Conjure Wife Read Free Page B

done. And then, you see, Norm, the things I did… well, they seemed to work… at least most of the time.”
    “But don’t you see,” he continued smoothly, “that those very exceptions prove that the things you were doing didn’t work? That the successes were just coincidences?”
    Her voice rose a trifle. “I don’t know about that. There might have been counter-influences at work
    — ” She turned toward him impulsively. “Oh, I don’t know what I believe! I’ve never really been sure that my charms worked. There was no way of telling. Don’t you see, once I’d started, I didn’t dare stop?”
    “And you’ve been doing it all these years?”
    She nodded unhappily. “Ever since we came to Hempnell.”
    He looked at her, trying to comprehend it. It was almost impossible to take at one gulp the realization that in the mind of this trim modern creature he had known in completest intimacy, there was a whole great area he had never dreamed of, an area that was part and parcel of the dead practices he analyzed in books, an area that belonged to the Stone Age and never to him, an area plunged in darkness, a crouch with fear, blown by giant winds. He tried to picture Tansy muttering charms, stitching up flannel hands by candlelight, visiting graveyards and God knows what other places, in search of ingredients. His imagination almost failed. And yet it had all been happening right under his nose.
    The only faintly suspicious aspect of Tansy’s behavior that he could recall, was her whim for taking “little walks” by herself. If he had ever wondered about Tansy and superstitions at all, it had only been to decide, with a touch of self-congratulation, that for a woman she was almost oddly free from irrationality.
    “Oh Norm, I’m so confused and miserable,” she broke in. “I don’t know what to say or how to start.”
    He had an answer for that, a scholar’s answer.
    “Tell me how it all happened, right from the beginning.”
    7:54: They were still sitting on the davenport. The room was almost dark. The devil masks were irregular ovals of gloom. Tansy’s face was a pale smudge. Norman couldn’t study its expression, but judging from her voice, it had become animated.
    “Hold on a minute,” he interrupted. “Let’s get some things straight. You say you were very much afraid when we first came to Hempnell to arrange about my job, before I went south on the Hazelton Fellowship?”
    “Oh yes, Norm. Hempnell terrified me. Everyone was so obviously antagonistic and so deadly respectable. I knew I’d be a flop as a professor’s wife — I was practically told so to my face. I don’t know which was worse, Hulda Gunnison looking me up and down and grunting contemptuously, ‘I guess you’ll do,’ when I made the mistake of confiding in her, or old Mrs. Carr petting my arm and saying, ‘I know you and your husband will be very happy here at Hempnell. You’re young, but Hempnell loves nice young folk!’ Against those women I felt completely unprotected. And your career too.”
    “Right. So when I took you south and plunged you into the midst of the most superstition-swayed area in the whole country, exposed you to the stuff night and day, you were ripe for its promise of magical security.”
    Tansy laughed half-heartedly. “I don’t know about the ripe part, but it certainly impressed me. I drank in all I could. At the back of my mind, I suppose, was the feeling: Some day I may need this. And when we went back to Hempnell in the fall, I felt more confident.”
    Norman nodded. That fitted. Come to think of it, there had been something unnatural about the intense, silent enthusiasm with which Tansy had plunged into boring secretarial work right after their marriage.
    “But you didn’t actually try any conjure magic,” he continued, “until I got pneumonia that first winter?”
    “That’s right. Until then, it was just a cloud of vaguely reassuring ideas — scraps of things I’d find myself