David Liss - The Twelfth Enchantment - A Novel

When Mrs. Quince had tried to teach her to read the cards, she had also said that cunning craft was like music or painting or acting. Everyone could do something , and, as in the various arts, only a few were possessed of sufficient talent to do a great deal. There were those for whom all the application in the world could produce only a mediocre result, and then there were those who hardly needed to apply themselves at all to achieve much. However, Mrs. Quince had come to the conclusion that Lucy was singularly ungifted. She called Lucy a clumsy oaf, too foolish and muddleheaded to grasp even the most basic of principles. Mrs. Quince’s efforts to help Lucy learn to read cards had marked the end of those early days of friendship and the beginning of the long period of enmity.

“What is it you tell me?” Lucy asked. “That I might become a cunning woman? I know something happened with Lord Byron, and there were more strange events at Mr. Olson’s mill. These things seemed real at the time, but then, that feeling fades, doesn’t it?”

“Only because we wish it to,” said Miss Crawford.

Lucy shook her head. “Do you suggest I might use magic to reclaim my inheritance?”

Miss Crawford nodded. “I believe that if you apply yourself, you will be able to master all aspects of your life. No one will ever command you again.”

Lucy wondered what it would be like to no longer fear her uncle or poverty or her future, to have the means to right the injustices of her life. The thought of such power and freedom thrilled her, but it was a childish dream that she must abandon. To let Miss Crawford lead her down this path would only open her heart to despair.

Yet at that moment, Lucy forgot to be cautious. She forgot to protect herself and to be too cynical to believe. She even set aside her fear and rage. The possibilities all seemed so real when Miss Crawford spoke of them. Her eyes were wide and bright and inviting, and Lucy was ready to believe anything she said.

“We have a selective notion of truth. Look at this mound here.” Miss Crawford took a sip of her wine. “Do you know what it is?”

“It is a fairy barrow.”

“And do you know what a fairy barrow truly is?” asked Miss Crawford.

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?”