But whom would she use the potion on?

  The fox barked at her, one sharp, short sound.

  Without expecting to, Irène laughed. “What?” she said aloud.

  The fox’s mouth opened, showing its white teeth, and its tongue lolled, laughing with her.

  A sense of recognition tingled in Irène’s bones and throbbed in her forehead. Her laughter died. She came to her feet, facing the creature. It scrambled down from the tree trunk, its lithe body weaving through the branches as easily as a stream of water might. It stood on the opposite bank. Its tail arced above its back, a plume of red and black. Its unblinking gaze fixed itself on her.

  Irène whispered, “Are you here for me?”

  Again the fox’s mouth opened in its grin, and its tail waved once, twice, before it leaped the little brook as easily as if it could fly. Irène stood very still as the fox stepped toward her on narrow black feet as dainty as a dancer’s. It—he, she could see now—pressed his cold black nose against the back of her hand, and, when she turned it, nosed her palm.