Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(61)

It was a fine day, of the sort when it was possible to forget the snows of winter, for the world was fresh and green. Maria was asked if she wished her eyes to be covered, but she waved the blindfold away. She remembered that when she had looked in her black mirror, she had not seen her fate conclude at the end of a rope. The magistrates had gathered to watch their will be done. The air was so still the cries of the swifts echoed, and a mass of swooping crows called to each other, gathering as they were known to do when one of their kind was threatened.

If it was Maria’s fate to live, she wished to make sure everyone in attendance knew it. She waved the hangman away so that she might speak. “If I do not die, am I then innocent and allowed to go free?” she asked the magistrates. She looked so young with her hair cropped short, there in her billowing white shift.

“Sister, you would,” the first magistrate said. “But that is unlikely.”

As they placed the rope around her throat, Maria gazed at the tree line. She saw the white horse tied to a tree and she thought about the day her father came for her mother, and the look of joy on Rebecca’s face. That was the moment Maria had decided she would never fall in love. That was her mistake.

After the noose was looped around her throat, the constables unlocked the iron cuffs. Maria once more felt the stirring of the heat of her bloodline, carried from mother to daughter for as long as time had existed. She saw John Hathorne among the crowd, and she couldn’t stop herself. She cried out a curse that opened the skies, and a squall arose, a drenching rain that would flood every farm and every house. The man who had brought her to Essex County stood in the field and nearly drowned as he gulped down rain. She would protect herself and her daughters and all the daughters who might follow from any such betrayals in the future. “To any man who ever loves an Owens, let this curse befall you, let your fate lead to disaster, let you be broken in body and soul, and may it be that you never recover.”



* * *



Had anyone bothered to look at the magistrate, they would have seen he was chalk white and shaking, even though he was still the same strong man he’d been when he’d come to Gallows Hill. If he had looked at the palm of his hand, he could have read the truth. His fate had changed on this day. He thought to run, but could not move. He could not stop watching her.

Maria leapt from the platform, the rope around her throat. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and there was silence as the trees dropped their leaves. The crowd drew a breath, expecting to view the horrible contortions of a hanged person who dangled in the air, but instead the line of rope broke. It snapped in two, and Maria landed with her feet in the mud, the rope still around her neck, as alive as anyone, as alive as she’d ever been.

People began to run away. They dashed through the muck in the field, hauling the startled children they’d brought to witness the hanging. Men who’d previously thought they were brave were afraid to turn back, for they remembered that an individual who looks back on evil may be turned into a pillar of salt. There were those who saw the horse approach, and the stranger who took Maria’s hand to pull her up to ride behind him. Later some people said it was the devil who’d been waiting for her, and that they had been tested and had failed, but there were others who said God always grants a pardon to those who are blameless and the fact that Maria couldn’t be killed was proof of her innocence.

Those who ridiculed the Nameless Art began to doubt that courts and laws could control magic. There was no need for them to know that Samuel Dias had replaced the constables’ original rope early that morning with one he’d used at sea, an old length rotted through by salt and exposure to the weather. He’d used it to tie up the magnolia tree, and when the rope split, he grew convinced that the tree had saved Maria. When spring came to Essex County, years later, the magnolia would bloom on the same day every year, a miracle and a joy to all who saw the white flowers blossom, the glory of the world.



* * *



They rode to Martha Chase’s house, where the chimney was falling down and the windows were shuttered. There was no sign of life. Maria felt a wave of darkness as they approached, which hit her like the heat from an oven. Her child was her heart and now she was hollow. When she pushed open the door, she saw that jars of raspberry jam had been left to cool on the table, and the place smelled sticky sweet. There was the small pallet where Faith had slept. Everything else was gone. They had left in a hurry.

Maria went into the garden. Samuel tried to comfort her, but she could find no comfort here. Then she heard a moaning from a storm cellar where Martha Chase stored her provisions and jars of jam. Samuel came to help unbolt the lock and then open the heavy wooden doors. When they peered into the dark, there was the wolf, Keeper, chained to the wall, his ribs showing, starved and abandoned. Made vicious by his ill treatment, he growled when he spied a human form.

Samuel put a hand on Maria’s arm as she went forward. “That’s a dangerous animal,” he said, concerned.

“Every mistreated creature is dangerous,” she replied.

She ran down the rotted wooden steps into the dark and let the wolf off his chain. He only glanced at her with his silver eyes, before he lurched past her and ran up the steps and into the house, in a mad search for Faith. When he found she wasn’t there, he lay down beside the pallet where she had slept, exhausted and hoarse from weeks of howling. Martha had duped him, tricking him into the cellar by tossing Faith’s clothes down the stairs. She’d then thrown a chain around his neck, attached to the mud-caked wall. Whenever Faith had heard howling, Martha had said it was the wind, and she’d vowed that the wind here always sounded like crying, and it was best to ignore it.