mandrake root, dried mistletoe leaves, and stems of dried barrenwort, complete with the flowers, their lavender color faded to gray.
Last of all, carefully wrapped in tissue, was the manikin.
It had not been easy to hide the bag from Antoinette on the journey. Antoinette had packed Frances’s valises and trunks and knew every item they held. Frances had been forced to slide the string bag into a small valise without Antoinette seeing, then remove it before her maid began the unpacking.
Now, on their first day in London, she made her start. She planned to choose her target as soon as possible, and she needed Annis to be in the perfect frame of mind when the moment came.
Such work took time. It had taken her six weeks to magic George, administering her philter when they dined together. Here in England she had a scant eight weeks to bend Annis to her will. To force her, Harriet would say, but Frances didn’t care what Harriet would say. A philter would not work, not in these circumstances. But Frances knew what would.
The maleficia.
“The maleficia may win a practitioner what she wants,” Beryl had said. “But she pays a terrible price.”
Frances smiled to herself, gazing down at the manikin. She remembered saying to Beryl, “Why do you keep saying ‘practitioner’? Why don’t you just say ‘witch’? Isn’t that what we are?”
Beryl had looked down that formidable nose. “We told you at the beginning, Frances. We take care with our words because we are at risk from the ignorant and the weak-minded.”
Frances rolled her eyes. “I remember what you said.”
“Yet I can see you’re not taking it seriously. Have you heard of Blackwell’s Island, the lunatic asylum?”
“Of course. It’s a hideous place, but nothing to do with us. It’s for—well, Blackwell’s is for lunatics!”
“I know of at least three practitioners languishing there, women of our own kind imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island. They were careless. They practiced the maleficia, and it redounded upon them in the worst way.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were committed for ‘aberrant behavior.’ One was turned over by her husband, who paid a doctor to diagnose her as a hysteric. Another was reported by her neighbors for selling an abortion potion, and she was convicted under the Comstock Laws. Someone decided the asylum was better than prison, although I doubt that’s true.
“The third, I’m sorry to say, was your grandmother. That was why your mother was terrified of the practice.”
As Frances digested this bit of history, it occurred to her that Harriet and Beryl were afraid of the maleficia, too. That, she decided, was the real reason they refused to teach it to her.
But she, Frances, wasn’t afraid of anything. She took pride in that and set about studying the maleficia on her own.
She spent hours in the library in Beryl’s house, reading and memorizing the books assigned to her. She spent even more hours, when she was left alone, searching through the other books, the ones she wasn’t meant to read but that she had known must be there somewhere.
They were older than any other books in the library, with cracked bindings and fading script. Someone—perhaps Beryl, perhaps someone even older—had hidden them behind less remarkable volumes, shelving them so high she had to climb on a chair to reach them. Their fragile pages held the secrets she wanted, the recipes for philters and the instructions for making poppets, also known as manikins. Some bore the initials of witches long dead. Some were so blurred with age they were impossible to read, but others—others were a treasure trove of forbidden knowledge. Of the maleficia.
Frances took great care with those books and always replaced them exactly as she had found them. Since Harriet often looked over her book of recipes, she wrote nothing down. She committed what she found to memory and then began to experiment.
She made a neighbor’s cat follow her for days, tagging at her heels whenever she stepped out of the house. She caused a hummingbird to fly in manic circles, as if it had lost its little mind. When the bird bashed itself to death on the window glass, she felt a moment’s regret before she told herself she had to learn somehow. Once she made a manikin of the rag man, just for the practice, and gave him a lame leg for a week.
After that success she decided it would be best to resist the compulsion of the maleficia. She had learned enough, and she resolved to do no