Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(42)

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The sky was black and pricked with stars when Maria went to the lake to chop ice for their drinking water. As she knelt, she spied the future written in the black ice. She saw herself tied to a chair, and John walking away in his black coat, and diamonds falling from her hands. She saw a tree with huge white flowers, each one the size of the moon.

Try as she might she could not tie these images together. Hannah would have said that women often didn’t understand what they didn’t truly wish to know, and perhaps Maria knew the truth already, for she wasn’t surprised when one night she trekked to the harbor only to find the door to John’s warehouse locked. She waited, but he never appeared. Each night she listened for his steps, but when the brass bell outside her door rang, it was only sounding for the wind.

When March came around, Maria celebrated Faith’s second birthday alone with the baby, fixing a pie from apples she had stored in a barrel, adding the last of the cinnamon she’d brought along in her herb box from Cura?ao. Faith was a wonder. She could hold full conversations, and was well behaved, a true helper in gathering herbs, a darling who listened to Maria’s retelling of Samuel Dias’s stories about a cat and a wolf and a child who had been lost in the woods.

Know who you are, Hannah had told her. Know what you are, Rebecca had said.

By now she knew exactly who she was. She was the woman who decided to walk to town on the day the snow melted, even though Hathorne had warned her not to come.

“People will not understand you,” he’d told her. “The way you look, the clothes you wear, what we are to each other.”

“What are we?” she had said, her face hot.

“We are what God will allow us to be,” he’d said, which was not the answer she’d wanted.

It was spring, with the world suddenly alive and green, magicked back to life. Maria walked quickly, for it was mud season as well, and she didn’t wish the muck to stain her red boots. On Washington Street, Cadin dove down from the sky, pulling out strands of her hair until she waved him away. Clearly he disapproved of the path she took. But a crow was a crow, and a woman a woman, and there were some things she believed he couldn’t understand. She had written a letter with ink made from her own blood. It was a last attempt to see if John would do the right thing.

The house with the black shutters was only steps away. The black elms were festooned with a thousand dark buds that would soon unfurl into heart-shaped leaves. Maria was standing beneath the tree when she spied a woman and a young boy on the other side of the fence, there in the warm spring sun. Ruth Gardner Hathorne and her boy, three-year-old John, were seeing to the garden. Ruth wore a white cap, her blond hair hidden, her fair skin blotchy from hours of gardening. It was then that the new black leaves began to fall. The elms could not abide Maria, nor she them. A wet gust of wind came up and blew the fallen leaves away. She had seen Hathorne walk away from her in a vision where there was black water and a black heart lying broken in the grass. She’d discovered the reason he could never stay with her, why he kept her on the outskirts of the city, why he had begun to avoid her. All along he’d had a wife. Even a woman with the sight can be taken for a fool in matters of love.

Maria could not take her eyes off Ruth Gardner Hathorne, whose parents had been Quakers, persecuted for their religious beliefs by the Puritan magistrates of Salem. They had been forced to leave Massachusetts and had followed Ann Hutchinson to Rhode Island, leaving behind their fourteen-year-old daughter, Ruth. Thirty-three-year-old Hathorne had taken the girl in, then had married her. Ruth was now nineteen and her son meant all the world to her. Hathorne had betrayed them both, on Cura?ao and now again, and there was reason to burn with anger. The leaves around Maria’s boots caught fire and turned to cinders, and the sparks flew down chimneys all over town, so that women had to drench their fireplaces with pitchers of water.

Ruth had a basket on her arm as she cut the first of the season’s parsley and sage. She’d urged her son to keep out of the billowing phlox, the first buds to bloom in this season, but he only grinned and let out a joyous whoop before disappearing into the tall white flowers, trampling a few on his way. He was a naughty, delightful boy of three, whose father would soon take a cane to him for his own good, for headstrong behavior was not tolerated. The little boy came up to the fence, and when he realized he was not alone, he wrapped his hands around the posts and stared at Maria, for she appeared to be an angel hiding behind the phlox. There were petals in her hair, so that the black strands were woven through with white, as if winter had already returned after only a few days of joyous, muddy spring. The boy had John’s dark eyes. Faith’s, on the other hand, were silvery gray, her mother’s eyes, but paler still. Faith waved at the boy and he stared at her, considering. Their features echoed each other’s. Straight nose and small ears, their father’s high cheekbones, his pale coloring, marked by ruddy cheeks. Maria crouched down and slipped the letter between the railings of the fence. If this was her enemy, there had never been a sweeter one. She flung the child a smile, which he was quick to return.

“Be a good boy,” she said in a soft voice. “Give this to your father.”

John’s son nodded with a serious expression, a child who knew nothing of the cruelty of the world. But he saw the black leaves falling and the crow that came to perch on the woman’s shoulder, and in this town even someone at such a tender age looked for evil everywhere, not trusting a stranger’s smile. Perhaps she was not an angel after all.