Petty Magic (30 page)

Early that fall Neverino stopped to visit for a couple of days on his way to Argentina, where he planned to spend the next several years hunting for Nazis. He lifted my spirits and delighted my nieces with his own brand of magic, though Helena hardly knew what to make of him. We stayed up all night eating ambrosia cake and telling each other everything that had happened since we’d last met.

But as soon as he was gone I felt even lonelier than before. I’d had a portent, a dead pigeon on my windowsill. I would never see Neverino again either.

E
VENTUALLY MORVEN
suggested that perhaps I shouldn’t retire just yet. I wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting around singing my
Liebestod
over and over, now, was I?

So I asked the War Department to renew my commission and returned to Germany for the last time. I helped in the effort to compile and sort all the evidence against those who were to be tried at Nuremberg, and it was then that I came into possession of the ledgers from the prison at Fresnes, what my colleagues grimly referred to as the “book of lost souls.” It wasn’t one book, of course—there’d been many thousands of prisoners at Fresnes, and the records filled a room.

The book hadn’t come into my hands by chance. I had tracked it down over a period of weeks, weaseled my way onto the team that was working through every last ledger trying to figure out precisely what had befallen all who were lost. I opened one of the books from early 1942 and flipped hurriedly through the pages looking for Jonah’s alias. And when I found it—
Jean Renard
, then the details of his capture and his intended destination—there at the end of the line were two characters in neat red ink:

NN
.

Nacht und Nebel:
night and fog. He knew full well he would have been executed had he stayed on that train, but he couldn’t have known this: there would have been no trace of him, no closure for his family and friends.

My next step was to find out who’d been in command at Fresnes in late 1941, early 1942. There were several candidates, not all of whom had been apprehended. I wasn’t fazed at the prospect of tracking him down, whoever he was, but in the event I didn’t have to. I caught my first glimpse of SS-Sturmbannführer Heinrich Engel from a back-row seat in courtroom 600, and I need hardly tell you he was wearing my father’s face. I closed my eyes, saw Jonah’s naked body in the darkness, his bare flesh mottled with round red scars.

The next morning the tribunal acquitted Heinrich Engel of three out of four counts of crimes against humanity. While grisly photographs of the executed Nazi ringleaders were released to the international press, Engel was being sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in a Soviet prison camp.

I
WAS EVEN
more disgusted when I saw Heinrich Engel as he truly was. He was
fat
. Why did they have to feed these criminals so bloody well?

He was dozing when I let myself into his cell, and he sprang up and stared at me. “Who are you?”

“Doesn’t matter.” I conjured a card table and chair, bade him sit on the edge of his bed. “Cigarette?”

He nodded, no doubt believing himself still in the middle of a dream. I lit the fag, made as if to hand it to him, then snatched it away again with a cold laugh. I took a long drag. Then I leaned across the table and brought the burning end very near his hand; he tried to recoil and discovered he was unable to. He looked at me first with the panicked eyes of a caged animal, then with a sort of horrified recognition. We now understood each other perfectly.

“Now take off your boots.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

He obeyed. Not such a bully now, was he?

“Socks too!”

He doffed his socks.

“Now lie back on the bed.”

I gave him no choice but to obey me. I rose from the table, still smoking and eyeing him thoughtfully.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. I knew he was dying to cry out a string of expletives,
Fotze!
and
Schlampe!
and worse I’m sure, but he was much too afraid to.

“Tell you what,” I said, as if I had changed my mind and decided to be merciful. “Sit up. Put your socks and boots back on.”

As he did so he looked longingly at my cigarette, wincing as I stubbed it out on the card table with a taunting flourish.

“I’d love to watch you suffer as he did,” I said. “But I haven’t the patience.”

So I did it in the space of a blink: the dagger came out of its sheath without any conscious effort, and I lunged forward and drew the blade across his neck in a neat red line. He clutched at his gaping throat, eyes goggling, blood spilling out from between his meaty fingers. I wiped the dagger on the leg of his prison-issue trousers.

You can’t use magic to rob a man of his life, but nobody ever said I couldn’t use my hands. He was still dying when I flew out the window.

Madness, Put to Good Use

29.

There were once upon a time three sisters, quite transparent, and very beautiful. The robe of the one was red, that of the second blue, and that of the third white. They danced hand in hand beside the calm lake in the clear moonshine. They were not elfin maidens, but mortal children. A sweet fragrance was smelt, and the maidens vanished in the wood; the fragrance grew stronger—three coffins, and in them three lovely maidens, glided out of the forest and across the lake: the shining glow-worms flew around like little floating lights. Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead? The odour of the flowers says they are corpses; the evening bell tolls for the dead!

—Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen”

I
WAKE UP
in my bedroom at Harbinger House inside a warm patch of afternoon light. I lay the back of my hand—my crinkly liver-spotted hand—over my eyes and let out a groan. For a second or two I can’t remember a thing; then it hits me and I scramble up on my elbows, struggling with the tangled bedsheets. “What’s happened?”

Vega hands me a glass of a murky green liquid—tastes of rancid lemons and dirty feet—and though I feel better as soon as I’ve downed it, the stuff brings my panic into focus.

“Where’s Morven? Where’s Justin? He doesn’t remember, does he?”

“He doesn’t remember a thing,” Vega replies. “He’s back at Harry’s house now.” She sighs. “That was a cruel stunt Lucretia pulled. Who would’ve thought she had it in her?”

I give my niece an evil little smile. “She’s in for it now, the old crow.”

Vega shakes her head. “I’m sorry to tell you she only got a slap on the wrist. Dymphna’s already called
that
meeting.”

“What’s this? How long have I been out?”

“Nearly a week.”

I fall back onto the pillow with another groan. “How did you know?”

“Before she conked out, Auntie Morven told us you might run into a spot of trouble at the toy shop. Said she saw you in the View-Master.” She pauses. “Incidentally, Granny’s made her promise not to indulge you ever again.”

“No need,” I say crossly. “I already told her it would be the last time.”

Vega suppresses a smile. “But in all fairness, Auntie, hadn’t you said so before?”

“Why needle me? I’m never going to see him again. Mind you, I’d promised as much to Morven before I left. She’ll tell you that. I meant to keep my word, and I will, without anybody else’s intervention, thank you very much.”

“Well, I hope you had a nice holiday.”
I hope it was worth all the fuss you kicked up
is what she means.

“Best night of my life,” I reply a little haughtily.

Vega stands up to go, and I only just notice she’s looking far too weary for a girl of forty-six. “You’d better come downstairs, as soon as you feel up to it,” she says. “Granny says she’s got something to tell us.”

* * *

I
COME DOWN
to find all the Peacocks and the Jesters assembled in the drawing room. When I greet them I try for my old brio, but I can’t quite keep the quaver out. “Dymphna! How lovely to see you.”

“Evelyn,” she says, nodding somewhat stiffly. “I hope you’ve regained your strength.”

“I
am
feeling better, thank you.” I spot Lucretia seated at the far end of the room, but she avoids my eye.

Dymphna leans closer so she can murmur in my ear. “They’re waiting for you in the kitchen.” Glancing round confusedly at the room full of expectant faces, I back through the doorway and close the drawing room door behind me.

I find all the Harbingers round the table. Hieronymus is back in human form for the occasion, fully dressed for the first time in Lord only knows how long, and even Heck’s come home. He’s taken off his boots and the whole room smells of stale cheese. Nobody greets me. There’s a terrible whiff of momentousness here, and with this second frosty reception in a row I’m fairly certain my comeuppance is at hand.

I stand on the threshold, hesitating. “Have I bought it?”

“Sit down, you goose,” Helena snaps. “I have something to tell all of you.”

Marguerite lays her hand gently over Helena’s. “Mother?”

My sister takes a deep breath. “I am ready to confess.”

Somehow we’ve all been expecting this, but I can’t help sputtering out,
“What?!
But you—but you said—”

“Oh, I’m not denying I’ve lied to you,” she sighs. “It was a lie of omission.” She pauses. “I suppose it never occurred to any of you to
ask
me if I’d done it.”

I believe the English have a word for the lot of us right about now, and that word is “gobsmacked.”

“I wasn’t very concerned at first. I thought she’d be easy to deal with. Then one night he told me he’d … 
strayed …
and I knew it was too late. Hag knots or no, she hadn’t needed any hocus-pocus to beguile him. She was young and obsequious. Told him he was a genius, made him feel virile. That was enough.”

“Did he—did he tell you he was going to leave you?”

“Good heavens, no! He only wanted my forgiveness. After a period I told him he had it—but a wife can never actually forgive, can she?”

So it was just as the local chemist had suspected all those years ago, though he never could have proved she was behind it. “I tampered with his coffee that very Monday. Now that there are no more secrets between us, I must tell you that I felt no guilt, not even the slightest twinge. He promised to let Belva go right away, and I told myself that so long as he made good on his promise, I would never do it again.

“Well, you all know how it turned out. He began to make excuses for keeping her on. He swore up and down that he had ended it, that it had never really begun because it had only happened the once. I kept an eye on him at his office—”

“You
did
use that grimoire, for the fish-eye trick,” Morven says. “We saw it in the View-Master.”

Helena nods. “I’m sorry, dear, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I’d ever opened it. The book itself was a token of
maleficium—
I told you I didn’t know who’d sent it, but you all know well enough who it was—and I knew I could shake it off by actually using one of the spells. Anyway, I saw them together, day after day, sometimes working … and sometimes not.

“So I kept adding the methylene chloride, and he got a little sicker every day.” She pauses to press her hankie to her eyes. “It wasn’t that I wanted him to suffer; I only wanted to give him time to make good.”

I picture Henry’s life as an hourglass filled with coffee grounds instead of sand, his life slipping away cup by cup. I won’t ever drink another coffee again as long as I live.

Tingles of horror creep down my neck when I think of what she’s done—the cold precision of it and the apparent fact that in sixty years she’s never once felt the need to ease her conscience. Why has it taken a public accusation for her to confide in her own family? Perhaps that’s what sickens me most. After all, when
I
killed a man I came home and told her all about it. That’s what sisters do.

Each of us, her daughters especially, must spend these few silent moments looking backward, reinterpreting every memory. Every home-cooked meal of the last sixty years was prepared by a murderess; every kind word, every embrace was bestowed by the mother who robbed them of their father. Rosamund finally says, “You didn’t follow Clovis’s instructions the night of the séance, did you, Mother?”

Helena’s mouth twitches wryly. “The cufflinks and the other things were Jack’s, not Henry’s. Wouldn’t do to have Henry coming through loud and clear, so I used Jack’s things for interference. And I can’t really blame Belva for hating me even in the afterlife. Yes, I suppose I should come clean on that too: I put a curse on her. Every man she ever seduced soon tired of her, and she never found true love or happiness. After all, she took mine from me—at the time it seemed only fair.”

Vega clears her throat. “I need to know, Granny. Grandpa Jack … did you …?” Jack, of course, was the only grandfather she could remember.

“Grandpa Jack gave me no cause,” Helena replies. “Of course, it helped that the only pretty young things wandering about
his
place of business were to be made shortly into veal.”

“What about Julius Mettle?” I ask.

Helena frowns. “What about him?”

“He came here to speak to you once—threatened you. We saw it in the View-Master. We …” But I can’t bring myself to say it.

“You were afraid I’d done away with him, too? No, certainly not. Poor Julius … he had every reason to worry what his daughter was getting up to.”

Mira gasps. “Belva killed her own father?”

“It’s likely it was an accident, which is why the police never pursued it.” My sister gives a rueful little smile. “If you ever dig her up again, you might ask her.” Helena rises from her chair. “And now it’s time I made my confession to the rest of the coven.”

“Oh God.” I hide my face in my hands. “How will we ever face Lucretia?”

She looks down at me sadly and puts her hand on my shoulder. “I am the only one who has to face her. I regret that my sin has tainted your reputations, and I am very sorry that you girls have come to grief over it.”

We make a move to stand, but Helena motions for us to stay where we are. She takes a long, deep breath, turns heel, and marches into the drawing room. The door muffles her voice. We wait in agonized silence.

She comes back a few minutes later, sits down again, and takes the last sip out of her teacup. Always so composed, is Helena—far too composed. Would lead you to wonder if she’s even fully human.

“I don’t understand, Granny,” Mira says. “Why did you wear his hair in a locket all those years?”

“Penance,” she sighs. “I know better now, of course. My penance is only beginning today.” We watch as she rummages through her sewing bag and pulls out another of Olive’s marionettes, this one with a thick gray chignon, a tiny calico apron with a ruffle along the hem, and a relentlessly pleasant expression. She stands, props the marionette against the back of her chair, and loops the strings round the chair back. Then she straightens up, unties the strings of her apron, and hangs it on the hook by the door.

She stands in the middle of the kitchen, her eyes roving hungrily over our faces. “This is good-bye, my darlings,” she says at last. “I can’t say when I’ll be back.”

No pomp or ceremony here—there can’t be any, I suppose, when you’re departing in disgrace. It happens like a film reel with a missing frame: she’s there, and then she’s not.

We stay seated round the kitchen table for a long time, still in silence, as if we’re waiting for the marionette to pick itself up and speak to us. From the drawing room we can hear the shuffling sounds of the rest of the coven preparing to leave, and eventually the noise moves into the hall, but nobody ventures into the kitchen. Can’t say I blame them—it
would
be awkward, now, wouldn’t it? The front door slams behind them.

Vega begins to cry then, and when her sister tries to comfort her she weeps even more bitterly. This is all very dreamlike, nightmarish I should say, and when the rest of us start talking again our mouths feel disconnected from the rest of our bodies. “Tea?” Deborah murmurs, and we say, “Yes, please,” faintly, one echoing after another. The kettle boils, china cups appear on the tabletop, and the hot golden liquid rises to the brim of every cup.

But I need something to clear the fog from my eyes. “Time for a nip if there ever was.” I get up and find the whisky bottle myself because it gives me something to do, and when I hold up the bottle everybody says, “Yes, please.”

I pour a healthy glug into Morven’s cup, and there’s only the clink of her teaspoon stirring in the hooch and Vega still sobbing her poor little heart out. There’s a freshly baked ambrosia cake on a china pedestal on the table in front of us, but no one has the heart to cut the first slice.