“Oh! Am I? Why—I don’t—Are you here because of me? You came all this way?”
“I did. I think you need me.”
Annis lifted her hand from the pillar and came slowly up the two steps into the folly. She sank onto the bench and twisted her hands in her lap. “How did you know, Miss Bishop?” Her words tumbled from her, stammering, confused. “How—how did you know what’s happening? Everything is so—so strange. The oddest things… There’s no one for me to talk to!”
“I understand. As it happens, I know all about it, and I’m going to try to explain.” She sat next to Annis but took care not to sit too close. She felt the girl’s tension radiating from her as if she were a wary bird who might fly away at any moment.
Harriet had rehearsed her explanation in her second-floor room in the Four Fishes Inn of Seabeck Village. It wasn’t much of a room, but then, the Four Fishes wasn’t much of an inn. There were only four bedrooms, fanning out from a steep, rickety staircase. She had to share her bathroom with the guest next door. Fortunately, the occupant of that room was rarely present. She had paced in circles, from the dormer window to the old-fashioned door with its iron fittings, practicing what she would say to Annis, but the words she had prepared seemed woefully unequal to the task. How in the world do you explain such things to a girl who has never even heard of them? And probably doesn’t believe in them?
Still, there was intelligence in Annis’s eyes, and courage in her stance, despite her state of mind. Her color had begun to return, and her breathing to ease. She touched the choker at her throat, a string of white pearls with a cream-colored stone in the center. A moonstone, Harriet realized, with layers of silver beneath its pearly surface. It was a jewel known to produce calm and balance. To emphasize feminine energy and wisdom.
Harriet remembered this necklace. “Your choker…, ” she began.
Annis dropped her hand. “It was my mother’s, I think. She died when I was small.”
“I know. Such a tragedy, and so hard for you to grow up without a mother.”
The girl shrugged. “I had our housekeeper, Mrs. King. And then I had my horses.”
Harriet considered horses a poor substitute for a mother’s love, but she kept the thought to herself. She pulled her grandmother’s amulet from her bodice and lifted it up in her fingers. “This was my grandmother’s. Your necklace once belonged to your grandmother. I remember the stone—a moonstone.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Yes. Moonstones have wonderful properties, and this one has a special power.”
Annis caught a breath and touched the stone again. She whispered, the words almost inaudible, “I thought I imagined it.”
“Has it spoken to you?”
“Well, I suppose… you could say that, I guess. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
“Perhaps I can help with that.” It was a good introduction to the subject of witchcraft. Harriet gave Annis a tentative smile as she slid her amulet back inside her dress. “I have a great deal to tell you, my dear. I hope you’re comfortable. This will take a while.”
“But how can you be sure,” Annis asked, “that I have any ability at all?”
Harriet had finished telling the story. Their story. Annis had listened, her lips open in wonder at first, then set with determination when Harriet reached the part about Frances and what she had done.
Harriet had left nothing out. She explained the Bishop heritage, the divergence between the practices of Mary and Christian, and the difference between her own practice of enhanced herbalism and Frances’s maleficia. She had talked for nearly an hour. Annis had barely moved in all that time, watching Harriet’s face intently, as if to see beyond her features and into her soul. As if to decide whether to trust her. Harriet hoped that their family resemblance would help to convince her.
In answer to her question, Harriet said, “It’s a gift of mine. I think of it as the knowing, for lack of a better word. Insights come to me, usually when I’m working, sometimes when I’m not. They have never been wrong.” She added, with a twist of her lips, “It can be a mixed blessing, but I’m glad to know you have inherited the ability. Knowing how your pearls affect you is confirmation.”
“I thought they would strangle me last night at dinner.”