A MAGICAL AFFAIR
by
VICTORIA GORDON
© Victoria Gordon 1994
There is a Ruth who is a witch, and this is still for her,
Although there’s a Rosemary who deserves her place, too.
CHAPTER ONE
Ruth didn’t remember noticing the envelope when she’d grabbed up her mail in the final, splashing run to the relative sanctuary of her doorway. Not surprising, she now thought, considering the flood of rain across her glasses, the driving torrent that had sluiced her wavy dark hair down across the nape of her nurse’s cloak.
And yet ... she should have noticed, even then. Snug in her rocking-chair, the soothing flicker of her fireplace slowly massaging warmth into her exhausted body, she could only stare at the unopened missive and wonder at the apprehension it caused.
No return address: hardly significant. She didn’t recognise the typeface in which her Launceston address was typed. There was nothing, really, all that unusual about die envelope. So why the frisson of sensation that crept light-footed along her spine?
‘I’m getting spooked,’ she murmured aloud, then shivered visibly as she mentally scolded herself for doing so, hearing his voice in her mind, laughing, telling her she only talked to herself so she’d be sure of liking the answers. But she denied him now, thinking, It’s probably the music, accepting and yet denying that there, too, he remained a part of her.
Scarcely heard in the background was the almost sole legacy of Ruth’s short-lived marriage; the love of baroque music created in her by Kurtis Goodwin tied him to her in memory, but the soothing magic she found in it was of itself sufficient to outweigh his influence, sometimes enough that she could almost forget him.
She closed her eyes for a moment, revelling in the warmth, the quiet of the soothing music, then turned her attention again to the envelope and its invisible aura of disquiet.
She reached out, withdrew, then reached again with one close-cropped fingernail, tentatively inserting it beneath the envelope’s flap. A quick, decisive rip and it was done; but Ruth still had to force herself to free the heavyweight bond — only a single sheet, she noticed — from its containment.
As she huddled in the chair, it seemed that the entire room had taken on an aura, threatening, unseen, but somehow tangible, striding over the music with a dominating tread that reminded her of Kurtis’ forceful movements.
Shaking her head, flinging that memory away, she took a deep breath and flipped the single sheet of paper open, only to fling it away from her and lurch to her feet with a cry of soul-wrenching pain as she read the salutation.
‘Dear my lady witch’, it said; and her suddenly drunken brain took in only those four words as the paper fluttered towards the fire, Ruth almost following in her panic.
She had the presence of mind to clutch at the letter, snatching it from the flames despite all of her being crying out to her to leave it; let it burn. But even once she’d saved the letter, Ruth found it impossible to force her vision past that salutation and the haunted visions it dragged from within her.
Shaking her head violently, she strode into the hallway to stand, all one hundred and fifty-six centimetres — five feet one and a half — of her trembling as she stared at the stranger’s face in her mirror.
Witch? Easy to believe now, she thought. Her hair, ever unruly in its tortured waves and now roughly towelled dry, floated round her head in a dishevelled ebony halo. Her large, pale grey eyes — eyes she’d been told so often could change at will from serenity blue to fury green — were just grey now. Pale grey, death-grey, a colour she had seen all too often as a skin colour in the nursing home where she now worked. And huge! They seemed to dominate her face, the pupils thrust into black relief against the lightness of her irises.
She looked away, then back, seeing no change and expecting none. The lips of the image trembled, drawn back into a fearful smile that revealed slightly protuberant canine teeth that for all of her adult life she had felt marred her smile, making it a thing seldom freely given, and always self-consciously. Schoolmates had ridiculed them; even her mother had once remarked upon them unkindly. Ruth had never quite forgotten that comment, coming as it did after the dentist had declared it too late to alter the situation without drastic measures at an unaffordable price.
Only Kurtis had, at least in the beginning, seemed immune to such comment. ‘They’re part of you,’ he had said, dismissing her flawed image as irrelevant in the face of his love for her... ‘For all of you. As you are; as you will be.’
Ruth stared into the mirror, wallowing for a moment in this image of her uglier than he’d ever seen, then flung herself away, rejecting the impulse to self-pity.
‘Who ever heard of a witch without a gap tooth’ she growled as she hunched in her rocking-chair, eyes captivated by the dancing flames and arms wrapped round the pain inside her. Pain helped not at all by repeating his words out loud.
Eleven months, she thought. Eleven months since she’d fled the emptiness of their hollow, impossible marriage. Another month and she would have been free, delivered from the shame and failure by the twelve-month separation rule of the Family Law Court.
Eleven months. Longer apart than married, she thought, and sneered, because they’d been longer apart even while married, if the truth be known. Looked at from the distance granted by time, she wondered if they’d ever been together at all.
‘Dear my lady witch...’ Ruth cowered in the chair, unable to bring her tear-misted eyes past those four words. She felt herself twitching like a dog in the fire’s warmth, her nerves so jangled she could hardly hold on to this single, terrifying slip of paper. Her eyes slid out of focus, making the dancing flames a featureless curtain beyond which lay memories...
~~~
She had met him first at a party given by a fellow nurse, when she was living and working in Hobart. To this day, she didn’t know what fickle threads of fate had brought either of them to the party; she herself had decided to go only at the last possible instant. She wasn’t a party person. She liked her crowds small and manageable or big enough to hide in. Non-threatening. This party had been anything but, and she’d sought solace from the thumping music and seemingly inane activities by tucking herself in a nook between wall and refrigerator in the darkened kitchen alcove, wine glass in hand and mind in neutral.
She had been on her third glass, past her usual limit, when Kurtis Goodwin had stepped into the room carrying with him that aura of command she now always associated with him.
He, too, had had glass in hand, but he had paused in the act of opening the fridge door to peer down at her, his eyes obviously still adjusting to the alcove’s low lighting. The silence between them had stretched until Ruth thought it would snap like a weakened elastic before Kurtis had spoken to her. His voice was rough, like tyres on gravel. Rough, low, yet somehow alive with a strange power. And an accent ... not Australian, she’d thought; North American?
‘And what are you?’ he asked, teeth bared in a wry, subversive grin. ‘Not a dishwasher, surely? And the oven’s over there.’
Ruth blamed it on that third glass. Surely there was no logic to the way she revealed her own teeth in a savage smile and croaked as best she could manage.
‘I’m the kitchen witch,’ she replied. ‘Show respect, sir, or I shall turn your wine into water.’ The she lapsed into silence as she saw laughter rising in his eyes like a flood. It was no mirage; she saw it, recognised it, and for some strange reason relished it.
He couldn’t have been much above average height, she realised, but in the closeness of the situation he fairly loomed above her slight, diminutive self. Dark, perhaps slightly auburn hair with flashes of grey above his ears. Eyes ... some colour, bu
t too dark here to be revealed. And it wouldn’t be their colour that first registered anyway, she realised, but their weariness, their expression of world-worn sadness.
Late thirties? Early forties? Impossible to tell with a man like this. Those wondrously compassionate eyes seemed a hundred years old; the rest of him denied it. He was poised before her like an athlete, had moved so when he entered the room.
He stayed unmoving, silent. His eyes roamed almost carelessly along the length of her, and Ruth sensed he was quite literally memorising her. She could feel those eyes, weary, tired, but knowing, almost tactically touching her at points throughout their journey. Her response was involuntary but none the less severe; her nipples throbbed to that tangible caress, her tummy went all fluttery and she had the most insane urge to thrust out one shapely — or so she’d been told — leg in a model’s pose to assist his assessment.
‘Not much of you,’ he finally commented, returning his eyes to meet her gaze. ‘But then I suppose that isn’t important, if you really are a witch.’
‘I’m very large in spirit,’ she quipped, astonishing herself in the process. What on earth was she doing? Ruth had never considered herself excessively shy; reserved was perhaps a better description, but neither was she usually this flippant.
‘Oh, I can see that by the way you’re getting into that evil red,’ he grinned. ‘Seeing I have control of the fridge door, I’d be happy to fill your glass if you’d be so kind as to empty it.’
‘Not a chance,’ Ruth replied without thinking. ‘I’m the original two-pot screamer, and this is my third.’
‘Ominous,’ he replied. ‘Haven’t you got some spell or another to counter the effects?’
‘The best of all,’ Ruth heard herself saying. ‘It’s called abstinence.’
And to her astonishment he laughed, a genuine, lusty, honest laugh, followed by a shake of his head before he turned those incredible eyes upon her once again.
‘I’ve heard of virgin queens, but a virgin witch is well and truly beyond my experience,’ he chuckled. ‘Probably not surprising since you’re my first witch of any kind.’
‘That wasn’t what I was talking about,’ Ruth snapped before she had time to think, then could have kicked herself — or him! He’d deliberately led her into that, and his eyes fairly shouted his triumph at succeeding.
‘Good.’ Just the single word, but it spoke volumes, accompanied by the look in his eye. Suddenly her safe little niche between fridge and wall made her claustrophobic. She could feel her breath shortening, her body tightening in a poise for flight. But flee where? This suddenly dangerous stranger blocked her only exit, unless she truly could fly.
And, as if he’d read her mind, the man shifted his body so as to block her exit less, to give her room to move if she really wanted to. Not without having to press past him, touching him, increasing her awareness of him, one didn’t need to be a witch to realise that. But still there was a certain courtesy in the gesture, as if he had sensed the threat and deliberately removed it.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he suddenly said, ‘that, being a witch and all, you might have a decent spell to counter three days without sleep? I’m so overtired I think I’ve forgotten how to sleep.’
‘You’d hardly need a spell, then,’ she replied, her training rushing to the fore as she suddenly realised the man before her was swaying on his feet with exhaustion. ‘All you need to do, I expect, is lie down somewhere.’
And she stiffened, waiting for the obvious ‘your place or mine’ response, suddenly aware of just how stupid she might be being. But he fooled her, and Ruth found great satisfaction in that, somehow.
‘Social obligations prohibit it,’ was the reply. ‘I’m here more on business than for pleasure, and from the looks of it I’ll be toughing it out for a few hours yet.’
‘Well, then all I can suggest is that you give the grog a miss,’ she found herself opining. ‘Otherwise you’re liable to need a wake-up spell, not a sleeping pill.’
‘I seldom drink,’ he replied, making the statement neither a brag nor an apology. ‘Do witches have names, by the way? Mine’s Kurtis Goodwin.’
‘Ruth Chapman,’ she replied, and found herself dipping a slight curtsy in response to his slightly wavery bow. And he was smiling. Even half dead with exhaustion, he exhibited a quirky sense of humour she couldn’t help but like.
So when he reached out for her hand, she accepted the gesture, only to catch her breath with complete astonishment as he slowly, deliberately, lifted it to meet his descending lips, never taking his eyes from her own.
Insane, she whispered in her mind. Yet couldn’t help but be drawn by the intensity of the moment. This man might be playing games, but his eyes said he took even his games very seriously. His lips touched her hand in a genuine caress, and his eyes fairly glowed as they poured seduction into the entire gesture.
When he murmured, ‘My lady witch,’ Ruth caught her breath once more, astonished at her own reaction. For just an instant she felt as if her sedate little black dress had been transformed into a dazzling evening gown, as if her rowdy hair had suddenly become tame and managed, as if the dingy little kitchen alcove had become a medieval room, a magic place.
Just for a moment, but it startled her, And this must have shown, because he released her fingertips even as she flinched inwardly at the strangeness of her feelings.
‘Every second woman in the place tonight seems to be a nurse of some kind,’ he said then. ‘Are you...?’
‘At Calvary,’ she replied. ‘And you?’
‘I’m what used to be known as an entrepreneur before the label became something of a dirty word,’ he replied with an enigmatic grin. ‘Speaking of which, I’d best return to the fray before my business interest falls in love or some such thing and the whole performance goes down the tube,’
He shook his head, the gesture as weary as his eyes. ‘This has been a helluva trip,’ he muttered, speaking as much to himself as to her. ‘I love Hobart, but sometimes I wonder about the way they do things here.’
‘You’d do better to go home to bed,’ Ruth said impulsively. ‘I don’t see how anybody could concentrate on business in the shape you’re in.’
Which gained her a sudden, rueful grin.
‘I’ve been doing it for twenty years,’ he said. ‘And while my shape mightn’t be as ... bewitching as yours, don’t go writing me off as a geriatric yet. I’ve got plenty of good years left.’
‘I wasn’t...’ She paused as his eyes told her he hadn’t been at all insulted by her earlier remark, was merely stirring a bit.
‘Of course you weren’t. A proper witch — and I’m dead certain you are a proper witch — would have used her second sight to see me as I really am,’ he said. ‘But, on the other hand, a proper witch could probably cast some sort of spell on this bloke I’m dickering with so that he’d be as tired as I am; then he could stop trying so damned hard to impress me with all the gorgeous girls he knows and I could flee back to the Sheraton and my lonely but oh, so welcoming bed.’
The Sheraton... ‘You’re not local, then?’ A silly thing to ask, she told herself even as the words emerged. Of course he wasn’t local; everything about him fairly shouted at a worldliness far beyond Hobart’s parochial confines. Not that it was anything specific — his suit displayed careful tailoring, the gleaming shoes looked expensive, and the thin gold watch she’d seen revealed as he’d taken her hand also fitted the mould of wealthy, worldly businessman.
But who could tell, these days? So much of everyone seemed to be a facade, and in business suits all men looked much of a muchness. Except, she realised, this one. His persona was too strong, too thoroughly defined, to be of any but his own making.
‘Not local anywhere any more,’ he replied. ‘Canada, originally, mostly Australia these days. I had a home once, but I sort of lost it in the wheeling and dealing, to be honest. Just now I’m basing myself in Sydney, with clothing stashes in half a dozen other big cities.’
>
‘You don’t sound as if you like it much,’ Ruth said. ‘Why do you do it if you get no pleasure from it?’
‘All I know how to do, and when it’s good it’s very, very good,’ he replied, again with that wry, cynical grin.
‘Like the little girl with the little curl …’ and his hand lifted to touch at Ruth’s rowdy locks ‘right in the middle of her forehead.’
‘When she was good she was very, very good and when she was bad she was horrid’. The words of the nursery rhyme tripped through her mind, but Ruth was far more aware of the light gentleness of his touch, the way he made a simple gesture into an intimacy.
And then, too soon, he was turning away to rinse his glass at the sink, fill it with water, and down the contents in a gesture both weary and savage.
‘Right,’ he said, quite obviously speaking to himself. ‘Up and at ‘em, boyo!’ He moved towards the doorway, then paused, spun on his heel, and bowed low towards where Ruth still stood.
‘My apologies, lady witch,’ he murmured with a half- grin. ‘But do I have your permission to withdraw? Less pleasant than our dalliance, certainly, but business does await.’
Ruth’s hand extended itself as if with its own life, and as he bent his lips to it with a secret smile she heard herself speaking flowery words of permission while the touch of his mouth against her fingers sent tendrils of ... something that rippled through her entire body. Something quite inexplicable, but very, very nice.
She stayed for a moment, in awe of both the situation and her reactions to it, then followed Kurtis Goodwin out into the pandemonium.
He didn’t stay long after that. Ruth noticed him deep in conversation with another man in business clothes, then with their hostess. And twice she caught him looking at her, his sad eyes gentle with some unspoken message, one cocked eyebrow acknowledging her existence, but he didn’t return to her and when she looked a few minutes later he was gone.
Gone without so much as a farewell... It bothered her for some obscure reason; she found herself thinking of him, seeing those eyes in her mind as she drove home not much later. Sliding into sleep, she felt again the touch of his lips on her fingers, even more so that curiously intimate touch at her forehead.
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