Phillip Paxton, like other young men of his class, went into the RAF as a commissioned officer, and Veronica went to the station to see him off for pilot’s training. He had always been good-looking, but in his uniform and officer’s cap he was heartbreakingly handsome. They hadn’t spoken of love between them. It had always seemed there was plenty of time for that, time for them to grow, to be independent, and ultimately to follow their families’ wishes.
But the English air was electric with romance, charged with the sense of peril and adventure and vitality. Every young person, and many not so young, felt romantic.
Phillip did, too, and his urgency infected Veronica. Five minutes before his train departed, he took her left hand, deftly pulled off her calfskin glove, and slipped something heavy onto her finger. She looked down to see a ring of heavy white gold, with an old-fashioned square sapphire in a surround of diamonds.
“Oh! Phillip! Your mother’s ring!”
He caught her to him in a crushing embrace, knocking her hat askew. “I would have waited, Veronica,” he said in a husky voice. “I meant to wait until your twenty-first birthday, but now …”
All around them were men in uniform, weeping girls clutching handkerchiefs, mothers and fathers and siblings there to see their soldiers off to war. The train’s whistle pierced the hubbub, and Phillip released Veronica to look into her face for her answer.
There was no time to think, to consider. Veronica had never questioned their future together, but it had always seemed very far off. Phillip was a fine young man, from an outstanding family. He was honest and loyal and brave, but …
Was she in love? She didn’t know. She would have decided, in time. She might even have decided true friendship was more important than romance.
But there was a war on. Time was a lost luxury.
“Will you?” Phillip asked, grinning.
“Of course I will!” she cried. He bent to kiss her, and she closed her eyes, hoping for a rush of emotion, that delirium girls were supposed to feel when they became engaged. His lips were smooth and cool, his arms around her strong, the buttons on his uniform pressing into her bosom in a delightfully masculine way. She loved him, of course. She had always loved him.
She wasn’t in love. But at this moment, as they tore themselves apart and he jumped onto the already-moving train, it didn’t seem to matter. They were part of something greater than the two of them. They were actors in this national drama.
He clung to the handrail and saluted her, grinning. She saluted back, smiling through her own tears, laughing at the hoots and whistles from the soldiers hanging from the windows. They doffed their caps as their girls and their mothers called farewells and fluttered their handkerchiefs. Everyone blew kisses, men and women alike. No one allowed their tears to spoil the moment.
Veronica stood on the platform for a long time after the train had chugged away. She held her glove in her hand, because it wouldn’t fit over the bulk of Phillip’s ring. She knew Chesley was waiting for her in the car, but she still remained, trying to understand what had just happened. Hoping that, in time, she would feel what she was supposed to feel.
Veronica tried to ignore the crystal, hiding in its hamper in her wardrobe. Certainly she had masses of things to distract her from the possibility of witchcraft.
The staff was alarmingly short at Sweetbriar. Since Cook had lost her assistant, Veronica gave up her daily rides in order to help with the shopping as well as planning menus that were restricted by shortages. She worried about Mouse getting exercised, but a weekly outing was all she could manage.
She had never before cleaned a bathroom or dusted furniture, but now, with only one housemaid left to them, she added those things to her chores. She even made an attempt to keep the shrubberies around the front lawn weeded, but that job was monumental. Lord Dafydd advised her to give it up, and with her hands full and her energy taxed to its full extent, she agreed. The weeds grew enthusiastically around the junipers and cotoneasters, and as she hurried to and fro on errands for her father, she did her best to shut her eyes to them.
If there was ever an extra minute, she spent it worrying about house repairs that couldn’t be postponed. She had never been particularly social, but there had customarily been at least one engagement each week, a tea or a cocktail party. Since the war began, most such invitations had ceased, and those that did arrive she was obliged to decline. At night she fell into bed as early as she could, exhausted.
“You’re working too hard,” her father said one morning as they finished breakfast.
She rose and kissed his cheek. “Let’s hope the war doesn’t last long, and everything can go back to normal.”
“Of course,” he said, but without conviction. “Where are you off to today?”
“Butcher,” she said. “And Cottage Farm. I think they have some eggs for us. We’re going to need them.”
“Not more than our share, though, Veronica.”
“Of course not, Papa.”
“They’ll have to ration eggs, I’m afraid. And cheese, and a lot of other things.”
“As if petrol and meat aren’t bad enough. Bacon. Sugar!”
He was getting to his feet, leaning hard on his cane. She didn’t offer to help, because she knew how much he hated that. “I miss sweets,” he admitted. “Maybe you could ask at Cottage Farm for some honey. They keep hives, don’t they?”
“They did. I don’t know if there’s anyone to mind them.”
“Are you going to have Chesley drive you?”
“No. We have to conserve petrol.” She pointed at her jodhpurs. “I’ll take Mouse. He needs a gallop, and I won’t have enough to carry that it will be a problem.”
“It’s cold, though. February.”
“I know. I’ll bundle up.”
They had fallen into a routine, comfortable enough despite the straitened circumstances. Lord Dafydd had offered Sweetbriar as a potential hospital, though the War Office had not yet taken up his offer. Veronica couldn’t imagine their beautiful house filled with hospital beds and medical equipment, much less injured soldiers, but she supposed it was inevitable. She was resigned to it.
She wasn’t accustomed, though, to constant worry. She feared for Phillip, of course, imagining him in his aircraft, preparing to do battle with vicious German fighters. She feared even more for her brother. She couldn’t imagine anyone less suited to be in the infantry than Thomas. She saw her father’s frequent glances at Thomas’s photograph in its pride of place in the morning room, and she knew he was worried, too. It wasn’t just that Thomas was his only son, his heir, the hope for the Selwyn name to carry on. Thomas was a shining star in their family, the smartest, sweetest, kindest young man they knew. He was gentle with servants and with friends, and honest to a fault. He was generous with his time and his energy. He never seemed to have any money, because he gave it all away.
Veronica idolized her older brother. Her father, she understood without the slightest resentment, doted on him.
At night she was haunted by the vision she had suffered before the war began. She tried to let her exhaustion carry her off to sleep, but too often the image of Thomas falling to the ground, limp and lifeless, rose over and over again into her weary mind. At last that image drove her to bring out the Fortnum & Mason hamper.
She decided, as that cold and dismal February wound down, to explore the grimoire. Leaving the stone in its wrappings, she opened the book on her bed and struggled to decipher its fading, spotted script.
She didn’t get far. Her French wasn’t strong, and the language in the book was old-fashioned. She could identify recipes for potions and simples, which she supposed could be useful, if they worked. There were instructions for spells, too, with specific guidelines for herbs to be used and candles to be burned. None of it seemed any more real to her than the ancient and rather silly text on alchemy she had found in Lord Dafydd’s library.
Was there, as Jago had implied, real power in the grimoire? Spec
ifically, was there something she could do to protect Thomas? Every Sunday they offered prayers for him, of course, kneeling in the village church. Was this any different?
“The thing is,” she told Oona, who sat gazing up at her as she turned the fragile pages of the old book, “that I’m supposed to be a witch, but I don’t know how.”
The dog blinked at her, and lay down with her head on her paws.
“Not your problem, is it?” Veronica closed the book with care and laid it back in the hamper. “I think I need a different book.”
The Sweetbriar library was extensive, with volumes collected by Lord Dafydd, by his father Lord William, and a precious few added by Morwen during her lifetime. Those were arranged in their own special section in a glass-fronted cabinet. Veronica had looked them over before, out of curiosity and a vague longing for the mother she had never known. Now she opened the cabinet and took each book out, searching for anything Morwen might have left behind for her to find.
She opened the books, shook them, scanned their titles and chapter headings. She looked on the frontispieces and examined the flyleafs, but there was not so much as a note in Morwen’s hand. Jago was right. She had given it all up when she married Dafydd. She had lived a conventional life. A safe one.
The sound of the front door opening meant her father had returned from his meeting. Veronica got up from the floor, where she had been sitting. She knew she needed to go to the kitchen, to make sure dinner was underway and Cook had everything she needed, but something made her pause in the act of closing the cabinet doors.
A phrase sounded in her head. The words came so clearly she jumped, and glanced around in the expectation that someone had come into the room with her. There was no one. Her father had already made his painful way up the staircase. Chesley would be garaging the car. She was alone.
In the drawer. Those were the words she had heard.
“What drawer?” she muttered. “Which one?”
There was no repetition of the phrase, but the sense of having heard it was so distinct she began to search, though she felt a bit sheepish about it. There was a desk in the library, of course, but it was Lord Dafydd’s. Its drawers held his pens, bottles of ink, blotting papers, and stationery, everything neatly organized in compartments. There was a sideboard, where occasionally tea might be set out, but its drawers were full of napkins, coasters, and trays, with a small collection of butter knives and teaspoons.
Veronica stood in the very center of the room, trying to discern another drawer, something she hadn’t noticed in all the years of using this library. Some instinct made her close her eyes and reach out with her empty hands. She felt a tug, as if someone had taken her hand and was leading her.
She hadn’t moved, but when she opened her eyes, her gaze fell directly onto a narrow slat of wood at the bottom of the glass-fronted cabinet. There was no drawer pull, no knob to reveal it, but she could see it was there. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. In a flash she was crouching beside the cabinet again. She put her fingers underneath and pulled.
A shallow drawer slid out at the command of her fingers. It was no more than four inches front to back, and surely only one inch deep, barely worthy of the word drawer. On first glance it seemed to be empty, but then she spotted a card that looked as if it had been left behind by accident, caught on a splinter at one side.
Veronica lifted it out and read, in old-fashioned copperplate script:
Atlantis Bookshop
Museum Street
London
The card was thick, the name, which she had never heard before, heavily embossed.
She heard her father’s cane clicking on the floor and hastily closed the drawer and jumped to her feet. She tucked the card into the pocket of her tweed skirt and went to see about dinner.
Veronica had no excuse for going down to London just then. Phillip wouldn’t have leave for some time, and there was no extra money for shopping or dining out or staying in a hotel. She had to settle for writing to the bookshop.
She worded her request as cautiously as she could. She asked for books on sorcery, inspired by the French word. In response the bookseller sent her three old volumes: Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft; Orcutt’s The Spell, which turned out to be a novel; and Goetia, an unsettling collection of essays about calling up spirits. She read them all, struggling to divine what was invention and what might be useful.
On a cold March night, when she had digested the books as best she could, she judged it was time to bring out the crystal once again. She decided to follow a pattern in Goetia. She used her dressing table stool as a makeshift altar and sprinkled salted water around it. She brought an unburned candle up from the butler’s pantry and lighted it. She set the crystal on the stool, knelt inside the circle of water, and waited. Oona sat outside the circle, watching, her mouth closed and her tail stretched straight out behind her. Veronica felt a bit foolish over the whole thing, and was glad there was no one but the dog to observe her.
For at least twenty minutes nothing happened. Not even the lights she had seen the first time appeared, much less the whirl of strange faces. She supposed she was doing something wrong, but she didn’t know what to change. Or maybe she had no power after all. The whole thing seemed foolish, in any case, as fantastic as a fairy tale.
Her knees began to ache with the chill, and her toes to cramp from the uncomfortable position. She began to think of giving it up, but when she shifted her position, Oona jumped to her feet and stood with her ears and tail drooping. She whined until Veronica, startled, settled back on her heels. “What is it?” she whispered. Oona stopped whining, but watched her, as if afraid she might change her mind. The dog, too, settled back to the floor.
Seconds later a face began to emerge from the smoky depths of the stone.
Veronica’s heart lurched. It was the face of a woman, much aged, with a mass of white hair and wrinkled eyelids hooding eyes as dark and glittering as Oona’s. She gazed out of the stone as if she knew who was looking back, and lifted one age-spotted hand in greeting.
Veronica stared, openmouthed. The woman crooked one arthritic finger in invitation, and her mouth stretched into a sharp-toothed smile.
Veronica froze, unable to respond, unable even to think. She remembered the sensation in her stomach as she first looked into the stone. It returned now, swelled until it was almost unbearable, and then, bit by bit, subsided. The face in the stone faded as if someone had turned out a light. Veronica inhaled a sudden, much-needed breath. Her candle guttered out in a pool of wax, telling her that more time had passed than she realized. The water drops had dried long before.
Oona lay flat on her side, her eyes closed.
Veronica sat back on her heels and looked around her dressing room. What could be more ordinary than this room, with its mirrored bureau, lacy dressing table, cabbage rose wallpaper? How could there be lights in a stone, or a mysterious woman beckoning to her? What did that woman want?
Veronica seized up the silk and folded it over the crystal. She hastily stowed the crystal and grimoire back in the hamper, and hid the whole behind the dresses in her wardrobe.
She didn’t understand what was happening. If there was magic in her, how was she supposed to use it? What good was it if she couldn’t do something to protect Thomas, or to support Phillip? She was as fearful as ever, no less worried than she had been.
She couldn’t help wishing that the stone and its mysteries had never come into her possession.
4
Veronica turned and turned her engagement ring as she gazed up at the bulk of Sweetbriar from her post on the south lawn. Stars outlined the silhouette of the house. Blackout curtains covered every window, like shrouds over the faces of the dead. The house seemed dead, in a way. Its life as a home was at an end. The dining room, the parlor, the morning room, even the great hall had all been turned over to wounded officers and their doctors and nurses.
She twisted the ring
again, knowing she should break the habit. She didn’t wear it often these days. It felt heavy and constricting, and she found herself removing it whenever she had a reason. Working in Sweetbriar’s makeshift hospital gave her very good reason. She worked a great deal with her hands, changing bandages, emptying bedpans, writing letters for the men, but she wasn’t doing any of that this evening. She had made herself take it from the small cut-glass tray on her dressing table and slide it onto her finger.
An air of grim resignation pervaded the house. Everyone felt it, from Lord Dafydd to Jago and Honeychurch to Cook and the one remaining housemaid. Even Oona looked unhappy, her stiff tail drooping as she followed Veronica around the house and the grounds.
Except for Honeychurch, now nearing seventy, there was only a skeleton staff left. Jago had returned to fill in where he could, moving from the Home Farm to the apartment above the garage. Ynyr had come as well, to drowse away his days in the main stables. All the other horses were gone, sold off or moved to country farms for their safety.
Veronica thought Oona might go back to Jago, now that he was so close, but the dog wouldn’t budge. Veronica tried to apologize to Jago about stealing his dog, but he shook his head, smiling. “Yours now,” he said. “Made her own choice.”
No bombs had fallen near Sweetbriar, but the threat of the blitzkrieg loomed over all of England. On this night, as on so many others, residents and patients and nurses stood or sat on the lawn to watch the fireworks created by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. Clear skies and starlight worked in the enemy’s favor. London—and the residents of the surrounding countryside—could do nothing but hold their breath and pray the ack-ack guns would deter the worst of it.
A Secret History of Witches Page 33