Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(22)

When the first of January finally arrived, she would start a bonfire on the shore to mark the end of her contract. She would let it burn all night long.



* * *



Everything might have been different if she hadn’t walked into the dining room at nine in the morning, a room she entered every day to polish the silver, which she did wearing heavy cotton gloves, and sweep away the red dust that filtered inside even when the wooden shutters were closed. Had she come an hour later, had she chosen to first set to work on preparations for dinner, had she done the washing and not waited for the afternoon sun, fate would have shifted. As it turned out, she was prompt. The day was blistering, and she had on her blue skirt and blue bodice, for blue was the color servants wore, since the dye was so cheap. Still the dress showed off her lovely shape and was short enough to show her long legs. She threw a passing glance at herself in the mirror above the sideboard. Oddly, she saw a glimpse of her mother’s reflection instead of her own. It was a startling sight that stopped her cold. True, she resembled Rebecca, with the same cool gray eyes and delicate features, though she was already taller and far more skilled at enchantments. But even a witch can possess a woman’s flaws, and a woman’s desires. Maria thought she knew what was to come, but she was wrong. Anyone can fall in love, despite vows to the contrary. Any woman can make a mistake, especially when she is young, and sees the wrong man through a haze so that he appears to be something he’s not.

Maria wore her long hair piled atop her head, held with the hairpins no one would suspect to be silver, for they appeared to be black, and were thought to be worthless. In her position it was best to have nothing, and all that she had she made certain to keep concealed, including the fact that she was now fluent in Dutch and Spanish and Portuguese. She was barefoot; her red boots were made for snow and foul weather, not heat and fair skies, and called attention to her differences. All of the housemaids went barefoot, priding themselves on how tough the soles of their feet were. It was an island of people who could survive an arid land, like the iguanas in the desert that could go weeks without water. This was not a place for the faint-hearted, and the beauty of the island belied its trials. The winds could raise a man into the air and toss him back down half a mile from where he’d originally stood. Rain rarely fell, and when it did it was collected in barrels, and even then it carried the taste and sheen of salt.

On the day she met the man who changed her fate, Maria had come from the sun-drenched courtyard, her skin still warm from the glints of sunlight sifting through the leaves. She always hated to leave that lovely spot, with its painted tiles and a fountain that was the home of three golden fish that hid beneath a lily pad whenever Cadin was near. She was dizzy, her head filled with sun, when she came inside to find a man gazing out the window at the sea, as if it were the enemy that divided him from everything he was accustomed to, pine and birch trees, fields of sheep, a house with black shutters closed against winter storms, a red fire that burned all night long. Even before she saw his face, Maria sensed he was the man she had seen in the black mirror. In the mirror he had been walking away, and so she had never spied his face, but he was tall and he wore a black coat, and he had been at sea, staring out at the waves, much as this man now did.

Caught off guard, she stopped where she was and began to recite an incantation that would prevent her from suffering the fate of her mother and so many of the women who came to her at night, when the Jansens were asleep. Women searched her out when they saw that a candle was burning in her room, when the nightjars flew from tree to tree, when the thorns on the hedge were said to be so sharp they would reach out to you as you walked along the path and wound you in places so deep you would never recover, piercing your throat, your sex, your heart. Most women in Willemstad knew that Maria Owens attended to love that had been lost, love that was broken, love that was meant to begin but hadn’t, love that had become a fever despite every remedy.

They came to her and she was bound to help them, as Hannah had, but who was she to go to?

Cadin was outside tapping at the window. He was relentless and frantic. All the same, Maria didn’t let him in. She knew what he would tell her. Burn mandrake in a brass bowl. Write his name on a candle and throw it far into the sea. Repeat three times: Fly away as fast as you can.

She thought of the way her mother had looked at her father, as if nothing else mattered. It was dangerous for a woman to give up her power. Under her breath, Maria uttered the first verse of an invocation she had learned from Hannah as she sat by the fire in a place she might have felt she had only dreamed, had she not had Cadin to remind her of who she was and who she would always be. She was the woman who couldn’t be drowned, who had fled from fires and the country where a woman couldn’t be free. It was an ancient conjure Hannah had found in a book of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, perhaps part of a powerful manuscript called The Fourth Book. It was among the most potent charms and incantations Maria had copied into her Grimoire.

You are not mine, I am not yours, you have no power, I walk where I wish, my heart is protected.



“You are not mine,” Maria said under her breath. But she had no pins, no red thread dyed with madder root, no rosemary, no St. John’s wort, no mandrake torn from the ground, no myrrh oil, no will of her own, and she stopped the chant before it was complete, in mid-sentence, leaving herself defenseless. That was when he turned to her.

I will never love you, she should have said—it was the last line of the invocation—but instead she stood there like a fool, not unlike the women who came to her at night, their faces damp with tears, their minds made up, convinced they would walk through a door they knew full well should be kept bolted shut.