Page 19 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
We shake on it, awkwardly, avoiding each other’s eyes, then hurry through the rest of the downstairs. Matthieu goes upstairs and taps his way through the chipboard walls of the bedrooms. To his credit, he says nothing as he eyes the discarded steam wallpaper stripper, and that simple kindness thaws me out even more.
By midday we’re working our way through the bedrooms upstairs, carrying furniture down the crooked staircase. My lower back sends out a steady pulse of pain, and I rub it, kneading away the ache, before moving to the opposite side of a small chest of drawers as Matthieu reaches for the other side. We lift it, moving slowly toward the staircase, and I puff out a breath, a strand of hair falling across my eyes. Matthieu smiles at me and shifts his hands to take the bulk of the weight on the stairs.
“So you grew up here?” he asks, steadying the old set of drawers as we reach the hallway. I rub my hands together, stalling for time as I work out how to answer.
“Yes... I was born here.”
“And you left?”
“A while back. But I wouldn’t call this a return.”
“No?”
I shake my head, moving back to the staircase. “No. How about you?”
“I grew up all over. Lots of moving around. Mum didn’t like the people in this place, or my dad couldn’t get enough work in the next town...” He sucks in a breath. “Anyway, I’m just here for the winter, like I said. Just until the season changes.”
“And you were here all of last winter?”
“Yeah. Before—”
“Before?”
I turn to catch his frown, quickly erased as he smiles at me. “Before I had to leave for a while.”
“And you like the mountains?” I ask as I reach the main bedroom. The one with the view out to the looming mountains, the ever-present giants.
“I do,” he says quietly. “My brother and I... we used to come hiking here, years ago. The stories are interesting. You know, the old ones. Ivy started telling me some of them before I had to leave.”
I nod, then move to the front bedroom, with the floral wallpaper. It was mine when I stayed here sometimes, the room where Ivy tucked me in with bedtime stories and silver tea. “Some of them you have to take with a pinch of salt.”
“And the rest?”
I pretend I don’t hear him. The last thing I want to do is talk about being a Morgan, about the book. About still heeding the warnings, though none of us will admit it. “We’ll have to strip all this back next, I guess?”
“All of it,” he says, leaning against the doorframe. “The bathroom suite as well, and I’ll check the plumbing. It looks ancient.”
“All right,” I say, mentally calculating whether I have enough saved to cover the cost of a new bathroom suite as well. Ivy left me a bit in her will, along with her bequest, but it wasn’t enoughto hand the problem off by paying someone else to do the work. She knew full well that renovating the cottage would compel me to return, and also that I couldn’t shirk her request. But I wanted to come home. Maybe she knew somehow, in that Ivy way of hers, that I just needed a good enough excuse.
Movement plays at the corner of my vision, and I glance up to the window. It holds the view over the fields, all the way to Woodsmoke. I can just see the tops of a few houses over the bump of the land as it slopes away. And there, shoulders hunched, cap pulled low over his ears, is someone crossing through the gate. He’s shuffling more than he used to, dragging his feet through the thickening snow. He looks up, only once, and I raise my hand, in case he can see me standing here. But he just carries on, steadily trudging toward the cottage.
Matthieu comes up behind me, eyeing the man, who is nearly halfway across the field. “Best get going. I’ll be back in a couple of days, you can manage until then?”
I nod, not taking my eyes off the man. “Sure, thanks. I’ll be fine.”
Matthieu mutters a farewell, swings down the stairs, and slips out the back door, leaving only that scent of citrus and frost and loam lingering in his wake. By the time the knock of knuckles cracks against the front door, he’s gone. I tidy my hair up, smoothing it back as best I can, and stretch out the ache in my back before opening the front door.
“Flower, it’s time,” Howard says, mouth all twisted up like he’s eaten something sour. “We need to talk.”
Chapter 16
Jess
It’s midnight again. And again, she can’t sleep. But it’s not Tom this time who plagues her thoughts. It’s Carrie. Not the nightmare version she’s grown into, the shadow of guilt and regret looming over her life, but the Carrie of before all this. When it was just the two of them and the whole world glinted with promise and magic. Before Elodie, even before Tom, they walked to school every day, arms linked at the elbows. They would stop in at Ivy’s candle shop in town on the way home, sniffing all the candles, and Ivy would drop paper packets of lemon sherbets and chocolate limes into their pockets.
She smiles into the dark, the scent of Ivy’s winter candle lingering, pluming around her in a cloud. She carried on buying them, every winter. Stealing into Ivy’s shop like a thief, barely making eye contact as Ivy accepted the notes, handing over the candles for Jess to stow in her cloth tote. Her heart aches, knowing Ivy’s shop is closed now. Knowing that there will be no candles this wintertime, no gentle flickering light on the mantelpiece. That the scent weaving through her house, the tenuous connection to her former life before all this domesticity, now wafts only through her memories.
Listening to everyone at the book club, she had the peculiar feeling of floating out of her own body, up above them all, and watching the gossipy twitch of everyone’s heads below as they discussed Carrie Morgan’s return. Betty had many opinions, ofcourse, about how Carrie wouldn’t last the winter, about how she was too wayward, too flaky. Jess’s own mother tried in vain to lead the conversation back toThe Night Circus.
