Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
It’s the Queen of Pentacles.
The card I have privately called the Effie card since the first week I lived here, the practical queen, the keeper of the hearth and the land, the woman who tends what’s hers, it’s face-up on the floor of Effie’s sitting room, in front of her dresser, having jumped the coffee table to get there.
Neither of us moves for a second.
“The draft,” I try to explain. “The window’s got a gap, the heat off the stove makes a current, cards are light—”
“Aye,” Alasdair says in a wry tone. “The draft.”
He gets up. He picks up the card with both hands and looks at it a long moment, and then he stands it upright on the dresser shelf, leaned against a ceramic figure of a duck playing bagpipes, facing the room.
“She wants to see the tree,” he says. “Just her way of letting us know.”
So the Queen stays on the dresser, looking at the tree, and I deal the third card—the Nine of Cups, the wish card, of course it is, the deck is clearly showing off now—and we finish the reading, which says, in summary, that the visit will be happy, that the year ahead is gold, and that somebody here is getting everything he wished for, which makes him insufferable for the rest of the evening because of course this ends in me giving him a blowjob.
Later, after banking the stove while he locks up—he locks up now, the man checks the doors and windows like he’s paranoid and it never stops being ironic—I stand a moment outside our bedroom, under a certain spot. Just above, under floorboards in Effie’s closet turned binding workshop, in a dead witch’s box, there’s a piece of horse hide that lies warm in the dark. I checked it once, alone, lifted the lid and found it exactly as I’d left it, warm as a sleeping animal, and I understood standing there that checking was the wrong relationship to have with it. It’s not a prisoner. It’s a promise and it will be fine on its own. It’s the only thing in this house with more time than we have, and it can mind itself.
What I think instead, standing there with the fire settling and the snow falling softly at the window and Alasdair’s footsteps doing their nightly human round, is the thing I’ve been arriving at all month, the thought the whole year has been walking me toward.
We loved each other before the binding. I know that now. It’s kind of fucked up, considering the circumstances, but it’s true. But neither of us could have sworn to it, not with the glamour in the air and the pull in the water and the monster at the wheel half the time. And a love you can’t swear to isn’t love yet…it’s hope. Hope under threat, hope holding its breath, hope with salt on the windowsills. That’s what we had, as summer bled into autumn: two people hoping in the haunted dark, with no way of knowing what feelings were true.
And then the horse went under, and the threat went with it, and what was left standing in my kitchen was just hope. Plain hope, with cold feet and a heartbeat.
Hope, with the threat gone, turns out to be another word for a life.
Alasdair comes back in, rubbing his hands, declaring the night “bitter as a bailiff,” and finds me standing outside the bedroom doing nothing.
“What is it, foxglove?”
“Nothing. Just counting my luck.”
“Aye?” He gathers me in, warm right through, smelling of woodsmoke and the cold outside air. “And how’s it tallying?”
“Rich,” I tell him as I hold him back. “Embarrassingly rich.”
Epilogue
ALASDAIR
Twenty years later
The body keeps a tally, and I’ve learned to read it the way I once read water.
I’m sixty, or thereabouts—we settled on a birthday years back the third of October, the binding’s day. I was nearly forty when I first stopped being a man and died, so we just ignored the centuries after that, and picked up on the third.
So, therefore, I’m sixty. The black’s gone silver at the temples and is losing the war everywhere else, there’s a knee that moans in wet weather, and my eyes want the cheaters now for the small print, which Iris finds so funny she’s hidden three pairs around the cottage like Easter eggs, so there’s always a set within reach of my outrage.
And I am, she informs me regularly, holding up indecently well. “It’s not fair,” she says, watching me split wood that morning with my sleeves up. “You’re going to be one of those silver-fox pensioners. Women at the heritage site ask about you.”
I tell her centuries of practice ought to count for something, but the truth is simpler: the body’s sixty, but I’ve only been using it twenty years. Everything on me is original parts, low mileage. The first half of my life put no wear on the machine at all.