Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(40)

The baby was bundled in her blanket with Maria’s name stitched at one corner and Faith’s name stitched below her mother’s with the blue thread Rebecca had given her. Blue for protection and remembrance. Hathorne embraced Maria fiercely; he would have had her right there if she hadn’t stopped him. His hands were all over her, so hot they burned her skin. She thought of the laurel leaf aflame in her hand; she’d called him to her, but now she backed away. Do good among them, Hannah always said, but do not expect the same in return.

“If they have set out rules in this town, let us act by them,” Maria said.

If marriage was what this world insisted upon, then marriage it would be. Here, in these woods, in the second Essex County she had known, Maria thought of Hannah’s burning house. Most witches feared water, but Maria feared fire. She thought of the day when Lockland and his brothers arrived, when the air had filled with the stems and petals from the poison garden. Her eyes had burned for days afterward, perhaps from the billows of smoke, perhaps from the tears she couldn’t shed. It was so easy to make a mistake in matters of love. So many women had made their way across Devotion Field, convinced they must make the wrong man their own. Maria had done her best to help those who came to her in Boston, even the ones who knew they should let go of love. Now she asked for marriage, even though she thought of another man. There was a cure for this, she knew, but to set a spell upon herself was dangerous, and she could stop such thoughts by sheer willpower if she tried. O Amor meant sweetheart, darling, flame, love. That is what Samuel Dias had called out in his sleep, and it was only now that Maria realized he might have been speaking to her.

“My pledge remains the same,” Hathorne told her. For now he would bring all she might need to stay in the cabin: bedding and pots and pans, baskets of apples and onions, ginger and butter and eggs, odd vegetables Maria had never seen before. He returned the next night and the night after that. They took a late supper together cooked over a fire. Before she’d left Boston, Mrs. Henry had taught her how to fix Salem Pudding, a favored dish made of flour, milk, molasses, and raisins, all boiled for hours, and how to make a quick meal of johnnycakes with Indian meal and flour, one egg, a little sugar, and salt and soda. John praised the tea she made and said it gave him the strength and courage to try to set things right.

In time, Maria relented, and while Faith slept, she took him to her bed, the straw pallet where hunters camped after the leaves turned, when they came to shoot deer and wild fowl. Spring passed into summer, and some evenings John could not get away. On these nights there was nothing but darkness and the flicker of the fireflies, creatures unknown in England. They rose amid the trees in globes of pale yellow light, signaling to one another. Is this what love is? Maria might have asked Hannah Owens, who’d been betrayed by a man who claimed she spoke with Satan and had sworn to the judges that beneath her skirts she possessed a tail. Is love not more than this? she might have asked her mother, who pledged her life to a man who’d charmed her with words that weren’t his own. She knew something was wrong, even within her own heart, but then John would return, as though he’d never been gone, full of apologies and promises. It was his family, he explained, and their austere view of the world that was at issue, and the differences between them. Maria had not been raised in any church, she did not live by the tenets of Puritan beliefs, she had a child without the benefit of marriage. She would not be accepted, and yet he returned. He could not stay away, he told her. Was this love? she might have asked herself, if she hadn’t feared the answer.

On nights that she spent alone in the second Essex County, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had been the one who had mistaken a monster for a miracle. She was a world away from Devotion Field, far from everything she had known. She could hear owls and the sound of deer mice in the pine needles. At night, when she was alone in her bed and John had left her, she could hear her own heart beat. She had seen this before, a woman arriving at Hannah’s door, love gone sour, love gone wrong, love that wasn’t love at all.



* * *



October came quickly, a glorious month when the fields turned yellow. The leaves might appear green in shadow, but when sunlight pierced through there were threads of scarlet and orange. So many pigeons crossed the sky they blocked the sun from sight, and the day seemed as if it were night. Maria felt there was a power in this place as she knelt by the lake that was said to have no bottom. The twiggy shore was home to birds she had never seen before—scarlet cardinals, red and black woodpeckers, flickers, white owls sleeping in the hollow trees. She imagined she felt as Hannah had when she left the world of men and crossed through Devotion Field to enter into a world of magic and silence. The only sound she heard was the song of the earth when she lay in the yellow grass. Perhaps this was a blessing, for during this time the lines on her left hand began to change and she saw for herself that if you had the strength, you could change your fate.

The crows stayed on past autumn, as they always did. They would remain all through the coming snows, fearless creatures that they were, eating winterberries and snatching eggs from henhouses, managing to survive. Through the autumn, rumors spread about a young woman living in the woods. People said she was fearless, for it was a wild, thorny woodland, with creatures that had never been seen in England. Spikey porcupines, deer that were twelve feet high and thought to be so strong that the teeth of their fawns were strung into necklaces by the native people for babies to wear when teething. There were beaver that were said to contain both sexes, whose powdered tails were mixed into wine by those who claimed to be physicians and swore the false remedy would cure stomach ailments, and fox with pelts that were silver or red or black, and bats of all sorts flickering through the night. Raccoons that lived in hollow trees could open the doors and windows of houses in town, as if they had human hands, then slip inside to steal flour and day-old bread. Ground squirrels were so ravenous they would devour entire fields of corn, inspiring farmers to pay two pence apiece for each one killed and brought to town hall. What woman would live in such a place with a young child other than a sorceress, or a wild woman, or a witch?