Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(111)

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Faith Owens was regularly seen in town with a book in hand, reading as she walked. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat and men’s trousers, and she carried a satchel of books to ensure that if she should finish one volume she would be handily prepared with the next. There was rarely a time when she didn’t have her nose in a book, and people would come upon her in the woods, sitting on a rock and reading, or on a ledge by the lake, tossing bread crumbs into the murky water as she turned the pages. She’d collected dozens of volumes for the new library, meeting with wealthy families throughout Essex County, as well as in Boston and Cambridge, convincing well-to-do patrons that the entire population, men, women, and children alike, must be literate in order for the colony to grow. Several men fell in love with her, but she turned them all down. If they called her beautiful, that was a mark against them, for what a person was could not be seen with the naked eye. She had learned from her mother’s mistakes. If she ever fell in love, she wanted someone she could talk to.

Although women were not allowed to be students at Harvard College, the esteemed citizen Thomas Brattle, who had written a letter that was critical of the witch trials and was both the treasurer of the college and a member of the Royal Society, had made arrangements for Faith to study in Cambridge. She was closer to Brattle than most people might have supposed, despite their age difference; they appreciated each other’s minds, and she was grateful to him for believing in her abilities as a teacher.

Faith sat in the back row of the classics seminar at Harvard, allowed only to listen and never to speak. She dressed in boy’s clothing in her everyday life, which she found so much more practical than skirts and capes. At Harvard, she could be seen in a black jacket along with trousers and a white shirt and a black tie, the same uniform as the men, so that she might not call attention to herself and her gender, although she hardly went unnoticed due to the red boots she wore every day.

“Gentlemen,” the professor had told his students on the first day of class when Faith Owens was present. “Keep your eyes on me, if you please.”

Faith had been wrong about many things. She still had the red mark that had arisen in the center of her left palm when Martha Chase drowned; the color had faded, but the blotch was enough to remind her of the bad choices she had made in the past. Every midsummer’s eve a sparrow came into the parlor of the house on Magnolia Street. If it completed a circle around the room three times, bad luck was sure to come. Because of this, Faith never forgot the bird whose life she had taken for her own benefit when she made the Revenge Pie for John Hathorne. Hathorne was a successful trader, but people in town avoided him. There was nothing she wanted from him now, because he had nothing to give her. She always chased the sparrow to the window, then gently urged it out with a broom.

Faith still had a penance to pay and much to set right. For this reason, she went from one farm to another on Saturdays to teach any girl whose parents wouldn’t allow her to take time from the workday and attend school. She walked so many miles, and came home so late at night, that Maria worried she would exhaust herself. One dusky evening, as Faith was crossing a pasture on her way home in the gray light of early winter, a white horse approached her and followed her home. It was the field that had belonged to the Hopwood brothers, and the ground there was still ashy. Faith understood that she was fortunate indeed to be chosen again after Keeper’s death. She called the mare Holly, and people became accustomed to seeing her riding through the fields at night, wearing trousers and carrying a satchel of books, her red hair tucked up under a black hat.

John Hathorne made certain to avoid the Owens women, but Maria and Ruth occasionally saw each other on the street, and when they did they embraced as if they were sisters. Ruth had begun to teach reading classes, and every time she went through her garden gate and kept walking until she reached the library, it occurred to her that she hadn’t told her husband where she was going or asked for his permission, and she was grateful for the life she led.

There were times when Maria and Faith would glance at one another as they set the table for dinner, or worked together choosing ingredients for a cure, or baked the traditional Chocolate Tipsy Cake for birthday celebrations. They had not forgotten the dark time of left-handed magic. But that time was over, and they had forgiven one another. There are none who can fight as fiercely as a mother and a daughter, and none who can forgive more completely. One evening, when Maria was turning on the porch light so that her clients would know they could come calling, Faith followed her outside and handed her The Book of the Raven. She was ashamed of her behavior and of the red mark she carried in the palm of her hand. “I used it badly. It shouldn’t be mine.”

Maria considered burning the book, for it was bound to cause trouble. There was no one to claim it, and by rights it should have been burned at the time of its owner’s death. She might have made a bonfire in the rear of the garden and rid the world of it, but the book was so beautiful, and the writer so knowledgeable, she couldn’t bring herself to destroy it. There were reasons dark books were written by women, those who were not allowed to publish, those who couldn’t own property, those who had been sold for sex, those who had grown old and were no longer desirable, women in chains, women who dreamed, women who had turned left when it seemed the only choice. If used carefully, by the right person, the magic in this text could be a great gift. Hidden on the last page there was a spell to bring about the end of any curse, but the price for doing so was high, and the woman who did so must be fearless.