Healer and Witch by Nancy Werlin

Author:Nancy Werlin [Werlin, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536224573
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

On the ride back, Sylvie tried not to think about how good, how safe, it felt simply to be in Robert’s arms. She had much to turn over in her mind. She would have been grateful for the distraction of her thoughts, if those thoughts had not been so disturbing and yet so necessary.

Every instinct told her she could not agree to Robert’s — she found that she could no longer think of him as Monsieur — proposal. Of course she did not want to pay the steep price of marriage: to mortgage her future, to place it in his hands, to abdicate her own responsibility for herself and Martin. To a man who distrusted everyone, besides, and whom she did not know well? It was too much of a blind leap.

Beyond that, however, she questioned whether Robert could truly protect her and Martin, or if he only hoped he could. His confidence in this matter had been persuasive, but he was twenty-four, he had said, and still building his life. This was more than eight years older than she, but surely not enough to have true power, not when you came from nothing. Sylvie well remembered the egg-boy’s ugly comments. Robert had enemies and ill will; he had no family at his back. If he were to marry her and she were accused of witchcraft, it might destroy him. Had he thought of that? Foolish question; one thing she knew was that he did not lack for calculating, assessing intelligence. He had thought of it. Which meant . . . which meant he had decided to take a risk. For her sake.

Sylvie’s throat caught with feelings that she dared not examine too closely. One was that he was, perhaps after all, a fool. The other —

Oh, this she knew: she had done right in refusing.

Sylvie had come from a family of women who managed, if sometimes only precariously, to remain in charge of their own lives. “Even the best men desire to control their women,” Grand-mère Sylvie had said once, pragmatically, to Jeanne, who agreed: “Even when their motives are good, the box can grow very tight.” The two women had not been looking at Sylvie, then only twelve, as they talked. But she had known their words were meant for her to hear. Hear and consider, when it was time to make her own choices.

Now Sylvie — her stomach clenching — thought that Robert’s plan was noble, but, though he could not know it, unnecessary. She herself could stop Yves — stop all of the men of the caravan, if need be — from endangering herself or Martin.

She could use the part of her gift about which Robert knew nothing.

Was it wicked, a misuse of her power? She did not know, and there was no Grand-mère Sylvie to ask. But this she did know: the other choice, to depend on Robert, was not acceptable or fair to herself, to Martin, or to Robert himself.

And so, Sylvie began to plan.

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