The Magic Mirror

by Susan Hill Long

  Lucy turned onto Claremont Street and disappeared through a low doorway, beneath a sign picturing a mortar and pestle. Margaret turned the latch. The shop was dim, brighter by the hearth.

  “Closed,” said a voice. “Apothecary’s out.”

  Then the old woman turned from the fire, rising from a crouch with bellows in hand. Her face lit with astonishment, then went vacant, open-then-shut like the shopkeeper’s door, as one by one the party shed their masks.

  “I don’t know nothing about nothing,” the madwoman uttered, as if she could read Margaret’s thoughts. Then she turned her back and picked up a poker to rattle the embers, snapping as they shifted and licked now with flame.

  “I set you free,” Margaret said. “All I ask in return is your story.”

  “I’m not ready,” said the crone, with a shake of her gray head. “I—I’m not ready,” she said again, and her voice cracked. “I’ve work to do.”

  “Please,” said Minka, and Margaret turned to her in surprise, having never before heard the word pass Minka’s lips. The madwoman moved her head a fraction and watched Minka out of the corner of her eye.

  “This one has traveled far to learn the truth,” Minka said, pointing at Margaret. “And that one,” she said, pointing at Petronilla, “has endured much in the covering up of it. We’ve reason to think you know sommat of the truth.”

  Margaret had seen the old woman in the glass—the crone would speak! “Tell us what you know!” she cried, as she yanked the mirror from her satchel and shook it in the air.

  The old woman stood still. She gaped at the mirror. Twice she opened her mouth and shut it, squinting hard. She frowned and cocked her head. Then her shoulders drooped as if yielding to a heavy burden, and, setting aside the poker, she turned to face the small party again.

  “Listen, then,” she said at last.

  She was a midwife, she told them. Years ago, before her imprisonment.

  “And why were you imprisoned, Lucy?” Petronilla interrupted. “You seem hardly mad at all,” she added, but the old woman waved a dismissive hand.

  “I did deliver the child, the daughter of Queen Isobel and Armand, the first king consort.” The woman turned and poked the fire again, disturbing the embers to burn with more heat. “She were a dear baby, full of piss and vinegar, yet sweet as honey, too.” She paused, staring into the fire. “A person doesn’t guide a baby into this world without she gets some feeling for the child,” she murmured.

  The madwoman half turned to Margaret, eyes narrowed. Light from dancing flames slashed her face. “They say that child is you,” she said, “all grow’d up and come back. The child Beatrice…”

  Petronilla cleared her throat. “She never knew her given name, and goes by Margaret now.”

  “Aye.” The crone nodded. “They say it’s you,” she said, “but they’re wrong.”

  Everyone began to sputter and object and crease their brows and talk at once, uttering “what?” and “why?” and “who are you to say?”

  All at once the madwoman reached and grabbed Margaret by the hair! Margaret yelped in surprise and confusion, but before the others could react (though Minka’s hand shot out for Maggie’s crutch), the crone let Margaret loose. “You are not she!” she said. “You are not she!”

  The room went silent, but for a soft rustling from above—mice? Too loud, too large a sound for mice—and the hiss of water on the boil.

  “As I thought—as I knew—you are not she,” the old woman said again. Tears ran down her cheeks, and for a moment she squeezed her eyes shut.

  “How—how do you know?” Margaret was stunned as much by the woman’s tears as by the hair pulling. She rubbed her nape where it smarted.

  The crone shuffled to the single chair in the small room and sat heavily. “Beatrice were born with a mark,” she said, wiping at her cheeks, “as if the skin were pinched between God’s finger and thumb. Shape of a wishbone.”

  Minka narrowed her eyes.

  Margaret stared at a spot in the air two feet in front of her, seeing nothing. A memory was dawning. The feel of the crutch beneath her arm, a crutch that she could use like a lance, to defend against—

  The madwoman looked at Margaret and shook her head. “You haven’t got the mark.”

  “And you say her given name were Beatrice?” said Minka, with a glance at Urchin.

  Lucy put a shaking hand to her lips and nodded. “Just as I say.”

  Margaret’s face went slack. For she did know a girl with a mark on the back of her neck. She knew Beady, the beggar girl she’d once met along the riverbank….Two little girls, standing together side by side…She knew the girl who’d been run out of town, beaten and bloodied, and who visited her in dreams, searching for the truth.

  Margaret looked at Minka. Minka returned her gaze.

  “Beady Bone,” they whispered as one.

  Minka pivoted slowly and moved across the room toward Urchin, who, noting Minka’s eye upon her, and with an instinct to run when attention turned to her, began to back away.

  Petra stomped her foot. “Tell me what is going on! Who is this Beady Bone?”

  Margaret’s head hung, as if it were suddenly unbearably heavy. “Did Lord Geoffrey know of this mark?”

  Because now Margaret recalled him lifting her damp, clean hair from her neck the day they first met, how proudly she’d worn her hair down and long, to dry, scented with licorice and cinnamon. She’d thought he was checking for lice.

  The old woman gave a slow nod. “He did,” she said, still nodding. “Oh, yes.”

  “I do not understand!” said Petra.

  Margaret paled, legs gone weak. She lurched toward the table and leaned on it. So he’d known all along that Margaret was not the rightful heir, but he would have wed her anyway, deceived her and the people of the kingdom, and his own daughter, her sis—

  Oh.

  They were not sisters, then. Margaret gripped her crutch, her knuckles white. She and Petra were never sisters at all.

  The bells of the cathedral began to ring the hour.

  But now Margaret wasn’t listening. She was remembering a scene from long ago.

  Sommat else, then. There: the voice of the little beggar girl. Margaret, so young, so small, had stood up to Thomas the miller’s son, poked him in the eye with the end of her crutch, and she’d given the beggar the penny meant for market. And the beggar had tried to give Margaret her dolly, which was really a stinking hank of hair, and Margaret had said no.

  Sommat else, then, for stabbin’ that boy and givin’ me a whole penny.

  And the beggar knelt and rootled around her meager belongings, and there it was, the pale mark of birth—a wishbone!—and Margaret made a wish.

  I want not to be so alone.

  The beggar girl raised her head—Here’s sommat!—and took Margaret’s hand and pressed into it her gift. And there it was, upon her small palm.

  A comb.

  The carved horn comb she’d convinced herself had come from her mother, the comb that had convinced Petra they were sisters.

  Now Margaret took a sharp breath and pushed herself from the oaken table. “Thank you,” she managed; then she turned and fled out into the street.

  It was Petra who found her, huddled against a doorway.

  “How terrible sad,” Margaret said, her sobs slowing to a hiccup. “Beady was someone with a mother and a sister who loved her,” she said, with a longing look at Petronilla, “and now she’s likely dead, and she never knew it.”

  “Then she, this Beady—this Beatrice Bone…she was my sister?” said Petra. “And we…are not?” she finished.

  Margaret shook her head and fought off tears for poor Beady, for herself, for Petra, all of them growing up motherless, sisterless. Petra helped her to her feet and put her arms around her. Maggie slipped into Petra’s hand the horn comb that did not, after all, belong to her.

  “Holy Mary!” came a cry, and they turned to see Minka moving as fast as ever she had, arms p
umping, forehead damp with sweat.

  “It’s Urchin!” she cried. “She is Beatrice Bone!”

  Minka had glimpsed the mark of the wishbone when she’d shoved Urchin in the river, back in Sackville Proper.

  “But with that blasted squirrel wrapped around the girl’s throat for dear life, I haven’t seen it since. Plain as day, once I grabbed her up and looked just now,” Minka said. “I wonder as she ever knew it was there, the poor wretch.”

  Margaret’s chin quivered, and she fought the tears that threatened again. Her sorrow stung, because she’d come to love Petra, and sisterhood, and all that she’d found in herself, and none of it was true, none of it would hold. But muddled with sorrow was gladness, too, for it was Beatrice Bone, known to herself as Urchin, who had carried the comb of Queen Isobel. Urchin, beloved by a mother. Urchin, a sister. It was Urchin who would be queen now. Margaret smiled. Then she began to cry a little, and then to laugh. If Maggot was an unlikely queen, Urchin was unlikelier still.

  “But where is she?” said Margaret, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.

  “Gone! Gone!” Minka cawed. “She wants nothing to do with it!”

  “Why didn’t you stop her?” cried Petra.

  Minka puffed like a broody hen. “You try holding down a scrawny little eel who won’t be held! You’d think I meant to cut her up and put her in a pie!” Minka shook out her arms. “Good luck making her into a lady. She bit me!”

  They spent the better part of an hour in a vain search. While they wondered what to do and where she might have gone, Minka began noticing groups of people walking briskly in the same direction, some of them even running, toward the two-towered gatehouse. So she called to a passing town boy, “You, there, what’s going on?”

  The boy did not stop, but called back as he ran, “A joust at the high meadow!”

  “Who is in the lists for jousting?” demanded Minka.

  The boy stopped and turned. “Lord Geoffrey did cry the tournament—a duel, it is, a trial by combat. To the death!” He grinned wickedly and ran on.

  The boy’s father walked more slowly, and fell in beside them. “The castle is in an uproar,” he said. “Lord Geoffrey’s been faulted for high crimes, and has called for a duel with his accuser, as is his right.” The man pursed his lips. “And no matter his guilt or innocence, he will live, and the rival will die, for His Lordship’s armor is fine and oiled, and his opponent…” He shrugged. “Well, they say he is a monk!”

  “By the Mary!” Minka gasped. There could be no search for Urchin, not now.

  Margaret hitched her crutch beneath her arm. “Hurry!”

  They joined the crowd climbing the hill to the field in the high meadow where the joust would take place. Emma came across the field at a run, holding up her skirts, with Bilious close behind.

  “You’ll have heard, then,” he wheezed.

  “What’s taken you so long? You’ve missed everything!” Minka cried.

  “We sought the sheriff hither and thither, only to find him at home and in bed and not to be roused,” Bilious said.

  “A drunken stupor, no doubt,” Emma said. “It’s at these great men’s pleasure to call a duel, but—madness!”

  Bilious wiped his brow. “What have we missed?”

  “It will wait,” Minka said. “The world’s gone upside down, is all, but it will wait.”

  They went and stood along the south side of the field, where the bank rose up behind them to form a natural amphitheater, and pushed their way through the crowd. The orange ball of the sun hung low in the sky to the west over the red roofs and church spires, and Margaret raised her hand to shield her eyes when it came in and out from behind the clouds, which sped hurriedly over the city as if they wanted no part of what would happen next.

  Bertram hurried to them from the other side of the field, carrying Brother Henry’s robe. He and Brother Henry had gone at once to the castle, he told them, and presented Lord Geoffrey the evidence of the elixirs meant to keep his own daughter half-dead and easily manipulated. They accused him of imprisoning a ruling princess. Geoffrey was most agitated to discover Petra gone. He scoffed and bluffed and spewed, mocked Henry openly for giving up his knighthood, and challenged his old acquaintance to a joust for his insolence. Henry insisted they wait for the sheriff, but Geoffrey called for a judicial duel.

  “And he set a hurried time of one hour hence! The duel is nigh upon us. To the death.”

  The two horses stood one at each end of the great field. Lord Geoffrey sat high in his saddle astride his enormous destrier, armored in a shining full-length hauberk of chain mail, leggings, and an iron breastplate and backplate. Plates of armor covered too his elbows and arms, his thighs, shins, and feet. The warhorse champed and pawed the ground, flinching as Geoffrey’s lance scraped his side. Geoffrey held a helmet beneath the crook of his arm, a cocky smile upon his face.

  Brother Henry, sitting astride Gertrude, wore an overlarge coat of mail and breastplate borrowed from the brother of the butcher, killed in the wars. A helmet, ancient and dented, rested at Henry’s thigh. His lance, also borrowed, he wielded with the easy manner of old acquaintance. But at present the tip of it rested on the ground, for Gertrude stood but fourteen hands.

  “He appears strangely calm,” said Bilious, “for a man so doomed.”

  Bertram set his teeth and gripped the folded cassock in his arms. “He is certain God will not spare the guilty. And though ill-clothed and poor-mounted, my cousin has not forgotten his training. But look!” Bertram pointed at a stout rowan tree on the west side of the field, upon which was hung a colored shield that bore the lord regent’s coat of arms. “I’ve something to set right.”

  Bertram ran across the field to the shield tree and flung the friar’s cassock over a low-hanging branch. The woven brown cloth flapped and then settled wearily, and Bertram raised his fists in the air, as if he’d draped a fine banner.

  The two riders took up positions at either end of the field. Lord Geoffrey’s horse, to the west, pawed the ground; to the east, Gertrude bent her head and munched the sparse grass at her feet.

  To the death—Henry, good, kind Brother Henry, would be killed. A sob of rage and frustration caught in Margaret’s throat. Had she never gazed into the magic mirror, had she never set out to find the wild-eyed man, whoever he might be, Brother Henry would never have arrived at this moment on the field, and for that she felt deep regret, and a kind of shame for wanting so dearly and so much.

  Margaret clenched her jaw. But it was not she who had ordered the child Beatrice’s death, who had made of her the miserable beggar Beady Bone, scurrying from town to town like a rat. It was not she who had stolen Petronilla’s and Beady’s childhoods. It was that man: it was Geoffrey.

  Lord Geoffrey’s guard stepped onto the field.

  “He’s been chosen chevalier d’honneur, and will see the rules are upheld,” said a bystander.

  Bilious spat. “And does he enforce the rule that Henry should have to ride with the blasted sun blinding him?” he muttered.

  A stout boy joined the chevalier d’honneur on the field and announced Lord Geoffrey. There was a smattering of applause.

  Then Bertram ran onto the field. “Brother Henry, of the Brethren of the Holy Cross, of Dale’s End Friary, does engage in trial by combat,” he called out. “God will aid the innocent but not the guilty!”

  Henry urged the pony to raise her head as Bertram went on. “He does accuse Lord Geoffrey of drugging and imprisoning the Crown Princess Petronilla, His Lordship’s own daughter!”

  The crowd broke out into a wave of uneasy murmurs. Petronilla squeezed Margaret’s hand, and Bilious pulled Minka close.

  “On whose say?” came the clear, unhurried voice of Lord Geoffrey, from atop his high mount at the west end of the field. “The word of my daughter, the Princess of Hearts?” Geoffrey laughed. “A madwoman?” His horse stamped a heavy hoof, driving up dust that coiled like the smoke of a waking dragon.

&nb
sp; Petronilla stepped from the protection of Bilious and Minka and Margaret and stood two paces inside the pawed ground of the field. Geoffrey’s cocky smile slipped. Petra stood regally, the light wind blowing back her gown. “If I have been mad, it’s because you made me so with your poisonous elixirs and lies.”

  Geoffrey’s horse stamped again, and his master tugged the reins savagely; the horse cried out.

  Minka guided Petra back into the ring of the crowd, and Geoffrey chuckled and slowly shook his head. “Nonsense. I never gave my daughter any poison. Herbal tonics! I drink the stuff myself.”

  “Excuse me, uh, my lord.” Now a monk stepped from the audience. He looked around, wringing his hands. “I was given a vial,” he began. He scratched his head, swallowed visibly, and glanced at Brother Henry. “I have tested its contents, believed to have been administered to the Princess of Haaar…hmm, rather, the Princess Petronilla….” The monk flushed, and scratched his head again. “Belladonna! It’s deadly nightshade in the vial!”

  The crowd gasped.

  “Brother Henry may have given you such a vial, but…” Lord Geoffrey shrugged. “The source of the vial, who can say? Now I say again,” he called, smiling as if charmingly befuddled, “who has any evidence on which I may be charged with any crime?”

  The people murmured and muttered.

  “I have evidence!” came a shout from the crowd. “I bear witness to a crime!”

  Now the people turned this way and that, searching for the speaker. And then the crowd parted, and out of the gallery, a stone’s throw from Margaret, stepped a woman, tall and slender and with a long, dark braid.

  Geoffrey went rigid in his saddle; his destrier snorted and danced, and again he yanked the bit hard between the horse’s teeth.

  Something familiar about her, Margaret thought. That braid. Where had she seen the woman before?

  “Step aside!” Geoffrey shouted at the woman.

  But the woman did not yield. “I will speak!”

  “At your peril,” Geoffrey said, his voice gone low and threatening.