Peggy grimaced as she opened the mausoleum’s screeching door. A glance at the church rectory showed that the Vicar’s bedroom window was dark. He hadn’t heard, then. Good.
The gas lamps leading from the cemetery to the village bled into the winter fog like jaundice. The weak light was enough for Peggy to enter the mausoleum and close the door behind her without tripping over the raised threshold.
At first, there was only darkness and the close, musty smell of old stone and dust. Then: scritch. A match was struck, and a candle flared to life.
“Greetings, stranger,” Frankie intoned, her voice throaty and full of laughter. “A perfect evening to meet your doom, no?”
Peggy sighed, grinning.
“So dramatic, Frankie.”
“Drama is the spice of life,” Frankie said knowledgeably. Her sharp jaw softened as she smiled, flickering shadows pooling in her dimples. Peggy couldn’t see the rest of her face for the hood pulled low over her eyes.
“I thought that was variety,” Peggy said.
“What is variety if not drama? Now, come. Let’s see the damage.”
She’d been sitting in front of the granite tomb in the centre of the mausoleum. As she stood, the candlelight illuminated the stone figures lying on top: two beardless men in flowing ancient dress, their faces peaceful.
Peggy lowered the hood of her cloak. Frankie gasped.
“It’s so… shiny,” she said. For once she didn’t laugh.
“Go on, then. Let’s see yours.”
Frankie put the candle on the lip of the tomb and pulled her own hood back with a flourish.
“Behold! In all it’s eggy glory!”
Peggy supposed Frankie’s bald scalp did resemble an egg. It was smooth and brown, and definitely rounder than hers. She’d examined her own head in the mirror for so long after the plucking—were all heads that flat, or just hers?—that her sister Beatrice had waved the pincers and threatened to take her eyebrows, too, if she didn’t stop.
Something about Frankie’s head shorn of its halo of curls made Peggy inexplicably sad.
“What time does the wigmaker arrive tomorrow?” she asked after a moment’s silence.
“Thank you, I think yours is lovely, too.”
“Frankie…”
“Oh, Peg, do stop being so serious. It’s just hair. We’re still here!”
Hair that will never grow back after the wigmaker applies the treatment, Peggy thought. But she smiled thinly, trying to take comfort in Frankie’s certainty.
After tomorrow, when the wigmaker left, there’d be no more time for clandestine meet-ups. Their days would be devoted to readying their applications—applications for suitable employment and marriage proposals from eligible bachelors—and their nights would be spent under the watchful eye of their families, as was tradition. Every year there were Debutantes who snuck out for one last night of girlish abandon before their wigs, the sign of female maturity, were delivered, and it never reflected well on their prospects in the weeks following their Grand Debut into adult society.
They pulled off their cloaks to use as blankets on the chilly floor, and Peggy saw that Frankie was wearing her brother, Jonathan’s, clothes again: an oversized shirt that tied at the neck tucked into trousers she’d pinned at the waist. Peggy said nothing. She was used to Frankie’s eccentricities by now.
They sat. Frankie retrieved the picnic basket they’d left behind last week from the shadows cast by the tomb. Inside were two teacups and a bottle of flat ginger beer.
Frankie winked saucily and waved her fingers over the bottle, muttering. The room whispered with her on a cool breath, setting the candlelight fluttering. Though the bottle and its contents appeared unchanged, the red liquid that gurgled out of it filled the air with the sweet, bitter tang of aged wine.
Taking her cup, Peggy took an appreciative sip. It still tasted faintly of ginger.
“Did your grandmother teach you anything new?” Frankie asked.
Peggy glanced at the door. Nodded.
“Another cantrip,” she whispered, and Frankie’s eyes glimmered. “For revealing hidden things.”
“Like lost gloves or missing buttons?”
“I suppose. We mostly practised trying to find Beatrice’s sense of fun.”
Frankie snorted into her wine, and Peggy’s stomach flipped pleasantly. She rarely made Frankie laugh. Her penchant was for fussy concern and agreeable compliance. But ever since they’d met in the village’s clapboard schoolhouse as children, Frankie had worked to uncover the part of Peggy the adults told her to fear, the part that fed on the high-wire nerves of adventure and mischief. And if this part of Peggy only came alive around Frankie’s vivid energy, what did it matter? It meant she was alive, and she loved Frankie for giving her that. She loved Frankie for many reasons.
Frankie leaned close, excited. Peggy hoped she couldn’t see the flush in her cheeks.
“Teach me,” Frankie breathed, and Peggy was helpless to do otherwise.
They practised for hours. First they’d hidden the teacups in the room’s shadows while the seeker covered their eyes. Then they’d experimented, locating and reading invisible messages scribbled with wine on the walls. As they worked, Peggy thought guiltily of Grandmama’s insistence that she keep these skills secret, skills almost eradicated in the witch burnings centuries ago when spell-books were replaced with scripture and natural power bowed to divine obedience.
Peggy understood. She may not long to Debut, but to spoil her reputation with accusations of deviation would only ensure a penniless future with no escape. She wanted to escape.
Rumours spread by sailors in the port cities reached even here: on an island across the sea, there was a land of wishes. A land where women were free to use magic and keep their own hair, if they chose, or shave it as they pleased. Free to be themselves. She desperately wished to find it. She wished for Frankie to find her when she did.
And so they met in the mausoleum with the door that was never locked and they practised their forbidden skills at night, because one day, they were certain, they would be free to exist in the daylight.
Exhausted but pleased, the candle all but extinguished, they fastened their cloaks around their necks and picked up their cups to drain them of the last of the wine.
The door screeched open. In her shock, Peggy absorbed strange details: Beatrice’s elaborately styled wig was coming loose, bleached of its delicate rose gold colour in the fading candlelight. Frankie’s brother, Jonathan, stood silhouetted against the first grasping fingers of sunrise beyond the distant hills, his body strained with a furious tension.
They know, Peggy thought, and with it came panic.
“Frances!” Jonathan boomed. “I might’ve known. Only you would be stupid enough to throw away everything we’ve worked for.”
Peggy clutched her cup. Beatrice was upon her in a second, tugging it free and sniffing it intently.
“Wine,” she said loudly. And then, whispering, “Magic.”
“You could have married rich! We might’ve got out of this backwater hole!” Jonathan shouted. He grabbed the other cup from Frankie and flung it at the tomb where it shattered. “Women don’t wear men’s clothes, they don’t practice the unholy arts, and they. Don’t. Drink!”
Wine spread like blood across the figures’ shoulders, trickling into the stone folds above their hearts. For the first time, Frankie was speechless.
“Come, Peggy,” Beatrice said. Peggy could see tears glittering in her pretty brown eyes.
“What will happen to us?” Frankie whispered. She, like Peggy, saw their future vanishing with the night outside.
Jonathan hesitated. If he’d been alone, he might have shouted himself hoarse and allowed himself to be convinced to keep it secret. A late night excursion, a walk to burn their nerves, nothing worse. But Beatrice was there. Beatrice had likely been the one to notice Peggy’s absence, sneak that she was, and deduced that wherever she’d gone, she’d gone with Frankie.
No doubt Jonathan led them here. This was the tomb of his and Frankie’s long-forgotten ancestors, after all.
“The Vicar must be told,” Beatrice said thickly. “It’s only right.”
“It’s only right,” Jonathan growled, wincing.
Beatrice peered into the rising sun. “We’d better do it now. The wigmaker arrives in a few hours.”
Jonathan pinched Frankie’s arm, pulling her outside. Peggy tried to catch her eye as she followed with Beatrice, but her gaze was on her boots, her expression unusually serious, her lips moving soundlessly.
A light whisper of air brushed across Peggy’s face and blew out the candle behind them.
The wigmaker came and went, and Frankie never showed. Peggy’s scalp burned as she knocked on Frankie’s door.
Jonathan answered in his shirtsleeves.
“She’s gone,” he said without preamble, attempting to shut the door in her face. Boldly, she stuck her foot in the gap, flinching only a little at the pain.
“Where?”
“Away from here.” It might have been an order or an explanation.
“I need to speak with her. Please.”
He just grunted and kicked her foot. She stepped back reluctantly and the door slammed shut.
Uncertainty swirled with sick regret in her stomach. She wanted to cry, to hit the door with her fists until it splintered.
She didn’t know what to do.
She followed the road back home in a daze. Instead of turning down the lane leading to her cottage, she kept going until she reached the church.
She wound between the familiar graves, pushing her way into the mausoleum in daylight for the first time, not caring who saw. Maybe Frankie had come back. Maybe she’d left a note, some explanation for her disappearance.
Peggy circled the tiny, musty room three times before she hunched over the tomb, breathless with fear. The men’s peaceful faces seemed softer up close. Sympathetic.
Frankie’s gone. What if they never saw each other again?
With the ungoverned panic of a cornered deer, her eyes traced every detail of the stone figures. The wine had paled as it dried, making their wounds look older, scarred but healing.
The wine.
The whisper.
Heart hammering, Peggy stood tall and breathed the magic words. The daylight became a cleansing, guiding force, washing the mausoleum of its secrets. The wine stains shifted from red to ginger brown. The walls sparkled with last night’s messages. And there, beside the puddle of candle wax, was a scrawled note:
Let’s not wait. Let’s go where the wishes are real.
It was only as Peggy left, when she cast one last look over her shoulder, that she saw what had never really been hidden at all: the figures weren’t men. Nor were they women. They were people who had lived and loved, their secret carved in stone. Only now, in eternity, were they were free.
“I’ll find you, Frankie,” Peggy whispered, and closed the door on the mausoleum forever.
Lauren Hancock-Coffey is the co-founder and financial manager of Banksia Journal. She’s also a writer and devourer of historical fiction with a speculative twist and an avid fantasy RPG-er with more books and games than sense. She’s a full-time editor with a BA in Linguistics and an MA in Professional Writing and Publishing.
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