Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(109)

A ship there is and she sails the sea,

She’s loaded deep as deep can be,

But not so deep as the love I’m in

I know not if I sink or swim.

The water is wide, I cannot get o’er it

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that will carry two

And both shall row, my Love and I.



Samuel had to strain to hear Maria’s voice, but soon he understood she was saying she wanted to be with him no matter the cost.

“Are we ruined?” Samuel asked. The world was so bright and beautiful. Like his father before him, he had a new appreciation of the earth.

“No,” Maria said. She was as sure of this as she’d ever been of anything. “We’re just alive.”

While Samuel slept in the grass, Faith and Maria sat together in the falling dark. They had made a bonfire and sparks rose into the black sky. Faith gazed at her left palm. The line that had stopped when she found The Book of the Raven had begun again. She would live to be an old woman, she saw that now, but one who couldn’t work magic. That was the price she paid when she ignored the rules. She’d lost the sight and with it her bloodline gifts. She was ordinary now.

“If you don’t want me to be your daughter, I would understand,” Faith told her mother.

“You’ll always be my daughter.” Now and forever, in this life and the life to come, no matter what separated them or what brought them together.

At the first light, Faith would return to the field and bring Keeper back to the bonfire so that her loyal companion would be turned to ashes here in the woods, where he belonged. They watched the bonfire burn and remembered when they first saw fireflies and thought stars had dropped from the sky, when Keeper was a pup and drank goat’s milk, when Cadin brought gifts of buttons and keys, when they plucked apples from the trees, when the world of Essex County was brand-new.

Samuel Dias was asleep in the grass, his black coat still soaking wet. He was still dreaming when Maria Owens leaned in to tell him a story, one he already knew and had known ever since he saw her on the dock in Cura?ao when she was fated to save his life, and he was fated to save hers in return.





PART SIX

Fate





1696




Twelve carpenters had worked for a year without stopping to build Maria Owens’ house. Fifteen varieties of wood were used: golden oak, silver ash, cherrywood, elm, pine, hemlock, pear, maple, mahogany, hickory, beech, cypress, cedar, walnut, and birch. The house was tall, with a twisted vine of wisteria that ran along the porch, in bloom at the first surge of spring. In the kitchen there sat a huge black cast-iron stove; in the pantry were dozens of shelves on which to store herbs. Two staircases had been constructed, one led to the attic, turning and twisting as if it were a puzzle bending in on itself, the other was made of the finest oak, with a broad landing that offered a window seat framed by damask drapes imported from England, ones very like those that had hung in the Locklands’ manor house in the first Essex County. Beside the front door was the brass bell that had hung outside Hannah Owens’ door.

When a traveling portrait painter came through town, he was hired to capture Maria’s likeness in oils, rendering her image perfectly, down to the bump she had on her hand from the day she pounded on John Hathorne’s door. When sitting for the painter, she wore her favorite blue dress, with her dark hair caught up in a blue ribbon and the sapphire that she never took off fastened at her throat. She wore her new red boots, ones Samuel Dias had had fashioned in Boston, which she wore every day. It was said that her eyes followed you when you passed by her portrait, and that she could see what was inside you and that you would know in that moment whether or not you had been true to yourself.

There were dozens of green glass windows, imported from England, and two brick chimneys that towered above the roof. The house was so well made that when a hurricane struck, every other house on the street sustained severe damage, but not a single shutter blew away from the Owens house. Even the laundry out on the line stayed exactly where it was on that day, which led neighbors to gossip even more than before. Maria kept chickens and goats in a small barn, and there was a renegade swan that arrived one day and refused to leave, soon enough spoiled by the crusts of bread he preferred to wild food. Maria called him Jack, and he waited outside for her on the porch each morning, and followed her about all day long, accompanying her on city streets and into shops, so that the children in town whispered that he’d once been a man who’d been turned into a swan, though no one dared to come near him, for Jack had a nasty temper and was devoted to one person alone.

In the garden there grew lily, rue, and arnica, along with fiery onions that could cure dog bites and toothaches. Maria planted Spanish garlic in great abundance, peonies to ward off evil, rows of lettuce, parsley, and mint, and lavender, planted for luck, by the back door. The original shed had been attached to a glass greenhouse so that herbs could be grown all year long, even in the dead of winter. Behind the foggy windows there were pots filled with lemon balm, lemon verbena, and lemon thyme. The more dangerous plants were kept inside the locked shed, which now boasted a murky glass ceiling so that light could enter. Belladonna, yarrow, black nightshade, wolfsbane, foxglove, lords and ladies with its pretty toxic berries, pennyroyal, which could end a pregnancy. It was there that Maria kept her Grimoire in its black toadskin cover, a book that would belong to Faith upon her mother’s death so that she might learn magic all over again, from the start, but not until she was a very old woman who had come to understand the importance of the rules. On the first page Hannah had written the rules of magic, and now Maria added a third, doing so without hesitation. Some lessons you have to learn for yourself, others are best to know from the start.