Petty Magic (12 page)

Helena appears in the doorway, still wearing her apron. “That’s enough!” she calls out. “She’s done no harm.”

“No harm
yet!”
the puppets cry in unison.

“The boy’s only after a bit of fun himself. And so I see no harm in it.” She catches Uncle Heck’s eye then and nods. My uncle draws his old ibex headdress out of his pack and puts it on while the sulking puppets seat themselves on the end of the stage. Heck produces his tin whistle and plays a few notes. The children hurry back into the room in a stampede, trailing cookie crumbs all over the carpet. Faced with this wild new getup, the younger ones hide their faces in their mothers’ bosoms, believing him the bogeyman.

T
HE KIDDIES
go to bed before the meeting commences. It’s one of my favorite childhood memories of winter covention: being snuggled up in bed and hearing murmuring through the floor punctuated by occasional laughter, and if you got up for a glass of warm milk you would arrive in the doorway of a drawing room gone strange in the cozy gloom, your mother’s face silhouetted in the lamplight. You knew it was the same old room you passed your days in—but late at night, in the darkness, and with all the ladies and their big words and only faintly familiar perfumes, the room acquired an air of preternatural excitement. You expected there was a tremendous secret to which you’d shortly be made privy.

But what did I tell you about nostalgia? A sweet distraction before it bites you in the rump.

The first part of the meeting is uneventful, and I am too busy thinking of Justin to pay much attention. The boy child is named Erskine, after his grandfather, and the young people make their
beneficium
pledge. Many of the ladies knit through it all, and Olive Jester, Dymphna’s daughter, sits in the corner embroidering a tiny blouse. (She inherited the workshop over on Alabaster Street from Uncle Dickon, who, when he got old enough, sat down and made his own juju.)

Olive’s daughters appear in the doorway and listen with wide eyes as the last couple girls take their oaths. “Mommy, may we have some milk?” Two mugs appear on the end table at her elbow as Olive continues at her needlework, and the two little girls stand there in their footy pajamas with their noses in the gently steaming cups.

Then, as usual, Helena says, “Are there any matters of conduct to be brought to our attention?” to which there is always a brief silence before Morven says, “Right then, I’ll bring in the tea tray.”

Morven is opening her mouth to say just that as Lucretia Hartmann raises her hand. “I have a charge.”

Helena starts. “A charge?”

Lucretia rises from her chair and smooths her skirt before speaking again. “It is my unfortunate duty to declare that I have come into possession of documents suggesting that you, Helena, had a hand in the death of Henry Dryden.”

Gasps, gaping mouths, snorts of incredulity. My sister, a murderess? Helena Homebody? Preposterous.

“Surely you can’t be serious, Lucretia,” the ladies are saying.

“I assure you that I am. And if this evidence is to be believed, the consequences for this coven will be profound.”

I stand, trembling, and face her. “How dare you,” I say. “How dare you accuse my sister in her own home!”

“How dare
you
, Evelyn! How dare you suggest your family is above the rules of this coven!”

“Lucretia is right, Eve,” Helena says quietly. “She may be mistaken in her accusation, but I must prove my innocence according to custom.”

The ancestors are of little help, being too busy arguing among themselves. Their limbs clash against one another’s as they argue, clackety-clack-clack. “It isn’t true. We know it isn’t,” says Uncle Dickon, but what can a ghost offer in the way of tangible evidence?

“This is nonsense and you know it,” I cry. “Everyone knows it. Where’s your proof, you spiteful old cow?”

“Eve,
please!”
Morven tugs at my sleeve. “Hush now. We’ll sort this out.”

“You are the worst hypocrite there ever was, Evelyn Harbinger. Look at you, vain as a peacock, strutting around as if—” She cuts herself short, flushing quite deeply, for it has only just occurred to her that a third of the people in this room are Peacocks.

“Pea
hen,”
Vega sniffs.

“And peahens don’t strut,” her sister says impishly. “They haven’t the plumage.”

“Be quiet!” Lucretia’s face has gone rather purple. “The way she’s bewitched that poor boy is positively criminal, and as I see it you’re
all
to blame for your complicity.” She huffs and glares at all the ladies seated around her. They avert their eyes and clear their throats. “Call me all the names you like, Evelyn,” Lucretia says, “but your house is made of glass.”

Morven implores me not to retort as Lucretia fumbles for her purse—a great brown thing that resembles a mound of offal more than a fashion accessory—and pulls out a neatly binder-clipped sheaf of photocopies. She’s been
planning
this, the sour old prig!

She hands the sheaf to Helena, who skims the first page with a dispassionate eye (as only Helena could, the poor dear). “I found these letters in my mother’s papers. These are facsimiles, of course. Her correspondent laid out the case against you, Helena, and it is lamentably convincing.”

“Who is the correspondent?” somebody asks.

“Miss Belva Mettle, a native of this town.” Lucretia turns to Marguerite. “Your father’s secretary.”

“An ordinary woman?”

Lucretia nods. “Not that it matters.”

Dymphna clears her throat. “Naturally, we must have time to review th—”

“Yes, of course,” Lucretia says. “Will we reconvene in one month’s time?”

Helena looks up from the papers in her hands and nods slightly. With that, Lucretia Hartmann slings that horrid handbag over her shoulder, lifts her chin, and marches out of the drawing room.

Nobody speaks. I fall in a heap onto the sofa beside Morven. Olive’s children, thoroughly oblivious to the kerfuffle Lucretia has just kicked up, have been rummaging through Uncle Heck’s knapsack in the corner of the room. The elder of the two is monopolizing the bag, however, so her little sister has moved on to her own mother’s sack; Olive, like most of the rest of us, is too busy staring at the floor in troubled rumination to notice what her kiddies are up to. With a small cry of delight, her younger daughter pulls out a string of three unfinished puppets and carries them across the room to the sofa where we are seated. “Look, Aunties!” she says. “Look what I found!”

I lean forward to see her better—what a sweet little thing she is, Shirley Temple curls and a milk moustache drying to a crust on her upper lip—and I take the marionette she offers me.

It has no clothes or hair yet, but its face is freshly drawn, and as I look upon it I am dimly aware of Olive demanding her daughter bring her back the puppets at once. It’s a girl puppet, of course, with pale cat’s eyes, arched black eyebrows, and a bowed mouth painted crimson.

Olive rushes forward, plucks the puppet from my hands, and stuffs it, clickety-clack, back into her workbag. “I’m so sorry, Auntie,” she mutters. “I never intended for you to see it.”

Schemes and Counterschemes

14.

There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.

—Joseph Wood Crutch

“R
ATHER PREMATURE
, wouldn’t you say?” I’d said drily once someone had poured me a generous glug of brandy. “I might live another sixty years, you know.”

“You might,” said Olive.

“Mind you, Auntie Emmeline was two hundred and twelve. Uncle Elmsford was nearly two forty-three. And Dorcas Harbinger lived to be over three hundred!”

“You don’t know that for certain,” Olive replied. “Sorry, Auntie, but you Harbingers do have a tendency to exaggerate.”

I turned to Morven, who didn’t seem aggravated in the slightest. “Aren’t you offended?” I asked. She said no, and I replied, “Why not? Don’t forget, you’ve got almost a year on me.”

The covention was spoiled, of course, though Lucretia had the sense to hide her face the rest of the weekend. I took pleasure in none of the old New Year’s customs, not even the Enchanted Gingerbread Man’s annual prophecy. (At least it wasn’t any more ominous than it usually is.) Nobody had the heart to man the Grey Mare, so the horse’s skull sat idle on the drawing room mantelpiece, the well-worn cape trailing down the side of the fireplace. Vega put two votive candles in its sockets and we—only the Harbingers left now—sat in the darkness, watching the light flicker where its eyes used to be. Helena kept to herself.

Until now I never truly understood how a small-town feud could drag on for generations, how children could so willingly inherit the grudges of their grandsires. For days afterward my blood roared in my ears whenever I thought of the toy shop proprietress going about her daily business, doling out Robitussin-flavored lollies with every purchase in between plotting the ruination of the Harbinger clan. Why must we defend ourselves against her ridiculous accusations? Anyone can see she’s mad as a wet hen!

T
HE DAY
after Christmas we hold a family meeting. The Peacocks and the Jesters and all the rest had offered sympathy in abundance, but none of our friends could possibly offer a solution. So we kept our conference to ourselves.

“There’s not much to tell beyond what you all know already.” Helena is seated at the head of the dinner table, dignified as ever. Her daughters pepper her with questions.

“Have you read the letters?” Rosamund asks. My sister nods.

“Who was this Belva Mettle, anyway?” Marguerite says. “I never heard anything about her.”

“She wasn’t your father’s secretary for very long. I don’t remember much about her myself—only met her a handful of times …”

“Well,
I
remember her,” I put in. “She had the most unremarkable face I’ve ever laid eyes on, which is in itself the only reason I would have remembered her. She was utterly nondescript.”

“I do recall she was very studious, very accommodating,” Helena says. “Perfectly willing to work until ten o’clock at night any time Henry was on one of his big cases.”

“How is it
you
remember her, Auntie Eve?”

“Oh, your father was handling some small legal matter for me, so he asked the girl to bring the papers round to the house on a Friday afternoon. She was a strange little thing, too. Birdlike. Ill at ease.” The image of her hovering on the kitchen threshold, eager to be away, comes to mind now as readily as if Henry had only died this morning. When she turned to go I’d noticed crooked stocking seams over a pair of shapeless calves. “Shifty-eyed,” I say.
“That’s
what I’d call her.”

“She wanted Daddy for herself, I suppose,” Marguerite remarks tonelessly, and Helena starts in her chair. “It
is
the most logical conclusion, Mother.”

“Perhaps it is,” Helena says in a queer voice.

“If that’s so, then it’s easy to see why she’d leap to suspicion. What was Lucretia talking about when she said the letters had proof?”

“It isn’t
proof
, per se. The ‘evidence’ is all very circumstantial.” Helena pauses.

“Mother?”

“
Yes
, dear, I’m just trying to think of how best to explain it.”

“Why don’t we hear it from the horse’s mouth? Marguerite, you read it.”

Deborah hands Marguerite the sheaf of photocopies and she begins reading at the top of the page.
“March 1, 1950. Dear Maud, I hope all is well with you and yours, and that baby Michael is fully recovered from his bout of colic. Life in Blackabbey is uneventful, though I am sorry to report that Henry is not looking well.”

“ 
‘Henry’?
They were on a first-name basis?”

“I don’t think so,” Helena replies. “She would have called him Mr. Dryden to his face, I think.”

“Something is amiss at Harbinger House, of that I am certain.”
(Here, a collective rolling of the eyes.)
“Maud, I feel I must confide in you, not only to ease my own anxiety, but in case something horrible should happen
—” Marguerite interrupts herself with a sigh and her sister takes the opportunity to ask, “Where is Belva Mettle now?”

“Dead, I expect, or else Lucretia would have spoken to her and told us all about it.”

“Dead,” I reply. “How convenient.”

“Will I keep reading?” Reluctantly we nod.
“Henry is clearly ill and yet he seems utterly unconcerned, though you would expect as much from a man, wouldn’t you? Especially one so busy and important as Henry.”

I let out a groan. “Will the silly mouse get to the point already!”

Marguerite is scanning ahead. “She comes to it soon enough, Auntie.
I have noticed something very odd. Some mornings Henry brings his coffee in a thermos from home, and other mornings he goes down to the diner with his newspaper and drinks it at the counter. I have observed that on the afternoons when Henry has had his coffee from home, he spends more time in the toilet than could be considered normal, and when he emerges he is almost deathly pale
.

“Unbeknownst to him, I have taken the liberty of contacting a chemist in town to ask if he might test a sample of leftover coffee from Henry’s thermos. Of course, the idea that Henry’s wife could be poisoning him is shocking in the extreme. Though she is unfailingly polite and considered a pillar of feminine virtue by all who are acquainted with her, I cannot dismiss my suspicions. I am visiting the chemist’s again tomorrow evening and will relay to you everything there is to report.”

“I take it the chemist found something in the coffee,” Morven says dolefully.

“Every trace chemical he found is present in an ordinary cup of coffee,” Helena replies. “And yet Henry did die of it.”

Her daughters and nieces respond with a chorus of gasps and
“What!”s
, and Helena holds up a weary hand. “I am getting to it. On his doctor’s recommendation, Henry drank only decaf. Now, there is a chemical called methylene chloride that is used to strip the caffeine from the coffee. It is that chemical that is toxic in larger doses, and it was an extraordinary dose of that chemical the pharmacology professor found in Henry’s thermos.”

A long and eloquent silence follows. How can Lucretia
possibly
expect us to prove Helena’s innocence more than sixty years after the fact?

We cannot ask Henry himself because he was, alas, an ordinary man. There is no earthly way to prove or disprove any of it, and yet a pall will hang over this coven until we achieve the impossible. There are unearthly means, of course, but they are too frightening to contemplate. We have not reached that level of desperation just yet.

“There’s only one thing to be done,” I say at last. “We must discredit Belva Mettle.”

“I
’D LIKE
to research a person,” I tell the teenage boy behind the desk. I might as well mention I’ve gone girlish for the afternoon. I’ve been to the digital reading room at the Blackabbey Public Library before, and I have observed who gets the most help from the all-male staff. Chicks trump grannies every time, blast them. “A resident of Blackabbey in the 1950s. How would I go about doing that?”

“Is it, like, for genealogical purposes?”

I glance at Morven and she flashes a grinchy grin. “It is indeed,” I reply. “My great-aunt. Her name was Belva Mettle. I’d like to look through the old microfiche of the
Blackabbey Gazette
for a wedding announcement and what have you, but I was wondering if there’s a search engine for the whole archive.”

“Yup.” He rounds the desk and leads us to a row of computers. “I can show you how it’s done, if you like.” I turn to Morven and roll my eyes. He’d never have offered to help
her
. These cocky young blokes think we’re too feeble to understand how a computer works, that we should just stick to our typewriters and home-shopping channels. “I’ll put in your aunt’s name and we’ll see what comes up,” the spotty-skinned junior librarian is saying. “Belva Mettle, you said? B-E-L-V-A M-E-T-A-L?”

“M-E-T-T-L-E,” I reply, and he, oblivious to my frosty tone, types her name into the search field.

“The results will come up in reverse chronological order, as you can see,” he says, pointing to her obituary notice at the top of the screen. “Died in oh-three, is that right?”

“Uh—yes, sounds about right.”

“Don’t expect there’d be many other Belva Mettles around here,” he says with a wink. “Anyway, there’s a lot more here. Over thirty hits. You can search other newspaper archives too. The
Times
and whatever.” He points to a long list on the left side of the screen. “So just make a note of the newspaper issue dates, and then you pull the microfilm canisters out of the drawers over there. Don’t worry about putting them back. We’ll do it. Just let me know if you have any other questions,” he says, and finally leaves me be.

I scan the search list: other people’s wedding announcements mostly, and her father’s death notice at the very bottom. “You know what would be
so
perfect,” Morven sighs. “If she’d done time at the Manor.” The local asylum, she means, where there are iron bars on every window and the inmates eat Jello with their fingers.

“Let’s not get our hopes up, dear. I’d settle for a charge of perjury.” I pull the film canisters from the drawers at the end of the room and load the first spool, oldest news first, into the winder. Morven seats herself beside me and does a bit of typing. “I’ve just done a broader search on Lucretia.”

“Good thinking. ‘Glass house,’ my took.”

I start reading her father’s death notice. It isn’t an obituary like I’d expected—it’s a
news
piece.
“Aha!
Her father was murdered.”

“Murdered? Really? I’m sure I would have remembered that.”

“Well, he died mysteriously, anyway. And you wouldn’t have remembered; it was during the war. Here, read it.”

Julius Mettle, head botanist at the Blackabbey Botanical Society and veteran of the Great War, died yesterday at his home on Pearl Street. The Blackabbey Police are investigating the nature of his death, which the coroner believes was not accidental …

His sixteen-year-old daughter, Belva, has been left in the care of extended family
.

The details are annoyingly vague, and as it turns out, this is the only article of note in the lot. I’ve grown fussy as a baby, tired of our mission and eager for a dram. The boy behind the desk stares at me as I wriggle out of my mohair sweater.

But I can’t quit yet—we’ve only begun! So I do a
Times
search, and the only hit for “
BELVA AND/OR JULIUS METTLE
” just so happens to be from the spring of 1939, when Dr. Julius gave a lecture at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Jonah was married, in Manhattan, in the spring of 1939. I pull the film canister and spool it nimbly.

I’ve seen pictures of Patricia Rudolfsen before, of course—this isn’t the first time I’ve pored over their wedding announcement—and every time I see her photograph my initial impression is reinforced. She was no great beauty—didn’t even have that je ne sais quoi I could have grudgingly admired—and when I met her in New York after the war I saw she wasn’t any prettier in person. It was her brain Jonah had fallen in love with, and I loved him all the more for that.

I am dimly aware of someone seating himself to my immediate left, but I am too busy reading about the exotic provenance of the lace on Mrs. Jonah Rudolfsen’s wedding gown to give him a glance.

“Research?”

“Justin!” With shaking fingers I advance the film so he can’t see Jonah’s picture. It’s too strange, seeing his black-and-white likeness on the microfilm screen just before he appears beside me in the flesh. “Shouldn’t you be at the shop?”

“Uncle Harry’s working today. I stopped by the house and your aunt said you were here. I just wanted to make sure we’re still on for tomorrow.”

“We certainly are.”

“Great!”

“But I’m going home tonight, so shall I meet you at the museum?”