The Magic Mirror

by Susan Hill Long

  One day she slipped behind the stair at a tavern where she’d found work, and took out the mirror and gazed into it. As always, she saw herself with a little girl, a mum with a child of her own. Wasn’t that why she’d found her way into midwifery? Didn’t it show her she’d done right to keep the child?

  Lucy was still smiling and gazing when there came a riot of noise. Out of the tavern she ran. First she saw the little beaded slippers in the street. And there was her little girl, beneath the wheel of a milk cart. She’d toddled into its path while Lucy’s attention was far away in the mirror.

  She did what she could for the leg, but it wouldn’t heal right. And she wrapped the mirror up in linen and sealed the package shut, never to gaze again upon it in her life. She wondered if she should return the child to Will the glazier in the royal city, despite the danger there. She could try. She could see if he was still a prisoner. But she loved the girl, and she never went.

  Then one day a knight came. Lucy recognized this red-bearded one—Harold? Henry? A favorite of Isobel’s. Though she felt sure he’d not know her, she took to the shadows behind the tavern stair to watch and wait, as was her practice, and that was where she was when the royal messenger came in.

  “The Princess Beatrice is missing and thought dead. The queen lies ill and dying of grief. All the queen’s men are to return to Knightsbridge.”

  The heir to the throne missing, or dead? Lucy instantly suspected Lord Geoffrey of foul play. Will Glazier had seen Lord Geoffrey murder Armand, in the mirror. She had to get word to Isobel. She would give this knight the magic mirror to take to the queen.

  She must take the risk, and so she did. The knight gave his word of honor that he would deliver the mirror.

  But Lucy must also protect her child. And so she ran.

  So practiced was she at moving, and so few were their possessions, that within minutes Lucy and her little one had hopped into a wagon with a farmer leaving town. On the road they were overtaken by the red-bearded knight, riding hard. Good, she thought, and smiled at the little girl. It’s done.

  They came into a town where a crowd was gathered. Hours before, a man had been killed on the road, and now the law was there. She saw the royal messenger. Did he recognize her? She slipped from the wagon and sought a place to hide, ducking into the sanctuary of a church. Later she went to see if the way was clear. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, she told her darling crooked girl. Back soon.

  There was no sound but the embers shifting in the hearth. Lucy looked at Margaret. Looked down.

  “The royal messenger caught me,” she said. “I have been in prison—in every way—from that moment until last night.”

  Lucy blew her nose. “And there you were, that day you ventured down with the princess. After all these years,” she said, “after all this time. The moment I saw you, I knew. It wasn’t the odd likeness to the princess. It wasn’t even that bit of green velvet.

  “I saw my crooked girl. And I had a feeling.”

  Margaret’s brow creased in thought, and she was silent a while, sitting on the righted bench beside the green-eyed man. Her father, they said. Her father. “You told me you didn’t guide a baby into the world without getting a feeling for the child,” she said, after a time. “Did you have a feeling,” she asked, “when I was born?”

  “I had a feeling you were made of love and magic.” Lucy nodded. “Mayhap they’re one and the same.”

  “Did my mother…what did she call me?” Margaret asked.

  Lucy took in a breath. “Vera,” she said, with a long look at Will Glazier. “She called you Vera.”

  It happened, after all, that there was a wedding on St. Petronilla’s Day.

  In the morning, Emma helped Petra dress. Her gown was full and flowing, sky blue and trimmed with gold brocade, and woven into her coiled hair were flowers made of gold. Margaret’s gown was of imported cloth from Camulon, purple and red, and fastened low around her hips she wore a jewel-studded belt.

  It took the strenuous efforts of Emma plus two kitchen maids to wrestle Urchin into her clothing, and even with that the green ribbons that crisscrossed her chest hung loose and refused to stay tied, so despite all the finery she still looked less royal than ragamuffin. The squirrel on her shoulder didn’t help. But when she dutifully curtsied to the young lady in the glass, she gawped and let out a great guffaw, for she recognized the young lady was herself.

  By midday the sun was lighting the square before the cathedral so bright that some in the crowd had to shield their eyes from its blazing glory as they nodded to their neighbors, smiling and talking. There was music in the air alongside the smells of game and meat and baking bread. A mother swiped her boy’s cap from his head and hit him with it. “Remove your hat, you clod; we’re witness to a wedding!”

  Frederick de Vere, no longer known as the Toad, hummed and tapped the stylishly long toe of his shoe and watched Castle Street. When he caught sight of Petronilla approaching, his round face broke into a grin, and he waved charmingly, standing high on his toes to see. The throng before the church parted to allow the Princess Petronilla through. Smiling, she came and stood beside Frederick and took his arm. Petra had invited him to stay on, for it would have been very rude to send him away after such a long journey when it was hardly his fault he hadn’t got the message the wedding was off. Besides, there was no sign of any drool, and he was kind and funny and a fair dancer, too. Rumors of Frederick’s idiocy had been greatly embellished; indeed he was quite as clever and canny as Lord Geoffrey, but with a pleasant result.

  It was not Frederick and Petra who stood at the door of the cathedral to wed, however, but Minka and Bilious. Minka, after seeing that Bilious had replaced Sweetheart in the mirror and shaking the thing and deciding after all that it showed the truth of her heart’s longing, agreed, or rather demanded, to wed. “You’ll have me, Bilious Brighton,” she’d said, “or my name’s not Minka Pottentott!” And Bilious granted it was, and of course he would.

  “It was luck we met,” Minka had said.

  Margaret’s jaw dropped. “Luck? Luck, you say?” she sputtered. “Plain, ordinary luck?”

  Minka bristled. “How many times I’ve said to you, Mags, the coin of life has but two sides, the good luck and the bad! To each of us a turn at each side. I’m sure I’ve always said it thus!”

  Minka had never said it thus in all her days. But she had also never looked so happy.

  Now Father Sebastian began to speak the holy words.

  “Wait!” Brother Henry pulled the ring from his little finger, the one he’d worn for twelve long years, and put it into Bilious’s hand.

  “Most unusual,” said the priest.

  “For luck,” said Brother Henry, and Minka turned to Bilious, who tried the ring first on Minka’s middle finger, then her third finger, and finally her pinkie. It was a perfect fit. She wondered why the ring looked somehow familiar, and shrugged. She would ask Brother Henry later, if she remembered to.

  And with the giving over of the ring, Brother Henry felt strangely lighter. He looked heavenward and whispered a prayer of deep thanks, but for what, exactly, he wasn’t sure.

  Father Sebastian completed the holy sacrament of marriage, and then, too, the sacrament of baptism, for Margaret had never been baptized; she did not mind the taste of the salt on her tongue, nor the cold dousing of holy water, not one bit. Will Glazier stood by her side, and when the priest asked who did sponsor her into the church, he answered, “I do. Her father.” His green eyes sparkled.

  “The alchemy never worked again,” Will explained to Maggie later, as they watched the dancing in the square. “I was so full of terror and sorrow I couldn’t speak. I went a little mad, you see,” he said, and scratched the back of his neck. “Chamomile, was it? Monkshood? Common things, but…” He shook his head. “I was so full of hope and love and expectations when I made the mirrors—perhaps that was the missing stuff. Well, never mind,” he said with a wink, and tapping his toe to
the music. “I’m only a simple glass-painter.”

  Released, restored, Will Glazier had gone straight to work in the kiln that had been his prison, sketching designs and cutting the glass for a window to honor the new queen. Urchin scowled at the title Queen Beatrice, but she had already issued her first decree—a wordy scroll having to do with bread and blankets. Petra would help her navigate the rest.

  “But is it the right sort of thing?” Margaret had asked, when her father had eagerly shown her the drawings: a boy and a beggar. And a girl the very image of herself. “For a window, I mean?” The only stories she’d seen made of glass were from the Bible, saints and martyrs, and those on the workbench were common folk.

  “Oh, yes,” said Will Glazier, nodding vigorously, his hair alert in all directions. “God and St. Winifred and you, the squirrel and the peddler, magic mirror, humble crutch—all of it the same mosaic.” He pulled on his chin. “The same, er, tapestry. The same soup,” he said, and patted his stomach. “I’m hungry.”

  And then he’d asked if Margaret would like to learn what he could teach her.

  “Yes,” she’d said. “Yes.” They’d smiled, master and apprentice, father and daughter.

  Indeed, they could scarcely stop smiling.

  The wedding celebrations went on long into the afternoon. Frederick de Vere called for Bertram. “My minstrelsy lacks only the bagpipes! Bertram, will you do me the honor? Accept, and the job at court is yours!” He clapped Bertram sincerely on the back before dancing off.

  Petra leaned toward Bertram. “Poor Freddy,” she said in his ear before following de Vere to the dance, “he’s tone-deaf!”

  Margaret, alone now with Bertram, watched them go. “His poor ear works in your favor,” she said. “No offense.”

  Bertram tipped his head. “None taken. I, too, have a quest of sorts, and I am ever learning. You’ll see one day! You’ll see!”

  Her fingers moved along the designs that Bertie had carved into the wood of her crutch, and the letters there. M-A-G-G-I-E. Not Margaret the Crutch or Margaret of the Church or the Quest. Just Maggie.

  “Maggie.”

  She started from her reverie and realized he’d spoken her name more than once. “Yes, Bertie?”

  Bertram reddened, and he shifted the bagpipe on his shoulder, where it squirmed like a piglet. “My bag…,” he began. “I filled it with holy water from St. Winifred’s Well, Maggie.” He spoke quickly. “I’ve wanted to give it to you, but there was Petra, and Urchin, and the joust, and the wild-eyed man, and…” He held the bag out to her, and it sounded a gentle sloshing. “For you.” He made a courtly little bow and tapped his heels together. “That you would be healed.”

  Margaret’s chest filled up with something large and breathless: Just because you limp doesn’t mean you can’t heal….

  “Thank you, Bertie,” she managed to say. “Looks as though I’m in for another dousing!”

  Bertram took the plug from the bag, and on the spot he poured the holy water all down her crooked leg. They stared. They waited. The holy water pooled at her feet, a puddle like any other. She stepped and staggered, and as ever relied upon her crutch.

  “Mayhap to drink it,” he said, his voice bleak as a goat’s. “There are yet a few drops.”

  He held the bag for her to drink, and she swallowed a spoonful. It tasted of must and leather. Music came boisterous from across the square. Again they waited for a change that did not come.

  “I’m sorry,” Bertram said at last. His voice choked in his throat, and his eyes glistened. “I thought—I believed—I prayed you would be healed.”

  Margaret was quiet. All her life she’d limped along, marked by God’s displeasure. And yet she had journeyed. She looked across the square. In front of the cathedral, the music played on. Petra laughed at something Frederick was saying in her ear, Minka linked arms with Bilious, Brother Henry turned a cartwheel and took up the hands of Alice and Urchin. And there was Lucy the midwife dancing with Tom the apothecary. And Margaret’s own father was chatting quietly with the soldier who’d kept watch over the kiln all these years, and petting Walter, scratching behind his ears, straightening his red ribbon. Margaret had come to find a family, after all, and a place. She was not alone. God had not kept these riches from her.

  Margaret leaned on her crutch and looked long at Bertram, and she felt her own heart, big and brimming and bursting over with love.

  “But, Bertie,” she said, “I am healed.”

  The puddle at Margaret’s feet shimmered, and she glanced down and saw her face in the surface of the holy water. She smiled into the puddle, and her reflection smiled back. If she still had the mirror, wouldn’t she see, wouldn’t everyone see, this very scene upon the magic surface of the glass?

  Margaret shoved the crutch beneath her arm and took hold of Bertie’s hand. “And I don’t need any magic mirror to show me that I long to dance,” she said. She nodded at the bagpipe, empty now of holy water but full of possibility, and stepped, clump-slide, clump-slide, out into the square.

  “Now, play, Bertie,” she said, laughing. “Play!”

  Acknowledgments

  Jeanne Birdsall, Sarah E. Brune, Heather Vogel Frederick, Kelly Garrett, Heather Henson, Alice and Ronald Hill, Don, Mike, and Sara Hill, Kristi Wallace Knight, Kirby Larson, Literary Arts, Barbara O’Connor, Augusta Scattergood, Heather Schroder, Karen Sherman, Nancy Siscoe, Chris Struyk-Bonn, Kim Winternheimer, and others who read, responded, and encouraged: thank you. To Matt, to Molly, to Eliza: love and thanks beyond alphabetical order.