The Witch in the Lake Read Free

saw her so clearly, scampering through the narrow lanes, out of the village and into the fields. The ground would be soft with spring grass, stony in patches. He grimaced. She had further to go, with her house on the outskirts of town. He wished he’d been able to walk her home.
    He used to do that, almost every night. Stopped for dinner, too.
    Leo braced himself as he thought of his father. Winding through the alleys, his feet sliding silently over the stones, he made up his own story of the last two hours.
    â€˜Well, this is a fine time to come home, my boy,’ Marco Pericolo said, looking up with a start, his voice booming out over the quiet of the house.
    But Leo couldn’t help smiling. He’d been standing there for five minutes already, and his father hadn’t even noticed him. The fire hadn’t been lit for supper, and the big iron pot that hung over the hearth wasn’t yet filled with water for their
minestra
.
    When Leo crept in, Marco had been huddled over his notebook, glancing feverishly at sheets of paper scrawled with diagrams of the human body. He’d been making frantic notes, muttering to himself in excitement, sharpening his quill and saying ‘
si, si!
’ every few seconds.
    Marco saw the smile and grinned sheepishly back at his son. He waved in the direction of the fireplace and shrugged. ‘The thing is, Leo,’ he said, ‘there’s so much work to be done. Important work.’
    Leo nodded. He began to bundle up the kindling and dried leaves.
    â€˜See, I’ve got hold of this extraordinary manuscript. You should see some of the drawings.’
    Leo chose a log and placed it on the fire. He looked up at his father’s face. His dark eyes were sparkling with lamplight and his silver hair was curling up in wiry spirals where he’d been winding it round and round his finger. Merilee had often said that Leo was just like Marco.
    â€˜I know, I know,’ Leo had sighed, ‘it’s the hair.’
    â€˜No,’ she’d grinned, ‘it’s much more than that.’
    It was true, thought Leo, looking at him now, we can talk about anything—anything except Merilee and the witch in the lake.
    â€˜I’ve never seen this before, Leo.’ His father swung round his chair to face him. ‘Probably almost no one has. Look, here are the little vessels of the heart. Can you imagine? The diagram shows what it looks like, right inside a human heart. Come and see!’
    Leo came and pored over the drawings with his father. He’d let him talk, he decided, and marvel with him, and soon Marco would forget that Leo had ever been late and then they’d get hungry and eat and add more wood to the fire for the morning, and Leo would go to bed. From his dark corner of the room, behind the tapestry curtain from Florence, he’d hear the sounds of late-night Marco—the whispering, the trickle of the water being added to his glass of wine, the riffling through pages.
    Marco never went to bed before dawn. He’d done that ever since Leo was a baby, when his wife had died of fever, and Marco had begun a life’s study to find out why.
    Leo’s father had been born with silver hair. It was the first sign of wizardry, and it ran in all the males of the Pericolo family, just like brown eyes or bad temper runs in others. Marco told Leo that he was a wizard on his fifth birthday.
    â€˜Good,’ said Leo. ‘Are you a wizard too?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Marco. ‘But I was never a very good one. I don’t have the twin signs, and then . . . I think you’ll be a much better wizard, Leo. Maybe, one day, you’ll be as good as my grandfather. He—’ Marco frowned suddenly and raked his hand through his thick bush of silver hair. ‘Anyway,’ he went on brusquely, ‘let’s not dwell on the past—we’ve got your future to think of, my boy. I’ll teach you the little I know,