Petty Magic (10 page)

He might have been reading my thoughts. “What’s your real name, Alice?”

I looked at him sidewise. “Am I allowed to tell you?” But of all the secrets I’d given up to him, my name was surely the least significant.

“You’re not allowed to tell Robbins,” he replied. “But Jonah Rudolfsen wants very much to know.”

“Jonah,” I said softly. “I like it. ‘Jonah.’ It suits you.”

“Well, that’s lucky.” He laughed. “I’m sure yours suits you just as well, whatever it is.”

“You want to know that badly?”

“I do.” He looked at me, almost painfully earnest. “I can’t make love to you without it, now, can I?”

J
ONAH STILL
counsels me from the grave. Life is nothing without adventure, he used to say, and we
must
meet fate halfway or else our souls will wither. That said, there was no sense worrying about what might have been.

I still recall all the more trivial things he said, too—“The devil wears a toothbrush moustache,” to which I replied that even Satan wasn’t half so despicable as Adolf Hitler; and “You must always eat well, my darling. To abstain from good meat and wine is to squander your God-given taste buds.” Not that we had all that much of either given the rationing, but when the food was foul he’d tell me about the grand old bistros in London and Paris we’d visit once the war was over.

That evening we took the Caledonian Sleeper back to London, and alack, we were obliged to sleep separately in our assigned quarters. All the recruits retired almost as soon as the train was moving—they wore us out, so they did—but I was far too excited to sleep. I had to see Jonah. I hoped I would see plenty of him in the weeks ahead—there were two phases of training left—but it might be a long time before we could be alone again.

So I came bounding into the dining car looking for him. When I clapped eyes on him, back to the door in a booth at the far end of the car, it was difficult to pretend that nothing had happened the previous night. The waiter was watching me.

I sauntered up to his booth and he invited me to sit, and the knowing glance passed in a blink. The newspaper in front of him was two days old, but the pages were still crisp. He’d been looking out the window.

And what a view it was: a valley yawned beneath the glass, and on the surrounding hills, green though rocky, sheep grazed upon vertical angles in the twilight. Wisps of smoke rose from cottages scattered along the valley floor, and beyond the brooding peaks in the distance the clouds were promising rain and plenty of it. I cracked the window and breathed in the sweet musk of peat smoke.

I glanced at Jonah, who was still gazing out at this wild and lonely scene, and he wore an expression to match it. He really did look like a knight—my melancholy knight.

The waiter brought us a pot of coffee and a plate of digestive biscuits, and once he and his cart with the squeaky wheels were at a safe distance I asked, “Why the long face?”

“The view,” he said. “It reminds me of …”

I stirred plenty of milk and sugar into my cup as I waited for him to go on. “Of?”

“Connemara.” He took a sip of coffee—he always drank it black—and when he paused then I knew all at once what this was about.

“Your honeymoon, was it?”

He nodded, relief plain on his face. “How did you know?”

I gave him a look.

“You couldn’t ride a train through them, but Ireland has landscapes very much like this one. Tell me: would you call it bleak, or rather magnificent?”

“I suppose it depends on your mood.”

He smiled then, and the look of melancholy vanished for the moment. “Exactly,” he said as a disembodied hand caressed my knee.

W
HEN WE
got back to London—and by London, I mean an undisclosed location some distance outside it—I discovered I was scheduled for two weeks of parachute training. I’d never been on an airplane before, only a zeppelin for novelty’s sake, and I didn’t see why I needed to waste any time on it when I could simply grow a pair of wings.

“Well, of course.” Jonah gave me a wry look. “How did you think you were going to get there?” He paused. “Oh, I see.” But there was no way I could get out of it without arousing considerable suspicion; couldn’t very well explain to the F-Section leader why I didn’t need it.

After parachute training came “finishing school,” and there were heaps of forms to be filled out in triplicate. I even had to make out a
will
, would you believe it.
In the event of my death, I hereby appoint as
beneficiary of any payments due me by the Special Operations Executive the following person: Miss Morven Harbinger of Blackabbey, New Jersey, USA
. We women recruits were also given commissions in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the idea being that we’d be allowed the rights of a soldier in the event we were captured. This last phase of training was interminable: no firearms, no long tramps across the moor, just hours and hours of “classroom instruction.”

There were endless hypotheticals. What if you’re being tailed—where do you go, and how do you alert your comrades without giving them away? How do you react when you’re walking down the street and a car pulls up alongside you and two men jump out? How can you dispose of incriminating evidence without attracting your captors’ notice? It is rather infuriating, you know, to be instructed repeatedly in matters of which you have shown blindfolded mastery since you were a mere babe. And then we were roused in the middle of the night by someone shaking us by the shoulder shouting, “What is your name? Where are you from? What is the newspaper in your town?” All that sort of thing.

I hadn’t laid eyes on Jonah for the better part of a week, and as I say, the other “ladies” on the course were already working their cloaks and daggers. I was aching with anxiety to be up and away already.

At last I received a message that I should report immediately to room 217 at House Q, a redbrick building at the far end of the compound. I knocked on a door marked
KING’S ROYAL RIFLE CORPS
—to which some morbid trickster had added an “e” in red grease pencil—and found Jonah sitting at a desk poring over an Ordnance Survey map. A woman of forty or so poised over an open filing cabinet introduced herself as our liaison officer and invited me to sit down while Jonah briefed me on the details of the mission to Paris. Then the liaison officer presented me with papers and an identity card from the Cover and Documentation office, as well as a plain wool suit and sturdy shoes, all French issue.

“Full moon,” Jonah said as he folded up the map and tucked it in a hidden pocket in the open suitcase laid out before him. “We leave tonight.”

Covention

13.

Dame, Dame, the Watch is set:
Quickly come, we all are met.
From the Lakes, and from the Fens,
From the Rocks, and from the Dens,
From the Woods, and from the Caves,
From the Church-yards, from the Graves,
From the Dungeon, from the Tree
That they die on, here are we.

—Ben Jonson,
The Masque of Queens

I
T’S MID-DECEMBER
now and cold as a dead man’s schlong. The mews is decked in evergreen boughs and crowded with shoppers clutching delivery receipts and bags of gift-wrapped tchotchkes. The blackboard easel outside Mira’s café advertises eight-dollar mugs of mulled wine and fortified cocoa, and despite the windchill the queue is out the door. I stand at the window at Fawkes and Ibis, watching Harry putter around behind the counter, wanting to go in and ask after Justin but afraid of what he might tell me. When Harry glances up from his ledger, he notices a dark-haired girl in a fur-collared coat poring over his window display. I’ve taken care of myself, you see, in case he’s come back.

I duck into the café, jump the queue, and beg a mug of wine to steady my nerves. I take the mug back to the sidewalk outside Fawkes and Ibis and drink it in gulps as I go on pretending I’m only window-shopping. It’s almost seven o’clock and I don’t want to miss Harry on his way out. Once I’ve drained the mug I drag myself through the heavy velvet curtain, me and my frozen sticky fingers and my yellow belly.

“So you’ve finally decided to pay me a visit, eh?” Harry says as I step into the room.

The
Leuchterweibchen
—may it never sell!—still dominates the room in its barbarous majesty, and the sight of it gives me heart. “I’m sorry, but I’m not actually looking to shop tonight. I was hoping you could tell me if Justin’s come back from Europe yet.”

“He hasn’t yet, no.”

“Do you think he’ll be back before the end of the year?”

“Hard to say. Mr. Fawkes’s doctors over there don’t speak very good English.” He pauses. “You’re one of the Harbingers, aren’t you?” I nod. “Will you take my advice then, Miss Harbinger? Justin may be my nephew, but he’s a real charmer, and I wouldn’t want to see one of Helena’s girls in tears over it.”

“Right,” I manage to say. “Thanks, er—Mr. Ibis.”

Harry looks at me kindly and wishes me a merry Christmas, bighearted Jew that he is.

Now that the shops are closed there aren’t many customers left at the café, and Mira is erasing the specials on the blackboard as I take the mug back to the counter. On my way up the mews I spot a mother and daughter—can’t recall their names offhand, they’re Peacocks anyway—marveling at all the goodies in the window of Hartmann’s Classic Toys: Lightning Gliders and Flexible Flyers, Raggedy Ann and Andy, deluxe editions of Scrabble and Monopoly, a gumball machine and a yellow Sesame Street record player, Holiday Barbies in frilly lamé gowns, and tin soldiers with kepi hats and red-dotted cheeks.

I pause there, just across the way from them, and watch as the mother leans in and taps gently on the glass. The needle drops on the little plastic record player and a swing waltz begins to play. Again the mother taps the window and one of the little tin soldiers steps forward, hangs his rifle on the gumball dispenser knob, and gives a jerky bow. The little girl giggles. Her mother taps the glass a third time and the soldier starts to tap-dance, windmilling his arms and kicking up his heels. The child watches him, thoroughly delighted, and after a time the mother rests her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and murmurs a few words of encouragement. The girl taps on the glass, and a moment later one of the Holiday Barbies sashays forward. The soldier extends his arm, and they take off round the window display like Fred and Ginger in miniature.

A
H, MISTLETOE:
“witch’s broom” they called it, in a more superstitious time. People believed a sprig of mistletoe above the doorway would prevent us crossing their thresholds. We’ve put it up every Christmas for as long as I can remember.

The rest of the family, parrot included, has gone to bed by the time I’ve tacked a sprig above the sitting room door. Irony aside, I don’t know why we bother, considering how few men there are to snog—and most of them related to us besides.

As you may know, Yule was one of the pagan winter-solstice festivals that gave way to modern Christmas. As with the Roman Saturnalia, our holiday is more an excuse to carouse than anything else, though it being our time of covention we do get a bit of business taken care of in between. We put up a Christmas tree, too, for the little ones. There isn’t a whole lot of gift-giving though, as presents are generally only exchanged among members of one’s immediate family. I have found my sisters’ gifts at Fawkes and Ibis, of course: for Helena, a set of wooden
Lebkuchen
molds probably as old as Methuselah—poofed up a duplicate set for actual use—and for Morven, a red plastic View-Master I’ve fixed to show scenes of the future.

One of our best traditions is the gingerbread house, which we work on for an entire month beforehand. It may seem a quaint pastime by ordinary standards, but we’re making a model of Harbinger House. Everything in it is made out of sugar, which can be spun so finely it’s clear as glass, even the fishbowl on the kitchen counter. Family heirlooms are replicated in miniature, carved out of gumdrops or rock sugar, and all the furniture is made of Belgian dark chocolate. We use graham crackers and vanilla frosting too, of course. And who knew you could get a full palette mixing the food coloring ordinary families use for dying Easter eggs? It was our gingerbread Harbinger House ritual that inspired Mira to take the confectionery course at that fancy-pants culinary academy in New York.

The model is built in halves so that you can open it and peer into each of the rooms, even the ones that exist only for the occasion. We also fashion a sort of candy golem for each guest as well as ourselves; some are molded out of chocolate, others cobbled together with almonds and sultanas. Even the tabby cat is replicated in candied ginger. The house is displayed on a table in the foyer and all the candy golems arranged on the table outside the entrance. Then Helena enchants our grand creation, and the gingerbread house is a complete mirror of the real thing: candy ladies scurrying between kitchen and dining room; candy children making merry (and making naughty); the chocolate figures of all the local beldames climbing the front porch just before the real doorbell rings, and others vanishing off the tabletop just before they appear inside the WC. When we were children we could spend hours at a time giggling at every tiny chocolate dame that popped out of the marzipan toilet. On a more practical note, mothers can ensure the kiddies are all in their beds without going up two flights of stairs to check.

Our other two great traditions are the tableaux vivants—last year’s was
The Thirty Heads of Princess Langwidere
(to which, regrettably, the little ones responded with more terror than we had anticipated)—and after that the puppet shows. Our puppet stage is a splendid antique. We use the stage at every covention, because it has always been our credo that the things we love best should not be squirreled away for the enjoyment of no one. A grander stage for puppets
or
people is rarely found; indeed, it is an Odeon in miniature, with swagged curtains of festive red velvet and Atlas-like caryatids holding up the curtain rod, real footlights that cast a golden glow, an intricate ceiling panel painted to look like stained glass, and other fin de siècle flourishes. There are over a dozen backgrounds—Italianate garden, graveyard by moonlight, colonial Harveysville street scene, even one of this very drawing room—that are stored beneath the stage and may be rolled up for use with a little brass crank, as well as a scrim through which all violent or amorous scenes are obliquely depicted.

Using all the marionettes in the house, our coven’s puppeteers reenact noteworthy episodes from coventions past (there’s even a puppet for the Turkey Who Wouldn’t Die, though his squawks are simulated), coven history (this year they’re doing
The Trial of Goody Harbinger
), and reinterpretations of classic literature (in past years they’ve done
Paradise Lost-and-Found, Dante’s Disco Inferno, Off with Her Head: A Love Story in Two Parts
, and so forth). For the little ones these puppet plays provide history lessons as well as entertainment, though the funny bits are more Monty Python than Punch and Judy.

And afterward—oh, the feast! We always have a roast goose (no turkey, never again), candied sweet potatoes and stuffing with sage and raisins, fennel sausages and rhubarb pudding and corned beef hash. Every year Helena bakes an ambrosia cake, which is something you will not find on an ordinary Christmas dining table. It is rather nondescript in appearance, but this is a product of its magic. To me it tastes like plums marinated in honey with a hint of cloves; Helena’s slice tastes of pineapple cheesecake; to Vega it tastes like carrots and cardamom, and so on. And like all the other food on the table, the ambrosia cake goes on and on until we can stuff ourselves no further.

I savor the hush that falls the evening before everyone arrives, before every cranny of my childhood home is consumed in the festive chaos. They say the veil separating this world from the next is at its thinnest at the winter solstice, and if that is true then logically Christmas is the ideal time for the practice of necromancy. (You
knew
those puppets weren’t ordinary playthings!)

Totems, jujus, lares—call them what you like. Late that evening I am sitting by the fire, feet up and savoring a glug of amaretto, when one of the puppets stuffed into the Christmas stockings, a Gibson girl, starts wriggling like a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis.

“You ought to have taken me off the mantel before you lit the fire,” the puppet huffs as the control bar shimmies out of the stocking and falls to the hearth with a clatter.

“A happy Yule to you too, Auntie Em!” I rise creakily, pull her out of the stocking, and position the puppet on a neighboring armchair. None of the other puppets are animated yet. Auntie Emmeline always arrives earlier and leaves later than the rest, the pesky old bird.

She turns to face me and her little painted eyes glitter with shrewish shrewdness. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to, miss.”

You get awfully pushy when you’re dead. Afraid of being forgotten, I suppose.

“You’re asking for trouble, Evelyn. You know you are. Don’t come crying to me next covention time, that’s all I mean to say.”

“If all you’re going to do is nag me,” I say wearily, “then I’d rather you kept to the ether.”

She’s silent for a moment, and I can tell she’s softening. She’d do the same as me if she were still alive, and she’d even admit it if I pressed her hard enough. “Don’t sulk, dear,” she says finally. “You know I have your best interests at heart.”

“You wouldn’t be giving me so much grief over it if he weren’t important.”

“Important?” she sneers. Creak goes the hinge in her little wooden jaw. “All your men are
important
to you at the time, are they not?”

“Please tell me, Auntie Em. I’d know how best to handle it, if only I knew what it meant. Is he …?”
Has Jonah come back to me?
is what I’m asking, and she knows it.

Clack, clack, she folds her arms and glares at me. This is Auntie Em for you, hoarding the secrets of the universe like a mother who hides the cookie jar from her children just so she can devour them all herself.

Which is worse, I wonder: having to listen to the overbearing opinions of all your cranky dead relatives, or how it works in ordinary families, when they come back but don’t let on they’re there? Oh, the things that horrify your poor old granny when you believe yourself alone!

“I hope I’ll find you in a better mood in the morning,” I say to the puppet, and she only harrumphs in response. It’s times like this I wish she would hurry up and reincarnate already.

Before I turn the lights off in the parlor I hang an old silk dressing gown on a hook behind the door. This is not exactly a gift for Santa Claus; you’ll see.

I
N THE
morning I’m woken by voices and bustling below. When I come downstairs I see the parrot is gone; all that’s left of him’s a smattering of silky gray feathers on the parlor carpet. I venture into the kitchen and find Hieronymus enjoying his first pipe of the season, wagging his hairy shin under that old dressing gown as he peruses the arts section. Some of the local ladies are already here, of course, having arrived near dawn to aid Helena in her preparations for the Yuletide bruncheon, and our departed aunties dispense time-honored culinary advice from above the kitchen sink.

I sit down by Uncle Hy and survey the scene along the kitchen counter. These are all my family and friends, so you may be surprised that I can’t say I
like
all of them. Rather, I like them all but one: Lucretia Hartmann, owner of the toy shop, who has just plucked a mixing bowl from Morven’s hands with the words, “But I can do it faster, dear.”