“Hedwig, I feel abandoned,” Conrad said. “As a companion you make a fine bookworm, I must say!”
“Just coming.” Hedwig replaced the book on the shelf. She would keep watching Larkin.
5
Persephone sat alone in her bedroom, at the small dressing table that made do for a workbench. She dipped her slenderest paintbrush in a cup of chocolate acrylic. The buttons she’d cut from Larkin’s coat lay before her in a row. Selecting one, she held the brush above it, poised, yet lacking the nerve to make a mark.
Focus, she scolded herself. Her attention was divided. She didn’t worry, precisely, when Briar failed to return home for the night. She imagined him lying in a gutter, his head caved in by a mugger, or passed out on a bench as he succumbed to hypothermia. The images were persistent, but failed to raise her pulse or sicken her, because she had been picturing them since she was old enough to know he could come to harm. They were simply there in her mind, as an unfolding reel which she experienced passively.
She concentrated on circling the eyelet with her chosen paint, in a single, fluid line. That doesn’t look too bad, she conceded.
Downstairs the front door banged. It could only be her father, because they lived by themselves in the little house; her mother had moved to Berwick nine years ago. Persephone felt commingled relief and irritation at her father’s safe return. She listened to the familiar thwack against the wall as he discarded first one boot, then a second. The white noise of the pipes told her he had turned on a kitchen tap. Finally she heard the wheeze of the stairs as he ascended.
When he opened the door, he was odorous, but hale, as far as she could tell. He was holding a chipped mug of tea, and a roll of Jammy Dodgers was wedged between his side and his elbow. This must be his peace offering for his petulance over the scotch in the sink. Neither of them would mention that dispute now; nor would they discuss where he had been in the meantime. This was how they proceeded after any explosion of temper. A veil would be drawn down, and though they might refer to it in gestures, Persephone knew speaking out loud of prior arguments risked reignition.
“Just put the tea there,” she said, nodding at the corner of her dresser.
He obliged. She attempted to circle the remaining eyelet. This time the line wobbled like a child on training wheels.
“Shit.” She put down the brush in frustration. No; not only frustration, but temper. Why? Why would she get angry, at so small a thing as a crooked line of paint, but not at her father letting her think he lay injured on the streets of Oxford?
“You’re very flushed,” her father said, hesitantly.
“It’s just warm in here.”
He picked up the button. “What’s this? Is it a little face you’re making?”
“Kind of. The ridge in the button is the nose, the holes are the eyes. I saw them and thought they’d be a good shape for a doll’s face, if I could paint them well enough.”
Briar returned the button to her, and looked at his daughter fully.
“You’re very flushed,” he repeated.
“I’m fine.”
“You know, Seph,” he said, “sorcery’s no job for a woman.”
“So everyone says.”
“It’s just – all the energy you put into improving your craft – you’re chasing something that’s not meant for you.”
“But serving in the shop is for me?”
“You have a point there,” he said. “If you were like Cosima Botham, or Hedwig Mayhew – or if you were like… your mother… serving in the shop would be a better fit. They have the gift of persuasion. And they like it, talking people into things. But you’re not like them. You’re like me.”
Jesus, she thought, don’t make me even crosser.
He must have thought he’d said too much, because he beat a retreat to the hall. The added distance allowed him to finish, as if indulging an afterthought. “There has to be another option,” he said. “Not just sorcery, or working in the shop. You’re a bright girl. Don’t waste your time over either of them.”
Persephone swirled her paintbrush in the water jar. She heard her father walk to his own room, where she suspected he’d sleep till it was time for dinner.
*
Persephone spent most of her childhood trying to understand why there were no women Sorcerers. When she was around ten, an incident by the riverside increased her suspicion that her father, Alastair, and Dennis were in the wrong by saying it wasn’t possible.
Her mother had bought her rollerskates, and she was experimenting with which areas near home provided the smoothest surface. So far, Jackdaw Lane – which was the closest tarmacked street – was the best for gliding cleanly. The lane was the very furthest Persephone was willing to stray; it was nearly at the main road, and well past the psychological barrier represented by the eyot’s footbridge. When she felt she had skated enough, she returned to the grassy path that bordered the river. She traipsed through cornflowers, lifting her feet because the wheels wouldn’t turn in the mud. The skates added unaccustomed weight and she grew breathless.
Before she reached the cottages she paused to rest by a wooden bench. An old woman was sitting on it. She was a stranger to Persephone, which was remarkable enough on the eyot, where everyone knew everyone.
“Hello,” Persephone ventured.
The woman shot Persephone a look of indignation, and said nothing. She had the short chin of a person with no teeth in, but she was otherwise neat, with her white hair bobbed and combed, and a brightly coloured shawl about her shoulders. In her hand she held a paring knife.
The woman searched within the folds of her shawl. She took out a cube of pale brown soap, which was about two inches long.
“Are you lost?” Persephone asked. She noticed the woman was wearing socks without shoes, and the mud was seeping into the white cotton. The old woman ignored Persephone’s question. She took the knife to two corners of the soap, cutting a pair of tiny facets, top and bottom. The soap fragments dusted her lap.
Persephone sat on the end of the bench. She shuffled closer, keeping her eyes on the old woman as if she were a squirrel who might bolt if you came too near. Now the woman made a further incision, a third of the way down the cube corner. It formed a shallow v. On either side of it she cut two horizontal lines.
Finally, she spoke: “That is the bridge of the nose. Do you see? Between a pair of eyes.”
Persephone nodded, although she didn’t see, just yet, anything in the soap that resembled eyes or a nose.
Directly beneath the horizontal lines, the old woman made one downward cut, and one upward to meet it, creating a small pyramid. This, Persephone recognised, was more nose-shaped. To mark the nostrils the woman hollowed out two specks of soap.
“It is very important to leave in the septum,” she said. Septum wasn’t a word Persephone knew, but the woman tapped her knife on the narrow strip of soap dividing the nostrils. Persephone raised a hand to her own septum, to check its shape.
The old woman adjusted her grip on the knife. Instead of curling her fist around it, she now held it like a pencil. With the tip she cut two inverted pyramids on either side of the nose, far deeper than the other cuts she had made.
“You must put the knife in straight,” she told Persephone. “No wiggling it around! The blade would break!”