Page 74 of As Many Souls as Stars
Once, at an afternoon tea, twelve-year-old Rosamund’s napkin had lit on fire. One of her father’s visiting Eton friends had jokingly said, ‘Didn’t you once mention a curse of some sort, Alfred? Some old family superstition?’
Her father, Alfred, slightly built, fair haired, the spitting image of two dead men—although he didn’t know that, of course—had made a dismissive gesture. ‘Premodern twaddle. You know, I bloody wishthe supposed witchcraft in our family had been real. Maybe she’d do something interesting for once.’
Rosamund had excused herself. And then, in the corridor, she’d laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
Cybil’s brother had died; Esther’s brother had lived. Rosamund had no brothers at all, and that was a blessing. Family, to her, was nothing more than dead weight. By the time she’d reached her teenaged years, she had figured out how to bend her parents’ wills away from suspicion, how to whisper in their minds and say,Don’t look at me, don’t think of me, I am nothing to you. She had no interest in them, or in the six sisters who succeeded her, who all were more beautiful and charming than she—bug-eyed, flame-haired Rosamund, the Harding savant, who was whispered about in the halls of her boarding school with hushed disquiet. She had no friends there, unsurprisingly, but she didn’t care. This wasn’therlife, after all.
This was borrowed time.
The dreams had begun when she was eleven, and by sixteen she had recalled enough of her prior lives to reconstruct, piece by piece, Cybil and Esther in their entirety. Rosamund had a notebook where she’d written everything down, scribbling eyes in the margins, drawing tiny crows between the spaces in the letters. She remembered, but their lives weren’thers, at least not yet—they were moving pictures she’d watched on the screen of her mind, plot summaries to which she’d gradually added detail: a dark forest, a bleeding throat; a cracked oyster and the smell of burning flesh.
And she remembered the woman, too.
Rosamund was no artist, not really, but reproducing the face she saw in her dreams was her dearest project. She was gifted a set of drawing pencils for her eleventh birthday. For a year, she’d laboured at the wall concealed behind her headboard: pushing the bed aside each morning, adding a tiny stroke at the lashes, at the chin, until the woman’s features emerged in full, grooves of shadow against white plaster.
Eleven-year-old Rosamund looked at the drawing, pencil gripped in trembling fingers. Heavy brows, a pair of moles at chin and cheek, a mane of dark hair. She thought, for the first time—Miriam.
Miriam. For the next few years, the name echoed in the caverns of Rosamund’s mind, ineffable, inextricable, a question without an answer. Miriam cast herself over Rosamund’s psyche like a stained- glass window looming over her, offering Heaven in one hand, Hell in the other. By her adulthood, Rosamund had yet to see her, as a crow or otherwise; maybe Miriam was more of a coward than in her scattered memories, or maybe Miriam was now indifferent. Rosamund didn’t know which option was worse. But she knew that Miriam would come for her eventually, and Rosamund knew that when she did, her soul was forfeit.
Unless, of course, she could do something to keep it.
Her gifts to herself, on her eighteenth birthday, were a train ticket, a spade, and a pair of secondhand trench boots that must have once belonged to a soldier with uncommonly small feet. In Suffolk, she had stayed in what had once been the crumbling foundations of Harding Hall: now a quaint bed-and-breakfast with an attached golf course. She had slept badly, trembling beneath flower-printed sheets, listening to the wind rattle the glass. That morning, she’d been served a soft-boiled egg and soldiers, which she’d eaten with little enthusiasm, sprinkling too much salt over the yolk and drowning the bread in butter. She’d toasted the soldiers for longer, too, with the tip of her finger, just to remind herself she could—ignoring the sting of pain as the shadows took their due.
She loved the pain as much as she hated it. It was an old friend, a comfort. A memory and a promise.
It was raining: that light, misty sort of rain that was almost pleasant, and impossible to avoid. As Rosamund trudged further into the woods, her hair stuck to her cheeks with damp; she wasn’t sure why she’d bothered to curl it. She was wearing her usual makeup—powder, dark eyeliner, red lipstick—and she could feel, as she walked, that it was all sliding down her face like paint beneath turpentine. She tried not to care.
The forest looked the same as it had in her dreams, eternal and indifferent, trees stooping to watch her as she passed. It was the dead of winter, of course, but it hadn’t snowed this year. There were piles of icy sludge slumping over roots, dripping icicles adorning each twistedbranch. The colours were so monotone that the whole scene could’ve been one of the photographs her little sister took with her Brownie camera. Rosamund’s breath plumed before her, shoulders hunched beneath her stole, spade heavy in her hands.
In the distance rose an impressive, wizened oak, a knot at the centre of its trunk like an unblinking eye. Rosamund stopped at the oak and tried to dig, but the spade struck the frozen earth with a clang.
Sighing, she dropped the spade and fell to her knees, reaching out her palms towards the soil. She remembered the soldiers that morning, toasting beneath her fingers. She remembered Esther setting Thomas alight. She remembered Harding Hall, devoured by flames.
The familiar pain came as the shadows sipped from her soul. In exchange, heat now radiated from her palms and softened the earth, melting the ice until the soil was sodden and as pliable as flesh. Then she dug, tossing tufts of dirt over her shoulder, until she was panting with exertion and the linen sack was revealed. It contained what Rosamund had expected: books, about a dozen of them, less waterlogged than she’d feared, pages still pale and fresh. What she hadn’t expected was the identity of one of the volumes, which she’d presumed destroyed by Miriam a century ago. Black leather, an embossed cover—the three-headed hawk with its open beaks. Past, present, future.
‘Jackpot,’ she murmured.
Rosamund had been hoping to find a book ofsomeuse—something that would help her hone her magic, in Miriam’s absence—but the grimoire was everything she needed and more. She raised it from the sack, hands trembling, and opened it to the first page, where there was a drawing of a many-eyed angel staring back at her. A droplet landed at the centre of its wings, a single tear. Rosamund quickly blotted it away with her sleeve. She had often wondered, of course, if she was simply mad; if her memories were delusions and her magic false. Here, it seemed, was undeniable proof otherwise.
She turned the page to find dense handwriting. It looked like a foreign alphabet, indecipherable, with sweeping letters and strange, tiny marginalia written in spiral patterns. Her memories hadn’tblessed her with a continued knowledge of Elizabethan palaeography. She’d expected as much.
Rosamund tucked the book into her coat and reburied the others. Who knew what would happen? Best to keep the rest of the stash safe, in case another life found her digging by this tree with another spade, another set of hands. Besides, she had what she needed now. The key was hers: all she had to do was turn it.
That night, she reapplied her lipstick and her eyeliner. Then, by candlelight—Rosamund preferred it, despite the electric lamp the bed-and-breakfast had provided—she began to decipher the grimoire.
She had beside her a pen, a notebook, and a compendium on Elizabethan secretary hand. Still, it was a slow process. She suspected that Christopher Harding’s handwriting had been difficult to read, even for his contemporaries. Rosamund had to be selective about what she started with. Thankfully, Christopher had a habit of entitling his pages, to give some indication as to their topic. She began with these titles. Several caught her eye: ‘On a Lineage of Seraphim’; ‘On the Transference and Reversal of Souls’—that section was well thumbed, no doubt thanks to Thomas; ‘On the Transformation of the Body’; ‘On Concealment’; ‘On the Summoning of Demons’.
She turned to the page on demons and began to work. After half an hour, she had produced a tiny scrap in modern English in her notebook.To weakene a dymon, it read.Within the lighte of daye, but beneathe clouds so no shadow is cast, surrounde the creature or those possessed wythyn a circle of salte, or water that runs…
A circle of salt. It seemed so simple, soeasy—the Miriam in her mind, malignant and almighty, would never be contained by something so banal. But then it was obvious, wasn’t it?
Salt had prevented her from entering the townhouse, all those years ago. If she were surrounded by it, she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.
Magic was exchange. Rosamund knew that. The rituals in this grimoire were pageantry—but Rosamund hypothesised that they were also the basis by which Miriam had been created. She was ashadow given form: somethingsummoned, somethingmade. If her makers had believed these things would weaken her, it was likely that they would.
Still, weakening was only one step in a more complicated dance. More would have to be done to ensure Rosamund’s survival. Miriam would start looking for her eventually, and Rosamund didn’t want to be found until she was ready. She turned to the section on concealment, pen in hand. Exhaustion made her eyes water. She looked at yet another long paragraph of unreadable gibberish, and for a moment, Rosamund felt despair. What was the point of all this? Once the deal was up, it wouldn’t matter how hidden she was. Her soul would be Miriam’s.
Rosamund paused to consider this, recalling a promise she’d made two lifetimes ago.
