The Twelfth Enchantment: A Novel

Breaking her concentration, Lucy strode forward. She opened the stranger’s coat and, gripping the lining in both hands, she tore it, and there, tucked in the folds of the cloth, was a little package of white linen, no bigger than a crab apple, tied with what appeared for all the world to be human hair.

She began to reach out toward the bag when there was at once something between her and the bundle. It was dark and ill-defined and empty, and yet, for all its shapelessness, it seemed to Lucy to have a face—not composed of features precisely, but points within its blankness that stood in for features. It turned to Lucy and gazed upon her with its indistinct eyes and opened its absent mouth to reveal an even more black and undulating abyss within. There was something sick and wriggling about it, as swift and jittery as a beetle’s legs as it lies upon its back. It was more terrifying than anything Lucy had ever imagined. It was terror itself, given a cold and shimmering nonform. Lucy’s legs grew weak, and though she did not know it at the time, she would later realize she had nearly passed water where she stood.

If the encounter had lasted longer, Lucy would have been unable to resist the urge to flee, but from the moment she first saw the thing until the moment she acted, only a second or two passed. She had almost no time to feel the full brunt of the terror, and so she reached past the shapeless thing and grabbed the cloth sack and yanked it away.

She looked back and saw that the dark presence had gone, and the stranger was awake, staring at her with glassy eyes, but then he sank back to bed, unconscious once more.

Lucy took the little sack, and realizing she was no longer in the quiet state, she held it out to Miss Crawford.

The lady looked at the bag and then at Lucy. Her sea-green eyes were wide and moist. “Miss Derrick,” she said, “that was most impressive.”

Lucy held the package in her shaking hand. “What was that?” she managed, though her voice cracked as she spoke.

Miss Crawford put her own hand over Lucy’s and smiled. “There are dark things in this world, and you have seen one of them, but it is gone now. Now we must get rid of the instrument that attached it to this man,” she said. “A curse of this kind works upon the principle of sympathy. Whatever has linked the stranger to this bundle must still be in effect, so we must be careful how we destroy it. If we were to burn it, for example, it might cause that man to develop a fever or blisters, or possibly even burst into flame himself.”

Miss Crawford took the package, set it down upon the little bed table, and began to untie it. The cloth unfolded as a square, and within in it, made of the same cloth, was a little effigy of a man, so bland and featureless as to be a model of any living person with four limbs and a head. Around its little cloth neck were tied strands of hair.

“Now we may safely destroy it,” Miss Crawford said, clutching it in her hand. “It is inert. I shall toss it in the fire on my way out.”

Lucy could not cease thinking of the shapeless creature she had thought she had seen or almost seen or sensed or whatever it had been. She opened her mouth to ask about it, but then decided it was better not to know. Already she began to doubt she had seen anything at all, to tell herself that her mind had combined shadow and smoke and fear and created a formless chimera. She liked believing this better than believing that the shape she had encountered was real.

To distract herself, she turned toward the man. “Ought he not to awaken?”

“I expect he will soon enough,” said Miss Crawford. “Though free of the curse, he has been through an ordeal, and he will need time to recover.”

They departed the room, and Miss Crawford put her hand on Lucy’s arm in what felt like a gesture of friendship. Lucy looked up at Miss Crawford and saw her beautiful smile, and though she wished to hear more praise, she understood no words could ever capture the same force as that expression of respect and benevolence. Miss Crawford liked her. She approved of how Lucy had conducted herself. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Lucy felt as though there was a person in the world to whom she mattered.

4

ONCE MISS CRAWFORD HAD DEPARTED, THE FATE OF THE STRANGER remained a matter of significant consternation for Uncle Lowell. He sent Mrs. Quince several times to investigate whether or not the stranger had yet awakened, and Uncle Lowell advised that she not be quiet when opening and closing doors. Still, as though a drunkard, the man showed no sign of rousing.

Lucy slept very ill that night, distracted as she was by her astonishing evening. Had she truly removed a curse from this man? Miss Crawford had seemed so sure of what she had said, and at the time Lucy had certainly felt that something had happened, but as each hour passed, she began to doubt that very much had happened at all. There had been no bright lights or shattered glass or other signs of wondrous things. The creature Lucy had seen, or believed she had seen, had been but shades of darkness, and it was possible, even likely, that the whole incident had been but an outburst of her imagination under Miss Crawford’s guidance.

On the other hand, there was much that an overactive imagination did not explain, such as the stranger’s peculiar outcries. He had said she must not marry Mr. Olson, but he had also said she must gather the leaves. She did not know what that meant, but the words echoed in her thoughts all night, like a haunting tune that, once heard, could not be forgotten.

Back and forth she debated with herself, pondering what was real and what was not, so the next morning at breakfast she was possessed of little appetite—in part from fatigue, and in part because, in the light of day, her situation with Mr. Olson seemed far more alarming than any supposed curse. Her life, which had been so unhappy, was on the verge of growing more terrible than she could imagine. There was no one to offer her advice, no one to tell her what to do, and this feeling of helplessness made her miss her father with such intense yearning that her stomach clenched and her lungs turned to stone in her breast.

Even as she felt his loss as an unbearable weight, she knew he’d been the man she cherished only in the last year of his life. Until her death, Emily had been his favored child; Lucy and Martha, the middle sister, had warranted little more than staccato bursts of conversation at meals. Mr. Derrick had room in his heart for only one of his motherless children, and Emily—clever, observant, and learned—was the obvious choice for a man who spent nearly every hour of every day sequestered in his library, tending to household business or losing himself in his books.

Lucy had never resented her father’s overt preference. Her father’s favoritism had always felt proper, so the emptiness she felt now had a familiar quality. Even when he had still been alive, for much of Lucy’s life, she had yearned for him. She’d wanted him to talk to her, to tell her his private jokes, to invite her into his library and share his ideas and frustrations, but he had been always too busy with his solitude or with Emily.

Emily, for her part, had always appeared slightly embarrassed by her father’s favoritism. Many times he would call for her and she would cry back that he must wait, for she was talking to Martha of a book, or listening to some gossipy story that Lucy was telling. It was Emily who taught Lucy the workings of the household, how to deal with merchants and tradesmen and laborers, who addressed her questions about the wider world and her own transition from childhood to adulthood. When she had been small, she went to Emily to cry over an injury or a slight from a friend. For a girl who had grown up without a mother and with a distant father, Emily had been the closest thing she had to a parent.

After Emily’s sudden and unexpected death, Martha and Lucy feared their father would never recover. He shut himself away, barely ate, and spoke little but what the operation of the household required. Only once he had withdrawn entirely did Lucy understand how much of her father she had experienced through Emily—through the clever remarks no one but they understood, their conspiratorial whispers, the sounds of their laughter or spirited debates, muffled by the closed library door. Papa might have withheld himself from Lucy, but he had been there for Emily, and that had always been enough.

Then, one day, Lucy and Martha had been in the sitting room, sewing in mournful silence, when the library door cracked open, spilling forth sunlight. For weeks he had kept the curtains drawn, and now both sisters looked in wonder as their father walked to the door and stared for a long moment. “Lucy,” he said, “I should like to speak with you.”

She set down her sewing and entered the library, where he invited her, rather formally, to take a seat across from him by the window. They remained silent while Lucy breathed in the scent of tobacco and juniper. Mr. Derrick looked at his daughter, and Lucy stared out the window until she could stand the silence no longer. “We all miss her, Papa.”

“Of course we do.” His voice was clipped, almost impatient. “Tell me of the books you like to read.”