The Witches of Cambridge (3 page)

“Fuck the French Impressionists.”

Having just pulled her essay out of her bag, Noa drops it. Five pages flutter to the floor but Noa just stares at her teacher, wide-eyed, her fingertips already sticky with fear. Mercifully, the shock empties her mind and silences her mouth.

“Sorry,” Amandine says softly. “I didn’t…of course, that was rude. But you can’t say something like that and then expect to start talking about Monet. You have to explain yourself first.”

Noa nods. Her mouth is dry. She swallows. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just…” Noa has no idea how to explain herself so that she doesn’t sound crazy or scary or both.

Amandine takes a deep breath and sits up. She pulls her long fingers through her short hair. “You don’t have to give me a rational explanation,” she says. “I’m not a rational person myself. I’m…”

It’s then that Noa sees what Amandine is. And she smiles, just a flicker at the edge of her lips, but a sense of relief floods her whole body from fingertips to toes. Now she knows it’s safe, for the first time in her life, to reveal herself. Noa has only just met this woman, but she knows that Amandine won’t judge, reject, or punish her. She knows that it’s finally okay to tell her own secret, to be honest about who she is.

“I see things I shouldn’t,” Noa begins, her voice soft. “I see all the things most people don’t want other people to see…I don’t want to say anything, I want to keep their secrets, but I can’t seem to help saying what I see. I don’t have any control over it, I don’t know why not.”

Amandine sits forward. “How do you see what you see?”

Noa shrugs, twisting a piece of her hair around her finger, then smoothing it against her cheek. “I don’t know. I’ve always just known things. That’s okay, I guess, but not being able to shut up about it, that’s a shame.”

Amandine nods. “It doesn’t make you many friends, I suppose.”

“No,” Noa says, “not many.”

Amandine sits back in her chair. “You mentioned my husband.” Her eyes flicker to the one painting on the wall. “And how we used to be happy…”

Noa nods. “Something changed, quite recently. It’s like…a wall between you.” While Noa speaks she looks at her teacher, who’s still gazing at the painting. “You don’t know what’s happened. You wonder if he’s having an affair. You wonder if he loves you anymore.”

Still staring at the painting, Amandine nods, slowly, as tears pool in her eyes and drop down her cheeks.

“Do you want me to leave?” Noa asks, her voice so soft she almost can’t hear her own words.

“No.” Amandine pauses, taking a long moment before she brushes her cheeks with the back of her hand and looks up at her student again. “No, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to meet my husband. I want you to tell me the truth about him.”

I
T’S BEEN A
while since Amandine has practiced any real magic. She can’t help what she feels, of course, but since marrying Eliot she’s been careful not to cast any spells and to control her body so it doesn’t betray her. It hasn’t always been easy. When she gave birth to Bertie and Frankie four years ago, her skin got so hot that her sweat burned holes in the sheets of the hospital bed. Fortunately, Eliot was too caught up in rubbing ice cubes on his wife’s back and whispering urgent words of encouragement to notice. The midwives did give Amandine strange glances while changing her scorched sheets, after the four-hour-old sleeping babies had been tucked up into bassinets, but didn’t say anything. On her wedding day Amandine was so happy that her skin sparkled and her hair shone, but luckily the heavy July heat wave shimmered over all the guests and hid the shining bride. On the wedding night silver sparks dropped from her fingertips onto her new husband’s back but he, swept up in love and desire, didn’t feel a thing.

On her wedding night, and many times over the past thirteen years, Amandine has almost blurted out her secret to Eliot but, whenever the white-hot words are sitting on her tongue, ready to tumble out and change everything, she swallows them back, choosing to keep everything safely the same for a little while longer. Amandine has no idea how Eliot might react if he knew the truth about her but guesses, based on his practical, rational nature, that he’d be horrified, thinking she was either crazy or a con artist, or both. She should have told him on their first date, or soon afterward; she should have told him the day she knew she was in love. But she didn’t want to lose him, and the longer she loved him the harder it was.

Amandine watches her boys closely for signs that they’ve inherited her particular powers but she hasn’t seen anything yet. She wonders what she’ll do if she does. How would she explain that to Eliot? Sometimes Amandine feels sad that her husband doesn’t know the deepest parts of her. Sometimes she blames herself for the breakdown of their relationship, for the distance between them. After all, starting out with such a big secret to hide doesn’t really foster intimacy. Lately, while she watches him move through their lives barely noticing her anymore, Amandine wonders if that’s why he finally found a mistress (as she suspects he has): because he never really felt connected to her. But why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he ask if he felt something was wrong? Amandine can’t blame him for that, she knows, since she hasn’t done the same thing herself.

How can it be that two people who’ve been together for over a decade, who’ve shared a bed and two births, who’ve kissed every inch of each other’s bodies and gazed into each other’s eyes through tears of joy, unable to believe that this much love was possible, can one day—seemingly all of a sudden—turn into virtual strangers? If it hadn’t happened to Amandine herself, she wouldn’t have believed it possible.

Now she watches her husband eating breakfast, forking scrambled eggs into his mouth with one hand, flicking through
The Times
with the other. Bertie and Frankie sit opposite their father across the wide oak table on their respective booster seats. The twins chatter away in their own secret language, ignoring their parents and their breakfast.

“Eat your eggs, boys,” Amandine says, ruffling her fingers through their soft brown curls, swallowing an urge to kiss their cheeks. When the boys were babies they loved kisses, insisting on at least a dozen a day, but as soon as toddlerhood hit the kisses stopped. Now Amandine is lucky if she can sneak a solitary peck at bedtime.

“Oui, Maman.”

“Oui, Maman.”

The boys speak in unison, their words simultaneously reassuring and dismissive. Sometime over the last year they perfected the art of superficial listening, absorbing instruction without stopping to really hear the words. As her sons gobble up their eggs, still chattering, Amandine closes her eyes, remembering the days when they used to fix her with attentive gazes of such absolute adoration that she almost couldn’t breathe, unable to absorb so much love all at once.

A wooden chair scrapes against the stone floor. Amandine opens her eyes to see Eliot pushing his chair back, tucking
The Times
under his arm, and taking his empty plate off the table. He strides over to the kitchen sink, where Amandine stands, and slips his plate gently onto the white plastic drip tray. He quickly kisses the tops of his sons’ heads as he passes.

“Bye, Dad,” Frankie says.

“Bye, Daddy,” Bertie says.

“Bye, boys,” Eliot replies as he reaches the kitchen door, giving a little wave with his newspaper. Then he looks at his wife, while somehow managing not to meet her eye.

“I won’t be back till late tonight, maybe midnight,” he says quickly. “We’re working on the Tredlow case, it’s a pain in the arse.”

Amandine’s eyebrows shoot up and she nods toward the boys. She can see Eliot swallow a sigh and speak through thin lips.

“Sorry.” He turns and pushes open the wooden door. As it bumps shut behind him Amandine turns to the sink and starts to wash the pan she’d scrambled the eggs in.

“I’ll get a babysitter then,” she says softly, “since I’m visiting my mother tonight, though I expect you’ve forgotten that.”

—

Noa ambles along Bene’t Street, past the enormous shining gold clock (an incredible work of art in itself, with an elaborate pendulum marking off the seconds while a fierce metal locust gobbles up time with each tick) and the tiny stone church until she reaches Gustare, the lovely little Italian café at the top of the street. This is her morning ritual. First she stops at the café for an espresso and pistachio cream croissant before dividing her allotted breakfast hour between the two art galleries across the road. Before her first lecture of the day, Noa sips her coffee and nibbles her croissant while the beauty of the art and the peace of the empty, unpeopled place soaks slowly into her skin.

Noa’s dream, her deepest desire, is to work as an art curator for the National Gallery. She first found this wish—waiting for her, wrapped in shining gold paper and tied with ribbons of longing and hope—in the gallery of modern art, tucked between Monet’s
Le Bassin aux Nymphéas
and van Gogh’s
The Church at Auvers
. Her father, a curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum, took Noa down to London to visit the art galleries as a special treat for her seventh birthday. She already knew more about every artist, from Aachen to Zaganelli, than any child, and probably most adults, from the amount of time she spent among the corridors of the Fitzwilliam, gazing up at all the wondrous art contained within its walls. At three o’clock every afternoon after school finished, Noa hurried along Trumpington Street, her bag bouncing on her back, toward her father and the magical world to which he held the key. She spent a blissful few hours away from people, wandering up and down the galleries, absorbing the brilliance of the colors and the beauty of the pictures, with a full heart and a silent mouth.

The Fitzwilliam Museum was the greatest place in the world until Noa saw the magnificence of the National Gallery. She’d never seen anything on that scale before and was—incredibly—rendered speechless at the sight of it all. She walked along each wooden corridor in a daze, grasping her father’s hand, until she found the wish.

Noa has treasured this wish ever since that day, and every step in her academic career has been aimed toward this one goal. The only problem is that, in addition to a degree in art history, Noa needs work experience and, given her particular power for seeing and speaking the truth, that might be significantly harder to come by.

She’s never spoken to the owner of either art gallery on King’s Parade, too worried that she’ll blurt out their secrets mid-conversation and be instantly banned from her two favorite places in the world. Noa would love to work part-time as a sales assistant in one of the galleries but she doesn’t dare ask. A fellow art history student works in one; she sees him on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, so Noa knows she’d have a good chance of getting in. If only she weren’t a social liability. Even if she got through the interview (no chance of that, though, since she’s already seen that the owner of Primavera is concealing a gambling addiction and the owner of Atkis is hiding an affair with his sister-in-law), Noa wouldn’t be working an hour before she’d insult a customer with an undesired and unsolicited tidbit of truth, something she’d snatch sight of while extolling the talents of the artists they represented or the beauty of the paintings they sold.

Noa pushes open the door to Primavera and smiles at the girl behind the counter, a pretty redhead in a gorgeous green dress, who nods slightly and smiles back.

“Good morning,” she says, “I’m here if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” Noa says, hurrying past her as quickly and politely as she can. The beautiful girl is bulimic, spending her evenings gorging on gargantuan tubs of chocolate ice cream and plates of cookies, then regurgitating it all before bedtime, something she certainly wouldn’t want a stranger mentioning in the midst of polite chitchat about the weather and the price of art.

Noa settles herself in the farthest reaches of the gallery, admiring the work of an artist she hasn’t seen before. The canvases are large and dark, great splashes of royal blue on black, what appear to be deep purple seas beneath deep red skies. They remind her of Turner’s tranquil sunsets, with a slightly sinister edge, as if sharks swim in the purple seas and black crows caw through the red skies. Noa gazes at the painting, leaning closer, careful with her coffee and croissant, to see each brushstroke, the curves and dips of the sea and sky. And then she does something she’s never done before in her life, not to the thousands of paintings she’s ever seen—Noa reaches out and touches her finger to the paint.

For a split second she imagines she’s about to be pulled into the painting, sucked into the purple and red and spat out in another world. Because, so close now, Noa can’t believe the picture could simply be a flat surface, it must contain depths hidden to the naked eye. Noa peers at the artist’s name on a small plaque beneath the painting:
Santiago Costa—Storm over Bahia—114" x 98"—£950
.

“What do you think?”

Startled, Noa turns to see a man standing behind her, just a few feet away. She’s not sure how he managed to sneak up so close without her feeling his presence. He’s tall and thin with floppy black hair, caramel-colored skin, a large nose, and large brown eyes. Noa stares at him. It’s not that he’s handsome, though he is; it’s more than that. He’s captivating. When this man fixes you with his brown eyes you want to stare into them for a long, long time. It’s as if his heart doesn’t reside in his chest but sits, waiting and open wide, just beneath his eyes. And you believe that if you look long enough you’ll fall right in.