The square of sevens, p.1
The Square of Sevens, page 1
To Holly Shepherd-Robinson
This new forth-setting of an old mystery is cordially offered
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BOOK TWO CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BOOK THREE CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BOOK FOUR CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
HISTORICAL NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Author’s Note
A complete guide to the method of fortune telling, as well as a full list of the meanings of the cards, can be found in The Square of Sevens: An Authoritative System of Cartomancy by Robert Antrobus (John Gowne, 1740). The first edition is extremely rare, but the second edition, edited by E. Irenaeus Stevenson (Harper and Brothers, 1897), will meet the needs of any fledgling cartomancer.
‘The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.’
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
BOOK ONE
Concerning a fortune told of Mr Robert Antrobus
CHAPTER ONE
Eight of spades, influenced by a heart: an illness to another, dear to one.
PEOPLE LIKE TO say they seek the truth. Sometimes they even mean it. The truth is they crave the warm embrace of a lie. Tell them they’re going to be rich or fall in love, and they walk away whistling. Give them the hard, unvarnished truth, and you’re looking at trouble. Now I am told to do just that. Tell the truth and nothing but. Well, my story begins with a story, it begins with a lie.
November, 1730. I never knew precisely where. A few hours’ walk south of Tintagel. A neap tide and a quarter moon. A rain that fell in fat, cold droplets like quicksilver. It ran off the inn sign in a torrent, washing away a crust of soot and salt, revealing a queen’s head and bright beads of scarlet blood. I edged closer to the door and the light and the warmth, straining to hear over the patrons’ laughter. Father was weaving one of his tales: a sick man and a motherless child (that part true), a robbery on the road and a dead dog (that part lie).
‘I don’t care if you’re St Christopher himself,’ came the innkeeper’s retort. ‘I said no gypsies.’
‘I am not a gypsy, sir,’ Father said. ‘I am a cunning-man, a—’ I heard a crash, a splintering of china.
Father emerged from the door, grim-faced. ‘I tried, Red. It’ll have to be that barn we passed a mile back.’
I whispered a curse to Joan the Wad, licked my thumb, and pressed it against the wall of the inn. A departing couple had followed Father out, and the woman frowned. ‘She’s not yet ten years old. She should be in bed.’
The trouble with being a child, was people expected you to act like a child. To cry over a late night, or a missed meal. A year on the road is worth two in a town, Father liked to say, which, by my reckoning, made me fourteen rather than seven. Yet I smiled up at her, wide-eyed, clutching Joan the Wad like a toy, and her expression softened.
‘Try the Seven Stars,’ she said, in a kindlier tone. ‘It’s about a quarter-mile out of town.’
The man by the woman’s side had edged into the shadows, lowering his head to hide his face beneath his cloth hat. Father had taught me about fishing towns. How the women took up with other men while their husbands were away at sea. I often saw it in their eyes when I told their fortunes. The men suspicious, often seeking the name of a rival, the women tormented over worthless choices. Then they had the brass to tell you when you should and shouldn’t be in bed.
‘The Seven Stars?’ Father murmured. ‘Aye, we would be thereabouts.’
‘Do you know it?’ I asked.
He merely grunted, tipping his wide-brimmed hat to the woman, and we battled on through the rain. Like most Cornish ports, the town was a maze of ancient, narrow streets. My numb feet slipped upon the cobbles, my hair plastered to my icy cheeks. To my frustration, Father kept stopping to rest. Some weeks ago, we’d passed through a village where the mood had turned ugly. A farmer had accused us of souring his milk, and his friends had ducked Father in a millpond to see if he would float. Ever since, his chest had troubled him, the hollow rattle of his breathing keeping us both awake at night.
On the outskirts of town, we turned onto a steep road that climbed a windswept headland, the waves crashing against the rocks far below. The inn looked as if it had stood there on the clifftop for a thousand years or more. An arch with a lantern above it led to the stable yard, which was surrounded by timber buildings, some tiled, some thatched. A strong smell of fried fish greeted us as we staggered into the taproom. The drinkers stared.
Father cut a tall, striking figure in his long indigo coat embroidered with hieroglyphs and hexafoils. On his back, he carried a knapsack, tied to it a cumbersome arrangement of bedroll, market wallet, and leather portmanteau. The rain was dripping from his hat and he pushed it back on his head. I found the change in him disturbing. All the fat had gone out of his face. He asked the innkeeper if there was a room for the night.
‘Gypsies, is it?’ The man had mean eyes, ink-stained fingers and a hard, thin mouth.
‘I am a pellar, sir,’ Father said. ‘A Cornish cunning-man.’
The innkeeper shrugged, as if he didn’t understand the difference. ‘Two shilling a night,’ he said. ‘Supper, three shilling for two. If ye wants to be selling fortunes or like what-not in my taproom, then I’ll take half.’
We were being fleeced and royally so, but we were used to that. Give us greed over hate, over fear, even over charity. There was much less chance of things going wrong.
The landlord’s eye fell upon Joan the Wad. ‘What’s that witchcraft?’
People often had that reaction to Joan’s twisted wicker limbs and braids of woven horsehair. Afraid their comments would hurt her feelings, I’d had Father make her a patchwork dress much like my own. One day, I’d make her a crown out of a nugget of purest gold, and then all our journeys would receive her nod of good fortune.
‘She’s just a doll, a child’s plaything,’ Father said, and I pressed my fingers over her ears so she couldn’t hear.
Father gave me a nod, and while he signed the register, I counted out the coins from the purse at my belt. The innkeeper studied the pile of shillings I laid on his counter, selected one and bit it. I smiled at him sweetly. These were no butchered bobs, filed farthings and the like. Father had carved the mould from chalk and mixed the metal in his crucible. Possessing smaller and steadier hands, I had stamped the coins myself, and polished them up with aqua fortis and cream of tartar. The innkeeper grunted, sweeping the coins into the pocket of his apron.
The rooms we were given overlooked the dung heap in the stable yard and smelled as one would expect. Yet the place was warm and dry, and when I ran my hand over the mattress of the large oaken bed, only one or two lice scuttled out. Father sank into an old leather chair in the parlour and asked the innkeeper, Mr Chenoweth, for a bottle of brandy. ‘And food for my daughter. A pie, something like that.’
‘Father, please eat.’ Joan the Wad had told me to make sure that he did.
He waved me away. ‘Brandy will revive me.’
‘Another two shilling for
‘My daughter will do so gladly.’
He gave me a contemptuous glance. ‘She’s just a child.’
‘Seven years old, and more gifted than any cartomancer you will ever meet.’
The innkeeper stared at Father intently. ‘Do I know you, sir?’
Father gave him a long look. ‘I don’t believe so.’
He frowned. ‘My mistake.’
After he’d gone, I scowled at the door. ‘If I read his cards tomorrow, he’ll learn some hard truths.’
Father smiled. ‘I don’t doubt it. But soften it, will you, my love? We need his goodwill. Remember what happened with that farmer.’
Guilt made me fierce in my defence. ‘I can’t help what’s in the cards.’
‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘But sometimes you scare people. We don’t want to end up in any more millponds, now do we?’
Father was in a strange mood that night. Several times he went to the window to look out at the stable yard, and he seemed unusually distant in his talk. In bed, I whispered about it to Joan the Wad, but she didn’t know why. When I awoke the next morning, the brandy bottle was empty.
Father’s chest seemed worse. Nor was the weather any better, and when I asked him if we could stay another night, to my surprise, he agreed without argument. Two nights turned into three, then four. On our fifth night, we made the acquaintance of a doctor named Kilderbee, who was staying at the inn on his way to St Ives. He declared an interest in natural remedies, and Father offered to show him his herbal grimoire the following morning.
When the doctor came to our rooms, I was sent outside as the weather was brighter. I ran across the grass to the edge of the cliff, my hair blown wild by the wind. Worming forward on my belly, clutching Joan the Wad very tight, I discovered that we could look right down the face of the cliff to the rocks below. My head swam and my stomach lurched, even as danger held a strange allure. When I could stand it no longer, I gathered a pile of stones and stood back from the edge, hurling them out to sea. The sun gave the tips of the waves a shine like the inside of a seashell, the little fishing boats like the toys of Bolster the Giant.
When I returned to our room, Father was sitting in his chair, lost in thought. I put my hand on his arm, he ran his fingers through my tangled red curls, and told me to put on my cap and mind my books. Our small library travelled with us on the road: an almanac; Father’s grimoire and magical books; and a few battered novels. My favourite was Don Quixote, the adventures of a mad Spaniard who had become a knight errant at the age of fifty. Father often read it to me aloud, and I knew all Quixote’s quests by heart. I turned the pages slowly, whispering the stories to Joan the Wad, but rewriting them to give them better endings. I imagined Father as Quixote, me as his vengeful squire, finding the constables who’d beaten him and making them beg for their lives, enjoying the humiliation of the men who’d ducked him in the millpond.
That night at supper, a gentleman, a new arrival, was seated at the next table, and several times I caught him staring at Father and I. The dining room was hung with paintings of ships, and as the walls and floor were all askew, and the roar of the sea faintly heard, it was easy to imagine yourself aboard one. Mr Chenoweth’s pot-boy cleared our plates, and in the lull, the man leaned over and introduced himself. ‘Robert Antrobus, a visitor to these parts from the city of Bath.’
Father shook his hand. ‘George the Tenth of Kernow, glad to know you, sir.’
This delighted Mr Antrobus. ‘I had no idea I was in the presence of royalty. You are, I think, a gypsy king?’
When he smiled, two little red circles formed high on his lightly lined cheeks. Throw into his lap a parcel of knitting, and with his snow-white wig and tortoiseshell spectacles, he would have resembled a benevolent grandmother. Not that I had much knowledge of grandmothers, benevolent or otherwise, but I knew such women existed, for I had told their fortunes.
‘I am no gypsy,’ Father said, ‘though I hold the Romani people in naught but the highest regard. Neither am I a king, but merely the tenth man named George in a long line of cunning-men. My forefathers have walked this land since the days of the Saxon invaders.’
‘Which makes you a king indeed.’ Mr Antrobus raised his glass and they drank.
‘My daughter, Red,’ Father said.
‘Red,’ Mr Antrobus repeated, beaming at me. ‘An unusual name, but I rather like it.’
He made no jokes about my hair, and I liked him better for it. All told, he looked a very good catch indeed. Soft, plump hands; his coat a fine brown woollen broadcloth with silver-gilt embroidery; his watch chain indisputably gold.
I inclined my head. ‘I am very happy to make your acquaintance, sir.’
‘What pretty manners,’ he exclaimed. ‘Your daughter does you credit, Mr George.’
‘Indeed she does. Her mother was a lady, and I have endeavoured to teach her a lady’s comportment and speech.’
‘Then her mother . . . ?’
‘Taken from us before her time. Red has never known a mother’s care.’
‘I regret to hear it.’ He peered sympathetically at me. ‘But I don’t believe you have made all the introductions.’
I smiled, liking him more. ‘This is Joan the Wad, sir. The Queen of the Piskies. Show her respect and she’ll light your journey, but if you are unkind to her, she’ll call down the mist and lead you astray.’
‘Then I am in the presence of royalty!’ He sketched a little bow in her direction. ‘I’d never dream of showing anything but respect to Her Majesty.’
‘Do you have children of your own, sir?’ Father said.
‘Alas, no. I am a bachelor. Rather more by accident than design.’ He took a sip of wine and changed the subject. ‘I have never had the good fortune to meet a cunning-man before, though I have studied the ancient traditions that survive in the furthest reaches of this realm. That is my avocation, an antiquarian. I have published several volumes on our island’s history to some small acclaim.’ He smiled modestly, glowing a little pink. ‘Lately I have been studying the language of the Romani, hence my rather clumsy introduction.’
‘Is it your studies that bring you here to Cornwall?’ Father asked.
‘A rather more sombre matter. I was called to the bedside of an ailing cousin, who regrettably died of his illness two weeks ago. I would have returned to Bath by now, had I not learned that the dear man left me a small bequest: a farm and some other landholdings. My intention is to sell them, but I have been forced to wait while some rather tiresome legal entanglements are resolved. In the meantime, I felt a little sea air would do me good.’ He patted his chest.
Father eyed him appraisingly. ‘Perhaps you desire a charm or amulet to bring you fortune in your affairs? Or a horoscope to consult the fates? I see from your expression that you are sceptical, sir.’
Mr Antrobus chuckled. ‘I confess I struggle to believe that if I buried an egg and a packet of pins under an oak tree on full moon, it would ease the passage of probate.’
‘For a matter of money, I too would advise against using an egg,’ Father said. ‘Yet you should not dismiss our arts too lightly. There is a reason they have endured. They hold more power than your science, and have more adherents than your reason.’
‘Hence my interest. Anything that holds the common people in thrall is worthy of closer study, however implausible.’
It was my task, at such moments, to sit modestly and hold my tongue. People felt soothed by the presence of a child, their fears and suspicions allayed.
‘My daughter understands the powers of which I speak,’ Father said. ‘She is herself already adept at the art of cartomancy. We use an ancient method that has been passed down in my family from pellar to pellar for generations. That’s what people here call the cunning-folk.’
Mr Antrobus nodded. ‘Etymology, I believe, tells us that “pellar” derives from the word “expellers”. Is that another of your talents? Driving out witches and evil spirits?’
‘True witches are rare in the modern age,’ Father said. ‘More often than not, the finger of suspicion is pointed at women who have committed no crime greater than growing old without a husband. For that reason, when I am asked to undertake such work, I tend to decline.’
