Petty Magic Page 9

  LATE THAT night I crept out of the dormitory and made my way out of the camp. There was a guard on duty at the entrance, but I briefly turned myself into something small enough to scurry under the gate. I turned onto the road for Mallaig village and walked a ways, until I found the symbol on my napkin etched into an old stone road marker. A trail through the woods was just visible in the moonlight.

  I heard a murmur of female voices through the trees, but when I reached the clearing I found the only creatures in the wood were the birds convening in the branches above. I said a few words and then I flew up to meet them.

  Mrs. Dowel introduced me to all her friends from the Mallaig coven, some of whom were also employed at the SOE camp. They were elderly beldames, most of them even older than I am now. Their daughters had all gone off to London to volunteer, and they were eager to hear whatever news I could offer them. And I, in turn, was curious as to how they were keeping themselves busy. Did they pass along any of their oomph to those young women cracking codes and ferreting out Nazi spies down in the capital?

  The birds traded glances, so that it was obvious they were trying to decide if they should let me in on a secret. “No, nothing like that,” said one of them rather diffidently. “They manage quite well on their own.”

  Just then another corbie alighted on a branch beside me. Dumb as it was, the bird soon realized its mistake and flew away again. “Out with it, then,” I said.

  Turned out they were the guardians of a huge trove of artworks, masterpieces rescued from museums in all the occupied nations of Europe. Michelangelos, Titians, Rembrandts, you name it, all of it safely kept in the attic of the old Mallaig town hall, which had been torn down in 1892. “And we brought it all through the flue!” said Mrs. Pitch with obvious pride.

  Most of their gossip was art related. “Well, my Lily’s in Berlin,” said Mrs. Dowel, “and she told me they’ve taken all the statues down off the cathedral dome and dumped them in the river! Can you imagine? St. Peter and all the angels and cherubs, covered in muck!”

  “They’re safer at the bottom of the river,” said Mrs. Sledge.

  “Couldn’t your daughter have hid them herself, in one of the warrens?” I asked.

  “My Lily has much more important things to do. St. Peter is on his own,” Mrs. Dowel sniffed.

  Mrs. Sledge turned to me. “If you or any of your friends should ever come upon an important piece, you will send it here, won’t you?”

  By the time the sky was growing pink in the east, I felt as if I’d known these ladies all my life, as if my coven and theirs were one and the same. For better and for worse, the world is a great deal smaller than we believe it.

  I made it back to the SOE compound before dawn broke, flying over the guard shack and alighting on a windowsill outside the dormitory. I spotted no one about before I made myself human again, but as I went to open the window I heard a twig snap behind me.

  I turned round, my heart in my throat, but relaxed when I saw it was Major Robbins. The look on his face was inscrutable as he gripped me by the elbow. “They say the rook is the devil’s messenger,” he said under his breath. “Or is it the magpie?”

  “The corbie, I think.”

  I stood there staring at him for what felt like a very long time. “Come on, then,” he said at last. He still had a firm hold on my elbow. “We’ll go back to my room.”

  I TOLD HIM everything. I told him I was born the day the American Civil War broke out, and I told him I would live as long as a bow-head whale, maybe longer if I was lucky. And I told him the story of Goody Harbinger, how legend said she’d outwitted the devil by switching his Book of Lost Souls for her own household ledger, but that she’d eventually succumbed to the hysteria that had claimed so many more lives up north in Massachusetts. And I told him how her nine-year-old daughter was found on a ship bound for Liverpool though her name wasn’t anywhere on the passenger manifest.

  He listened as I went on and on for what felt like hours, his face impassive. I couldn’t even imagine what he might think of me now—after all, the only man I’d ever told was Neverino.

  Eventually I stopped for breath, and there was only a brief pause before he said, “If Goody Harbinger was so powerful, why couldn’t she have saved herself as well as her daughter?”

  “What?”

  “Surely she could have, if—”

  “You mean … you believe me?”

  “I saw you turn yourself from a bird, didn’t I?”

  We talked so long we wound up missing breakfast. I told him the story of Adam and Lilith, and he said from that moment on he would always think of me as the Wandering Jewess. And I told him about the beneficium pledge.

  “Recite it for me,” he said.

  “Recite it for you?”

  “Go on. I want to hear it.”

  I took a deep breath. “By magic I shall do no harm,” I said, “except in defense of myself or another. I shall not use my abilities for mercenary ends. I shall always practice discretion and make every effort not to reveal my true nature to persons ill equipped to understand. I shall spend the prime of my life in the service of humankind, and upon my retirement I shall never engage in any mischief of a malicious nature. Furthermore, I shall always encourage the same principles in my fellows. I make this vow upon the integrity of my ancestors and by the Eternal Power to whom I owe my life and ability.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” he said at last. “It all makes sense now. Everybody else was dead tired at the end of that trek on the first day—as anybody would be—but not you. You had a rosy glow all the while, as if you were only out for a stroll. I knew you were thirty-eight—according to your birth certificate, at any rate—and yet you’re no more than a girl. Your perfect aim, every time. Your lightning reflexes.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting when I sat up to wait for you tonight,” he went on, shaking his head. “But it certainly wasn’t this.”

  THE AIR between us crackled with electricity all the next day. That’s not to say I was distracted; on the contrary, my aim was sharper than ever. That night I made another confession, quite an embarrassing one this time—I’d never been on a bicycle—and he went off straightaway and found an old three-speeder rusting in a shed somewhere on the compound. He didn’t once laugh at me, bless his heart, and I picked it up in a matter of minutes.

  Over the next fortnight we would go for long walks in the wee hours. We talked of politics and military strategies, Stalin’s film reviews and Churchill’s bathing habits. Jonah said the prime minister conducted much of his business in bed, in an oriental dressing gown. I told him I’d heard Hitler consulted astrologers and that he was conducting a mad scavenger hunt across Europe for any artifact said to have prophetic power. After the Anschluss he’d wasted no time filching the Lance of Longinus, the spear that pierced the side of Christ to make sure he was dead. He who holds this shall rule the world and all that sort of rot. It was hard to get a good night’s rest when the fate of the world was in the hands of a first-class lunatic.

  And I learned far more about Jonah than I was meant to. He told me he had grown up in Finchley, received his undergraduate degree at Oxford, moved to New York to attend law school at Columbia, and after several years working at one of the big firms he’d come back to London to join SOE. Sometimes he grew very quiet, and I wondered what he had been like before his imprisonment at Fresnes.

  He also told me that he had requested my assignment to his next mission to Paris. There was nobody else, he said, who was so perfectly suited to the task, and as he spoke a thrill went all through me.

  We were accomplices now, and though we did a good job of behaving as if nothing had changed, I was a bit worried that the grumblings of the other female recruits would grow even louder. Yet the complaints seemed to have ceased suddenly; there was no whispering at all that Major Robbins had found himself a pet. The other girls treated me as warily as ever, but I made myself especially friendly and solicitous.

  One night,
a few days before the end of the Mallaig training, we arranged for another one of our midnight tramps; but all the physical exertion from dawn to dusk was finally catching up with me, and I slept too soundly. The next morning Robbins sidled up to me in the canteen queue and gave me a look. “I missed you last night,” he murmured as he palmed an apple.

  “You ought to have woken me up!”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. You sleep like the dead.”

  But I kept my eyes open on our last night. He invited me back to his room after our walk for a “nightcap”—a swig out of his flask, which of course he could have offered me just as easily while we were out on the moor. I took a pull and relaxed as the whisky set my throat alight. As I put the cap back on the flask it occurred to me that he couldn’t bring it where we were going—it was a telltale sign of his Englishness.

  Then I caught sight of the monogram on the side. I noticed his initials, JAR, but it scarcely occurred to me to feel excited that I now had a clue to his real name. Come to think of it, this flask looked suspiciously like a wedding present.

  He had chosen that very moment to rest his hand on my knee, but I slithered out from under it and seated myself on the far end of the bed. “Hold up a minute. Are you married?” He hesitated, and I heaved a sigh. “Just my luck.”

  He moved toward me and took my hand in his. “I’m not married,” he said. “What I mean is, I won’t be for much longer.”

  “You’re getting a divorce?”

  He nodded. “She’s in New York—in the Chairborne. We’d been heading south long before we got involved in all this. The writing was on the wall, as they say.”

  I was relieved to hear this, but something else was nagging at me now. I had so seldom known jealousy that when it did happen I was all the more affected by it. I wondered what her name was; I wondered if she’d found another man in New York and if they were at this very moment engaged in the same conversation. Then I wanted to laugh out loud at the absurdity of all this, falling in love with a man I only knew by a phony name.

  He might have been reading my thoughts. “What’s your real name, Alice?”

  I looked at him sidewise. “Am I allowed to tell you?” But of all the secrets I’d given up to him, my name was surely the least significant.

  “You’re not allowed to tell Robbins,” he replied. “But Jonah Rudolfsen wants very much to know.”

  “Jonah,” I said softly. “I like it. ‘Jonah.’ It suits you.”

  “Well, that’s lucky.” He laughed. “I’m sure yours suits you just as well, whatever it is.”

  “You want to know that badly?”

  “I do.” He looked at me, almost painfully earnest. “I can’t make love to you without it, now, can I?”

  JONAH STILL counsels me from the grave. Life is nothing without adventure, he used to say, and we must meet fate halfway or else our souls will wither. That said, there was no sense worrying about what might have been.

  I still recall all the more trivial things he said, too—“The devil wears a toothbrush moustache,” to which I replied that even Satan wasn’t half so despicable as Adolf Hitler; and “You must always eat well, my darling. To abstain from good meat and wine is to squander your God-given taste buds.” Not that we had all that much of either given the rationing, but when the food was foul he’d tell me about the grand old bistros in London and Paris we’d visit once the war was over.

  That evening we took the Caledonian Sleeper back to London, and alack, we were obliged to sleep separately in our assigned quarters. All the recruits retired almost as soon as the train was moving—they wore us out, so they did—but I was far too excited to sleep. I had to see Jonah. I hoped I would see plenty of him in the weeks ahead—there were two phases of training left—but it might be a long time before we could be alone again.

  So I came bounding into the dining car looking for him. When I clapped eyes on him, back to the door in a booth at the far end of the car, it was difficult to pretend that nothing had happened the previous night. The waiter was watching me.

  I sauntered up to his booth and he invited me to sit, and the knowing glance passed in a blink. The newspaper in front of him was two days old, but the pages were still crisp. He’d been looking out the window.

  And what a view it was: a valley yawned beneath the glass, and on the surrounding hills, green though rocky, sheep grazed upon vertical angles in the twilight. Wisps of smoke rose from cottages scattered along the valley floor, and beyond the brooding peaks in the distance the clouds were promising rain and plenty of it. I cracked the window and breathed in the sweet musk of peat smoke.

  I glanced at Jonah, who was still gazing out at this wild and lonely scene, and he wore an expression to match it. He really did look like a knight—my melancholy knight.

  The waiter brought us a pot of coffee and a plate of digestive biscuits, and once he and his cart with the squeaky wheels were at a safe distance I asked, “Why the long face?”

  “The view,” he said. “It reminds me of …”

  I stirred plenty of milk and sugar into my cup as I waited for him to go on. “Of?”

  “Connemara.” He took a sip of coffee—he always drank it black—and when he paused then I knew all at once what this was about.

  “Your honeymoon, was it?”

  He nodded, relief plain on his face. “How did you know?”

  I gave him a look.

  “You couldn’t ride a train through them, but Ireland has landscapes very much like this one. Tell me: would you call it bleak, or rather magnificent?”

  “I suppose it depends on your mood.”

  He smiled then, and the look of melancholy vanished for the moment. “Exactly,” he said as a disembodied hand caressed my knee.

  WHEN WE got back to London—and by London, I mean an undisclosed location some distance outside it—I discovered I was scheduled for two weeks of parachute training. I’d never been on an airplane before, only a zeppelin for novelty’s sake, and I didn’t see why I needed to waste any time on it when I could simply grow a pair of wings.

  “Well, of course.” Jonah gave me a wry look. “How did you think you were going to get there?” He paused. “Oh, I see.” But there was no way I could get out of it without arousing considerable suspicion; couldn’t very well explain to the F-Section leader why I didn’t need it.

  After parachute training came “finishing school,” and there were heaps of forms to be filled out in triplicate. I even had to make out a will, would you believe it. In the event of my death, I hereby appoint as beneficiary of any payments due me by the Special Operations Executive the following person: Miss Morven Harbinger of Blackabbey, New Jersey, USA. We women recruits were also given commissions in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the idea being that we’d be allowed the rights of a soldier in the event we were captured. This last phase of training was interminable: no firearms, no long tramps across the moor, just hours and hours of “classroom instruction.”

  There were endless hypotheticals. What if you’re being tailed—where do you go, and how do you alert your comrades without giving them away? How do you react when you’re walking down the street and a car pulls up alongside you and two men jump out? How can you dispose of incriminating evidence without attracting your captors’ notice? It is rather infuriating, you know, to be instructed repeatedly in matters of which you have shown blindfolded mastery since you were a mere babe. And then we were roused in the middle of the night by someone shaking us by the shoulder shouting, “What is your name? Where are you from? What is the newspaper in your town?” All that sort of thing.

  I hadn’t laid eyes on Jonah for the better part of a week, and as I say, the other “ladies” on the course were already working their cloaks and daggers. I was aching with anxiety to be up and away already.

  At last I received a message that I should report immediately to room 217 at House Q, a redbrick building at the far end of the compound. I knocked on a door ma
rked KING’S ROYAL RIFLE CORPS—to which some morbid trickster had added an “e” in red grease pencil—and found Jonah sitting at a desk poring over an Ordnance Survey map. A woman of forty or so poised over an open filing cabinet introduced herself as our liaison officer and invited me to sit down while Jonah briefed me on the details of the mission to Paris. Then the liaison officer presented me with papers and an identity card from the Cover and Documentation office, as well as a plain wool suit and sturdy shoes, all French issue.

  “Full moon,” Jonah said as he folded up the map and tucked it in a hidden pocket in the open suitcase laid out before him. “We leave tonight.”

  Covention

  13.

  Dame, Dame, the Watch is set:

  Quickly come, we all are met.

  From the Lakes, and from the Fens,

  From the Rocks, and from the Dens,

  From the Woods, and from the Caves,

  From the Church-yards, from the Graves,

  From the Dungeon, from the Tree

  That they die on, here are we.

  —Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens

  IT’S MID-DECEMBER now and cold as a dead man’s schlong. The mews is decked in evergreen boughs and crowded with shoppers clutching delivery receipts and bags of gift-wrapped tchotchkes. The blackboard easel outside Mira’s café advertises eight-dollar mugs of mulled wine and fortified cocoa, and despite the windchill the queue is out the door. I stand at the window at Fawkes and Ibis, watching Harry putter around behind the counter, wanting to go in and ask after Justin but afraid of what he might tell me. When Harry glances up from his ledger, he notices a dark-haired girl in a fur-collared coat poring over his window display. I’ve taken care of myself, you see, in case he’s come back.