IT WAS A COLD MORNING in early February, but outside the windows of the old farmhouse, the world was still cloaked in blackest night. Not even the sliver of a moon silvered the frost and snow crusting the yard and the rock-strewn hills beyond. Only the pale starlight showed Miriam Cantor the barn where she must go to feed the geese and the ducks.
She hesitated before opening the back door and venturing forth into the profound stillness only found just before the dawn in deep winter. But it was not the silence that made her hesitate, nor the darkness, nor the chill—nor was it fear of what predators might be between her and the barn. At least, not animal ones. Foxes and weasels did not frighten her; it was the threat of who might be out there, not what, that caused sweat to prick at her neck and under her arms even in the raw predawn.
Her worry was absurd, she knew it was. There were no Nazis prowling through the frigid gloom. There were no Nazis anywhere nearby, not down the lane in the picturesque village of Hawkshead, not in the houses of their distant neighbors. Here in the north of England, she was safe—and yet every morning, Miriam had to remind herself of that before she could pick her way along the path that wound its way through the hoary remains of last year’s victory garden.
“Who’s the real goose here?” muttered Miriam as she let herself into the barn. The truth was, if Nazis ever did intrude upon their privacy, her “aunt” Nancy, whose treasured flock impatiently pecked at Miriam’s shoes, would know. Mrs. Nancy Blackwood was no mere widow living quietly with her daughter and ward on a farm in England. Nancy Blackwood was a diabolist—a natural scientist who had summoned a demon and worked with it and its essences rather than more traditional chemicals or creatures. Her demon lent her certain unusual abilities in exchange for sharing her experiences and her body.
Nancy was also the official Librarian for the Société des Éclairées, the current worldwide organization of diabolists. The Société formally oversaw the education of individuals interested in working with demons—or rather, the powerful, ineffable beings they called demons. That meant Nancy had more methods of protecting herself than the average widow—more than the average diabolist, even—to protect her home and the books within the Library beneath it.
It was also true that Miriam, as Nancy’s apprentice, was not entirely helpless. Even so, she was only fifteen and had not yet passed her Test.
Miriam rubbed at her numb and dripping nose before starting to scoop grain onto the ground. She, like most apprentices, spent a lot of time pondering demons and their abilities, but actually summoning one was something only Master diabolists were allowed to do. As an apprentice, she was limited to minor works of diablerie, such as concocting armamentaria—the diabolical potions, pills, and powders that were the essence of the Art. Before she advanced beyond that, Miriam would need to pass her Test, and then submit the results of her Practical for judgment by the Société before she would be deemed qualified.
Even an apprentice diabolist could do much without actually summoning a demon, however. For instance, by using diabolic essences culled from plants and minerals, Miriam had created a potion that let her assess an opponent’s weaknesses if she had to strike out with fist or knife, and a pastille that granted her increased strength and speed. Keeping a phial of the former and a small tin of the latter in her pocket helped Miriam stay calm when she needed to venture into the village.
The trouble was that the effects of apprentice armamentaria did not last long. Creating them was a process intended to educate, not endure. But once Miriam had summoned her own demon, she, like Nancy, would be a powerful diabolist, capable of ever so much more.
As she scattered grain on the ground, Miriam’s mind strayed to a different farm, in a different country, where she’d fed different ducks. Her aunt—a real aunt, her father’s sister Rivka, whose farm outside of Weimar had been seized by the Nazis—had also kept poultry, and goats too.
They’d stopped visiting her long before that, when the laws had made it difficult for their family to do much of anything without being harassed. The last time they all went out as a family, a boy had thrown a stone. A policeman had laughed when it hit Miriam’s father in the back. That was when Miriam’s mother and father had written to Nancy to ask if their daughter could live with her, in England . . .
No—she could not think on that now. Miriam pushed the memories away, shoving them down inside a shadowed place deep within her that served as a repository for her fear, her rage, and her disappointment. That silent shadowed hollow never judged, never rejected, never asked questions—it just took what she offered it, and absorbed it, and made it go away.
“All that happened a long time ago,” Miriam said to the ducks and the geese as they nibbled at the grain. She couldn’t let her mind wander away down those unpleasant paths—there was too much to do today in anticipation of the arrival of another “aunt”: Aunt Edith.
Edith was Nancy’s sister. She, too, was part of the Société, though, unlike Nancy, she was not an elected official. The position of Librarian meant living in the Library, which was here, in rural Hawkshead. Why the Library was in Hawkshead no one knew, but it had been there in various forms since the Middle Ages—long before the Société formed in Paris, a hundred years ago—and there it would remain after the Société gave way to some new organization, whenever it inevitably did.
Once she had finished feeding the poultry, Miriam returned to the farmhouse. Nancy was awake and in the kitchen, frying a bit of their weekly ration of bacon in a skillet on the cooktop of her ancient beloved AGA. The smell of it was mouthwatering and, even after all this time, a little guilt-inducing. But hunger was hunger, and rationing was rationing.
“How are they this morning?” asked Nancy, as Miriam shrugged out of her coat.
“Snug and warm and fed.” Miriam tied her apron around her waist with a satisfied tug. It was a relief to once again be within four walls and under a sturdy roof.
“I wish I could say the same,” said Nancy’s daughter, Jane, as she bustled into the kitchen to put on her own apron. “I’m starving!”
Miriam’s “cousin” had obviously gotten up early to set herself to rights. Jane’s hair was coiffed and shining, and she was already dressed, nicely, in a dark gray skirt and a fashionably stark white blouse. The cardigan she wore over it was also gray, but the color of smoke rather than charcoal.
Miriam unconsciously glanced down at her tweedy ankle-length skirt. It was one of Nancy’s hemmed and patched-up hand-me-downs, lumpy and too large but suitable for keeping her calves free of muck when she went out to the barns or her legs warm as she worked in the lab and Library. She’d not thought of dressing for Edith’s arrival; perhaps she should have.
“Is it ready?” asked Jane, reaching for the tea before she even really sat down. “I think I shall starve to death if I have to wait any longer!”
“Must you be so dramatic?” said Nancy, turning around with a tray full of bacon and toast, which she set down in the center of the scarred wooden kitchen table alongside the small pat of butter they must share. Jane scowled at the word dramatic and slurped her tea.
“A lady is as a lady does,” remarked Nancy airily, as if this wisdom had just come to her mind unprovoked. At last she sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. Then, from a pocket in her apron, she withdrew a little dropper bottle of smoked glass. She squeezed a bit of clear fluid into her tea before taking her first sip, doctoring the beverage not with milk and sugar, as Miriam liked it, but with a distillate of the essence of her demon, the Patron of Curiosity.
In order for diabolists to comfortably maintain contact with their demons, they had to regularly consume their essences. Every diabolist had their preferred way of doing so, some more elaborate or decadent than others. Nancy, being a no-muss, no-fuss sort of woman, produced a tincture from the unusually beautiful and robust chives she cultivated in pots on her sunniest windowsill.
“And speaking of dressing nicely,” said Nancy, after taking a sip, “I don’t know why you’ve done that so early. You still have to dust and sweep, you know! I won’t have you begging off smartening up the house just because you’ve already smartened up yourself.”
“But I dusted and swept yesterday!” cried Jane.
“It could do with another going-over. This time, use the dust rag on the woodwork instead of talking to it like it’s Clark Gable.”
For a while now it had been Jane’s joy to go see every picture she could at the theatre in Ambleside. She talked endlessly to Miriam about the sophistication and beauty of the women on the silver screen, but Miriam had only Jane’s word for how wonderful they were. She had never gone. It was five miles to Ambleside, and the thought of the bus made Miriam dizzy. In a way, though, she felt she’d seen Meet Me in St. Louis, Cover Girl, and other films; Jane liked to talk over the plots after she got back, doing impressions of the actresses Miriam knew only from still photographs in Jane’s magazines.
Jane was good at impressions—so good she’d managed to incorporate a few little turns of speech and gestures into her everyday manners. And as they were at that age where it was common for girls to quickly become young ladies, only Miriam was pained by her friend growing up.
Nancy, for her part, seemed to find it amusing.
“Edith won’t arrive until around two, so you’ve plenty of time to do your chores and reapply that lipstick before we leave if it gets smudged. Yes, I noticed,” said Nancy, who disapproved of cosmetics. Miriam thought that a bit funny, given that Nancy was a Master diabolist; most people would likely see trafficking with demons as a far greater offense against nature than a bit of mascara.
Jane looked like a little girl as she sullenly poked at her breakfast.
“You’ll trip over that lip if you don’t pick it up,” said Nancy, but her teasing did little to mollify her daughter. “Oh, come now. What would your beloved Edith have to say if she saw you like that?”
“Mother!”
That was another change—Jane had always called her mother “Mum” until lately.
“Oh, come now. If you’d known Edie as long as I have, you wouldn’t feel there was some great need to make yourself up for her,” said Nancy. “She was once your age, you know—and a lot wilder and more scabby-kneed than either of you.”
“Scabby-kneed!”
Miriam was now the sullen one as she stared at her plate. Jane’s affected horror at this information exasperated her. Why should it surprise Jane that Edith had had to put away childish things, just like anyone else? Did Jane really believe her aunt had sprung forth into the world as a stylish adult?
And anyway, squeamishness was not for the ambitious when it came to the Art. Master diabolists saved their hair trimmings, their nail clippings, their scabs, sometimes even their menstrual fluid—anything that could become infused with the essences that diabolists regularly consumed to maintain their connection with their demons. Some diabolists had been known to harvest permanent parts of their own bodies in the service of empowering a particularly powerful preparation—such things could be rendered down to enhance the overall potency of diabolic armamentaria. Scabby knees weren’t a patch on, say, extracting one’s own perfectly healthy molar.
But Miriam didn’t say any of this. She took a discreet, calming breath and pushed her annoyance and anger down inside her, where the shadow within her welcomed her feelings with open arms.
“Edie played rugby with our brothers until the day she moved away,” said Nancy.
“And yet she seems so civilized. I suppose there’s hope for me yet,” said Jane, before finally stabbing a piece of bacon with her fork.
“Oh, no,” said Nancy, with an appraising look at her daughter. “There’s no hope for you—or there won’t be if you don’t finish your breakfast and your chores.”
Jane’s childish, long-suffering sigh made Miriam smile to herself, but she quickly sobered when her aunt turned her attention to her.
“Aren’t you excited about Edith’s visit, Miriam?”
Nancy’s question caught her off guard.
“Of course I’m excited,” she said, but when that sounded a bit flabby even to her own ears, Miriam added, “I’ve been wanting to ask Edith about her research into diabolically enhanced cosmetics. I think it might help me understand the theory behind the Fifth Transmutation.”
This was all true. The only lie was in what she’d omitted.
“Oh, I’d like to hear that too.” Jane wasn’t pouting now. She was bright, alert, and focused: the Jane that Miriam liked.
Jane was also an apprentice diabolist. They’d learned side by side since Miriam had come to stay, but they couldn’t be more different. Where Miriam was pleased to think through the theoretical aspects of an act of diablerie before attempting it, Jane jumped right in to learn how deep the water was.
“The Fifth Transmutation is necessary when attempting Campanella’s Substantive Exchange,” said Jane. Jane was currently working her way through the Twelve Transmutations, a set of practical exercises. “I can’t quite parse it, and I’d like to see a practical demonstration. The Grimoire Italien says that demonic vapors and their impure properties are beneficial, but it’s not clear if it means for the demon or the diabolist.”
“The Grimoire Italien? Are you using the French translation of Trasformazioni della Materia?” asked Miriam. Jane nodded. “Oh!” said Miriam. “In the original medieval Italian, that passage is a bit clearer. The demon benefits, but there’s also a chance that . . .” Miriam trailed off as she saw Jane blushing angrily.
Miriam winced. The learning of ancient languages was not among Jane’s talents—which was nothing to be ashamed of, in Miriam’s opinion. Still, she should have remembered how sensitive Jane was about it.
“Miriam, as usual you’re not only correct, but your scholarship is impressively thorough,” said Nancy.
Nancy’s notice always thrilled Miriam, but it was hard for her to accept the compliment with Jane looking so unhappy and embarrassed.
“I wish I’d known you were reading that,” said Miriam. “The modern Italian translation is better, and I have it in my room to compare with the medieval, since the medieval is a bother to read. It’s barely even Italian, really—just a dog’s breakfast of medieval Venetian vernacular mixed with Latin.”
“Thank you,” said Jane, with the sort of formality and poise she usually reserved for impressions of her favorite actresses. “I’d be pleased to look at it when you can spare it.”
“Later,” said Nancy, with a tone that conveyed exactly what the girls ought to be doing just then.
Miriam began to clear the dishes, as keeping the kitchen tidy was one of her responsibilities. Jane, too, stood up from the table, but as she did, a great yowl split the air and a soft gray blur of wounded dignity streaked out the kitchen, the bell of his collar jangling merrily.
“Poor Smudge!” Jane, dismayed, hurried after the cat to check on him.
“You’d think one day he’d learn that sitting behind Jane’s chair will only get him a pinched tail,” said Miriam.
“Perhaps he enjoys the attention,” said Nancy, as she wrapped the remaining bread in a cloth. “I’m off to the stacks, my dear.”
“All right.”
“I hope you’ll join us when we walk into the village? I think it’ll be a lovely day in spite of the cold, and a merry party once Edie arrives.”
Miriam managed a smile even as her stomach churned at the thought of the long walk away from their safe, quiet home into the relative chaos that was Hawkshead. But she loved Nancy very much and wanted to please her—no, more than that: she wanted to be the sort of person who pleased Nancy.
“Of course!”
Miriam was rewarded with a smile. “I’m very glad,” said Nancy. “Now, I must see to a few things before my sister takes up all my waking hours. Ciao!” And with that, Nancy swept out of the room with more flair than was strictly necessary.
For all she was hard on Jane for being “dramatic,” Nancy, too, had a bit of the theatrical about her. And as with Jane, it came out even more when Edith visited.