Lucy looked at the hill, green and bright. A butterfly hovered above it, not ten feet from where she sat. “A hill. No more.”
“It is more, but also less. That is a story for another time, I think.”
Lucy thought of what she had seen at the mill, what she thought she had seen in her uncle’s house. “You don’t mean to suggest there are actual creatures, do you?”
“In the mound? No.”
“Because I saw something,” Lucy continued. “I feel so foolish even mentioning this, but you seem to believe in these things, and I have told no one else. At Mr. Olson’s mill, there were workers chanting the same strange words Lord Byron spoke. And there were creatures, dozens of them, made of shadow. And there was a man, a strange man, and he seemed made of shadow too. I sound mad. I know I do, and yet I saw all these things.”
Miss Crawford rose to her feet. She walked away from Lucy and then back again. Her fingers moved, as though adding sums, and then she wiped her hands on her skirts. “You have already seen so much, and you have no training.” She sat down again. “Can it be that you have truly never studied any sort of music?”
“I have read Mr. Francis Barrett’s book, The Magus,” Lucy said, referring to a popular book that had been published perhaps ten years earlier. After the unpleasant incident with Mrs. Quince, Lucy had sent off to London for a copy, spending money she could hardly afford. She had believed in a moment of weakness that if she could master magic, she would have a friend once more. It had been a silly notion.
Miss Crawford appeared amused. “Have you, now? All of it?”
“Some of it.” Lucy felt her cheeks grow warm.
Miss Crawford did not respond to her embarrassment. She was, on a sudden, quite businesslike. “Have you attempted to make any of the talismans therein, or to cast any spells?”
She shook her head. “It all felt silly. Like I would be playing childish games.”
Miss Crawford nodded. “And you would have been. Barrett’s is a popular book written for a general readership. His spells are fabricated or extracted from tawdry volumes meant for the ignorant. And such books are always obsessed with love magic, which you must never practice.”
“I thought that was nearly the whole of what cunning women do,” said Lucy. “Make this one fall in love with that one.”
“Those spells are for dabblers with little skill. For someone with talent, it is a vile thing to make someone believe he feels what he does not, to induce him to make commitments that stand even after the effects of the magic fade. I cannot tell you how many unhappy matches, how many ruined hopes and lives, are the result of cunning folk playing with love magic.”
Lucy nodded, though she might as well be promising not to fly too close to the sun with her waxen wings.
“If there is anything of value in Barrett,” Miss Crawford continued, “it is cribbed from other writers, principally Agrippa. I daresay these are the sections you chose not to read.”
“But I have read of Agrippa. My father had me read some histories of his life. I found them extraordinarily dull, but my father thought him important.”
Miss Crawford’s expression remained neutral. “Indeed he is. But you will have to know more than his biography. You will have to read and understand Agrippa’s thinking, along with the ideas of a number of other writers even more impenetrable. Yes, I see the look upon your face. No one wants to spend her days and nights buried in dusty old tomes, especially those that are designed to confound, confuse, and defeat the reader, but there can be no true greatness without sacrifice. And, let me assure you, before I ask you to read anything too dull, you will have seen things, done things that will make you hungry to read the most tedious books in the world if they will advance your craft. Let me give you something.”
Miss Crawford reached into her picnic basket and removed a little book, a duodecimo, and put it in Lucy’s hand. It was hardly bigger than her palm, though it was heavy. It smelled of old leather and mold, and all at once it reminded her of her father. How at home she felt with Miss Crawford. A warmth spread over her, for here was another great protector, like her father had been, who loved her books. The thought of it made her feel safe, and for the first time in many years, it made her feel like she was somewhere she belonged.
“Are you well?” Miss Crawford asked her. “You have gone quite pale.”
“I am well,” said Lucy, who felt her eyes beginning to moisten. “It is just that I suddenly felt—I know this will sound odd—but I felt as though, for a moment, I was living my own life.”
“I understand you—more than you can know.” She took Lucy’s hand and squeezed it. They sat like that for a moment until Miss Crawford let go and invited Lucy to examine the book.
The first fifty or sixty pages contained densely written arguments about magical theory—Lucy could see that from the most casual of glances—but the rest of it was nothing more than various charts. Here were chessboards filled with letters, sometimes English, sometimes Greek, sometimes Hebrew. Some stood alone, some of the squares were embedded within circles, and these circles contained writing as well.
“You may recognize this sort of thing from Barrett,” Miss Crawford said. “These are charms and talismans collected from major works on magic. Many of the charms included in those books are false, deliberately false, to deceive dabblers. There has never been a book of spells that was not at least three-quarters nonsense. In that book you hold, one of the better ones I could obtain, there are perhaps three hundred charms, and it may be that forty are genuine. Before you begin to read through material you will find challenging, why don’t you attempt to discover which charms are real and make some of them work?”
Lucy examined the book. As she had when looking at the charms in The Magus, she felt vaguely silly, but at the same time she could not help but respond to Miss Crawford’s gravity, and she held the book as though it were a piece of delicate and rare china. On the pages, the charms had labels indicating what they did, and most involved some sort of manipulation of another person. To make another cleave to you in loyalty. To drive another from your presence. To inspire feelings of love in another. Many required no other work than to copy out the charm and to hide it in the clothes or things or upon the person of the subject. Others required a small ritual or manipulation of objects.
“How will I know which are genuine?”
Miss Crawford merely said, “You must determine that for yourself.”
“Must I choose now?” she asked, feeling slightly panicked and inadequate.
Miss Crawford laughed and her eyes appeared to turn darker, and then grow pale once more, like the moon appearing from, and disappearing behind, clouds. “No, I shall not make you perform for me, Miss Derrick. You take the book as a gift. Do not object. It is not rare.”
Lucy hardly knew what to say, but she clutched the book to her chest. She wanted to bask in this new sensation of feeling special and important and of being someone of whom great things were expected. She had learned that very afternoon that she and her sister had been cheated out of their father’s money, that their liberty had been stolen from them, and yet this awful knowledge was somehow mitigated by what Miss Crawford promised. This very notion of magic was foolish, but Lucy could hardly dismiss what she had seen. It was silly, she knew that, and yet she also knew it was real and suddenly all set out before her. With Miss Crawford, her friend, to guide her, soon everything would be different.
13
THINGS DID NOT HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE. LUCY COULD FIND FEW enough quiet hours to take her book out of its secret hiding place and look it over, and perhaps she did not want to find the time. The mere thought of Miss Crawford’s pale and pretty face was enough to fill Lucy with a kind of unrestrained happiness, but other times she would push the image away, not daring to hope that her life could be something more than what it was.