The Witch of Painted Sorrows by M. J. Rose

Author:M. J. Rose [Rose, M. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Gothic, General
ISBN: 9781476778082
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2015-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

From the back of the carriage, it seemed my grandmother and I had left France and traveled to some other country. Haussmann’s remolding of Paris had not extended to the ghetto in the Marais. The cobble streets were narrow, the buildings ancient. Signs in Hebrew identified the various shops. The setting sun glinted off mezuzahs nailed to door frames as if the houses were all catching fire.

Beside me, my grandmother seemed restless, no doubt due to the words we’d exchanged when I’d returned home earlier that afternoon. If she had noticed that I’d not slept in the apartment, she didn’t refer to it, but she did sniff the air when I came in. Her nose wrinkled as if she smelled cow dung. She told me I stunk of oil paints and requested I bathe since I was to accompany her to dinner at her cousin the rabbi’s house.

“It would be appropriate to wear your new bottle-green satin gown,” she’d said. One of the dresses Grand-mère’s dressmaker had created for me, it was fancier than my clothes from New York, with its black bows and black lace edging. The accompanying small hat, in the new style so many Parisian women were wearing that season, sported two tiny bunches of velvet grapes, one in green, the other dark purple.

Was she telling me which dress to put on to ensure I didn’t wear my art student’s costume? I didn’t argue—it didn’t matter. I’d been too preoccupied with what Julien and I had found to care. Looking back, I think that must have been why I even agreed to accompany her. The discovery of the book in the tower had shocked me. Disturbed me. And confused me.

A grimoire, Julien had explained, was a book of spells. He’d designed a special cabinet for them in Dujols’s shop. And knowing that finding one would exacerbate my interest in the strange occurrences happening around me, he wasn’t pleased with the discovery.

The grimoire I’d found was handwritten in the margins of a printed book by an entirely different author.

Some of the grimoires Dujols owned, Julien explained, contained remedies for various ailments, charms for manipulating nature and man, rituals for making pacts with the devil, incantations for summoning good or evil—or, like the spell I’d been able to read in the book in the tower, for summoning a ghost.

Dressing up that evening had actually been a pleasant diversion. Luxuriating in a bath of steaming perfumed water, I’d soaped my arms, my legs, my torso, my breasts . . . running my hands over my body, touching all the places Julien had touched and made toll like the bells.

Amazing, how his fingers had the power to inflame me so profoundly. When I touched myself, it took more work and concentration to induce the same feelings. But they did eventually rise to the surface. In this new life I was leading, painting and passion seemed to be going hand in hand. And what a feeling of power they gave me. I was finally becoming the woman who my father had always seemed to believe was inside.

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