“Emily,” Charlotte turned to her, the idea hard, frightening inside her. “Pentacles are the shapes people use when they practice black magic! Maybe that’s what they do here, at their parties?” Now she remembered when Pitt had mentioned the scar-on the body of Fanny-on the buttock. The place of most mockery.
“That’s why Phoebe is so terrified,” she went on. “She thinks they have begun by playing but have conjured up real devils!”
Emily screwed up her face.
“Black magic?” she said incredulously. “Isn’t that a little far-fetched? I don’t even believe in it!”
But it made sense, and the more Charlotte thought of it, the more sense it made.
“You haven’t got any proof,” Emily went on. “Just because the garden is set out in a star shape! Lots of people might like stars.”
“Do you know any?” Charlotte demanded.
“No-but-”
“We’ve got to get inside that room.” Charlotte stared at it. “That’s what Miss Lucinda saw, someone dressed up in black magic robes, with green horns.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Bored people sometimes do ridiculous things. Look at some of your Society friends sometime!”
Emily squinted at her.
“You don’t believe in black magic, do you, Charlotte?”
“I don’t know-and I don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t.”
Emily gave in.
“Then I suppose we had better see if we can get inside that room, if you think Miss Lucinda’s monster could be in there.” She led the way across the bitter herbs and took out her hairpin again, but this time there was no need. The door was not locked. It swung open easily, and they stood staring into a large rectangular room with a black carpet and black curtained walls with green designs on them. The sun streamed in through a totally glassed roof.
“There’s nothing here,” Emily sounded annoyed, now that she had come this far and was half convinced.
Charlotte squeezed past her and went in. She put her hand to the velvet curtains and brushed them slowly. She was more than halfway around before she came to the space behind and saw the black robes and hoods. There were crosses embroidered on them in scarlet, upside down, symbols of mockery, like the one on Fanny. She understood immediately what they were, and it was as if they were still alive. The evil in them remained after the wearers had gone out of this place, stripped to their ordinary faces and their daily lives among other people. How many of them carried that scar on their buttock?
“What is it?” Emily asked from just behind her. “What have you found?”
“Robes,” Charlotte said quietly. “Disguises.”
“What about Miss Lucinda’s monster?”
“No, it isn’t here. Maybe they didn’t keep it.”
Emily’s face was pale, her eyes shadowed.
“Do you think it really is black magic, devil worship, and that sort of thing?” She was struggling to disbelieve it herself, now that she actually saw it in its ugliness and absurdity.
“Yes,” Charlotte said quietly. She reached out and touched one of the hoods. “Can you think of any other reason for all this? And the pentacle, and the bitter herbs? That must be why Phoebe wears a cross and keeps going to church all the time, and why she thinks we can’t ever get rid of the evil now that it’s here.”
Emily started to say something, and it died on her tongue. They stood staring at each other.
“What can we do?” Emily said at last.
Before Charlotte could think of any answer, there was a sound at the door, and they both froze in horror. They had forgotten the possibility of someone else coming. There was no conceivable explanation they could make. They had unlocked the door in the hedge deliberately. There was no way they could have lost their way. And no one would believe they did not know or understand what they had found!
Very slowly they turned to face the door.
Paul Alaric stood there, black outlined against the sun.
“Well!” he said softly, stepping in and smiling.
Charlotte and Emily stood so close together their bodies touched. Emily was gripping hard, fingers digging in like claws.
“So you’ve found it,” Alaric observed. “A little foolhardy, wasn’t it-to come looking for such a thing, and alone?” He seemed amused.
At the back of her mind Charlotte had always known it was foolish, but curiosity had driven out awareness of danger and silenced warning in her brain. Now she stared at Alaric and felt for Emily’s hand beside her. Was he the head of them, the warlock? Was that why Selena found it credible that he should have attacked her-or was it why Jessamyn knew he had not? Or could it be that the head was a woman-Jessamyn herself? Her mind whirled around all kinds of ugly thoughts.
Alaric was coming toward them, still smiling, but with a slight furrow between his brows.
“I think we had better get out of this room,” he said gently. “It’s an extraordinarily unpleasant place, and I, for one, do not wish to be found here if one of its regular users should chance to come.”
“R-regular?” she stammered.
His smile broadened into a harsh laugh.
“Good heavens, you think I’m one of them! I’m disappointed in you, Charlotte.”
For one idiotic moment she blushed.
“Then who is?” she demanded defensively. “Afton Nash?”
He took her by the arm and led her into the sun, Emily only inches behind her. He pushed the door closed and continued along the path between the bitter herbs.
“No, Afton is far too bloodless for anything of that sort. His form of hypocrisy is much subtler than that.”
“Then who?” Charlotte was sure enough it was not George to be unafraid of his answer.
“Oh, Freddie Dilbridge,” he said confidently. “And poor Grace studiously turns a blind eye, pretending it is just a normal excess of the flesh.”
“Who else?” Charlotte kept up with him, leaving Emily behind on the narrow path.
“Selena, certainly,” he replied. “And I should think, Algernon. Poor little Fanny, before she died-at least, I would guess so. Phoebe knows about it, of course-she is not as innocent of nature or people as she seems-and Hallam without doubt. And naturally Fulbert knew, from what he said, even though he was never invited.”
It all fitted into place.
“What do they do?” she asked.
His mouth turned down at the corners, rueful, a little contemptuous.
“Nothing very much, play at a little wickedness, imagine they conjure demons.”
“You don’t think it could be-real?” She hesitated to ask such a question outside in the summer garden with the beach hedge fluttering green above them. It was getting hotter and stiller, and there was a faint overcast across the sky. The thunderflies were worse.
“No, my dear,” he said, looking straight at her. “I don’t.”
“Pheobe thinks so.”
“Yes, I know. She imagines a foolish and rather sordid game that has suddenly summoned up real spirits, and set them loose in the Walk, to bring murder and insanity up from the dark regions of the damned.” His face was wry, utterly reasonable, dismissing such things to the realms of hysteria.
She frowned.
“Is there no such thing as black magic?”
“Oh, yes.” He pushed the door open in the hedge and stood back for them to go through. “Most certainly there is. But this is not it.”
They emerged into the color and normality of the garden party again. No one had seen them leave the beach hedge and pass along the herbaceous walk. Miss Laetitia was listening dutifully to Lady Tamworth expounding on the evils of marrying beneath one’s station, and Selena was having what appeared to be heated words with Grace Dilbridge. Everything was as usual; they might only have been gone for moments. Charlotte had to shake herself to remember what she had seen. Freddie Dilbridge, standing so casually with a glass in his hand, next to the pink
