Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(56)

“Do women not come to you for potions?”

“For herbs to cure illness, yes.”

“For magic, for vengeance, for spells, for the devil’s work.”

“No.” She was freezing, as if a block of ice had been set upon her. Even now John said nothing. “I’m a healer.”

“Did you not think of enchanting the sheriffs who came for you and consider killing them?” she was asked. But these were not questions, she understood that now, they were statements of facts in these men’s eyes. This is the way it must have begun for Hannah. With lies, with fear, with a man who refused to look at her.

“I did not, sir,” she managed to say.

“Speaking falsely is a sin, you understand,” she was told. One constable had sworn he had a bite mark on his shoulder. The other had been in a fever since he’d touched her.

“Treating someone falsely is a sin as well.” Maria glared at Hathorne. He must have felt her eyes upon him, for at last he returned her glance. It was as though they had never met.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” the old magistrate said, quoting from Exodus. It was the same quote used on the title page of The Discovery of Witches, written by Matthew Hopkins, who had overseen the deaths of so many in the first Essex County in England.

A woman in disguise was called into the room; she’d been covered in a veil that reached to the floor to hide her identity. As a witness against Maria, she had pleaded to remain anonymous, fearing for her life. To turn against a witch was dangerous business and her pleas had been answered. When she was seated before the council, she was to respond by nodding, so that Maria would not know her by her voice and curse her. Without the iron cuffs Maria would have known her in an instant through use of the sight, but now this enemy of hers might have been any woman in town. The veiled witness nodded yes to enchantments, yes to a promise of murder, yes to curses, yes to sexual perversities, yes to speaking with the devil. Had she seen her fly? Yes, indeed, she had. Had she seen feathers fall away and flesh appear to cover the witch’s bones? Yes as well. Black plumes sprouting upon her skin? Yes, a thousand times yes.

“You are a liar,” Maria said before she could stop herself. “And you will pay for these lies.”

“Are you threatening witchery right here before us?” the chief magistrate asked.

“Where is her proof?” Maria wished to know.

“Her proof is the word of a God-fearing woman.”

Maria sat back in her chair. Hannah had told her how God-fearing people had nailed her cat to her front door while it was still alive. How they had given her moldy bread and no water in jail. How she’d been stripped and searched to see if she had a tail. Already the metal cuffs had drawn blood on Maria’s wrists, black blood that was burning through the wooden floor. Let no one see it, let no one know, Hannah had warned her, should her fate ever lead her to a prison cell. Do not speak or argue. Do not proclaim your innocence. They want you to be guilty, they want to mock your sins, they want to keep you in irons, and they would most certainly like to see you burn.



* * *



The trial lasted three days, during which time there were several accusers, some Maria knew and others she had never seen before. The farmer who had shot her; a woman who had lost her sight and insisted Maria had climbed through her bedchamber window, causing her to go blind so the witch could have relations with her husband; the husband himself, who agreed and wore a blindfold so he would not have to look at Maria and perhaps fall under her spell yet again; a local fruit vendor, who had tried to sell her rotted lemons, for which she had refused to pay.

John Hathorne was the one who said she should not be kept in her nightdress, and in truth, many of the wives in town had complained. There were scabs on her wrists from the rubbing of the metal against flesh. Lydia Colson managed to sneak her another small bottle of ink, and all night she attended to the blue journal.

Wherever you are, she wrote to her daughter, I did not wish to leave you.

She was guilty, proven so by spectral evidence, rumor, and gossip that could not be proved, only believed, based on nothing more than a random bite mark, or a black crow feather, or a man who swore she had come to him in his dreams. They intended to test her by water. If she was a witch she would float, if she was a woman she would drown. Either way, she was likely to die. They fitted her with a pair of heavy black boots filled with stones that would sink any normal woman, and she was made to wear a white garment with pockets in which she could carry more stones. She was so weighed down she could not walk and had to be carried to the chair she was then tied to. They were at the lake that had no bottom, with its weedy shore and dark water. Maria gazed at the green leaves on the trees, wondering if they would be the last beautiful things on earth that she would ever see. She recited her daughter’s name, her mother’s name, and Hannah’s name. None of the names were said aloud, but her lips moved quickly, in a silent chant. Certain people in the crowd swore she was calling down an incantation and that all of Salem would pay a price for what they did on this day when there were damselflies drifting over the black water, when the sun was strong, when those who had doubts did not dare to come forward lest they be accused of giving aid and solace to a witch.

They carried her chair into the water, though the men who did so quaked with fear, for they all believed there was a monster in the lake. Still, they went deeper, convinced that the devil might appear before them if they called him by his name. They were up to their ankles, then up to their knees, then they pushed the chair out into the water, the bottomless depths, where stray lilies floated, creamy white blooms on pads whose tendrils reached toward shore, wrapping slimy strands around the men’s legs so that it seemed they might be pulled down as well until they charged backwards.