That autumn would have marked the return of my happiness and serenity, all golden slopes of sun and Homer by the fire, if it had not been for the seismic trembling of anxiety. Every day I hoped for the news that Gus Farrow had disappeared, leaving no hint to where he’d gone. Every day I hoped for his surrender to the fact that I was myself, that my words were my words and their meaning was not his to revise; to the fact that I did not love him. Once he grasped those realities, surely he would forget me and leave for Nautilus? And since my father still worked for the Farrows, I knew I would hear at once if Gus was unaccounted for.
Instead my father sat at the table and took off one boot, then seemed to forget the other. “The younger Mr. Farrow keeps watching me at my work,” he told me at last. “Never thought horses interested him.”
My heart stuttered. It was because of me that my father was being hounded, and I heard his implied question as well.
“I told Gus I could not love him,” I said. “I’m sorry he’s taking it out on you.”
He nodded, staring down. “It’s my fault, letting you run wild with him for so long. You’re a good girl, you couldn’t see that he ought to be better.”
It startled me; I’d assumed my father subscribed to the common view that I was the one conniving to marry Gus. Now from the sorrow weighing down his face I understood how my father had compromised his own heart, his own judgment, for the sake of our daily bread.
I put my arms around his neck and softly kissed his cheek. Ours was not a demonstrative family, and he huffed in surprise and patted my hand with awkward affection. I hope my father remembered that kiss once I was dead, and knew that I, at least, absolved him of all blame for what Gus did.
I hope he felt the love that went unspoken. That it warmed him as he stood on the cold clay that filled my grave, my mother and brothers buried beside me. Perhaps he even forgave me for all the ways I turned from him. For how, with every step, I abandoned him again.
Hush now.
I remember the exact day it happened, shortly before Christmas, because I knew Thomas was coming home for the holidays and I was in a tumult of indecision over whether or not to see him. I wanted to, very much—but I did not want to be unkind, or encourage feelings he was better off without. I spent many nights making a drawing for his present: a study of animal skulls we’d found in the woods together, radiating like petals from a central stone. Then I thought I would be wrong to give the drawing to him, and tucked it away behind my bed.
All through the twenty-second I was preoccupied by thoughts of his journey: from Madison he would take the stagecoach to Syracuse; from Syracuse he would ride a train as far as Batavia—I had never yet traveled by railway!—from Batavia he would take a stagecoach again. A light snow scrawled white traces on the early gloaming, and I wondered if it looked the same to him through a window that rushed like the snow itself.
When the knock came, I was caught off guard. It was too early for Thomas to have arrived. He was too diffident, too careful of my boundaries to appear uninvited in any case. Nonetheless I hoped, and darted to the door.
It was Margo Farrow. She wore a beautiful slate-colored carrick coat, quite new, and only a shade lighter than the sky behind her; its layered collars fluttered in the wind. Her nostrils had a thin, almost glassy appearance as they flared, their violet veins clear against her pallid skin. Her gray eyes met mine with a look I could not read, but there was a grim set to her mouth.
“Catherine,” she said. “You must come at once!”
“What is it?” Imaginings tussled inside me; why would Margo demand my presence, unless something terrible had happened? “Some accident?”
If there had been a mishap involving Gus’s magic, she would naturally try to keep it quiet. And she knew I knew already.
“I can’t explain now. Is this your cloak? On with it, there’s not a moment to lose! We must dash, he’s in the shed.”
“Has Gus been hurt?” I flushed at the ambivalence concealed in those words: I was terribly worried for Gus, and at the same time I felt a stitch of hope that—well, that he would never bother me or mine again.
“I told you, I can’t explain; you must come and see. Listen the first time, won’t you, and spare me from repeating myself?” Should I have read a warning in her preemptory tone, should I have seen her urgency for the ruse it was? As she spoke she was swinging my cloak around my shoulders, fumbling with the buttons at my throat. To slap away an old lady’s hand seemed unwarranted brutality, and I did not resist. Not then, and not when she seized my elbow and towed me out the door.
I wonder, did Margo realize the inadmissible bait she was dangling in front of me? Did she guess that I could not help but wish for the relief of finding Gus dead, even as I hated myself for wishing it? His magical arts must be improving by the day, I knew. I was tired of suspecting every bird, every leaping flame; I craved a world made innocent once again.
The grass was crisp with frost; it squeaked under our shoes. Snowflakes spiraled in the lilac dark. Margo was still strong and limber then, and her haste was contagious as we pushed through white pools of our own breath. We walked at such a pace that I grew giddy with mingled dread and anticipation, and we took the same shortcut through the hedge that I had used as a child.
She caught my elbow again, tugging me toward the shed at the bottom of the garden. Stripes of lantern-light shone around its door—only the light’s color seemed odd—and I stared at it as if my gaze could tear out its secrets.
Margo threw the door open and planted her other hand on the small of my back, pushing me forward. I stumbled in, blinded at first by a light that, I realized, was too bright for any lantern. The whole floor was a swirl of fire, azure and violet, though it did not burn. In its disturbed light the hanging shears and racks of pots threw huge and tremulous shadows, and it was a moment before I could separate the people in that space from the bewilderment of light and dark.
Then I did. Three people stood in that shed apart from Margo and myself. I recognized Gus first, shining like a fairy prince; he wore a sort of cape formed of wandering sparks, cobalt and white and cerulean. Their firefly weave lit the sharp planes of his face from below, giving him a splendor that looked disjointed and not entirely human. His blond hair flamed into a blue-pale crown, and he reached out and caught my hand and pulled me to his side. Next I saw Darius, rather cleaner than I was used to, in a black suit. And there to his right, someone dainty, diminutive—
Mrs. Hobson, wearing so much lace that she looked like a human cobweb.
A spasm shook my limbs, and I reclaimed my hand with such force that I nearly fell. I heard the door clap shut, and spun toward the sound only to find that there was no door: bowed walls of liquid flame reached far wider and higher than the shed could possibly hold, with Margo in the middle of them. There was no more heat than bodies in a confined space usually produce, though. I had just enough presence of mind to understand that all these theatrics must be illusion; that, if Margo had closed the door a moment ago, it should be behind her. I lunged in her direction.
I pushed her aside with panicked roughness and reached through sheeting blue brilliance; felt wood planks, groped for a latch. Gus cried out, outraged and inarticulate—I suppose he’d expected this spectacle to awe me into submission, and his false glory to take command of my heart. He must have been terribly disappointed to see me scrabbling like a trapped rat instead.
I couldn’t find a handle anywhere.
“If only you’d let me teach you,” Darius observed, “you’d have a better idea of what to do now, wouldn’t you?”
“Whatever this game is, I want no part of it!” I snapped. “Let me go!”
“There is no wanting, and no choosing,” Mrs. Hobson said with girlish lightness, “in the face of what is. Catherine, my sweet, sweet girl, we are already perfectly aware of how misguided you are, and how you ignore every prompting of the spirits! We mean only to help you. Tonight we will bring you into alignment with your higher self and its most sacred affinities.”
With that vile word, affinities, I began to understand and spun at her, my back pressed against the unseen planks. Under her simpering smile I caught a gleam of vindictive malice, and knew that she was here for revenge.
“My affinities are mine, elective, free! You cannot impose—”
“My guides told me the night we met how you and Gus Farrow are one in spirit. Now they tell me the time has come to solemnize your bond.” She raised her hands in a travesty of blessing. “I affirm your connection, spirit to spirit! The truest marriage is that unseen by man, but celebrated by those beyond the veil!”
I’d thought that Mrs. Hobson was a false medium. But she was, I knew, a very real sorceress, and perhaps Darius’s presence meant she even realized it now. Perhaps he’d been teaching her.
“No,” I said. “No!” My arm flew out as if I could ward off her words, and I saw I was dressed in the same bright and restless filigree as Gus.
There was something already licking through the air, a line of power, a wiry brightness that dipped and snared—
I had never hated magic as much as I did in that moment. But it did cross my mind that Mrs. Hobson might be rather less powerful with her skull staved in—that there might still be time to undo her doings before they could draw tight. Behind the flaming mirage, I knew the shed was full of shovels, urns, a marble birdbath. It was true I had no idea of what I was doing, no control, and might very well kill all of us.
But it struck me as a fair enough outcome, if I did.
With something like a convulsion of thought I reached for my power. I knew where it lived; I was all too familiar with its irritating twiddle at the base of my brain. Find it, call it, conduct it with my fury—
Nothing. There was nothing. I clawed in myself as, minutes before, I had clawed at the wall. There was only a deadness where magic had been in me, an empty socket.
Darius guffawed.
“Call it my wedding present, pretty Catherine,” he said. “I’ll tell you, it didn’t come cheap. Oh, but if you’d only let me teach you, you’d know how to give it right back.”
Is it any wonder I renounced magic with all my strength, when it betrayed me at the crucial moment? I felt something snag me deep inside, and knew it was the power flung out by Mrs. Hobson’s words—my God, by her spell.
“Catherine, please stop struggling. You’ll see soon enough, we’ve done the only thing we could do. You keep your greatness in Gus, and he keeps his goodness in you, and I dread to think what would become of either of you without the other.” It was Margo who delivered this bit of priceless wisdom. “Come now and kiss him.”
“I will not!” I shouted, and then realized that Gus had been uncharacteristically silent throughout the proceedings. I looked and saw his face striped with tears, bright as meteors in that fierce light.
My hands spread on the wooden wall behind me. It was solid, rough, real; it felt like life.
“None of this is right,” Gus gasped. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this! Oh, Catherine, Catherine, I was sure you’d understand. Even if it was only at the last moment. I was sure you’d see how necessary it is, for you to love me. And now—”
My hand brushed something cold, metallic. I’d found the latch at last.
“She will,” Margo soothed. “Give her time, my darling boy. She will.”
Gus doubled over with the force of his sobs. Margo and Mrs. Hobson both rushed to him, babbling reassurance and sympathy. I lifted the latch.
It gave with a loud clank, and Gus raised his blazing head to gaze at me. Heartsick and desperate, star-spattered and broken. I pitied him then, and I wished he were dead.
The door fell open behind me. I must have blazed blue myself against the sudden yawn of night as I looked at the four of them. I took a backward step into the creaking grass, and felt snowflakes melting on my cheeks.
“You do all realize that this was the most pathetic nonsense, don’t you? An infantile game, nothing but playacting, as if all of you were nasty, bullying children? It meant nothing!” Gus stretched out a hand, in appeal, in denial, I couldn’t tell. “Nothing at all!” I screamed, and turned to run.
“Be patient, Gus,” Darius said behind me. “Catherine’s no fool, and she’ll see—what we’ve seen to, that’s all.”
I charged through the hedge, and I was brilliant at first as a runaway moon. But as I ran the blue shimmer that clothed me began to dim, then the sparks peeled back and drifted away and I was again a girl in a dark green cloak, alone and raging.
I knew, naturally, that I had protested too much. Mrs. Hobson had done something to me in that shed, though exactly what its consequences would be I could not tell.
Do you, my childish, my corrupt reader, wonder if it was Mrs. Hobson’s operation that strung my spirit to Gus so securely that, on dying, I could not die, but must kite along after him? Of course I have wondered myself, many times, and come to this conclusion:
Mrs. Hobson’s spell was surely a contributing factor; she stitched with strong thread, no doubt. But the fatal entanglements that force certain spirits to haunt their killers have manifold sources. They have histories twisted from countless small fibers, a sob here and a silence there.
No sorcerer, however gifted, could braid such complicated suffering in a matter of moments.