Petty Magic (21 page)

They’re such a cliché, the pair of them: the silly little minx looking for someone to take the place of her father, and the middle-aged man too flattered to resist her attentions. As I watch this scene I keep shaking my head at the magnitude of Henry’s stupidity. I’m hard-pressed to understand the attraction; she’s too thin, too birdlike, and there’s an eagerness and a hunger in her manner that by rights should repel him. She can’t hold a candle to Helena, not in a thousand lifetimes.

“I can’t help feeling as if I’ve ruined you for all other men,” Henry is saying. I roll my eyes.

“There are no other men, Henry.”

“There will be.”

“There’s only you.”

“Oh, Belva. You shouldn’t talk that way.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not. I have a family. I have a wife.”

Belva scowls as he mentions my sister. “You’re afraid of her. I know you are.”

“Afraid? Of Helena?” In Henry’s look of genuine surprise I can see the signs of illness—he looks so pallid, so worn out.

Belva nods, her thin lips pursed in defiance.

“This has nothing to do with Helena.” He pauses, then says almost ruefully, “Helena is perfect.”

“She’d like you to think so, wouldn’t she?”

Good Lord, what did Henry
see
in this pathetic girl? I glance at the fishbowl and notice something in the doorway of the little ceramic castle that definitely should not be there: an eyeball the size of a marble.

Henry shakes his head. “She knows, Belva. She knows everything—and yet she’s willing to forgive me.” He regards her with a look of tender sadness.

What he’s about to say is already written on his face, and Belva reads it as plainly as I can. Her look of horrified panic is priceless. “No—Henry—”

“You’ll be all right, Belva. I’ll find you another position in town, with better hours. I promise.”

Here it comes: she’s turned on the tears. “I like working late,” she sobs.

He pats her on the knee, a gesture of awkward affection. “You like it a little too much.”

“No!”

“This is what’s best for you, don’t you see? The sooner we end this, the sooner you’ll find a man who can offer you everything I can’t.”

“No, Henry!” She launches herself into him, throws her arms around his neck. “You have no idea all that I’ve lost, just to be near you.”

He holds her at arm’s length and scrutinizes her face. “What do you mean by that?”

“It doesn’t matter. I love you, Henry. I love you more than she ever could.”

And so what little resolve Henry possessed melts away in the blink of an eye—just like a man!—and as they embrace I decide I’ve seen quite enough of this.

I lower the toy from my eyes. “Did you hear all that?”

Morven nods grimly. “I’m just glad I didn’t have to see it. Poor Helena!”

“There
is
something you should see, though.” I hand her the View-Master. “Look at what’s inside the fishbowl.”

“It looks like an eyeball. It’s … 
watching
them.”

“Exactly. I bet you anything Helena put it there. I saw it in the grimoire when I was flipping through it—”

“No!” Morven drops the View-Master so she can clamp her hands on her ears. “Don’t tell me!”

“How to use fish eyes to spy on somebody,” I shout, so she can hear me through her hands.

Morven lowers her hands. “But I don’t see the harm in that—anybody would do the same in her position.”

“Yes, but she told us she never used the book. Why would Helena lie to us?”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe she found out about that trick some other way.”

I lift a brow as she hands me back the View-Master. “I’m going to advance to the next slide, all right?”

“It’ll likely take you backward,” Morven replies.

“Maybe that’s just what we want.” I press the orange tab a few times to advance the images, and then I see a much younger Helena chopping carrots and myself seated at the table talking to her as she works. “I’m in the kitchen with Helena. Looks to be about 1950.” I tap on the plastic to set the scene in motion.

Helena pulls a codfish out of a greasy paper wrapper and leaves it on the counter to stare at the Eve of 1950 with its big googly eyes. “I don’t like that fish,” says young Eve.

Now Helena is busy flaying a giant parsnip. “Oh, are you staying for dinner now?”

“It’s
looking
at me.”

With an exaggerated sigh Helena drops the fish on the cutting board, draws a cleaver out of the knife block, and decapitates said codfish with an oddly triumphant flourish. Then she guts the fish, scoops the innards into a bowl with her bare hand, and sets the bowl on the floor for the tabby cat.

“Why do you have to do all that the long way? If I were you I’d be on the couch right now listening to
The Armchair Detective.”

“Henry might see.”

“Tosh. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon!”

The tabby cat sashays into the kitchen and briefly rubs itself against Eve’s bare legs before heading for the goodie bowl on the floor.

“He hasn’t been feeling well lately. I’ve been asking him to take an afternoon off.”

“Hah! Henry will never take an afternoon off.”

“I know,” Helena says darkly as the Eve of 1950 watches her pry the googly eyes out of the fish head with a teaspoon and drop them in a lowball glass on the counter.
Plink, plink
.

“Ick. What did you do that for?” (Meanwhile old Eve is thinking,
Fish eyes, eh? Sometimes a two-bit spellbook is worth more than you paid for it.
)

Helena turns away from the counter, mucky teaspoon in hand. “Why
don’t
you go sit on the couch and listen to the radio?”

“I could chop something,” Eve replies, suddenly eager to be helpful.

“No, thank you,” Helena says crisply. “It’s done now.” And as my sister turns back to the counter in her spotless gingham-check apron, the Eve of 1950 rises from her chair and leaves the kitchen with a look of mild affront.

Meanwhile, the Eve of today has just caught sight of something she had failed to notice at the time: the open canister of decaf Maxwell House on the counter by Helena’s elbow. I gasp, and Morven grabs the View-Master and holds it up to the light.

“Do you see what I see?”

“Yes, Evelyn, I see it,” she sighs.

“It was just like I said. She was harvesting those fish eyes. There they are, in the glass. And what about the coffee can?”

“You always did like a cup in the afternoon from time to time,” Morven points out as she hands me back the little red toy.

“You know I don’t drink decaf. I’m going to click to the next scene, all right?”

We’re back in the kitchen at Harbinger House. Helena is sitting at the table opposite a man I immediately recognize as Belva’s father, Julius Mettle—as slight and birdlike as his daughter, with that weight-of-the-world air about him. He always seemed like a decent enough chap, but I can tell even before I tap the plastic that he’s there to make some trouble.

As always, Helena is playing the perfect hostess. “Would you like a slice of cake, Dr. Mettle? I just made it this morning.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Harbinger.”

“Tea?”

“No, thank you. This is not a social call, Mrs. Harbinger. I had better make that clear straightaway.”

“Oh?”

“I have come to discuss a matter that has troubled me greatly. It concerns my daughter, Belva. She has recently taken up with a group of wayward girls, who have encouraged her in behaviors I find completely inappropriate.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” my sister replies, leaving the rest unsaid:
But what does your unfortunate situation have to do with me?

“I have found things in her room, horrible things no young lady should ever have in her possession. Dead things in boxes—frogs, spiders. Strange pieces of jewelry. Occult symbols in the margins of her school notebooks.”

Helena is listening with a patient attitude and raises her eyebrows when Mettle indicates that he expects her to respond. “Well—that is certainly strange. Have you considered taking her to a specialist?”

“I was rather expecting that
you
could provide some insight into the situation, Mrs. Harbinger.”

“Me?”

“I am given to understand that you are Blackabbey’s foremost practitioner of witchcraft.”

“Dr. Mettle, I understand you are upset, but I can assure you that I do not keep dead vermin in my house.”

“And what of the rest of it? You are a witch, are you not?”

“Have you spoken to your daughter? Has she implicated me in any way?”

“She refuses to say.”

“Then what gave you to think I have anything at all to do with your daughter’s activities?”

“I won’t stand for this!” he cries. “You can’t sit here and tell me you have no idea the influence you have over these girls!”

“Influence?” Helena lets out an incredulous little laugh. “I have never conversed or corresponded with your daughter. And seeing as my daughters have all left the high school, I doubt that any of them have ever spoken with her either. Your daughter has never been inside this house. Frankly, I’m not sure what it is you expect me to refrain from doing.”

Mettle seems to be formulating his next move, so Helena goes on. “I hope you won’t take offense at what I’m about to say, Dr. Mettle. I know that your daughter lost her mother at an early age, and you must not underestimate the difficulty that motherless children face as they move through adolescence. After all, one cannot expect even the best of fathers to fulfill the roles of both parents.” Helena reaches for the ambrosia cake and cuts him a slice. “I must say I admire your determination to do right by your daughter. I lost my own father when I was very young.”

“And just how long ago
was
that, Mrs. Harbinger?”

“I was only three years of age. It was a long time before your family arrived in Blackabbey.”

“A
very
long time, I think,” Dr. Mettle replies with a meaningful glare. “And if you don’t mind my asking, what was your family name?”

“I really wish you would have a slice of cake, Dr. Mettle. Let us be civil.”

The botanist shakes his head. “I know how you lot do things around here. I’ve watched you. You’re all too skilled in the art of distraction, and I tell you, I won’t be waylaid by food, conversation, or anything else you try to ply me with.” Mettle leans in, pointing a finger. “I know what you are!”

Helena shrugs, still smiling pleasantly. “Positively nonplussed?”

He pounds the table with his fist. “I’ll expose you.”

“Are you threatening me, Dr. Mettle?” Helena speaks as if she’s asking if he would like another cup of tea.

“If you don’t keep well away from my daughter, believe me—I won’t hesitate.”

“That is easily done, as I’ve said, since I have had no contact with your daughter in the first place.”

Without further comment Dr. Mettle rises from his seat, puts on his hat, and stalks out of the house.

“How odd,” Morven says as I place the View-Master on the sofa between us. “She never told me Dr. Mettle came to see her.”

Fawkes’s words come back to me now, try as I might to suppress the memory:
Them two deaths was linked somehow, I just know it
. I don’t say anything, I just look at her. Morven stows the View-Master in a drawer on the end table, purses her lips, and resumes her knitting.

Some Dread Malady of the Soul

22.

Autumn 1944

A
FTER THE
liberation of Paris they claimed there was no more work for us. They even tried to shoehorn Jonah into a desk job. There was no need for new agents in Cairo, Istanbul, or anywhere else, they said. I couldn’t begin to imagine Jonah on his took shifting papers all day—and more to the point, neither could he. I saw how it maddened him to be sidelined like this, but I felt sure a new opportunity would present itself; I could do as I liked, of course, but I didn’t want to go back to Germany without him. No matter how fluent we were, or how well we could claim to understand the quirks and customs of the German people, a mission to Nazi Germany was tantamount to suicide. At least that’s what the Brits said.

The Americans, on the other hand, were willing to try it.

We were only cooling our heels in London for a couple of weeks, but to Jonah it felt like the better part of a lifetime. At the end of that fortnight, we found ourselves in a snug at the Monkey’s Uncle, where he got so pickled he said they’d have treated him better if he’d died in a death camp.

I’d had a dream the night before that three old men were playing a card game under a green lamp. One had a cigarette tucked behind his ear, out of which sprouted a little thatch of gray hair; another tapped his feet to a tune he heard only in his head. The game ended and one of the losers stood up and threw his cards on the table. “That’s the last time I play a game with you, Charlie. You’re a fink.”

“See you tomorrow, Ed!” Charlie called gleefully after him.

Well, when my dreams come to pass it means I can expect a tall dark stranger within the hour. The old men set up their card game as Jonah drank his whisky, and Ed told Charlie to shove it in just the words he’d used in the dream. I told Jonah to hush, that I’d had a portent and I felt sure our luck would turn on a dime.

He frowned. “Turn on a dime?”

“Turn on tuppence, then.”

I heard a coin drop nearby, and a man bent over to pick it up just beside our snug.

When he straightened up I saw a bespectacled gent, somewhere past forty, wearing a Fair Isle waistcoat under his jacket. He might have been a professor. “Did somebody drop a coin?” he asked in a Boston accent.

I smiled as I shook my head. “Do sit down,” I said. Jonah was looking at him with great interest, his empty whisky glass, thankfully, forgotten.

“Name’s Howard,” the man said as he slid into the booth. “I took the liberty of ordering another round of whisky sodas.”

T
HE GRIMM
brothers got most of their fairy tales from the Harz mountains, where even the sleepiest villages had their Walpurgisnacht parades of “witch” masks and mock sacrifices of rag dolls and china babies. But it wasn’t all fiddle-faddle; every so often I’d hear a tantalizing rumor of a ring forged of Harz silver that could render you invisible. You’d slip it on your right-hand ring finger with the stone turned inward, look into the mirror and touch your hand to your throat, and if you couldn’t see the ring then you couldn’t be seen at all. Would’ve made a great shortcut.

Here, too, was a fortress inside a mountain where machines were made that could obliterate whole city blocks. Oh, how I wish I could say it was only another one of those horrid fairy tales—but the ogres who ran this death factory were all too real. The Allies had found their first complex on the Baltic Sea, where the V-
1
buzz bombs were made, and blown it to smithereens. So they’d built this new subterranean plant, Mittelwerk, on the southern fringe of the Harz—and it was bomb-proof. Our objective was the same as it had been at the V-
1
depots in France: to learn the supply routes and transit schedules and bomb the hell out of the railway lines, so that the new generation of rocket bombs, the V-
2S
, could never reach their targets.

With the mission to Germany we were starting afresh; we were under a new authority, and our code names for radio and courier transmissions, aliases, and cover stories were all reassigned. My code name was Marvel—rather fitting, and I don’t mind saying so. My alias was Uta Braun, age thirty-two, widow, no children, formerly employed as a governess in Quedlinburg, and I’d been given the name and details of a local family that had left for Switzerland. As I say, we were in fairy-tale country now, ironically enough. Whenever we would pass a shop window full of witch ornaments whittled out of wood, each hooked nose topped with a huge knob for a wart, Jonah would laugh and say we’d arrived at my ancestral home.

Howard had also brought on board our demolition man, Fisher, but we had a new radio operator: Hans Grüssner, a German in his middle thirties recruited from the socialist workers’ union in London. His wife and two daughters were living in a one-room flat in Brixton, and he fretted endlessly about how regularly they could expect to receive his OSS salary. I had my doubts about Grüssner—he was just the type to shriek if he spotted a mouse—but Jonah was so eager for departure that I decided to say nothing.

* * *

W
E PARACHUTED
blind into a field outside Quedlinburg in October of 1944. Once we’d arrived in town Hans was meant to bring us to his cousins’ house, where he hoped we might stay while we got our bearings. His cousin, however, coldly informed us that she could only shelter Hans, and after a night in the choir loft of a church down the road, we three—Jonah, Fisher, and myself—had to scramble for a better place to hide.

At midday I decided to find us a temporary safe house by way of the local tavern, where I felt sure I would encounter someone we could trust. I spotted a man with my father’s face here and there and had to wait until they’d finished their beers and left the place before I could make any overtures. Finally I struck up a conversation with an elderly man, a farmer, seated at a table beside me and found him willing to shelter us for a few nights in his barn. Through him Jonah began to make contacts with other locals disaffected with the Nazi regime.

He hadn’t yet had a chance to get word to Hans of our whereabouts, and it was a good thing, too, for later that week I learned from a shopkeeper that Hans had been arrested. The radio was more than likely discovered as well. The life expectancy of a radio operator was six weeks; Hans had lasted six days. I wondered if that statistic took into account the time one spent in prison.

Howard had told us that in a pinch we could rely on a man named Hoppe, whose brother was working as a translator at Bletchley Park; the only problem was that the Hoppes’ farmstead was on the far side of the mountains.

Getting all three of us there posed a considerable problem. I couldn’t work more than a pair of shape-shifts at a time, and as I say, riding the loo flue in a war zone is out of the question unless one’s life depends on it. If it had been only Jonah and myself, I could have turned us both to owls so we could fly the whole way, but the chances of Fisher making it to Bad Harzburg on his own were, as he put it, “piss-poor.” So I decided to risk the train, with a mouse in either pocket. The Nazis wouldn’t suspect a woman traveling on her own.

In retrospect, it wasn’t such a good idea. The conductor greeted me as he took my ticket, but as he returned it I caught him looking down at my coat pocket with a frown. There was a chance I could pass myself off as an eccentric who kept mice for pets, but Jonah’s life was literally in my hand if I took him out to make such an explanation to the conductor. The man might bat him out of my hand and crush him underfoot. So I laid my hand over the twitching wool as casually as I could, and he nodded at me as he left the compartment.

But a minute later I ducked my head out the door of our compartment and spotted him conferring with an SS officer down the corridor. Right then, we’d have to take the flue. There are some times it’s worth betting on the wild card that is a moving toilet, and this was certainly one of them.

I ran toward the WC on the far side of the carriage, and a second later the SS officer was in pursuit. I closed the door, flipped the latch, pulled the mice out of my pockets, and in a twinkling there were three of us crammed into the tiny stall. Fisher was swearing like a sailor with his hands over his eyes. Jonah glanced down at the train tracks passing swiftly beneath the hole at the bottom of the toilet bowl, then looked at me doubtfully. The latch groaned as the Nazi threw himself against the door.

“The general vicinity of Hoppe’s Farm, Bad Harzburg, please,” I said, and took the hands of both men in a firm grip.

I
AWOKE IN
the morning to a cock’s crow in the distance and a crisp breeze wafting through an open window. I opened one eye and found Jonah seated in the corner of a sparsely furnished bedroom, the fluttering curtains occasionally hiding his face. He was gazing at me as if something had gone horribly wrong.

I sprang up in bed like Finnegan’s corpse. “What is it?” I hissed (for I had no idea yet how safe we were). “What’s happened?”

He didn’t answer, just sighed and rubbed his eyes.

Then I had an inkling. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Three days, Eve.” Clearly he’d been bursting to scold me for the last seventy-two hours.
“Three whole days.”

“Oh. Is that all?”

“This isn’t the time for levity. I was afraid you wouldn’t wake up.”

“I can’t help it, Jonah. I get so tired.”

“Tired? You were comatose!”

I rolled away from him and faced the wall, where a birch tree cast dancing shadows on faded floral paper. “I should have rolled you in a carpet and stuck you in the boot, just like they did to you last time,” I grumbled.

He rose from his chair, sat down on the bed beside me, and reached for my hand. “Oh, Eve, you know I’m grateful for all you’ve done. But …”

I turned over and looked at him. “Where are we, anyway? And where’s Fisher?”

“He’s safe. He’s staying at a farm up the road.”

“You mean we’re here?”

He nodded. “But not without a fair bit of trouble, I can tell you that. We landed in some farmer’s outhouse thirty miles southeast of here, and you were in a heap at our feet. I had to stay with you in the woods while Fisher found a car. It was a small miracle there was enough petrol in the tank to get us here.”

“Oh, that won’t be any trouble now that I’m awake.”

He only glared at me in response.

“I did try to tell you, you know.”

“I know you did.” He stroked my cheek. “But I couldn’t have woken you if our lives depended on it. That concerns me.”

“It’s my tragic flaw,” I replied with a twitching mouth. “Every heroine has one.” He gave me one more reproving look before he got up from the bed and left the room. There was fresh water in the bowl and a sliver of lye soap on a washstand in the corner, and I splashed my face and lathered my forearms before I followed Jonah downstairs.

No one else was in the house; I could sense that as soon as I opened the bedroom door. I made my way quietly down a narrow wooden staircase, through a bright kitchen with a massive hearth—he’d left a slab of bread and butter and a steaming mug of something for me on the broad butcher’s-block kitchen table—and into a sitting room where Jonah stood looking out a window into the yard. The place smelled faintly of pipe smoke. There were photographs lined up along the mantelpiece, and a needlepoint sampler lay half-finished in a wicker basket on the floor by an armchair.

And on the wall above the chair was a framed embroidery, a marvelously intricate scene of a midnight tryst between a knight and a golden-haired maiden.
Tristan und Isolde
read the embroidered caption.

I laughed quietly, and he turned around and looked at me. I decided not to tell him why I was laughing. We were damned lovers if ever there were.

I
T TURNED
out our new home had been forcibly abandoned the year before. No one in the area knew what had become of their neighbors, but nobody expected them to return. People were afraid of the place, so they stayed well away from it. It was the perfect safe house.

Albrecht Hoppe lived with his mother and eight-year-old daughter, Adelaide, a quarter of a mile from there. We arrived on his front step at nightfall and were quickly ushered inside. Jonah had met them three days before, and it was Albrecht who had helped him settle me into bed upstairs at the empty farmhouse.

The future of his farm seemed bleak indeed; that year’s harvest had been confiscated to feed the Wehrmacht, and the family had very little to live on. Albrecht’s youngest brother had been killed on the Russian front, and his other brother, as I say, had long since fled to London to work for the Allies. Hoppe had been brought in for questioning on multiple occasions, and each time he’d said, truthfully, that he’d had absolutely no contact with his brother since his departure. Owing to his family’s sacrifice, the Nazis were inclined to believe him. There was a portrait of Hitler on the sitting room mantelpiece, and on that first visit it was all I could do not to spring up and cast it into the fire. “It’s only for show,” Jonah told me later that night. “Just try not to look at it.”