Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(27)

Jansen cursed Maria Owens, not that it did him the least bit of good, for he feared the knowledge she had. Anyway, she kept lavender in her dress and blue thread stitched through the hem of her petticoat and was protected from his wrath. When she walked away, she owed him nothing. She was happy to move in with Juni and Adrie, who agreed that the three would share a roof. Though the house Mr. Jansen had allotted Juni was tiny, they would make do.

Maria made Hannah’s black soap when the moon was waning, adding local ingredients, aloe vera and hibiscus. It was a hot night and Maria was burning up, using the largest iron pots in the house. The soap was so fragrant bees awoke, birds sang at an hour when they should have been silent, and fussy babies suddenly slept through the night. When she was done making the soap, she fell into her bed and didn’t wake for eighteen hours. It took a huge amount of energy and focus to make this soap, and because of this whoever used it would benefit and appear younger, perhaps by as much as ten years. In the morning, women from Willemstad and from all over the countryside came to buy the bars wrapped in brown paper, tied with string. Even Adrie was impressed by the profits Maria brought in. She tried the soap herself, and when she looked in a mirror she was surprised to find she was as pretty as she’d been as a girl.



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For three months they lived together, happier than they’d been for a long time. When there was a chore to do, they decided when it would be seen to. They awoke when they wished to, and washed sheets and clothes for themselves, not for the Jansens. Time was slow, with each day a pleasure, but time speeded up and took over eventually. The baby arrived on a night when the moon was hidden behind clouds. It was the windy season, unpredictable spring, but soon the wind died down, which signified good fortune to come. What is a daughter but good fortune, as complicated as she might be. Maria dragged her straw pallet outside, then drew a circle in the dust around her chosen birthing place as protection from evil. Cadin settled onto a low branch, watching every move she made with his sharp eyes. It seemed a long time since he’d found a baby in the snow, wrapped in a blue blanket, her hair as black as feathers. Now the night was hot, and the earth was sand, but the blanket set out for this baby was the same one Rebecca had stitched late at night in the Lockland house. Hannah had folded the blanket into the bottom of Maria’s satchel, dusted with lavender to keep away the moths. As the labor began, Maria took up a pair of scissors. She held up her long black hair that reached to her waist in a single braid and cut it short enough to graze her shoulders, unusual for a woman in this time and place. To have a child she knew she must make sacrifices and this would be the first of many.

On this night she forgave her own mother who had labored alone in the snow and had left her child behind for her own good. In doing so, Rebecca’s heart had hardened. Still, she was the one Maria called for when the worst of the pains came. Adrie told her to breathe and she did so. The old woman had brought a hundred children into the world during her long lifetime, and Maria herself had seen dozens of babes born on Hannah’s wooden table and had often helped with the birthing. Hannah had tied knots in a rope, then cut the rope between those knots into pieces, a spell for an easy birth. Here there was no such tradition, and the labor was hard. Maria asked Juni for a bowl of water, and when she gazed into the bowl it was black and deep. This was the moment when the worlds opened between life and death, the future and the past. She saw a man in the snow who longed for her, and a house ringed by a garden where nightshade and mandrake grew, where the lilacs were so sweet bees came from all over the county to drink from them. She threw the plait of her sheared hair into the fire to mark the death of her old life and the start of the new life to come. The smoke was red, a bloodline passed down from mother to daughter for as long as time existed.

It was March 20, and she wanted her baby to be born before midnight. March 21 was known to be the unluckiest day of the year. Juni and Adrie spread salt on the earth to banish spirits who might wish the baby ill. By then Maria was cursing the world that had made her a woman. But when the child at last arrived, at eight minutes before twelve, everything changed. She had seen her daughter’s face in the black mirror when she herself had been a child, but she hadn’t expected to feel as she did now. Nothing else mattered.

“Beautiful,” Adrie said with approval. All of Adrie’s friends came to view the baby, old women who, too, had once been beautiful. But this baby was something more. They could all tell that was the case, even the ones who were nonbelievers; the most practical, logical, down-to-earth women praised this new life. There was no mistaking that this child had the sight. Her eyes were silver, her hair as red as Rebecca’s. On the back of her left hand was a black mark in the shape of a half moon, the sure sign of a witch.

The baby was soon enough safe in her mother’s arms, wrapped in the blanket stitched with blue thread. Because the future seemed to have opened on this night, and because Maria’s heart had opened as well, she called her daughter Faith. If Hannah had been with them, she would have spoken the truth for Maria to hear on this day that was like no other.

This is your heart that you hold in your hands, be careful with it, don’t lose it, and don’t forget that I loved you the same way even though you weren’t born to me.



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When Faith was five months old, Maria kissed Juni and Adrie good-bye. She wept to leave them, for they had offered her only kindness; all the same her fate awaited her, and she packed her satchel, sewed the diamonds into the hem of her dress where they would be safe from thievery, then went to the docks to search for a ship that would take her to Massachusetts. Before she left, she’d made a pot of Courage Tea, for she would require courage to find her way across the sea. Adrie had fashioned a small traveling basket made from reeds for Cadin, which he hopped into when Maria whistled.