Arcana Page 12

  ‘If you’re not allowed to read them, why do you?’ Anita enquired.

  ‘Oh my dear silly goose, if Mother left them lying about they wouldn’t hold the slightest interest for me. Take a look at this one. Did you ever see such a strapping fellow?’

  Macha was not in possession of the whole truth. It would neither have surprised nor displeased her mother to learn she had been educating herself. Mrs. Pilkington had been at first petrified of her wedding night and afterwards rather disappointed. Anything she could do to avert the same fate for her daughters, she considered a maternal duty. The secrecy surrounding the magazines was purely to save having to offer awkward explanations to such prudish visitors as Reverend Oates, who probably only took holy orders under the mistaken assumption they came with a vow of chastity.

  Anita’s parents were too busy working to attend church, but they were not without their own personal morality. Yet even so, Anita could not help feeling there was something illicit and unwholesome about such publications. They did not arouse any particular emotion in her besides confusion: she simply could not see what all the fuss was about.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know how to get a man as excited as that?’ Macha asked.

  Anita didn’t think the man in the picture looked excited, only sheepish and faintly chilly. But from a standing start she had learned a good deal in three months in the Pilkington household, and one of her first lessons had been in the futility of contradicting Macha.

  ‘Do tell. Please.’

  At first Macha feigned reluctance, at which she was such a past mistress that Anita found it terribly challenging to keep up the appearance of keenness. She was on the verge of abandoning her already-strained pretence of interest when Macha said, ‘All right then. If you insist, let me teach you a spell.’

  In those days magic was a shadow of its former and its present self. The Industrial Revolution was going full steam ahead, and even perfectly competent sorcerers were being made to feel shabby: theirs was considered nothing more than a cottage industry, completely overshadowed by the reliably identical products of the vast factories. The truth, which it fell to subsequent eras to rediscover, was that those dear dead dodos the capitalists feared and strove to dominate consumers, cajoling them into preferring mass-produced replicas to their own home-grown glamours.

  So the spell Macha taught Anita that sultry afternoon is not worthy of recording in its entirety, so trifling would it appear to the modern reader. Suffice to say that in the England of those days, it had the potential to wreak a great deal of havoc. Most likely Macha learned it because magic was one of Aunt Agatha’s discarded pastimes, as were cross-stitch and philately and lepidoptery. The original text probably came from one or other of the correspondence courses to which magic had been reduced. Well-preserved instalments can be requested in the Reading Room at the British Library.

  It was a great blessing that Anita was Macha’s first and only apprentice. For all her posturing, Macha in fact lived a life as sheltered as her cousin’s, although for a different reason: she had no need of friends nor occasion to go out, not when a panoply of the latest and greatest products was delivered to her door in full pomp.

  And Anita, withdrawn as she was from the wider world: what harm could she do with such knowledge, however hectically imparted?

  When they got back to the house, Mr. Arbuckle’s carriage was waiting to take Anita to join her father in the City.

  #

  The view of the cathedral spire from her garret disquieted Anita. But then there was no prospect that would have enlivened her spirits save that of her own familiar home, and her mother rushing to greet her. There could be no question of her beloved mother rushing anywhere on anybody’s account: the most recent report said she was, though thankfully no worse, still showing none of the signs of recovery the beleaguered Mr. Arbuckle was praying for. The opportunity had lately arisen to buy shares in a leading publisher of women’s magazines, a decision Mr. Arbuckle dared hardly take without his wife’s good counsel.

  The school holidays were long over. Mr. Arbuckle had at first resisted continuing Anita’s education locally. A visit from two gentlemen in frock coats had dashed his hopes of keeping his precious daughter apart from the children of the neighbourhood, whom he considered a bad influence in every respect from their impenetrable accent on up. In their motley argot there seemed no way of differentiating someone who strode far from someone who rode fast. There had been a time when Mr. Arbuckle might have put up more resistance, maintained Anita in splendid isolation, but work had eroded and his wife’s illness enervated him to such an extent that his former fire was quite quenched. So it was to a nearby dame school that Anita went.

  One unanticipated benefit of Anita’s sojourn among the Pilkington clan was that she had learned, after a fashion, the rudiments of dealing with people. Much to her father’s and not a little to her own amazement, she grew quite popular. The old lady notionally entrusted with providing an education was more than happy to doze in a corner while Anita recited as much as she could remember of the eclectic periodicals that littered Aunt Agatha’s sitting room.

  A wise instinct told her to mention nothing of men nor of magic.

  It was only with the greatest reluctance that Anita took leave of her friends at the end of the school day. If she had dipped her toe into the stagnant social pond at the Pilkingtons’, she threw herself head first into the urban maelstrom whenever her vigilant father would permit. For his part, not a day went by when Mr. Arbuckle did not regret having allowed Anita so much intercourse with unsuitable peers. He was tempted, sorely tempted, to bring his business affairs to the swiftest possible conclusion, heedless of the consequences for his patiently-gathered investments, purely for the sake of returning to the North and safety.

  What stayed his hand was the mounting bill for his London lodgings, the money to settle which had passed temporarily out of his hands, tied up in the acquisition of a new factory that churned out plastic trinkets and sold by mail order. Until at least that phase was concluded, he and Anita must stay put.

  Deprived of his wife, his oldest friend whenever they had time to talk, Mr. Arbuckle had no-one to share his rueful deliberations. It was as natural as could be that he should turn, if not for outright solace then the minimal consolation of holding forth about one’s cares, to his valet, August. Of this admirable young confidant Mr. Arbuckle availed himself, and his trust was not in vain.

  Already a devoted servant, August’s affiliation to Mr. Arbuckle had only deepened upon Anita’s joining their little household. If Anita were a bright star in August’s empyrean, there was but one cloud on his horizon: August found the gulf between their ages unseemly and to all intents irrefrangible. He quite failed to see how an upstanding fellow might come before God of a Sunday with such thoughts in his head as he had latterly entertained towards Miss Arbuckle. Leaving aside their radical difference in social status, the age chasm was the final straw. August put aside the very idea, or at least wrestled manfully with it each time it reared up and confronted his raging imagination.

  Mr. Arbuckle found himself woken in the depths of one night towards Christmas. Supposing a burglar had entered by the garret’s casement, he seized a poker and dashed upstairs, hollering for his landlord who dwelt on the ground floor. He flung open Anita’s door and beheld, by the light of the fecund moon pierced by the cathedral spire’s silhouette, faithful August’s kisses chasing one another in a mad dash from Anita’s clavicle to the fullness of her lips.

  Debilitated though he was by his long hours of business, by the price of his lodgings and the toll of his loneliness, Mr. Arbuckle stood in that instant in the long shadow of his former virility. He sprang forward and administered a blow with the poker that would have split August from his senses, except that August was so completely beside himself that the outcome was rather to restore his reason. He brought up his fists and would have returned Mr. Arbuckle’s bellicosity, had not Anita begun to scream and refused to sto
p, not even when enjoined to do so by the risen landlord, whose concern for his tenants was only exceeded by deference for the neighbours upon whose continuing goodwill his rental income ultimately depended. This kind of nocturnal commotion was, whatever may have been said in its defence from other perspectives, bad for business.

  #

  Had all these events taken place with the benefit of the Counter-Enlightenment that enlivens the modern world concerning arcane matters, Mr. Arbuckle would not have been put in such a tight spot. As it was, he returned to his bed and lay awake until the fullness of day found him as little inclined to believe Anita’s story as before.

  The suggestion was preposterous.

  Mr. Arbuckle knew his sister Agatha for a stupid shallow woman, but even he baulked at the idea that the use of magic was rife among his own flesh and blood.

  There was nothing for it but to investigate the matter himself.

  Mr. Arbuckle sprang into his carriage and bade his coachwoman, Gayle the Carriager, make haste towards the Pilkington abode. From afar he could see all was not well in that household: the front door stood ajar and the howls of a horde of banshees welcomed Mr. Arbuckle as he strode up the path.

  Mrs. Pilkington was abed and refused all visitors, even her own brother. The two older girls took their cue from her, and it fell to Deirdre to break away from reading the magazines she had found in an unlocked cabinet and supply Mr. Arbuckle the explanation he sought.

  ‘Macha said a spell and it magicked Daddy and the Reverend away.’

  ‘What’s that you’re reading, my dear?’

  ‘It’s a sort of storybook about a man who has lost all his clothes.’

  ‘Do you think it a good story?’

  ‘Oh yes, Uncle.’

  ‘May I see the name of the publisher? Aha. Thank you, little one.’

  Mr. Arbuckle hastened back to London, betaking himself first to his stockbroker and afterwards to his lawyer, where he altered his will so that all his considerable estate should go to Anita, leaving nothing for Agatha and her viper brood.

  Next he visited the cathedral, where the Archbishop’s theological qualms were silenced by the promise of a generous donation towards his new roof, and so it came about that Anita and August were married that very day.

  The father of the bride wrung his hands. ‘I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am that there were moments when I did not believe you—you two, the persons of the greatest probity I have ever met and probably ever shall. I reproach myself utterly for calling tall tales those simple truths you tried to make me cognisant of. Forgive me! I have been about my business and out of the world too long. It has changed. There is no place in it for me any longer. As soon as this wretched factory investment is over and done, I shall return to the North and nurse my ailing wife, until she is fit to return to work where she belongs. As for you two newlyweds, I want to see you get the best possible start in life. That is why I am arranging the purchase of the house where the two of you first met. May God bless you both, and have mercy on my vacillating soul.’

  And so the wedding night found the happy couple in their garret bed. August gazed out at the moon. ‘There’s just one thing I’d like to know.’

  His bride said nothing. She was too happy to speak.

  ‘Did you really put a spell on me? Because I didn’t feel a thing.’

  Anita rolled over and went to sleep.