The Witch Watch (34 page)

“Then Lord Mordaunt was buried in that mass grave,” Alice agreed.

“And he has been recently unearthed,” Gilbert added.

“Probably in anticipation of recovering your vigor.”

“Sophie’s vigor,” Gilbert corrected her.

“A shame we didn’t have more time to explore the manor. If we had found his body we might have taken his head and dashed his hopes forever,” she muttered.

“In any case, His Lordship is above ground now. I wonder if they’re looking for other means to revive him,” Gilbert muttered.

“I have no doubt of it,” Alice replied.

In all, they spent three days with Gilbert’s family. Alice and Simon stayed in the house, and Gilbert lurked on the edges of the property, walking the woods and remembering. On the second day, Alice and Simon came out to meet him, and he took them for a walk.

“Where are we going?” asked Simon after they had walked some distance to the east.

“Up this hill,” Gilbert replied flatly.

Simon was silent, but Alice responded with irritation, “Obviously we’re going uphill. I’m sure Simon was wondering if you had a destination in mind, or were just of a mind to wear our legs off.”

“Our destination is the top. There’s a clearing.”

It was late afternoon, and the sun was shining. The late October air was chill, but the sun provided the illusion of warmth. Gilbert had thrown back his hood and let the light fall on his rotting face.

“We shouldn’t go too far,” Alice cautioned. “If we linger until after sundown, Victoria will worry.”

Gilbert stopped and turned back, “Has she mentioned me?”

“She has not spoken your name, yet you seem to occupy her thoughts a great deal,” Alice replied.

Simon explained, “Mrs. Hiltman discovered that Alice wasn’t married, or even being courted. She started to speak excitedly, saying that she should introduce Alice to someone. But then she stopped herself and dropped the subject.”

“It happens often,” Alice added. “She is continuously avoiding talking about you. I suppose we are as well.”

“Does she know for certain that I’m dead? Or does she think of me as merely ‘missing’?” Gilbert wondered.

“It’s impossible to say,” Alice sighed. “We would have to ask her directly. Which would be foolish, I think.”

Gilbert nodded and they resumed their march. At last they came to the crown of the hill and found themselves looking east over the vast expanse of barren trees. Amongst the grey branches were a small number of trees which were slow to release their leafy covering. To the southeast were the taller hills of Richmond County. These largely blocked their view of the Atlantic. The water of Arthur Kill crept along below them. To the northeast, across the Hudson, were the green pastures of Manhattan, which were dotted with clusters of buildings.

“A lot has changed since I left,” Gilbert said after they had looked a while.

“It’s so strange here,” Alice said. “In London you can find buildings which have stood for a thousand years. Even most of our ‘young’ buildings are older than any of the buildings in front of us. And your streets! How does one decide to build a new street? The streets of London were laid centuries ago. Their origins and authors are lost to history.”

“That never occurred to me,” Gilbert said. “You certainly have an appetite for aging secrets.”

“That reminds me!” Alice said as she set down her bag.

Simon came over, eager and curious to see what she had carried all this way. “Oh,” he said with disappointment as she brought out two books. “I was hoping you had brought lunch”

“We had breakfast before we set out,” Alice said in surprise. “You managed to eat everything that was set before you, and much of what was set before others. And you still have appetite? I despair of ever filling your belly.”

“You brought sorcery with you on a walk?” Gilbert asked with annoyance.

“It seemed much better than leaving the books in the house where they might be discovered. The larger book we already know. It’s the one Simon used to revive you. This smaller one belonged to the headmaster. He abandoned it when he fled the house.”

Simon kicked a stone away and snorted. “He needed a book to make a feeding circle? It’s a simple spell. Just two stanzas in a two-ring circle with very little interconnection. All of it clockwise. I could have done something like that from memory when I was nine. And he would have sent me to bed hungry if I failed.” He sat down with a huff.

“Well I have been eager to examine his book since we recovered it, but this is our first real opportunity.” Alice set the book in her lap as she said this and began to turn the pages. Gilbert walked away some distance and pretended to be interested in an outcropping of rock.

“Most of these are the same spells that I have in my book,” Simon observed after a few minutes of reading over Alice’s shoulder.

“Yet there are fewer spells in this one, and the annotations are more detailed,” she said. “Also, this is not original research. The pages here were copied from elsewhere.”

“How can you tell?” Simon asked.

“See how the writing gets smaller at the bottom of this page? The scribe was attempting to reproduce another work, but he was writing in a larger hand than the original author. So he was running out of space. If he was writing this on his own, he would simply have moved to a new page.”

“I know this handwriting. This is the headmaster’s. And those egg-shaped circles are clearly his. I always assumed our assignments were sloppily written because he was in a hurry and didn’t care if they were easy to follow. But now I suspect he can’t draw proper circles.”

Alice ran her finger down a page, “The book is small, and each page is unrelated to its neighbors. I suspect this is for carrying about common spells, and not for study. These first few pages are little more than simple tricks. Divination. Feeding circles. Here’s one for communing with Lord Mordaunt.”

“Look at how worn the page is,” Simon said with sudden irritation. “He must have used this constantly. You know, when he was our master I always assumed he was a sorcerer of great knowledge.”

“Clearly that was not the case. I would say the man had no head for it at all. He simply had access to a good library.”

Simon stormed away, ranting, “I can’t believe he was so stupid he couldn’t even do these simple spells without needing to copy them from a book. I thought... I thought that, even though he was cruel and his lessons were hard, that his knowledge was deep. I thought I was receiving a rare education for my pains. But now I see he was useless! Why did His Lordship employ him?”

Gilbert looked up, “Are you really complaining about the quality of your profane and grotesque education? Would you really be happier if you’d been taught sorcery
properly?
”

“
Yes!”
Simon said in frustration. “It’s the only thing I was ever taught. And now I learn that it was useless. There’s no reason I couldn’t have learned more with less hardship under a more qualified tutor.”

Alice looked up from the book. “I’m sure the headmaster was chosen not for his skill, but for his methods. Or rather, his willingness to do what decent men would not.”

Simon had turned away, and was looking out over the sunlit woods beneath them.

“Besides,” she added after a few moments, “I think you have undervalued your learning. Whatever his evils, the headmaster gave you knowledge that surpasses that of the expert in Her Majesty’s Ministry of Ethereal Affairs.”

“I hate him so much,” Simon said in a trembling voice. “I never wanted revenge. All I ever wanted was to escape. I just wanted to be free of his mistreatment. And now I
do
want revenge, but he’s already dead!” Simon kept his back to them. He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

Concerned, Alice looked over to Gilbert. He shrugged.

“What spell is this?” Alice asked as she returned her attention to the book. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’m sure I’ve done it a dozen times,” Simon said bitterly. “Let me see.”

Alice held the book while Simon looked over the page. Finally she spoke, “This is the only circle that appears alone on a page like this. All of the others come with some form of explanation or instruction.”

“This is a very strange way of writing a circle,” Simon said after examining the diagram.

“It’s as if the author wanted to make a circle without lifting his pen.”

“It’s more than that. The circle has been drawn out of order. See how the line strays from one ring to another?”

Finally Gilbert’s curiosity got the best of him, and he came to look over Alice’s other shoulder. He found that the mystery circle looked just like all of the other sorcery he’d encountered; it was a mess of incomprehensible symbols, drawn in a series of concentric circles with jagged lines drawn all around. Finally he shrugged, “What makes this one so special?”

Simon explained, “There are two major styles for drawing large, complicated circles. Some sorcery is done by making the outer circle first, and then working inward. This makes it easy to start with a nice, neat circle, but it means you have to plan ahead, as well as write the stanzas in reverse order. Also, if you’re writing on the floor it’s hard to finish the center without scuffing your work. Usually sorcery is done by starting at the center and working outwards. Some people have trouble keeping their work neat using this method, and they don’t like all the moving around you have to do for floor work.”

“So which is this?” Gilbert asked.

“Neither,” said Alice. “This is... this is the work of a madman. The line starts inside, then does some lettering in the middle, then moves to the outer ring. It’s random.”

“It’s not really random,” Simon countered. “It’s sort of lazy. The author was just moving to whatever was closest.” He pointed to one of the characters on the page, “This symbol ends on an upward stroke. Going clockwise, the sorcerer would have to move his pen back down to the bottom of the line. Rather than do that, he moved the smaller distance to the line above and began working there instead.”

“So what was he trying to do? Save ink?” Alice asked rhetorically.

“I don’t know,” Simon admitted. “The entire circle is done in one line. Trace over it, and eventually you’ll end up back where you started.”

“I don’t know what the magical significance of that might be. Perhaps it’s of no significance of all. The Greeks used to etch their circles into stone, which produced a careful, minimalist style that looks odd to us today. Popular spells are sometimes embellished with elaborate penwork, particularly if they’re being woven into cloth for use as decoration.”

“Do they?” asked Simon with surprise. “I would like to see that. But isn’t that dangerous to have an active spell hanging on the wall?”

“It depends on the spell, of course. But often extra decorative strokes are added to spoil the spell. But this spell is probably not decorative, and it would be
more
work to etch this into stone as it is presented here. I don’t know.” Alice cocked her head to one side, “It’s very hard to read like this. What
is
this spell?”

“It’s a feeding circle. For Lord Mordaunt,” Simon said, pointing to the name nestled amid the swirling characters.

For a while they sat in the cold October sunshine and toyed with theories about what the circle might mean. Eventually they grew bored with the subject. The page was otherwise empty and there was no way to really know its purpose. It could have been nothing more than the work of an idle hand searching for amusement, a profane scribbling of the bored.

When midday came they returned to the house, and Gilbert returned to his lurking among the trees.

During their stay, Victoria took an instant liking to Simon and doted over him. She cut his hair, mended his jacket, and nearly succeeded at the impossible task of keeping his belly satisfied. In the afternoons they would go for a walk and meet with Gilbert, who would pester them for news of life inside the house. He would ask them the most mundane questions about what was said, what food was prepared, and about what amusing things younger Gilbert had done or said. He even asked about Walter. Gilbert was greedy for this news, but it always made him sad. Once they were out of things to tell him he would begin sulking, and they would leave him alone.

“Are you sure we have to leave today? Victoria practically begged us to stay,” Simon protested as they slipped away in the early morning of the forth day. He looked back at the house wistfully as they hurried along the road.

“We can’t possibly remain another day,” Alice replied sharply. “You heard her yourself at dinner last night - she’s heading into town today.”

“We can wait for her to get back. Or perhaps we could go with her!” Simon said cheerfully.

Alice stopped and turned to him, “Oh? You think we should all go into town together? You know we have to ride the ferry to get there, don’t you?”

Simon looked at her dumbly.

“What do you think the ferryman will say when he sees us?” she continued. “Remember we rode the ferry a few nights ago. Remember he has a special affection for Mrs. Hiltman. We told him she was in danger. And he saw us traveling with Gilbert.”