A Witch in Love

by Ruth Warburton

  Sectioned. Another punch to the stomach. I could hardly breathe.

  ‘But … but she got better?’ I choked.

  ‘For a while, yes. But then after the birth it got worse. First of all she thought that everyone was trying to steal you or harm you – she wouldn’t accept any visitors; she wouldn’t go out. She’d cut ties with her family a long time before that – but she refused to let them know about the birth, even. And then it changed and she started to behave as if she was the risk. She became very odd. She disappeared for long stretches, did strange things. And then … then she disappeared for good.’

  He had, I thought, almost forgotten that he was speaking to me. He was talking softly, almost to himself, letting the accumulated weight of eighteen years’ silence roll off his shoulders.

  ‘The shock of her absence was dreadful … brutal. I was half crazy with worry and trying to look after a newborn – you were only six weeks old. But in a horrible way I was almost glad, can you believe that? She had been so deranged, so convinced that her presence was harmful to you, that I’d almost started to believe it myself. Now, of course … well, I’ve read a lot, over the years. I think I understand a lot better what she was going through. And I think I failed her, just when she needed me most.’ He blinked and the tears ran down his cheeks again. ‘She had no one, you see. Her family had cut her off when she married me. Only me. And I failed her.’

  ‘Dad …’ My voice cracked. I didn’t know what to say, how to comfort him. I reached across the table and took his hand. He squeezed it, smiled, then took off his glasses and busily wiped away the moisture, coughing to try to cover his emotion.

  ‘She left a note,’ he continued, clearing his throat again, ‘saying that she loved us both but this was the only way she could think of to protect us, and that she hoped I could forgive her. She asked me not to tell you too much, not to haunt you with her devils, was how she put it. “Let her have her childhood innocence” she wrote. I think she was right.’ He smiled at me and patted my hand. Then he drained his wine glass with businesslike determination and refilled it.

  I just sat in silence, reeling with all the new information Dad had given me, trying to fit this with the picture I’d built in my head so far. The clock above the dresser ticked and Dad gulped down his wine like a man just back from the desert. At last I cleared my throat and pointed to the envelope with my name on it.

  ‘And … this?’ I managed.

  ‘Her note asked me to give this to you on your eighteenth birthday,’ Dad said. ‘I don’t know what’s in it.’ He stopped and rubbed under his glasses again in that nervous gesture of strain. ‘She wrote it just before she left. She may not have been …’ He broke off, then said, ‘What I mean is, that’s why I wanted to tell you about her illness. Before you opened it. In case … in case the letter’s not …’

  ‘Not sane,’ I said dully.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dad said. ‘But I had to warn you.’

  ‘I understand.’ I looked down at the envelope and drew a breath. ‘Dad, please don’t be offended, but would you mind if I opened this by myself?’

  Dad looked surprised for a minute, but then he recovered himself and nodded. ‘Of course. Of course. I understand.’

  ‘I know she was your wife,’ I tried to explain, ‘but it’s just—’

  ‘Anna, don’t be silly,’ Dad said firmly. ‘This is your letter. Heaven knows, there’s little enough else I’ve been able to give you from your mother. You deserve to have this to yourself. Go on.’ He pushed the envelope across the table to me and I took it. My hands shook as I put it in my pocket, but whether with fear or excitement, I couldn’t have said.

  Then I stood up.

  ‘Thank you, Dad,’ I said. ‘For, you know. This. Everything.’

  ‘Thank you, Anna.’ Dad pushed his chair back with a screech of wood on stone and kissed my forehead. ‘I know I’m a maudlin old man who’s drunk too much wine, but I need to get this off my chest. You’ve been the best daughter an old dad could have. No –’ as I shook my head uncomfortably, blinking against my suddenly swimming eyes ‘– no, I mean it. Every day I’ve been thankful that if Isla had to be taken from me, she left someone so wonderful in her place.’

  ‘Oh, Dad!’

  He folded me in his arms and I smelt his familiar comforting smell: aftershave, perspiration, woodsmoke. For a minute I rested against his shoulder and the years melted away, the moment melding into all the other hundreds and thousands of times Dad had comforted me against his shoulder. Then I straightened and wiped my eyes. Dad laughed and blew his nose, pretending that he hadn’t been crying.

  ‘Dear, dear. That’s what happens if you get through the best part of a bottle of merlot before supper. Let that be a lesson to you, my dear; red wine will turn you boring and sentimental.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said, managing a shaky laugh. ‘And senile too, if you’re not careful.’

  ‘Go on.’ He thwacked at my legs with the tea towel. ‘Get away, you cheeky whippersnapper. I’ve got important drinking to do.’

  Up in my room I turned on my side-lamp and took the envelope out of my pocket. My heart was thumping painfully. So. This was it.

  I ripped along the top edge, tearing back eighteen years of past in a moment. A single sheet fell out into my lap and I picked it up.

  It was folded in half and, just for a moment, I almost couldn’t bear to open it. Then I drew a deep breath, and smoothed out the sheet.

  My dearest, it read.

  I wish I could stay, but I can’t.

  I love you so very much, but this is the only answer. It’s better this way.

  All my love, always.

  Is Mum

  And then, underneath that, a poem that I half recognized.

  Death is nothing at all

  I have only slipped away into the next room

  I am waiting for you for an interval

  Somewhere very near

  Just around the corner

  On the other side.

  All is well.

  For a minute I just sat and stared at the sheet, my chest rising and falling with strange, heaving breaths that hurt my ribs. There was a hard, painful knot near my heart. This was it? Eighteen years – eighteen years I’d waited; eighteen years Dad had guarded this envelope, waiting faithfully for the prescribed day, and this was it? A four-line note and a poem cribbed off the internet?

  Some huge bitter emotion rose up in my chest, making it hard to breathe.

  I felt … betrayed. Betrayed by that moment of optimism I’d had downstairs – that this letter would explain everything, give me the answers I needed.

  Betrayed because the letter hadn’t given me anything – instead it had taken something away, extinguished a tiny spark of hope I’d never knew existed, until now. If you’d asked me that morning whether my mum was coming back, I would have answered an emphatic ‘no’. But now, to see the word ‘death’ in her own writing, and next to it the glib cliché about ‘slipping into the next room’, as if the act was nothing at all, when it was everything, everything …

  I crushed the envelope in my fist, wishing I could blister it into cinders and ashes – but something made me stop. There was something else in the envelope, something hard, like a little square of cardboard.

  I uncrumpled the envelope, turned it upside down, and out fell a little passport-sized photo of a woman, just a few years older than me. She had my smudgy grey-blue eyes, my pale skin. But her long dark hair fell in ripples down her shoulders, where mine rioted in tangled curls. Her face was a china oval, her lips curved in a smile. She was young, happy, carefree. She looked infinitely familiar and yet I had never seen her before. I knew, without anyone to tell me, that this was my mother.

  I held the photo in shaking hands, hardly able to see through my falling tears. What had happened? What had she been running from? Her face shimmered and rippled through my tears and, suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I seemed to see a faint writing going diagonally
across the portrait, the letters painstakingly small. It was just a shadow, like the indent of a pen transferred through from another page, but it was there.

  Blinking back my tears I held the photo closer and looked more carefully. Nothing. I couldn’t even see the ghost of a letter. I was just about to put it down when something, some instinct, made me look again, really look, as a witch. I narrowed my eyes, sent all my power flowing out towards the little photo. It trembled in my hand as if swept by a strong wind – and suddenly the words sprang out, traced so clearly I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen them before.

  Anna, I’d so hoped that you would take after Tom’s kind and not mine. If you can read this, that hope was false. I’m so sorry. Be careful who you trust. Be careful who you love.

  I let the papers flutter to the floor and sat in the growing darkness.

  When Dad’s call to supper echoed up the stairs, I pulled myself together and got up to switch on the light. For a moment the shocked ghost of a girl stared fearfully at me, white face and shadowed hair black in the darkness. Then I flicked the switch and it was just my reflection in the mirror, blinking at me in the sudden flood of yellow light.

  ‘Anna!’ Dad bellowed again.

  ‘Coming!’ I called back, trying to make my voice as normal as possible. And I clattered down the stairs to pretend I was just a normal girl, eating curry on a normal school night. Not a reluctant witch, choking down food on her secret, concealed birthday, trying to piece together the fractured shards of her past.

  I ate in near silence, forcing out the odd reply to Dad’s chatty monologue, then we did the washing up side by side, Dad washing and me drying and putting away. I was just putting the last dish in the cupboard when the hall clock struck ten and Dad yawned.

  ‘Right, up the stairs to Bedfordshire for me. I spent all day shovelling snow and it doesn’t half take it out of you. And tomorrow I’d better whitewash the barn.’

  He was about to leave the kitchen when he remembered something and turned back.

  ‘I’d almost forgotten.’ He put his hand in his pocket. ‘We’ll do your birthday properly next week, like usual, but I didn’t want the day to go unmarked so …’ He held out a small box with a smile.

  ‘Is this a present?’ I asked uncertainly.

  ‘Sort of. Open it, why don’t you.’

  I looked down at the little worn cardboard box in Dad’s palm, feeling an odd reluctance. So many secrets in sealed packets; could I stand any more revelations tonight? But Dad was waiting, so I picked it up and took off the lid.

  Inside were two earrings, small silver droplets like drops of rain, quicksilver tears.

  ‘They were Isla’s,’ he said softly. ‘The one thing of hers I have left to give you.’

  My throat was suddenly tight and to cover my emotion I moved to the hall mirror, trying to insert the earrings with fumbling fingers.

  ‘What do you think?’ I turned around with an effort at a smile and Dad smiled back, his eyes unnaturally bright.

  ‘They look lovely on you.’ He framed my face with his big, work-roughened hands and looked at me, his eyes liquid and shining. ‘You know, tonight, in those earrings, in this light, you could almost be Isla. The likeness really is extraordinary.’ He coughed and dashed at his eyes and then kissed my forehead. ‘Happy birthday, darling, and goodnight. Sleep well and remember it’s school tomorrow, so don’t stay up too late.’

  I watched him as he climbed the stairs, emotions churning inside me. His words should have brought a glow to me, but instead they made me shiver. Did I really want to be like her, my doomed, beautiful, hunted mother? At that moment I felt her fear had reached across the years and infected me.

  Be careful who you love.

  Oh, Dad, you should have listened to that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the darkness and listened to the sounds of Dad huffing and turning in bed, and then the faint sounds of snores coming down the landing.

  Thoughts, words and feelings were scrabbling around inside my head, scrapping and fighting for dominance. I should have been stressing about exams, coursework, social life – but they were the last things on my mind.

  What had driven my mother away? Was she mad or sane? Had she been right about the demons hunting her, or was it just paranoia? What about the letters on the barn, were they connected to my birthday, or just a horrible coincidence?

  The questions battered at the inside of my skull until I felt like screaming, but instead I ground my fists into my tired, scratchy eyes and tried to think rationally, concentrating on what I knew, or thought I knew.

  I was now completely certain that my mother had left the charm under our step. It fitted with Dad’s account of her paranoia, her fears for me. And, as I’d suspected, she must have been the person to put the spell of silence on my father – the date on the letter coincided with the lifting of the spell; that couldn’t be mere chance. She’d crippled my magic, changed my birth date, sealed Dad’s tongue, and then left. But why? Why? I felt as if the answer were there, but hovering just out of my grasp.

  There must be something about me – something that made it necessary for me to be hidden. Was it the same something that had set the Ealdwitan on my track last year? Was it connected to the Malleus’s sudden interest? But whatever it was, why couldn’t she just tell me? What was so unspeakable that my mother couldn’t bear to put the facts on paper, not even in the secret witch-message she’d left for me, written on the photograph?

  As I lay in the darkness, unspoken fears hardened inside me, suspicions that had been festering and growing for days, weeks even, coalescing into a dark shadow that seemed to swallow up my past and future. What if … What if there was something … bad about me?

  Maya and Emmaline had always talked as if there must be something desirable about my powers that the Ealdwitan wanted to use, for their own ends. But my mother, my own mother, had left a charm in our house to cripple my magic for as long as I lived there.

  I began to think about everything I’d done with my witchcraft since we moved to Winter. I’d smashed up our house and cracked the seawall protecting the town. I had summoned up demons and watched powerless as they ravaged Winter. I’d set fires, destroyed property, hurt people, hurt myself.

  I’d hurt Seth. I’d obliterated his love for Caroline with a single spell and made him love me for ever more, with a love so passionate and steadfast that it scared me sometimes.

  I couldn’t think of a single good thing I had ever done. Was this what my mother had known? Was there such a thing as a truly evil power, independent of whatever the owner wanted to do with it; a witch with a limitless potential for harm?

  Lying motionless in the darkness was suddenly intolerable. I switched on the bedside light and got out the photograph, as if my mother’s gaze could somehow tell me what she’d feared for me.

  But there was nothing in the photograph to help. She looked back at me from the paper, laughing, fearless. A feeling of intense warmth and love washed out towards me, and I suddenly knew from her open happiness that the photographer must have been a friend. If only I knew who it had been…

  Narrowing my eyes, I looked more closely at the background of the photo. It looked like she was in a shop, a bookshop; there were stands of books to her left, fuzzy and out of focus. Behind her was the shop window and I could see letters etched on the glass, but they looked strange, unfamiliar.

  It took a moment for me to realize why. It was mirror writing – designed to be read from the street. I was seeing it reversed, as it would look to customers inside the shop.

  My hands shook as I held the photo up to the mirror beside my bed, so much that for a minute the reflection was completely unreadable, just a trembling mess of lines and images. I bit my lip, forcing myself to be still, and the letters swam into focus. Truelove Books, Soho, I read, and then something underneath in letters too small to read with the naked eye.

  But before I could try to remember where I
’d last seen Dad’s big magnifying glass, there came a sound that sent my heart racing; a crack. Then a stealthy scrabble from outside.

  I thought of the red letters, of men in hoods creeping round our house, of Dad lying unprotected just yards from me. Power began to build inside – and just as I was about to snap, there came a knock at the window and Seth’s low voice saying, ‘Anna, Anna, it’s me.’

  ‘Seth!’ I flew to the window and let him in on a gust of cold, wet air. ‘What are you doing? You nearly gave me a heart attack.’ It wasn’t the first time he’d climbed up to my window, but each time scared me afresh.

  ‘Sorry.’ He rubbed his chilly feet, bare for climbing the creviced brickwork. ‘Christ, it’s brass monkeys out there.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I wanted to see you. I had a hideous night – bar full of braying tossers, and Mum’s staying overnight at the hospital with Grandad so I’m all alone.’

  ‘Is he bad?’

  ‘Yes. They said she probably shouldn’t go home, you know … in case.’ His voice cracked on the last word.

  ‘Oh, Seth …’ I bit my lip. I had no idea what to say. I had no family except Dad so I could only try to imagine Seth’s feelings. It must be made all the worse for him by the memories of his own dad, who’d died of cancer in that same hospital four, nearly five years ago. I put my arm around him. Seth tried to shrug but I could feel the stiffness in his shoulders.

  There was nothing I could say, so instead I took his hand and pulled him to the warmth of my bed and we curled together. He was damp and chilled to the bone, even his clothes struck cold through my thin pyjamas, and my teeth were chattering with sympathy as we drew the duvet up. I tried to wrap my warm feet around his ice-cold ones and gradually we both stopped shivering as my body-heat communicated itself to Seth. I felt his muscles begin to thaw and his clenched limbs unfurl, twining with mine.