The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

mother’s homeland. She came from somewhere well east of where my family was from in the Old World, before she sailed here with Petru and married. She won’t talk about it, and makes us all call him ‘Peter’, which Erica Carter says is because her people are gypsies and she doesn’t want people to know now that she is married to a respectable man.
    Petru loves Mr Thorssen like a father, but sometimes I think it must make him sad that his mother never wants to talk about her life before. He was too little to remember anything, and if his mother wishes her former life to be forgotten then he may never know even the smallest details. Sometimes he seems so sad and far away that I wish to take his face in my hands, and I have to remember that a far more appropriate match has already been made for me than a fatherless boy from a nameless country.
    It goes without saying that John dislikes Petru intensely, but he is even more baffled by my interest in Sabina Thorssen. She is so lovely and so mysterious, and sometimes I think that even the way she distrusts me makes me more curious about her life on the other side of the ocean. Petru hinted once that her people back there had magic of their own, and Erica insists that gypsies are all just thick with it. I don’t know about that, but if I close my eyes and imagine a person who could command unnatural forces, it would be Mrs Thorssen. Petru says she prays in a language he cannot understand, that she never taught him. Anyone might pray in their own language, of course, Father Rexford says, but Petru says that sometimes he is almost sure she is saying something else.
    John jokes that she is a witch all right, but I know he doesn’t mean it the way I do. Perhaps I really am as foolish as he says: perhaps I am using these ideas I have become fascinated with to explain my fascination with the Thorssens.
    ‘Spoiler alert: she marries lame-ass John anyway,’ Jane muttered, a little disappointed. Petru and his mother sounded far more interesting and far less likely to allow their relatives to commit Rosalie to a mental institution down the line when her book tarnished their family’s reputation. Jane remembered when, shortly after she had started working at Atelier Antoine, Elodie had discovered just how restrictive Jane’s upbringing had been and spent three long months catching her up on the pop culture she should have got as a tween. She had the same feeling now as when they had screened
Titanic
in her cozy studio with the (sometimes partial) view of Notre Dame: maybe the story would end differently this time. Maybe Rosalie would live happily ever after; maybe the boat wouldn’t sink.
But that’s not the way it happened.
    She skipped a few more volumes and opened to a page at random. A familiar name leaped off the page at her instantly.
Ambika.
There must be more than one in the world, but Jane knew immediately in her bones that Rosalie was writing about the one whose name was also carved into marble on the Dorans’ wall: the mother of all the witches in the world. The legend was that she had had seven daughters, and left her magic to them when she died. One of those seven had become Jane’s ancestor, another one had been Maeve and Harris’s, and one had begotten Lynne and her cabal. Jane closed her eyes and pictured the family tree in Lynne’s parlour, but she didn’t really need to: the first name below Ambika’s had definitely been ‘Hasina.’
    Jane’s eyes swept across the pages, trying to pick up the thread in the dense forest of vertical handwriting. Rosalie was married now, to John, just as Jane knew she would eventually be. And Petru was gone. He had grown up angry and increasingly reckless until he had fled the colonies under a cloud of suspicion related to the mysterious death of a trapper. In the privacy of her diary, Rosalie allowed herself to wonder if some of his newfound violent temper had anything to do with her reluctant refusal to have an affair with him, and her guilt tied her firmly and finally to Sabina Thorssen.
    Although Petru’s mother had never admitted to being a witch outright, the myths and stories that she told Rosalie to ease her sorrow over her lost son sounded an awful lot like the true origins of magic in the world. Admittedly, most of Jane’s understanding had come from Rosalie’s own book and source material, but enough of the details had been corroborated along the way by Malcolm, Harris, Gran’s letter, and Lynne’s