The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(10)

Reading this, Franny paled.

It’s not the same here without you, Haylin had written in one of his letters.

Then, clearly embarrassed that he’d overstepped certain boundaries, he’d crossed out that line and wrote Boring here instead. But Franny had seen through the smear of black ink and knew the truth. It wasn’t the same without him either.

Do not ask what the spell is, or how it was accomplished. I have been betrayed and abandoned. I do not wish this for any member of my family.

“Don’t you think I look like her?” Jet asked one day when she found Franny sitting pensively on the window seat studying the portrait. One of Maria’s remedies called for the beating heart of a dove to be taken from the bird while it was alive. Another included collecting the hair and fingernail clippings of a disloyal man and burning them with cedar and sage.

“You don’t want to look like her,” Franny was quick to respond. “She ended unhappily. Trust me, she was miserable. She was accused of witchery.”

Jet sat beside her sister. “I wonder if that would have happened to me if I was alive at that time. I can hear what people are thinking.”

“You cannot,” Franny said. And then, after a look at her sister, “Can you?”

“It’s not that I want to,” Jet said. “It just happens.”

“Fine. What am I thinking right now?”

“Franny,” Jet demurred. “Thoughts should be private things. I do my best not to listen in.”

“Seriously. Tell me. What am I thinking right now?”

Jet paused. She gathered her long, black hair in one hand and pursed her lips. Since coming to Massachusetts she had grown more beautiful each day. “You’re thinking we’re not like other people.”

“Well, I’ve always thought that.” Franny laughed, relieved that was all her sister had picked up. “That’s nothing new.”

Later, when Jet went out into the garden, she stood beneath the lilacs with their dusky heart-shaped leaves. Everything smelled like mint and regret.

I wish we were like other people.

That was what Franny had been thinking.

Oh, how I wish we could fall in love.



One bright Sunday the sisters awoke to find a third girl in their room. Their cousin April Owens had come to visit. April had been raised in the rarefied world of Beacon Hill. With her platinum blond hair pulled into waist-length braids, and the palest of pale gray eyes, she looked like a painting from an earlier era, yet she was oddly modern in her demeanor. For one thing, she carried a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter, and she wore black eyeliner. She was bitter and fierce and she didn’t give a hoot about anyone’s opinions other than her own. Strangest of all, she kept a pet ferret on a leash; it ambled beside her, instantly making her far more interesting than any other girl they’d met.

“Cat got your tongue?” she said as the sisters stared at her mutely.

“Most certainly not,” Franny said, snapping out of her reverie. “If anything I’d have the cat’s tongue.”

“Well, meow,” April purred.

April had visited this house last summer when she’d turned seventeen, and now she’d run off from Beacon Hill and come back to the one place she’d been accepted. Her presence was an unexpected surprise and, in Franny’s opinion, completely unnecessary. April dressed as if ready for Paris or London rather than a small New England town. She wore a short black skirt, a filmy blouse, and white leather boots. She had on pearly pink lipstick, and her long pale hair had a thick fringe that nearly covered her eyes. She’d begun to unpack: chic clothes, makeup, several candles, and a battered copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned and had only recently been published in America.

“I’d love to read that,” Jet said when she saw the racy novel everyone was talking about.

April tossed her cousin the book. “Don’t get corrupted,” she said with a grin.

Their cousin was clearly far more sophisticated than they. She was a wild child, doing as she pleased, refusing to be constrained by the social mores of Beacon Hill. There was a blue star tattooed on her wrist that had caused her to be grounded for several months. She had another on her hip, but that one hadn’t yet been detected by her prying, fretful parents. Ever since childhood she’d rarely been out of eyeshot of a nanny, a tutor, or Mary, the long-suffering housemaid, whose hair had turned gray as she dutifully did her best to keep up with her charge’s shenanigans. According to Dr. Burke-Owens’s theories, such ingrained behavior couldn’t be stopped; it was like a tide, rising to flood-like proportions despite anything placed in its way.

April had been to several private schools and each time had been asked to leave. She didn’t believe in authority and was a born radical. She told the girls that she could turn lights on and off at will and recite curses in four languages. She had been sent on trips to Europe and South America and had learned things from the men she met that would have made her parents woozy with anxiety had they known about her exploits. She seemed to have no fear of consequences, or perhaps it was only that Aunt Isabelle had allowed her to see her fate and she knew there was no way to avoid her future. She would fall in love once, and with the wrong man, and she wouldn’t change it for the world.

“I hope you’ve had some fun while you’ve been here,” April said to the sisters. “Isabelle doesn’t care what we do. You’re entitled to enjoy yourself, you know, and you might as well do so now, because it will most likely end badly for all of us.”