The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel

by Alyssa Palombo

  “I am sure he is not,” I said lightly, my tone belying the apprehension I could not seem to dismiss. “I must simply hope he can do no further damage.”

  * * *

  Ichabod was still sleeping as I prepared to take my leave. He would likely stay at the cottage for a few days, so that Charlotte might oversee his recovery. She would send word as soon as I could see him.

  I was just heading out when Mevrouw Jansen came in. “Ah, Katrina,” she said. “Returning home?”

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing down my foolish nervousness. “I must thank you yet again for your hospitality.”

  “You know you are welcome here anytime.” Yet after she spoke, she studied me for a moment. “Charlotte told me what passed this morning,” she said suddenly, and I flinched as though she had shouted at me. “I know we have young Mr. Ichabod Crane, the schoolteacher, recovering in our house. From a gunshot wound.”

  I stood there awkwardly, my hand on the latch of the door behind me. “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “My daughter told me only what I needed to know to explain our patient’s presence,” she said. “I know no more than that. I certainly do not know enough to tell anything of import to your mother.”

  I squirmed uncomfortably.

  “But, Katrina,” she continued, “take care. You are a young woman, and there is much about the world and those who inhabit it that you do not know. Not everyone is as they seem.”

  I bristled at this. At least she would keep my secret, as much of it as she knew, anyway; which, given her second sight, was much more than she was letting on. “Thank you for the warning,” I said, somewhat stiffly. “And … thank you.”

  “Of course, my dear. Get home safely, now. And give my greetings to your mother.”

  I left quickly after that.

  27

  A Night for Lovers

  I spent the rest of the day and evening in a state of nervous anxiety, worrying about Ichabod and half expecting Brom to appear on our doorstep with news for my father. And I could do nothing but sit at home and stew.

  The next day, thankfully, Charlotte sent a brief note letting me know Ichabod was much improved. If I wanted to come visit him, she knew he would welcome it.

  With no patience to walk, I had Henry saddle my mare, Starlight, and rode quickly to the Jansens’.

  “Brom Van Brunt shall not be the end of me, as I said,” Ichabod said on my arrival, a crooked smile on his lips.

  Overjoyed to see him looking well, I longed to embrace him where he sat in bed, but settled for holding his hand tightly. “Indeed he shall not,” I said, though his choice of words had filled me with unease.

  “And have you seen him since?” Ichabod asked, his expression suddenly growing worried. “He has not been to see your parents, has he?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of him, and can only hope it will stay that way.”

  Ichabod relaxed slightly. “Good. Good.” The concern had not completely left his face. “He is still a danger to us, though.”

  I squeezed his hand, and tried to make my voice sound as though that very thing did not plague my every thought. “It does not matter,” I said. “We shall do as we planned. You shall ask my father for my hand at the All Hallows’ Eve party.”

  Ichabod looked away and was silent.

  “If you still wish to marry me, that is,” I said.

  “Of course I do,” he said, with gratifying speed. “I just wonder if we should wait that long.”

  I shook my head. “We must not let Brom make us over-hasty,” I said. “In honor, after all, he cannot tell my father.”

  “Honor,” Ichabod nearly spat. “Indeed.”

  “And,” I went on, ignoring him, “we must wait until you are healed. No good will come from drawing his attention to your injury and its cause.”

  Ichabod sighed. “Very well.” He leaned forward and kissed me. “I shall, as I have always done, put my trust in you.”

  * * *

  Charlotte kept Ichabod for observation another few days, but he continued to heal wonderfully. “He has been helping us with some small tasks around the house, in fact,” she informed me as we walked along the bank of the Hudson one day. “He is longing to be away, I know. He is impatient with being cooped up, and eager to get back to his students, though my mother and I have put it about the village that he has been quite ill and is recovering with us. But I told him in no uncertain terms you would never forgive me if something happened to him, and so I must watch over him like a mother wolf over her cub.” Charlotte smiled. “He is the most wonderful man, Katrina. I see it now. I knew he was handsome enough, and amiable, but truly I never understood why you would risk so much for him.” She paused. “But I see it now. I do.”

  I smiled back at her. “I knew you would, in time.”

  “And so I have a gift for you, in a way,” she said, grinning mischievously.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “Tomorrow night, my mother and I are off to see a friend of hers near West Point,” Charlotte said. “We shall be staying the night there.” She paused. “Ichabod is well enough to go home, but I have persuaded him to stay through tomorrow night, for I suggested you might join him.”

  “Oh, Charlotte,” I whispered. “Truly?”

  She nodded. “But you must take care,” she warned. “Let no one see you enter or leave. The neighbors will notice Mother and I are gone, and it is known Ichabod is staying with us. My mother, of course, is not to know.”

  “My mother does not know you are going, does she?” I asked.

  “I cannot see how she would. So you will tell her you are spending the night with me again.”

  I laughed aloud and threw my arms around her. “Bless you, Charlotte. You are wonderful.”

  She returned the embrace. “I expect to be the maid of honor at your wedding,” she said. “And godmother to your first child.”

  “Who else?” I asked, drawing back. “Oh, Charlotte, thank you. Thank you. A thousand times!”

  She left soon afterward, and I spent the afternoon and evening—and much of the night—in a haze of delicious anticipation. A whole night with Ichabod … just the two of us, and with a proper bed!

  * * *

  My lie in place with my mother, I went the next evening to the Jansen cottage. I glanced around surreptitiously to see if anyone observed me, but it was a chilly evening, and most people were inside taking their evening meal and preparing for bed.

  I tried the door and, finding it unlocked, stepped inside, closing it quickly behind me.

  Ichabod had come into the front room at the sound of the door, and we both froze as we caught sight of one another, drinking each other in with the satisfying knowledge that we were alone in this house for a whole night.

  “Katrina,” he whispered. “You are really here. When Charlotte suggested this, I almost could not believe…” He trailed off, still looking at me as though I were some holy vision he had never expected to behold.

  “Nor I,” I said. “Yet here we are.”

  We moved swiftly toward one another. He took me hungrily in his arms, and if his wound pained him, he did not show it. I sank into him eagerly, our mouths crashing together, as though we were starving and would devour one another.

  I am not quite certain how, but eventually we made it into the room Ichabod had been staying, where the bed waited invitingly for us.

  Here, everything slowed down. We took our time undressing one another, stopping to kiss and caress along the way, indulging in a way we could not in the woods. When we made it to the bed—and never before had such a narrow, lumpy mattress seemed like a soft and downy paradise—we leisurely explored one another’s bodies, laughing and sighing and crying out together.

  When Ichabod finally entered me, I nearly wept with the sheer joy of feeling him move inside me once more. We reached the peak of our pleasure together, feeling as familiar to each other as longtime lovers, but somehow new again to
one another in this night that was unlike any other we’d spent together before.

  Afterward, he wrapped me in his arms and fell asleep, and I nestled my head against his shoulder. I ran my fingers gently over his wound, still bandaged, which had once seemed like it could be the end of everything. But it had not. Secure in this knowledge, I soon drifted off as well.

  * * *

  We both woke perhaps an hour later. “I quite forgot my manners,” Ichabod said, stretching his lean, naked body languidly under the coverlet. “Charlotte left us some stew and fresh bread and wine, and it never occurred to me to offer you any.”

  “What a barbarian you are,” I teased. “You simply haul your woman off to bed and tear off her clothes without even offering her any repast.”

  He laughed. “Indeed. I am most base and uncivilized, we have learned.”

  “Well, I shall forgive you this once, for when I arrived I was not hungry in any case.” I let my eyes travel over his body, grinning. “Not for food, anyway.”

  He laughed.

  “Yet now I find I am famished,” I said. “You have quite depleted my energies.”

  “And you mine,” Ichabod said. He rose from the bed and donned his breeches, leaving his chest bare. “Shall we adjourn to the kitchen, then, my lady?”

  I pulled on my petticoat and followed him, lighting the stove to warm the stew as Ichabod set to cutting the bread. I could feel myself smiling with the intimate pleasure of our domesticity: the two of us in the kitchen, readying a meal together.

  This is how it shall be once we are husband and wife, I thought, happiness filling me to my core.

  I got out bowls and silverware, and we set our simple but delicious feast out on the table, and sat down to dine. I poured the wine, serving Ichabod his first like a dutiful country wife. We ate by the dim candlelight, and spoke freely in a way that we had not been able to for a long time, it seemed: how he was healing, of Charlotte’s generosity to us, of our plan for approaching my father. We also began to speak—for the first time in solid, definite plans—of the future that now seemed so close to our grasp.

  “Once we are married, perhaps we can buy a small cottage in the village,” I said, brightening at the thought. “I could ask my father for the appropriate sum as my dowry.”

  Ichabod leaned back in his chair, taking a moment to envision it. “A little cottage just for us,” he said. “As husband and wife.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you can continue teaching, and I shall keep our house and read to my heart’s content.”

  “And,” he said, taking my hand, “raise our children, I should think.”

  “Yes, indeed,” I said, my face flushing with pleasure at the thought. “And I shall teach them their letters and sums until they are old enough to be sent to your school.”

  “You are as skilled and wonderful an artist as any of the old masters of Europe, such is the beauty of the picture you have painted,” he said. “Or perhaps you are a soothsayer, and can foresee the future.”

  I determined not to betray my flicker of unease at these words, at the unwitting reference to the Sight that Charlotte was sure I possessed and Ichabod knew not of. I might wish my words a foretelling, yet any visions I had had were much different, I thought uneasily. But I would not ruin the perfect oasis of happiness we had this night with such musings. “It is no foreseeing,” I said lightly. “One needs no magic to know that we shall make our future what we wish it to be.”

  “We shall,” Ichabod averred.

  “And eventually, of course, we will move into my family’s farmhouse, when it comes time for us to take over the farm,” I said. “And we shall have everything we could possibly desire.”

  Ichabod sighed happily. “I will not pretend that the thought of such bounty, such financial security and even wealth, does not excite me after so many years spent struggling.”

  I smiled. “Soon you will never have to struggle again, nor worry more about such things,” I promised.

  “Simply having you as my wife shall be wealth enough; still, it will be wonderful not to have to worry,” he said.

  “It will be wonderful,” I repeated. “Everything shall be wonderful.”

  Soon afterward, we cleaned up our dinner dishes and went back into the paradise of the bed. We made love again, another slow, luxurious coupling.

  Yet this time we could not seem to fall asleep, and who could blame us, exhilarated and joyful as we were? Neither of us wished to waste our night together sleeping.

  “Tell me a tale,” Ichabod murmured in my ear, his fingers toying with my hair. “You tell the most marvelous tales, my love. Surely there are more spooky tales of ghosts and goblins that you have not yet told me.”

  I smiled uneasily. “Surely we’ve had enough darkness and terror of late.” I suppressed a shiver, thinking not only of the duel and its aftermath but my fearful dreams and visions. I had no wish to inspire more of them.

  “But these are just stories, yes? Legends and nothing more. We need not be afraid.”

  I realized that I no longer believed that, if I ever had. For all my skepticism, I knew that stories always held some truth, else why did we tell them? “So you say now,” I said, “until you must ride home after dark one evening and recall all the tales of the supernatural you have ever heard.”

  “But no one is riding anywhere after dark tonight,” he said, drawing me closer. “We shall be safe and snug in here together.”

  I sighed, unable to deny him, not when we were naked in bed together. “Very well. But only one tale.” I sifted through all the legends in my mind, searching for just the right one. “This is the legend of the Woman in White of Raven Rock.”

  “Is not a woman in white a mournful, weeping sort of spirit?” Ichabod asked.

  “Yes, and you shall see why in this tale.” I cleared my throat and began.

  “During the revolution, there was a famous battle at White Plains, as you no doubt know, and afterward British soldiers sought billet with the local folk. Two officers claimed a cottage where a young woman lived alone—her brothers were off fighting with Washington—and demanded she shelter and feed them. She obliged, having no true choice in the matter, and during the course of their stay, she fell in love with the younger of the two officers, a lieutenant.

  “He returned her love, and the two planned to run away together once his service was ended, someplace where armies and loyalty could not trouble them. He promised to return for her in two months’ time, when they would be married and go away. During that time, he was obliged to continue in his service under General Howe in the British army, and while she waited, she sewed her wedding dress.”

  Despite my initial reluctance to tell a story, I loved having Ichabod’s undivided attention, and found I was quite enjoying myself. I had always loved these stories throughout my life, and they defined this place where I lived. It was a novel experience to tell these local stories to someone who had never heard them before; in a way, I was experiencing them anew myself.

  “Once two months had passed, she climbed up to Raven Rock, a tall point deep within the forest. From there she could spy the waters of the Hudson, and waited for sight of her love’s ship.

  “All night she waited, sometimes crying out, ‘My love! Have you come for me?’ She would not be moved from her vigil, not even when an icy wind whipped up and brought a blizzard with it. Still she remained, waiting for her beloved.

  “In the morning, two huntsmen came upon her there at Raven Rock, frozen to death in her white wedding dress. To this day, those who venture there—especially at night, and especially during a winter storm—claim they can hear her crying, ‘My love! Have you come for me?’” I shivered again, at the eeriness of the tale, and in sadness for the poor woman who had died rather than give up on her love. Suddenly I understood her in a way I hadn’t before. “She still keeps her vigil there, and most say she will until her beloved returns.”

  Ichabod’s arms tightened around me silently. “And w
hat became of her lieutenant?” he asked at last.

  “No one knows. His name has been lost, so it is impossible to find out. He may have been killed in battle, or taken prisoner, or perhaps he deserted her and ran off with another woman. We shall never know.”

  “A sad tale,” Ichabod said.

  “Yes,” I agreed quietly. “Very sad.”

  After a moment had passed, I spoke again. “Although if that was not eerie enough for you,” I added, trying for a lighter tone, “I should mention that Raven Rock is not far from the infamous clearing where the Headless Horseman is said to have met his end.”

  Now it was Ichabod’s turn to shiver. “A truly haunted place, then.”

  “Indeed.”

  “All of Sleepy Hollow, it seems to me, is a truly haunted place.”

  I had never thought of it in such a way before. “Perhaps,” I conceded.

  “And you have added to its magic,” he said, “by weaving spells around me with your tales.”

  I smiled at him. “Surely I do not tell these tales half so well as all the old Dutch farmwives.”

  “I have had occasion to know many of them do spin a good yarn,” he acknowledged, “but you have a true gift for storytelling, Katrina. You should write these tales down.”

  I laughed. “For whom? And what purpose? Everyone around here already knows them.”

  “For newcomers like me, then. Or perhaps they could even be published, to show the world what history and imagination the Dutch have in their river valley. Surely I could not be the only one to find such tales so fascinating.”

  I laughed again. “And I should write them and expect to be published? A woman author? Away with you,” I said, shoving his shoulder playfully.

  His face remained seriously. “Why not? This is a new country we are living in, Katrina. We, its people, can make it anything we wish it to be. What do you wish our nation to be?”

  I had no answer. I lay awake for a long time after he fell asleep, pondering his words.

  * * *

  Later in the night, Ichabod woke me to make love to me again, and I smiled in the dark with my pure joy. And this, too, I thought, shall be a frequent occurrence once we are married. This, too, shall be how it is all the time, and we can spend each and every night in each other’s arms.