Betty stared at Granny. For a moment the kitchen was completely still, like a scene painted on a canvas. Granny’s face was a mask of sorrow; Fliss’s dark eyes were staring into her lap. Even the smoke from Granny’s pipe appeared motionless, a choking cloud hanging over them.
A horrible noise caught in Betty’s throat, something that was half groan, half sob. The room felt airless, as if the truth had sucked the breath from it, just as all Betty’s dreams and hopes had been crushed out of her. This was it: the big secret. The answer she had been scratching for, like something buried in dirt. They were stuck here in Crowstone forever.
The practical side of her wanted to laugh, to blurt out how ridiculous the idea of a curse was. Only, Betty didn’t feel practical now, not after everything that had just happened. Added to Granny’s excuses and sudden appearances out of nowhere over the years, it suddenly seemed scarily possible that she was never leaving. Never going to sail off and be Betty the Brave, Betty the Explorer. She was just another Widdershins girl, destined to be a drudge in a life of endless gray routine. They were all as stuck as Father’s ramshackle boat rotting in the harbor: bobbing, with no hope of ever going anywhere.
She blinked as Granny’s pipe smoke hit her eyes, making them water. Next to her, Charlie began to cry softly. Betty was too numb to comfort her.
“Cursed . . . ?” Betty asked, her voice hollow. “How? Why?”
“I asked myself the same questions, when I first found out.” Granny puffed on the pipe, her eyes glassy. “I thought it was just a story, invented to keep curious girls from wandering too far. But even I had to admit that the deaths of eight Widdershins girls stretching back over the past hundred and fifty years couldn’t be by chance. Strange, unexplained deaths of otherwise healthy girls and women.”
“When did you find out?” Betty asked, chilled. “Was that on your wedding day, too?”
“No.” Granny smiled faintly. “Before then. Your grandpa warned me a long time before, when we were just sweethearts. He gave me plenty of chances to change my mind.”
Betty gaped. “And you still went through with it?”
Granny shrugged. “People make all kinds of sacrifices for . . .”
“For love,” Fliss finished. She placed her hand over Granny’s old, wrinkled one.
“I-I’m sorry,” Betty spluttered. “But I can’t understand any of this . . . It’s just too strange.” And confusing and unfair, she raged silently. All the possibility the enchanted objects seemed to offer had been cruelly snatched away, and seeing the magic for herself made it harder to doubt the rest of what Granny was saying. “Are you certain?” she asked weakly. “Couldn’t it just be . . . bad luck?”
“I was a lot like you, once,” Granny continued. “At first I refused to believe it. Then, one day, I saw it for myself. The day the death toll rose to nine.”
The air in the room seemed to thicken, and not just with smoke. Betty suddenly had difficulty breathing. “Nine . . . nine girls died?” she said faintly. “I mean . . . I know you said it happens by sunset after leaving Crowstone, but what exactly happens? They . . . we . . . drop dead?” She searched Granny’s face, waiting for more horrible revelations and imagining tales of freak accidents. A vision of falling from a great height, of the ground rushing toward her and wind roaring in her ears, floated before her eyes, and a wave of terror and grief washed over her. She blinked it away, trembling with adrenaline. Where had that come from?
“It’s always the same,” Granny said. “It starts with birdsong. The crows’ chorus.”
Betty frowned. “But that happens anyway at dawn, doesn’t it?”
Granny nodded. “The difference is, no matter how hard you look, you’ll never see them. The sound exists only in your head.”
From the corner of her eye, Betty caught Fliss shuddering.
“It gets louder,” Granny continued, staring into the distance, as though remembering. “As the sound grows, you become cold, and colder still. And even though your skin is like ice to the touch, the last thing you feel before the end is a cold kiss.”
The hairs on Betty’s arms stood up. “How could you . . . know that?”
Granny’s lips quivered. “Because I saw it with your father’s cousin, Clarissa,” she said finally. “I was there.”
“Did she know about the curse?” asked Betty. “Or was it an accident?”
Granny’s fingers tightened around her glass, then slid to the tabletop, almost lifeless. “Yes, she knew. She thought she could undo it. She’d heard of a place where, legend has it, wishes can be made. Horseshoe Bay, across the marshes. She thought making the wish could uncurse us all, but it didn’t work. Whatever magic exists in that bay—if it even does—it’s not strong enough to undo the Widdershins curse. And when she came back, she already knew it had failed. The crows were rasping in her head; her skin was like ice. We couldn’t get her warm . . .”
“She came back to Crowstone?” Betty asked. “But wouldn’t that stop the curse, if she returned before sunset?”
“Nothing stops it,” Granny muttered, glassy-eyed. She linked her thumbs and fanned her fingers like birds’ wings over her heart in the sign of the crow.
“Tell her about the stones,” Fliss croaked. Her skin was waxy pale.
“Stones?” Betty pressed.
“Every time the curse is triggered, a stone falls from the tower wall,” Granny said, in an uncharacteristically quiet voice.
“You mean, Crowstone Tower . . . ? The prison?”
Granny nodded.
“But what does the prison have to do with the curse?” Betty asked. Fliss’s ashen face wasn’t helping with the image of a freezing, dying Clarissa haunting Betty’s thoughts. How brave Clarissa had been to even try to break the curse, risking everything. To do that, she must have wanted to leave as much as Betty did, and believed there was a way . . . even if she had failed.
Granny shrugged. “The tower is ancient, older than the rest of the prison. As for its link to the curse, well . . . there are stories. But none that tell us how to break it.”
Betty swallowed the lump in her throat, trying not to cry. Tears solved nothing, but her leaking eyes didn’t seem to care. Before tonight, she’d been able to dream of leaving Crowstone and living a different life. She’d never known that being kept there was more than Granny being overprotective; that leaving was actually impossible. She could see why Fliss had given up, but Betty couldn’t accept it. Not yet. “There must be a way to break it. There has to be . . .”
Granny gave a hollow laugh. “Oh, that’s what they all say. You think girls like you haven’t had the same thought for generations? Of course they have. Clarissa was as determined as they come! Everything you can think of has been tried, from marrying to lose the Widdershins name, to taking something of Crowstone with you, to leaving something of yourself in Crowstone. Nothing has worked. So now you know why I can’t let it happen, not to any of you.”
She grasped Betty’s hand suddenly, startling her. “Please, Betty.” Her shrewd old eyes were haunted. “I’m begging you . . . don’t try. I couldn’t go through that again, not with one of you. Not . . . not like Clarissa. It’d kill me.”
Betty felt as though her heart were being wrung out. The last time she had seen Granny vulnerable like this had been when their father was taken away. It was easy to pretend this side of Granny didn’t exist when it was so well hidden.
“And Father?” Betty asked. “Surely he knows about the curse?”
“Yes.” Granny’s voice was grave. “Something like this . . . the whole family has to know, it’s too dangerous not to. I often wonder if it was guilt, as well as your mother’s death, that pushed him down the wrong path.”
“Guilt?” Fliss asked. “You mean . . . for passing the curse on to us?”
Granny nodded. “He hated the unfairness of it, that no Widdershins woman could ever leave. Yet, because of his own foolishness, he’s now as trapped as we are.”
“And Mother?” Betty asked. “Was it really an accident, like you said, or was . . . was it the curse?”
Charlie had been just a baby, but Fliss and Betty both remembered the morning they’d learned their mother was gone. Granny and Father had been sick, though their father had been the worse of the two. It was Granny who’d broken the news that their mother had gone to fetch a doctor in the night while a dense fog had lain over the island. On the way she had become lost, wandered onto a frozen pond, and fallen through the ice.
“I was telling the truth about that.” Granny rubbed her ruddy nose. “I’m not sure whether that makes you feel better or worse, but your mother . . . It wasn’t the curse. It was bad luck.”
Bad luck: the unwanted guest Granny was always trying to ward off with her charms. Nothing ever worked. Their parents were gone. The inn never made enough money to clear its debts. Fliss ruined everything she cooked. All Betty’s travel schemes had failed miserably, and Charlie was always getting nits. Yes, thought Betty. It was fair to say that Lady Luck crossed the road when she saw the Widdershinses coming.
They were interrupted by a low, rumbling chant accompanied by a rhythmic thudding from downstairs. A moment later came the sound of a door being flung open. The chanting of “Beer! Beer! Beer!” was followed by a shriek from Gladys at the foot of the stairs: “Bunny! If I don’t get some help right now, I’m leaving!”
“They’re thumping on the bar, the louts!” Granny said, outraged. She leaped to her feet with a fresh burst of energy, her knees clicking. “Get yourself together, Fliss,” she said. “Then come downstairs. We’ve already been gone too long.” She left the kitchen, and a moment later the noise downstairs surged as Granny rushed through the door into the bar. Momentarily, the spell over them was broken and things felt almost normal.
Normal? How could any life carry on as it always had, when for Betty, everything had changed? All this time, she’d thought she was in control of her destiny, but if what Granny said was true, Betty’s only destiny was this. One there was no escape from.
Betty glanced at her sisters. Charlie had been struck dumb and had one thumb lodged firmly in her mouth, a habit Betty had thought was long broken. Fliss was silent, brooding.
“You should have told me about the curse,” Betty said at last. She felt heavy, as though the revelations of the evening were crushing her like stones fallen from the prison tower.
Fliss looked up, her dark eyes weary. “I wanted you to still have hope that someday you’d leave this place.”
Betty felt herself getting prickly now. “What’s the point if it can’t ever happen? Wouldn’t it have been kinder to tell the truth?”
“Yes, I mean . . . no, oh, I don’t know!” Fliss bit her lower lip. “I wanted to, but Granny made me promise.”
“It never stopped you before,” Betty said, hurt creeping into her voice. “We used to tell each other everything.”
Fliss’s cheeks went pink. “Do you remember when you were little?” She glanced meaningfully at Charlie. “The thing that I told you?”
Betty nodded, scowling. When Fliss was eight and Betty just five, Fliss had discovered that the tooth fairy wasn’t real, and had in fact been Granny putting a copper coin under the pillow. She had immediately told Betty. Granny had been furious and had never let Fliss forget it.
“I never forgave myself for that,” Fliss said quietly. “Spoiling it for you, when you could have had the magic a while longer.”
“This is nothing like that,” said Betty. “That was a silly childhood belief. A family curse is not the same!”
“I think it is. It comes down to the same thing, which is innocence.” Fliss tried to smile. “I wanted that for you, just for a little longer. To not have this be the first thing you think of in the morning, and the last thing at night. Because once it’s there, that’s it.” Her eyes shone suddenly. “This is the rest of our lives.”
The rest of our lives. Betty stared into her sister’s desperate eyes and saw her own mirrored there. She had felt smothered before, but that was nothing compared to now. The curse had snared her like an invisible bindweed, strangling the hope out of her. And not even magic could make up for it.
Hours later, Betty lay awake in bed with Charlie snoring softly next to her. It had taken ages for Charlie to fall into a restless sleep, hours of fidgeting and thumb-sucking as Betty told every story she knew to try to settle her—but none was as strange or as dark as the one they had just heard. Eventually Charlie dozed off, but Betty was wide awake.
Voices burbled beneath them. How odd, she thought, to live the way they did. Even though the Poacher’s Pocket was theirs, it never truly felt it. It always hummed with other people’s voices, creaked under other people’s feet.
Even the bedroom was shared, a jumble of Charlie’s stuffed toys, rag dolls, shells, and pebbles, and then novels, jam jars of buttons and other useful bits, and a sewing kit of Betty’s. Her most treasured items were her book of stamps and her map collection, which she had pored over on many a quiet afternoon, jotting down the names of places she planned to explore.
It had all begun when her father had been haggling down at the harbor one morning. Betty had wandered off with a mapmaker’s daughter from one of the ships. Her name was Roma, and she had smooth brown skin and braided hair, as well as a thousand memories of clear turquoise waters, arid deserts, and snowcapped mountains. Betty had listened, spellbound, wishing more than anything that she could see them herself. Later, as Roma helped pack up the maps, Betty had begged until her father had relented and bought her one: her very first map. She had cradled it like treasure as the mapmaker’s ship set sail, becoming a speck in the distance. They never saw Roma again, but the spell she had cast over Betty remained.
Her eyes lingered on her maps, a whole world she’d longed to explore rolled within them. Now the curse had ruined them for her, like a tempting but poisoned box of chocolates. She could look, but a single taste would kill her. Her gaze slid from the maps to a flicker of moonlight on the cracked ceiling, and a tear trickled down her cheek. She couldn’t imagine a world she was forbidden to explore, just as she couldn’t imagine that there wasn’t an answer, somewhere out there, to make it possible.
And then she sat up in bed, realizing something. Granny hadn’t said it wasn’t possible. She had said that nothing the other girls had attempted before had worked. Which meant that Granny still believed there was a way the curse could be undone, even if she was too afraid to pursue it.
“I’m sorry, Granny,” Betty whispered determinedly in the darkness. “But if there’s a way to break the curse, I have to try.”