‘But surely the two of you talked about it?’ I pressed. ‘Surely she would’ve helped you?’
‘I couldn’t talk about it because I didn’t know,’ Virginia said. ‘Edwina only confessed her actions to me shortly before her death when I fell pregnant with Alexandra, afraid of history repeating. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.’
‘That doesn’t explain why Catherine didn’t say anything,’ Lydia protested, shifting away from me by a degree, as though I shared the guilt she had already assigned to my grandmother. ‘She could’ve explained all of it to you.’
Virginia took an unbroken coffee cup from the set in the middle of the table and poured herself a fresh cup.
‘The Bells had good reason not to approach me directly,’ she said.
‘Which was?’
She stirred the hot coffee with a small silver spoon, tapped it twice on the edge of the china cup then set it on the saucer.
‘Edwina threatened to kill Catherine, her mother and her grandmother if they did.’
A heavy quiet overwhelmed us once again.
‘I suspect it would be quite impossible for me to impress upon you how very strongly Edwina felt about the corrosive effect of magic on her family,’ Virginia added, ‘but you must believe me when I tell you she was prepared to kill to be rid of it.’
‘They could’ve killed her,’ Lydia said with quiet fury. ‘They could’ve protected our magic.’
‘Catherine Bell is a formidable woman.’ Her grandmother tasted her coffee before adding half a teaspoon of sugar. ‘Her antecedents were not quite so ruthless. Your grandmother was not born, nor was she raised, to be the way she is today. Hermother and grandmother were gentler souls. They would never strike against a sister witch.’
‘What I don’t understand is how you and Catherine have been best friends your whole life,’ Lydia said, drumming impatient, dissatisfied fingertips on the table. ‘The topic never came up?’
Virginia laughed, the sound light and unexpected. ‘Baby, I do realize you find it almost impossible to live with an unexpressed thought, but you’d be amazed at how many conversations a couple of old friends can have about nothing at all. After a while, I did not think of it and I chose not to share the burden with Alexandra.’
‘I knew.’
It was barely above a whisper but the silence that followed her statement was deafening. Virginia, Lydia and I sat around the table in varying states of shock, all of us statues. Through the picture window, I noticed clouds gathering overhead.
‘Paul told me when we were teenagers,’ Alex went on. ‘I didn’t believe him. He told me his mother made him promise never to discuss magic with me, so naturally he did. You know what Paul was like.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I replied shakily, thinking of my loyal, steadfast father. ‘That doesn’t sound like him at all.’
‘He was different when we were younger,’ she said, looking upwards as she wiped her eyes with her napkin. ‘Telling Paul Bell not to do something was the surest way you could guarantee it would be accomplished by sundown. He would talk about it from time to time, make wild claims about his crazy witch of a mother, but as we got older he stopped mentioning the magic, only how much he hated his mother. I didn’t even take that seriously until you were born. That’s when things began to change. That’s when I realized he was genuinely afraid of Catherine.’
A crash of lightning sounded outside the house, so close that it rattled the windows in their frames. I looked nervously over to Lydia. Her irises had turned a pale gold, her stare utterly vacant. Alex and Virginia both stood abruptly, Alex’s chair falling backwards and clattering loudly against a serving trolley.
‘Lydia,’ I said, taking her hand in mine. Her skin was cold and clammy to the touch but I knew to her it must feel red hot. ‘Lyds, you have to control it.’
‘What’s happening?’ Alex said, standing in front of her mother. ‘Make it stop.’
‘I’m trying,’ I told her, my attention still fully on my best friend. ‘She’s not doing it on purpose.’
‘Make it stop!’ Alex said again before racing around the table to grab Lydia’s shoulders, shaking her daughter violently. ‘Stop it, I said!’
‘Alex, no!’
Virginia flew at her daughter, pulling her away just as a white-hot bolt of lightning sliced through the window and ripped the antique dining table into pieces. As the centuries-old mahogany smoked in matchsticks on the floor, Lydia’s eyes shifted back to their regular colour and her body slumped in her chair like a fallen ragdoll.
‘I can’t do this,’ Alex muttered, turning away from her only daughter as though she couldn’t bear to look at her. ‘I just can’t.’
‘You can and you will,’ Virginia said. ‘This is who she is.’
But Alex wasn’t ready to accept it. She shook her head and pointed at me, an ugly, frightened twist to her lips.
‘That is not who she is, it’s what she made her!’ she yelled, stalking towards the door, her whole body shaking. ‘That is not my daughter. Paul was right to take her away from here but it wasn’t enough. If only she’d died instead of him, we would all be better off.’
