Chapter 57
SUSANNA
Mountbron is coming to a boil. You’ve been suspicious of the town ever since Abner staggered wounded and bleeding out of the orchard more than a year ago, and it’s only gotten worse since the end of the war.
The North’s victory, finally declared in August, should have brought everyone closer together. But instead, it’s all falling apart.
The men who didn’t come home. Who’re either dead or deserters.
Eldest sons who went to fight and have plainly decided they can make a better life for themselves anywhere but here.
The ones who did come home, only to find their wife taken up with another man, or buried, or no longer enough now they’ve seen other beauties America has to offer.
The lads who’ve brought home women not to their parents’ liking.
The father wondering if his new daughter-in-law is a doxy, a camp-follower; the mother worrying her husband will be tempted by this exotic, out-of-town chit.
Maine gave a higher proportion of its men to fight than any other state.
You scoffed at how gullible Mountbron’s folk were, to be proud of that.
Now you’re being proved right. You see it in every face that peers out as you and the Swinson twins walk the length of Main Street, baskets over your arms, to buy the items you can’t make yourselves at Haven.
Needles and thread. Sugar. Molasses. Caustic and lye.
New secateurs, for Abner’s have finally worn out beyond even magical repair and he no longer likes to come into the town himself.
A yard of pink satin ribbon for Constance Kilpatrick.
It’s not much. You’re mostly self-sufficient – especially in foodstuffs.
And that’s noticed. Remarked upon, as small purchases are wrapped in paper and twine, and small coin handed over for them.
The Haven market garden is doing well, is it?
That’s nice. So many farms hereabouts are struggling after sending all their young men to war.
And your animals fat, your hens laying, your cows producing milk?
That’s nice. ’Cause with the demands of war supply, there’s been little enough fodder for humans, let alone to spare for beasts.
You see the resentment behind every smile.
The plain-writ jealousy hidden by a nod.
You listen to the way they talk to each other. ‘All these incomers,’ the grocer’s wife says slyly. ‘All these negroes. I’ve nothing against them,’ she adds quickly. ‘Only they don’t know our ways. They wouldn’t be happy in a place like this.’
‘And these tattered men in uniform,’ sniffs her customer.
‘Claiming they’re veterans. I’m not saying as they aren’t, but for which side, eh?
Some of them sure do speak strange. For all we know, they’re Johnny Reb who stripped off his own filthy grey uniform and stole an honest Union blue from one of our boys.
Looking for somewhere to live that escaped the war, eh?
Maybe they shouldn’t have started it in the first place! ’
‘I get so frightened,’ says the man’s wife. ‘The way they stare at ladies. It shouldn’t be allowed. Makes you feel all hot and cold and shaky all over.’
You’re so absorbed listening you don’t notice the man noticing you.
His eyes slide over the twins, already strange enough in their doubleness, and rest upon you.
You sometimes wonder what it is that gives away your witchery.
You’re an unremarkable-looking woman, save for your abundant reddish hair.
No one could accuse you of bewitching by beauty.
But folks always know, and secretly that pleases you.
‘Where were all you witches?’ the grocer’s customer demands with sudden truculence.
‘Not on the front line, for sure. We coulda had Johnny Reb whipped in months if your lot had turned out to fight. And no one in Mountbron would be going hungry if you shared your garden-sorcery, or whatever it is that means you’re all strutting around plump like chickens in grain while the rest of us scratch the dirt. ’
‘You’re the Fenn woman,’ says his wife. ‘I see your boy in town sometimes, and a better fed, more cheerful little fellow I never laid eyes on. My sister three towns over had a boy the same age. Her town sent all its men to fight, and there weren’t enough hands to get in the harvest last year, and no menfolk to make a noise to get them any relief.
Her boy weakened from the hunger, then when ’fluenza went through the town, he died. ’
‘I’m sorry for her loss,’ you say, automatically, though really you’re wondering why this prosperous seeming couple didn’t take the sister and her child in, if things were bad as all that.
‘You’re not though, are you?’ says her husband. ‘You useless, selfish baggage. You witch.’
And he spits on you.
At your side, the twins gasp as one. You fix him with your gaze, and seriously consider a hex, but he quails beneath your mere look, and that feels like triumph enough.
‘Handkerchief,’ you say to the twins, holding out your hand. You don’t see which of them presses her embroidered linen square into your palm. Carefully, deliberately, you wipe up all the gob and spittle and fold it into the kerchief.
‘Bodily fluids enhance the power of any enchantment,’ you say, with a smile. ‘Girls, I don’t think we’ll be needing anything here today, seeing as we’re well-enough stocked at home.’
Trembling in your wake, fluffed with alarm like cygnets behind a hen-swan, the twins follow you out. You shake the dust of Mountbron from your feet.
But you turn over the townsfolk’s arguments all the way back to Haven.
When you were a child, Elora would take you to church, for the sake of fitting into whichever community you’d set your bags down in for a few months, or years.
Mostly, you found the services dull, the idea of a god who was also a man nailed bleeding and dying to a wooden cross grotesque and bizarre, and the church interior offering little distraction, especially when compared to a wooded grove.
You’d read over the Ten Commandments and marvel both at how prescriptive they were, and how many possible sins had been left off.
Why not twenty? Why not a hundred? There’s no end to human wickedness.
Your interest was briefly caught by the notion of the Trinity.
A threefold divinity. You wondered if Christ’s followers copied that from the goddess’s eternal triad of maiden, mother, and crone.
The lessons Elora hoped you’d absorb, the importance of assistance and charity and kindness, never really sank in, and you don’t believe you owe those grumbling townsfolk one iota of help.
But you do wish you could have shown that their assessment of your abilities is true.
Witches could have stopped the war in its tracks – and might have, if only people gave them the respect they deserve, instead of treating magicals with fear and suspicion.
You never gave us a reason to fight for you, you think.
‘Was it even discussed?’ you ask your grandmother that night after dinner, as you help her get ready for bed.
You brush out Elora’s long hair and rinse it with gillyflower water to help the grey strands shine an elf-silvered, luminous white, before towelling it dry.
‘Witches helping win the war? It would have been the perfect way to show how powerful we are, and worthy of respect. And no one could complain because we’d be on their side. ’
Elora’s blue gaze cuts up to yours in the mirror. You’ve worried, occasionally, if the drug you use to buy yourself time with Starcross has dulled her mind. But her eyes and her intelligence are still sharp as January wind.
‘Greater powers in the field would only have meant greater destruction, Susanna. There are magical folk in the South too, you know.’
‘I would have let them come,’ you say, glimpsing the scar in your palm as you set down the towel. You use a small charm of concealment upon it, and neither Elora nor anyone else has ever noticed. ‘Let them come – and then Ruined them.’
‘Then you would have Ruined our beautiful land,’ says your grandmother, ‘because they would have responded in kind. Magical scorched earth. All of America, a wasteland. The mundane folk would have been terrified, and forgotten their war to turn their armies on us. No, people are frail and can only bear a little help before they resent the helper. We need to lie low for our own good, Susanna.’
You curl your palm. You do not agree.