cantrip wore off, her father would be angry at having been manipulated into buying back the two horses, but he wasn’t. He shrugged and said, “It wasn’t that much money, and now I don’t have to fork over a big dowry.”
“I wasn’t aware you objected to paying my dowry.”
“Your stepmother gave me no peace until I agreed to it. That’s all over now.”
Frances herself made no comment. She continued mute and unresponsive.
Velma had transferred all her devotion to Frances. She seemed content to be the one to feed her, bathe her, dress and undress her. Annis, seeing this, ordered a cot moved into Frances’s room so Velma could sleep when Frances did. Velma brought all her few belongings and stowed them in a wardrobe Frances no longer used. Annis was touched to see the cut-glass swan candleholder resting on a little stool beside her cot. It held a candle that had never been burned. It was as pristine as the day she had bought it in the shop near the strega’s.
Once, when Annis asked Velma if she wanted to continue her unrelenting care of Frances, the maid said simply, “Mrs. Frances needs me. You never did.”
It was true. Annis had never wanted a lady’s maid and was content to be free of Velma’s anxieties and clumsy ministrations. Still, she felt Velma deserved better pay for her constant attention to Frances, and risked angering her father to ask for it.
“I suppose I’ll have to pay the girl more,” he said. “It seems I’m a widower again, but still with the responsibility of supporting a wife.”
“Have you been to see her, Papa? Even one time?” They had been home for weeks.
“What’s the point?” he growled and refused to discuss it again.
As the sultry summer melted into a cooler autumn, Annis divided her time between riding Black Satin and helping Robbie in the stables and her work with Aunt Harriet at the Dakota. The doorman of the Dakota scowled at first over a young lady arriving alone and going up the corner staircase to Miss Bishop’s apartment, but in time he became accustomed to it. Now when she hurried in, flushed and bright eyed from the walk from Riverside Drive, he tipped his cap, greeted her by name, and gestured to the staircase as if he were one of her own servants. If she had a basket with her, he sometimes asked if she needed help carrying it up the stairs. When she departed, he tipped his cap again and wished her a good afternoon.
She loved working with Aunt Harriet. It was good work, more practical than magical. She was thrilled the day she was allowed to compound a tincture all by herself, for a patient named Dora Schuyler, who suffered from painful menses. Annis took careful notes for the book of remedies she was steadily filling, writing down the elements of the tincture—cramp bark, poppy flowers, cohosh and burdock root. She learned the technique of macerating the tincture in alcohol and wrote down the proportions before she placed everything in a jar.
It had to sit for two weeks. Harriet had made an appointment by mail with the patient to come for the remedy, and she allowed Annis to be present as she handed the medicine to Mrs. Schuyler, who was a well-dressed, fragile-looking woman.
When Mrs. Schuyler had paid her fee and departed, Annis said, “Mrs. Schuyler seems terribly sad. Is that because of her pain?”
“In a way,” Harriet said. “She is sad, and there’s little we can do to help her with that.”
“She doesn’t seem to mind the cost of her remedy.”
“No. Money is not one of her concerns. I don’t hesitate to charge a full price for my patients who can afford it. It helps subsidize my patients who can’t.”
“You’ve seen Mrs. Schuyler before.”
“I have, but on principle I can’t speak to you about it. I will teach you, though, in time, and without mentioning names, how we help women who come to us with a certain problem.”
Harriet wielded knowledge and experience and wisdom in her herbarium in equal measures. Annis watched her chop and dice and pound, her face intent, her steady instructions so full of information Annis had to rush to write everything down. It hardly seemed possible, watching Harriet go about the quotidian work of an herbalist, that she had once watched her great-aunt wield a magic so powerful she had literally lifted from the ground.
Only two things marred Annis’s contentment. One was, of course, Frances’s failure to