Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(43)

Maria put a finger to her lips. “Don’t forget the letter.”

When his mother called to the boy, Maria learned he had been named for his father, lawfully his only child. Maria turned and ran, Faith riding on her hip.

Love was the thing that tore you apart; it made you believe the lies you were told, obvious as they might be. It was nearly impossible to see your own fate while it was happening to you. It was only after, when what’s done had been done, that one’s vision cleared. She thought of the man who had turned against Hannah, and of her mother’s husband, trekking across Devotion Field with his brothers and revenge in mind, and of her father, so handsome and vain he hadn’t thought twice about selling her into servitude.

Love is what you make of it, and she had made it into her undoing. As she walked through the farmland ringing Salem, the rows of wheat she passed withered in the fields. Her hair was in knots, her complexion pale. She thoughtlessly tore her flesh on thorn bushes, and the blood that fell scorched the grass she walked upon. In her arms, Faith patted at the tears streaming down her mother’s face, but a witch’s tears were as dangerous as they were rare, and they burned the child’s fingers. Even Faith, whose touch could heal a bird with a broken wing, couldn’t heal her mother’s despair. Nothing could give her back the time she had wasted on a worthless man.

They went to the lake, where Maria knelt to dash water on her face. Surely John would answer her, for a letter written in blood has consequences for both the writer and the reader. You could not forget what you had read. He would have to answer. Faith was his child, after all, and deserved his name and attentions. What his response would be, no one could foretell, for a man’s fate changed every day, depending upon his actions. When Maria gazed into the still, black water, she could see pieces of what was to come. The tree with white flowers, the woman in the lake. Summer would come, and the world would grow greener, and, she could already see, John would disappoint her. She realized it had never been love between them, for you cannot love someone you can never know.



* * *



Perhaps his neighbors had told him that a woman with black hair had been seen peering into his garden, speaking with his son, with some insisting that she seemed to rise above the bricks. They said that a black bird had followed her, often a sign of bad luck and a harbinger of death and disaster. Everyone noticed she was not like any other woman in town; she wore blue rather than gray, with no bonnet covering her hair, and her leather boots were red. It was clear she did as she pleased, despite the magistrates’ rules. If indeed she was a witch with bad intentions, she could have easily had her revenge; she might have stolen the Hathorne boy and left a changeling in his place, a faceless poppet made of straw. Even an ordinary woman who had been betrayed might have started a fire in the garden, a flame that would have quickly spread to the roof and the gables. But Maria did no such damage. Revenge was not in her nature. She knew full well that whatever she sent into the world would come back to her threefold, be it vengeance or kindness.

Cadin, however, wasn’t as generous. When Hathorne came home at the end of the day, he was puzzled by the small gray rocks on his roof, tossed down as if some imp had marked his house for doom. This past winter he had done his best to leave behind his other life, the one in which he’d been enchanted. Whenever he yearned for Maria, he went out to a shed behind the house, removed his coat, then his loose linen shirt, and he beat himself with a rope, leaving marks on his back to remind him of the failures of the flesh. He had considered speaking with his father, that stern and illustrious man who had led troops to victory in King Philip’s War against the native people, and was said to be the most upstanding man in Massachusetts. But he knew what his father would have told him: even a fool must pay for his wrongdoings. John was not ready to pay, and yet what was done could not easily be undone. There was proof of his sin after all. There was the child.

When John stepped inside his house, he spied a letter on the table in the parlor, folded and sealed with melted candle wax.

“What’s this?” he asked his wife.

“The boy says a witch gave it to him.” Ruth had been worrying all day, ever since little John had deposited the letter into the basket of herbs. The woman who’d given it to him had had a black bird with her, their son had said, and she wore red boots. Weren’t these the signs of a witch? Ruth had kept the shutters closed and the door locked. She made certain their son remained in a small chamber that had no windows, where he would be safe. There was evil in this world, just as there was good, and it didn’t hurt to be careful. Ruth had never spoken back to John, or discussed what had happened to her parents, but she wasn’t a fool. Something was wrong. She’d washed her hands three times after touching the letter. She had a sinking feeling inside of her, as if she’d swallowed rocks. She’d heard stones pelting against the roof all afternoon, and she shuddered with each one that was thrown. Now that her husband had at last come home, she kept her eyes downcast, as she always did when speaking to him. He had rescued her from the fate of many Quakers, and she felt she owed him everything. Why was it then that her heart hurt as it beat against her ribs?

“Our boy is telling you a story.” Hathorne addressed his wife as he might a child, doing his best to convince her as he spoke, and convincing himself as well. “Don’t be silly.” He opened the letter, unfolded the message within, then quickly refolded the parchment and slipped it into his coat. “This is pure nonsense,” he told his wife. “Nothing more.”