Free Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas Page B

fortune?’
    He looked at me seriously. ‘I’m not sure it’s always good for people to know their fortunes.’
    ‘But you promised,’ I said.
    He sighed. ‘Come back tomorrow if you like. Make sure your parents know where you are, though.’ The man said his namewas Robert, ‘like the herb’, and that before I could learn magic, or indeed understand my own fortune, I’d have to learn some other things. He had a friend called Bethany, who would be there tomorrow, but who was very shy and wouldn’t want to be disturbed too much. He said she was so shy that I might not even see her at all, but that she would definitely be there.
    The next morning I went straight back to the strange little cottage. There was a beautiful young woman there who was wearing a long, wine-coloured dress. She seemed to be Robert’s wife, although there were other times when I thought she was his daughter, or even his granddaughter. She would sit and play the flute all morning, and on market-day afternoons she would gather up her things in a drawstring bag and go off into the local town. The first thing that Robert taught me was the Waterwheel. We were sitting in the gazebo, and Bethany was inside the cottage playing a melody that sounded like half-finished birdsong. ‘You breathe like this’, he said, ‘when you want to concentrate, or when you’re scared, or’, he smiled, ‘if you want to do magic.’ But he didn’t show me any actual magic.
    Each day of the rest of the holiday was more or less the same. I’d arrive early at the cottage and Robert would give me some task to do, like organising the woodshed or filling bird feeders, because, he said, Bethany loved seeing the birds, and feeding them ‘made the other Faeries happy too’. One day we planted bulbs in the garden: snake’s-head fritillaries, irises and grape hyacinths. Another day we made some sort of moonshine in a still at the back of the cottage. Another day we pickled walnuts. One day I gathered blackberries, hawthorn berries and rosehips with Bethany. It was the first time I’d been with her alone. She didn’t say much, but at one point she smiled and said,‘Robert’s taken a shine to you. He must think you are one of us.’ Then she skipped off to the next bush and didn’t say another word. Later, we made jam. On the last day of my holiday, I asked Robert if he would please show me just a little bit of magic, because I wouldn’t be able to come back again. He sighed and said, ‘Are you sure you want to learn?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    Bethany was still out in the town. I was sitting at the big, pine table in the kitchen, where I had been shelling peas for her. Copper pans, skillets and griddles hung from the ceiling, and there was an axe propped up by the back door. I’d done so many tasks at the table, and I’d got used to gazing over at the strange objects on the dresser, one of which was a ship in a bottle, which particularly fascinated me. I wondered how the ship had come to be in the bottle. It couldn’t have fitted through the neck. Perhaps it had come to be there by magic. One time Robert had been out collecting mushrooms and I’d picked up the bottle and looked at the ship inside. It had white muslin sails, and writing on its hull in a white, chalky script. When I looked closely I saw that the writing said ‘Cutty Sark’. The ship sat on a waxy blue sea, and the bottle had a cork in its neck. I’d wanted to pull the cork to see if it came out, but hadn’t.
    ‘Do you believe you already have the ability to do magic?’ Robert asked me.
    ‘Yes,’ I said solemnly. ‘I think so.’
    He smiled. ‘I think so too. So does Bethany. Not everybody sees Bethany, you know.’ Now he looked down at his hands. ‘Some people think you need to be initiated to do magic, and that you need to understand the relationship between the world of the Faeries, this world and the world above before you caneven attempt a spell. It’s a big commitment, and once you