Petty Magic (9 page)

“Our language, our civilization—these are just the trappings. It is our instinct that preserved our distant ancestors from the beasts on the African plains, and you must trust that instinct above all else. If you recall only one thing from all your weeks of training, let it be this.” He paused, gazing around the room at each of his pupils in turn. “If you hesitate,” he said, “all will be lost.” The excitement and admiration he inspired was very nearly palpable; they were fine words, all the more so because he had lived them.

Then someone had to go and ask what would happen if you shot a comrade by mistake. “Anybody who kicks down the door is, in all likelihood, no friend of yours,” Robbins replied, and the group erupted in laughter. “Again,” he went on above the snickering, “it is a matter of intuition, a matter of instinct.

“You must divorce yourself from all sentiment,” he said. “There can be no tender thoughts of your mother—no thoughts at all, if you can help it. You cannot save the life of a child at the price of your associates’.”

Then he told us that there was no shame in confessing ourselves unsuited to the task, and that if so our job prospects for other branches of government or military service would be unaffected. At times you could see a doubt flicker across their faces, but the majority of my classmates were to decide it was much too late to turn back now. You could only pretend to be the man or woman you wanted to become, and hope and pray you would eventually grow into it. So everyone prayed—everyone but me.

O
THER WOMEN
at Mallaig were much friendlier, but they weren’t the ones in training to be parachuted into France. All the cooks and housekeeping staff had given themselves aliases—Mrs. Wrench, Mrs. Pitch, Mrs. Axel, Mrs. Sledge—and they attended to our needs with jollity and a brisk sort of affection. They considered themselves den mothers as much as maintenance staff, though the head cook, Mrs. Dowel, ran a very tight operation. After all, no self-respecting beldame lets her cauldron—full of
soup
, which is
fully edible
, mind you, no bat wings or eyeballs in the mix—run dry.

Of course, I knew what they were from the get-go; if a beldame ever wants to see if there are kindred nearby, she needs only to look at the crescent moon on the base of her thumbnail. The moon will glow if there are other beldames about, as I found when I shut myself in the WC upon my arrival.

At our first supper I lifted my teacup to find a strange symbol scrawled in black ink on the napkin:

One of the other recruits had already noticed and was craning her neck to make sense of it, her brow knotted. “What
is
that?”

“Haven’t the faintest,” I replied coolly as I took a sip. She would tell the others, of course—but let them talk.

Mrs. Dowel was making the rounds, stopping by each table in the canteen to ask if everyone had enjoyed their meal, and on the far side of the room I heard Robbins declare her hearty lamb stew had gone to a better place. When she paused at our table to lap up the compliments, I gave her a look that said I accepted her invitation to meet her and the others that same night. They don’t call it the witching hour for nothing.

L
ATE THAT
night I crept out of the dormitory and made my way out of the camp. There was a guard on duty at the entrance, but I briefly turned myself into something small enough to scurry under the gate. I turned onto the road for Mallaig village and walked a ways, until I found the symbol on my napkin etched into an old stone road marker. A trail through the woods was just visible in the moonlight.

I heard a murmur of female voices through the trees, but when I reached the clearing I found the only creatures in the wood were the birds convening in the branches above. I said a few words and then I flew up to meet them.

Mrs. Dowel introduced me to all her friends from the Mallaig coven, some of whom were also employed at the SOE camp. They were elderly beldames, most of them even older than I am now. Their daughters had all gone off to London to volunteer, and they were eager to hear whatever news I could offer them. And I, in turn, was curious as to how they were keeping themselves busy. Did they pass along any of their oomph to those young women cracking codes and ferreting out Nazi spies down in the capital?

The birds traded glances, so that it was obvious they were trying to decide if they should let me in on a secret. “No, nothing like that,” said one of them rather diffidently. “They manage quite well on their own.”

Just then another corbie alighted on a branch beside me. Dumb as it was, the bird soon realized its mistake and flew away again. “Out with it, then,” I said.

Turned out they were the guardians of a huge trove of artworks, masterpieces rescued from museums in all the occupied nations of Europe. Michelangelos, Titians, Rembrandts, you name it, all of it safely kept in the attic of the old Mallaig town hall, which had been torn down in 1892. “And we brought it all through the flue!” said Mrs. Pitch with obvious pride.

Most of their gossip was art related. “Well, my Lily’s in Berlin,” said Mrs. Dowel, “and she told me they’ve taken all the statues down off the cathedral dome and dumped them in the river! Can you imagine? St. Peter and all the angels and cherubs, covered in muck!”

“They’re safer at the bottom of the river,” said Mrs. Sledge.

“Couldn’t your daughter have hid them herself, in one of the warrens?” I asked.

“My Lily has
much
more important things to do. St. Peter is on his own,” Mrs. Dowel sniffed.

Mrs. Sledge turned to me. “If you or any of your friends should ever come upon an important piece, you will send it here, won’t you?”

By the time the sky was growing pink in the east, I felt as if I’d known these ladies all my life, as if my coven and theirs were one and the same. For better and for worse, the world is a great deal smaller than we believe it.

I made it back to the SOE compound before dawn broke, flying over the guard shack and alighting on a windowsill outside the dormitory. I spotted no one about before I made myself human again, but as I went to open the window I heard a twig snap behind me.

I turned round, my heart in my throat, but relaxed when I saw it was Major Robbins. The look on his face was inscrutable as he gripped me by the elbow. “They say the rook is the devil’s messenger,” he said under his breath. “Or is it the magpie?”

“The corbie, I think.”

I stood there staring at him for what felt like a very long time. “Come on, then,” he said at last. He still had a firm hold on my elbow. “We’ll go back to my room.”

I
TOLD HIM
everything. I told him I was born the day the American Civil War broke out, and I told him I would live as long as a bow-head whale, maybe longer if I was lucky. And I told him the story of Goody Harbinger, how legend said she’d outwitted the devil by switching his Book of Lost Souls for her own household ledger, but that she’d eventually succumbed to the hysteria that had claimed so many more lives up north in Massachusetts. And I told him how her nine-year-old daughter was found on a ship bound for Liverpool though her name wasn’t anywhere on the passenger manifest.

He listened as I went on and on for what felt like hours, his face impassive. I couldn’t even imagine what he might think of me now—after all, the only man I’d ever told was Neverino.

Eventually I stopped for breath, and there was only a brief pause before he said, “If Goody Harbinger was so powerful, why couldn’t she have saved herself as well as her daughter?”

“What?”

“Surely she could have, if—”

“You mean … you believe me?”

“I
saw
you turn yourself from a bird, didn’t I?”

We talked so long we wound up missing breakfast. I told him the story of Adam and Lilith, and he said from that moment on he would always think of me as the Wandering Jewess. And I told him about the
beneficium
pledge.

“Recite it for me,” he said.

“Recite it for you?”

“Go on. I want to hear it.”

I took a deep breath. “By magic I shall do no harm,” I said, “except in defense of myself or another. I shall not use my abilities for mercenary ends. I shall always practice discretion and make every effort not to reveal my true nature to persons ill equipped to understand. I shall spend the prime of my life in the service of humankind, and upon my retirement I shall never engage in any mischief of a malicious nature. Furthermore, I shall always encourage the same principles in my fellows. I make this vow upon the integrity of my ancestors and by the Eternal Power to whom I owe my life and ability.”

“Well, I’ll be,” he said at last. “It all makes sense now. Everybody else was dead tired at the end of that trek on the first day—as anybody would be—but not you. You had a rosy glow all the while, as if you were only out for a stroll. I knew you were thirty-eight—according to your birth certificate, at any rate—and yet you’re no more than a girl. Your perfect aim, every time. Your lightning reflexes.

“I don’t know what I was expecting when I sat up to wait for you tonight,” he went on, shaking his head. “But it certainly wasn’t this.”

T
HE AIR
between us crackled with electricity all the next day. That’s not to say I was distracted; on the contrary, my aim was sharper than ever. That night I made another confession, quite an embarrassing one this time—I’d never been on a bicycle—and he went off straightaway and found an old three-speeder rusting in a shed somewhere on the compound. He didn’t once laugh at me, bless his heart, and I picked it up in a matter of minutes.

Over the next fortnight we would go for long walks in the wee hours. We talked of politics and military strategies, Stalin’s film reviews and Churchill’s bathing habits. Jonah said the prime minister conducted much of his business in bed, in an oriental dressing gown. I told him I’d heard Hitler consulted astrologers and that he was conducting a mad scavenger hunt across Europe for any artifact said to have prophetic power. After the Anschluss he’d wasted no time filching the Lance of Longinus, the spear that pierced the side of Christ to make sure he was dead.
He who holds this shall rule the world
and all that sort of rot. It was hard to get a good night’s rest when the fate of the world was in the hands of a first-class lunatic.

And I learned far more about Jonah than I was meant to. He told me he had grown up in Finchley, received his undergraduate degree at Oxford, moved to New York to attend law school at Columbia, and after several years working at one of the big firms he’d come back to London to join SOE. Sometimes he grew very quiet, and I wondered what he had been like before his imprisonment at Fresnes.

He also told me that he had requested my assignment to his next mission to Paris. There was nobody else, he said, who was so perfectly suited to the task, and as he spoke a thrill went all through me.

We were accomplices now, and though we did a good job of behaving as if nothing had changed, I was a bit worried that the grumblings of the other female recruits would grow even louder. Yet the complaints seemed to have ceased suddenly; there was no whispering at all that Major Robbins had found himself a pet. The other girls treated me as warily as ever, but I made myself especially friendly and solicitous.

One night, a few days before the end of the Mallaig training, we arranged for another one of our midnight tramps; but all the physical exertion from dawn to dusk was finally catching up with me, and I slept too soundly. The next morning Robbins sidled up to me in the canteen queue and gave me a look. “I missed you last night,” he murmured as he palmed an apple.

“You ought to have woken me up!”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. You sleep like the dead.”

But I kept my eyes open on our last night. He invited me back to his room after our walk for a “nightcap”—a swig out of his flask, which of course he could have offered me just as easily while we were out on the moor. I took a pull and relaxed as the whisky set my throat alight. As I put the cap back on the flask it occurred to me that he couldn’t bring it where we were going—it was a telltale sign of his Englishness.

Then I caught sight of the monogram on the side. I noticed his initials, JAR, but it scarcely occurred to me to feel excited that I now had a clue to his real name. Come to think of it, this flask looked suspiciously like a wedding present.

He had chosen that very moment to rest his hand on my knee, but I slithered out from under it and seated myself on the far end of the bed. “Hold up a minute. Are you married?” He hesitated, and I heaved a sigh. “Just my luck.”

He moved toward me and took my hand in his. “I’m not married,” he said. “What I mean is, I won’t be for much longer.”

“You’re getting a divorce?”

He nodded. “She’s in New York—in the Chairborne. We’d been heading south long before we got involved in all this. The writing was on the wall, as they say.”

I was relieved to hear this, but something else was nagging at me now. I had so seldom known jealousy that when it did happen I was all the more affected by it. I wondered what her name was; I wondered if she’d found another man in New York and if they were at this very moment engaged in the same conversation. Then I wanted to laugh out loud at the absurdity of all this, falling in love with a man I only knew by a phony name.