Read Petty Magic for Free Online Page B

died young and Jack lived to a ripe old age, at least by ordinary standards. Henry had some nasty kind of food poisoning; I’m none too clear on the details, but I need hardly say that Helena was blameless. Indeed, she seized upon every morbid custom by which to mourn him: she festooned the door knocker with black crepe, wore that somber color head to foot every day for two years, and during that time left the house only to visit the florist and the graveyard. To this day—and in flagrant disregard of her second husband’s feelings on the matter, though his feelings matter even less now he’s dead—she wears a lock of Henry’s hair in a glass pendant round her neck.
    Apart from that one reminder, however, she seldom gives any indication of Henry Dryden’s presence in her thoughts. Helena is a pillar of efficiency, judicious with praise and affectionate in moderation. The B and B is her lifeblood now, though she doesn’t do it for the income. Entertaining family and coven with tasty victuals in a spick-and-span home simply isn’t enough of a challenge for her. Helena Homebody delights in finding new ways to keep her guests happy; her latest scheme consists of a system of chutes under all the guest beds, whereby an item not yet discovered to be missing is deposited in a lost-and-found box in the laundry room and returned to the surprised and grateful guest upon checkout. Yes, she revels in all the trappings of domesticity, the quilt making and the gingham aprons, the teapots and the feather dusters, the stainless-steel cookie-cutter sets and the eco-friendly cleaning products. I must look positively feral in comparison.
    And of course, Helena is the only one of us three who has experienced the miracle of procreation. As I say, we reach puberty as usual but age imperceptibly from then on, which means our biological clocks keep a different time. Beldames tend to wait until they’re fifty or sixty to have their kiddies. I suppose Morven had some vague wish to do so herself, but she never met the right man, in the madhouse or anywhere else. She did garner a slew of proposals at Ypres though, and she might have even accepted one had any of the men survived the hospital. The soldiers adored her—and why wouldn’t they, sweet as she is? Her pointy nose and expressive mouth made her the classic jolie laide . Perhaps she reminded them of their mothers.
    As for me, well—I did have the occasional pang of maternal desire, but I knew better than to pretend I could ever be selfless enough to raise a kiddie.
    T HE HARBINGERS , the Jesters, and the Peacocks are the oldest extraordinary families in Blackabbey, our ancestors having arrived among the first colonial settlers. Few were ever suspected of witchcraft, and fewer still were persecuted for it—our own Goody Harbinger, “the Harveysville Witch,” being the infamous exception. Hers was the only recorded witch trial in the history of our humble burgh, initially brought about by all the haggard young mothers in the neighborhood grumbling that Goody Harbinger never seemed to grow any older. It didn’t help that her hair was red and her little black terrier—her familiar, they said—would follow her anyplace she went. Subsequently she was blamed for an epidemic among the cattle, and that was that: Goody Harbinger was sentenced to die on the gallows. Though that sentence was carried out in due course, she arranged that her nine-year-old child should vanish in the crowd that bright and frosty morning, prescient as she was that her daughter would be next accused. Lily Harbinger stayed away for a long time, nearly a hundred years, so that by the time she returned there was no one left outside the coven who might have recognized her.
    Most of the people they tortured and executed in those days weren’t even witches—and in those dark times you might accuse any woman of witchcraft. The charges were generally preposterous: if a destitute old woman was really a witch, wouldn’t