Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(48)
When she went to the courthouse, Maria was mindful that a woman in her situation must not call attention to herself. Not yet. Not now. She wore a white cap she had sewn, using the white cotton lining of the bodice of her blue dress. She had affixed white cuffs to a gray shift so that she would appear more presentable. Her hair was pinned up so that no one could spy that it was not long enough to knot into a braid but sheared at chin length, as if she were a boy. A legal document was worth little, for laws are made to serve the men who create them, and are rarely meant to honor women, but land is difficult to take away from the rightful owner. She kept her eyes lowered when she went before the magistrate, and she spoke softly. Be careful what you say when you come before such men, for they will find guilt in innocence, and evil in what is most natural. The magistrate approved of her manner of speech, and he allowed her to buy the acreage she camped on, for it was considered worthless. She used Hathorne’s silver, for unlike the gems, these coins were real enough, and it gave her pleasure to know the man who wished her to vanish had made it possible for her to own land. That same day her ownership was recorded in the book of deeds and stamped with the clerk’s initials. Married women could not own property, but a woman without a husband was free to do as she pleased.
Maria Owens did exactly that.
1685
II.
By the age of five, Faith was a charming, well-behaved girl with talents all her own. She had already learned that judgment was everywhere in their world, and one should keep one’s private thoughts and deeds and attributes to oneself. Her mother warned that being different could cause grief, for men often destroyed what they didn’t understand. When the child asked who her father was, for surely she must have one, Maria simply said that some things were best not to know, and that, whoever he was, he had a darling child.
Faith understood that theirs was a world of secrets. She told no one that she could start a fire simply by imagining a red flame or that she could leap from the roof and land softly on the balls of her feet. She could call birds and fish to her, and because of this she soon discovered that certain rumors in town were, indeed, correct; there was a serpent in Leech Lake, a large gray-scaled eel-like creature she soon trained to eat crusts of bread from her hand. She told no one about his existence, for already she had witnessed how men handled any creatures they deemed to be monsters. This winter, she had spied two hunters dragging a she-wolf from her den; they murdered her in the snow, along with her pup. Wolves were outlawed in the colony, and men went about killing them one by one, as they did with the native people. One of the first laws the Puritans had passed in 1630 was to place a bounty on wolves, and that included Indian dogs, which looked to be a mixture of a wolf and a fox. A black wolf’s fur was worth the most, and the poor mother wolf had a coat of that color. Faith had been hidden behind the bramble bushes, her hand over her mouth so they wouldn’t hear her sobs. It was a terrible thing to have witnessed, and it changed who she was. She felt her difference tenfold, and the part of her that was human was ashamed of humankind.
Another pup, overlooked by the hunters because he was so small and weak, soon emerged from the den. His half-opened eyes were silver-gray, the same shade as Faith’s own, and his coat was pure black, all the better to slip through the night unnoticed. He went to Faith as if he’d known she was waiting for him, and that she could be trusted, and that they belonged to one another. Faith raced home carrying the tiny surviving pup. Maria gave Faith a leather glove filled with goat’s milk for the wolf pup to drink, sucking on a hole cut in the fingertip. Faith kept the wolf in her bed that night, to make sure he stayed warm. She named him Keeper, for she didn’t intend to let him go. Sometime after midnight the pup ceased whimpering, and soon they were dreaming the same dream, girl and wolf alike, a dream of blood in the snow, and of warm milk, and of a bed in which to sleep without worry or fear.
In the early morning, Faith carried Keeper through the dark to the little shed where they kept two goats, and filled the glove with milk. Maria found her there once the sun had risen, asleep in the straw with the wolf by her side. She recognized a familiar when she saw one. Such a creature must always come to you on its own. You cannot choose it, it must choose you. Once it does, it will be loyal for the rest of its life, as Cadin had been.
“Wolves are killed here,” Maria told her daughter that day. “But if you call the creature a dog, then a dog is what it will be.”
Faith nodded solemnly. She knew that people in town stared at her red hair, thought by some to be a mark of the devil’s own, and gawked at her mother’s red boots. Everything they were must be a secret, and the same was true for the wolf. From the very first day, when Keeper was a tiny half-blind pup, he did his best to follow Faith wherever she went, refusing to be parted from her, fiercely loyal. She laughed and called him her little goat, for he soon enough ran to the goats in the barn, wishing to be fed, and he played with the tolerant creatures, biting at their hooves and running beneath them, until, having had enough, they butted him and chased him from the barn. Maria wondered if her daughter remembered the man they’d called Goat, for she still slept with the poppet doll he’d made for her. Maria had never told anyone how close Samuel Dias had come to death, a mere breath away. Even then he had continued to talk, as if there would never be enough time to say all that was inside of him. His stories had often seemed like imaginary tales of sea monsters and storms, but his advice to Maria had been true. He’d warned her to be careful in Massachusetts, for men would be men, especially in such a self-righteous place as Salem, and judges would continue to judge those who came before them.