A Vision in Velvet: A Witchcraft Mystery (13 page)

“I . . .” He trailed off, as though fascinated by the overabundance of clothing.

“Did you want your clothes back?” Ever since we took them, I had wondered whether he was really ready to part with them, so I had kept them together in their bag. Will’s words rang in my ears.

“No, not at all. I was . . .” Bart looked over his slumped shoulders, as though to determine whether we were being overheard. Folks milled around us, a few shoppers but mostly people involved in the hunt for one Oscar the pig. No one appeared to be paying the slightest mind to us or our conversation. “I was wondering if I could ask you about . . . the love spell. The curse.”

“You mean the one you believe was cast against you?”

He nodded. “I’ve been asking around, and your name has come up as someone who might be able to help me.”

“Is that so?”

He leaned closer to me and whispered, “Could you help me break the curse? I will pay you.”

Since his niece Hannah had recently been selling off his possessions I wasn’t sure what he was claiming he could pay me with, but I would leave that aside for the moment.

“I’m not really an expert in these areas . . .” I began.

“Sebastian mentioned you once. I just didn’t put two and two together—I didn’t realize who you were when you came to my apartment. You might be a vintage clothes dealer, but I believe you are an even more powerful practitioner.”

I held his gaze for a long moment.

“I thought I felt it when I first met you,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure. I can’t be sure of much of anything anymore. But through my life, through the course of my search for a cure, I’ve met many a practitioner. You have that feel.”

“That feel?”

“Just a way about you . . .”

There was a ruckus at the front door when a large young man lugged in a huge plastic pig, its hide drawn into sections labeled with their butcher names:
loin, chops, rump roast, ham
.

“This isn’t a treasure hunt,” I heard Maya straining over the crowd to explain. “We’re looking for an actual lost pig.”

The man looked disappointed, but added his pig to a growing collection of ceramic and plastic pigs near the register. He took a flyer from Bronwyn and left.

“Anyway, the point is . . .” Bart was still talking. “Can you imagine what it feels like never to know true love?”

I studied the old man. His blue eyes were watery and red-rimmed, but I imagined they had once sparkled.
Hannah had told me Bart had been a handsome young man, and I could believe it. What would it be like to spend one’s whole life searching for love only to find it elusive? Chances were great that Hannah was right: There was no actual curse and Bart simply hadn’t been able to open up to love, for whatever reason people have—issues stemming from childhood, perhaps, or maybe even from a lifetime of being told you suffered under a curse and would never find happiness.

But what if he was right? What if there really
was
a curse through the ages, cast upon his family from the lips of a dying witch?

“I don’t know that much about love curses, much less inheritable curses, but . . . I’ll do what I can.”

Now I saw something new in his eyes: hope. “You’ll help me?”

“I’ll look into it,” I said. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll look into it.”

“Thank you! I can’t thank you enough. Hannah and her sister told me not to bother. She said you wouldn’t help. Do you want a deposit? I can give you money for expenses, that sort of thing.”

“Why don’t we see if I get anywhere first? If I have expenses, you can reimburse me.”

“You can take more clothes if you want. Or sugar bowls.”

“Thanks. But I don’t actually carry that many men’s clothes. We got some nice things from you just the other day, and as for kitchen items . . . you can see I’m running out of space.”

He nodded. “How about looking for your pig? I could at least help with that.”

“It’s really not necessary. There are already so many—”

“I wasn’t raised to expect a free handout. And besides . . .” He looked around the store. “It looks kind of fun.”

I wasn’t sure about the love curse, but it was clear poor Bart was suffering from the curse afflicting so many elderly in this country: He had nothing to do.

“Sure,” I said. “I would appreciate that. The more eyes and ears out there, the better. Duke?”

The big retired fisherman was seated at the main table. He turned around in his chair. “What’s up?”

“This is Bartholomew Woolsey. Bart, this is Duke Demeter. Duke, would you see how Bart could help?”

“Sure. Here; have a seat.”

Bart turned back to me and dropped his voice: “And if you don’t mind, could you keep this just between us? Maybe keep my name out of it if you’re asking around?”

I nodded. “I’ll be discreet.”

“Thank you.”

Bart sat down next to Duke. The two men looked similar in age. Perhaps this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, I thought, trying to force my thoughts toward something pleasant. And then I noticed that two of Bronwyn’s coven sisters were already welcoming Bart, their patchouli-scented purple gauze aflutter. One offered Bart a cup of steaming coffee; the other proffered a plate of cookies.

Unfortunately, none of this activity was going to help find my lost pig. That was a whole other kettle of supernatural fish.

I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. What did I know so far? Bart Woolsey’s niece Hannah sold a trunk of old clothes to Sebastian Crowley. Bart gave no indication that he had any knowledge of what had been in that trunk. Sebastian was subsequently killed under an oak tree that was causing Conrad to experience nightmares. Aunt Flora’s Closet was attacked, possibly by someone looking for the trunk. A velvet cape—which Oscar called a travel cloak—within the trunk gave me
visions of a witch burning. Bart Woolsey believed he was the victim of a love curse passed down through the ages. Oscar disappeared in—or near or around—the oak tree.

And I was one clueless witch.

* * *

At three I set out for Berkeley. It probably wouldn’t take me a full hour to reach the university located right on the other side of the bay, but it was rush hour, so one never knew. Still, the real reason I left early was that I wanted some distance from the flurry of well-meaning activity at the store.

Just thinking of Oscar hurt my heart, leaving it feeling scraped and raw. The longer he was missing, the more I feared he was being kept against his will.

I often get lost when I cross over the Bay Bridge, so I followed Will’s instructions carefully, taking the University Avenue exit off of 80 and then crossing town on surface streets. I half expected to see student protests and hippies, as though it were still 1969. In reality, I passed through a neighborhood full of Indian clothing stores, display windows jammed with jewel-toned saris and glittering gold bangles—I made a mental note to stop in one day, as though I needed more cool clothes in my life—and then drove by several blocks peppered with restaurants and cafés and health food stores.

University Avenue, handily enough, dead-ended at the UC Berkeley campus. I found metered parking and bought a ticket for two hours. Just in case.

Then I threw myself on the mercy of a student who showed me how to get to the religion department, which was housed in Evans Hall, along with the mathematics department. Mathematics made me think of algebra and how Oscar had encouraged me to go to the GED this weekend, offering to drive. How I hoped he would be back in time to offer again.

The door was ajar. I knocked lightly and pushed it in.

“Professor?”

“Hello! Nice to see you again,” said Will as he came out from behind a standard-issue beige institutional desk to shake my hand.

Besides the desk, the office consisted of one wall of bookshelves, a filing cabinet, and two chairs. Everything was neat as a pin; the desk blotter was empty of anything but a framed photo, a well-ordered stack of papers, and two pens that seemed to have been placed at the side with military precision. I wondered how Will managed to work in the chaos of Bart’s apartment without either organizing or sitting on his hands to keep from diving in.

“Please come in. Have a seat,” he continued. “How’s Bart doing? Have you seen him?”

“As a matter of fact, I just left him at my shop. He stopped by and then stayed to help find a lost pig.”

Will had returned to his seat behind his desk. He blinked.

“I have a . . . pet pig,” I clarified. “A miniature Vietnamese potbellied pig.”

“Oh?”

“It’s sort of like a dog. It’s gone missing.”

“I’ve heard of that. Didn’t George Clooney have one of those?”

“I think so, yes.”

“I’m sorry to hear it’s lost. You must be so worried. I have a couple dogs myself.” He picked up a photo in an ornate antique frame and held it out to me. He smiled, a little embarrassed. “I don’t have kids, so . . . they’re my babies.”

I looked at the photo—a goofy-looking golden retriever and a smaller dog of unknown heritage, grinning widely, tongues lolling—and returned it to him with a smile.

“Cute. I love dogs.”

“Anyway,” he said. “You didn’t come here to ask about my canine companions. What can I help you with?”

“I was wondering . . . We met the other day at Bart’s house, of course, but I was also referred to you by someone else, who suggested you might be able to answer some questions for me.”

“Who might that be?”

“Aidan Rhodes.”

“Ah. Aidan.” Our eyes held for a long minute. “And now you’re not sure what to think of me.”

“Where I come from, we say someone like Aidan might be welcome to supper—but hide the silver.”

Will grinned, showing straight white teeth. “I like that. Mind if I steal it?”

“It’s not like it’s mine. Belongs to plenty of Texans, I reckon. By way of warning, I wouldn’t say it to Aidan’s face, though.”

“Believe me, I know better. Aidan was kind enough to answer some questions for a class of mine once. One of my students recommended him as a visiting lecturer. It was . . . fascinating.”

“I’ll bet it was.”

“So, you’re here because of Aidan, or because of Bart? Or something else?”

“I was hoping you might be able to tell me more about the history Bart was discussing yesterday.”

“His family history?”

“Yes. But also . . . about the witchcraft trials in general. For instance, he mentioned his family was from a Massachusetts settlement that was . . . similar to Salem?”

“That’s right. Salem was the location of the most famous witch craze in colonial America, but trials also took place elsewhere. Many elsewheres, in fact. Bart’s
family settled in a town called Dathorne. Nasty history there.”

“So it was a generalized hysteria?” I should know more, but had always shied away from learning much about the witch hunts. The subject was too frightening, too painful.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘hysteria,’ exactly,” he said slowly, as though searching for words. “In my work I describe it as a confluence of events and attitudes that led inexorably toward an extreme response—”

“Such as putting a bunch of women to death?”

“And several men as well,” he said with a nod. “But yes, that’s the kind of extreme response I’m talking about. It’s hard for the modern mind to understand the seventeenth-century mentality. The Scientific Revolution was just getting underway in England, and the worldview of most American colonists was still very much medieval. They saw the universe as a battleground between the forces of good and evil, between God and the devil. And they didn’t mean this metaphorically; they meant it literally.”

“Weren’t the colonists mostly uneducated and illiterate?” I asked.

“That’s a common misconception. In early colonial New England especially, literacy rates were uncommonly high—much higher than in most of Europe at the time. The Puritans prized education and founded Harvard College only six years after settling the Boston colony.”

“Then why . . . ?”

“In the Puritan world, the devil was constantly on the prowl to snatch vulnerable souls from the path of righteousness. Lacking a scientific explanation for natural events, they tended to interpret bad things—a crop failure, a baby’s illness, a cow’s milk drying up—as the
actions of either God or the devil. Witchcraft was not the default explanation when something bad happened, but it was one possible explanation.”

“So are you saying there weren’t any actual witches in Salem?”

“The evidence for Salem suggests the accusations of witchcraft grew out of social conflict rather than the presence of actual witches. But this is not the same thing as saying there were no witches in colonial America; witchcraft has been present throughout history and all across the world. Women, mostly, often healers and botanists, who specialized in the rites and traditions that brought people comfort and health. They were the wisewomen, or cunning women.”

Will reminded me of myself, insisting upon the positive aspects of the history of witchcraft. While I took in the professor’s words, my gaze wandered to the window, which looked out across a stand of trees. Idly, I wondered if this would qualify as a “coppice.” The word brought Oscar’s loss back to me with a vengeance.

Will continued. “Women were considered more vulnerable to witchcraft, of course, since they were traditionally defined as morally and spiritually more fragile than men and therefore at greater risk of being seduced by the devil. The Puritans were trying to create a ‘city on a hill,’ a shining example of a godly community on earth. What greater prize for the devil than to disrupt God’s people? So when conflict broke out, as it did in Salem and other places, a logical suspect was the devil and his minions—the witches.”

“I understand.” I watched Will and tried to assess whether he knew I was a witch, whether he might have a sense of such things, as Bart had mentioned about himself. That still shook me a bit. I wasn’t used to being outed by someone who barely knew me, who wasn’t part
of the magical world. “But what I’m wondering is whether there might have been some true witches present at that time. Powerful women. Maybe someone who cursed someone else?”