‘You knew?’ I said, stunned. ‘About all of it?’
‘Knowing isn’t the same as believing,’ Virginia replied. ‘When Catherine disappeared so very suddenly after your seventeenth birthday, I remembered the stories and the thought began to prey on my mind.’
‘You’ve always known I was a witch?’ Lydia slammed a fist on the tabletop, making me and the flatware jump. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Doesn’t that seem like the kind of thing you’d casually drop into conversation, oh, I don’t know, from birth?’
‘Please do not raise your voice in my house,’ her grandmother chastised, not entirely removed from the woman she was five minutes ago. ‘To the best of my knowledge the blessing was dead in our line, but I was concerned enough to encourage some separation between the two of you.’
My turn to ask a question.
‘Why? You’ve been close with Catherine your whole life.’
‘Because,’ she replied. ‘If you were to Become when Lydia could not, I did not want her to spend her life in the shadow of a witch. I know that pain all too well.’
We all sat for a moment, no one sure what to say next. Eventually, it was Virginia who broke the quiet.
‘Not for one minute did I ever suspect I would need to explain any of this, or myself, to any of you,’ she said, addressing the three of us. Alex remained speechless at her side, worrying the opal ring on the middle finger of her right hand.
‘The Powell witches were once almost as strong as the Bells. We have been sisters for centuries, ever since we arrived in Savannah. If a Bell witch died before she could instruct her granddaughter in her ways, a Powell witch stepped in, and vice versa. We have always been close in that way. This friendship,’ she gestured across the table to me and Lydia, ‘is not a surprise. It’s fated.’
‘But you don’t have magic,’ Lydia said, and I could tell by the yearning in her voice, she desperately wanted to be wrong.
‘Because people do terrible things to protect those they love.’
Virginia tented her fingers under her chin and stared straight ahead.
‘Since before I was born, my existence has been based on a lie,’ she began, absently patting her daughter’s hand, tears still streaming down Alex’s face. ‘My mother, Juliet, was only fifteen when she fell pregnant.’
‘Juliet?’ Lydia interrupted. ‘I thought that was your sister’s name.’
Despite the wistful smile on her face, Virginia looked so sad, I thought I heard her heart break.
‘In 1963, an unwed teenage mother was considered a very shameful thing in polite society. Juliet and her mother, my grandmother, Sarah, left Savannah before she started to show. When Sarah returned, she brought back her daughter’s baby and passed me off as her own. People believed Juliet died in childbirth, a tragedy that invited no questions about the authenticity of my parentage.’
‘People believed she died in childbirth,’ I said, overwhelmed by the rush of revelation coming from the Powell matriarch. ‘but it wasn’t true.’
‘If Sarah had lived longer, there’s a chance everything might have been different for me, but she died three years later, leaving me with my great-grandmother, Edwina,’ Virginia replied. ‘Edwina’s mother was a witch, she was a caretaker, but almost all of those she was destined to care for were murdered. Her mother, her daughter and her granddaughter.’
Outside, I heard a rumble of thunder and placed a steadying hand on Lydia’s shoulder until the sudden storm passed.
‘Her mother was killed in the street on the way home from the theatre, everyone assumed thieves but nothing was taken. Sarah slipped on the staircase of a department store on Broughton Street, hit her head, died instantly. Juliet’s death was the ugliest of all. Days away from giving birth, her throat was slit on the porch of the house they were staying in. Her life was taken to prevent mine from ever coming to be but there was a doctor in the house next door. He could not save my mother, he was able to deliver me safely enough.’
‘They were all murdered,’ I said quietly. ‘By whom?’
‘I don’t know,’ Virginia said, before taking a steadying sipfrom her juice glass. ‘She wouldn’t speak on it. But Edwina didn’t blame the people who slew her family, she blamed the magic that put them in a murderer’s crosshairs. And she was determined not to let the same thing happen to me.’
No wonder Virginia was always so sick, carrying the weight of these secrets for so long.
‘How could she stop it?’
‘Simply enough. A little while before my seventeenth birthday, two weeks perhaps, Miss Bell came to call. It was very late, around midnight, but I had a peculiar feeling she was coming for me and I was awake, waiting for her.’ Her gaze drifted over to the dining room door, towards the foyer of her home, phantoms of her past putting on a play just for her. ‘Voices were raised, doors were slammed. The very next day, Edwina told me to pack my things and prepare to leave for Europe at once. She was taking me on a tour for my birthday.
‘I was, as you can imagine, impossibly excited, until we boarded the airplane and I saw the new moon through the window. Something changed in me that evening and I spent the next two weeks in a daze, no idea what was happening. Edwina called it travel sickness and assured me it would pass. On the night of the full moon, I lay on the bathroom floor of our hotel in Florence, screaming and crying as my magic was expelled from my body. The only time my great-grandmother left her bed was to close the door to the bathroom. The next morning, she greeted me as though nothing had happened.’
The tears I’d been holding in slipped over my lower lashes and when I looked over at Lydia, I saw we were all crying. All of us except for Virginia. Strong and proud, she just looked numb.
‘Did Catherine know?’ I asked. She had claimed the Powells had no knowledge of their magical lineage but it would hardly be the worst lie she ever told me. ‘Surely she would’ve tried to help you?’
‘She did not.’
