by Mindy Klasky
CHAPTER 10
“I’M SORRY I’M late!” I was apologizing before the hostess had finished ushering me to our table. David Montrose stood as I arrived, and he placed his hands on the back of my chair in that strange gesture that conveys that a man is ready to assist a woman, but also feels possessive.
Not that I was complaining. He was back to his dark suit look, with a blindingly white shirt, and a conservative silver-on-black tie. I glanced down at my own outfit and was grateful that Neko had talked me into the microfiber one-piece dress. And the chunky green glass necklace that played off my hair. And the narrow-heeled slingbacks that were killing my feet.
“Actually,” David said, “you’re right on time.” He glanced at his watch. I had left mine behind, in deference to this dinner that was more than a regular everyday meal. But less than a date. A lesson? A new beginning?
I surreptitiously took a deep breath and ordered my flip-flopping belly to settle down. Fortunately, the waiter chose that moment to scuttle up to the table. “Would Madame like a cocktail?”
I cast a quick glance at David and hated myself for doing so. Would I like a drink? Of course. Make mine a double. But I had made a promise. If we were working tonight…. David nodded and took the lead. “I’ll have a martini,” he said.
“Vodka gimlet,” I countered, and the waiter nodded before scurrying off toward the kitchen. “So,” I forced myself to say, confronting the alcoholic bull by the horns. “We’re not actually working tonight.”
“Not in the sense that you mean. We’re getting to know each other better. You’re learning to trust me. To trust yourself and what you can be.”
His smile was disarming. I looked around the restaurant and wondered how much time he had spent selecting the place. When Neko had told me that I was meeting David at La Chaumiere, I was excited, pleased enough that I momentarily forgave Roger for being my social secretary.
La Chaumiere was a Georgetown staple; it had been around for more than thirty years. It was known for its fine French food and its fabulous service, but it was supposed to be relaxed, comfortable, almost like a country inn. I could imagine a warm hearth in the front room and lavish guest beds above, complete with fluffy down comforters and 400-count cotton sheets.
Sheets. I blushed. This was a restaurant in the middle of Washington, D.C. I’d better get my mind out of the bedroom and back to work.
Because whatever David Montrose said, this dinner was a sort of work for me. If I was going to believe him, if I was going to accept the strange new job I’d undertaken, then I’d better accept that everything about David was business. He was my mentor, my teacher. My warder.
The waiter came back with our drinks, along with menus. “To new beginnings,” David said, lifting his glass. I touched mine to his and repeated the toast, feeling the words thrum down my spine like musical notes.
New beginnings, I reminded myself. Like a new school year, the start of junior high. Like that terrible, awkward time, when you looked up in seventh-grade history class and realized that you were the only girl in the room, and that odd-shaped white thing on your desk must be one of those athletic cups that you’d heard about, and that if you wanted it off your desk you were going to have to be the one to touch it, and that all the boys were going to laugh at you, and then all the boys were laughing at you, and it was only the second day of class, and the teacher wasn’t even there yet, and, and, and….
Oh. Maybe that was only my experience with new beginnings.
I dove for my menu and started studying it as if it were the most fascinating thing written since George Chesterton’s private diaries. Not that I had personally found those diaries so fascinating, but Jason had, and so I’d honed my passion for them. Passion….
Another sip of the gimlet. A grown-up’s mojito, if you really think about it. I resisted the urge to drain the glass. I could handle this. I was an adult.
I looked at the first courses and saw that they had onion soup. French onion soup, by definition. One of my favorites. I considered ordering it, but then I heard Melissa whispering in the back of my head. Certain foods were not first date foods. French onion soup. Spaghetti. Pizza. Anything that had a tendency to become long and stringy and drippy and embarrassing.
As I heard her admonitions, I wondered what Freud would say about them. It certainly sounded as if she were warning me off from more than luscious food-stuffs, trying to keep me from another whole range of messy activity. Spare me from the embarrassment, she would certainly say.
But who was I, to argue with D.C.’s queen of First Dates? I sighed and decided to pass on the soup. Mesclun salad for me, with a classic vinaigrette. And while the pork loin sounded divine, it was served on a bed of tagliatelle. Tagliatelle. Worse, actually, than spaghetti, because the long flat noodles could hold more buttery sauce, could splatter more mess on an unsuspecting diner. Dover sole, then. With rice.
The waiter came back to take our order, and he attempted to complicate things. They had three specials for the night, and each sounded better than the last. But the tuna scaloppini was served with spinach (a definite no-no; it would get caught in my teeth.) The trout was a no-man’s-land of potential bones, evil slivers just waiting to stick in my throat and embarrass me into requiring Heimlich assistance at the table. And the roast lamb was served with cherry tomatoes (did I even need to think about where the seeds might fly?)
I smiled at the waiter and ordered with Melissa-bred confidence. Mesclun and sole.
“Very good, madame? And for you, monsieur?”
“Onion soup, to start, and the pork with tagliatelle. And,” David turned to me, “if it’s all right with you, we’ll have a chocolate soufflé for dessert?”
Chocolate soufflé. An item I’d never ordered in a restaurant, because I was too afraid of the “leave a minimum of forty-five minutes of preparation time” note on the menu. I ran through a list of Melissa’s potential objections—it wasn’t stringy, saucy, or explosive—and said, “That sounds lovely.”
“And wine?”
Without hesitating, David recited a bin number. The waiter nodded his approval and sidled off to the kitchen.
Leaving David and me at our table.
Alone.
Where were Melissa’s Five Conversational Topics when I needed them? I started to raise my fingernails to my teeth, just for a quick gut-settling gnaw, but then I remembered where I was. I folded my hands in my lap instead, even managing to resist the urge to drain my gimlet.
David smiled easily and passed me the bread basket. Selecting a slice of baguette was practically therapeutic as he said, “So? How was your day at work?”
For just a moment, I thought that he was asking me about the library, that he was expressing an interest in colonial education, millinery of the eighteenth century, or crop rotation for gentleman farmers.
Then, I realized his true intent. “It worked,” I said. I glanced around at the tables closest to us. No one seemed to be listening, but I still leaned closer to David and whispered, “The spell worked.”
He nodded in silent encouragement, and I told him all about Harold’s unexpected attention, about the almost-laughable interest that he’d shown in my skirt. While that didn’t surprise David, my mentioning Jason did. And old Mr. Zimmer. And the three other men who had paid me a surfeit of attention that afternoon.
The waiter interrupted to bring out a bottle of wine. David engaged in the entire tasting game, but he down-played each step. He looked at the cork, swirled the straw-colored liquid in his glass a few times and took a single, abstemious swallow. He nodded to the waiter, who filled my glass, completed David’s, then disappeared.
I took a sip and smiled approvingly at the full taste of the pinot gris. Much cleaner than the oaky chardonnays that I’d had before. Simpler. More straightforward.
Then we were back to my day as a witch. I gathered from the questions that David asked that it was unusual for a spell to have the strength of the one that I had cast. I shouldn’t have been a
ble to bring all of those men into my snare. I shouldn’t have enchanted each and every one of them.
Somewhere during the telling, the waiter brought our appetizers. I only wasted a moment looking at David’s soup with longing. Fortunately, the bright greens in my salad satisfied my taste buds. And I didn’t have worry about the gruyere strands that tested David’s cheese-sawing abilities. Not that the challenging soup made him look silly. It actually made him seem more … human. Less threatening. Just a regular guy eating a regular meal.
“So,” I said, as we waited for our main courses.
“So.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Warding? All my life.” I waited for him to elaborate. That took three bites of baguette, a sip of water, and another of wine. But at last, he said, “It’s not going to be easy for you to accept all this information at once. I’ll give you answers, but—for a while at least—you’re going to have to accept these things on faith.”
“Try me.”
He took a deep breath but was interrupted by the appearance of our entrees. The waiter put my plate down on the table and spun it a quarter turn, counter-clockwise, so that the fish was best displayed against its lemon and caper sauce. David’s pork was beautiful on its bed of treacherous, sauce-laden pasta.
“Bon appetit,” David said, and he picked up his knife and fork. The knife and fork that he was using European-style, I noticed. He took a bite (sparing his suit from unsightly splashes of tomato and olive sauce) and chewed carefully before meeting my eyes. “Warding is … a family occupation. My father was a warder before me, and his father before him. I’m the oldest of three boys, and so I became a warder. My middle brother is a stockbroker, and my youngest is an experimental film maker, living in Toronto.”
Well. That made the Montrose family seem downright ordinary.
“There are about two dozen of us warders here in D.C. One for each witch in the metropolitan area.” And that made it all sound like a census survey. “We warders begin our training when we’re children. For simplification sake, you can think of us as students at a boarding school. We go to work with other warders, to learn from them.”
“Like an apprentice.” That was a system familiar to me. In colonial America, there were still apprentices and journeymen and masters, all learning their trades.
“Exactly.”
“But what do you do when you’re not watching me? I mean, what did you do before I worked that first spell?”
A dark memory flickered across David’s face, and he took a sip of wine before answering. “I warded another witch until last year.”
“What happened last year?” I asked softly, imagining some terrible magical battle, a beautiful young witch fighting desperately for her life. I pictured David struggling to rescue her from an evil sorcerer, grimacing in pain as he absorbed one magical assault after another.
“I was fired.”
“What?” I was so surprised that I practically shouted the question.
“I was fired. My witch decided that I was too conservative. Too restrictive.”
“Fancy that,” I said before I could stop myself, and I was rewarded with a glare. I hurriedly asked another question, before he could match words to his expression. “So you were just sitting there … where? Waiting? Collecting astral unemployment?”
David grimaced at the word “astral”. “Let’s just say I was on assignment.”
“On assignment?”
“A detail.”
“Doing what?” His evasiveness triggered every librarian instinct in my blood. I wanted to get to the bottom of this.
“I was working for the Court of Hecate, all right?” I was reviewing valuable documents, storing them in proper places so that future generations can access the wisdom contained therein.”
I stared at him in surprise. “You were a file clerk!”
“I—”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” I cut him off, even though I wanted to laugh. My proud, domineering warder had been filing papers for the past year, alphabetizing page after page. Or scroll after scroll. Whatever.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “There was more to it than that. I provided physical protection for the Court’s meeting places. I searched for lost and stolen artifacts. And I remained on call to any witch in the Coven who needed my assistance.”
“Did you train them, then, the other witches? Like you’ll train me? “
“No. Most of you are trained by your Caller.”
You. I was a witch. The words still sounded impossible inside my own skull. I swallowed hard and forced out a whisper. “What’s a Caller?”
“An older witch. One who senses strength in a new generation. One who calls you to your new powers.”
“So it’s not hereditary?” My thoughts flashed to the topic I’d been avoiding all night, to Clara, who I was now supposed to meet on Saturday at Cake Walk, curse Roger and his willingness to poke his nose into my bare-paged calendar.
“Usually, it is. Hereditary in the mother’s line. But it doesn’t always pass, not even from a strong witch to a first daughter. A Caller senses the seeds of power and encourages it in a young girl.” He looked me directly in the eye. “Is your mother a witch?”
I started to say, “My mother’s dead,” because that was the way I had answered questions about Clara my entire life. But she wasn’t dead. She was alive and well and ready to see me after a quarter century. Was that why she’d finally come back? Did she want to tell me that she was a witch? That I was? “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I haven’t seen her since I was four years old. My grandmother raised me.”
David nodded. “And is she a witch?”
“Gran!” I laughed out loud at the thought. “Absolutely not.” David just looked at me. “She’s a little old lady. She drinks Earl Grey tea. She sits on the board for the concert opera. She’s my grandmother, for God’s sake.”
“Precisely.” He reached out and rested his fingers on my wrist. As with the night before, I was surprised by how smooth his fingertips felt, how much warmth flowed from him against my pulse point. “She’s your grandmother. And you came by your power from somewhere.”
I pulled away from him and disguised my discomfort by stuffing my mouth with sole and rice. This was just too strange, I thought as I chewed. Too bizarre. Gran was not a witch. She couldn’t be. I would have suspected something all these years. I swallowed. “Is there any other way?” I asked, and my voice sounded impossibly small.
David nodded, and I thought that the glint in his eyes just might be sympathy. “There is. Sometimes, the witchcraft skips generations. Every once in a while—in a very, very rare while—it appears spontaneously. But there hasn’t been a wild witch in the Eastern Coven since Salem, since 1692.”
“So it’s not likely.”
“Not likely.” He shook his head and went back to his pork loin. He finished twirling the last strand of his tagliatelle as if we’d been discussing something as ordinary as pumpkins in fall. As he placed the bite in his mouth, a tiny dollop of sauce fell on his lapel. I was prepared to ignore it, but he noticed it himself and mopped it up with his napkin. He gave me a wry smile, and my heart twisted inside my chest.
So, that was how it was done. You mop up the mess and move on. I consoled myself with the fact that my sole had been excellent. Before I could dwell on eating matters, I asked the question that had been percolating for days now: “So, the books. How did they get to be in the Peabridge’s cottage? I mean, isn’t that a strange coincidence, that I just happen to be a witch and my employer just happens to have a secret stash of spellbooks?”
David leaned back as the waiter came to take our plates away. When questioned, he ordered an espresso, and I—distractedly—asked for tea. The answer to my question was further delayed by the entire service ritual that accompanied that beverage—the waiter brought the little tea chest, I got to choose between a dozen flavors, and there was much shuffling of china a
nd silverware.
Finally, David leaned forward in his chair and grappled with his answer. “The books are part of an extraordinarily valuable collection. They—and Neko, too—were brought together by Hannah Osgood. She led the Eastern Coven in the first two decades of the 1900s.”
“But she didn’t live in the Peabridge house. I would know her name.”
“No.” David shook his head. “She lived up near the Palisades.”
“Then how did the books get into the cottage?”
David sighed. “Hannah had seven daughters, six of whom actually had considerable power, all but the youngest, Emily. Hannah had compiled her library for her girls.”
“What happened?”
“The Spanish flu. It tore through Washington in 1918. Hannah lost her husband first. And then her daughters, one by one. She tried to save them with spells, with crystals, but she fell ill herself.”
“Poor thing,” I whispered, feeling a ripple of pity.
“Hannah recovered her physical strength, but her spirit was broken. She renounced her witchcraft. She ordered away her warder, refused any assistance from the Coven. And when she died, all her books were missing.”
“But she’d brought them to Emily’s house,” I said, nodding as I realized what had happened. “Emily Osgood became Emily Peabridge.” I recognized the name from records kept in Evelyn’s office, records that tracked the mansion’s former owners.
David nodded and spread his hands wide. “It seems that she hid them away when it became apparent that her line would not survive. She’d come to despise the books, to hate the witchcraft that could not save her family. The Coven has been searching for years, but no one ever thought the books would turn up on Emily’s land. No one ever imagined they’d be stored completely outside the reach of known witches.”
“But why me? Why now? I mean, how did I end up living in the same cottage where those books just happened to be stored?”
David shrugged. “Magic reaches out to magic. Like magnets, jumping across space to be joined together. The books sensed your powers and influenced the world around you. Your dormant powers sensed the books.”
“That’s ridiculous! Evelyn let me live in the cottage because the Peabridge couldn’t pay my salary.”
David did not take offense at my agitated tone. Instead, he turned his hands, palm up. “I can’t explain it. This isn’t science. It isn’t actions and reactions, like the world you’ve always known. If Evelyn hadn’t let you live in the cottage, the books would have gotten you there another way. You might have found some colonial reference to a valuable collection in the basement. You might have chased a cat in there one day, while you were strolling through the gardens on your lunch break. In a pinch, you might have had a dream that pointed out the location. Magic calls to magic.”
The thought was enough to drive me to silence. At least until the chocolate soufflé arrived.
The dessert was impressive—it towered above the walls of its shiny porcelain serving dish. The waiter maneuvered it toward our table with a satisfyingly controlled sense of urgency. I’d seen enough of Melissa’s baking endeavors to appreciate the pillowy sweet, and I actually sighed as the waiter punctured the elevated crust to release a whiff of chocolate-scented steam. He poured a steady stream of vanilla sauce into the resulting crater before serving generous bowls of the treat.
One spoonful, and I thought that I would swoon.
David caught my eye and grinned. “Good?”
“Heaven.”
By unspoken agreement, we were through with the witchcraft instruction part of the evening. As we finished our dessert and I sipped the last of my tea, we discussed other things—the traditional Halloween parade that would take place through Georgetown at the end of October, the questionable quality of the first autumn apples at the Safeway up the street. We could have been friends, out to dinner after months of separation, catching up on the mundane details of our very busy professional lives.
It wasn’t until David held my coat for me that we returned to the true root of our relationship. He kept the collar low enough that it was easy for me to slip my arms into the sleeves. As he settled the woolen shoulders over my own, he smoothed them into place with a comforting familiarity. “We’re agreed, then? You’ll continue meeting with me to learn more about your powers?”
“Of course.” I realized that I’d already assumed we were going to work together. We started to walk back toward the Peabridge and home. I was so full and relaxed that I scarcely acknowledged the pain in my toes from my ill-fitting shoes. “But what sorts of things are you going to teach me? I mean, what can you tell me that Neko can’t?”
David’s lips pursed. “Neko is your familiar. He can magnify your powers. To some extent, he can even focus them. But he can’t channel them in the first place. There are many skills that you can learn besides reading spells.”
“Such as?”
An older couple brushed past us on the sidewalk, and David waited until they were out of earshot before he answered. “You can read auras. You can tell who a person is, what they believe before you’ve ever met them. That man, who just walked by. He is on the Board of Directors of the Shakespeare Fund, and he’s worrying about whether they’ll raise enough money to underwrite seven productions next year, or only six.”
The Shakespeare scholar in me hoped it would be seven. The new-hatched witch asked, “You could tell all that, just by walking by him?”
“My sleeve brushed his. Physical contact helps.”
“So, are you a witch, too?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have inherent powers, nothing as strong as witchcraft. Reading auras lets me function as a warder. The Coven gives me the power so that I can best serve. They work a spell.”
Auras. Coven. Warders. I shivered. David was talking about power. A lot of power. Power that I wasn’t certain I wanted to have. I thought of Harold, hanging around my desk like an overeager puppy. But then I thought of Jason, looking me in the eye and smiling broadly as I recommended the reference source of his dreams.
Before I knew it, we were standing at my garden gate. I glanced down the path and saw that lights were on in the cottage. Neko was waiting up for me. Neko, and possibly Roger.
I turned back to David. “Thank you,” I said. “For everything. I had a lovely time tonight.”
Before I realized what was happening, he closed the distance between us. His arms came around me, pulling me in toward his chest. His lips on mine were chilled from the night air, but they thawed instantly. His fingers moved into my hair as he pulled my head closer to his, and I tasted chocolate soufflé and vanilla sauce and the deep rich coffee that had ended his meal.
It was a kiss like you read about in books. It was a kiss like the ones on movie screens, the ones that make you sink deeper into your stadium seating and lean your head back and sigh. It was a kiss that my body melted into, that made my hands grip his arms and clutch him close.
And then, it ended. He stepped back and straightened his arms. The autumn air swirled between us.
He looked down, avoiding my eyes, but then he seemed to remember some silent promise he had made. He looked directly into my face. “That was wrong,” he whispered. He cleared his throat, and said again, loud enough to make both of us start. “Wrong.”
“No! I mean—I wanted—” And then I fell silent, my cheeks flaming as I remembered just how much I had wanted his kiss the other night. Had that desire been in my aura? Had he read my thoughts as clearly as words on a page?
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I’m your warder.”
“So what does that mean?” I was trying to make the best of this, but my legs were trembling so hard that I was having trouble standing.
“I shouldn’t have blurred the boundaries. You’re my witch. I’m your warder. We’re going to work at being friends. It is too complicated for us to do anything more. Not while you’re still coming into your powers. Not while you’re still learning.”<
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Of all the patronizing, controlling, master-of-the-universe, pig-headed –
But maybe he was right. I didn’t know the first thing about being a witch. Okay. I knew the first thing—I could read spells in a spellbook. But I didn’t know the second. And I didn’t even know what might be on the list for third.
“Were you reading me just now?” I asked. “Reading my aura?”
“No!” He sounded shocked. “The Coven sent me to be your warder. A warder can’t read a witch unless she invites him to.” My relief was almost a physical thing. I glanced toward the cottage, just in time to see a dark shape jump back behind the curtains. Neko.
“Friends?” David asked, and he took another step back as if to clarify his stance.
“Friends,” I said, managing a nod that felt almost jaunty.
“Get some rest, then. We’ll continue with your training. And be kind to poor Harold Weems.”
My lips still tingled as I worked my key in the front door lock.