Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(60)

“Have you come to free me?” Maria asked.

She sat on the floor, for there was no bed, although Lydia Colson had brought her a woolen blanket.

“Tell them what they want to hear,” John Hathorne said. “Confess you have worked with the devil. I’ll help you leave here.”

“With false gems?” How could it be that he seemed a complete stranger to her?

“With silver and a wagon to take you to Boston or New York. I can keep the girl.”

Maria rose to her feet. She could feel something flicker inside her, despite her iron chains.

“I’ve discussed it with my wife,” Hathorne went on. “We’ve agreed this is the right course. We’ll take the child and treat her as if she were our own.”

“She is your own. But you will never have her.”

He backed off, seeing the fever in Maria’s eyes. “Then take her with you when you leave this place if that’s what you wish. Just sign a confession.”

“I confess that I was a fool and a young girl who knew nothing. But what is your excuse?”

“You refuse my help?”

“Unlike you, I am not a liar. I have nothing to confess. Not even who the father of my child might be.”

Hathorne bowed his head and wished the world were a different place. But it was not. There were no turtles in the sea, no courtyard filled with Jamaican apple trees. He stepped outside, where the jailor was dozing on a bench. The air was bright and the day was blue. A man had no choice but to live in the world he was granted.

“Go forward,” Hathorne told the jailor before he walked home to Washington Street, where the black leaves were falling, and would continue to fall until not a single one was left.



* * *



When Maria was marched along the street, Hathorne closed himself into his study. He could not watch her pass by, but Ruth Gardner Hathorne went into the yard and stood at the fence, her hands wrapped around the wooden pickets. She did not know why her eyes were burning when she saw Maria, or why her face was wet with tears. She wished she could walk past the gate, out of the yard, and out of her life. Maria was instructed to stare at the ground, but she lifted her eyes to Ruth, who felt a burden of guilt even though she’d had no voice in all that had happened and all that was about to transpire. Perhaps it was because they had the same love line in the center of their left hands, one that altered halfway across their palms as their paths diverged.

John Hathorne was so chilled to the bone, he went out to stand in the sunlight. It was then he saw his wife there with tears in her eyes.

“You must take the child,” she said.

He had never heard her speak in that tone before. Perhaps the girl was their burden. He nodded and left the garden, but before he went to inform Martha Chase of his decision, he made his way to Gallows Hill. He went to offer Maria grace in her final moments, a prayer book in his hands.

For Maria it had been a long walk to the hillside, and it was meant to be so. Let it be difficult and painful, as the sentence for crimes of witchery must be. The accused’s feet were to bleed; in her white shift, which was as sheer as her nightdress, she would remain unprotected from brambles and thorns. All the while, Maria thought of Faith. My darling, she thought. I have written down the lessons you need to know in a blue notebook. She’d told Dias where the notebook was hidden, in the wall of the jail cell, and also where he would find her Grimoire, in the bureau drawer of her cottage, should his plan not work as he intended. There will be no need for me to do so, he had assured her. You’ll be here to give her those books.

But if, she had said.

Anything you wish, he had assured her.

Maria had little faith in this world, where every woman must behave. She had grown up without a mother, and now Faith would likely do the same. She trusted that Martha would keep Faith inside today, and close the shutters, and that when she spoke of Maria she would say, at least, that she had loved her daughter, and that when Samuel Dias came to the door she would unlock it, for he had agreed to take Faith and raise her as his own if need be, and show her that there were other worlds, far across the sea.

There were swifts in the air as they crossed the pasture where Cadin had been murdered. Maria concentrated on the blades of grass and the warmth of the sun on her shoulders. When they came to the hill, there was a crowd assembled, not a raucous, wild gathering, but a solemn throng, as if they were attending a church service, and, in fact, there were those who held hymnals. The constables acted as the gallows men; the older one had overseen a hanging, but the young one, named Ellery, had not, and he had been sick all morning and had come to the gallows late and had rushed to prepare. The frame was a simple hanging construction, hastily built for the event. There were not even stairs leading up to the platform. Maria was lifted up by the jailor, who wore heavy gloves so he would not have to touch her and risk becoming bewitched, for to look at her was said to be dangerous.

Risk or not, people couldn’t take their eyes off Maria Owens. Most of the women who had come to her for help stayed home, refusing to attend the hanging; some feared they would somehow be implicated, others could not abide such a terrible wrongdoing; still others, the most grateful among them, were in attendance. Anne Hatch was there, doing her best not to cry, losing her faith on this day, not in God, but in mankind and in those who sat in judgment and saw evil where there was none.