Petty Magic Read online

  “Well, I remember her,” I put in. “She had the most unremarkable face I’ve ever laid eyes on, which is in itself the only reason I would have remembered her. She was utterly nondescript.”

  “I do recall she was very studious, very accommodating,” Helena says. “Perfectly willing to work until ten o’clock at night any time Henry was on one of his big cases.”

  “How is it you remember her, Auntie Eve?”

  “Oh, your father was handling some small legal matter for me, so he asked the girl to bring the papers round to the house on a Friday afternoon. She was a strange little thing, too. Birdlike. Ill at ease.” The image of her hovering on the kitchen threshold, eager to be away, comes to mind now as readily as if Henry had only died this morning. When she turned to go I’d noticed crooked stocking seams over a pair of shapeless calves. “Shifty-eyed,” I say. “That’s what I’d call her.”

  “She wanted Daddy for herself, I suppose,” Marguerite remarks tonelessly, and Helena starts in her chair. “It is the most logical conclusion, Mother.”

  “Perhaps it is,” Helena says in a queer voice.

  “If that’s so, then it’s easy to see why she’d leap to suspicion. What was Lucretia talking about when she said the letters had proof?”

  “It isn’t proof, per se. The ‘evidence’ is all very circumstantial.” Helena pauses.

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, dear, I’m just trying to think of how best to explain it.”

  “Why don’t we hear it from the horse’s mouth? Marguerite, you read it.”

  Deborah hands Marguerite the sheaf of photocopies and she begins reading at the top of the page. “March 1, 1950. Dear Maud, I hope all is well with you and yours, and that baby Michael is fully recovered from his bout of colic. Life in Blackabbey is uneventful, though I am sorry to report that Henry is not looking well.”

  “ ‘Henry’? They were on a first-name basis?”

  “I don’t think so,” Helena replies. “She would have called him Mr. Dryden to his face, I think.”

  “Something is amiss at Harbinger House, of that I am certain.” (Here, a collective rolling of the eyes.) “Maud, I feel I must confide in you, not only to ease my own anxiety, but in case something horrible should happen—” Marguerite interrupts herself with a sigh and her sister takes the opportunity to ask, “Where is Belva Mettle now?”

  “Dead, I expect, or else Lucretia would have spoken to her and told us all about it.”

  “Dead,” I reply. “How convenient.”

  “Will I keep reading?” Reluctantly we nod. “Henry is clearly ill and yet he seems utterly unconcerned, though you would expect as much from a man, wouldn’t you? Especially one so busy and important as Henry.”

  I let out a groan. “Will the silly mouse get to the point already!”

  Marguerite is scanning ahead. “She comes to it soon enough, Auntie. I have noticed something very odd. Some mornings Henry brings his coffee in a thermos from home, and other mornings he goes down to the diner with his newspaper and drinks it at the counter. I have observed that on the afternoons when Henry has had his coffee from home, he spends more time in the toilet than could be considered normal, and when he emerges he is almost deathly pale.

  “Unbeknownst to him, I have taken the liberty of contacting a chemist in town to ask if he might test a sample of leftover coffee from Henry’s thermos. Of course, the idea that Henry’s wife could be poisoning him is shocking in the extreme. Though she is unfailingly polite and considered a pillar of feminine virtue by all who are acquainted with her, I cannot dismiss my suspicions. I am visiting the chemist’s again tomorrow evening and will relay to you everything there is to report.”

  “I take it the chemist found something in the coffee,” Morven says dolefully.

  “Every trace chemical he found is present in an ordinary cup of coffee,” Helena replies. “And yet Henry did die of it.”

  Her daughters and nieces respond with a chorus of gasps and “What!”s, and Helena holds up a weary hand. “I am getting to it. On his doctor’s recommendation, Henry drank only decaf. Now, there is a chemical called methylene chloride that is used to strip the caffeine from the coffee. It is that chemical that is toxic in larger doses, and it was an extraordinary dose of that chemical the pharmacology professor found in Henry’s thermos.”

  A long and eloquent silence follows. How can Lucretia possibly expect us to prove Helena’s innocence more than sixty years after the fact?

  We cannot ask Henry himself because he was, alas, an ordinary man. There is no earthly way to prove or disprove any of it, and yet a pall will hang over this coven until we achieve the impossible. There are unearthly means, of course, but they are too frightening to contemplate. We have not reached that level of desperation just yet.

  “There’s only one thing to be done,” I say at last. “We must discredit Belva Mettle.”

  “I’D LIKE to research a person,” I tell the teenage boy behind the desk. I might as well mention I’ve gone girlish for the afternoon. I’ve been to the digital reading room at the Blackabbey Public Library before, and I have observed who gets the most help from the all-male staff. Chicks trump grannies every time, blast them. “A resident of Blackabbey in the 1950s. How would I go about doing that?”

  “Is it, like, for genealogical purposes?”

  I glance at Morven and she flashes a grinchy grin. “It is indeed,” I reply. “My great-aunt. Her name was Belva Mettle. I’d like to look through the old microfiche of the Blackabbey Gazette for a wedding announcement and what have you, but I was wondering if there’s a search engine for the whole archive.”

  “Yup.” He rounds the desk and leads us to a row of computers. “I can show you how it’s done, if you like.” I turn to Morven and roll my eyes. He’d never have offered to help her. These cocky young blokes think we’re too feeble to understand how a computer works, that we should just stick to our typewriters and home-shopping channels. “I’ll put in your aunt’s name and we’ll see what comes up,” the spotty-skinned junior librarian is saying. “Belva Mettle, you said? B-E-L-V-A M-E-T-A-L?”

  “M-E-T-T-L-E,” I reply, and he, oblivious to my frosty tone, types her name into the search field.

  “The results will come up in reverse chronological order, as you can see,” he says, pointing to her obituary notice at the top of the screen. “Died in oh-three, is that right?”

  “Uh—yes, sounds about right.”

  “Don’t expect there’d be many other Belva Mettles around here,” he says with a wink. “Anyway, there’s a lot more here. Over thirty hits. You can search other newspaper archives too. The Times and whatever.” He points to a long list on the left side of the screen. “So just make a note of the newspaper issue dates, and then you pull the microfilm canisters out of the drawers over there. Don’t worry about putting them back. We’ll do it. Just let me know if you have any other questions,” he says, and finally leaves me be.

  I scan the search list: other people’s wedding announcements mostly, and her father’s death notice at the very bottom. “You know what would be so perfect,” Morven sighs. “If she’d done time at the Manor.” The local asylum, she means, where there are iron bars on every window and the inmates eat Jello with their fingers.

  “Let’s not get our hopes up, dear. I’d settle for a charge of perjury.” I pull the film canisters from the drawers at the end of the room and load the first spool, oldest news first, into the winder. Morven seats herself beside me and does a bit of typing. “I’ve just done a broader search on Lucretia.”

  “Good thinking. ‘Glass house,’ my took.”

  I start reading her father’s death notice. It isn’t an obituary like I’d expected—it’s a news piece. “Aha! Her father was murdered.”

  “Murdered? Really? I’m sure I would have remembered that.”

  “Well, he died mysteriously, anyway. And you wouldn’t have remembered; it was during the war. Here, read it.”

  Julius Met
tle, head botanist at the Blackabbey Botanical Society and veteran of the Great War, died yesterday at his home on Pearl Street. The Blackabbey Police are investigating the nature of his death, which the coroner believes was not accidental …

  His sixteen-year-old daughter, Belva, has been left in the care of extended family.

  The details are annoyingly vague, and as it turns out, this is the only article of note in the lot. I’ve grown fussy as a baby, tired of our mission and eager for a dram. The boy behind the desk stares at me as I wriggle out of my mohair sweater.

  But I can’t quit yet—we’ve only begun! So I do a Times search, and the only hit for “BELVA AND/OR JULIUS METTLE” just so happens to be from the spring of 1939, when Dr. Julius gave a lecture at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Jonah was married, in Manhattan, in the spring of 1939. I pull the film canister and spool it nimbly.

  I’ve seen pictures of Patricia Rudolfsen before, of course—this isn’t the first time I’ve pored over their wedding announcement—and every time I see her photograph my initial impression is reinforced. She was no great beauty—didn’t even have that je ne sais quoi I could have grudgingly admired—and when I met her in New York after the war I saw she wasn’t any prettier in person. It was her brain Jonah had fallen in love with, and I loved him all the more for that.

  I am dimly aware of someone seating himself to my immediate left, but I am too busy reading about the exotic provenance of the lace on Mrs. Jonah Rudolfsen’s wedding gown to give him a glance.

  “Research?”

  “Justin!” With shaking fingers I advance the film so he can’t see Jonah’s picture. It’s too strange, seeing his black-and-white likeness on the microfilm screen just before he appears beside me in the flesh. “Shouldn’t you be at the shop?”

  “Uncle Harry’s working today. I stopped by the house and your aunt said you were here. I just wanted to make sure we’re still on for tomorrow.”

  “We certainly are.”

  “Great!”

  “But I’m going home tonight, so shall I meet you at the museum?”

  His face falls, but he quickly recovers himself. “Sure. How about eleven o’clock? We can have lunch there.”

  “Perfect. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  It belatedly occurs to me that if my sister catches wind of our visit to the Met tomorrow then Justin and I will never see the back of her, but when I glance over she seems completely engrossed in the article on her screen. With any luck she never noticed he was here.

  “Find anything juicy?” I ask as I lean over her shoulder.

  “Perhaps. And have you come up with anything?” my sister says, arching an eyebrow.

  All right, so she saw him. The Met is humongous, though—it should be easy enough to avoid running into her. “We do have time to deal with this,” I say as I appraise the state of my manicure. “Rome didn’t fall in a day, you know.”

  “Don’t be glib, Eve! Remember, Helena’s reputation is at the stake.”

  I look at her sidewise, but she doesn’t seem to have noticed her own little slip o’ the tongue. She forwards the film to the next entry on her list, a front-page article from the Blackabbey Gazette entitled “Orphan Shocked by News of Father’s Murder.” We both lean closer to examine the accompanying photograph and gasp in unison.

  IT IS my heartfelt opinion that anyone who spells “magic” with a K ought to be nettle-whipped for a small eternity. All those tree-hugging “neo-druids” and their new-age twaddle, chirping “Blessed be!” every time somebody sneezes. If you are all that you claim to be, what need have you to advertise it?

  “Belva was a dabbler!”

  This revelation doesn’t have quite the dramatic effect I was hoping for. I glance round the dining room table to find my nieces all looking up at me expectantly. “You know what I think?”

  “No,” says Helena, “but I have an inkling we’re about to find out.”

  “I think Lucretia has it all wrong. I think she killed him. Belva. Oh, maybe she didn’t mean to. But it makes sense.”

  “How do you know she was a dabbler, Auntie?”

  “Oops, I skipped that part.” I pull out a photocopy of the microfilm so they can all see the picture. “Her father was murdered while she was still in her teens—”

  “Oh yes,” says Helena. “I remember. Poor Julius.”

  “And while they were interviewing her in her uncle’s kitchen, they took this picture.” I lay the photocopy on the table before the girls and they all lean forward to examine it. “Notice what she’s wearing round her neck.”

  It’s a hag knot on a silken cord, worn snug like a choker, and the top two buttons on her blouse are undone as if she wants to show it off. There are two reasons to use a hag knot and two diametrically opposite types who would employ it: it can be a knot tied around a peculiar sort of stone or scrap of iron, one with a natural hole in it, and worn around the neck to ward off evil intentions; or it can be worn by one who has evil intentions—maleficium—and wants to protect them against benevolent counter-magic. (Dabblers have no inherent powers, being ordinary women, and they tend to think they can compensate by stirring up bad juju on anybody they don’t like.)

  The thing about her neck is useless, of course, and this photograph was taken years before she could have fallen in love with Henry Dryden. But the nature of the knot is unmistakable, and it is unmistakable proof of her dabbling. To a keener pair of eyes the girl in that black-and-white photograph is the classic schoolgirl obsessive, one who would readily resort to meddling in things she knows nothing about, heedless of all consequence.

  “Well,” Helena sighs, “it’s something, anyway. We’ll bring it up at the meeting.”

  The Devil’s Snuff

  15.

  Paris, 1942–1943

  THE CATACOMBS of Paris were an ideal meeting place for the Resistance. New recruits were spooked by all the bones in the walls, but the old guard greeted the leering skulls as friends, gave them nicknames, and even pretended to offer them a fag or a bite of dinner. You’d never get through this without a bit of levity once in a while.

  The Ossuaire Municipal connected every warren in Paris, and of course the only truly safe houses were those torn down years before. Now, I know what you’re thinking: if a warren is a safe haven, why couldn’t you gals hide the whole so-called “civilized” world in all your old tenements and opera houses to wait out the war?

  Here’s the rub: if you let too many ordinary people into a warren, it starts losing its magic. How many is too many? Nobody knows for sure, but it seems you near the tipping point when the number of ordinary visitors nears that of the native population. Words disappear from books, beldames start suffering from arthritis and myopia, cats go dying in the streets. A warren stripped of its magic is dead space, like when you ride the loo flue to a place that’s just been bombed, and soon it isn’t only the cats. Believe me, you’d be better off living in central London in the heat of the Blitz.

  Another problem with hiding folks in the warrens was the possibility, in Paris at least, that one might become hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of passageways. Say a man lost his way. If he lit a match he’d come face to face with a leering skull (or fifty), and it would be all he could do to keep his wits about him. These chambers and passageways were only a matter of meters from the streets and lampposts and bistros of ordinary Paris, yet he wouldn’t know it in this perfect silence, the darkness broken only by the hissing of the match about to burn his thumb and forefinger. One time the maquisards found a soldier who’d somehow wandered out of a Nazi bunker in the Sixth Arrondissement and apparently died of fright on the cold stone floor. Best way to go, all things considered.

  Of course, it wasn’t always silent down there. You could often hear footsteps, muttered conversations in adjacent corridors, the rustling of maps, and the squeaking and scurrying of rodents—and, on occasion, the unmistakable sounds of la petite mort.

  That said, I spent most of my time in Paris aboveground.
After we returned to London for the last phase of training, Jonah himself briefed me on our mission. It was common knowledge, he said, that a prominent SS officer frequented a certain brothel on the Rue de Suffren. This man had knowledge of the locations of at least half a dozen Kuhlmann chemical plants owned by Vichy industrialists. It was also well known that this SS officer’s taste in whores was far more eclectic than the average customer’s, and so he would almost certainly be eager to engage a new arrival. The SOE agent would pose as a prostitute, working in cooperation with those femmes de nuit who were members of the Resistance. She would loosen his lips using one of that newly developed arsenal of truth drugs in order to discover the locations of the plants. The agent would probably not be required to play the role to its consummation, but she should be prepared for it nevertheless.

  And she would be accompanied by another agent from SOE, Monsieur Robbins, who would pose as a clerk in the Australian embassy—which maintained diplomatic relations with both the Vichy government and the Free French—and transmit those coordinates back to London via wireless telegraph, the end result being the obliteration of each of the chemical plants by the RAF. Jonah knew I could do it without any need for “truth drugs” or other machinations, and he’d convinced the head of F-Section that I was the girl for the job.

  Here is how it went—for we carried it out plenty of times, on nearly every German officer who passed through the doors of that brothel, and each time was more or less like the first:

  He was rather young for his rank, with typical Teutonic good looks. Normally those blandly handsome men would blend into the wallpaper, so this would take a fair degree of acting on my part. “Is it true Hitler eats no meat?” I asked with a casual air.

  I had draped myself over the bed in a black silk negligee and little else; he was unbuttoning his shirt and taking care to hang it neatly from a hook behind the door. “So they say.”

  “No meat at all? What kind of a man is that?”

  “It is not wise to talk so of the Führer, Fraulein.”