A Charm of Powerful Trouble by Joanne Horniman Page B

and belladonna and the fabulous datura, whose huge trumpets (not shy, these flowers) are borne upon a tree. Angels’ trumpets, they are called, and they can give hallucinations, and kill.
    Henbane she loved because the name made her laugh - she said why anyone would want to poison hens was beyond her, as hens are the most domestic and benign of birds (though perhaps it reminded her, savagely, of Stella, surrounded by all that poultry during her childhood). In the Middle Ages henbane was employed in witchcraft to cause insanity and convulsions, and to give visions - it deranged the senses of whoever took it.
    And there's belladonna ( bell-a-don-nu - say it with a lilt), meaning beautiful lady, for drops of it in the eyes cause the pupils to dilate, simulating sexual arousal, and enhancing their beauty.
    And there was heartsease, and love vine and love-lies-bleeding, forget-me-nots and rosemary, bitter herb, and rue. Plants for weakness of the heart, to expel pain and torments, or to aid the memory (though I would have thought that if you were in such torment, the best thing to do would be simply to forget), and motherwort, ‘to help women in sore travail': all of these she grew, but they didn't seem to help, for she grew sadder and sadder.
    She went to her tumbledown studio and worked at her paintings, but nothing she did allowed her to forget.
    Her friends rallied round. One of them, Edith, brought her some clay, thinking that making a sculpture from such earthy material might help. Edith made vessels on a wheel, distorting their regular shapes afterwards by pushing at them or tapping them with a paddle. She sometimes pressed her thumbs into the soft clay in secret and subtle places so that if you looked carefully you could see the mark of a human making.
    Emma found that one pug of clay wasn't enough. She bought more and created a sculpture. It was life-sized, of a woman lying on her side, one leg drawn up like a sprinter's. She was slipping out of an old, wrinkled skin with a smile of triumph on her face. I asked what the sculpture meant, and my mother replied that she'd come to realise that you grow older around an unchanged core, that the young self is still there, always.
    Emma's sculpture, because it was so large, took a long time to dry out, and she called it her leather woman, because at a certain stage of drylng clay gets a sheen on it, like leather.
    The leather woman lived on a length of plastic laid out on the floor of her workshop. We got used to stepping around her. She looked so real that I began to imagine that she could come alive. There was so much possibility in those arched feet, poised as if to leap into the world, such elasticity and power in those muscled legs.

    Mullumbimby is a small town overlooked by a single triangular mountain nearby and wild rainforested ranges further west. It is dead flat, with a grid of streets lined by wooden houses. At the back of the houses is a network of narrow lanes, with timber fences collapsing under the extravagance of the vines sprawling over them. It is a prodigal town, blessed by an abundance of vegetation, a place where flowers and fruit grow lavish in neglected back yards, and lie squandered and overripe and spent at the end of summer.
    Claudio wanted us children to come and stay with him in the house they'd rented there. Lizzie didn't want to go, saying to me under her breath, ‘He's not even my father.’ But she agreed finally for my sake, and our mother's.
    In the old house near the river I wandered through the afternoon-darkened rooms when everyone else was out. I enjoyed the temporary feel of the place. The telephone sat on the floor in an empty room; boxes of stuff sat randomly about. The unpolished timber floors echoed when you walked on them. The house had no need of blinds, for trees surrounded it, trees covered in morning-glory vines with their purple flowers. Looking through those windows was like peering at a stage set draped with