The Midnight Witch

by Paula Brackston

  Inside, although there are in fact walls surrounding the space, they are barely noticeable, for they are less than a yard high, the rest of the construction being entirely of glass. And what glass it is! The specially made panes, some flat, others curved, are slotted into a spider’s web of slim iron, giving a startling view of the skies above, as well as the city stretched out below. I love to come here on stormy nights, when the wind and rain assail my transparent shelter, but I am kept dry and snug, able to experience all the wildness of the elements without so much as getting wet. And on clear nights, such as this one, I feel as if I have been raised up to dwell in the heavens and browse among the crystal stars. There is a telescope in the north of the room, mounted on gleaming brass fittings, so that I may study the celestial bodies more closely. It is a diverting pastime, perhaps the one guilty luxury I permit myself in these troubled times.

  When the coven lost its home, it fell to me to provide, or at least to find, a new one. There were many ideas put forward by senior witches, all of a uniformly gothic and gloomy nature. But I felt the need for change. For a sacred space that would signify our commitment to the future, as well as the past. Who is to say that we must dig downward to reach the spirits? It is only tradition that has dictated this. We are not in the business of plucking the dead from their graves; we do not require them to physically clamber to the surface, so why must we burrow underground like moles? Spirits exist on a plane all of their own. It is the night that gives us best access to them, not the subterranean dark. There was much dissent among the coven at my idea. I expected it. But I held to my view. I even said that I would be happy for the senior witches to have an alternative venue for their meetings, so long as they realized that I, as Head Witch, would maintain the sacred space where I chose to. They were, after all, free to stay away from meetings held here if they wished. After a deal of argument it was agreed that the observatory would be the new home for the Lazarus Coven, so long as it proved successful. I had cushioned seating installed around the inside of the low wall, and the floor is painted exactly as the one in the Great Chamber had been. If spirits were reluctant to come to it, the matter would be reviewed. In fact, the spirits have shown themselves happy to come here when called or summoned, and to feel very at home in the airy, ethereal space.

  There was another reason for my wish to free our rituals and meetings from such a place as a catacomb. I still wake gasping and panic-stricken some nights when the sight of what I saw in the Darkness when Freddie was nearly taken into its depths fills my nightmares. To think that I might have lost him to such a place. To such … beings. The Darkness holds all that is bad in this world once it no longer treads the earth. I will do all I can to stay away from it and not to put my fellow witches near such danger ever again.

  A bell in a small alcove by the door rings gently, alerting me to a visitor. I pick up the telephone on the wall next to it.

  “Who is it, Terence? Oh, please send her up to the observatory. And would you be so kind as to bring a tray of gin and tonic, too?”

  One further advantage of the observatory over the catacombs is that it can be used for entertaining my friends. I could hardly have invited them into the Great Chamber, even if its existence had not been a secret.

  Charlotte arrives in her customary flurry of excitement, with Terence, my rather aged butler trailing in her wake bearing the tray of drinks. I know him to be uneasy with heights, so that he has to steel himself to walk about on the roof garden. He is certainly no Withers, but he is quiet and diligent, and since he’d been wounded in the war and lost an eye, I know he would have struggled to find a position elsewhere. He lives with other servants in the building in the staff rooms in the basement, which suits us both. There is a restaurant on the ground floor from which food can be sent up, as well as my own small kitchen where Terence assembles breakfasts and suppers. Mama cannot fathom how I manage to live like this, but I find it blissfully uncomplicated and far more private than life at Fitzroy Square ever was.

  “Lilith, darling!” Charlotte kisses me quickly and then flops onto a chaise longue, tugging off her gloves and removing her hat. “Goodness, coming up here is like visiting some rare bird up in its aerie.”

  “I think that would make me an eagle.”

  “Really? Oh no, that won’t do. Much too predatory.”

  “An owl, perhaps? I am something of a night bird.”

  Terence hands us both tall glasses of gin and tonic with generous slices of lime and lashings of ice. He picks up Charlotte’s discarded accessories and leaves us, walking a little unsteadily back to the lift door on the far side of the garden.

  “No, owl won’t do,” Charlotte goes on. “They are too plump, somehow. I have it! You are a phoenix! You have risen from the ashes of Fitzroy Square and flown up to this lofty perch in all your glorious colors!”

  I laugh at her. “Charlotte, what nonsense you spout. I am the least colorful person I know.”

  “Oh well, have it your own way.” She sips at her drink. “I must say, that new man of yours might be unsteady on his pins, but he’s a whiz with the gin bottle.”

  “He’s settling in.”

  “How you manage without a lady’s maid I simply cannot imagine. Lord knows it’s an utter nightmare trying to find servants these days. Any worth having are all snapped up. Perfectly good maids have got all sorts of modern ideas into their heads since the war and now don’t want to be in service. I mean to say, how is one supposed to function? Mummy says if things continue the same way we shall be forced to give up Glengarrick.”

  “Oh, surely not. The estate’s been in your family for generations. Can’t you just, well, manage with fewer footmen?”

  Charlotte looks at me as if I have taken leave of my senses. “Lilith, darling, these are my parents we are discussing. They have no notion of ‘managing’ when it comes to servants. They think the setup you have here quite extraordinary. No, it will be down to me to save them, I fear. I shall simply have to marry well, marry quickly, and marry money.”

  “Well, that sounds straightforward. Have you a lucky groom in mind?” I ask, sitting on the chair next to her.

  “Don’t tease me. All very well for you to be smug. You know you’ve bagged one of the few decent bachelors going. How is darling Louis?” Charlotte settles deeper into the chaise and savors more gin.

  “He’s very well, thank you.”

  “Counting the days to the wedding, no doubt. Should be quite an occasion. Though so sad he won’t have his dear father there.” She pauses for form’s sake before adding, “Still, nice to be marrying an earl instead of a viscount, one would imagine.”

  I know I should disapprove of so many things about Charlotte, but she has been a stalwart friend to me through difficult times, and she does make me smile.

  “I’m sure the perfect knight, armor gleaming, will come galloping up to your door any day now, begging for your hand,” I tell her.

  “Huh! I’ve had precisely two proposals of marriage since the beastly war ended. One was from a friend of Father’s who is more than twice my age, and the other from Sticky Stackpole. I mean, really. Someone has to tell him that cultivating an abundant mustache will not disguise the fact that he has a weak chin and an even weaker mind.”

  “But he is ridiculously rich.”

  “There is no such thing, Lilith. Which you should very well know. Once you and Louis unite the Montgomery and Harcourt fortunes you will be quite the wealthiest couple in London, shouldn’t wonder.” She is thoughtful for a moment and studies me closely. “You are looking a little thin. Are you eating properly?”

  “Now you sound like Mama.”

  “You won’t do that gorgeous gown justice if you’re all thin and scrawny.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “Most likely wedding day nerves getting to you.”

  “It’s weeks away yet.”

  “But it will be a splendid event. Any girl would be a bit jittery, I’d have thought. So lon
g as that’s all it is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sits up and puts her hand on mine. “You are happy about marrying Louis, aren’t you? Oh, I know I joke about marrying for money and all that, but you understand what I truly believe, Lily. One should marry for the right reason. You do love him, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” I reply with practiced ease, though I no longer know whom I am trying to convince more, Charlotte or myself.

  “It’s just that, well, he has wanted to marry you for so very long, and you always said no before.”

  “Things change, Charlotte. People change.”

  “I suppose so. Only…”

  “Charlotte, if you have something to say don’t you think you ought to come out and say it?”

  She sits up, setting her glass down on the pale ash table. She takes both my hands in hers and squeezes them tightly.

  “You simply do not look like a love-struck bride to me.”

  “Oh, Charlotte, really, we are not silly girls…”

  “No, listen, it’s just that I know how you look when you are in love, Lily, because I have seen it once before, and this is not the same.” She smiles at me and adds, “I have never seen anyone as infuriatingly beautiful as you were when you were with Bram!”

  I keep my voice level but avoid meeting her eye.

  “That was a long time ago, Charlotte. Everything is different now.”

  “Is it? Are you telling me if he were to walk through that door now I wouldn’t see that same transformation in you? Because to be perfectly frank, darling, I believe you are still every bit as much in love with him as ever you were, and what you feel for Louis is not the same, is it?”

  “Perhaps not,” I say, “but who is to say it is not more … sensible?”

  Charlotte lets go of my hands and waves hers in a gesture of despair. “Lily, please! We are talking about being in love—I don’t see in the slightest what sensible has got to do with anything.”

  I say nothing, for what can I say? I cannot tell Charlotte that, before that fateful zeppelin raid, I had myself decided I would find Bram again and tell him how I felt, because I believed love matters above all else. I cannot tell her how what happened changed things yet again. That how Lord Harcourt acted, what he was prepared to do, and what I must do to fulfill my obligations as Head Witch of the Lazarus Coven, all these things made me realize that no one but another witch could understand me. That it would be unfair, in fact, to love and be loved by a non-witch, for they could never understand the danger that surrounds me. The constant vigilance I must maintain because of what I am. Louis understands. Louis accepts all of these things, because we share that common path. Marrying Bram, even if I could find him, even if he would forgive me, even if he still wanted me, would be wrong. It would be unfair, unkind. It is better I do not see him again. Yes, marrying Louis is the right thing to do, however unromantic Charlotte thinks me. It is the sensible thing to do.

  24.

  From the window of the bedroom that currently serves as his studio, Bram has a good view of the finer houses in Skimmerton. His mother offered little resistance to the idea of his using the room. She was so pleased to have him home again she would, he thinks now, have agreed to his commandeering the drawing room if he had only asked for it. His father had not been so accommodating.

  “Thought you’d done with all that,” he’d said, seeing Bram wincing as he attempted to raise a paintbrush to easel height. “Would have thought you could put that arm to better use, now that the hospital has seen fit to send you back to us.”

  The rifle bullet that found Bram’s shoulder had seen him spend the final months of the war in a ward full of similarly wounded soldiers. He counted himself fortunate. His injury had healed, leaving only a scar and some residual weakness and occasional pain. After the months he had endured in Africa, fighting disease and hunger as much as the enemy, watching his brothers in arms fall victim to the deadly Blackwater fever or malaria day after day, trudging through the swamps along the Rufiji River or baking beneath the equatorial sun alongside the Ugandan railway, he knew he had been lucky to come home at all.

  “I’ve said I’ll come in to the steelworks with you, Father. I can enjoy my painting in my spare time.”

  His father’s answer had been a disapproving grunt, but Bram has stuck to his word. For months he has traveled across town to the steel yard and spent his days in the office, carrying out his father’s instructions, familiarizing himself with the running of the works. And as soon as he is free he hurries home to his paints and his canvases and picks up wherever he left off, with whichever painting currently holds him spellbound. He has never felt so inspired, so in the grip of some artistic fever of creativity. It is as if, after touching the edge of oblivion, after the smell of death filled his nostrils and almost claimed him, he is reinvigorated with the desire, the need, to put what he has seen, what he has felt, what he has known, onto paper. To strive to capture the presence of those who were lost. To depict what they went through, and to show the strange land where they fought, suffered, and, some of them, died. He has been entirely taken up with his mission this past year and a half. And now it is done.

  He turns back from the window and considers what he has achieved. The paintings stand leaning against every wall, stacked against one another, carefully wrapped and bound and ready for their journey down to London. So many images. So many faces.

  But have I succeeded? Will others see what it is I have struggled to show? Or will they simply find figures? Compositions. Clever slants of light or depths of shadow, but nothing more. Nothing more.

  Moving to the bedside table he picks up the letter he received from Jane the previous week. Reading her words he can hear her warm but harassed voice in his ear.

  “… so you simply must stay with us when you come up for your exhibition. Mangan will be so very pleased to see you. He has not yet recovered his health entirely. The months he spent in that dreadful place weakened his lungs forever, I fear. Thank heavens darling Lilith was able to come to our rescue and secure him a place working on a farm in Somerset. You know, he took to the work! Can you imagine?”

  Indeed, Bram can imagine. He can just see Mangan coming to grips with plowing fields or milking cows and then setting about telling everyone else how it should be done. The image makes him smile, but he knows the reason he reads and rereads Jane’s letter is for the pleasure of reading of Lilith. To hear news of her is to feel a tiny bit closer to her once more. He resolved, while lying wounded in the hospital in Nairobi, that if he made it home he would seek out Lilith. Go to her and tell her how he felt. Make her see that the gap between them was bridgeable, and that there was no one else he could ever envisage being with. He would convince her that somehow they would find their place in the world, together. The war has changed things. What stood in their way a few years earlier surely did not, could not, matter so much now. He would find her. He would speak with her. He would make her see.

  But men make plans and the gods laugh. Perhaps it was the fever I suffered after I was wounded that gave me such a ridiculous view of how things might be.

  He forces himself to read on, make himself face the bleak reality that the second page of Jane’s letter contains.

  “… Charlotte is quite the darling of high society now and is in the newspaper on the arm of some duke or other nearly every day, it seems. Or course, Lilith was so very busy with her war work, doing so marvelously in the soup kitchens at St. Mary’s Convent. And now she is to be married. I think you met her husband-to-be, the Earl of Winchester? He was still a viscount back then, of course, but his father was killed quite recently, in an air raid. How people have suffered! Mangan seems to recall Lilith’s fiancé being at that rather grand ball you went to some years back, do you remember? You and Perry looked terribly dashing, and poor dear Mangan was barely let through the door, he looked such a fright! We saw the notice in the Times. So I suppose she will cease being Lady Lilith Montgomery a
nd become Lady Lilith Harcourt instead. Oh, say you will stay with us at least until the week after your show finishes, so that Mangan may have plenty of time with you, do…”

  Lady Lilith Harcourt. Louis. Of course. She was always going to marry Louis. She was always going to marry an earl. She was always going to marry a witch. Why wouldn’t she marry an earl?

  Bram folds the letter and puts it in his jacket pocket. He is not quite ready to dispose of it yet. He will go to London. He will stay in the familiar muddle of the house in Bloomsbury and enjoy letting Jane fuss over him, and see the children, and spend time with Mangan. He will hold his exhibition, show his work to the world, and brace himself for its reaction. But he will not look for Lilith. He will not hold her hand and tell her what is in his heart. He will not.

  He busies himself checking the packaging on his paintings, and marking them off against the list he has made, with the layout of the hang attached. As he does so, his eye is caught by a slim, unwrapped canvas standing in the corner of the room behind some works that are unfinished. He knows what it is. He knows what he will see if he chooses to look at it. Who he will see.

  Cross with himself now, he strides over to the corner and drags the canvas from its hiding place. Without pausing, he takes the painting and carries it to the empty easel, where he sets it up and stands back, mouth grim, determined to face his fears. Lilith’s enigmatic face gazes back at him. The artist in him is struck at once by the quality of the work. It is one of his best, and he knows it. The man in him is struck by the beauty of the subject.

  Dear God, Lilith. What spell have you cast over me?

  In his heart he knows that he did not imagine her love for him. That it is more than likely duty and loyalty and fear that have made her abandon him and turn away from the possibility of a life together. And he believes, if he allows himself to do so, that were he to go to her, to take her hands in his, to meet her soulful gaze, and to tell her he still loves her, he still wants her, he would see in those glorious, wild green eyes that she still loves him, too. There and then, he resolves to try one more time. To risk the pain of possible rejection. To risk humiliation. To risk falling again into that kind of madness into which he descended those lonely years ago when she spurned him.