The Dark Glamour (21 page)

Chapter Thirty-Five

B
y Wednesday, Jane was thoroughly bored with being Ella. She hadn’t been able to exchange more than a few quick text messages with Dee, who had apparently gone straight to work following her long weekend, and it wouldn’t have been smart to risk being seen with her right now, anyway. Jane felt she had imposed enough on Misty’s hospitality for the time being, and she certainly didn’t want to see André, who had started sending aggressively flirtatious notes the moment he had returned, empty-handed and presumably furious, from Alsace. So Jane spent a good deal of her time in her hotel room, alternately reading
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
and tabloids. The discovery of the missing Doran was still big news, of course, fueled in part by speculation about what was sure to be the most elaborate coming-out party New York had ever seen.

By the time the front desk called to let her know that a package had arrived for her, her cabin fever had gotten so irritating that she nearly ran down the stairs to collect the delivery herself. She remembered just in time that royalty didn’t do that sort of thing, and literally sat on her hands to avoid calling back every few seconds to ask why the bellhop hadn’t reached her door
yet
.

Her excitement only grew as she took the package—a wide, flattish box covered in brown paper—and recognized Elodie’s cheerful handwriting. The box looked fairly intact, and Jane guessed that her friend had thoughtfully repackaged the mangled box that had originally arrived from Gran’s farmhouse. It didn’t stay intact for long, though: she began by trying to pull off the paper and then, in her eagerness, wound up ripping straight through the cardboard beneath. Crisscrosses of tape held it together in unexpected and sometimes inconvenient ways, but she was determined, and in a few seconds she was looking directly at the last remnants of her inheritance.

It didn’t look like much, she had to admit, but it didn’t really matter: everything in the box had belonged to Gran, and that made it special to her. There were a few books in English, more in French, and a floral fabric–covered one that she set aside, noting that it looked like a diary of some kind. There was a pair of reading glasses with gray plastic frames in a soft leather pouch, two glass paperweights with flowers suspended inside, an ancient-looking Polaroid camera with no film in it, a little box that held a few seashells, and a collection of broken and dried-out pens. Jane lifted each item carefully out of the wreckage of the cardboard box, lining them up on the floor in front of her. The resulting display made her feel as though Gran were in the room with her, and she closed her eyes in a moment of pain. She reached out blindly until her hand encountered the cold surface of one of the paperweights, and let her mind slide back to the old farmhouse at the foot of the mountain.

She remembered the way that the dusty sunlight had fallen sideways through the small windows, illuminating the pink anemone in one glass bubble, the yellow rose in the other. She had held them up, turning them to catch the light, transfixed by the way they seemed to glow from within. Gran would be in the kitchen, filling the entire house with the smell of cabbage and boiled ham, or she would be in the living room, nestled in one of her overstuffed armchairs, the gray reading glasses perched on her nose. Jane’s hands balled into fists as she opened her eyes. No matter how well things had turned out, she had already lost so much to this conflict. She was free to start over now, but with no family to return to, starting over was her only real choice.

She picked up the diary and flipped it over in her hands. The fabric was faded, but still cheerful, with white, red, and pink flowers overlapping one another on a periwinkle-blue background. Jane felt a little more apprehensive than she had expected: Gran had always presented such an intimidating, closed-off façade that Jane was almost afraid to find out what had been underneath. Even now that she knew what Gran had been hiding, and what she had been hiding Jane from, it was still hard to shake the feeling that she might regret invading her guardian’s privacy. She took a deep breath and opened the front cover.

An empty white page stared back at her.

She flipped slowly through the blank pages, deflated. She felt sure, just as she opened each, that there was writing on it, but there wasn’t. She closed her eyes, feeling a little foolish for getting her hopes up. But once she wasn’t looking at it, the book seemed to thrum and almost tremble in her hands.
Something is here,
she insisted to herself.

She wondered wildly what would happen if she tried the same location spell with this book that she had performed on Anne’s glass unicorn and then with her stuffed rabbit. Would she see through the eyes of Gran’s body, buried in the little cemetery of Saint-Croix, or would she see something different, something about what had become of her grandmother’s soul? She felt a chill at the thought, but she felt her magic begin to form a circuit, passing faster and faster between her heart and the book.

I don’t want to see the present, though,
she thought almost pleadingly.
I just want to understand the past a little better.

It came to her in a flash: she had done exactly that once, without even meaning to. The force of her magic had shattered Anne’s unicorn into countless shards, but before it had exploded, she had seen the girl the object had once belonged to. Without giving herself time to think, Jane gripped the diary, making sure to press Gran’s silver ring against it as hard as she could. Then she poured herself into the diary, shoving her mind into the grain of the paper, flattening herself into its lengthwise plane.

Images rushed past too fast for her to see them, although she craned to look. But she was being pulled deeper, somewhere more still, and when she finally landed on what felt like solid ground, there was only one other image in front of her. “Gran,” she whispered, nearly choking on the word. Celine Boyle nodded back at her.

Jane risked a glance downward, but whatever was beneath her feet was invisible. There was nothing but darkness on all sides of her, except that Gran stood in the same darkness, looking back at Jane expectantly.

“I’m not real,” Gran cautioned her when Jane started forward, holding up a warning hand. Jane stopped obediently; she could tell now that there was something insubstantial about her grandmother, and also somehow ageless. She didn’t look real.

“But you’re here,” Jane told her stubbornly, and then felt exasperated with herself; even in the magical non-presence of her deceased grandmother her instinct was to act like a child.

“I’m a memory,” Gran replied simply. “I’m Celine Boyle’s diary. You are Jane Boyle, and you have the power to read this, but I have no recollection of you gaining the knowledge.”

Jane thought about that for a moment. She had no idea when Gran had made this remarkable spell, but Gran had died before Jane had learned about magic. So, of course, the version of her in the book wouldn’t expect to encounter Jane, although she didn’t seem especially upset about it. Jane’s initial impulse to throw her arms around Gran had faded down to nothing almost immediately; whatever was standing in front of her, it wasn’t the difficult, overprotective woman she had loved.
But she could show her to me,
Jane realized,
or . . .

“Can you tell me about my mother’s death?” she asked plaintively, and Celine Boyle nodded curtly.

With a sickening spin, Jane felt herself disappear into one of the strains of memory around her, which immediately became sharper, slower, more visible. “I wasn’t there, of course,” Gran’s voice came from somewhere around her, although the image of her hadn’t joined Jane wherever she was now. A younger Gran was picking up a phone, and Jane realized that they were in the kitchen of their old farmhouse in Alsace. Gran listened to the voice on the other end of the line, which was nothing but a faint buzz to Jane, and then her face began to crumble. Her grief was so raw that Jane couldn’t help herself: she looked away, and the walls began to shift around her.

“I was told it was a car accident,” the voice of Gran from the diary went on clinically, and a shifting collage of images showed Celine on a plane, talking to police, talking to neighbors, staring through an empty window, clutching ten-month-old Jane to her chest. “But I didn’t believe it.”

Jane frowned; she had wondered once if her mother’s magical heritage might not have played a part in the flash flood that had swept her parents off the road one night. After all, Anne had accidentally killed her entire foster family because she didn’t understand her magic and couldn’t control it; might not Angeline Boyle have done something similar? It was the question she had wanted to ask in the first place, but hadn’t quite been able to say out loud. She held her breath, simultaneously hoping Gran would go on—and that she wouldn’t.

“I suspected a witch named Lynne Doran,” Gran continued, and Jane’s breath flew out of her.

“Lynne?”

“So I stayed in America to investigate.”

Jane shook her head. “You brought me back to France the next day,” she told the disembodied voice, but the images around her were telling a different story. Gran had stayed, and if the changes in little Jane were any indication, she had stayed for quite some time. “I don’t remember this,” Jane whispered. She knew she must have been too young to register where she was at first, but as her younger self passed three and headed toward four, she felt completely disoriented. At some point, they had obviously traveled to France; how could she have no memory of an international flight by then?

Meanwhile, the younger Gran was stalking a younger Lynne Doran, first in Manhattan, then in the Hamptons, then back again. Jane had the bizarre experience of watching Annette grow from a toddler to a young child, while Malcolm slid inevitably into his still-gorgeous version of an awkward preteen. Gran had allies in her hunt, Jane realized: a good-looking, dark-haired couple who were probably just over forty at the time. Something about the woman’s eyes made Jane certain that she was a witch, and she watched Celine as avidly as they both watched Lynne. Sometimes Gran brought Jane along as she followed the Dorans, although more often she left her with a string of interchangeable-looking babysitters. Sometimes she would sit in their minuscule studio apartment, reading obsessively and making notes in the margins of old books that Jane couldn’t quite see.

Finally, during one of those evenings at home, Gran’s face turned ashen as she looked up from a page. “I didn’t find the information I was looking for,” her voice told Jane almost sadly. “I found something worse.”

The images began to speed up again, and Jane was glad she had Gran’s voice to make some sense of them. Gran had begun investigating the Dorans at the real beginning: she had researched Hasina. Jane didn’t understand what Lynne’s ancestress could possibly have to do with her own parents’ deaths, but her guide to the diary seemed intent on showing Jane everything her grandmother had learned, so Jane paid attention.

Hasina had been one of the seven daughters of Ambika, the very first witch, who had split her magic among her daughters after her death. All seven had gained notoriety among their suspicious contemporaries, who had often tacked their reputations onto their names. Hasina, as Jane remembered from her own reading, had been called “the Undying.” Jane had wondered why . . . but Gran had found out. As Hasina had felt her body begin to fail, she had dug deeper into dark magic than any of her six sisters ever had, and had found a way to live on well past her body’s natural time: she had taken her daughter’s.

“Wait,” Jane whispered, but there was no stopping the narrated flood of images now. Hasina possessed generation after generation of her descendants, leaving each body when one of her daughters was grown and strong enough to hold her. It had taken her years to learn the spell, which took a full month to cast, but once it was done, the soul couldn’t be shaken loose from its new home by anything but the next repetition of the spell.

Of course, that meant that Hasina could never be without a prospective host—or hostess, rather. A daughter was ideal, but not always possible. In a pinch, she eventually learned, a niece would do: as long as the new body was a witch’s, and as long as there was a blood link between her and the last host, Hasina could make the switch. The witch she left, Jane noticed, tended not to live long afterward, and her horror at Hasina’s atrocious betrayal of her own family—over and over—was tinged with profound sadness for them.

In the diary’s memory, Gran followed the ancient witch’s trail from book to book, from portrait to photo, and then, finally, inescapably, to Lynne Doran. Jane saw Lynne, protected from the summer sun by a long-sleeved shirt and floppy straw hat, sitting on a beach. In spite of her large sunglasses, she shaded her eyes with one hand, watching a small group of children run toward, then away from, the waves. Celine watched her from behind some tall dunes, her hands and jaw clenched. “It was her,” the diary’s voice hissed. “I’m sure of it.”

“Lynne,” Jane whispered.

“Not anymore,” the diary replied clinically.

The images spun again, and Celine argued with the dark-haired couple on a deserted stretch of windswept beach. Something lay on the sand between them, and Jane recoiled when she recognized unconscious six-year-old Annette Doran. A nasty-looking bruise was already beginning to form on her right temple. “We can stop the chain,” the woman was telling Celine in an urgent voice. “She’ll never be able to have another one, not at her age.”

“I won’t kill a child,” Gran insisted in the steely voice Jane remembered so well.

The man looked downright murderous at that, but the woman placed a cautioning hand on his chest and he remained still. “Then we share the work,” she declared, and Celine nodded.

The scenes spun and shifted again, but this time Jane could follow them on her own. Gran lit candles around a hastily taken Polaroid of Annette, whispering and working magic, and then she turned to the frightened-looking girl herself with regret in her eyes. She led a blank-looking Annette and a happy, sturdy four-year-old Jane through Heathrow.