“Bet you didn’t know we have our own resident wise woman,” she said. “Seriously. It’s kind of eerie the way Bettina can pick up on stuff no one else notices. And she makes these charms that really work.”
“Urn, no offense,” Ellie said, “but I don’t really buy into that kind of thing.”
“You can be a friend of Jilly’s and say that?”
“I think Jilly has enough belief for the both of us and then some.”
Chantal smiled. “Yes. But don’t you want to believe?”
“Not really.”
“We’ll just have to win her over,” Chantal said to Bettina.
The dark-haired woman shook her head. “The spirits do not require anyone’s belief to exist. They were there at the beginning of the world and they will still be here, long after we are gone. Whether or not we believe in them is irrelevant.”
“She can be way more fun than this,” Chantal assured Ellie.
The twinkle in her eye made it plain she was teasing, but Bettina seemed to take it seriously.
“Me pasa,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was being rude.”
“No,” Ellie told her. “I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
“Oh, please,” Chantal said. “Enough with the ‘I’m sorrys’ already. The one of you’s worse than the other.”
Ellie and Bettina exchanged self-conscious smiles.
I like her, Ellie thought, talk of spirits and magic notwithstanding. And if she could put up with the way Jilly and Donal carried on about the strange and mysterious at times, then she could do it with Bettina as well.
She turned to Chantal and said, “Maybe we should go find Nuala and see where Kellygnow stands on shared studios.”
“Are you certain this is what you want?” Nuala asked Ellie when they caught up with her in an upstairs hallway.
Ellie thought it was a little odd that the housekeeper seemed to be making a point of only asking her, but she nodded. Nuala regarded her for a long moment, as though giving Ellie one more chance to reconsider.
“Very well,” she said. “I will speak to the executors about it. I’m sure they’ll agree when they learn this is your wish.”
“And in the meantime… ?” Ellie asked.
“Enjoy each other’s company,” Nuala told her.
They waited until they were around a corner and out of Nuala’s sight before giving each other high-fives, smiling and laughing like a trio of schoolgirls on an unexpected holiday. Ellie didn’t know why she was so giddy. Part of it was simple relief that she wasn’t going to be responsible for Chantal’s getting sent away. But mostly it was the unexpectedness of making new friends in a place where she hadn’t really anticipated she’d fit in at all. Truth was, she’d half-expected to be found out as a fraud and turned away from the front door before she’d even gotten a chance to step inside. Because, really. The caliber of artists who’d been in residence here was way out of her league.
“I am so happy,” Bettina said, linking arms with them as they continued down the hall. “My old friend and my new both get to stay.”
“Actually,” Chantal told Ellie, “it’s just that she’s really vain and didn’t want me out of here until I finished the bust of her that I’m working on.”
Bettina blushed, but she smiled when Ellie laughed.
For once, Ellie thought, things were going her way.
When they reached the stairs, they went down single-file. Halfway down, Ellie paused at a side window. She’d been distracted at first by a group of figures on the lawn, a group of men, Natives, she guessed from their dark skin and black braided hair, standing in a loose circle, smoking and looking up at the house—right at her, it felt like. Then she realized that they were only wearing thin white shirts and broadcloth suits, some of them not even bothering with their jackets. She leaned closer to the window. And standing barefoot in the snow.
“What is it?” Chantal asked from a few steps lower down.
“There’s these guys out there,” Ellie replied. “It’s like they think it’s summer.”
When Chantal and Bettina joined her at the window, the sculptor gave Ellie an odd look.
“What guys?” she said.
“Ha, ha.”
“No, seriously,” Chantal told her. “I don’t see anything except for an empty lawn, covered in snow.”
Ellie turned to look at her and was shocked to realize that the other woman wasn’t simply teasing her.
“Chantal can’t see them,” Bettina said.
Ellie slowly turned to face her. “What do you mean?”
“Dark-haired, dark-skinned men,” Bettina said. “Dressed in dark suits and white shirts. Barefoot. Smoking. Staring up at us.”
Ellie nodded along with the description. “Exactly.”
“I don’t see anything,” Chantal repeated.
“Your sight isn’t strong enough,” Bettina said.
Ellie shook her head. “Hang on here. Are you trying to tell me—”
“They stand in la epoca del mito,” Bettina told her. “The spiritworld. That is why you can see them and Chantal can’t.”
“No. That isn’t possible.”
“Everyone carries magic in them,” Bettina said. “But to be able to use it, one must be either trained in its use, or have a high natural ability.”
“But… I’ve never seen things before. Things that aren’t there, I mean.”
Except they were. Dark eyes watching her from below, cigarette smoke wreathing about their heads.
“Then something has woken it in you,” Bettina said.
“Tell me you’re just putting me on,” Ellie said to Chantal. “This is all some kind of initiation prank, right?”
Chantal continued to stare out the window, but she shook her head.
“I swear to you,” she said. “I don’t see anything. I wish I did.”
Ellie turned away from the window and leaned against the wall. That eerie sensation of something moving up her spine had returned and her chest was tight, as though her bones were shrinking.
“I don’t want this,” she said.
Bettina laid a steadying hand on her arm. “Unless you specifically seek it out, the spiritworld makes those choices for you. It’s better to accept its interest in you as best you can, for fighting it only adds to the stress you feel. Come,” she added. “Let’s go back to the studio. I’ll make you a tea that will calm you down.”
“More…” Ellie had to clear her throat. “More magic?” Bettina shook her head. “No. A simple herbal remedy, nothing more.”
“Okay,” Ellie said and let the smaller woman lead her away. “Can you make me one that’ll let me see this stuff?” Chantal asked from behind them.
Ellie didn’t know if Bettina had put some enchantment on the herbs and the boiling water she used to make her tea, or if it was simply the natural properties of the ingredients, but the tea did calm her down. The soothing liquid couldn’t erase the memory of what she had seen, nor the unfamiliar sensations it had woken in her—a kind of floating in her nerve ends, a sharpening of her vision, a clarity in her thinking. But it laid a thin gauze between the immediacy of the idea of magic, the anxiety it had woken in her, and her normal self.
After a while she was actually able to take her suitcase up to her room and unpack, then rejoin the other women in the studio. There she set up her side of the studio and worked on some preliminary sketches for Musgrave Wood’s mask while Bettina sat for Chantal on the other side of the room.
She was a little jealous of Chantal having Bettina as a model and kept glancing in their direction. It wasn’t simply that Bettina was so beautiful, though she certainly was. No wonder Donal had been smitten with her. But there was more to her than that. She had great character in her still-youthful features and something else as well. Some undefinable charisma that made it impossible to not want to make a rendering of her.