A Secret History of Witches

by Louisa Morgan

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Family Life; Historical Fiction; World War II; Magical Realism; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A tale of family, sacrifice, love and magic.

'It's true, ma petite. If they know—if they discover what we are—they will try to kill us.'

Brittany, 1821. After Grand-mere Ursule gives her life to save her family, their magic seems to die with her. Even so, the Orchires fight to keep the old ways alive, practising half-remembered spells and arcane rites in hopes of a revival. And when their youngest daughter comes of age, magic flows anew.

The lineage continues, though new generations struggle not only to master their power but also to keep it hidden. But when World War II looms on the horizon, magic is needed more urgently than ever—not for simple potions or visions but to change the entire course of history.

A Secret History of Witches is a moving historical saga that traces five generations of fiercely powerful mothers and daughters—witches whose magical inheritance is both a dangerous threat and an extraordinary gift.

Perfect for fans of A Discovery of Witches, Outlander and Nora Roberts.

Release date: September 5, 2017

Publisher: Redhook

Print pages: 459

Sample

The layered clouds, gray as cold charcoal, shifted this way and that, mirroring the waves below. They obscured both stars and moon, and darkened the beach and the lane running alongside. Beyond the lane, in the field of standing stones, a handful of caravans circled a small fire. Firelight glimmered on the uneasy faces of the people gathered there, and reflected in the eyes of their restive horses. The invisible sea splashed and hissed, the only sound except for the crackle of burning wood. The flames cast their wavering light over the menhirs, making the stones appear to move out of their centuries-old alignment, to sway and tremble like ghosts in the night. The child Nanette whimpered and buried her face in her sister Louisette’s rough skirts. The older Orchiéres glanced nervously over their shoulders, and at one another.

Two of the stones, collapsed on their sides in some unremembered era, formed a pit for the fire where a brace of rabbits had roasted, sizzling and spitting into the embers. The rabbits were gone now, their meat eaten, their bones buried in the ashes. One of the women stoked the fire, then stood back to make way for her grandmother.

Grand-mère Ursule, carrying a stone jar of salted water, walked a circle around the pit. She muttered to herself as she sprinkled the ground. When that was done, she brandished her oaken walking stick at the sky and whispered a rush of words. The clan watched in tense silence as she laid down her stick and reached into a canvas bag for her scrying stone. She carried it with both hands into the blessed circle, and lifted it into the firelight.

The stone was a chunk of crystal that had been dug out of a riverbank by the grand-mère of the grand-mère of Grand-mère. Its top had been rubbed and polished until it was nearly spherical. Its base was uncut granite, in the same rugged shape as when it emerged from the mud.

The scrying stone glowed red, flaring with light as if it burned within. It was a light reminiscent of the hellfire the Christians feared, and it reflected off Grand-mère Ursule’s seamed face and glittered in her black eyes. Nanette lifted her head from her sister’s skirts for a peek, then hid her eyes again, sure the blazing stone would burn her grandmother’s hands.

Ursule crooned as she turned the stone, seeking the best view into the crystal. Her eerie voice made gooseflesh prickle on the necks of the watchers. She was the greatest of the witches, inheritor of the full power of the Orchiére line, and watching her work struck awe into the hearts of even those closest to her.

The men shifted in their places and worriedly eyed the lane leading from the village of Carnac. The women clicked their tongues and drew their children close in the darkness.

All the clan were fearful this night. Word of another burning had come to the ears of the men when they went into Carnac-Ville to buy beans and lentils. Nanette had heard them tell the tale, though she didn’t fully understand it until she was older.

It had taken place in the nearby city of Vannes. It was said that one Bernard, a young and ambitious priest, had tracked down the witch. He took it upon himself to examine her for the signs before he denounced her in the public square. The archbishop, eager to be known as a burner of witches, had set the torch to the pyre with his own hand.

There was great excitement over the news of this burning in Carnac-Ville. The Carnacois applauded when Father Bernard, a man with sparse red hair and eyes too small for his face, appeared in the marketplace. Nanette wanted to cover her ears when Claude, having returned in haste from the town, told the story, but Louisette pulled her hands away. “You need to hear,” she said. “You need to know.”

“They say he hates witches because of his mother,” Claude said.

“Why?” Louisette asked.

“She had a growth in her breast, and died in pain. Bernard accused the neighbor—a crone who could barely see or hear—of putting a curse on her.”

Grimly, Louisette said, “There was no one to protect her.”

“No one. They held one of their trials, and convicted her in an hour.”

“Did they burn the poor thing?” Anne-Marie asked in a low voice.

Claude gave a bitter laugh. “Meant to. Bernard had the pyre laid. Stake ready. The old woman died in her cell the night before.”

“She probably wasn’t a witch at all.” Louisette pulled little Nanette closer, absently patting her shoulder. “But he feels cheated.”

“Been hunting witches ever since.”

A grim silence settled around the circled caravans. The day was already far gone. The salt-scented dusk hid the ruts and holes of the lane, making it unsafe to travel before morning.

It wasn’t safe to stay, either. They were only three men and five women, with a handful of children and one grandmother. There would be little they could do against a bloodthirsty mob.

The Romani had always been targets, and were always wary. When the blood fever came upon the people, when they were overcome by lust for the smell of burning flesh and the dying screams of accused witches, there was neither law nor reason in the land.

“We should leave,” Paul, Anne-Marie’s husband, said. “Move south.”

“Too dark,” Claude growled.

Louisette nodded. “Not safe for the horses.”

They all understood. There was nothing left for them but to rely on Grand-mère.

The old woman swayed in the firelight. Her cloud of gray hair fluttered about her head. Her wrinkled eyelids narrowed as she gazed into the scrying stone. She resembled a menhir herself, craggy, timeless, inscrutable. Her thin lips worked, and her voice rose and fell as she recited her spell. The gathered clan shivered in fear.

After a time Grand-mère’s chant died away. She stopped swaying and lowered the crystal with arms that shook. In a voice like a violin string about to break, she said, “There is a house.”

“A house?” Nanette lifted her head to see who was speaking. It was Isabelle, the most easily frightened of the six sisters.

Louisette put up her hand to shush her. “Where, Grand-mère?”

“Beyond the sea,” Ursule said. “Above a cliff. Long and low, with a thatched roof and broken shutters. A fence that needs mending. A hill behind it, and a rising moor.” Her eyelids fluttered closed, then opened again to look around at the faces in the firelight. Her voice grew thinner. “You must go there. All of you.”

“But Grand-mère,” Florence said. “How will we find it?”

“There is an island, with a castle on it. It looks like Mont St. Michel, but it isn’t. You will pass the island. You must go in a boat.”

The clan sighed, accepting. When Ursule scried, there was no arguing. Even four-year-old Nanette knew that.

The old woman sagged back on her heels, then to her knees. Her head dropped toward her breast. Nanette stirred anxiously against Louisette’s side, and her eldest sister shushed her. They waited in the chill darkness, listening to the murmur of the ocean and the occasional stamping of one of the horses hobbled among the stones.

Sometime near midnight the clouds above the beach drifted apart, admitting a narrow beam of moonlight that fell directly onto the circled caravans. It gleamed on painted canvas and hanging pots and tools, and shone on the clan’s tired faces. Grand-mère shot upright with a noisy intake of breath, and glared at the break in the cloud cover.

She commanded, “Put out the fire!”

One of the men hurried to obey, dousing the flames with a bucket of seawater kept handy for the purpose. When a child’s voice rose to ask why, Grand-mère said, “Be still, Louis. Everyone. Silence.” She reached for her canvas bag and covered the scrying stone with it. She got stiffly to her feet and bent to pick up her stick. She held it with both hands, pointing at the slit that had opened in the clouds. She murmured something, a single emphatic phrase that sounded to Nanette like “Hide us!”

Everyone, child and adult, gazed upward. For a long moment there was no response to Grand-mère’s command, but then, lazily, the clouds began to shift. They folded together, layer over layer, healing the break as if it were a wound to be closed. No one moved, or spoke, as the light faded from the painted canvas of the wagons. The fire was nothing but a mound of ash smoking faintly in the darkness.

As the Orchiéres’ eyes adjusted, their ears sharpened. The sea grew quiet as the tide receded from the beach. The wind died away. Not even the horses seemed to breathe. Gradually their straining ears caught the muffled tramp of feet on the packed dirt of the lane, and the voices of people approaching.

“Grand-mère,” one of the sisters murmured. Nanette thought it was Anne-Marie, but she sometimes got them confused. She was by far the youngest of the six sisters, and the only one who had never known their mother, who had died giving birth to her. “Shouldn’t we—”

“Quiet!”

Grand-mère Ursule was tiny and bent, like a doll made of leather and wood, but everyone knew her fierceness. She gripped her stick in her gnarled hands and whispered something under her breath, words so soft only those closest to her could hear. One last spell.

Mother Goddess, hear my plea:

Hide us so that none can see.

Let my belovèd people be.

Louisette clamped a hand over Nanette’s mouth so she would not cry out as a deep shadow, more dense than any natural darkness, enfolded the campground. The footfalls of the approaching people grew louder. Some cursed when they stumbled. Some prayed in monotonous voices. One or two laughed. They reached the curve in the lane that curled past the field of menhirs, and the Orchiéres froze. The older children huddled close to the ground. The men braced themselves for violence.

The townspeople in the lane trudged along in an untidy crowd. They drew even with the campsite, with the dark sea to their left and the standing stones to their right, and walked on. Their steps didn’t falter, nor their voices lower. They marched forward, a mindless, hungry mob in search of a victim, all unaware of the caravans resting among the menhirs, and the people crouching around a cold fire pit. It took five full minutes for the Carnacois to pass beyond the hearing of the clan.

Not till they were well and truly gone did the Orchiéres breathe freely again. In careful silence they signaled to one another and retreated to their caravans to rest while they could. The men murmured in one another’s ears, arranging a watch. The women tucked their children into their beds and lay down themselves, exhausted.

But Grand-mère Ursule remained where she was, her stick in her hands, her eyes turned upward to the sky. She stood guard until the moon set behind the clouds. She held steady while the slow dawn broke over the rows of standing stones.

No one heard the sigh of her last breath when she crumpled to the ground. The man whose turn it was to watch was focused on the lane. The women, her granddaughters, slept on beside their children, and didn’t know she had left them until they rose in the chilly morning.

It was Nanette who found Ursule’s old bones curled near the fire pit, her hair tumbled over her face. The little girl shook her grand-mère’s shoulder, but there was no response. Nanette put out her small hand and brushed aside the mist-dampened mass of gray curls.

Ursule’s eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open. Nanette touched her cheek with a tentative palm. It felt cold as old wax. Nanette sucked in a breath to cry out, but Louisette appeared beside her, catching her hand and pressing it.

“Chut, chut, Nanette. We have to be quiet.”

“But Grand-mère!” Nanette wailed, in a small voice that died against the surrounding stones. “We have to wake her!”

Louisette bent over the still figure, then straightened with a heart-deep sigh. “No, ma petite. We can’t wake her. Grand-mère is gone.”

“Where did she go?”

“I can’t say that, Nanette. None of us can.”

“I want to go with her!”

“No, no, ma petite. You can’t do that. You have to go with us.”

Louisette signaled to her husband, and he came to stand beside her, looking down at Ursule’s frail body. Her stick lay beside her in the damp grass. The scrying stone was cupped against her with one arm, as if she had died holding it.

“We’ll have to bury her here,” Louisette said.

“Hurry,” her husband said. “We need to go.”

“Oui. D’accord.”

Nanette watched them wrap Ursule in a quilt from her caravan. Her grand-mère never complained, or tried to push them away, even when they covered her face. The other two men brought shovels and began to dig in a space between two of the menhirs. Louisette called Florence to take Nanette away to her caravan to pack her things. When they emerged again into the brightening day, Ursule and her quilt had disappeared. A mound of gray dirt marked the place between the stones.

Nanette turned to Louisette to ask what had happened, but her eldest sister’s face was forbiddingly grim. The question died on her lips. She clutched her bundle of clothes, blinking away tears of confusion and loss.

The clan unhobbled the horses and smacked their hindquarters to send them running. They abandoned the caravans where they were, leaving them in their colorful circle in the field of standing stones. With their most precious possessions packed into bags and stuffed into baskets, they started away on foot. Louisette had charge of the crystal, and had packed Ursule’s grimoire along with her own things. Nanette would learn later that her grandmother’s staff had been buried with her, because no one else had the power to use it.

The Orchiéres left their grandmother, the great witch Ursule, resting alone with none but the deathless menhirs to guard her shabby grave.

1834

Nanette shook the pony’s reins and clucked at him. He sped into a trot, but not for long. He soon settled back into his usual walk. The jingle, empty now of the vegetables and cheeses Nanette had sold at the Saturday market, rattled against the stones of the cliff road. Nanette shifted anxiously on the bench seat, chafing at the slowness of the journey, but she didn’t reach for the whip. She had trained this pony herself. Whipping only made him rebellious. To pass the time she recited the major and minor Sabbats. The pony’s ears twitched with interest as he plodded on.

By the time the thatched roofs of Orchard Farm came into view, the sun had begun its descent beyond the peak of St. Michael’s Mount. The Cornish wind bit through Nanette’s coat and homespun dress. She was cold, tired, and worried. When Claude emerged from the byre to take the pony’s reins, she could barely manage to nod to him.

“Good day?” he asked, speaking French as always.

In irritation she answered in English. “The priest was there.”

He lifted his brows at her. “Prêtre?”

“Priest. Priest! I know you understand that much English!” She jumped down from the jingle and stamped around to the back to unload the empty baskets and folded bags.

“Seventeen years old you are, to my forty. Show some respect.”

She sighed and switched to French. “Yes. The priest was there. That priest. Bernard.”

Claude didn’t answer, but his customary scowl deepened as he led the pony away.

Nanette hurried up through the garden and let herself into the porch. She stacked the baskets beside the door and went on into the kitchen. The house was warm, and the scents of pottage and fresh bread made her stomach contract with hunger, but she hardly noticed.

Anne-Marie was bent over the stone sink, scrubbing a pot. She glanced up, saying, as Claude had, “Good day?”

“No.” Nanette sagged into a chair, feeling as if she had carried home the weight of the world.

“What’s wrong?” Louisette came to the door of the pantry, a dish of butter in her hands. She was the eldest and the tallest of all the clan, even the men. She had a man’s voice, and she often spoke like one. She frowned at Nanette.

Nanette propped her chin on her fist and glared back. “Aside from the fact that I’m the only one of this family who speaks the language of this country?”

Anne-Marie said in her mild way, “Pierre speaks English.”

“He’s gone, though, isn’t he? And George, and Louis. Left as soon as they could get away, and left it all to me.” No one responded, and Nanette wished she could snatch back the words. Her older sisters had mourned their children’s leaving, as she knew very well. Their sons had fled, one to Scotland, one to Ireland, and one back to Brittany, which had proved disastrous.

Fleurette brought a bowl of pottage and set it before Nanette. She rarely spoke—sometimes Nanette wondered if she still had a voice—but she touched her little sister’s shoulder with a forgiving hand. Nanette gave her a wan smile. “Désolée,” she murmured. It wasn’t fair to be cross, though she was exhausted. Her sisters had been both mother and father to her for as long as she could remember. She knew they were afraid, and they had reason. She had grown up hearing the stories of the burning times.

Louisette said, “Nanette. Tell us what happened.”

“The witch hunter was in Marazion.”

The sisters glanced at one another, and tension filled the room with darkness, as if the wood stove had belched a gout of smoke.

The Orchiéres had found the farm Ursule had prophesied, every detail just as she had described. The voyage had been a misery, but the boat had deposited them on a rocky beach within sight of St. Michael’s Mount, a miniature imitation of Mont St. Michel. They found the farmhouse nestled at the foot of a boulder-littered tor, with a moor stretching beyond it. The place was in such poor repair as to be uninhabitable, and no one objected when they took possession. They spent months making the farmhouse livable, the garden productive, and the byre safe for livestock.

It had been a sacrifice, settling down. The Orchiéres preferred the road, new scenery every season, hidden places where they could practice the old ways undisturbed. In Cornwall the older Orchiéres left it to the younger ones to learn English, and such bits of Cornish as they needed. For the first ten years, the clan had felt safe in Cornwall.

Then, three years before, Bernard had appeared. He put it about that he had been sent to establish a Catholic parish in Penzance, but the truth was that the priest was still hunting witches. The clan had no need of Ursule’s scrying to tell them so, and that was a blessing. Ursule’s magic was lost to them.

“You need to eat,” Louisette said to Nanette. “Then you can tell us.” She pulled up a chair on the other side of the table, and rested her elbows on the scarred wood.

Nanette obediently took a spoonful of pottage, and then another. Despite everything, she was hungry, and the soup was good, flavored with summer sage and pepper. She knew Fleurette had dipped out the largest chunks of meat she could find, and she smiled at her again. Florence carved a slice of bread off the loaf and slid the butter dish close to her hand. While Nanette was eating, the men came in, and the women served them. No one spoke until they had all finished.

“Enough?” Louisette asked.

Nanette sat back. “Yes, thanks.”

“Well, then.”

Nanette brushed bread crumbs from her fingers. “He spoke to me.”

“Did he?” This was Anne-Marie, the second eldest of the sisters. She was the calm one, but even her face was tight with alarm.

“He watched me all day, even when I was chatting with my friend Meegan. When I was harnessing the pony, he walked right up to me, in front of everyone.”

All of Marazion knew that the Orchiéres never attended the Anglican service at St. Hilary Church. Everyone would have noticed Bernard, in his rusty black cassock and flat-brimmed hat, speaking to someone from Orchard Farm.

“What did he say?”

“He quoted Scripture.”

“‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’” Louisette said in a toneless voice.

“No. It was different.” Nanette rubbed her windburned face. “He said something about ‘a man or woman with a familiar spirit, or who is a witch, shall be put to death.’”

Florence said, “We don’t keep familiars.”

No one responded. It was pointless, because the witch hunter wouldn’t care. When Louis, Isabelle’s only child, had returned to Brittany, Bernard had found him and beaten the clan’s location out of him. Isabelle didn’t know if Louis had lived or died.

“He knows our farm,” Nanette said. “He said we should take care on the cliff road, since we don’t have God’s protection.”

“A threat,” Louisette said.

The rest sat in silence, absorbing Nanette’s grave tidings.

Nanette sipped at the mug of honeyed goat’s milk Fleurette brought to her. She could have said more. She could have told them how the witch hunter’s empty eyes made her stomach clench, how his sour breath reminded her of the very devils he prated about. She could have said she would just as soon convert and get it over with. That would make Meegan happy, and she might make other friends.

But she was tired, and, now that her stomach was full, sleepy. She didn’t want to talk anymore. She longed only to take off her heavy boots and close her burning eyes.

The wick of the oil lamp was trimmed short, and the kitchen was comfortingly dim. One of the men lit his pipe, sending the sweetness of applewood curling to the rafters. The low ceiling of the farmhouse, with its thickly thatched roof, felt as cozy as an old quilt. Nanette wanted to go to her bed, to bury her face in her pillow of goose feathers, to forget all about the man who hated them so much he had pursued them across the Channel. Who had thrown a string of beads at her, daring her to pick it up, hoping it would burn her fingers.

She should, of course, have ignored it, but she hadn’t. She had picked up the string and dropped it into her pocket, just to prove she could.

She drank off the milk, murmured her thanks to Fleurette, and rose from the table. She said, “Bonne nuit,” to the room in general.

Claude put up a weathered hand. “Attendez. You women,” he said. “No more rites.”

Louisette turned to her husband. “Pourquoi?”

“He spies on us. He and that other priest, the one from St. Hilary. Not safe.”

“No one sees us when we climb the tor.”

“A peddler might ride by. A neighbor come to call.”

“Pfft! Neighbors never come to call.”

Claude’s rocky features didn’t change. “Don’t argue.”

Louisette pursed her lips, stood up, and left the table in a stony silence. The others, Anne-Marie, Isabelle, the spinster twins Florence and Fleurette, dropped their eyes.

Nanette shrugged, too tired to care. She plodded off to her bedroom at the back of the house, where she closed her door, kicked off her boots, and stripped off her clothes, letting them lie in a pile on the floor. The beads were still in the pocket of her skirt, forgotten in her exhaustion. She was half-asleep before she slipped her nightdress over her head.

When Louisette’s hard hand shook her, she was in the midst of a nightmare. She was driving the jingle along the cliff road, with the sea on her right, and the lethal drop to the rocky beach below. On her left was only the empty moor, and behind her, coming up fast, was the witch hunter. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he was there. She couldn’t get the pony to run. Her hands ached with gripping the reins, and her legs twitched with the need to hurry, while the pony plodded on and the witch hunter came closer and closer. In her dream Louisette’s hand became the hand of the priest falling on her shoulder. She startled awake on a shriek of terror.

Louisette clamped her fingers over her mouth. “Quiet!” she hissed. “They’ll hear you.”

With a shudder Nanette came fully awake. Louisette’s grip loosened, and Nanette whispered, “Who? Who will hear me?”

“Claude. Paul. Jean.”

“What’s happening?”

Louisette plucked Nanette’s dress from the floor and thrust it at her. “We’re going to the temple. If Claude knows, he’ll stop us.”

Nanette sat up. Beyond her window, stars glittered in a windswept sky. The early frost of approaching Samhain rimed the edges of the glass. Nanette shivered as she wriggled out of her nightdress and back into her clothes. Louisette found a pair of stockings and held them for her. In the darkness her eyes were like black stones.

Nanette shivered again and whispered, “Why, Louisette?”

“We’re going to try a spell of diversion.”

“But Claude—”

“Pfft! Men know nothing of the craft.”

With her boots in her hand, Nanette padded after her sister, down the dark hallway and out through the kitchen. On the porch they found the others waiting, so shrouded in scarves and coats Nanette could barely tell them apart. She thrust her feet into her boots and chose a coat at random from the rack of pegs. Someone—she thought it was Isabelle—pushed a woolen scarf into her hands, and she wound it about her neck as the sisters filed silently out through the side door and into the garden.

The climb up the tor that was so familiar in daylight was treacherous in the dark. The stars’ uneven light glistened deceptively on the stones of the path. The brambles that curled beside it were all but invisible, and threatened to trip the marching women. Anne-Marie led the way, with the twins behind her. Isabelle, carrying a basket with the new candle and jar of salted water, walked in the middle. Nanette came after Louisette. She trudged wearily upward. The goats would be bleating to be milked in only a few hours. She wanted to complain that she didn’t see the point of doing this, or that it could have waited for Samhain, but she kept those thoughts to herself. When Louisette set her mind on something, arguing was a waste of energy.

Louisette was the one, when they took possession of Orchard Farm, who had found the cave at the top of the tor. It was an echoing space with a narrow entrance, well hidden by towering chunks of tumbled granite. The sisters had swept away the feathers and bones and gravel that littered the floor, and appropriated a three-foot stalagmite that erupted from the center for their altar. They used rock outcroppings as shelves for their supplies. Ursule’s crystal rested on the altar, covered with a piece of homespun linen.

For years they had observed the Sabbats in the cave, which they called their temple. They followed the rites Ursule had taught them, referring to the ancient grimoire for simples and potions. They lit a new candle, sprinkled salted water, burned the proper herbs. They wore ceremonial scarves, and stood in a swaying circle around the scrying crystal.

Not once, since her initiation into the craft, had Nanette seen the crystal respond in any way. She doubted tonight would be any different.

When Nanette was still small, she had begged her older sisters to be allowed to climb the tor with them. Louisette said, over and over, “Not yet. Not yet,” refusing to explain. Nanette even tried once asking Claude, but he growled at her, as if he were a dog and she were a bothersome kitten. It was his only answer.

Fleurette had found her voice that day. “Men don’t understand,” she said, with a touch of her hand, but she offered no other explanation.

Nanette eyed the tor from time to time, wondering if she dared climb its twisting path alone, if she could find the temple by herself. She could have, she supposed, but she was busy from dawn to dusk with chores, or the market, or having to translate for her family with the farrier, or the ragman, or the men who came to buy ponies. It remained a mystery as she grew to be ten years old, twelve, fourteen. Then, on the day of her first blood, Louisette gave her a wolfish grin across the kitchen table. “Aujourd’hui,” she said. Today.

“Today what?” Nanette asked plaintively. Her belly hurt, and the sight of her own dark blood on her clothes when she rose that morning had made her feel queasy. Florence had fitted her out with a homemade clout of homespun. She hated it. It chafed her thighs and caught on her skirt when she sat down.

Louisette leaned forward. “Today you can go to the temple.”

Nanette stared at her. “Aujourd’hui? Pourquoi?”

“Because now you’re a woman!”

“This was what I was waiting for, all this time?”

“Exactly.”

“Couldn’t you have told me?”

“And argue about it? No. This is what the craft teaches.” Louisette pushed up from the table. “We’ll go as soon as the sun sets.”

Despite feeling unwell, Nanette was thrilled when she first set foot inside the temple. The climb up the tor had been chilly, but the boulders that marked the entrance to the cave blocked the wind. Suddenly much warmer, she stood gazing in wonder at the granite walls, the niches here and there holding stoppered jars and lumpy baskets. In the center of the cave an upthrust cylinder of granite held something covered with cloth so old it was crumbling to bits. When she caught sight of it, a shape both mysterious and promising, her neck prickled and her aching belly quivered.

“Ursule’s crystal,” she murmured.

Anne-Marie, a broom in her hand, nodded. “We’ll uncover it in a moment.”

“I remember it,” Nanette said.

“I don’t think you could. You were only four.”

“I do, though. I remember. It glowed in her hands, and I thought it must burn her.”

Anne-Marie began to sweep, shaking her head with a sadness Nanette didn’t unders