The Magic Mirror

by Susan Hill Long

  Now it was Margaret—tugging—who looked from the mirror to Minka and back again. The wild-eyed man in the glass faded, rippled, and then a man dressed in a knight’s tunic came into view. He was not handsome, but he did have strong teeth, large and square as fence posts. And there, too, was a younger Minka, smiling coquettishly. Margaret blinked in surprise and let go the handle.

  Minka elbowed Margaret out of the way, clearing ample room to beat her breast in anguish with one hand and grip the mirror tightly in the other. “Bad luck, this!” Minka wailed. “This wretched fate is what I save you from, by marrying you off to the hunchback! While I, I am cursed to revisit the greatest torment of my miserable life, all over again!” She stared hungrily into the mirror. “And again!”

  Things were not making sense. The magic didn’t work the way it ought. While Minka ranted and moaned, Margaret stared into the hearth and went over in her mind everything she’d seen in the mirror. First she’d seen nothing but gray. Then she’d seen the wild-eyed man. Then she’d seen Hugo. And just now she’d seen the wild-eyed man again, and as well the view outside his window. And then she’d seen Sweetheart in the glass. What was the meaning of it all?

  Margaret’s musings were interrupted by a heavy hand upon her shoulder; Minka was leaning on Margaret as though she were the traded crutch.

  “Oh, I cannot bear it!” Minka moaned, and with another squeeze of Margaret’s shoulder she retired to her room behind the chimney, taking the mirror with her. Margaret could hear her crying.

  It was the touch, Margaret understood with the suddenness of a cool breeze before a rainstorm. Hugo had grabbed her, pulled her to him, and after that she had seen him in the mirror. And it was when Minka’s hand had touched hers, tussling over the mirror, that she’d seen what Minka saw: Sweetheart.

  Deep in thought, she rubbed the back of her neck. The magic worked differently for her than for Minka. Minka had not been able to see the wild-eyed man at all. Not even when their hands touched. Minka saw her own vision in the glass, but not Margaret’s.

  The wild-eyed man. She wrapped her arms around her middle. Why would he appear to her? She would focus on the man, crazed though he seemed. The bars on the window. The scene beyond the chamber. The spires. Something shifted in her mind. The spires. The great round window, a web of masonry and glass. Could it be the rose window of Knightsbridge? The cathedral in the royal city was famous for its wall of glass. Even Minka had considered leaving the house and facing the whims of the world to kneel before the rose window, if only she could be sure she’d not be trampled to death by the speckled horse of a red-bearded stranger.

  “Is the man in the glass…my father?” Margaret whispered. She wanted to make the notion real by saying it aloud. “Is he alive? In Knightsbridge?” She dared to think it so. To be certain, she needed the magic mirror, which anyway belonged to her and not to Minka.

  Margaret stood. You have no family, no prospects, Minka had told her, and so she had engaged her to Hugo. Margaret had always thought of Minka as family, and though it wasn’t much, they had each other, didn’t they? Yet how readily Minka would pitch her away, like so much slops in the bucket. What if she did have family, and prospects? Then came another thought, as new as dawn: mayhap she had a place in the world. Not as wife of Hugo the woolmonger, nor as the town Maggot. Someplace good.

  She would go to Knightsbridge and find there what she would.

  At an hour just past the lowest of her life, she vowed—to God and to herself—to run away.

  Later, Margaret set about preparing a measly supper, noisily putting on the table no fish (Minka had tossed it out the window) but bread and ale and turnip soup. Reflected in the murky broth, Margaret’s face looked back at her in a very un-magic way.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Mags,” Minka said with a sidelong glance, “but the mirror is mine, and I’ve hidden it away. For what if the magic has a limit?” she wondered aloud. “I must be sparing. I must mete it out like salt.” She spent the rest of the evening planning how best to conserve the magic.

  Maggie said nothing and bided her time.

  When the hearth fires were banked and the lights extinguished, Margaret dressed in both her kirtles, the russet and the gray, and quietly put into her satchel her few belongings: an extra pair of hose with a hole she’d yet to mend, the scrap of soft green velvet from the dress she’d been found in as a babe, a pretty blue feather, and a cup. Up in her sleeping loft, Margaret lay on her straw pallet, clutching the satchel, and waited for Minka’s snoring to begin.

  There. Like the snort of the peddler’s nag.

  A quick search turned up the mirror under Minka’s mattress ticking. Another moment and she had it in her hands. She peered into its surface but could see nothing in the dark. She shoved it in her satchel. Minka groaned and rolled over. Margaret froze, but Minka slept on. She thought to shove her hand again beneath the mattress, and a slow smile spread across her lips as her fingers found what they sought: the little horn comb. Into the satchel with it.

  Grab the food, don the cloak. Done. Margaret reached for the latch, pulled open the door, turned. Her gaze moved slowly about the room, blue-lit by the moon: the table and the hard bench, the heavy cauldron on the hearth for brewing day, every common thing silvered and softened in the indistinct light. She fancied this must be like looking out from inside the mirror.

  She swallowed hard. The silence of the house seemed a reproach. By what faith did she believe herself fit for such a journey?

  An arrow of guilt shot through her at leaving the one who, though bitter and mean, was nevertheless her caretaker and companion. She would have liked to explain. To say, after all, farewell and Godspeed. If she could write, she would have left a message. But Margaret could not write, nor could Minka read.

  Minka gave a fart and snorted in her sleep. Margaret would not be sentimental. Pinning her cloak close about her throat, she lurched crookedly out the door into the dark night. Even without her crutch she felt unexpectedly strong: if she ran afoul of Thomas the miller’s son this night, she did believe she’d box his ears.

  Margaret kept to the shadows and hastened to Market Cross, for it was late and the taverns would be closing. Her plans went only as far as finding the peddler Bilious and hoping he could be persuaded to travel west, the way toward Knightsbridge.

  Bilious was not to be found. A blow, to be sure, and again Margaret thought to turn back. She saw a couple of travelers and asked them where they were going; when they referred to cities and townships she thought to be east, she hurried away without answering their questions.

  But a new scheme presented itself soon enough. Margaret listened to the men outside the tavern, most of them drunk on ale and chatty as geese. The tinker who spoke of Bumbles Green, he would be traveling west. It was a simple matter to find the man’s cart, with its collections of shears and snips and nippers for patching pots and things. Simple enough to climb into the back and conceal herself there beneath a heavy canvas. Simple enough to pray she’d not be discovered, for what else could she do?

  She must have slept, for the movement of the cart woke her some hours later. Dawn neared, and she was on her way.

  Margaret’s thoughts bounced along with the cartwheels, rolling over and over her circumstances. She was a fool to venture out alone and without protection on the road. What if she never found her way to where she was bound? What if she was wrong about the man being in Knightsbridge? Minka would never take her back. Margaret was terrified to end like Beady Bone, wandering and begging, beaten and bloodied. She could leap from the tinker’s cart even now and soon be back at home on her bed of straw in the attic, and no one the wiser, including herself. She sat up straight in the cart and held her satchel to her chest, watching the road run away.

  She might still jump from the tinker’s wagon! Should she?

  As if deciding for her, the horse gathered sudden speed; the resulting jolt pitched her onto her back in the wagon. The clomp of the horse’s hoove
s, the ka-lump of the rolling cartwheels, and the very beating of her heart carried her farther and farther from everything she knew.

  In the morning, Minka stretched her arms up and gave her head a good scratching. With a sharp pang of joy she remembered: Sweetheart! She smiled, cheeks tightening with the unaccustomed movement. But when she groped beneath the mattress, her smile slipped. She tumbled out of bed. On her knees, she stuck her hand under the mattress all the way up to her armpit and swept the ticking. She stood and brought the bedding with her, tossing it to the floor. No mirror.

  “The knotty-pated baggage,” she hissed, “she took it, I’ll wager, or my name isn’t Minka Pottentott!” Minka stormed out of the room and bellowed, “You clay brain! You muddy-mettled oaf!” Snorting like an ox, she waited for Margaret to climb down and cower, but was met instead with stone silence. “Get down here, you beetle-headed scullion, before I climb the ladder and pitch you down myself!”

  Minka prayed that Mags would come down, for she certainly could neither climb the ladder nor pitch a well-nigh full-grown girl over the side, even so slight a one as Mags.

  Nothing, not a sound.

  Minka stared at the ladder. She stared at the dead embers on the hearth. She stared into her room at the back, where the missing mirror was. Or would be, that is, were it not missing.

  The limping, timid mouse, she’d never gone anywhere save the town market, and once the fair at Grimsby. Always at hand she was, since the day Father Bernard dumped her like a runty lamb in Minka’s care. Always underfoot, always at the table, always coming or going to market, always sleeping in the house they shared. Minka caught a breath. Always here, with her.

  No, Mags would not simply go out. She’d not simply go for a stroll beyond the hedgerows, or to picnic with a friend. She hadn’t any friend. No one but Minka, and Minka was no friend; she wasn’t meant to be. She tugged her wimple over her wild straw hair. No, Minka thought. Maggie was gone. And with her, the mirror.

  “Bad luck, that!” she gasped. “Oh, dear. Oh, me. God’s wounds!”

  And after only a moment of hesitation, despite having not set foot outside the house in months, Minka decided. She took up her good kirtle and pulled it on over her linens. “Surely it’s shrunk since last I wore it,” she said, stuffing her arms in the sleeves and attempting to tug the center closed across her bosom. “I wouldn’t bother for that frothy, dismal-dreaming baggage,” she huffed, “but I must have the mirror!”

  Minka found an old felt hat with a deep brim, and put it on her head on top of her wimple, leaving a ruff showing below the hat all around. The assemblage looked like a cowpat atop a puff pastry. “Oh, that miserable, muddy-mettled crookshank!”

  She pulled the too-tight kirtle tighter still across her broad chest, and attempted to fasten the open front with laces too short to span the gap. “Bad luck,” muttered Minka. She tied the dress as far up the front as the laces would go. Then she took a wooden spoon and stuck it through the holes in the kirtle’s front facing, to secure the remaining gap, and prayed the spoon would hold.

  As she grabbed her cloak, her gaze caught on the peg where the crutch used to hang, before Margaret traded it away for the magic mirror. Minka shook her head. How would the poor little ninny manage without it?

  “Oh, Mags, my girl,” she said softly. “What have you done?” She closed her eyes and put hand to lips to stifle a single cry. “What have you gone and done?”

  Then, shaking herself with a burst of trumped-up gusto, Minka opened the door on all the bad luck outside it and stepped into the street.

  “Saints preserve us,” Minka muttered as she hurried away from the house.

  By the time Minka stomped her way to the village center, it was midmorning. No one had seen Margaret—not the cooper’s wife, nor the butcher, nor the miller’s son—and all were surprised to see Minka out and about. “You might not stare so,” she said, “as if I’ve grown a second head.”

  All the while, Minka looked round and over her shoulder, knowing bad luck typically approached from a slant. She preferred to face bad luck head-on, lest she be trampled to death by it like poor Sweetheart, God rest him. She put her hand to her cheek, thinking of his image in the magic mirror. She must find it!

  She looked in the church and at Market Cross and down along the river and behind the mill and everywhere. Margaret was not to be found. She was gone.

  Gasping from the brisk walk and unaccustomed emotion, Minka stood in the street outside the tavern and took several deep breaths.

  “Forgive me, madam, but I couldn’t help noticing your distress” came a voice.

  Minka turned and gave the rough stranger a squint, on guard for bad luck: an itinerant, by his traveled appearance, humped over from driving a cart, no doubt, minus most of his teeth, missing one leg from disease or accident or the wars, and supporting his bulk upon…She gasped. Yes, by St. Matilda! Upon a too-short crutch! Minka’s gaze snapped to the man’s face, and she began to shout.

  “You eye-offending, gorbellied thug! What have you done with her?” She shook her fist at the man. “What have you done with her, I say! Where is she?”

  “Who?” demanded Bilious, for he was only moments awake, and still, if truth be told, a bit drunk. “What?”

  “The crutch! How came you by that crutch?” Minka lunged for him.

  Bilious reared back to escape her. “I traded for it, fair and square,” he said, “if it’s any business of yours.”

  Minka put her hands on her hips in a threatening manner. “It is my business,” Minka said, her voice rising steeply, “since the object belongs to me, and its bearer also belongs to me. Furthermore,” she went on, her voice now reaching the pitch of a falcon shrieking before plunging to seize its prey, “the whereabouts of such bearer is certainly business of mine, and what do you know about it?”

  With that, Minka yanked the crutch from under Bilious’s arm and began to beat him over the head with it.

  “Stop, Dame Beat-About! Stop, I say!” he cried.

  Suddenly exhausted, Minka let go the crutch, and it fell to the ground at their feet. Bilious, on guard for further menace, slowly bent and picked up the crutch, and then held it firmly under his arm.

  “I am innocent, good dame,” Bilious said, “excepting an honest trade for a bit of…glass.” Eyes narrowed, he peered sideways at her. “A mirror it were.”

  Minka shifted uncomfortably. “Er, yes. I believe my girl may have said something about a mirror.” She glanced left and right. “She showed it to me, in fact.”

  Bilious leaned forward. “Did you, errr, see…anything in it?”

  Minka put her hands to her cheeks. The hat brim rolled like the belly of a dying fish. “Yes, by God, I did.”

  “And now you want it back?”

  “Yes, by God, I do!” Minka cried, her hands in fists. “And I want her back, as well!”

  “The one the village boys call Maggot?”

  “Maggot! Why, you cursed cur!” With that, Minka set upon the sluggard again. He covered his head with his hands until Minka’s fury was spent. Then he sat down on the bench outside the tavern and waited while Minka muttered and paced.

  “But where on God’s earth would she go?” Minka stopped pacing and looked at the peddler, noticing as she did the four teeth in his head, which seemed to point in the four directions of the wind. “North?” she said. “South? East? West?” Minka turned all around. Dizzy, she tipped dangerously to one side.

  Bilious hopped up and tried to catch her. Buckling under her weight and thrown off balance, he still managed to ease the woman down gently in the street and keep her from landing on a steaming pile of ever-present dung.

  “You might have caught me!” Minka panted.

  “I might have, if I had two good legs, and you didn’t weigh twelve stone and ten!”

  “Well! Hands off! Off, I say! Poor defenseless woman.”

  “Poor defenseless woman, my absent leg,” Bilious muttered, rubbing his head.

&n
bsp; “Well, help me up, then!” Minka cried. “A gentleman would help a lady!”

  “A lady would cover up her plump knees and great bosom so that her linens didn’t show!”

  “Oh! Humph! Whatever’s to become of me! I must go after her! I must find her and save her from—from—from bad luck! Since you’ve taken the poor girl’s crutch, she’ll not have got far on foot,” Minka huffed. “She’ll have found passage with a”—she gasped—“a stranger. She’s off in who knows what direction with a stranger traveling who knows where!” All this while, she was reaching one hand back to draw round her cloak, and clutching with the other the front of her kirtle to attempt to meet the two sides in the middle, but her efforts failed, as did her makeshift button, which popped like a cork. She looked around the cobbles in dismay.

  Bilious picked up the fastener.

  “Your spoon, my lady,” he said gallantly. “Bilious Brighton,” he added, introducing himself with a broad smile that exposed all four teeth to best advantage.

  Minka could not have known how very imposing an impression she made upon Bilious, who reckoned any woman who would wear such a hat and make such a fuss was a fearsome and magnificent creature.

  “If I might suggest it,” Bilious said, bowing deeply and taking note of the woman’s stout shoulders and ample hips, “for a fair fee, you might ride with me to Eastham.” She could probably be counted on for some heavy lifting, and that misshapen old hat could be used to gather tinder for the fire.

  “Certainly not!” Minka said. But even as she uttered the words, she knew that by this hour all the other merchants had traveled on, and that his was the only ride she’d get. She looked Bilious up and down. He was fat, and he smelled, and those teeth! She didn’t know if they made her want to laugh or stuff his head in a grain sack. Nonetheless, though lacking leg, teeth, and looks, this Bilious brute was in possession of wagon and nag.