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“I’ll hold you to that, young lady,” Arlette said with one final bone-crushing squeeze. Then she let my hand go and lay back on her pillow, closed her eyes, and waved a suddenly frail-looking hand to dismiss us from her presence.
We left the Ballards—but the Ballards didn’t quite leave us. Two blocks away I could still smell cigarette smoke on my clothes and in my hair.
“Ugh, every time!” Dory cried, stooping to pick up a pine branch from one of the many that had come down in last night’s wind. It was frozen solid to the ground, but she knelt and blew a stream of frosted breath on it, and the ice disappeared. Then she picked up the branch and proceeded to dust me off head to toe, while repeating three words that sounded likefyrnsceaoa odoratus epil. When she was done she repeated the procedure to herself. “There, that’s better.”
I sniffed the sleeve of my coat, then a lock of my hair; both smelled like pine now instead of cigarette smoke. “Than—” I began, but stopped at a scowl from Dory. “That’s a neat trick,” I amended. “Was that Latin I heard and…Anglo-Saxon?”
Dory smiled as we continued walking down Elm Street.“You’ve a keen ear for languages. Yes, the language of spells is a mixture of old languages. When the fey first started teaching magic to humans we had no words for spells. We justthoughta thing and it happened. But to communicate with humans we needed to put things in words and we found that the words, although often imprecise and tricky to use, added power to our magic—a little extrazing, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded, although I wasn’t quite sure I saw how there could be a stronger magic than thinking a thing and having it happen.
“Having something better and bigger happen.” Dory answered my unspoken question without missing a beat. “Having somethingunexpectedhappen. The fey had not been surprised by anything in a millennium. They loved the little extraumphthat language gave magic. So we taught humans magic in exchange for language and for…well…forother things.” Dory blushed pink.
“Other things?” I asked.
Dory turned to me and silently mouthed the letters S-E-X. “It’s not something we’re proud of, but there it is. The old ones…were a bit…well,you know. To their credit, most of the fairies became quite attached to their human…um…companions and treated them very well. Better than some of the humans treated them back. But, really, I don’t think I’m the one to explain all that. I’m sure Elizabeth will brief you on fairy/human relations, current etiquette, and the sexual harassment laws passed in the nineties once you’ve had your orientation and received your own spellbook.”
“Cool,” I said, sufficiently intrigued at the idea of learning how to cast spells to spare Dory the embarrassment of having to explain unsavory interspecies sexual relations. I knew I shouldn’t have been shocked. Mythology and folklore was full of randy gods abducting youths and maidens, but somehow the idea that the fey hadtradedfor those favors made the whole thing seem more sordid. I decided it was a good time tochange the subject. “Is there anything in those spell books that could help the Ballards? They seem…”
“Cursed?” Dory asked, stopping on the sidewalk. “They are. I’ll tell you, but let’s first go into the Lindisfarnes’ house. They’ve left to spend the winter in Florida, so I just want to make sure their pipes don’t burst.”
I followed Dory up a bluestone path bordered by orange chrysanthemums—now encased in ice—to a neat fieldstone and clapboard bungalow. She upended a stone gnome half hidden in the hydrangeas (their tawny globular blooms looking like giant snowballs under their glaze of ice) and retrieved a key. She let us into an immaculate Craftsman bungalow decorated in period Stickley furniture.
“Okay, the Ballards,” Dory began as she headed to the kitchen. “Have you ever heard of Bertram Hughes Ballard?”
“Wasn’t he a big nineteenth-century robber baron and railroad magnate?”
“Uh-huh,” Dory said from beneath the kitchen sink where she was doing something to the pipes that involved blowing on them and telling themNe fyrstig glaciare!“He was the son of a French trapper—hence all the French names the family’s still fond of—who made his fortune in lumber and then, as JayCee said, in railroads. He and his partner, Hiram Scudder, took over the Ulster and Clare in the 1880s and founded the Ballard and Scudder Ironworks here in town to supply the railroad with tracks. At the height of his fortune Ballard built that huge monstrosity we were just in.”
Dory emerged from under the sink and cast an appreciative glance around the Lindisfarnes’ cheery, neat kitchen. “Ballard and Scudder bought up most of the town between them, but then there was the Great Crash of ’93.”
“A stock market crash?”
“No, a train crash. The westbound train out of Kingston crashed into the eastbound train out of Binghamton. A hundred and three lives were lost, including a crew of workerswhom Ballard had ordered out that morning to remove a section of track that was in poor repair. The crash was blamed on shoddy tracks manufactured by Ballard and Scudder. In the aftermath both the railroad and the ironworks went bankrupt. Scudder’s wife, Adele, committed suicide. Ballard lost all his houses but the one here in town. He came back to Fairwick a broken man, but it wasn’t until the curse started manifesting itself that we knew he must have done something to get on the wrong side of a powerful witch.”
“Curse?”
Dory held up a finger to her lips and cocked her head, listening. The only sound I heard was the ticking of the Stickley grandfather clock in the hall and the drip of melting icicles outside the kitchen window. Dory shook her head. “Sorry, I thought I heard something. Anyway, as I was saying,” she continued as she marched briskly into the downstairs powder room, “the curse: the year before the crash Bertram had married a young society girl from New York. She was pregnant when the crash happened, but lost the baby, a boy, in her sixth month. She got pregnant half a dozen times after that, but they all died at birth—all boys—until she finally gave birth to a live girl and then was told by her doctor that she couldn’t have any more children. Bertram was so upset at the idea that the Ballard name would die out that he had a lawyer draw up a will stipulating that his daughter would only inherit the house and the Ballard fortune if she kept the Ballard name and that unless there was a male heir all female Ballards must keep their surnames to inherit.”
Finished with the downstairs powder room (she’d given the pipes a good talking to in Spell and set the tap to drip) Dory started up the stairs, continuing her story. “That’s when we all guessed that Bertram was under a curse that he conceive no male children. It took a while longer to make out the rest of the curse…”
She paused at the top of the stairs, again cocking her head asif to listen. Her face scrunched up, but then she shook her head and went on as she repeated her ministrations on the upstairs plumbing.
“Bert’s daughter, Estelle, grew up with every sign of becoming a grand lady. She was beautiful, talented, smart, and witty. What was left of the Ballard fortune went into her debut at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. I suppose Ballard hoped to recoup his fortunes by marrying her off to money. She had half a dozen rich suitors, but then when she turned eighteen it was like she’d become a different person. She started drinking, she turned down all proposals of marriage, and finally she showed up back in town pregnant. Old Bert locked her up in the house, and when the little girl was born he christened her Nicolette Josephine Ballard and started all over again, raising her to be a grand lady of society while her mother drank herself to death locked away in that mausoleum of a house.”
“And when Nicolette”—I shuddered at the repetition of my student’s name—“turned eighteen?”
“The same thing happened all over again…” Dory paused at the threshold to the Lindisfarnes’ bedroom and sniffed the air. Then she crossed the room toward the bathroom but stopped at the Mission-style slat bed to smooth the rumpled coverlet, her face thoughtful.
“And has it been like that ever since? One girl born each generation who falls apart after her eighteenth birthday?”
Dory looked up, her face distracted as if she were listening to something. Then she shook her head and waved a hand in front of her face as if clearing away a cobweb, although the room was spotless save for the rumpled coverlet and a damp towel lying on the bathroom floor. It looked like the Lindisfarnes might have left in a hurry yesterday and hadn’t quite lived up to Dory Browne’s code of neatness. “Every few generations there’s a boy born, but then he runs away from the Ballard house—who could blame him?—before he’s old enough to inherit and his sister follows the same pattern again. Arlettewent off to Smith College, but came back after her first semester pregnant. Even JayCee finished high school and had a good job at a hotel up in Cooperstown before she came home pregnant and started drinking.”
“And Nicky? She’s not like that…Wait, how old is Nicky?”
Dory smiled sadly. “She turns eighteen on May second. Liz thought if we got her into the college and kept an eye on her maybe we could save her. The witches of Fairwick have been trying for generations to avert the Ballard curse, but the only person who can revoke a curse is a descendant of the witch who cast it. So without knowing who cast the curse…Well, I’m afraid it’s like trying to cure a disease without a correct diagnosis.”
Dory wrapped her arms around her chest. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “It’s freezing.”
