The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  They followed the concentric windings of the canals, where one morning they saw a new bride being photographed, her veil flowing out behind her over the water. By unspoken agreement, they avoided the Red Light district. Suzanne had never had any desire to see it. Intuitively she knew that Murdo would have found any proximity to such voyeurism degrading.

  On their second afternoon in Amsterdam, Murdo fell asleep in their hotel room. The book he had been reading dropped from his hand to the floor. Suzanne felt the impulse seize her then, and slipped out.

  She knew where to go. Her destination was only a few blocks from their hotel. The sweetly acrid scent hit her as soon as she opened the café door. The place was tiny. There were five tables surrounded by high stools, and a coffee bar tucked into the back corner, with a list of the extremely limited fare posted on the wall behind. Suzanne nodded to the woman behind the counter, and walked directly to the spiral staircase that led to the café’s upper reaches. There she found a handsome black man with a menu.

  She perused it and asked for a gram of Afghani black. Downstairs she purchased papers and a coffee from the bar, and sat down to roll herself a joint. As she smoked it, she wondered whether Murdo would disapprove. She felt high, jubilant, in part because she had needed this separateness from him. The joint was a kind of ritual self-celebration. She did not consider it at all childish.

  Walking back to the hotel, she was struck by the outer gleam of the barges and their inner secrecy. Gulls swooped like manic angels. The ebb and flow of the water matched the rhythm of her blood. Then she saw the bride again. Or rather, she caught a glimpse of the billowing white veil just behind her right shoulder. Yet when she turned around, there was nothing, no one there. As she walked on, it appeared again, a kind of massed shimmering whiteness at the edge of her vision. She attributed the illusion to the potency of the hashish, took a few deep breaths and went on. This time the veil disappeared.

  Until, later that night at dinner, it showed up again, hovering over Murdo’s shoulder just as he raised his wine glass to his lips. She remained quite calm, telling herself it was just the residual effects of the drug.

  There was, however, another possibility. If it were so, she had married far more than she had bargained for. At that moment, she wished desperately that her mother were still alive.

  3

  Her Mother’s Teachings

  It was Ada who had inspired Suzanne’s book on the “Whore,” a fact in which she considered herself fortunate. How many women had mothers who could help them redeem whore from the muck heap, stripping it of overlays false and foul, until it was set in their midst again, shining?

  Not that this redemption had been a painless process. Once, Suzanne might have said that the cost was too high, too personal; even bloodied. For there had been a time – her tenth year in particular – when physical battle had been a daily event. All that September and October, she came home from school to pluck gravel from her knees, elbows, or palms. Ada bathed the wounds, patted on the yellow-green unguent of her own making; then wrote invisibly on her daughter’s brow the arcane symbols that would help her endure the next day’s torment.

  “They are ignorant and to be pitied,” Ada said of Suzanne’s assailants. These trials would make her strong, Ada insisted. Tears were pointless. “Think of the magic cauldron,” Ada said, tilting Suzanne’s chin upward with a long white finger, tipped with a carmine nail. “You have to plunge into the boiling water and take the pain, to be made new and courageous.”

  “You’ll have a life-power they will some day envy,” Ada insisted. “Poor little insects,” she added, with a click of her tongue. For Ada, all lesser mortals – namely, those she judged to be motivated primarily by cruelty, greed, or wilful stupidity – were insects.

  “Not to hate. Not to hate. That’s the thing. And avoid striking back if you can. There are other ways. You will find other ways.” Her milk-white hands would cup Suzanne’s chin. Her mother’s hands about her face were veined petals, and she – Suzanne – was a flower closing for the night. There was honey in her blood.

  At ten she knew, as she knew ever after, how blessed she was to have a mother who could work spells.

  “I want to kill them,” she told Ada once, wincing not so much at the washing out of the wound, as at the remembered words. “Your mother’s a whore.” Only it came out “whirr” in their small, red mouths. “She sells her bum. She sells her bum.” They would push out their little rear-ends at her, as well as their tongues; then rush her with bodies hard as bulls, four or five of them in a phalanx. Always girls. The boys were largely indifferent, contributing only the odd snigger.

  Her habitual attackers were a group of five girls, all relishing a complex thrill that mixed moral superiority, sadism, and the mysterious electricity of sex. How had they imagined it, Suzanne wondered years later. A monstrous male god perhaps, with lascivious slanting eyes and horny unstoppable hands that groped for their virgin bodies in the dark. His name was Sex. His blood was hot. He had all whores in his thrall.

  As a child, she had understood that in calling Ada a whore they were simply repeating what they had heard their parents say. Or to be charitable, perhaps only one parent of one girl, and so it had spread as malicious words will, flicking from tongue to tongue.

  “Whirr. Whirr. Wriggles her bum. Wriggles her bum.” Their little bodies writhed. They looked like pale snakes in the sun. Then they became bulls again, rushing her. Suzanne tasted blood in her mouth.

  “I want to kill them,” she said. It was for Ada’s sake she wished them ill. She wanted vengeance for Ada, whose long, strong-boned face was sometimes a Gypsy’s, sometimes a Russian ballerina’s. Ada with her straight spine and purposeful stride. Who wore clothes that flowed about her as she moved. Who had never wriggled her bum in her life.

  “Revenge is its own poison,” Ada cautioned. “You can be angry at the pitiful little insects. But use the anger. Use its power to help you walk straight and stay proud. Keep him bridled, for Anger’s a potent and slippery demon. He’ll swell like a puffed-up toad if you don’t keep the bridle on. Then he’ll get control of you.”

  Living with Ada, Suzanne inhabited a world populated with demons (or daimons as her mother often called them), powers that could be summoned for good or ill. Everything had its own daimon: spices and trees and balls of opaque glass; shells and bells and swatches of velvet or linen. Emotions. Water. Fire.

  Ada belonged to no school, neither Gardnerian nor Alexandrian witchcraft. She was a syncretist, as eclectic as Madame Blavatsky, but without the chicanery. At heart, she was an animist. When Ada looked at a stone, she saw a being that lived and breathed. Stones sometimes spoke, she told Suzanne. That was why, if you arranged them in just such a way, in configurations the stones themselves suggested, they would yield you such power. Sometimes Ada added incense and music, Dufay and Palestrina, to bring about a wedding of sensations, a synaesthesia so total that when it peaked, the world was drenched in colour. Suzanne remembered once riding the chrome-yellow surge of sound issuing from a crumhorn. It bore her up through the window. She had the buoyancy, the energy, of a darting sunbeam. Afterward, her sleep was profound.

  Yet there were times when Suzanne found Ada’s presence overwhelming. Even when sitting perfectly still, her long eyes closed, Ada could project an urgent agitation, a kind of raw energy that reddened the air about her. Did she battle demons at these times, or plumb the depths of another soul to seek the source of its pain, as one would draw a thorn from flesh? Suzanne was never to know. She was aware only that she must absent herself when Ada was in these states. For to stay could be terrifying, in a room so charged that it would begin to throb.

  Ada had many faces, and was in fact a consummate actress. She could play the haughty Queen of Pentacles (there were clients who came simply because they thrilled to this performance); or Compassionate Confidante and Gentle Healer.

  Then there was the sleek Gypsy Sorceress, from whose hands the cards flowed like
settling doves. For this role, Ada gathered her dark hair into a taut braid that brushed the small of her back. She had an array of embroidered silk shawls, all with the deep black fringe that elongated her already sinuous movements. Her hooped earrings were huge; some plain gold, some engraved with scarabs or twined snakes, some studded with diamantes that caught the light from the candles she would set about her consulting room. The curtains in this room were always drawn, so that with candles or sometimes oil lamps, she could reproduce the half-light of dusk or dawn. These were the times of potency, Ada explained, when the spirits moved most easily between our world and their own.

  None of these trappings were specious. Not the beaded curtain that hung in the doorway to the reception room, and which Ada would open with a flourish, gesturing the client through. Certainly not the whisk broom (“My besom,” Ada called it) that was always propped in one corner of the living room. This broom was never used for sweeping. Suzanne understood very early that the besom was in some sense a revered object, much as the crucifix and family Bible were in more conventional Halifax homes. Later, she understood it purely as a symbol of a sisterhood that stretched back centuries.

  Ada was respectfully cautious with her own gifts, and to have engaged in any sort of charlatanism would likely have killed her. She had, for example, no crystal ball. “Swami stuff,” she called such practices. Any duping of the public, she found repugnant.

  Ada could – and did – give readings of personal destinies using either the Egyptian Tarot or a standard deck of cards. She rejected the reading of palms as pure theatrics. Sometimes, she would agree to help clients explore past lives. She also had an unfailing ability to locate lost objects, and on many occasions, missing persons. This visualization process involved a concentration so intense that she appeared to be in pain, eyes screwed shut, knuckles pressed into her temples.

  One of her greatest gifts was comforting the bereaved, a talent that made her even more unpopular with the local clergy. Ada took care to undercut no one’s gods, unless she honestly believed their effects were pernicious. Her syncretism admitted them all, and she would not hesitate to bring in elements of her clients’ faiths if she felt this would help them cope. In extreme cases, she would act as a conduit between the bereaved and the spirit of the deceased. This was not a task she took on lightly. For one thing, she found such communication physically and psychically draining. She believed, as well, that one should avoid disturbing the newly dead, if at all possible. If they came first to you, that was another matter.

  For clients’ physical ailments, Ada maintained a pharmacopoeia of tisanes, ointments, and rubbing oils. Some of these compounds were based on the lore of her beloved Marsilio Ficino; others were drawn from the tradition of Wicca (the Craft, Ada called it); some were her own invention. She had efficacious cures for impetigo, eczema, arthritis, and pinkeye. The client’s belief was a necessary component in all her cures, most especially when she worked with phobias. Ada was an instinctual therapist, with an unstinting compassion and an adamantine power of the will.

  Her clientele came from all segments of Halifax society: working-class women out of their own neighbourhood, society matrons who always wore dark glasses, real estate salesmen and stockbrokers seeking the foreknowledge that would make them rich (what Ada really gave them was self-confidence). Then there were the foreign sailors, very often Russians and Poles, who would return each year. They were attracted to her exoticism, for Ada was a rarity in Halifax; and she in turn was drawn to their rugged darkness, their wide, high cheekbones that seemed to pierce the air, and their ingrained restlessness. Through them Ada was able to satisfy her own wanderlust vicariously. Intuitively, Suzanne realized how the world sometimes tugged at her mother. She could readily picture Ada in the classic, circus-bright horse-drawn caravan, following the twists of roads that wound ahead of her like smoke. The sailors of whom Ada was fondest had been to Peking, to Kashmir, to the Caucasus where Zeus, she told Suzanne, had chained Prometheus to a rock for daring to steal fire from the gods. The sailors brought bottles of glittering vodka that itself tasted like fire.

  Sometimes one of the sailors would spend the night. It was these liaisons, together with visits from other males among Ada’s varied clientele, that fuelled the gossip she was a whore.

  Whores, Ada carefully explained to Suzanne, had once been holy women, celebrated in their own temples, superbly knowledgeable about the transports and dangers implicit in the act of sex. It was male greed that had undermined the sacredness of these temple whores, Ada said. Male greed and the terrible imbalance of power between men and women in this world.

  Such were the roots of Suzanne’s feminism, with the archetypes of witch and whore made living presences through the heat of her mother’s belief. When she read the myth of Athena springing full-grown from the forehead of Zeus, Suzanne automatically transposed the story to herself and to Ada. Ada’s strength and her flaunting of convention made this kind of parthenogenesis seem quite likely. Nor could Suzanne ever remember feeling genuinely deprived because she had no father.

  “He was a sailor,” Ada told her, “and he died.” She would say no more, and there were no telling photographs or keepsakes. One did not push with Ada.

  If Suzanne sometimes found her upbringing bizarre, if she sometimes said things to Ada that years later made her writhe in shame, ultimately she saw their relationship as beyond price. For Ada did not seek deliberately to mould and shape her, as Suzanne observed happening with so many of her friends. Other parents prodded and poked, and threatened their children with the withdrawal of affection.

  Ada believed the nuclear family was responsible for much psychic damage. She was an R. D. Laing enthusiast, finding in his books a poetic expression of her own sense of things: that what masqueraded as familial love was often a form of violence.

  Ada had chosen Suzanne’s name to reflect her deep mistrust of the conventional family. Her daughter’s namesake was a young medieval Scotswoman, Suzanne Clelland, immortalized in a Border Ballad. That Suzanne had fallen in love with one of the enemy – an Englishman. Despite her parents’ pleading, she would not give up her lover. It was her own mother and father who dragged her to the stake to be burned for her treachery. The Suzanne Clelland of the old Ballad did not recant. She freely chose the flame rather than forsake her chance at love.

  “The name is your amulet,” Ada instructed her. “Keep it. Never change it.”

  This caution was as much information as Ada would ever venture about Suzanne’s future. Although she was sometimes willing to predict the fates of her clients, she would not do so for her own daughter. Maternal love would interfere with her clairvoyance, she said.

  “Your name is your amulet. Never change it,” was all Ada would say.

  So that on her marriage to Murdo Napier in a North London registry office, she did not even consider any of the unwieldy compounds that might have assuaged her feminist principles: not Clelland-Napier or Napier-Clelland. Instead she signed – as she was to sign all her life – the name Suzanne Clelland.

  4

  The Signs

  Murdo drew his latest equation on her body with the tip of his index finger. She shivered, closed her eyes, tried to picture the invisible signs he traced over and over, on the skin of her breasts, her belly, her inner thighs.

  Suzanne sped back to childhood. It was Ada’s feathery touch she felt, forming the protective symbols on her forehead, and at her temples and wrists where the pulse of blood would help absorb the charm. Anodyne. She had learned the word first from Ada. It had its own magic coolness and controlled power, like a crystal drop suspended in a blue glass vial. Or sometimes she pictured a solitary pearl on the beach, made hard and shining by the sea. The bed sheets smelled of the sea, for Ada hung them out to dry in the brisk wind that came from the harbour.

  Comforted, protected, and strong. Her eyes closed, the better to savour and memorize the sweet drift of her mother’s touch. Tucked in clean sheets, she would feel th
e day’s grubbiness, all the small failures and humiliations, drain away. The bedtime magic was her most intensely private ritual with Ada. She would experience then the sheer intensity of her mother’s powers. She was never able to describe exactly what it was happened. Yes, it was a current flowing into her, but more like water than electricity, coursing and then lapping through her veins. Yet there was also fire, the vivid sparks Ada implanted in her mind that Suzanne sensed were the sureness of all her possibilities to come. There was air too, for just before sleep, she would feel herself floating, skimming the surface of clouds. And at the close of this ritual, Ada brought in the certain solidity of earth. Curled on earth’s breast, Suzanne need never fear falling, that sickening plummet that sometimes came in dreams.

  Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. Suzanne knew these were the Elements of the Wise. If she wanted to draw on their powers, she had to picture them clearly first. Vis-u-al-ize, Suzanne. Ada sounded it out for her. Visualization was one of the most important parts of magic. If Suzanne wanted something to happen, she had to make the picture of it in her mind’s eye, as perfectly exact as possible, the colours throbbing, with all the pointed detail she could muster.

  Ada had stopped this ritual just about the time Suzanne started to menstruate. The blood meant she was growing up. Now she must protect herself, transform the day’s trials into strength as best she could. The Elements were also called the Four Watchtowers, and so Suzanne visualized herself as a strong, squared keep, a fastness on which each year she would build higher. She pictured it ultimately, set as high as Citadel Hill. Sometimes she surveyed the city from her imagined prospect, her eyes taking in only those places she loved best: her mother’s clapboard house, the Old Burying Ground at the corner of Barrington Street, and the mouth of the harbour itself, where the waves crashed forever against the rocks.