Witchlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Why am I thinking these thoughts?

  She glanced toward Kenny. Though he was only a few years older than she, Kenny’s hair had already faded to the color of tarnished brass, and in place of cruelty, his face showed nothing so much as a bovine indifference to the world around him.

  “But you’re not eating, dear,” her mother said. “Shall I have Martha fix you something else?”

  So that one moment you can say I’m putting on too much weight and the next try to force-feed me? “No thanks, Mother,” Winter said briefly.

  “Wycherly, do try to sit up straight. I’m sure Winter would like to hear what you’ve been doing.”

  Wycherly regarded Winter with sullen resentment. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he began nastily, but stopped at his mother’s expression of doe-eyed injury. Surrendering, he’d only gotten a few sentences into a hopelessly muddled explanation of some venture partnership when Kenny interrupted with the tale of a boat that he and Patricia were thinking of buying.

  “—I’d heard that Stevenson down in Term Mortgages had been looking at something like it but couldn’t quite swing the financing, so naturally I took the opportunity to ask his opinion—”

  And make sure he knew you were buying a boat he couldn’t afford, Winter finished for him silently. The atmosphere in the room shifted like water; water to put out fire … .

  Something was wrong here—more wrong than the clash of weak and spiteful personalities—but she could not be quite sure what. Of course everyone’s family were perfect horrors; Mother wanted her own way no matter who was hurt, Kenny was a snob and a tyrant, and Wych was as much of a bully as he could get away with being, but somehow she didn’t remember them being quite so blatant about it.

  And if they were all of these things, what was she?

  Dinner seemed to last for an eternity.

  KENNETH MUSGRAVE, SENIOR, arrived as predicted, about the time dinner was over and the dessert service had been laid out by the ever-faithful Martha. They had always had servants, and if Winter had thought about it at all, she’d considered it an automatic sign of privilege—but how much of a privilege was it, really, to have to wait for and depend on other people to do things you were perfectly capable of doing yourself?

  She welcomed her father’s arrival with relief. It had taken all her ingenuity to skate around the gaps in her memory; the only reason she was able to manage was the unwillingness of the others to mention anything that might open the subject of Winter’s stay at Fall River. She wondered what they’d say if she told them her problem had been diagnosed as poltergeists, not nervous collapse!

  “Daddy!” Winter cried, flinging herself into his arms with the first unmixed emotions she’d felt all day.

  “How’s my baby girl?” Kenneth Musgrave greeted her.

  Now in his late sixties, Winter’s father was tanned, silver-haired, and vigorous; so perfect a depiction of a prosperous Wall Street financier that he might almost be a symbol and not the thing itself. He hugged his daughter hard and then released her, studying her with acute steel-gray eyes.

  “And what brings you to our humble hacienda?” he said, smiling. “I thought you were settled in to that place you bought upstate. Randa, get me a drink, would you?”

  Winter let the baffling reference pass as her mother hurried to get her father his drink. This was what life at home had been like as long as Winter could remember: Kenneth Musgrave would enter like a conquering lion, and the Musgrave women would scurry to do his bidding.

  And the Musgrave men …?

  She stepped away from her father, glancing at her brothers, the princes in waiting, to see them both regarding her father with identical expressions of resentful envy.

  “I HOPE you’ll be getting back to work, soon,” Mr. Musgrave said. “You can’t let one failure define your entire life.”

  With her father’s arrival, Winter realized, the last player in the family tragedy had appeared, and events settled into their accustomed paths as if they had been repeated every night for a thousand years.

  “Oh, Kenneth,” her mother fluttered, “don’t you think it’s too soon? After all, Winter is so fragile …”

  “Fragile is another word for failure,” her father said flatly. “Ken Junior might not be as bright as his sister, but he’s risen right to the top. Persistence is what matters. You aren’t going to fail me twice, are you Winter?”

  His pale eyes transfixed her, allowing no room for evasion. All Winter could think of was every time she’d failed, every occasion on which she’d disappointed this man.

  “I won’t fail,” she said in a low voice.

  Her father smiled, and it seemed to Winter as if there were something of gloating in it, as if some victory had been achieved that stretched far beyond her obedience.

  She looked around the table, and it was suddenly as if each of them stood in the shadow of someone she knew: Kenny was Janelle, who’d surrendered everything she was good at for peace and security and found neither; Wycherly was Ramsey, afraid to try and knowing that the failure was killing him … .

  Both of her brothers had lost the golden time that Ramsey had talked about, and were doomed now to repeat their parents’ failures until the end of time.

  And her parents? Her father and mother? Whose failures were Kenneth and Miranda Musgrave doomed to re-create? Ramsey had said she’d escaped—she and Grey—but had he known how easy it was to fall back into failure? No matter what she did now—fail or win—Winter would disappoint one of her parents, and the realization was an unbearable, inescapable pressure.

  “I—Excuse me; I don’t think I feel very well.” Winter flung down her napkin and all but fled the dining room.

  HER MOTHER had given Winter her old room, but no trace remained now of Winter’s childhood occupancy. The room had long since been converted to the perfect guest room, from the Laura Ashley Ribbons & Roses wallpaper to the trendy country look of the hand-painted furniture and patchwork quilt on the bed. The room was light-years from Janelle’s Sears, Roebuck kitchen, but even at its stifling worst there had been something more … human … about Janelle’s house.

  The illness she had feigned appeared for real; Winter bolted for the bathroom as her stomach tried to eject what she’d managed to swallow of the evening’s meal.

  Afterward, trembling and sore, Winter opened the medicine cabinet in search of toothpaste and found instead several miniature bottles of liquor.

  So Wycherly’s following at least one family tradition.

  The only thing that surprised her was how much sadness the knowledge gave her. But she knew it had to be his; Kenny didn’t live here and neither of her parents would have felt the need to hide their liquor.

  Winter twisted the cap off one of the little bottles, rinsed her mouth with vodka and spat, then opened another and drank it straight down. Cold eighty-proof fire spread through her aching stomach, soothing the pain. Every instinct urged her to leave right now, to flee, but that was madness. This was her house; her family.

  “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?” Winter tipsily quoted James Goldman as she reached for another of the little glittering bottles. I’m having a relapse. Another breakdown. Whatever.

  And whatever it was, she couldn’t bear it. Why had she come back here, if coming was going to cause her so much pain? What kind of coward was she?

  A pretty stupid one.

  She’d been smarter before she’d gone to Fall River. The last time she’d been here was the summer she’d left school. She hadn’t been back since then. Not for Christmas, not for Thanksgiving. Not in fourteen years.

  And you’d think, wouldn’t you, that someone in the family would have mentioned that on the evening when Winter Musgrave came home again at last?

  Suddenly she was crawlingly cold to the tips of her fingers. All the secrets she’d cavalierly tried to unearth weren’t tidily deposited elsewhere. Some of the puzzles were here.

  And I said I wanted to know the truth. How stupi
d can you get? Oh, Grey, darling, help me!

  Winter retreated back to the bedroom, taking a third little bottle with her. Her headache was coming now in waves of chill and nausea, and in the world outside it had started to rain. The storm that had been threatening all afternoon and evening was breaking at last, and when Winter looked out the window she could see white lines of rain illuminated by the security floodlights.

  It had been raining that night.

  No! She could feel the effort it took to shove the memory beneath the surface, but she managed to make it. Her heart beat faster with fear, and the exertion left her dazzled and weak. She fell into the chair and stared morosely out the window.

  There were memories in the rain:

  —Winter Musgrave! That plate was Limoges!

  —But I didn’t touch it, Mommy! I didn’t!

  But her mother didn’t believe her. She never did. Just wait till your father gets home, young lady—And Winter had no way to rationalize the things she’d never done—or couldn’t remember doing.

  —If you’re going to go around trying to be different, don’t come crying to me that you’re not popular.

  —But, Daddy, all I wanted to do was …

  —If you’d spend less time trying to make yourself interesting and more on your schoolwork, young lady, you wouldn’t have time to complain that no one wants to take you to the prom.

  It wasn’t like that, Daddy! Winter protested, years too late. All I wanted was someone who would like me, not Kenneth Musgrave’s daughter … .

  The rain gusted against the window. It had been raining that night, too.

  No. Oh, please, not that. Not here. The pain behind her eyes shook her, making her surroundings glow and waver.

  By the time she’d reached her teens Winter no longer remembered the imaginary playmate of her childhood who had yanked pictures off the walls and broken plates with a gesture; nor that the blinding headaches she’d once gotten had coincided with electrical shorts in any machinery close by. She’d only known that there must be more to life than the garden club and the boardroom—something beautiful, meant for her alone. She’d wanted to go to UCLA or Berkeley, but her parents had insisted on an East Coast college. She’d chosen Taghkanic over Albany, even though Taghkanic was closer, because of the liberal arts program at the college and because the fact that it hosted the Bidney Institute horrified her mother.

  Don’t think I’m going to let you fill this house with a pack of scruffy college students after all my hard work, young lady. If you think you’re bringing any of them to this house, think again—

  —I wouldn’t bring anyone here that I liked, Mother!

  And then she’d met Grey. And he’d been all of her dreams come true.

  No—no—no—! Winter pounded her fist on the windowsill, knowing that in some sense she had planned her own agony. Why else come back, when she’d sworn she’d never return here, after—

  She’d never return here—

  It was raining, and—

  Never come back here. Never—

  IT WAS RAINING that night fourteen years ago. She hadn’t told them she was coming; she’d taken the train downstate to New York, then the LIRR to the closest station, then a taxi to the foot of the drive … .

  Winter groaned aloud. In a moment more she would remember; she could feel the psychic scars opening, leaving the wounds as raw and bleeding as if it were yesterday.

  She’d walked up from the foot of the drive—to give herself time, to prepare for having to tell them—and the rain had soaked her to the skin, first chilling, then numbing her. She’d wished she could be as numb inside; she would rather feel nothing than the pain … .

  She would rather feel nothing than the pain.

  She could still refuse to remember. To sit here looking inward took more courage than she would need to face a loaded gun; Winter had always thought she had courage, but she knew now those beliefs were a lie. All her life was a lie, carefully constructed.

  And now she knew it.

  THE GIRL RAISED her hand to the door-knocker, trying not to think. About what was to come, and what had already happened.

  12

  Past Reason Hunted

  Age makes a winter in the heart,

  An autumn in the mind.

  —JOHN SPARROW

  IN THE ORCHARD behind Greyangels, the apple trees were in full bloom. When she’d gotten back from the doctor earlier today all she could think of was finding some way to tell him privately—but on a small campus where both of them were so well known, privacy was hard to come by. Professor MacLaren didn’t mind Taghkanic students trespassing in his orchard, so she’d asked Grey to bring her here.

  But now that she had him alone, Winter Musgrave, age twenty-two and in her senior year at Taghkanic College, didn’t know where to begin. “I have something I need to tell you,” she’d said, and then had chattered on about meaningless things: spring break, the graduation ceremonies only a few months away, plans for the coming summer that she now knew were meaningless.

  “Come on,” Grey said. He’d leaned toward her, the fringe on his white buckskin jacket swinging. A stray sunbeam glinted off the glass-bead embroidery across the jacket’s shoulders; a blue more brilliant than the sky. “You’ve been dancing all around something. What?” he’d demanded. “Did you hear something about the internship? ‘Dandy’ Lion was supposed to hear this week—”

  They’d both applied for summer intern positions with the American Shakespeare Company, and Professor Welland had thought there was a good chance that Grey, at least, would get his. Winter brushed the thought aside. Like all her other plans for the future, it no longer mattered.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she’d blurted out.

  Grey had gone instantly still, staring at her with wide gray eyes. Even in this moment, knowing he was going to reject her, Winter could not help loving him the way she loved the wild beauty of the hawks or the Taconic hills. The spring breeze from the river had fluttered through his pale hair and the beaded fringe on his jacket, and it seemed as if the world held its breath.

  “A baby.” Grey had taken a deep breath and smiled. “A baby! Our baby! Why didn’t you tell me? How long have you—How do you know?” He’d reached for her and Winter gestured irritably, stopping him.

  “I went to the doctor,” Winter told him in a small cross voice. “Dammit, those pills are supposed to work.”

  Grey had laughed. “Everything always works out for the best.” He’d tried to put his arms around her, but Winter whirled away, glaring at the inoffensive apple tree directly before her and willing the tears not to come. Flower petals were everywhere, covering the spring grass in mock snow. She’d brushed them forlornly off the shoulders of her fake-fur jacket, hating the mess.

  “For the best! Grey, what am I going to do?” she’d wailed, leaning suddenly against the tree. It was somehow worse that he’d accepted it. When she wasn’t facing active resistance, Winter had never known quite what to do.

  “Don’t you want a baby?” Grey said then, and the sober note in his voice had made her turn back and look at him. “Do you want to, uh …” His voice trailed off awkwardly.

  I don’t know, I don’t know—

  “I don’t know!” Winter wailed. “You aren‘t—We aren’t—” She gestured helplessly, unable to put her thoughts into words, conscious only of feeling trapped. “What am I going to do?—Mother said they’d send me to Europe for the summer after graduation—mostly to get me away from you—and Daddy wants me to go to work for a friend of his on Wall Street—or get married—and I don’t even know what I’m going to tell them, and—”

  “Marry me,” Grey had said. “We’ll have the baby, and if that internship thing doesn’t work out I can do the Renfaire circuit out in California full time. We have the Blackburn Work, and I know some people out in the Bay Area who’ll help us. Everything’s going to work out. You’ll see.”

  Winter had gone on the circuit with him last summe
r, doing the pseudo-Elizabethan Renaissance Pleasure Faires up and down the West Coast. She’d played the guitar; Grey had done stage magic. They’d spent the summer sleeping on friends’ couches or in the back of Grey’s van; fine for a few weeks, but for a life? With a baby coming?

  “I don’t know,” Winter began, hesitantly. She could see the beginnings of confusion on Grey’s face; the question he was too proud to ask: “Don’t you love me, Winter?”

  I do, Grey—I do! but I’m so afraid—

  “Stay with me, Winter,” he said, holding out his hand one last time. “Stay with me.”

  She put her hands behind her back, afraid that if she took his hand she’d lose all common sense and blindly follow her heart.

  “I … I have to think, Grey. Take me back.” It wasn’t true—she hadn’t been able to think, not with so much uncertainty swirling around her.

  “It’s my baby, too; don’t you think it’s my decision, too?” Grey sounded hurt then and she couldn’t bear it.

  “No!” Winter exploded. “No I don’t! It’s my body and my life, and I can’t just—”

  He’d closed the distance between them and put his arms around her. She’d clung to him as if she were drowning and cried as if everything she loved were already gone. He held her until her tears were exhausted, teased her until she smiled, and promised her the sun, the moon, and the stars.

  And he’d thought everything was settled then, with the easy confidence of one who had never known defeat. But she’d had no faith in the future he painted for her.

  And that night, without telling anyone, not even Cassilda, she’d taken the train south.

  Home.

  WINTER OPENED her eyes. The storm had softened to a steady drumming rhythm that could go on for hours, and through the open window the room was filled with the smell of rain and wet earth. Laboriously Winter picked herself up off the floor of her room. When she moved, she found that her entire body ached with chill and tension, but the headache had passed, leaving a light-headed lethargy in its wake. Unwillingly she looked around. For a moment she expected to see the rows of carefully preserved stuffed animals, but that belonged to the past; she’d given them all away years ago.