THE GLOVE MAKER'S DAUGHTER

The Magician reaches out a long, pale finger and stirs the water in the silver bowl, shattering the pictures that lie upon the surface, reforming them into the image of a child. He knows this child, has watched her before; a smart little miss, neat in her black dress and lace collar, her red curls captured beneath a small cap: a credit to her parents. The picture upon the water follows her as she wanders the rooms of her father’s house, smoothing with her tiny hand the black oak furniture that shines with bee’s wax and years of endless polishing. He watches as she enters the workshops where the gloves are made, filled with the smell of leather, as thin and soft as tissue as she runs her finger over the ridged spools of linen thread and the silver needles, wickedly sharp. Then, with a gesture of his hand he turns her in her tracks and marches her out through the door and into the winter street, all without cloak, all without gloves, no credit now to proud parents, a lost thing, alone in the bitter wind.

The Magician too is alone; he sits at the summit of his power, in the highest chamber of his high castle. A house once built of stone and mortar, thronged with princes and paladins, housekeepers and cooks. Bereft now and empty it is built of rain and seasons and years, furnished with time and cloaked in mist, wrapped, like he, in the feathers of ravens, ragged and tough, eternal. He beckons the child onward and she, stoic on stout little legs and pretty leather slippers follows his silent call through silent streets. Leaning forward he breaths upon the surface of the water and lifts the veils from her eyes, seeing as she sees the wide highway that has been hidden for generations, that leads upward, ever upward to the grey sky and the house made of magic and of rain. For her sake he clothes it decently in a semblance of stone, casting out his hand to grow gates from a murmur and high walls from the song of a sparrow, paving the courtyard for her tiny feet with strong grey slabs remembered from dreams of long ago.

Long ago: for a long time he is lost in thought, a small part of his vast mind leading the child onward whilst a greater part roams the mansions of his memory, opening doors, exploring lost rooms, gazing through windows upon scenes all but forgotten. From between the pages of a book that lies in a trunk that sits in a dusty room in an ancient, crumbling tower he takes the fragile remnants of a bloom that was pressed when the world was younger and sweeter than it has become. Once it was a flower, a Meadow Crane’s Bill, as blue as the sky beneath which it was picked, as blue as the eyes of the girl that plucked it. The Magician breaths upon it and it blooms again, unfurling, uncurling, the room filling with ghosts, with the scents of summer long gone and the gentle touch of a red headed witch who plucked a blue flower from a green meadow and laughed as she kissed him.

Closing the door to that memory he returns his attention to the child, the scion of that long lost summer. He is pleased to see that she shows no fear, that she passes the gate and approaches the house with curiosity not dread. She will, he knows, believe that it was her own desire that drew her here and never feel the compulsion, the hand of another that led her onward. Choosing then to test her he allows something of the structure’s true nature reveal itself to her as she roams its empty rooms and halls. He permits the sweeping vistas to reveal to her the smells, the sounds of the magic that binds the house together and holds it still and unmoving here, at the intersection of time and space. The child shows no sense of fear until, having climbed upward through the diminishing cracks of the great house, she opens the door to the boundless sky and the great chaos of ravens that wheel and soar about her, each dark shape a spark of the Magician made manifest, as numerous as stars in the sky. Then she, afraid at last, cries out, a child’s voice, piercing and pure, that cuts through the darkness as though it were a sword of light.

With a word The Magician banishes his black avatars, with a word he builds for her the semblance of a room, with a word he calls her by name and she comes to him, blue eyed and trusting, her hair like fire against the grey stone walls that enclose her. He knows what she sees when she looks at him, for this little miss with her tidy clothes and proud parents will surely know a ragged man when she sees one, and he himself is as ragged as the wings of his ravens. It has been many years, indeed many centuries since he has found it necessary to shape his garments to the expectations of mortals and, like his house, his appearance has become something less or perhaps more than real until he has become wrapped in the rags of magic long done and years long past. The child seems unconcerned by his disreputable appearance, perhaps she is yet too young to make the judgements that would have fallen so quickly from her parents lips. Cautiously, as one might reach out to a wild animal, he touches her hair letting a red curl coil about his finger. She smiles, she is familiar with this, the desire to touch the spun gold of her hair, to make burnished rings of fire for adult fingers, and so she accepts this benediction as the just reverence due to beauty. Happily then she seats herself beside him, comfortable upon the hard and dusty stones that are but the physical manifestation of thought, and peers into the silver bowl.

Beyond the high castle, beyond the walls that are not walls and the gates that are not gates, her parents search for her, the short winter afternoon made long by fear and trembling, by rivers of tears that swept down the grey stone streets and gathered as pools of endless sorrow in the gutters. Meanwhile on that short, long afternoon the child remains at The Magicians side. It may have been hours, days or even years that she sat there, caught like a fly in amber, preserved through the eons in the crystalline prison of his mind. In waking life she would never be able to recall the details of that day; her memories, once touched by thought, would crumble like the images of plaster saints abandoned in the rain. But at night, in dreams that evaporated with the dawn, she would relive that day and all its many glories as though they were gems strung upon a cord, alive with fire in the black candlelight of sleep.

In these dreams she would walk again, hand in hand with the ragged man, a raven perched upon her shoulder, its scaly black feet heavy and warm, preening her golden hair with its black ivory beak. Together they would gaze from high windows upon frosty moors and midnight cities, upon futures and pasts where strangers walked, cloaked in mystery, burdened with impossible tasks. Through the rooms of that many mansioned house The Magician leads her through the seasons of the years of her life: the springs filled with promise and spangled with flowers like stars, the summer meadows across which she would run, the leaves of autumn that would drift, rustling in corners like unshed tears and the dark winter city streets upon which her growing feet would walk.

All unknowing then he leads her and teaches her, softly spoken and gentle, charging her with directions and injunctions, demands and impositions, enjoining her to obey, willing or unwilling, laying the compulsion upon her. She laughs then, as though such weighty strictures lie lightly upon her and she swings their clasped hands setting her raven fluttering and muttering, its horny feet clutching tight to her shoulder, its beak tweaking her ear in disgruntlement. Laughing with her The Magician takes her down through the house, through the chimeras of courtyard and gates to the familiar streets where her mother wept and her father railed uselessly against the cruel fate that had stolen his daughter. There, within sight of her house he places his hand against her and the raven, solemn and stately, steps onto his hand, rearranging its feathers as he tips it, not ungently, on to his own shoulder. Then, with a casual gesture he seals her mind, her lips and her heart before allowing her to run home to the glad and grateful arms of her parents.

So it was then that she grew, beautiful and serene as though a touch of the magic of that day still hung about her. She married well, this daughter of a glove maker. Her husband was a gentleman farmer, a customer of her father, besotted by the beauty of his child. They, in time, had children of their own and one of these, again a daughter, wed a wealthy gentleman from across the border in Scotland. These also were blessed with children and the glove maker’s daughter, an old woman now who had buried both husband and children in the cold soil of the north, saw her granddaughter marry a Mr Erquistoune of Edinburgh. She lived long enough, her red hair turned to white, her beauty lost in memory and time, to see the birth of her granddaughter’s child, a red headed girl, just as she had once been herself. It seemed to her then that with the birth of this child the world had come full circle and some long promised destiny had been fulfilled. Seeing this she returned home and lay down in the bed from which she would never rise. It was said in her village that as she lay dying ravens gathered from miles around to perch upon windowsills and roofs, keeping a silent vigil until they flew her to her final rest.