Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(53)

John Hathorne was quiet during the debate among the magistrates, but his heart was racing. By the end of the afternoon he would not have recognized the man he’d once been in Cura?ao. That fool had gone swimming in his clothes; he had broken his marriage vows and his vows to God. He was most certainly not the John Hathorne who threw in his lot with his fellow judges, agreeing that witchery would only lead to more witchery and to women who believed they could do as they pleased. At the end of the day John Hathorne stood up and declared there was reason enough to prosecute Maria Owens. That night in bed, his hands began to bleed. He rushed outside and poured water from the rain barrel over his palms, but he could not wash the blood away. In the morning, Ruth noticed that he wore gloves. Her mother had told her that this was what guilty men did after they committed a crime; they could not look at what they’d done, they hid it away from others and from themselves, but the mark was there all the same, for what was done could not be undone.



* * *



There was a rapping on Maria Owens’ door the following night. It was late and dark and the frogs were singing, as they did each spring. It sounded for a moment as if Cadin had returned, but when Maria woke she saw that the flame in the fireplace burned black, and she knew there was evil outside. She stood by the door in her white nightdress, reciting a spell of protection, but whoever had come was still there. It was then that she felt the same chill she’d had when Thomas Lockland and his brothers rode across Devotion Field with murder in mind. She took the wooden box of salt she kept in a bureau, then poured a thin line along the walls and the door. But the salt evaporated in a white cloud as soon as it was laid down. Nothing would stick; it was too late for protection. Keeper had begun to growl and scratch at the door.

“Tie up that dog of yours,” a man shouted.

Tell a witch to bind a wild creature and she will do the opposite. Maria opened the window at the back of the house. “Go,” she told Keeper. The wolf refused to move. He would listen to one voice alone. Faith had been woken by the ruckus and she sat up clutching her doll, terrified by the shouting outside.

“Tell Keeper to run,” Maria told Faith. She knew he would fight to the death to protect the child, and she sensed the men outside would be grateful for any excuse to shoot him. “It’s for his own good.”

Faith asked the wolf to go, and he reluctantly leapt through the window, tail between his legs. They could hear him out in the woods, howling. It was at that moment that Maria wondered if she shouldn’t have sent Faith with him, as Hannah had sent her away. But it was too late to reconsider. The door was flung open by a constable with an axe in his hand, for he’d been ready to break it down. As Maria was about to utter a curse, sending them on their way, to hell if need be, the constable grabbed her, though he wailed when he did, his jabbing fingers burning from the heat of her flesh. The second constable now had the opportunity to snap iron cuffs on her wrists. This is how a witch was caught, while she worried over her child, and fought off one man, forgetting there was another. The men saw a pile of books Maria had bought while in Boston, and collected them as evidence. Then Maria was taken barefoot, in her nightdress with no belongings, pushed out the door into the night as her child choked back tears.

Fate is what you make it, or you will be what it makes of you.

“You damn well burned me!” the first constable cried. Blisters were rising on his hands where he’d grabbed her. He didn’t dare touch Maria again. “You’ve rightly been accused.”

“Of what, I’d like to know,” she said.

“Do you see how she is? Prideful,” the constable muttered to his brother constable. He would have caned her then and there if he hadn’t been so afraid of her powers. He did have the nerve to tear off the amulet she wore, with Cadin’s feather inside; and when she protested, he insisted her distress was proof of witchcraft. They led her away in chains they’d attached to the cuffs. She was informed she was being taken to the jail. In the morning, she would be brought to the courthouse.

“I have a child!” Maria protested. “You cannot separate us.”

Faith had followed them, clinging to the skirts of her mother’s nightclothes. The child was very quiet and pale. She did her best to recall the remedies and enchantments she’d seen in the Grimoire, but nothing suited this moment, other than one dark spell that caused flames to arise on the ground when you tossed down six black stones. But she had no such stones, and she was too terrified to call up any of the magic from Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy that had been carefully transposed into the Grimoire.

“I don’t know which words to say,” she told her mother.

Maria silenced her girl with a warning. “Say nothing.” She could already tell that any words they spoke would be used against them, and even a child might be considered an emissary from the sinister world these men imagined to be everywhere. “They will get what they deserve.”

“Do you hear this witchery?” the first constable said to his brother. They stuffed their ears with grass so they could not be further bewitched.

Maria had no choice but to take Faith with her, as women who were confined to prison often did. She had once passed the jail, a small wooden building on a leafy corner of Federal Street, and had heard childish voices from within, and the crying of babies. What sort of world is this? she had wondered. This second Essex County was in many ways worse than the first.