The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(42)
“Isabelle sent you something.”
Jet sat up in bed and wiped the sleep from her eyes.
“It’s not a rabbit, is it?” Jet asked.
“Goodness, no.”
Jet rose from bed and knelt to peer inside. There was a small black cat. Wren, who had followed her in their aunt’s garden. She scooped it up and dissolved into laughter, a lovely thing to hear after such a long period of mourning. The cat sat completely still, surprised by the attention.
“Oh, she’s perfect! You have your crow,” Jet said to Franny. “Now here’s my Wren.”
Jet let the cat onto the bed to play with a ball of blue string. She stroked her and told her what a lovely little cat she was, but her eyes never lit up, and Franny remembered what Isabelle had written on the card that had accompanied the cat.
A remedy such as this can only last so long.
A real estate agent soon began showing the neglected house to prospective buyers. Every now and then the siblings would discover strangers being led through as they were told how a little remodeling could easily restore the true beauty of the house. Vincent kept his room locked and he drew a skull on the door in black ink.
“Stay the fuck out,” he told the shocked Realtor, who wore a pillbox hat, of the sort Jacqueline Kennedy wore.
The agent had known Susanna Owens from the Yale Club and was showing the house as a favor. Anyone else would have quit in light of Vincent’s shenanigans. The nearly tame rats in the broom closet, the flickering lights, the smell of spoilt milk in the kitchen sink. The Realtor didn’t dare to open Vincent’s door, and made what she hoped were reasonable excuses. Just a small child’s room, potential buyers were told. You’ll need to paint and plaster. This was the way to avoid the drained bottles of whiskey, the hashish and marijuana, a fancy glass hookah pipe, piles of unwashed clothes, stinky boots, books of magic, and an amazing collection of record albums stored in orange crates. Even Franny was told she must knock before entering his room. Now that they were leaving, Vincent, who’d never seemed to give a damn about their home, was in despair. “I don’t see why we have to sell the place,” he complained.
“Because we’re broke,” Franny said with a forthrightness her brother didn’t appreciate.
“You can’t make me leave if I don’t want to,” he groused.
He kept his locked room dark. So much the better. Less costly electricity bills. They were counting pennies now. Dodging the shops where their parents had run up tabs: the butcher, the baker, the liquor store. They sold the living room furniture at a bad price, and did the same with a rug from Persia that had always been in the dining room. The entire town house was shadowed by the siblings’ spiritual agony, therefore Franny tried her best to get her brother and sister out when prospective buyers came by, not that it did a bit of good. They hung around the home they couldn’t wait to escape from in the past. In the end, Franny paid Vincent ten dollars each time he vacated before a showing. He then stomped out of the house and went to the Ramble, where he could concentrate on the only thing other than music that held his interest. Magic. He was focusing on his powers of intense concentration. He could make larger and larger objects move, at first with a shudder, then with a leap. Rocks fell from the cliffs above the paths. People stayed clear of any area Vincent claimed for himself when he set a circle that couldn’t be crossed. He carried The Magus under his coat, studying it so closely he had much of it memorized before long.
At last the house was sold to a lovely family who hoped to enter their girls into the Starling School. They wanted to move in as quickly as possible. Their lawyer suggested that Franny put whatever money they made from the sale into real estate. It was a good investment and they wouldn’t have to worry about making the rent. They could forget the East Side, however, it was much too expensive. It was suggested that Franny look downtown.
She took the M1 bus to the end of its route, then walked to Washington Square Park, where she stood beneath the historic white arch. Long ago, Minetta Creek flowed here and Washington Square was a swamp. In 1794, Aaron Burr changed the course of the stream, so his own nearby property would have a pond, and later, when the city began encroaching upon the creek, muskrats still abounded. It was an extraordinary place, but it also held great sorrow, for Minetta Creek, known by the Indian people as Devil’s Water, was a boundary for a cemetery that was in use from 1797 to 1826, a potter’s field where twenty thousand bodies were buried and where they rested, uneasily or not, to this day.
The Hangman’s Elm, said to be over three hundred years old, stood in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. That was where witches were said to gather. The last execution in Manhattan took place here in 1820, when a nineteen-year-old slave named Rose Butler was hanged for burning down her master’s house. After that most people avoided the tree after dark, or at least they made certain to keep lavender in their pockets to bring them luck when they passed by. Folk magic could always be found in Manhattan, from the time English colonists valued the almanac in order to read astrology and magic parchments were sold as maps for treasure digging, along with divining rods and secret incantations. Divination and palmistry were studied. After the Revolution magic was so rampant, with peddlers selling forbidden books hidden in black covers, that ministers preached against it from their pulpits. The craft was dangerous and unpredictable, and witches were difficult to control, for they had minds of their own and didn’t hold to keeping to the law.