The mayor of the village is working in the kitchen when Willem arrives home. Willem sees him through the window and girds himself to be polite and respectful. The mayor is a friend of his mother.
Monsieur Claude often comes around when Willem is at school, or picking up supplies in Waterloo. Sometimes the mayor helps Willem’s mother with heavy chores, but too often he comes around when there is no work that needs doing.
Monsieur Claude is a handsome, gray-haired gentleman in his fifties. He is married and owns nearly half the village. He is well liked and generous to those who cannot afford their rent. He is also, from what Willem can see, a capable mayor, a position that involves being postmaster, banker, justice of the peace, and village administrator.
Willem feels that he understands why his mother is “friends” with Monsieur Claude. She is still in her thirties, and her husband—Willem’s father—has been dead for more than three years. She cannot wear a mourning coat for the rest of her life.
But of all the men in the village to be friends with, he wishes she had picked anyone other than Monsieur Claude. There is something in his mother’s eyes that he doesn’t like, after Monsieur Claude has visited. A certain look on her face. It is as though she has just scratched an insect bite and it has stopped itching, but has started to bleed.
Whenever Willem delivers bread to the mayor’s house, the mayor’s wife, Madame Claude, a stout, stern woman who smells strongly of rosewater, narrows her eyes, raises her nose in the air, and overpays for the bread. It is her way of showing her superiority.
Willem always accepts the coins graciously, but he thinks his mother is worth more than being the mayor’s mistress.
Monsieur Claude smiles at him through the window as he walks past the kitchen. Willem returns the smile but stones are gathering in his stomach. Having the mayor in the house complicates things. His mother will not approve of Willem, or the cousins, venturing into the forest to seek a raptor’s nest. Even if they do not find a raptor, it will be dangerous. There are wolves, bears, and snakes in the forest. Willem and his mother will argue, which will be difficult enough without having the audience of an outsider.
Monsieur Claude is alone in the kitchen.
“She is upstairs,” he says. He is mixing dough in a large bowl with a wooden paddle. That is usually Willem’s job, and although it is hard, physical work that he hates, he resents Monsieur Claude for doing it in his place.
Willem throws the bread basket in the corner as his pet microsaurus, Pieter, darts out from beneath a chair and chatters under his feet. The creature is about the size of a ferret or a large rat. His front legs are smaller than his rear, and he uses them as arms, only walking on them if he is foraging. His snout is short and beak-like, and his skin is banded with brown and green.
Willem bounds up the stairs two at a time and goes straight to his mother’s bedroom, but she is not there. With a sinking feeling he creeps toward his own room, the microsaurus underfoot. His mother is sitting on his bed, unmoving and unspeaking, but he can sense her anger from the rigid way she holds her head. Then he sees the open door to his closet.
* * *
Willem’s mother is a French-speaking Walloon, from Wallonia in the Southern Netherlands. His father was from Flanders, to the north. He was a magician, a conjurer of some reputation, who performed in the royal courts of Europe and was a favorite of Napoléon Bonaparte, the French emperor. But during one engagement at the Tuileries Palace in Paris, he did something to incur the emperor’s displeasure. What it was, Willem does not know. It was never discussed. But such was the nature of the emperor that his displeasure quickly turned to wrath and Willem’s father fled Paris. His disappearance from the palace and escape to Wallonia was perhaps his greatest conjuring trick of all.
It is said that Napoléon smashed crystal goblets and hurled crockery through palace windows when he heard of the magician’s flight.
The family was forced into hiding. Willem’s mother was the daughter of a baker and that had lent them their disguise. His father shaved off his beard, grew his hair in the Walloon style, and under his wife’s tutelage the Great Geerts became Monsieur Verheyen, the baker.
The costumes and equipment and other magic trickery were sealed into chests and never spoken of, lest someone in the village should discover the true identity of the simple baker and his well-spoken but humble wife.
For a Flemish family, hiding in Wallonia was a masterpiece of misdirection. For years the emperor’s men scoured Flanders, never suspecting that their quarry was hiding in French-speaking Wallonia, almost within sight of the French border.
The choice of village was clever for other reasons too. It lay on the edge of the Sonian Forest, and on the other side of the forest was the city of Brussels. Should they ever be discovered, they could steal away through the trees of the forest and lose themselves again in the bustling streets of the city.
It was a brilliant deception from a master magician.
For six years they lived peacefully in the village, hoping that the time would come when the shadow of the emperor no longer hovered over them.
And that day drew closer. Slowly Napoléon’s empire crumbled. Then came his final defeat and exile to the island of Elba.
But Willem’s father did not live to see that. Not even a master magician was a match for the dangerous beasts that roamed the Sonian Forest. At the funeral, his coffin had to be weighted with river stones. Willem was told there was barely enough left of the body to fill a hatbox.
Although hidden from the world, his father’s chests were a constant source of mystery and wonderment to young Willem.
Many times he sat and stared at them, his mind hardly daring to imagine what magic and treasures lay inside. After the death of his father, he opened them often, dressing himself in cloaks that were far too large for him, wondering at the secrets of the hats and the pouches. Then he found the letter. It had fallen down inside one of the chests and only a corner of the paper protruded from behind a sack of potions. Perhaps it had originally been placed on top.
To my son.
It was a letter written in case the father was no longer around when the boy was grown to a man.
The letter outlined the boy’s inheritance. The magic contained in the boxes. Willem read it with breathless excitement. It was many pages long and detailed the ways of the magician: the Glorpy, the French Drop, and even the Guillotine. It explained the powders and the potions, how to use them, how to make them. And the secrets of the grand illusions.
Willem kept the letter from his mother. She would not approve. But in quiet times, when she was out, or asleep, he taught himself the secrets of the chests. He learned the ways of the magician. But the tricks he performed were only for himself.
* * *
“Willem.”
“Mother.”
“What is this?”
“My illusions. I will perform them at the fête.”
The apparatuses and powders for those tricks now lie on the floor in front of him, removed from his closet, where he had hidden them.
“You will not,” she says. She unwinds her fingers from the silver chain at her neck and places her hands flat on the bed beside her.
“It is the spring festival, Mother!”
“Your father forbade it.”
“Monsieur Claude promised he would not tell you of this,” Willem says with a contemptuous glance down toward the kitchen.
“Monsieur Claude knew of this?” His mother’s eyes narrow to slits.
So the mayor has at least kept Willem’s secret.
“Then how…?” Willem asks.
“Jean’s mother told me you were to perform at the fête,” his mother says. “You do not sing, you do not dance, you do not pipe or fiddle, and you said nothing of this to me. It was not difficult to deduce what your performance would be.”
Willem shrugs.
“She said you are to be the final act,” she says.
“Jean’s mouth works harder than his brain,” Willem says.
“Have you forgotten your father’s rules?” his mother asks. Her voice rises. “Have you so soon forgotten your father?”
Willem takes a deep breath.
“I have not forgotten him, Mother, nor will I ever. But he is no longer here to make such rules. I am fifteen. I am old enough to make rules for myself.”
“If you really were old enough, you would understand the need for prudence.”
He reaches out and touches a finger to her lips. “You speak of prudence, so hush, lest your voice carry to the man in our kitchen.”
The mention of the mayor makes her angrier. She shakes his finger away, and her voice rises further.
“A child must obey his mother,” she says.
Willem keeps his tone and his volume low and even. “This is true. But I am no longer a child. You are my mother, and I love and respect you. But in return, you must respect that I am now grown. I no longer wish to cower and hide like a rat in a hedgerow.”
She looks away, and after a moment her voice softens.
“You cannot bring him back by becoming him,” she says.
It hurts him that she would say this. That she would even think that is the reason for his actions.
“I am not a fool,” he says.
“Then don’t act like one,” she says. “The rules are to protect you, not to punish you.”
“I am a man. I can protect myself.”
There is a moment of silence, but it is a calm before a storm.
She stands and raises her hands in the air. “A man? You are a barely formed boy, and you have no comprehension of the powers that will array against you. You would undo us both with your childish desire for attention.”
Pieter, the microsaurus, now runs behind Willem, alarmed at the outburst. He peers at her from between Willem’s legs.
“We hide from the little emperor, but where is he now?” Willem asks. “A prisoner on a remote island.”
“The man yet lives. When he no longer draws breath, then we may emerge from our hole in the world.”
“I am grateful for your advice, Mother, but I will make my own decisions,” Willem says, folding his arms.
“I forbid it,” she says.
“That is no longer your right,” he says. “I am grown.” He shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath. “But more than that, I am a magician. It is in my blood and my blood burns for it. I will put on a show at the fête, and you shall say no more about it.”
She looks strangely at him, shocked by this sudden display of will. Perhaps, he thinks, she sees his father in him.
She begins to cry, a woman’s trick to get her way when reason and logic have prevailed. Even so it softens him, and he is on the verge of relenting.
But a steely resolution comes over him. This is his fate, his future. Will he remain a simple baker all his life? No! Fate has great things in store for him, he knows it, and they do not involve hauling sacks of flour and delivering baguettes.
He will not be swayed by the tears of a woman.
He collects a leather satchel from the floor and lifts a silk pouch off the headboard of his bed. “Come, Pieter,” he says, and the tiny saur jumps up onto the bed, then scampers up his arm onto his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“I go where I want and do as I wish,” he says. “And I will be back when I am ready.”
He leaves her crying and goes calmly down the stairs, taking a baguette from the warming tray and walking out of the house without a word to his mother’s lover.
It only occurs to him much later that maybe he has misunderstood the tears.