An Accounting Recorded
in the Yeare of 1647
Dame Harriet Ashcroft
“Snickerdoodle! I found it!” I run back to the transportation crystal, return to the reading room, and race to the table.
My fingers tremble as I turn the pages, trying to speed read. But the handwriting, as beautiful as it is, is more difficult to understand than print, especially when you add in the not-yet-standardized spelling. I flip back to the beginning and make myself slow down, falling deeper into the story the longer I go.
Dame Harriet, it turns out, wasn’t royalty—she was schoolmistress of a “dame” school. I pause to pull out my phone for a quick search, unpleasantly surprised by what I find. Back when Harriet lived, only boys got to go to proper schools. Instead of leaving middle-class girls completely uneducated, they were allowed to learn reading and basic arithmetic under the direction of an older woman, who was usually a spinster or widow.
After that disappointing look at history, the next part of her story is better than I expect. There were no children’s books back in those days. Most kids were taught to read using the bible. So Harriet was a total boss bitch and wrote her own stories! They were fun little tales of girls venturing into the forest to pick berries or trying to milk a cow for the first time. Stories of village life, comforting and familiar, with some small mishap the character overcame, to show the girls it was possible.
Harriet taught for years without incident until a set of twin girls entered her class. They were bright, lively things, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t read.They say the letters dance on the payge. I tell them to stille their tongues, for such will get thee hanged as a wytch.
My heart pinches. Here are kids with dyslexia, made to fear for their lives instead of getting the help they needed. Not that I blame Harriet. I’m sure she was right about the danger they were in back in such an unenlightened age.
The twins, unable to read like the other children, begged for a way to enjoy the books. And something within Harriet came to life.I know notte whot I did, but the girls did disappear for some gud hours. When they came back, they told a fantastikal tayle that matched my booke.
Fudging fudge! Harriet was a book witch like me! Excitement bubbles in my chest with the joyous fizz of champagne. I’m not the only one!
I keep reading, going as quickly as I can. Over the years, whenever she had a student who couldn’t read for one reason or another, Harriet would use her magic to send them into her storybooks, so they could enjoy them as much as the other children. It was amazing and giving and sweet.
And it doesn’t help me a damn bit.
My fingers linger on the last page, and then I close her book with a sigh. Harriet never had to break one of her spells. The children went into the short stories, finished the entire plot in an hour, and returned. Harriet needed no control beyond the initial choice of who to send.
Princess Buttercup leaps onto the table and saunters past me, making sure her tail tickles my face.
I snort-laugh and swipe at my face, trying to remove the fine hairs clinging to my skin.
“You’re doing that sighing thing.” She comes back for another pass. “I don’t like the sighing thing.”
Before she can tickle me with her tail again, I scoop her into my arms and press a kiss to her forehead. “Thanks. I’m okay. I found a book about a witch like me and thought I’d finally get some answers about how to control my magic, but it was a bust.”
“But it’s still good, right?” She rubs her cheek against my chin and gives a little purr. “If you found one witch like you, there must be others.”
“You’re right. If I found Harriet’s book, I bet I can find more, and one of them will have the answer.”
Finally, I have good news for Luke. It’s felt impossible to keep working so closely with him after being intimate. His resting grumpy face gives nothing away. He doesn’t look like it’s bothering him at all to sit near me, while I’m over here sweating and trying not to squirm as my mind whispers an endless loop of naughty thoughts.
I grin and scratch Princess Buttercup under her chin, cuddling her close. “What would I do without you?”
“You’d be totally lost.” Her amber eyes close to pleased slits as my fingers dig into a good spot. “I’m amazing.”
Laughter, light and sweet, spills out of me as I hug her close, her purrs rumbling through my chest. “You certainly are.”
Luke finds me an hour later while I’m in the middle of emptying another bookshelf. A miniature mountain range of book stacks snakes down the center of the aisle behind me. I’ve been so focused on finding another dark-purple book that I haven’t bothered to reshelve as I go.
“Whatever are you doing to my library, little witch?” he growls.
“I found one!” I spin to face him and grab his hand, squeezing it, unable to contain my excitement. “I found a book written by a book witch!”
He squeezes back, his golden eyes intent. “Tell me everything.”
The story spills out of me: emptying a shelf, only to find one book left behind. Reading Harriet’s account of being a book witch back when being any kind of witch was dangerous. How she used her power anyway to help children with reading disabilities to enjoy her stories. “She never had to break one of her spells, so there wasn’t anything on that, but it does tell me there are other witches like me, and I now know I need to look for dark-purple books. I’m not sure why books about book magic are such a dark color, though. They’re not evil.”
“Black as evil is a human construct created due to fear of predators in the night. It has no true bearing on good or evil.” He frowns, but I’m better at reading his expressionsnow, so I know it’s grumpy number two, his thinking frown. “Do you know how you get black paint? You combine all other colors in matching proportions. Therefore, black isn’t the absence of color—black is all colors combined in perfect harmony.”
