WHITE MAGIC

CHAPTERONE

The village of Hathersedge woke each morning to the gentle tap-tap of James Greeley’s hammer as birdsong. He was a young man with careful hands and kind eyes, known for fixing shoes and offering a smile that seemed to mend spirits too. Children liked him, old ladies trusted him, and even the vicar swore by his work. No one questioned the quiet way he kept to himself, or why he always locked the shop at dusk, not even when the dog started growling at the cellar door each night without fail.

James was the son of Brad a British soldier who fought in the Second World War. Brad was a psychopath although he enjoyed being respected he preferred to be feared. James father hit his mother Elizabeth in front of them whenever she spoke to him in an unpleasant manner. Brad encouraged his children to pay any price required to be feared most amongst their peers as he kept on recounting the challenges he passed through in the training camp before he became a soldier. He also told his children some terrifying things that happened in the Second World War which was not information appropriate for children.

James elder brother Steven ran with that wrong doctrine and became an armed robber. Steven was feared by the people who stayed in their neighborhood. Brad encouraged him and was never ashamed to admit how proud of him he was even in public.

Few years later Steven was caught and hanged whilst his parents watched. It was quite a traumatic experience for his mother;she started acting excentric few weeks after the incident and was dumped in a psychiatric hospital by her husband.

James mother’s condition left him alone with his father. One would have thought that the tragedies that had befallen his family would make him drop the gun but Brad would not repent. He put so much pressure on James to become either like him or like his late brother Steve.

James decided that he would join the army so he could please his father and not end up like his brother.

James was a man of little strength and so when he enrolled into the military academy he was sent back after he sustained an injury in his knee cap that left him limping on one leg. Brad kept on calling him a disgrace and telling him that he was a woman.

As a result of the constant insults James decided that he would find a way to prove himself to his father.

One day James went to deliver the Reverend’s shoes at the church when he saw a lady, Aiden Mallowe sitting on the low stone wall outside the chapel, sketching the ivy-clad steepie with a smudged bit of charcoal. The wind tugged at her bunnet and teased curls loose from her braid, and her brow furrowed in concentration like someone solving a riddle. James paused, leather satchel sung over his shoulder, heart knocking against his ribs harder than a cobbler’s mallet. She looked up and he smiled without meaning to. She didn’t smile back, not yet, but her eyes lingered just long enough.

Their courtship began with books, borrowed from the church library-Aiden always borroeing poetry, James slipping notes between the pages. He quoted Burns; she answered with Dikinson. Their meetings grew bolder: walks around the riverbank, conversations that danced around politics, art and faith. James was everything the Reverend Malowe disdained-independent, blunt, uncertain of God. Yet Aiden bloomed under James’s honesty, craving a world wider than the pews and polished shoes of Hathersedge.

“I don’t suppose your father would approve,”

James said once, fingers brushing hers in the tall grass.

“My father would rather I marry a hymnbook,”

Aiden replied, and they both laughed, though there was truth in her voice.

Reverend Marlowe had long held designs for Aiden to wed Christopher Ashcroft, the chapel clerk-dutiful, clean-cut, devout. The reverend often said chris was “blessed with the temperament of a man who listens first and speaks with care,” unlike James, whom he called” a restless shoe-mender with no fear of Hell.” But it was not Aiden’s heart that beat for Chris-nor his for hers.

However their wedding date was already set.

Aiden had told James about the Reverends plans to get her wedded to the chapel clerk. As hurtful as it would be there was nothing he could do about it so he chose books as his go-to just to alleviate the pain he was feeling.

One day James came across a book on sorcery in the library he usually stayed to read. He stole the book and took it home. After he read that book he learnt he could do many things with the magical words in that book.

Chris bore the Reverend’s matchmaking with polite restraint, never expressing doubt, never making promises. But when he thought no one watched, his eyes followed Sade- the maid who swept ash from his family hearth and sang in soft Yoruba verses when she believed herself alone.

Sade had come from London during the war, a child of the empire sent north for safety. She had grown into womanhood between thresholds-welcomed as a servant, never quite as a kin. Yet chris saw her. Not as exotic or forbidden, but as someone who ached like he did, who whispered stories of home in a tongue that made his heart rise and fall like waves on the coast of Cotonou

They met under the pretense of errands-missing flour, stubborn lamps, things easily broken. But always, he found her. In the pantry. The garden. By the stream. Their hands met in shared tasks, then lingered longer, then clasped. Chris spoke of a future where she wasn’t hidden behind the kitchen door. Sade laughed, not unkindly . ‘White men make lovely promises,” she’d said.”But they rarely crossed thresholds with them.”

Chris, unlike most, proved her wrong.

The night before the wedding- the one arranged to make the reverend proud-chris vanished. So did Sade. The village woke to whispers: the clerk had run off with the maid. Aiden found a letter tucked into the window shutter.

Dear Aiden,

You deserve a love that doesn’t feel like duty. I deserve the same. I hope you find yours where it’s already begun.

Forgive me. -C

Reverend Marlowe raged like thunder from the pulpit that Sunday, railing against lust, betrayal, and “unnatural unions.” He tried to disguise heartbreak with doctrine, but the villagers murmured in the pews-some in shock, others in quiet admiration. And Aiden seated beside her mother, reached under her sleeve and felt James note pressed against her skin.

Later that evening, she found James in the workshop, the scent of leather thick in the air.

He’s more furious about Chris than I’ve ever seen him,” she said, closing the door behind her. “But not because he loved him. Because he could control him.”

James didn’t answer right away. He rubbed oil into a boot sole, eyes lowered.

“You’ll never have his blessing,” he said softly

“I don’t want a blessing built on fear,” she replied. I want one that grows from truth.”

He looked up, then. “You still want me?”

“I’ve never stopped.”

That night they sat by the hearth in James’s cottage, drinking tea and reading aloud from a book of poetry left behind by a soldier who never came home. Aiden reached for his hand.

I think she said, “we’re the lucky ones.”