Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(33)

“I judged wrongly,” he admitted. “Will he now be well?” Dias asked of his son. Though the old man was tough, his deep love for his son was evident.

“As well as ever,” Maria assured him.

They both laughed. Samuel had been a difficult, argumentative boy with a mind of his own, and he’d grown to be a difficult man who never shied away from a fight.

“So he is himself again,” Abraham Dias said, relieved. His son was his heart, and Maria understood, for she held her heart in her hands, a red-haired little girl.



* * *



Samuel was strong enough to be back on deck, and back at his maps as well. Navigators were prized on ships, for without them all was guesswork, and the northern coasts were littered with wrecks that had not avoided the reefs and rocks. He still tired easily, and was often chilled, wearing his black coat even on fine days, but he appeared healthy, as he must have been before breakbone fever seized him. He made certain to avoid Maria, sleeping on deck with the rest of the men covered with tarred sheets of linen to protect them from rain and seawater. Now that he had his health and freedom returned to him, it turned out he didn’t want either one; he would rather be ill if that meant Maria would still take care of him. He was no longer angry, he was hurt, and that was worse.

As they approached the Massachusetts harbor, Maria could see a city of docks and streets that followed the old paths where cows still wandered freely, where markets sold cod and oysters and clams. So many houses were being built that the clatter of hammers echoed constantly. Huge white clouds were strung as if on a clothesline and the harbor was thick with ships. Maria was on the deck with Cadin, at last freed from his cage in the open air, when Samuel approached. He had a slight limp due to the pain in his legs, but it was only noticeable to those who knew him. It had been days since they’d spoken.

“You’re setting him free?” They usually spoke in English, but now Dias spoke Portuguese. His voice was more musical and more urgent, and his questions and intent were harder to ignore. He almost seemed like a serious man. After his illness he had come to understand time in a different way. It was not endless, as most young men believed it to be. There was so little of it he could hold it in his hands, and still it slipped away, even as he stood in the pale sunlight approaching Boston Harbor, beside a woman he didn’t wish to lose.

“He was always free,” Maria said. “I told you that.”

When Cadin lifted into the sky, they watched him wing toward the shore. Boston Harbor was cold and gray even on a summer day. Dias had been stitching as sailors often did, and he’d made Faith a little poppet doll that she was delighted to be given.

“Keep it safe,” he told her, and the little girl nodded solemnly and clung to the doll. When Samuel went to the quarterdeck to help guide the ship to shore, the baby called out to him, but he didn’t answer. Samuel Benjamin Dias, navigator and robber, the man who liked to talk so much he continued to do so in his sleep, had become quiet on this day, as if afraid of what he might say. He’d been too many places and lost too many people to think there was a point in a drawn-out parting. He was gone before Maria knew it, leaving her there to consider what her new life might be once she found John Hathorne, for in truth, she could no longer picture his face. When she closed her eyes, all she saw was Samuel Dias, which clearly was a mistake.



* * *



He did not leave the ship after it docked. He told his father they should turn toward Newport as soon as their trading in Boston was done. There was no reason to stay. Maria looked back and saw him at his maps. Perhaps he was too busy to say his good-byes; he was meant to study the seas and stars and there was nothing for him here on land. A man who talked as much as he did knew when he’d reached the end of a story, even though there are those who insist that once you save a life, that person is tied to you eternally. Maria might have gone to him and asked for him to explain himself and tell her what he wanted of her, but it was too late. There was the city of Boston and beyond were the green hills of the second Essex County.

This was where fate had led her.





PART TWO

Talisman





1680

I.




Summertime in Massachusetts was sticky with heat and plagued by thunderstorms, and August was the worst of it. Even a weather witch could do little here when faced with the oddities of nature. Occasionally, hailstones as big as a man’s hand would fall with a noisy splatter, pelting against roofs and cobbled walkways. The streets ran with waste, and temperatures rose until people were unable to sleep at night. Overheated men roamed the city, courting trouble; proper women slept without a stitch of clothing and dreamed of lakes and streams, often waking with their hair wringing wet and pools of water mysteriously appearing on the wooden floor beneath their beds.

Yet, despite the troubles the season brought, every soul in the colony agreed that summer was far too short. No one wished for a New England winter. Winter was severe in every acre of this region, bleak and much more fierce than winters in England, so cold that harbors froze solid. There were those who believed this new country was too frigid for Englishmen, many of whom perished in blizzards, freezing in their own beds. The native people vowed that every ten years there was no winter, but that the years in between made up for that blessed time. It was a land of extremes and there seemed to be more of everything here, both disaster and promise, and mothers whispered that was the cause that there were so many twins in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for all here was doubled, even human life.