Petty Magic (17 page)

She gives me a wry little smile. “Would you like some cocoa?” A steaming mug appears at my elbow, the spoon stirring itself.

I pick up the mug, hesitate, and put it down again. “I just want to say that … no matter what happened in the past, or what happens from here on in, I want you to know we’re all behind you. No matter what.”

She gives me a fond look, more amused than touched. “Thank you, Eve.” I pause, hoping she’ll tell me how she’s feeling and how I can help, but all she says is “Everything will work out. You’ll see.”

I slip my hand into my pocketbook, find the hag knot, and run my thumb along the smooth cold stone. Should I tell her I’ve found it? For what good? Belva Mettle has already given her quite enough trouble for one lifetime.

I’m not sure why I want to keep it; I guess I have a hazy notion that it will someday be of use. So I leave the hag knot at the bottom of my bag and promptly forget all about it.

Effing the Ineffable

19.

France, 1944

… the very
diablerie
of the woman, whilst it horrified and repelled, attracted in even a greater degree. A person with the experience of two thousand years at her back, with the command of such tremendous powers, and the knowledge of a mystery that could hold off death, was certainly worth falling in love with, if ever woman was.

—H. Rider Haggard,
She

Y
OU COULDN’T
think about how useful your work might have been in ending the war, or how many lives were spared through your intervention, because then you’d have to face the truth of all you couldn’t do. Millions of people suffered and died all over the world, and to think that without us perhaps we might have lost a million more is no comfort. This magic, these powers—what
good
were they?

A lot or none at all, depending on the day. Even at my age I can recall that first heady thrill of my adolescence, discovering my birthright: growing wings for the first time and flying all the way to the sea and back, which from Blackabbey is a good forty minutes’ drive; and even then I was rather preoccupied with looking older or younger. On one occasion I convinced my mother (for a good three minutes anyway) that I was the headmistress of my day school, an ordinary woman sixty years of age, come to recommend me for early promotion to the eighth grade.

Being what we are makes our limitations all the more frustrating. You come to the realization, on the brink of womanhood, that you’re just a bird in a larger cage.

T
HE SECOND
mission to France was probably the happiest time I spent in SOE. This time there were four of us: Jonah, the organizer; Marcel, a radio operator recruited from the Free French; Fisher, an American demolitions expert who knew all of about five words
en français;
and yours truly, the “aider and abettor,” a girl Friday and the other six days as well. In those months just before the liberation Jonah and I devoted ourselves to sabotage, demolition, and arming and training the local Maquis.

And in the very early morning, in haylofts and attic rooms, we devoted ourselves to each other. I hadn’t paid all that much attention the first night we were together—isn’t it always the way?—but the more nights we spent together, the more I wanted to know the stories behind the strange scars I kept finding all over him. I don’t mean the thick bands of scar tissue round his wrists and ankles where the irons had cut into his flesh, or the lash marks on his back, although he had those as well; they had shattered his right kneecap, and there were mottled red protrusions all over his feet, from shin to sole. I thought of our first meeting, how he’d shown no discomfort at the knee injury, but now that I’d seen the full extent of it I was amazed he could walk without wincing.

When he finally told me what had caused those marks on his feet, I felt foolish for not having guessed. The scars were almost perfectly round—just as if someone, or several someones, had used his feet to put out their cigarettes.

“How would you know?” he asked. “It would never occur to a normal human being to do a thing like that.”

“Did it hurt very much?”

He paused. “I don’t remember.”

“Was this in Avenue Foch?”

He nodded. Then he didn’t speak for a while, and I thought perhaps it would be easier for him if he told me just what he was remembering. So I asked.

“I got delirious. It was almost as if I’d stopped caring what would happen to me. I thought of Patricia, I thought of my mother, but they were distant thoughts … their faces flashed before me, but I felt no emotion. I was aware of the pain, but it had become something separate from me. The only clear thought in my head was that I must not talk, and yet I had an acute awareness of the absurdity of my situation. I started thinking mad thoughts, utterly mad thoughts …”

“What kind of thoughts?”

“I remember wishing I could treat him like any schoolyard bully.”

“Kick ’im in the goolies and run the other way?”

He laughed softly. “And I would have, too, if they hadn’t chained my feet.”

“The cigarette burns … do you know who ordered it done?”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“It matters to me,” I said. “I’ll cut out his tongue.”

He smiled faintly. “I thought you weren’t supposed to use your powers for violence.”

“What powers? All I need is a good sharp knife. Or a rusty one, better yet.”

He pulled me into his arms then, stroked my hair and kissed my forehead, and when he pulled away a bit and looked down at me fondly I could see a thought of Patricia flit briefly across his face. Revenge wasn’t something that ever would have occurred to his wife, not in a hundred lifetimes.

This was something I wasn’t used to: growing as familiar with someone else’s body as I was my own. I could put out my fingers in the darkness while he was sleeping and feel his wiry biceps, find that funny little knob of flesh behind his right ear.

Not that he ever
really
slept—sometimes I’d wake up and find him in a trance, dozing with his eyes open.

T
HERE WAS
a blur of safe houses, so many that I couldn’t possibly remember them all. Some who sheltered us were more willing than others. A few times we spent the night with the
maquisards
, the guerrillas of the French Resistance, and I much preferred it to the farmers’ grudging hospitality. The mood in their camp was much the same as it was in the Ossuaire Municipal: the better your jokes, the more your comrades respected you and appreciated your company.

When they played cards Jonah sometimes bet his pocket watch—which had belonged to his father—and he never lost. Once the game was over, he might challenge one of the losers to pick a card out of the deck, and he always knew which one it was. Like any self-respecting magician (save Neverino, who told me everything), Jonah only ever responded with a wink when I asked him how he’d done it.

Our freedom fighters were headquartered in a “haunted” château ten miles from Lyons. It looked thoroughly uninhabitable from the road, which I suppose was why the Germans hadn’t requisitioned it. The elderly couple living in the gate lodge would have given them up in a heartbeat had they known, but fortunately they were so superstitious that any sounds or lights in the middle of the night were taken for paranormal activity. The
maquisards
had come up with an ingenious method of redirecting the smoke from their kitchen fire through an old sewage pipe that stretched to the woods behind the house, so that they were able to have hot food at night.

Our friend Simone had fallen hopelessly in love with one of the young Frenchmen, and as a consequence the men knew more about us than I would have liked. It was Maxime and his twin brother, Pierre, who had jury-rigged the chimney pipe. They had also built a series of oubliettes in the woods, wide and deep enough that escape was nigh hopeless. It was a wonder neither of them ever fell for their own trick.

They handed us tin mugs of grog they’d distilled themselves. I took a polite sip, gagged, and spat it back into the cup. “That will put the hair on your moles!” Maxime cried merrily.

I eyed him with distaste, and when I met Simone’s eye she gave me a small sheepish smile.

“Do you know the reason you were called away from Paris?” he asked. “The reason all those officers were found dead in the brothels?”

I looked at him.

“They say a girl, a young Breton girl, called them back.”

“Called who back? Back from where?”

He leaned in and said, in a stage whisper:
“The girls.”

“For heaven’s sake,
what
girls?”

Simone reached over and pinched Maxime’s lips together. “I will tell you.”

What happened was this. A ship was dispatched carrying Parisian girls for the entertainment of German soldiers stationed on the isle of Jersey. There was a storm, and at the island’s southwesterly point, La Corbière—a treacherously rocky headland where black birds gather—the ship capsized, and all on board were drowned.

Four days later a French beldame, a Breton girl not more than seventeen, passed the lighthouse on foot and climbed down the jagged rocks to the shoreline. She said a few words, and within moments dark heads began to break the surface of the water. Their skin was pale as putty and the light had gone out of their eyes.

It is possible for a beldame to revive the dead, but to restore them to life it must be accomplished within three hours of the last breath. If you say the words after those three hours are up, what comes back to you won’t be human.

So the dead girls made their way back to Paris by boat, by train, on foot, and by donkey cart, and everyone who encountered them wanted nothing more than to be removed from their presence posthaste. They stank of mold, and water dripped from their skirts long after their clothes should have dried.

They could still speak, and remember, and reason—to a certain extent—but when they slept they looked like the corpses they were, and they required no sustenance besides revenge. When they returned to their former houses of employment, the madams were too afraid to turn them away, and so the girls retreated to rooms with heavy curtains and used even heavier perfume. Attracted by the aura of mystery thus acquired, the German soldiers would venture into their darkened boudoirs. Those few soldiers who lived to speak of it told of rotting flesh in intimate places and were convinced to the point of madness that they had contracted some horrible new venereal disease.

And I would have been afraid of them, too, had I ever encountered them; calling the undead is a mighty tricky business. Even if you bring them back for the noblest of motives, they’re liable to turn on you.

Jonah had been riveted all the while Simone was talking. “What a tale,” he said when she was finished.

“Oh, but it isn’t a tale,” she said. “The girl was a cousin of mine.”

“Was?”

“Is, was.” She shrugged. “I don’t expect to see her again, in any case.”

“So,” said Pierre, turning to me. “Do you fly your broomstick every night, or is it only on special occasions?”

“That’s a myth, Pierre. We don’t fly on broomsticks.”

“No?”

“No.”
I tried to give Simone a dirty look, but she wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Then how do you travel to your black Sabbath?”

“Let’s get this straight once and for all, shall we? I do not traffic with the devil. We are not on a first-name basis. Indeed, I have never met him, nor do I wish to. I do
not
fly a broomstick, I don’t have warts, and I don’t eat babies. Got it?”

“Got it,” Pierre echoed. For a moment he looked lost in thought. “All the same, I think your powers will be very useful for us. Aerial reconnaissance. Hah!”

I glowered at him.

“What happens when someone makes you angry? Do you put a pox on them?”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Pierre let out a nervous titter, and the rest of them laughed outright.

“Answer me this, then …”

“Yeah?”

“Who’s Hitler got?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What kind of spooks has
he
got?”

“I’m not a spook,” I said frostily.

“Yes, yes, you are not a spook. But I have heard they have werewolves.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Do they have witches?”

“No such thing as witches.”

“What about you, then?”

“I’m—well, never you mind what I am. I’m a lady and that’s all you need to know.”

“And what about you, Renard?” (Among the
maquisards
, Jonah was known as “Fox.”)

Jonah took a swig of grog from his dirty tin cup. “What about me?”

Pierre leaned in closer. “Are you a he-witch?”

“A he-witch?!” Jonah laughed and laughed.

But oftentimes they could put their vivid imaginations toward entertaining rather than irritating us. Pierre told a story about a city at the bottom of the sea where every drowned sailor and frogman wakes up and discovers he’s grown a set of gills and webbing between his toes, and that each of them marries a mermaid—not a fanged mermaid, mind; those are a separate species altogether—who shares a face with the girl he left behind.

In turn, I told them another of our old legends, one of those classic cautionary tales your mother related in your adolescence hoping to scare you from making the same mistakes she had made. Cordelia Wynne, who had resided in Harveysville at some nebulous point in the distant past, had such an obsessive love for her poor husband that when he contracted scarlet fever she absolutely refused to let him die. He was positively ghastly to look at, and when he finally did die—through no consent of
hers
—she cut out his heart and put it in a rosewood box, and every day she would open the lid and talk to it. The coven had tried to talk some sense into her, but she eventually shunned them entirely. In the end some concerned beldame had found her on her kitchen floor, a good week after she had died; the open box had toppled over onto the floorboards, and an unspeakable stench permeated the whole house.