Thomas opened the kitchen door at my knock, baffled and sheepish and positively white with flour. “My father’s out visiting a sick parishioner. I don’t know if you want to wait?”
It was late summer then, and I was sixteen, and Thomas was eighteen, and he had recently been accepted to Madison University. It wasn’t so terribly far away, I told myself, over the unacknowledged whistling of my grief. He would still come home when he could. And we had him for a month longer, anyway. Flour drifted off his wildly waving hands, and I doubled up with laughter.
“All because Mrs. Richardson is visiting her daughter!” I said; Mrs. Richardson was their cook. “Oh, Thomas, what have you done now?”
If it had been anyone but me laughing at him, Thomas probably would have shrunk in on himself and vanished into another room. But the two of us had slowly achieved that playful familiarity which makes it very hard to give offense.
“It’s the pie’s fault!” Thomas said gamely. “It pounced on me like a wolf. Tried to tear my throat out! Of course I had to take measures.”
I looked past him. A basket of blackberries sat on the table surrounded by scraps of dough. “I see you used a shotgun. Thank heavens you survived! Or do you think your wounds might prove mortal?”
“To my pride, anyway. If I had any, which I’m very glad to say I don’t.” Then, accusingly: “You know how to control those things. Pies. It seems impossible that anyone could, short of resorting to witchcraft.”
“They’re temperamental things,” I agreed. “High-strung. They require a firm hand. Here, I’ll show you.”
We started over with new dough, and soon I was teaching him to flatten the lard into platelets with a whisking of fingers against thumb. “Like fish scales,” he observed, fascinated. “That thin. That must be what makes the crust flake?”
“Exactly,” I said. Something in his voice set me back on my heels. I straightened and looked at him. He was bent over the bowl with the same enraptured concentration he brought to his microscope, working the lard into the flour, and then I understood what I had found so startling. It wasn’t merely that he was approaching this woman’s task with an utter absence of condescension, though that would have been enough.
The look on his face—it was tenderness. This domestic labor was not too trivial to rate his deep attention, even his love. There was something in it that sparked an odd yearning in me. Something, even, that I wanted to learn.
“Catherine?” He’d realized I was watching him, and his old shyness rushed in between us again. “Did I do something wrong?”
“You’re doing it perfectly,” I told him. “Beautifully.”
He smiled to himself, too self-conscious now to meet my eyes. By the time Reverend Skelley came home we had the pie in the oven, and the mess swept up, and Thomas was making tea. Reverend Skelley took in the scene—I realized I hadn’t thought once of the impropriety of being alone with Thomas for so long—and his face lit up with a glow like sunlight piercing through deep water.
It was the look of a man who sees a long-guarded wish blooming into fulfillment.
With that I understood that the Reverend hadn’t been candid with me, any more than Margo Farrow had—that his gift of education was not nearly as disinterested as he’d made it out to be. It was understandable, I knew, it was motivated by his protective love for his son, but it was still a betrayal. Did Reverend Skelley think I was good for nothing but securing male happiness, had he only pretended to believe in my potential for more than marriage? When he said he thought I could go to college, was that merely a diversion?
He saw me seeing, saw me recoil. Thomas was gazing back and forth between the two of us, baffled by this drama that had unfolded in silence while he was busy warming the teapot.
“I should go,” I said, and stood. “It’s too late for lessons today.”
“Catherine,” Reverend Skelley said. “Catherine, please let me explain!”
“Later,” I snapped, with none of my usual fondness or respect. “Later!”
Then I was out the door of the new Universalist rectory; it was in the town’s small center, and I bitterly missed the remoteness of the Skelleys’ old house, the long walk that would have let me work off my ruined mood. I pivoted and ran up a side street that would fade soon into orchards and fields. The houses grew rapidly smaller, more shambling, until they seemed to shrink into the rustling grass like decomposing deer returning to the soil.
A pebble skittered behind me. Of course someone else might be going this way for reasons of their own, but the sound plucked me into a singing alertness. I could still go back to where passersby would offer some protection. A moment’s hesitation, and I turned.
It was Gus, purple-faced, his hands clenched. We were still forbidden from seeing each other, and though Gertrude Farrow’s melancholy was now too deep for her to bother much with enforcement, that ban kept our meetings few and furtive. But we were friends again, and I was constantly aware that I was charged with saving him—from Darius, and from everything he wanted most. With that in mind, I suppressed my irritation at this violation of my solitude. I made my best effort at a soul-reclaiming smile, though my talents did not lie in that direction.
“What were you doing at the rectory for so long?” Gus shouted. “Don’t tell me you were having one of your lessons, because I saw Skelley go in after you’d been there for almost two hours already!”
An observation, my many-lived reader: if someone is being ridiculous, it does not follow that they are not also dangerous. I didn’t know that then, and only registered the absurdity.
“I was making a blackberry pie,” I said—curtly now, all my angelic performance forgotten. “Their cook is away, and you know how the Reverend tutors me without any payment.” The last words were bitter on my tongue. He’d hoped, in fact, for a trade.
Gus was taken aback, and his anger faltered. “A pie? What for?”
My brows hiked. “I thought you were better informed, Gus. Search your memory, and I’m sure you’ll recall the purpose of a pie.”
“But—why are you wasting your time on something so empty? In the same hour you spent grubbing around in that kitchen, Darius could have taught you to make flames rise at your fingertips! I can almost understand the Latin, the natural history, even if I know all that is really beneath you. But not—ugh, it’s bad enough that you have to cook for your own family!”
I thought, of course, of Thomas’s sweet enthrallment at this chore Gus despised. I thought of that quality of Thomas’s attention; how generously he gave of himself, how ready he was to surrender to wonder. But of course I kept such thoughts private.
“And I don’t understand the value you find in Darius’s spectacles. Just because they’re magic—even when they aren’t destructive, they’re still frivolous.”
In hindsight, I marvel at my own recklessness. I was alone with Gus on an unfrequented road, using terms calculated to inflame him, at a moment when he was still wavering on the edge of a jealous rage. Even after what he’d done to his mother, I could not imagine that he might hurt me.
“Frivolous!” Gus exclaimed, predictably indignant. “Oh, you don’t begin to see—and if you can’t see the potential in magic, how can you realize your own? If I could take you to Nautilus, even for a glimpse, maybe then you’d—but they only allow apprentice sorcerers to visit with a mentor.” He delivered the last word suggestively. I did not take it up. “Catherine, listen: imagine a city that exists nowhere, in no specific place, so that it’s equally close to every place on Earth at once! To Egypt or the North Pole, it’s all the same! Imagine the gifted of all nations gathered there, building that city afresh every moment, with nothing but the power of their thoughts! Every building is the direct expression of all that’s greatest in the human mind, and nothing there decays—”
It pains me to confess that I was not wholly immune to the image he conjured—though I was aware that decay is what nourishes new growth.
“Is that why they chose that name for it?” I asked, hushed. “Nautilus? Because the spira mirabilis of a nautilus’s shell is part of a universal order, beyond any culture or language?”
Gus smiled; it was the first time I’d betrayed any interest in the city of sorcerers. To do so did seem to contradict my mission to save Gus from the seductions of magic—but then I’d been poorly suited to that mission from the start.
“Yes. And because the city is formed from thought the way a nautilus’s shell is formed from its secretions, with no hands or tools, and yet it builds something so perfect,” Gus agreed. It was not lost on me that Gus was undermining his own case; if a mollusk could spin marvels as great as those of the sorcerers, what need was there for magic? Before I could observe as much, Gus said something that surprised me. “Catherine, that’s all magic is! It’s a kind of thought, so I don’t see how you can reject it out of hand. If you revere knowledge, how can you prefer to stay ignorant? Don’t you believe in learning everything you can?”
In retrospect, these words sound out of character for Gus; they implied a democratic tendency in magic that he wouldn’t have cared to emphasize. I suspect that Darius had provided this new argument; that Gus had been watching for me by the Skelleys’ house so he could try it out.
In any case, it stopped me in my tracks. “I do.”
I was still angry at Reverend Skelley; rebellion was spitting inside me. And Gus was at my side.
A rationalization was just as readily available. It went something like this: Why, after all, should Gus take seriously my disgust for magic when I knew nothing about it, save for those violent manifestations I’d felt and then stifled? No one welcomes the opinions of the illiterate on their favorite books. If I meant to save him, I should have a better idea of what I was talking about.
“Then let Darius teach you,” Gus said earnestly. “At least try. He says he’s sure you have the potential. Is that why you’ve been so reluctant, you’re afraid you’ll be too weak? Don’t let that worry you! You don’t need to have nearly as much power as he seems to—that is, you don’t need to have as much as I do! Just a bit—a supplement to mine will be enough.”
I knew quite well that I did have it in me, though by this time I’d managed to mostly ignore the nagging flick of magic near my spine.
“But why does Darius care? Gus, I know you don’t want to believe it, but I’m certain he means to use you somehow. Why would I let him use me?”
“Of course he wants to use us!” Gus replied, startled. “They’re all of them always recruiting, but it’s nothing sinister, Catherine, I promise. Just politics.”
I did not regard those two terms as mutually exclusive. But here I was distracted by my first glimpse of something I later understood very well; namely, that established sorcerers could enhance their status by discovering new ones, and so helping appease Nautilus’s insatiable appetite for magic. It is, in fact, an outright competition among them, and a protégé of exceptional gifts is flaunted like a prize pig.
“I’ll try it once,” I said. “But I make no promises beyond that, and I certainly don’t intend to live in your sorcerers’ city. I’m pledged to the study of reality.”
“Oh—but anything can be reality if a sorcerer has the skill to make it so!” Gus’s green-white eyes looked themselves like mother-of-pearl with the scudding clouds reflected in their sudden wetness. He smiled at me through his tears. “Catherine, Catherine, once you see—there’s no turning back once you feel that power! And then no one will be able to separate us, not ever again.” He brushed away tears with the back of his hand. “Let’s go.”
“What?” I said. “Now?”
“Darius is waiting. He was sure you’d come.”