Page 13 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
The summer before everything changed.
I can’t give up now. I just can’t.
I reach inside my pocket. Smoothing out the receipt on the old kitchen table, I set my teeth and dial the number scrawled across it in black biro.
It rings and rings, and my shoulders slump. An answerphone kicks in, a generic message from the network provider, and I cancel the call. I’m muttering again, moving around the kitchen, when my phone lights up in my hands.
“Hello?”
“Ivy’s granddaughter,” he says, his voice a crackle of static and syllables. “You know, you never told me your name.”
I hesitate, wondering what he’s heard about me and all the other Morgan women who have come before. What stories are whispered still to newcomers? What did Ivy herself tell him of the old ways? “Carrie Morgan.”
“Well, Carrie Morgan, what can I help with?”
“The cottage. You said yesterday.” I close my eyes, then open them to look out the window. At the mountains, at the way they loom up, eclipsing everything. “You said yesterday that you’d done some repairs on the cottage. That you wanted to do more, but Ivy never let you.”
“Yes,” he says. Then there’s awhoosh, as though he’s adjusting the phone against his ear. “It’s an old place.”
I turn my back on the mountains, pressing the phone a little too hard against my cheek. “Would it be possible for you to come over? Perhaps tomorrow? I think I need some help with a few things, and I’d like a quote.”
For a moment, I think he’s hung up. Then his voice returns, warmer than before. “Sure, Carrie. How’s ten?”
“It’s good. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
The line goes dead, and I pocket my phone. In the ringing silence, I allow myself a moment to cradle my fingers around the warm mug. Maybe this isn’t beyond me. Maybe with a bit of help, with someone to check things with, like what the hell to do with that chipboard, I can make this work. A smile spreads over my face as I drink the coffee. The warmth of it threads through my chest.
No Cora meddling. No running from Ivy’s request. I don’t need to call on anyone from Woodsmoke, from the curling mists of my past. I can do this. I can knock this cottage into shape and find a fresh beginning.
Chapter 11
Cora
She walked to the town square with her sisters, perusing the ribbons in the haberdashery window. She saw his reflection behind her and turned, finding his eyes like ink as they trailed over her. Afterward, Sylba spoke of this man with eyes as navy as the night. But no one else could remember seeing him. It was almost as though she had imagined him entirely.
—Tabitha Morgan, July 19, 1929
What she never told anyone was what happened afterward. All they saw was a runaway girl that day.
But Cora knew different.
As she mutters, pulling on her warmest coat, tying her headscarf, checking that she’s stuffed some tissues into her pocket, she clicks her tongue at Kep, whose ears prick up, her gaze fixed on Cora. She needs fresh air to stir her stew of memories. She leaves the house, Kep at her heels, and drinks in the crisp morning air.
It wasn’t winter when it all changed ten years ago, but spring, with the frost behind them, the fields no longer crackling with ice. Carrie seemed haunted, with dark crescent moons under her eyes. Skin white as porcelain, collarbone jutting from that dress. She looked fit to shatter, too fragile to be real. In the years Carrie grew silent, when too long passed between each letter, Cora wondered if she had somehow dreamed her. Imagined her. And she would speak to Howard, a great babble of incoherence, aboutCarrie, her baby grandniece. Her girl. The one she wished, more than anything, was her own and not Ivy’s.
And every time, Howard reassured her, though his patience was growing thin and frayed. Carrie is real. She’ll be back one day. You have to have patience. You have to understand.
But eventually Cora could picture only the day Carrie left, seeing all those hairpins in a pool on her sofa. And the sight of Carrie, running as fast as she could, away from Woodsmoke, away from her legacy, her home.
Carrie kept saying, over and over, that she knew it would happen. That she knew it would come to this. She couldn’t go through with it, she couldn’t make everyone happy, she felt suffocated, trapped, she had to breakfree. As she pulled each pin out of her hair, her slight arms laced with blue veins, she trembled all the more. Shaking not just with sorrow but with relief.
Cora ponders it all now as she sets off on her walk, wending through the back ways, the cut-throughs between the fields. The silent ways. The narrow ways. The ones not marked on the maps detailing Woodsmoke. Whistling to Kep every once in a while, calling to the dog, her old voice grating against the silence.
“Come along, Kep!”
There’s no one about, just her and Kep. While Kep nuzzles the mulch and leaves, Cora strides through the past, where she can usually be found these days. In a way, Ivy gave her sister a gift by leaving the cottage and candles to Carrie. Cora and Ivy hadn’t spoken in six years, and the turn of each season had been marked with festering resentment between them. It had dug its claws into Cora and refused to let her go, even when she knew she should apologize for what she did. Even when she knew she was in the wrong. But every time she nearly walked this way with the intention of visiting Ivy to patch things up, to admit that the spell should have never been cast, she always stumbledand turned another way. It was envy really, all muddled up with pride. Carrie still made the effort to write to Ivy, but she seldom wrote to Cora. No. Cora was the one who was forever left out. Forgotten. The blood between her and Carrie wasn’t thick enough, apparently.
