Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(38)

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As he approached the house, John Hathorne spied a crow in the tree. A chill went through him even though the day was fine, or at least it had been until this very moment. He had a true distaste for such creatures, and had ever since Cura?ao when that horrible pet of the Jansens’ housemaid spat stones at him. Hathorne was accompanied now by the captain of one of his fleets of ships, scheduled to leave soon for the West Indies. A stone hit him as they spoke of sugar and slaves, grazing his cheek and drawing blood. He gazed upward and there was the vicious feathered beast. Although few men could tell one crow from another, he swore it was the same foul bird he’d known in the West Indies who had taken pleasure in tormenting him. It was the glint in the creature’s eye that gave him away, the way he held his head, proudly, as if he were as good as any man. If it was the bird he knew, it occurred to him that he was being threatened. He quickly made his excuses to the captain; he was so sorry to change their plans, but they would have to speak in the morning. He professed to be ill, and perhaps he was. Certainly, he couldn’t think straight and his gut was lurching. Like many in this world, he had two souls residing inside him: the man he wished to be and the man he actually was. Here, in Essex County, he was the man he’d been trained to be, his father’s son, a magistrate who did not stray, whose judgments were cast upon others, never upon himself.

He saw a woman’s figure in his own garden and was completely baffled. It was as if a wolf had come to lie beside the hollyhocks, or a lynx had climbed upon the roof, or worse, a witch had followed him across the seas. It was she; he knew her as he’d known the crow. His deeds had come back to haunt him. He rubbed his eyes hoping the vision would disappear, but the scene remained the same: a woman wearing red boots, which were outlawed in this town, intent on the child in her arms. He had never imagined her here in this landscape where the clouds billowed and the sky turned gray late in the day and black leaves fell. They fell now, as if the trees had been shaken and the world had fallen apart and not even seasons knew their time and place.

She was still a beauty, but he was now the other man, the one he’d been born to be, his father’s son, and Cura?ao was only a dream to him. He considered his own behavior on that island to be a mystery. Men were undone in mysterious ways; they stopped thinking and only felt when they wanted what didn’t belong to them, and they often did as they pleased in a strange country where rose-colored birds stood on one long leg in a blue-green sea and the women could bewitch you if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t keep your head and remember exactly who you were—a man who owned ships and wharfs and warehouses and a house with black shutters, whose father and grandfather had been men of honor, all magistrates, all respected citizens who kept their word and made certain others kept theirs. These were men who would never have leapt into the sea fully clothed, shouting with joy, grinning like a fool, as if a demon had entered to use the darkness inside of them for ungodly purposes.



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Maria sat beside a bank of tall, snow-white phlox. Nearby, in the kitchen garden, fennel and purple cabbage and radishes would soon be grown. There were no lilacs, as there had been in the vision in the black mirror, but surely she could plant them when she was John’s wife and this was her house. She would have Persian lilacs in shades of purple and violet and blue, with blooms so sweet women passing by would stop, unable to go any farther, called to the spot as if their names had been spoken aloud.

A bee came to examine Faith’s hair, red as a flower in the bright sunlight. Maria sent it off with a polite nod. “Be elsewhere,” she whispered, and it happily complied. In the tree with black leaves, Cadin was clacking and tossing down pebbles. Maria gave him a dark look, but otherwise paid him no mind. She could not let a crow make her decisions. Her fate was her own, and she would most certainly make the best of it before it made the best of her.

She set her sleeping baby in the grass. To call John to her, she took a laurel leaf from her satchel and held it in the palm of her hand, then set it on fire with a single breath, not minding that she scorched her own skin. The smoke was thin and green, so fragrant it was impossible to ignore. She said his name backwards, chanting beneath her breath. From behind the gate he felt the thrill of seeing her again. She was like no other woman he had ever seen or known, and when she called to him he felt his desire in the pit of his stomach. Sins were committed every hour of every day, and it was clear that this woman was unnatural in some way. But who among them had not committed a sin? The eternal torments of original sin had waited for mankind from the moment Adam ate the apple, which was handed to him by Eve, an act that proved to him and his brethren that women were spiritually inferior to men, weak with human frailty, sinful at their core.

John entered the garden and closed the open gate behind him, always bad luck. He was wearing the same black coat he hadn’t bothered to take off when he swam alongside the turtle, when he didn’t know the difference between a miracle and a monster. It had been laundered with hot water and lye soap and yet there was still sand in the seams. He looked at Faith, dozing in the afternoon light. She might be anything at all, an angel beside the snowy phlox, a wicked changeling sent in the guise of a red-haired girl, but her features were not unlike his, the same narrow nose and high cheekbones. She was merely his child. He softened then, and perhaps he smiled, for as Maria gazed up to see him she believed she saw his heart beating beneath his black coat.