WHITE MAGIC

CHAPTERTWO

In a fishing village on the welsh coast, Chris and Sade rented a room from a widow who didn’t ask any questions. She taught school, he found work on the docks. They lived plainly-secondhand dishes, cracked windows, rain that found every c***k in the roof. But they were free. Not just from expectation, but from the lies required to uphold it.

Chris held Sade’s waist as she danced to the gramophone in bare feet. “Do you miss it?” he asked once. “The safety?”

She smiled, brushing his cheek. “This is safety.”

They married quietly in a registry office where no one asked where her parents were or why his shirt wasn’t pressed. They wrote their own vows, full of promise not perfection.

Back in Hathersedge, the reverend eventually stopped asking after his daughter’s suitor. He still nodded stiffly at James during Sunday markets. But the village had moved on just as Aiden and James had. The cobbler still mended shoes. Aiden took to teaching and reading at the chapel, though she no longer bowed her head for prayers she didn’t believe.

Reverend Marlowe stood stiffly in the chapel vestibule, lips drawn thin, eyes cast to the worn stone floor as he gave his daughter’s hand to the cobbler. It was a quiet ceremony, no hymns, no choir-Just the rustle of Sunday coats and the faint creak of pews as villagers leaned in, half curious, half scandalized. He spoke the vows in a voice that trembled only once, when James looked him square in the eye and said, “ I will.” Aiden beamed, but her father’s heart twisted. He’d not won. He’d merely surrendered with the dignity of a man who’d lost too many battles to pretend otherwise.

James, now his son-in-law, had become something of a legend in Hathersedge

It began with harmless tricks at the May festival-flowers pulled from pockets, cards guessed with impossible accuracy, coins varnishing into smoke. Children gathered around him like ducks to a pond. Soon, people came from neighboring parishes to witness his illustrations, some whispering that James had made a pact with unseen forces. He never confirmed it either. He called it “craft” a word that made the Reverend’s skin crawl.

But it wasn’t until Thomas levitated a farmer’s hat tree off the ground during a Sunday picnic that the whispers turned to murmurs and the murmurs turned to sermons.

This is the devil’s work, “Reverend Marlowe thundered from the pulpit one morning, voice sharp enough to split the silence. “And the devil wears the face of a smiling man with clever hands and no soul for scripture! We must not be fooled by glitter and showmanship. There is no salvation in spectacle!”

Though he never named James, everyone knew. The villagers sat tense in their pews, some ashamed, some amused. Aiden, seated near the front, kept her chin raised, her hands folded neatly, unmoved by her father’s thunder.

Worse still for the reverend was that he could do nothing. Divorce in his doctrine, was sin. His daughter was bound, in law and in God’s eyes; to a man he believed to be an agent of darkness. Yet she was healthy, joyful, and unrepentant. A living contradiction to his theology.

James, for his part, never taunted him. He always greeted the reverend with polite deference. But the reverend saw the twinkle in the man’s eye. Not disrespect. Something worse. Pity.

The most Reverend Marlowe, once the moral anchor of Hathersedge, could not only watch the cobbler-turned-magician drew crowds, stirred minds, and somehow, still held his daughters love like a flame no sermon could snuff out.

James father Brad was irritated by his son’s magic as he saw that the people were just fascinated by it and no one feared him because of it.

One day in one of his open shows people gathered and James boasted that he could disappear and the people laughed in utter disbelief. Brad was passing by so he decided to stop to see what his son was up to, it did not take long before Brad discovered his son was being mocked for his unbelievable statement about being able to disappear, he could not be more disappointed in his son but that was going to change as James had mystery rolled up in his sleeves.

James stretched his hand to the sun and muttered some magical words continuously and few minutes later he was no were to be found amongst them yet they heard him whisper and move softly around them carrying the wind around as a cloth. The people screamed in fear and many of them took off. When James reappeared he saw his father looking at him in amazement. It was very certain that Brad was proud of him.

Few years later James mother Elizabeth was discharged from the psychiatric hospital Brad dumped her, she was now confined to a wheelchair as a result of the fall she had when she tried to climb out of the hospital from the fence.

Brad had his punching bag back, he didn’t mind that she was on a wheelchair as far as he was concerned she had been away from him for long and he needed to re-register his fear in her. Sometimes Brad would pull her away from the wheelchair and make her crawl to get the things she needed.

One day James went home to visit his parents and met his mother crawling on the floor. He was mad so he went straight to confront his father but Brad beat him up.

James spent that night at his parents studying to find any spell he could cast on his father and hurt Brad for hitting his mother but it appeared sorcery could not work on one’s parents as he tried to cast all spells on the sleepy Brad that night but the man seemed to still be having a good night rest.

The Early hours of the next morning James heard his father scream and rushed to his parent’s room to see that Elizabeth had plunged a knife into his father’s heart. The woman was tired of the constant abuse, she had to do something. As soon as he saw James, Brad moved his hands towards him indicating help, James moved quickly to him but took a sudden pause when he saw his mother’s face, the woman was afraid that the man would ever survive.

James stood there and watched Brad till he took his last breath after which he went to hug his mother who seemed to be muttering these words “he beat my baby”. The woman could take everything from Brad but she couldn’t bear it if he did the same thing to her son. He cleaned his father up and dressed him in one of his Tuxedo’s before laying him in a coffin he later bought. Neighbors and loved ones came into their residence to pay their last respect. That day they buried Brad just behind their house, Elizabeth shed tears and many people saw it as sorrowful tears but the woman was shedding tears of joy as she had finally liberated herself from the monster she was married to.

As a result of his many exploits in sorcery the colonial masters took James round the British colonies to entertain and also scare the people they were now lord over. Aiden was not happy as she never got to see her husband as often as she would’ve wanted.

The telegrams came less frequently now. Aiden could no longer remember the sound of James’s laugh-not clearly, not without effort. His fame had outgrown their vows. What began as parlour tricks and card games had turned into state-sponsored spectacles. Word spread across counties, across oceans. Colonial governors, smug behind gold-rimmed monocles, had summoned him to entertain dignitaries, to perform before sultans and kings, even in camps where magic became a tool of distraction-an opiate glossed with illusion.

When the letters came, they were wrapped in foreign stamps and penned with hurried guilt.

“Soon, my Aiden . Just one more tour.”

“I’m doing this for us. For the future.”

But what kind of future let three years pass between a man and his wife?

The garden had gone wild. Ivy crept up the stone wall. The rose bush, once James pride, withered brown in its base. Aiden had taken to long silences, moving from window to window like a ghost rehearsing a life once hers.

Kona came on a summer morning, sent by James with a purse and a note: “He’ll help with the grounds. He’s good. Treat him like family.”

He was quiet. Tall. Dark–skinned. His hands, calloused and capable, worked the earth like someone raised to understand its moods. Aiden didn’t know where he came from exactly-James only said “the cape”-but she knew how people in Hathersedge looked at him when he walked to the post office.

At first, she said little. But the quiet between them filled with familiarity. They shared soup in the kitchen. She offered him books, unsure if he could read. He could. Better than most Englishmen she knew

One afternoon, Aiden stood at the upstairs windows and saw Kona in the garden. Shirtless. Muscles taut beneath the sun, sweat glistening across his back. Her breath caught.

She hated herself for staring.

And yet, the next day, she lingered longer. She asked him to help move a shelf indoors. She asked him to help move a shelf indoors. She stood too close as he passed her the brom.

Her fingers touched his, too long. She asked things she shouldn’t ask. Where he slept. If he was lonely.

The shame didn’t stop the ache. The loneliness blurred the lines. And when her fingers brushed his chest one humid evening under the pretense of cleaning a scratch, neither of them moved away.

It happened once, and once was enough.

Afterward, Aiden sat alone in the dim hallway; knees pulled to her chest, listening to Kona’s footsteps recede toward the back room. No words exchanged. No apology. No promise. Just silence, dense as smoke.

The days passed with strained politeness. She returned to her routines-watering the now-thriving roses, brushing the dust from James’s books-but everything felt altered. Her body, her conscience, the house itself, Kona avoided her eyes. He took his meals outdoors. She didn’t ask him to stay; he didn’t ask to leave

Six weeks later, she vomited before breakfast.

She told herself it was stress. Loneliness. Something in the eggs. But when her belly began to tighten and her breasts ached, the truth settled in like an unwelcome guest: she was carrying a child that could not be her husband’s.

Kona noticed before she spoke. One morning, as she knelt to tie her boots, he stood frozen in the doorway, eyes now.

“You’re unwell,” he said

“I’m not.”

“You are You’re-“His voice faltered. “You’ve missed something. Haven’t you?”

She straightened slowly. “Its none of your business”

“It is” he said, barely above a whisper. “You know it is”

A long pause hung between them. Then he stepped forward, voice trembling.

“There’s a chemist. Near the mill road. You don’t have to…you can fix this. No one has to know”

“No.”

“Aiden, please-”

“I said no.”

She turned her back on him trembling not with fear but fury-at herself, at James, at fate. At how easily Kona assumed this could be erased, discarded like a shameful accident.

The child growing within her wasn’t a curse, not to her. It wasn’t planned, wasn’t righteous-but it was hers. And she would not put her body through pain for the sake of hiding another man’s guilt.

Kona said little after that. He still tended the garden, still fixed the gutters. But the way he moved-brisk, restrained, a man shrinking into the corners of the home- told her he was preparing to disappear.

By the fourth month, her dresses no longer hid the curve beneath her waist

The village began to whisper

And still, no letter from James.