Would he? If he discovered somehow that he was not his daughter’s father, would he care enough to harm his wife? Morwen shuddered to think of it. She would have said, until this moment, that she didn’t care what happened to her mother, but now—with this terrible possibility—she found herself sick with worry.
She said, “Dafydd, you must excuse me. I have to go.”
“Miss Morgan, I don’t believe that story! You must know that.”
“No, I don’t, either, but—I must go home … There’s something I have to do.” She jumped up onto the edge of the fountain, then onto Ynyr’s back.
“But, Miss Morgan—Morwen—can’t we—”
She lifted the halter rope and said hastily, “Come again tomorrow! I’ll come back, but now I must …”
Ynyr, anticipating, whirled and began his ground-devouring trot. She didn’t finish her sentence, but she looked back over her shoulder to see Dafydd, his trilby in his hands, squinting against the sunshine. She lifted a hand in hasty farewell, but she doubted he could see her.
With trembling fingers Morwen drew the covering from Grand-mère’s crystal. The covering was new, a piece of embroidered silk found in a shop in Piccadilly. She hadn’t touched it—or the stone—in months. She had tried to forget it was there, hidden behind a board she had loosened in her bedroom wall. Now it lay, glowing faintly in its nest of silk, on the tea table in the cramped parlor.
Morwen shivered, though the room was warm with autumn sunshine. She had left Ynyr in his stable, but she could feel him, stamping and whinnying, sharing her anxiety.
On her hurried ride back to Islington, she had searched for a scrap of affection in her heart. She didn’t find it. What she found, what Ursule had tried to explain, was loyalty, fealty to the line of women from which she sprang. Irene, with all her faults and weaknesses, was still her mother. Morwen had to know what had happened to her. If she was dead, she would mourn her. If she was in need, she would help her. She was an Orchiére.
She drew the curtain over the parlor window before she brought a new white candle from her small larder and set it in a saucer on the tea table. She wet one finger and dipped it into the salt dish, then dissolved the grains in a beaker of water. She sprinkled a circle of saltwater drops around the table, aware as she did so that she knew how to do these things only because Irene, albeit unwillingly, had taught her.
With her preparations made, she knelt on the carpet and drew her fingers across the smooth surface of the crystal. The darkness within it receded swiftly, reassuring her that the craft was still strong in her, perhaps stronger than it had been, as if it had matured and deepened on its own. With confidence she gazed into the shadowy depths of the stone. “Show me Maman,” she murmured. “Irène Orchiére. By the power of my ancestresses, by the privilege of my birthright, I ask to see her. To—to scry her.”
Sparks of light spun and grew immediately, as if some energy had only been awaiting her command. The interior of the crystal bloomed with light, and in its center, in the space of a few breaths, the sparks began to coalesce.
It was a blur at first, seen through a veil of mist, but the mist soon shredded and disappeared. The image resolved into a small but fully recognizable figure, and Morwen experienced a wrench of sorrow.
Irene crouched, cloaked and bedraggled, on the same pallet of old blankets Ursule had used. It hardly seemed possible that her hair should have grayed so quickly, or that her shoulders should be so bent. Around her ranged the paltry things Ursule had used to sustain herself, a crude stove, a smoky lamp, a chamber pot.
Irene had taken her mother’s place in the tower of Old Beaupre Castle. She had lost everything her treachery had gained for her, and more. All that was left to her—the object that rested in clear view on the crumpled pallet of blankets—was the grimoire.
Morwen fell back on her heels, and the image dimmed and faded into darkness. Heavy-hearted, she stared into the smoky depths of the crystal. She felt no tenderness for her mother, but could she leave her in such a condition?
When Jago returned from his day’s work, she told him everything—about Dafydd, about her mother, even about using the crystal. Jago sat in his easy chair, a piece of whittling wood in one hand and a knife in the other. He gazed at her from beneath drawn brows, and his eyelids drooped with sympathy.
“Jago, I don’t know what I can do. If Papa threw her out, he would surely not welcome seeing me.”
“No. Can’t return, you.”
“But I can’t just abandon her.”
A long, tense silence hung in the parlor. Jago sat staring at the piece of wood in his lap. Morwen’s head ached, as if the vision of her mother in the broken tower had taken hold of her brain with a physical grip. Darkness fell beyond the window, and the sounds and smells of Islington swirled upward into the night. At last, when Morwen thought her head might burst, Jago stirred and set down his knife and chunk of wood.
“I’ll go,” he said.
Morwen started. “What?”
Stiffly he got to his feet and stood with his hands hanging at his sides, gazing down at her. “I’ll go to her,” he said. “I’m the one who can. No one has any complaint against me. Not any longer.”
“But—but you hate her!”
“I did once. It seems I no longer do.”
Morwen could have argued, protested it was too far, too hard, that he had other things to manage. All of that was true, but at the same time she knew he was right.
They had never embraced, though they had acknowledged their true relationship. Now, however, filled with gratitude, Morwen stepped forward. The habits of a lifetime made Jago flinch back, but she paid no attention. She was nearly as tall as he was, and she put her arms around his shoulders, holding him to her. When she pressed her cheek to his, she felt the melting of his heart, so close to her own.
“You will be careful,” she whispered. “And come back to me.”
“Aye, lass,” he said. “There’s no need to worry, in any case. You can watch me in yon scrying stone.”
Morwen did watch. She kept the crystal beside her bed, and peered into it morning and night while he was away. She knew when he reached Wales, driving one of his own taxicabs. She knew when he climbed the hill to the castle. She watched Irene hide her face in shame when he stepped into the broken tower. When he made his way at last back to Islington, she already knew he had returned her mother to the cottage where she had grown up. Elegant, aristocratic Lady Irene Morgan was now working for the Grange as a milkmaid.
Morwen was surprised, though, when Jago carried in a bulky package, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. He pressed it into her hands. “Jago, what is this?”
“She said you would know.”
“Oh,” Morwen breathed. She took the parcel, feeling its weight, sensing the texture of it through the paper. “Oh, I do, Jago. Though I can hardly believe she gave it up.”
“Said she never wants to see it again. That it was her undoing.”
“That’s what happened, then. Papa found it. He knows.”
“Afraid so. He threw her out.”
“What about other people? Did he tell anyone else? Father Pugh?”
The faint curl of Jago’s lips faded. “Lass, if the priest knew what she was, there would be no saving her.”
“But you saved her.”
“Did my best.”
She said softly, “Thank you.”
He turned his head, as if in embarrassment, and said, “Did it for you, Daughter.”
“I will always be grateful.”
They never spoke of it again.
9
Many months passed before Morwen dared to undo the strings on the package Jago had carried from Wales. She hid the crystal away and laid the grimoire alongside it. She and Jago were making a life in London, a new, productive life like the ones other people made. Normal people. She had no more need of magic.
She saw Dafydd Selwyn often in Regent’s Park, where they walked their horses
side by side, and talked about travel, and books, and exhibits at the V&A. They didn’t speak of her parents, or of his father. Dafydd was all the society Morwen had, beyond Jago’s silent company. On the days they were to meet, her step was lighter, her mood brighter. She would have been desperately lonely without their afternoons together.
Still, on the day before the eve of Lammas, just after her eighteenth birthday, Morwen felt unusually restless and out of sorts. She longed for something, but it was hard to know what. Other women, perhaps. Someone she could speak to about the things she felt, the things she dreamed of, things that were hard to name but real nonetheless.
A sense of isolation weighed on her. She bid Jago a rather curt good night and went into her bedroom. She changed into her nightgown and braided her hair for the night, but still felt restive. She stared into the mirror above her dressing table and saw, with a shiver, her mother’s face looking back.
A compulsion seized her. She told herself she wanted to see her mother again, to know that she was safe, that she was well, but of course that wasn’t it. It was the crystal tempting her. She recognized the invitation, that tug on her breastbone as if someone had tied a silken cord around her chest and was pulling on it.
She fought the impulse for a time, standing beside her window to look down on Chapel Market. The lights went out one by one, leaving the street in darkness.
At last, with a muttered exclamation, she gave in. She crossed to the wardrobe where she had hidden the stone, with the grimoire beside it. She drew them both out.
She had no unburned candle at hand, and to fetch one she needed to slip out to the kitchen, where she kept new candles in the pantry. Cautiously, not wanting to wake Jago, she crept on her bare feet across the little parlor and into the kitchen. She made her way back as quietly as she could. Jago’s bedroom door was closed, and no light showed beneath it. Carefully she drew her own door shut. When she turned the lock, the click of the tumblers seemed to reverberate in the stillness of the flat, and made her nerves jump.
She set the candle into a holder and sprinkled salt water around the little pedestal table that held the crystal and the grimoire. She unfolded the embroidered silk to expose the darkly shining stone. When she knelt beside the table and set a match to the candle, lights blazed up instantly inside the crystal. Her heart leaped in response, and she leaned close to peer into it, whispering, “Maman?”
It was not Irene who appeared out of the swirling pool of sparks. It was Dafydd.
He wore a morning coat and gloves, and his thick hair was smoothly brushed and dressed. There were people with him, also in formal day dress, but Morwen couldn’t make them out in detail—except for one.
It was a girl, slim and fair and very pretty. She was leaning on Dafydd’s arm, laughing up into his face. He was smiling, too, and as Morwen watched he patted her white-gloved hand where it rested on his sleeve.
Morwen’s heart suddenly pained her so that she pressed her hands to it, and she closed her eyes against the sight of Dafydd—charming, handsome, fair Dafydd—with another girl. A suitable girl, no doubt, with a family and a dowry and a name to be proud of. Morwen hadn’t fully realized until this moment that she thought of him as her Dafydd. Her special friend, even her sweetheart. If this was what love felt like—this pain, and this fear—she wished she had never discovered it.
She sat back on her heels and dropped her hands. “Why?” she whispered into the candlelit room. “Why show me this? If Dafydd has met someone, there’s nothing I can do!”
But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. She was no ordinary girl. She was her mother’s daughter, and she was a witch. There would be something in the grimoire, a remedy hidden beneath its cracked leather. Her mother had created a potion that Jago had been unable to resist. Her daughter could do the same. The instructions were somewhere in the notes of an ancestress, waiting only to be found, and followed.
For a time she did battle with her conscience. The potion had not made Jago love her mother, after all, but—her own motivations were not at all like her mother’s. She would be acting out of love, not ambition! If she used the potion only to encourage what was already between them …
Her fingers were busy with the string even as these thoughts tumbled through her mind. Her hands were smoothing back the stiff brown paper, opening the ancient leather cover, touching, oh so gently, the stained and browning pages. In some places the ink had faded so much that whatever had been written there was lost forever. In others it had run and blurred so that she had to light a lamp to read the words. All of it, as Irene had warned her, was written in Old French. It would take her hours, perhaps days, to decipher.
Then, as she gingerly turned the pages, she saw words in her mother’s modern hand, written in good Egyptian black ink, carefully blotted and dried. Irene had done the work for her, had translated the recipe from Old French into the modern language. The ingredients were clearly listed, and the steps laid out.
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. Mix with water that has been boiled and cooled, and let rest on the altar until the morning star rises.
Make an offering of sage to the Mother of All, and speak your intention three times three times. The syrup can be mixed with wine or cider, and should be drunk in one draft.
The list of ingredients was long. The greengrocer would have sage, but not such things as mullein or lady’s mantle. Coltsfoot grew everywhere in the countryside, but would it grow in the ditches of London?
Her mind and her heart warred with one another, but her heart, at this moment in her young life, dominated. She would do it. She had to do it.
She had sacrificed so much. Surely she could at least keep Dafydd Selwyn for herself. What was the good of being a descendant of the Ochiéres—of being a witch—if she couldn’t use her power? It was her right.
Morwen slept little that night, and was off on her search even before the Chapel Market vendors lifted their awnings. She set out through a chilly autumn mist, a basket over her arm and her housekeeping money in the pochette that dangled from her waist. She tried an apothecary’s shop first, and was rewarded by discovering a small amount of dried lovage root, clearly labeled on a wooden shelf.
She carried the little jar to the counter. “Your young ’un has the colic, I expect?” the apothecary asked her, in a voice warm with sympathy.
Morwen was almost startled into denying it, but realized he assumed she had a baby at home. “Yes,” she said hastily, as she counted out coins. “But this should help.”
“You come back if it doesn’t,” he said. “We can try something else.”
She thanked him and went on with her mission. After walking down several streets into a neighborhood she didn’t recognize, she came across a dark little shop with bundles of herbs and jars of syrups and ointments in the window. This turned out to be a Chinese herbalist, and though she had some trouble making herself understood, she managed to find both lady’s mantle and mullein. The woman who sold them to her spoke so little English that when it was time to pay, Morwen simply held out coins on her palm and allowed the herbalist to choose the ones she wanted. The price was surprisingly low, and Morwen silently blessed the woman’s honesty.
She lacked only mistletoe, but she knew where that could be found. She hurried back to the flat to deposit her basket on the kitchen sideboard. She found a pair of shears and thrust them into her pochette before she strode down the street to the stables, where she could hear Ynyr nickering to her before she reached the door.
The stableboy, a jug-eared lad of perhaps twelve, met her in the aisle between the stalls. “That big horse allus knows when you’s comin’, don’t he, miss? Why’s that?”
Morwen grinned at him and fished a coin out of her pochette to press into his hand. “That’s the smartest horse in the world, Georgie,” she said
. “But don’t tell anyone!” He laughed and tossed the coin in the air before he thrust it into the pocket of his canvas trousers.
A ragged column of poplar trees grew at the far edge of Regent’s Park, and high among their branches bloomed great clouds of mistletoe. The mist had cleared by the time Morwen and Ynyr reached the park. They had to dodge crowds of walkers and riders to reach the trees. Morwen urged Ynyr as close to one of the trunks as he could get. Steadying herself with one hand on a branch, she put her feet on his back, one on either side of his sturdy spine, and cautiously pulled herself upright, holding the shears in her free hand.
Moments later, ignoring the curious and even scandalized glances that pursued her, she was happily on her way back to Islington, a generous clump of mistletoe in her fist.
She spent the day in preparation. She found an unburned candle, she boiled water, and chopped and crushed her ingredients according to the transcribed recipe. She set the soup pot simmering for Jago’s dinner, dashed down to the baker’s for a fresh loaf, and then, though she herself simmered with impatience, she paced the floor and waited for night to come.
Doubts assailed her. What would Ursule think if she knew what Morwen planned? How would she herself feel, knowing she had tricked him?
Worst of all, what if Dafydd found out? The memory of Jago’s look of revulsion when he spoke of Irene filled her with dread.
On the other hand, she asked herself, what is love but magic, after all? She pictured Dafydd as she had last seen him, riding alongside her in Regent’s Park. She thought of the way his hair fell over his forehead, how his eyes sparkled, how his dimple flashed when he laughed. She remembered the spicy smell of bay rum that always surrounded him, and the feel of his sun-warmed cheek when he pressed it to hers in farewell, and her belly contracted with longing.
A Secret History of Witches Page 30