Page 56 of The Phoenix Bride
There is another figure standing by the tree: a woman, with a large metal cauldron at her feet. The moonlight illuminates her, but I don’t recognize her.
She gives us a small curtsy as we approach. “Good tidings,”she says, and I know her voice—it is the wise woman whom my sister was speaking to in the kitchen, the last night I saw David.
“Cecilia,” Margaret says, “Alice is going to help you.”
“Help me?” I say, voice still thin with sleep. “What do you mean, help?”
The women trade a significant glance.
Margaret tells me, “You may have been bewitched.”
“Be—” I cut myself off to bark a laugh, the sound scraping my dry throat like sand. “Bewitched? Surely, you can’t be serious.”
“It isn’t your fault,” Margaret replies. “If anything, it is mine. And we can’t be certain, but if it is so—”
“David didn’t bewitch me, Margaret. No need to blame him for my folly.”
Margaret shakes her head. “The sister I know is reckless, but she would never debase herself to—”
“The only one debasing herself here is you.”
“Mistress Thorowgood,” Alice says gently. “It is often difficult to tell…”
“I…”know my own mind,I am going to say, but then I realize that often, Idon’tknow my own mind—that is the issue—and so I am reduced to glaring.
“I won’t force you to undergo the treatment,” Margaret says, crossing her arms. “But at least consider how odd this all seems, Cecilia. To run off like that, out of nowhere, with a…”
“A Jew? Is that what you were going to say, Maggie?”
“Yes.”
“He is a better man than any you’ll ever meet,” I reply. “Honest and intelligent andgood,and if you cannot see that—if you refuse to—then you are even more ignorant than I thought.”
She doesn’t respond; she just frowns at me, hands curled tightly around her elbows.
I turn to Alice. “What is your treatment?” I ask her.
She points to the buckets. “Blessed and boiled with vervain,” she says.
“Am I to wash my hands in it?”
She pauses, and then replies meekly, “If my mistress desires. But for the greatest efficiency—”
“You should be sluiced with it,” Margaret says. “I had it warmed before we came here, so it shouldn’t be too onerous.”
“How thoughtful,” I reply drily.
“As I said, you needn’t—”
“No, I must.” I stand in front of Alice so I am between her and the linden tree, spreading my arms in invitation. “It is the only way to disabuse you of this ridiculous idea, and spare David from further accusation.”
Margaret’s shoulders slump. I can’t tell if she is relieved or dejected.
Alice directs me to stand between the roots of the linden, in a patch of summer moonlight, the trunk of the tree solid as a stone column behind me. She hangs a silver cross around my neck, dabs the same symbol in charcoal across the backs of my hands, mutters incantations to herself. Meanwhile, I watchMargaret’s unmoving figure, and I wonder when she began to dabble with cunning folk. She’s always been prone to superstition, but this seems one step from popery, or even paganism.
Alice steps back and hefts the cauldron into her arms. She hesitates.
“Go on,” I say.
