Happy Holidays, Miscellanny!
Title: A Cup of Sugar
Author: a secret!
Rating: PG
Prompt: “Anathema, Madame Tracy, reluctantly built respect and covens, gen”
Notes: I hope you like your gift!! Happy holidays! (And many thanks to the extremely patient mods.)
Summary: Eye of newt was out of fashion, but sometimes the oldest recipes called for the real thing.
Eye of newt was out of fashion, but sometimes the oldest recipes called for the real thing--intent was usually enough, and the grizzled old woman who ran the proudly vegan health shop down the way had a back room with decent fakes, but it was the third time Anathema was trying to scry into this particular issue and she’d had no luck with rubbery seitan spheres or chrome ball bearings. Eyes it had to be, then.
Anathema rarely had the stomach to harvest the eyeballs herself anymore. For one thing, there was the matter of Newt, which threw the whole process into an unpleasant shadow. For another, in order to achieve maximum potency, the eyes themselves had to be plucked moments before the newt’s death, and the ruthless practicality that had characterized her youth had slowly begun to give way after Minerva was born eleven years ago. When Dido followed three years later, Anathema had found herself, quite against her will, transformed.
There were a few suppliers in Oxfordshire, if one knew where to look, which as a rule Anathema usually did. Anathema had been worried she would lose her prescience without the Book, but like most of the more advanced psychic skills, scrying was usually a heightened form of pattern-recognition. In fact, in many ways releasing herself from the trappings of Descendence made her a better witch. Above all, witches were survivors. It was this instinct in others that she used to sniff her kind out; it was how she’d wandered into the health shop in the first place-the aura of determination that wreathed the crumbling stonework like a live thing that called to her.
The telephone in the house didn’t work, of course. (1) Anathema now took her important calls in her workshop, which had started life as a lean-to attached to the house and had been transformed over the years, by virtue of thrice-blessèd wood and Anathema’s circular saw, into a proper working space. It had all the required elements for a witch’s hut: running water, the girls’ school projects on the walls, a lightning rod. The girls bustled off to school and Newt bustled off to work (2), she spent her morning at her desk, rifling through her little black book and calling all the maidens, mothers, and crones she knew with a reliable stock.
“No, dearie, I’m all out, I’m afraid,” said the thirteenth crone in a row, which was about the time Anathema realized she was being played.
This happened, occasionally: the sense that she was a much smaller part of someone else’s chess game. It was a sensation she did not relish, given her own rather significant power (3), but she paid attention to it, the way that she paid attention to the wriggling and obvious absence in her memory of an afternoon twenty years ago. Like the gap after a toothache, it felt both irrelevant and evidentiary.
There was one name left on the list. She sighed. She had been avoiding calling this particular name back for practically a decade, since the last time the woman had shown up at a thaumaturgic conference covered in scarves and culturally insensitive temporary tattoos. Anathema sighed again, then tapped the name twice and picked up the receiver.
“Shangri-La speakin’,” said a gruff voice on the other end, tightly, after a half-dozen rings.
“Can I speak to Madame Tracy, please?” Anathema asked.
“Who’s callin’?” asked Shadwell.
Primly, Anathema answered, “Anathema Device-Pulsifer,” and waited while the phone was transferred with much clunking, probably due to Madame Tracy’s constantly beringed fingers. She’d claimed all the stones helped with her arthritis, which was in any scientific sense pish-tosh. But pish-tosh came with the territory, a bit.
“Hello,” said Madame Tracy, pitching her voice about three tones too sultry for her vocal range.
“It’s Anathema,” Anathema repeated. “Anathema Device-Pulsifer?”
“Anathema,” Madame Tracy said, coolly. Anathema winced-she’d waited too long for even Madame Tracy’s generous sense of dignity. “So good of you to telephone.”
“Er, yes,” Anathema said.
“You know, I was rather surprised when you took that young man’s name,” Madame Tracy mused.
“Were you?” Anathema seethed. (4)
“Oh yes. I thought you'd have enough-stamina to maintain your own name. Dear,” she added, very obviously.
“We all make choices,” Anathema said rather desperately.
“We do,” Madame Tracy agreed, still cold.
Anathema realized with a dawning, aching dread that Robert Frost was right: the only way out was through. “I’m-look,” she said, gathering her courage, “I’m terribly sorry for how I’ve acted.”
“Oh?”
“Remarkably, immensely, exceedingly sorry,” Anathema continued, trying to channel Newt’s gift for apologies on one of his most embarrassing days.
“Oh.”
It was time to bite the bullet. Anathema took a deep breath and admitted, “I should never have ignored you that way.”
“Oh,” Madame Tracy said, beginning to sound worrisomely teary.
“Look, I know I didn’t call,” she hurried and gritted out, just as Madame Tracy bubbled, “Darling, I hope you know that I never meant to offend you-”
“Didn't you!” said Anathema, quite surprised.
“I didn’t know you were even a bit Indian,” Madame Tracy hissed.
“We don’t always advertise,” Anathema said wryly, surprised despite herself. “Anyway-thanks.”
“Don't you know, I’ve been dying to explain-”
“I mean, it wasn’t just me who was offended, you understand-”
“-for years-”
“-and anyway, that was on my mother’s side-”
“-and you wouldn’t call, and I don’t know how to work these new e-mails very well-”
“-but I didn’t know how to talk to you about it, I thought you’d just be angry-”
“-although you’d be surprised at the lovely setup Mister S has got for us here-”
“-I know you take that spiritual stuff very seriously-”
“-I just didn't know what to do-”
“-but I wasn't sure you'd known how you'd come across-”
“-and, well, I’m sorry,” they finished at the same time.
“Thank you,” said Madame Tracy, drawing her dignity back around herself like one of the ever-present scarves. Well, perhaps she didn’t wear them anymore. Anathema, in fact, did not know. “Well, what did you call for? I assume you want something?” (5)
“Eye of newt,” Anathema admitted. “A kilo of them.”
“A kilo!” said Madame Tracy. “That's a pretty kettle of newt!”
“It's for a personal project.”
“Nothing to do with that Book, I hope,” Madame Tracy mused aloud, far too keenly.
“No. Not quite. An experiment-”
“Oh, Anathema-”
“But not one to do with Agnes. At least not directly.”
“I don't know, I still don't like the idea.”
“But you don't know, Madame Tracy. And neither do I,” Anathema explained, feeling unexpectedly passionate about the entire affair: the Book’s ever-closed sequel, the week she and Newt had both now forgotten, even the blasted car Newt still drove because it refused to stop working. “We none of us know! And wouldn't you like to?”
Madame Tracy sucked in a breath through her front teeth. Anathema could easily picture the bright pink lipstick marks she'd leave behind. “I’m still not sure,” she said. “You and that man of yours had best come to tea.”
“And then the eyes?” Anathema asked, unable to help herself.
“We’ll talk about the eyes after you come and eat some home cooking.You need some looking after, Anathema, whether that husband of yours will do it or not.”
“I am perfectly capable of looking after myself!”
Madame Tracy ignored that entirely: “Bring the children, will you? Mister S could use the company.”
“Yes, all right,” Anathema said, her instinct for free childcare now one of the sharpest of her senses. “We’ll see you tonight.”
Arrangements weren’t particularly difficult to make; Shangri-La was only thirty minutes away. She called Newt, who for reasons as-yet-unascertained but probably linked to the forgotten week had genuinely fond feelings for old Shadwell, and readied bags for the girls with their books and games: Macbeth and Monopoly for Minerva, The Westing Game and Cluedo for Dido. On second thought, she tucked in Risk just in case they finished the books and got bored, as well as their hand-written set of rules-Anathema refused to raise her children to conquer the world rather than save it.
“You’d better pick the girls up from school,” she said to Newt. “I’ve got a brew going slower than I’d like and I need to keep an eye on it.”
She could practically hear Newt shrug as he shut down his computer and said, “All right, will do.” They were both freelancers, in each their own way, but Anathema’s schedule was typically the more rigid.
Anathema didn’t hold with cauldrons, which were much too heavy and flashy for her liking. She much preferred to tend her witches’ brews in her trusted slow-cooker, which had been with her since her undergraduate degree and which now permanently smelled of burned sage. Besides, it was significantly more portable than some medieval cast iron soup pot. In situations like this one, in which an important ingredient was held captive in Madame Tracy’s Cabinet of Horrors (6), Anathema was grateful to her ancestors for the frequent, explicit, and plaintive marginalia, which had given her the idea in the first place.
Like the best of her kind, and now long released from her first two decades of thorough if inspired obedience, Anathema followed some combination of tradition and her own intuition, heavier on the latter. She’d started with wild onion and then stripped springs of rosemary into the mix-ever practical, Anathema rarely believed in making a totally inedible brew-and doused it in most of a bottle of dry white wine she’d found inexplicably hiding in the back of the kitchen cupboard. The resulting steam burned her eyes, which she chose to take as evidence of her own power rather than evidence that she should in future not open her eyes immediately above a steaming pan of alcohol-drenched allium. Next, dandelion leaves and thin slices of apple, three tiny duck feathers Dido had found in the garden and that she'd been saving since last spring, and the deep red hip of a rosa rugosa she'd had in the freezer awaiting its eventual purpose. After hanging up on Newt, Anathema frowned down at the mixture and added another rose hip.
Ah, yes. There.
Breathing in the steam of her own intent, Anathema felt slightly sick and faint. She grinned, clutching at herself; this strange, bubbling feeling just under her breastbone was the best sign she’d had in years that she might, perhaps, learn what precisely had happened two decades ago.
Outside, Newt beeped the horn just as Anathema's mobile vibrated with a third message from him. Oh dear. Five minutes, she texted him back, and gathered up the slow-cooker and the girls’ bags. She was still looping her scarf around her neck when Minerva appeared, on the very cusp of adolescent irritation, to knock at the window and gesture for her to come on, Mum!
Anathema deposited both Minerva’s own satchel and then Dido’s into Minerva’s arms-“No fair,” said Minerva, but held onto both bags gamely enough-and walked back towards Dick Turpin, whose kitten-smooth engine was still as silent as it had ever been.
The drive was easy enough, though Newt got momentarily lost when he insisted on listening to the GPS rather than Anathema’s perfectly decent directions.
“As the crow flies is not as Dick Turpin does, Anathema,” Newt was saying, riled up, as they finally pulled up in front of the rather shabby little bungalow that Madame Tracy had lovingly painted a bright fuchsia.
“You should be used to translating by now,” Anathema pointed out. “Crows are useful little buggers.”
“Don’t talk like that in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N,” Newt gasped, clutching his seatbelt to his chest like so many pearls.
“Daddy, I can spell now,” Dido said helpfully as she unbuckled her seatbelt and scooted on out of the car.
“Don’t use the words Mum uses, then,” Newt called after her. “They’re very naughty!”
“I guess I’m very naughty,” Anathema observed in the briefly silent wake of their children, and Newt raised his eyebrows meaningfully at her before getting out of the car himself.
“Can I ring the bell, Mum?” Minerva asked, which of course meant Dido wanted the responsibility as well. Anathema had them both ring once in quick succession, and prayed that Madame Tracy would be the one to come to their rescue.
No such luck: the front door cracked open and let a thin sliver of nose peek through. “Aye?” said the nose.
“Anathema Device-Pulsifer and family,” Newt answered, jovial, and pitched forward to shake Shadwell’s hand as the door swung more widely open. “Good to see you, Sergeant,” he said.
“I’m retired now,” Shadwell said, which lessened Newt’s enthusiasm only slightly. “Come in, come in. The missus’ll be wanting to see you. Could have rung just once, you know,” he said, eyeing Dido and Minerva with a thousand-yard stare.
Minerva, whose preteen recalcitrance was just beginning to develop along with her attitude, hung behind Anathema, but Dido came straight up to Shadwell and held out her hand. "I'm Dido Device-Pulsfier," she said. "It's very nice to meet you."
Clearly taken aback, Shadwell held out his wizened old hand in return. "I'm former Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell," he said, as she shook his hand enthusiastically.
"That's a coincidence! I'm a witch!" Dido said, delightedly.
Shadwell eyed her. "D'yae think I can get yae to consider the other side," he said, very seriously, just as Madame Tracy came floating down the hallway in her usual cloud of perfumes and permed hair.
"Maybe," Dido said, clearly intrigued.
Then Anathema's view was full of Madame Tracy's coiffure, as Madame Tracy kissed her on both cheeks and held her out. "Look at you!" she said, then, her mascara'd waterline glistening quite carefully, "look at your family!"
"These are the little wolves," Anathema said. "About those eyes--"
"Give me a minute to take all this in," Madame Tracy said, clapping Anathema on the shoulder, then attacking Newt's cheeks in turn. "And your babies!"
"I'm not a baby," Minerva said, arms crossed over her chest.
"No, my dear, you aren't," said Madame Tracy, a strange gleam coming into her eye that Anathema found she didn't like very much. "All too soon, you'll--"
"Let's save the fortune-telling for after we eat, shall we?" Anathema insisted, pushing them all further inside the hallway and finally closing the door behind Newt.
"Mum says I don't have to get my fortune told if I don't want to," Minerva said, voice a bit shrilly.
Madame Tracy eyed her Anathema up and down in a way that felt all too shrewd for Anathema's liking. "Your mother is a very wise woman," she decided, finally. "Let's all go in for our tea, hmmm?"
Minerva looked back to Anathema in a now-unusual search for approval and then nodded agreeably enough.
"You and your sister don't mind setting the table, do you? Mister S will show you where the plates are," Madame Tracy said, shuffling Minerva into the kitchen, where Shadwell was now setting two tall stools next to the table as Dido watched, apparently spellbound by the idea of Witchfinders or perhaps simply by the strange hulking grace of Shadwell's presence. "Or, well, Newt, you remember where everything is, don't you?"
"It's been a long time since Anathema and I have been here," Newt said, but some part of him must have recalled their dinners here just as some part of Anathema did, because he began showing Minerva round the kitchen cabinets with a surety that was not usually part of Newt's general aura.
"You come with me," Madame Tracy said, crooking her finger at Anathema. "And bring that slow-cooker. I want to see what you've got boiling away in there."
Anathema held back her offense that she would be so amateurish as to ruin the delicacy of the spell by boiling it. "It's not bubbling," she explained mildly. "Nor toiling, nor troubling. I just kept it covered in the car so it's still warm."
Madame Tracy shrugged, and grabbed Anathema's wrist between her mauve-polished nails. "Come along, then, into the workroom with you."
Ten years ago, this had been a dreadful room, and in many ways it still was: incensed within an inch of its life and thrown over with thick burgundy carpets and yellow curtains, like a boudoir by someone who imagined herself to have Rromani blood. (7) "You're still holding seances, then?" Anathema asked, placing the slow-cooker next to the crystal ball and fingering the gauzy tablecloth underneath.
"A woman has to earn a living," Madame Tracy pointed out. "Funniest thing, though. I swear, these days it feels like the dead do actually come for tea. I don't even need him out there to knock on the wall anymore--they do it all their own!"
"Oh? When since?"
Madame Tracy became suddenly uncomfortable and didn't answer right away, instead lifting the slow-cooker's lid and allowing the small fragrant puff of steam to envelop her. "Twenty years, give or take," she said at last, and sighed, nodded. "I'll give you the newt's eyes on one condition--I want to scry with you."
"Anything," Anathema said, desperate, now, "anything you want," so Madame Tracy went over to the elaborate wardrobe in the corner, covered in dripping and eldritch carvings, unlocked it, and lugged out a huge sack. EYE O NEWT was scrawled on the side in Shadwell's surprising copperplate hand.
"Perhaps not a whole kilo," Anathema cautioned.
"Not for something as delicate as what you've got there, luv," Madame Tracy agreed, and scooped out a handful of the things. "One by one 'til the work is done," she intoned, much to Anathema's embarrassment.
They took turns dropping in an eye, letting it settle to the bottom, then float to the top again. At three, they paused, and at seven, Anathema suddenly felt an icy hand clutch at her stomach. "Stop, stop!" she said, as Madame Tracy went to plop in another eyeball. "We never plugged it in!"
"More fool me," Madame Tracy sighed, and lifted up the gauzy tablecloth to reveal the crystal ball was, in fact, plugged into an outlet by the wall.
“I thought the spirits spoke to you now.”
“An extra prop or two never hurt anybody,” Madame Tracy said huffily, patting the tablecloth back in place and turning the slow-cooker on. “Now, we wait.”
Soon the brew began to warm, and a strange, dark, hazy steam started to rise from the slow-cooker. Anathema felt Madame Tracy lean in beside her, and then she didn't care, anymore, whether Madame Tracy was next to her or not, because she was suddenly no longer in her body, carried along by the scent of rosemary and onion and the ever-present sage underneath, transported through time and space and into a hovering invisible presence somewhere very, well, ritzy.
Being that they were both without senses and invisible, it took her several moments to realize that Madame Tracy’s consciousness had appeared beside hers. She took another breath--sharp onion, sweet rosemary, burnt sage--and her vision, such as it was, focused in on two men sitting at one of the tables. In a metaphysical way Anathema knew she was both beside the table and at home in Madame Tracy’s ugly workshop, but it didn’t seem to matter where Anathema was, in the scheme of all things: these two men were somehow the points around which the entire world revolved. (8)
“Angel,” said the one in dark glasses, and Anathema was pricked by a shocking stab of recognition, although she couldn’t say why, exactly, or where it came from. “Don’t you think-don’t you think-”
“Don’t I think what?” said the blond man across from him. He was short and a bit stocky where the man in the sunglasses was tall and slender, but he had a strength running across his shoulders like few creatures Anathema had ever seen. When he poured more wine into their empty glasses, his wrists were so pale that they nearly glowed.
“Don’t you think it’s a bit strange? Twenty years ago today-“
“Crowley,” the pale one growled, setting the wine bottle back down and looking around with a suspicious gleam in his eye. “I wish you wouldn’t bring that up.”
“No one’s listening,” Crowley said. Then he frowned and looked directly at Anathema. “At least, I think no one’s listening.”
“No one wants to,” the pale one admitted, leaning forward and rubbing his thumb down the crook of Crowley’s wrist. Something about it struck Anathema as strangely intimate, though she didn’t know why anything about these men, beyond their existence, should seem especially strange to her. “We know that they’re not listening, my dear, but must you always bring it up, this wretched anniversary-”
“You think it’s wretched?” Crowley asked.
The pale one--Aziraphale, Anathema’s mind supplied, though she couldn’t be sure what made her come up with such a ridiculous name-smiled and said, “Well.” He clinked their glasses together. “Not all of it.”
In a sudden rush of understanding, Anathema knew that she'd met them before.
“Certainly not all of it,” Aziraphale repeated.
“You think we made the right choice?” Crowley asked, looking out at the rest of the restaurant, away from Anathema and Madame Tracy’s silent double presence. “The whole botched thing, these past twenty years, you think it was part of the Plan?”
“I don’t ask that anymore, my dear,” Aziraphale said, very gently. “And I don’t think you want to, either.”
Anathema tried to take in another breath, to see further, but she was deposited gently back into her body, Madame Tracy snorting awake beside her.
“No, no, no,” Anathema muttered, and dropped another newt eye into the mix before Madame Tracy’s questing hand could stop her, but it was no good: the brew had steamed out and was nothing more than a soupy mixture of dandelion greens and dissolving rose hips.
“We’ll try again,” Madame Tracy said, too kindly, while Anathema angrily, fruitlessly fiddled with the slow-cooker’s dial. “But for now, darling, won’t you come in for your tea?”
-
(1) Newt had tried to raise the volume once, since Dido was a particularly weepy baby. Afterwards, Newt upgraded to a military-grade mobile, and they’d kept the obsolete handset as a kind of toy for the girls.
(2) He’d fallen into a surprisingly lucrative freelancing market: whenever any particularly annoying legal motions for information were served, companies all over Britain would hire Newt as an IT consultant. There was something about a convenient buildingful of blank screens that lawyers tended to find very convincing.
(3) Not to mention the women’s studies courses she’d taken during her graduate work.
(4) Anathema hadn't originally planned to, but then Newt had cried.
(5) Their uncomfortable habit of ignoring social niceties was but one reason witches were typically solitary creatures.
(6) Anathema wondered whether she still charged admission to the neighborhood kiddies and their weepy mothers.
(7) Indeed, though Madame Tracy would never know it, her great-great-grandmother had been one of the greatest Rromani fortune-tellers of the early nineteenth century. This had nothing to do with her taste, however, which were rather more influenced by romance novelists.
(8) The less metaphysical part of Anathema, the one that had taken all those women's studies courses, was very affronted.
Author: a secret!
Rating: PG
Prompt: “Anathema, Madame Tracy, reluctantly built respect and covens, gen”
Notes: I hope you like your gift!! Happy holidays! (And many thanks to the extremely patient mods.)
Summary: Eye of newt was out of fashion, but sometimes the oldest recipes called for the real thing.
Eye of newt was out of fashion, but sometimes the oldest recipes called for the real thing--intent was usually enough, and the grizzled old woman who ran the proudly vegan health shop down the way had a back room with decent fakes, but it was the third time Anathema was trying to scry into this particular issue and she’d had no luck with rubbery seitan spheres or chrome ball bearings. Eyes it had to be, then.
Anathema rarely had the stomach to harvest the eyeballs herself anymore. For one thing, there was the matter of Newt, which threw the whole process into an unpleasant shadow. For another, in order to achieve maximum potency, the eyes themselves had to be plucked moments before the newt’s death, and the ruthless practicality that had characterized her youth had slowly begun to give way after Minerva was born eleven years ago. When Dido followed three years later, Anathema had found herself, quite against her will, transformed.
There were a few suppliers in Oxfordshire, if one knew where to look, which as a rule Anathema usually did. Anathema had been worried she would lose her prescience without the Book, but like most of the more advanced psychic skills, scrying was usually a heightened form of pattern-recognition. In fact, in many ways releasing herself from the trappings of Descendence made her a better witch. Above all, witches were survivors. It was this instinct in others that she used to sniff her kind out; it was how she’d wandered into the health shop in the first place-the aura of determination that wreathed the crumbling stonework like a live thing that called to her.
The telephone in the house didn’t work, of course. (1) Anathema now took her important calls in her workshop, which had started life as a lean-to attached to the house and had been transformed over the years, by virtue of thrice-blessèd wood and Anathema’s circular saw, into a proper working space. It had all the required elements for a witch’s hut: running water, the girls’ school projects on the walls, a lightning rod. The girls bustled off to school and Newt bustled off to work (2), she spent her morning at her desk, rifling through her little black book and calling all the maidens, mothers, and crones she knew with a reliable stock.
“No, dearie, I’m all out, I’m afraid,” said the thirteenth crone in a row, which was about the time Anathema realized she was being played.
This happened, occasionally: the sense that she was a much smaller part of someone else’s chess game. It was a sensation she did not relish, given her own rather significant power (3), but she paid attention to it, the way that she paid attention to the wriggling and obvious absence in her memory of an afternoon twenty years ago. Like the gap after a toothache, it felt both irrelevant and evidentiary.
There was one name left on the list. She sighed. She had been avoiding calling this particular name back for practically a decade, since the last time the woman had shown up at a thaumaturgic conference covered in scarves and culturally insensitive temporary tattoos. Anathema sighed again, then tapped the name twice and picked up the receiver.
“Shangri-La speakin’,” said a gruff voice on the other end, tightly, after a half-dozen rings.
“Can I speak to Madame Tracy, please?” Anathema asked.
“Who’s callin’?” asked Shadwell.
Primly, Anathema answered, “Anathema Device-Pulsifer,” and waited while the phone was transferred with much clunking, probably due to Madame Tracy’s constantly beringed fingers. She’d claimed all the stones helped with her arthritis, which was in any scientific sense pish-tosh. But pish-tosh came with the territory, a bit.
“Hello,” said Madame Tracy, pitching her voice about three tones too sultry for her vocal range.
“It’s Anathema,” Anathema repeated. “Anathema Device-Pulsifer?”
“Anathema,” Madame Tracy said, coolly. Anathema winced-she’d waited too long for even Madame Tracy’s generous sense of dignity. “So good of you to telephone.”
“Er, yes,” Anathema said.
“You know, I was rather surprised when you took that young man’s name,” Madame Tracy mused.
“Were you?” Anathema seethed. (4)
“Oh yes. I thought you'd have enough-stamina to maintain your own name. Dear,” she added, very obviously.
“We all make choices,” Anathema said rather desperately.
“We do,” Madame Tracy agreed, still cold.
Anathema realized with a dawning, aching dread that Robert Frost was right: the only way out was through. “I’m-look,” she said, gathering her courage, “I’m terribly sorry for how I’ve acted.”
“Oh?”
“Remarkably, immensely, exceedingly sorry,” Anathema continued, trying to channel Newt’s gift for apologies on one of his most embarrassing days.
“Oh.”
It was time to bite the bullet. Anathema took a deep breath and admitted, “I should never have ignored you that way.”
“Oh,” Madame Tracy said, beginning to sound worrisomely teary.
“Look, I know I didn’t call,” she hurried and gritted out, just as Madame Tracy bubbled, “Darling, I hope you know that I never meant to offend you-”
“Didn't you!” said Anathema, quite surprised.
“I didn’t know you were even a bit Indian,” Madame Tracy hissed.
“We don’t always advertise,” Anathema said wryly, surprised despite herself. “Anyway-thanks.”
“Don't you know, I’ve been dying to explain-”
“I mean, it wasn’t just me who was offended, you understand-”
“-for years-”
“-and anyway, that was on my mother’s side-”
“-and you wouldn’t call, and I don’t know how to work these new e-mails very well-”
“-but I didn’t know how to talk to you about it, I thought you’d just be angry-”
“-although you’d be surprised at the lovely setup Mister S has got for us here-”
“-I know you take that spiritual stuff very seriously-”
“-I just didn't know what to do-”
“-but I wasn't sure you'd known how you'd come across-”
“-and, well, I’m sorry,” they finished at the same time.
“Thank you,” said Madame Tracy, drawing her dignity back around herself like one of the ever-present scarves. Well, perhaps she didn’t wear them anymore. Anathema, in fact, did not know. “Well, what did you call for? I assume you want something?” (5)
“Eye of newt,” Anathema admitted. “A kilo of them.”
“A kilo!” said Madame Tracy. “That's a pretty kettle of newt!”
“It's for a personal project.”
“Nothing to do with that Book, I hope,” Madame Tracy mused aloud, far too keenly.
“No. Not quite. An experiment-”
“Oh, Anathema-”
“But not one to do with Agnes. At least not directly.”
“I don't know, I still don't like the idea.”
“But you don't know, Madame Tracy. And neither do I,” Anathema explained, feeling unexpectedly passionate about the entire affair: the Book’s ever-closed sequel, the week she and Newt had both now forgotten, even the blasted car Newt still drove because it refused to stop working. “We none of us know! And wouldn't you like to?”
Madame Tracy sucked in a breath through her front teeth. Anathema could easily picture the bright pink lipstick marks she'd leave behind. “I’m still not sure,” she said. “You and that man of yours had best come to tea.”
“And then the eyes?” Anathema asked, unable to help herself.
“We’ll talk about the eyes after you come and eat some home cooking.You need some looking after, Anathema, whether that husband of yours will do it or not.”
“I am perfectly capable of looking after myself!”
Madame Tracy ignored that entirely: “Bring the children, will you? Mister S could use the company.”
“Yes, all right,” Anathema said, her instinct for free childcare now one of the sharpest of her senses. “We’ll see you tonight.”
Arrangements weren’t particularly difficult to make; Shangri-La was only thirty minutes away. She called Newt, who for reasons as-yet-unascertained but probably linked to the forgotten week had genuinely fond feelings for old Shadwell, and readied bags for the girls with their books and games: Macbeth and Monopoly for Minerva, The Westing Game and Cluedo for Dido. On second thought, she tucked in Risk just in case they finished the books and got bored, as well as their hand-written set of rules-Anathema refused to raise her children to conquer the world rather than save it.
“You’d better pick the girls up from school,” she said to Newt. “I’ve got a brew going slower than I’d like and I need to keep an eye on it.”
She could practically hear Newt shrug as he shut down his computer and said, “All right, will do.” They were both freelancers, in each their own way, but Anathema’s schedule was typically the more rigid.
Anathema didn’t hold with cauldrons, which were much too heavy and flashy for her liking. She much preferred to tend her witches’ brews in her trusted slow-cooker, which had been with her since her undergraduate degree and which now permanently smelled of burned sage. Besides, it was significantly more portable than some medieval cast iron soup pot. In situations like this one, in which an important ingredient was held captive in Madame Tracy’s Cabinet of Horrors (6), Anathema was grateful to her ancestors for the frequent, explicit, and plaintive marginalia, which had given her the idea in the first place.
Like the best of her kind, and now long released from her first two decades of thorough if inspired obedience, Anathema followed some combination of tradition and her own intuition, heavier on the latter. She’d started with wild onion and then stripped springs of rosemary into the mix-ever practical, Anathema rarely believed in making a totally inedible brew-and doused it in most of a bottle of dry white wine she’d found inexplicably hiding in the back of the kitchen cupboard. The resulting steam burned her eyes, which she chose to take as evidence of her own power rather than evidence that she should in future not open her eyes immediately above a steaming pan of alcohol-drenched allium. Next, dandelion leaves and thin slices of apple, three tiny duck feathers Dido had found in the garden and that she'd been saving since last spring, and the deep red hip of a rosa rugosa she'd had in the freezer awaiting its eventual purpose. After hanging up on Newt, Anathema frowned down at the mixture and added another rose hip.
Ah, yes. There.
Breathing in the steam of her own intent, Anathema felt slightly sick and faint. She grinned, clutching at herself; this strange, bubbling feeling just under her breastbone was the best sign she’d had in years that she might, perhaps, learn what precisely had happened two decades ago.
Outside, Newt beeped the horn just as Anathema's mobile vibrated with a third message from him. Oh dear. Five minutes, she texted him back, and gathered up the slow-cooker and the girls’ bags. She was still looping her scarf around her neck when Minerva appeared, on the very cusp of adolescent irritation, to knock at the window and gesture for her to come on, Mum!
Anathema deposited both Minerva’s own satchel and then Dido’s into Minerva’s arms-“No fair,” said Minerva, but held onto both bags gamely enough-and walked back towards Dick Turpin, whose kitten-smooth engine was still as silent as it had ever been.
The drive was easy enough, though Newt got momentarily lost when he insisted on listening to the GPS rather than Anathema’s perfectly decent directions.
“As the crow flies is not as Dick Turpin does, Anathema,” Newt was saying, riled up, as they finally pulled up in front of the rather shabby little bungalow that Madame Tracy had lovingly painted a bright fuchsia.
“You should be used to translating by now,” Anathema pointed out. “Crows are useful little buggers.”
“Don’t talk like that in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N,” Newt gasped, clutching his seatbelt to his chest like so many pearls.
“Daddy, I can spell now,” Dido said helpfully as she unbuckled her seatbelt and scooted on out of the car.
“Don’t use the words Mum uses, then,” Newt called after her. “They’re very naughty!”
“I guess I’m very naughty,” Anathema observed in the briefly silent wake of their children, and Newt raised his eyebrows meaningfully at her before getting out of the car himself.
“Can I ring the bell, Mum?” Minerva asked, which of course meant Dido wanted the responsibility as well. Anathema had them both ring once in quick succession, and prayed that Madame Tracy would be the one to come to their rescue.
No such luck: the front door cracked open and let a thin sliver of nose peek through. “Aye?” said the nose.
“Anathema Device-Pulsifer and family,” Newt answered, jovial, and pitched forward to shake Shadwell’s hand as the door swung more widely open. “Good to see you, Sergeant,” he said.
“I’m retired now,” Shadwell said, which lessened Newt’s enthusiasm only slightly. “Come in, come in. The missus’ll be wanting to see you. Could have rung just once, you know,” he said, eyeing Dido and Minerva with a thousand-yard stare.
Minerva, whose preteen recalcitrance was just beginning to develop along with her attitude, hung behind Anathema, but Dido came straight up to Shadwell and held out her hand. "I'm Dido Device-Pulsfier," she said. "It's very nice to meet you."
Clearly taken aback, Shadwell held out his wizened old hand in return. "I'm former Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell," he said, as she shook his hand enthusiastically.
"That's a coincidence! I'm a witch!" Dido said, delightedly.
Shadwell eyed her. "D'yae think I can get yae to consider the other side," he said, very seriously, just as Madame Tracy came floating down the hallway in her usual cloud of perfumes and permed hair.
"Maybe," Dido said, clearly intrigued.
Then Anathema's view was full of Madame Tracy's coiffure, as Madame Tracy kissed her on both cheeks and held her out. "Look at you!" she said, then, her mascara'd waterline glistening quite carefully, "look at your family!"
"These are the little wolves," Anathema said. "About those eyes--"
"Give me a minute to take all this in," Madame Tracy said, clapping Anathema on the shoulder, then attacking Newt's cheeks in turn. "And your babies!"
"I'm not a baby," Minerva said, arms crossed over her chest.
"No, my dear, you aren't," said Madame Tracy, a strange gleam coming into her eye that Anathema found she didn't like very much. "All too soon, you'll--"
"Let's save the fortune-telling for after we eat, shall we?" Anathema insisted, pushing them all further inside the hallway and finally closing the door behind Newt.
"Mum says I don't have to get my fortune told if I don't want to," Minerva said, voice a bit shrilly.
Madame Tracy eyed her Anathema up and down in a way that felt all too shrewd for Anathema's liking. "Your mother is a very wise woman," she decided, finally. "Let's all go in for our tea, hmmm?"
Minerva looked back to Anathema in a now-unusual search for approval and then nodded agreeably enough.
"You and your sister don't mind setting the table, do you? Mister S will show you where the plates are," Madame Tracy said, shuffling Minerva into the kitchen, where Shadwell was now setting two tall stools next to the table as Dido watched, apparently spellbound by the idea of Witchfinders or perhaps simply by the strange hulking grace of Shadwell's presence. "Or, well, Newt, you remember where everything is, don't you?"
"It's been a long time since Anathema and I have been here," Newt said, but some part of him must have recalled their dinners here just as some part of Anathema did, because he began showing Minerva round the kitchen cabinets with a surety that was not usually part of Newt's general aura.
"You come with me," Madame Tracy said, crooking her finger at Anathema. "And bring that slow-cooker. I want to see what you've got boiling away in there."
Anathema held back her offense that she would be so amateurish as to ruin the delicacy of the spell by boiling it. "It's not bubbling," she explained mildly. "Nor toiling, nor troubling. I just kept it covered in the car so it's still warm."
Madame Tracy shrugged, and grabbed Anathema's wrist between her mauve-polished nails. "Come along, then, into the workroom with you."
Ten years ago, this had been a dreadful room, and in many ways it still was: incensed within an inch of its life and thrown over with thick burgundy carpets and yellow curtains, like a boudoir by someone who imagined herself to have Rromani blood. (7) "You're still holding seances, then?" Anathema asked, placing the slow-cooker next to the crystal ball and fingering the gauzy tablecloth underneath.
"A woman has to earn a living," Madame Tracy pointed out. "Funniest thing, though. I swear, these days it feels like the dead do actually come for tea. I don't even need him out there to knock on the wall anymore--they do it all their own!"
"Oh? When since?"
Madame Tracy became suddenly uncomfortable and didn't answer right away, instead lifting the slow-cooker's lid and allowing the small fragrant puff of steam to envelop her. "Twenty years, give or take," she said at last, and sighed, nodded. "I'll give you the newt's eyes on one condition--I want to scry with you."
"Anything," Anathema said, desperate, now, "anything you want," so Madame Tracy went over to the elaborate wardrobe in the corner, covered in dripping and eldritch carvings, unlocked it, and lugged out a huge sack. EYE O NEWT was scrawled on the side in Shadwell's surprising copperplate hand.
"Perhaps not a whole kilo," Anathema cautioned.
"Not for something as delicate as what you've got there, luv," Madame Tracy agreed, and scooped out a handful of the things. "One by one 'til the work is done," she intoned, much to Anathema's embarrassment.
They took turns dropping in an eye, letting it settle to the bottom, then float to the top again. At three, they paused, and at seven, Anathema suddenly felt an icy hand clutch at her stomach. "Stop, stop!" she said, as Madame Tracy went to plop in another eyeball. "We never plugged it in!"
"More fool me," Madame Tracy sighed, and lifted up the gauzy tablecloth to reveal the crystal ball was, in fact, plugged into an outlet by the wall.
“I thought the spirits spoke to you now.”
“An extra prop or two never hurt anybody,” Madame Tracy said huffily, patting the tablecloth back in place and turning the slow-cooker on. “Now, we wait.”
Soon the brew began to warm, and a strange, dark, hazy steam started to rise from the slow-cooker. Anathema felt Madame Tracy lean in beside her, and then she didn't care, anymore, whether Madame Tracy was next to her or not, because she was suddenly no longer in her body, carried along by the scent of rosemary and onion and the ever-present sage underneath, transported through time and space and into a hovering invisible presence somewhere very, well, ritzy.
Being that they were both without senses and invisible, it took her several moments to realize that Madame Tracy’s consciousness had appeared beside hers. She took another breath--sharp onion, sweet rosemary, burnt sage--and her vision, such as it was, focused in on two men sitting at one of the tables. In a metaphysical way Anathema knew she was both beside the table and at home in Madame Tracy’s ugly workshop, but it didn’t seem to matter where Anathema was, in the scheme of all things: these two men were somehow the points around which the entire world revolved. (8)
“Angel,” said the one in dark glasses, and Anathema was pricked by a shocking stab of recognition, although she couldn’t say why, exactly, or where it came from. “Don’t you think-don’t you think-”
“Don’t I think what?” said the blond man across from him. He was short and a bit stocky where the man in the sunglasses was tall and slender, but he had a strength running across his shoulders like few creatures Anathema had ever seen. When he poured more wine into their empty glasses, his wrists were so pale that they nearly glowed.
“Don’t you think it’s a bit strange? Twenty years ago today-“
“Crowley,” the pale one growled, setting the wine bottle back down and looking around with a suspicious gleam in his eye. “I wish you wouldn’t bring that up.”
“No one’s listening,” Crowley said. Then he frowned and looked directly at Anathema. “At least, I think no one’s listening.”
“No one wants to,” the pale one admitted, leaning forward and rubbing his thumb down the crook of Crowley’s wrist. Something about it struck Anathema as strangely intimate, though she didn’t know why anything about these men, beyond their existence, should seem especially strange to her. “We know that they’re not listening, my dear, but must you always bring it up, this wretched anniversary-”
“You think it’s wretched?” Crowley asked.
The pale one--Aziraphale, Anathema’s mind supplied, though she couldn’t be sure what made her come up with such a ridiculous name-smiled and said, “Well.” He clinked their glasses together. “Not all of it.”
In a sudden rush of understanding, Anathema knew that she'd met them before.
“Certainly not all of it,” Aziraphale repeated.
“You think we made the right choice?” Crowley asked, looking out at the rest of the restaurant, away from Anathema and Madame Tracy’s silent double presence. “The whole botched thing, these past twenty years, you think it was part of the Plan?”
“I don’t ask that anymore, my dear,” Aziraphale said, very gently. “And I don’t think you want to, either.”
Anathema tried to take in another breath, to see further, but she was deposited gently back into her body, Madame Tracy snorting awake beside her.
“No, no, no,” Anathema muttered, and dropped another newt eye into the mix before Madame Tracy’s questing hand could stop her, but it was no good: the brew had steamed out and was nothing more than a soupy mixture of dandelion greens and dissolving rose hips.
“We’ll try again,” Madame Tracy said, too kindly, while Anathema angrily, fruitlessly fiddled with the slow-cooker’s dial. “But for now, darling, won’t you come in for your tea?”
-
(1) Newt had tried to raise the volume once, since Dido was a particularly weepy baby. Afterwards, Newt upgraded to a military-grade mobile, and they’d kept the obsolete handset as a kind of toy for the girls.
(2) He’d fallen into a surprisingly lucrative freelancing market: whenever any particularly annoying legal motions for information were served, companies all over Britain would hire Newt as an IT consultant. There was something about a convenient buildingful of blank screens that lawyers tended to find very convincing.
(3) Not to mention the women’s studies courses she’d taken during her graduate work.
(4) Anathema hadn't originally planned to, but then Newt had cried.
(5) Their uncomfortable habit of ignoring social niceties was but one reason witches were typically solitary creatures.
(6) Anathema wondered whether she still charged admission to the neighborhood kiddies and their weepy mothers.
(7) Indeed, though Madame Tracy would never know it, her great-great-grandmother had been one of the greatest Rromani fortune-tellers of the early nineteenth century. This had nothing to do with her taste, however, which were rather more influenced by romance novelists.
(8) The less metaphysical part of Anathema, the one that had taken all those women's studies courses, was very affronted.