by IGMS
Another woman might have sighed, moved by the thought, but Hattie considered it pragmatically, abandoned it in favor of thinking over how many preserves were left over from the long winter, and kept on with her duties.
She rubbed away the last bit of soot from the hood of a whale-oil lamp and moved to dust the contents of the curio cabinet beneath the window.
Behind cloudy glass, keepsakes jostled in the cabinet's interior. When she was a child, two decades earlier, her mother had hidden coins among the figurines for her to find while cleaning. A fox with a penny in its paws, a Chinese maiden with silver treasure beneath her base.
As Hattie lifted the dolphin-shaped latch and reached inside to take out a Spanish dancing doll, a spark stung soft skin between thumb and forefinger. A briery spell, full of ginger and bite.
She recoiled. Nursing her hand, she searched the cabinet with her eyes. A frame pebbled with mother-of-pearl was missing. She knelt in a rustle of skirts to look closer, careful not to touch the doors.
On the second shelf, movement at the back caught her eye. She peered past a scrimshaw walrus. At first it was so still she thought herself mistaken. The gilded scorpion, a Siamese souvenir, crouched on golden legs. Then it shifted. One claw clacked. She closed the door as it rushed forward. The tail's tip skittered across the glass in metallic complaint.
Her hand burned but she could not afford to have the creature slip away and sting some other household member. She considered the drapes, but near the fireplace was a horsehide glove used for handling logs. She drew it over her injured hand and used the other to swing the door open.
China figurines scattered and crashed as she seized the scorpion. It squirmed against the leather, trying to drive its metallic sting through it, but she held it so it could get no room to swing.
Carrying it into the kitchen, she dropped it in an empty butter churn. It scuttled across the container's floor, scraping its claws against the sides.
She stared down at it, thinking.
On her fifteenth birthday, Hattie Fender contracted a fever that led to the loss of her hair, which until that point had been long and glossy and black as licorice. Her mother nursed her through the illness, then died herself of a fish aspic that had gone off.
Upon recovery, Hattie mourned her mother and resorted to patent hair restoratives, full of poisonous sugar of lead, sulphur, and copperas. The medicines forced a relapse, driving her back to fevered bed rest for three months more.
At seventeen and a half, she had become bantam egg bald and just as hard-shelled. At twenty-two, she daily polished her scalp with bay rum and bergamot oil, which left a perfumed trail behind her, so you could track her by smell up the stairs and out along the walk that watched the gun-metal waves lick at the clouds above the sea.
On her twenty-fifth birthday, two days after her true love's disappearance, Hattie had her scalp tattooed with the twelve celestial houses. They marked off her head in long pie-shaped wedges, Scorpio over her left ear and Taurus over the right. When she stood still, no matter the location, she chose to stand in alignment with the sky, so the spidery black demarcations reflected the patterns of the stars.
Sometimes, when her brain felt too full of feverish thoughts, too aboil with heavenly influences, she made her twin cousins, Lucius and Claudius, help apply leeches to her temples. Against her skin, the parasites looked like clinging alder leaves.
To get rid of them, she licked her fingers and dipped them in salt before touching the tip to each leech so it would recoil and drop away, soothing her overly energetic brain.
As today, when her thoughts seethed with the idea of what she'd lost.
The cook stood at the squat iron stove, stirring chowder.
The cook was a servant Hattie's father had brought back from his voyages, a peculiar, scale-skinned creature, with green hair and sharp teeth, that considered itself a woman, and served the family for over a decade, living on fish and sleeping in a barrel of brackish water in the coal cellar.
"A picture's missing from the curio cabinet," Hattie said. "The one Jemmy gave me before he set sail the last time. And magic is being thrown about till things that shouldn't be walking are." She tugged the glove away to reveal the magical bite swelling and red and sore.
The creature-cook turned to regard her with a narrowed gaze. "My magic is not for things like cabinets and pictures, like yours," she proclaimed, her voice a sing-song hiss. "Mine is the Deep Magic, and someday the waters will swallow this house so I may return."
"I am a sea witch," Hattie said calmly. "No waters will come to this house." She wished her magic had been stronger, had kept Jemmy here in the house to love her, rather than off to sea to vanish with her heart, two years ago. But certainly it was enough to keep the house in order and contain the cook and other servants. Certainly it was enough, when that was all you had.
The cook snorted, a sound like a hard rock hitting sand. She was cranky, for she lived a thankless existence. Like most fairy creatures, she would vanish if offered gratitude.
"Those twins been in there," she said. "Playing." She made the last word sound like "fornicating" despite the disparity in syllables.
"They don't know magic," Hattie said.
"Everyone in this house knows magic," the cook said. "Look to the twins. Or your sister. Or maybe someone come snooping into the house. Some peddler came to the door yesterday. Your sister talked to him."
Frustration crawled across Hattie's scalp like angry rain. The smell of bergamot, normally so soothing, seemed acrid and irritating to her nostrils.
"Where is Madeleine?" Hattie said. She doubted her sister's meager magics lay behind the scorpion, but Madeleine might have purchased something that had caused the mayhem or made the picture vanish. Hattie had thought once or twice, after finding alchemical ingredients missing from her room a few years ago, that Madeleine might be trying greater spells, but the disappearances had stopped. Madeleine had shown no sign of magical mastery since.
Hattie could see the frame in her mind, so clearly she almost could touch it. A rectangle set with mother-of-pearl that had crackled with age. In the center, a more modern illustration, the daguerreotype showing her and Jemmy, his arm around her in a daring, possessive pose. The only picture she had of him. The thief could have stolen nothing more precious. That fact made her think the act a declaration of war.
But on whose part? Few others in the village knew much of arcane things. Sailors sometimes brought charms back from foreign ports, but that was usually cheap and showy yet ineffectual magic. Reverend Hosiah left magic alone except for the enchantments that everyone knew came from the devil. He was always ready to exorcise a possessed pig or bless a child to remove the shadow of the evil eye.
Hattie prided herself on being more scholarly-brained than the old priest. This was almost the twentieth century, and magic was a thing of logic and proofs, something to be possessed by trained minds more educated than Hosiah's.
The cook said, "Did you want me to prepare a dish from this?" as she peered into the churn.
"Don't be a fool!" Hattie snapped.
"Can't make butter with that in it," the cook said. "The twins like butter on their flapjacks in the morning."
"Make them porridge," Hattie said. She carried the churn off to confront her sister.
Madeleine was in her room, brushing her long golden hair. She was seventeen, vain as a popinjay, and usually as brightly dressed. Hattie loved her sister dutifully, but she did not like her much. The feeling was reciprocated. Madeleine was fond of brushing her hair when she knew Hattie might be watching.
Hattie thumped the churn down in the doorway.
"What did you do to your hand?" Madeleine asked, ignoring the churn. The scorpion scuttled, and she shrieked.
"Hattie! What a vile thing!"
The scorpion hissed in the churn's depths.
"Madeline," Hattie demanded. "What did the peddler you spoke to yesterday want?"
"That old man? He wanted broken
things to take away and repair. And he was magic, he knew every broken thing in the house. He said there was a pair of scissors whose blades had come apart in the kitchen drawer and there were. And a lamp with its wick-holder rusted solid in the pantry. He even knew that a bit of mother-of-pearl had come off your picture frame."
"Oh, Madeleine," Hattie said. "What have you done?"
Madeline gaped at her. Hattie reflected unkindly how vacuous her sister's expression was, despite her beauty. Still, that beauty had brought many suitors to the house. It had even brought Jemmy, once upon a time, before Hattie had claimed him as her own, had scraped a bit of frosting from her sister's already overly full bowl.
She'd beguiled him with stories of magic at first, then had consented to show him little tricks, each one binding him to her a twist closer, bonds as fine as silk thread, as unbreakable as steel hawsers, until one night they sat until sunrise in the garden, smelling the blooming heliotrope, and exchanging words of love.
He had asked her to marry him.
Then Jemmy had been lost, and there was pity instead of rancor in Madeleine's eyes. She hadn't really wanted him after all, but Hattie suspected it had piqued her sister to have lost him. But foolish Madeline should have known better than to deal with a peddler, no matter what he had known about broken scissors or lamps with rusted wicks.
When Hattie went downstairs, the twins were there, both blonde and angelic looking. Chaos followed in their eight-year-old wake with the inevitability of stones rolling downhill.
Hattie decided to say nothing about their clothing. Instead she said, "Lute, Cloudy, did you see a peddler come to the house yesterday?"
Claudius stood on one foot, hopped experimentally, as though he hadn't heard her. She looked at Lucius.
He shrugged and spread his hands helplessly. "We was playing inside, soldiers in the attic."
She found that difficult to believe. They were sharp children, as hard to fool as foxes.
"What did he give you?" she ventured at a guess.
The two exchanged looks and she knew she was right. She pounced. "Show it to me!"
Up in the attic they demonstrated the wonder the peddler had given them, a set of lead soldiers that were, marvelously, animate. In the box, the tiny figures wheeled and marched in tireless formation.
"He said we wasn't supposed to show it to anyone or the magic would go away," Lute said. "But you're magic, so I figured if you saw them, it wouldn't matter."
It didn't seem to. The tiny first lieutenant raised his pin-sized sword. The platoon wheeled, marched to the other side of the box as Hattie watched.
Her scalp crawled with premonition. Were the soldiers some evil magic? She imagined them loosed, creeping through the house in the night, scaling bedclothes and slashing the vulnerable throats of the sleeping giants around them. But when she spread her long-fingered hand, wearing only the tiny diamond ring Jemmy had given her, over the box, murmuring a spell, she could sense no malignity. A toy, created to amuse and delight, the sort of marvel a sorcerer might create for a favorite son or nephew.
"What did he look like, the peddler?"
Again, a set of simultaneous shrugs. "Like an old man," Lucius said. "His beard hung down like a billy goat's. And his eyebrows had tufts!"
Both boys hooted with laughter at the last.
"How was he dressed? Did he have anything out of the ordinary?"
Claudius pointed at her hand. "He had a ring like that!"
Anyone could have a diamond ring, but you wouldn't expect to see it on an impoverished peddler, a rag and bone man going from door to door.
"Where else did he go?"
For the rest of the morning, Hattie traced the peddler's path. He had visited the Reverend Hosiah to swap a set of religious tracts for a pair of battered fire irons the Reverend's grandfather had wrought. In exchange for a sheaf of old household lists, the Parkers had received a miracle cleaner that had left everything in their house so sparkly you could barely stand to look at it. They said if Hattie found the peddler, they'd sure like another bottle. Widow Smart had traded a quilt from her ragbag for a device that brushed her three Persian cats till they looked like dust mops walking across the floor. Everyone had something wonderful. Everyone wanted to know where the peddler had gone.
So did Hattie. Every household had lost something irreplaceable but not valuable, it seemed, and while she loved the picture, she knew its value was only to her. In every case, the exchangers were content with whatever they had received.
Had the twins' soldiers been a simple trade? But then why leave a spell to harm her, an angry, vicious spell? Try as she might, testing every house (even the Reverend's, as surreptitiously as she could), she found no other malignant spells.
Down in the public house, she asked after the peddler. He'd slept in the stable loft, they said, and showed her the wind-up bird with an endless supply of songs that he'd paid for his bed with. But in the morning, he had gone, disappeared without a trace.
Hattie went home. She put on her lavender walking dress, a sturdy pair of shoes, and a hat with a veil to keep the sun from spoiling her skin, and packed a satchel with necessities. She left instructions with the cook on what to do in her absence, and told Lucius and Claudius as they sat grumbling over their porridge to obey the cook and to mind their manners.
She thought about telling Madeleine the same, but she knew that whatever she told her sister, Madeleine would do the opposite, out of sheer contrariness. Hattie didn't bother to knock at her sister's door, just carried her satchel past in order to lay it beside the front door.
In the garden she cut lavender and lemon balm and sprigs of St. John's wort, which was almost in June blossom. As her last act, she removed the scorpion from the butter churn and put it in a tin box, where it rattled and rustled as menacingly as it possibly could, while she paid it no mind whatsoever.
She closed the front door, set with its brass anchor knocker, behind her and went clack clack click down the front steps. It was mid-afternoon. She nodded pleasantly at the ladies out in their front gardens, but did not pause to gossip.
At the crossroads three blocks away, she took a downy white feather from her satchel. Whispering to it, she tossed it upwards.
The feather hung motionless for a second, swirled as the breeze took it. It circled, once, twice, and again, and with a jerk, swept southward as though seized by the wind.
Hattie watched it with a sigh. Southward lay Serenata, another port town, not large, prosperous and historically significant like her own town of Vailport. A mean, poor one where brigands and pirates were known to come to procure whiskey and women and opium from far lands. Still, it was a direction, and she had lacked such a thing before. She cut a walking stick from a nearby clump of birches and set out.
It was, as noted before, a fine day, and a good one for walking. From time to time a wagon or carriage trundled past. The wagon drivers waved at her and ask if she wanted a lift; the carriages rolled past in a rumble of hurried wheels. She declined the offers, thinking she might miss some sign along the road. If she walked reasonably quickly, she'd make the other town by sunset, and be able to put up in the inn there. She wasn't sure what they'd make of her - an unaccompanied gentlewoman, but she trusted her magic to keep her from harm.
When dusk was beginning to think about settling, she caught a white flash among the trees. A deer's tail, perhaps? But she couldn't afford to ignore any signs.
She picked her way along a scant trail, pausing to listen, now and again. She came to a clearing centered around a pool, a stone stele beside it. On it were graven these words:
Here lies Penelope Martin,
Darling of our hearts,
Who came to a sad end,
Caused by Cupid's deadly dart.
Hattie paused, considering the stele. The darkness was beginning to gather. She had underestimated the length of the journey and she didn't know where she might shelter.
A bird spoke in the gathering shadows. Hattie pau
sed to listen to the liquid, changing rills. A mockingbird, singing the songs it had overheard. It switched to a tumbling series of notes, an evocation Hattie knew. She gathered her cloak around her and sat down against the stele to listen.
Perhaps she dozed, despite the cold stone's bite. When she opened her eyes, a ghost hung in the dark air in front of her, a sad thing, all drowned weeds and burbling ectoplasm.
She had seen ghosts before, but tamed ones, the sort who lived in attics or old pantries, who only ventured out when it was quiet or when desired for table tipping or play with spirit writing. This was a wild ghost, capable of anything, and so she froze.
"Did you come for more questions?" the ghost asked. Its breath squeezed out the question so slowly that Hattie almost could not understand it.
"More questions?" she echoed.
"Speak to me of love lost," the ghost said.
Hattie thought of Jemmy, of waves covering his face, of his body swaying with the tide's motion. An involuntary moan escaped her. Ghosts had a way of amplifying the emotions around them. Sorrow raked her as solidly as any cat o' nine tails.
But she was a sorceress of the Fender line. Her grandmother many times removed had come over with the first colonists, and the house Hattie had grown up in was steeped with her lineage's magic. It had soaked into her bones, which held her upright now when she might have lapsed into tears.
As though tasting her sorrow, lapping it up like a cat, the ghost pushed closer. But even as its clammy chill touched her, Hattie jerked back, fingers flashing to shape a sigil in the air between them. The ink on her scalp writhed as though redefining itself, and for a moment, just a moment, physical laws changed, and became a place where the ghost could not, did not exist.
And so it was gone.
Hattie reached for restorative in her satchel. In its place, she found a bottle of vanilla, presumably mischief worked by Lucius and Claudius, who she remembered lurking around the front hall when she had come in from the back garden. She sighed, sniffed it, and downed it. It was fragrant but bitter, and she coughed, feeling it all through her lungs. She breathed a great sweet exhalation into the air, and listened to the night. The full moon wobbled in the tree-tops, winking at her fitfully.