Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(62)

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They went through the woods, the wolf following at a distance. At the lake Maria stripped off the white shift she had worn for weeks. Dias could not take his eyes off her, so he didn’t try. He gave her his coat to wear once she had bathed, then spoke to her in Portuguese. “We’ll look through every house in this damn county.”

But the sight had returned to Maria and she could see and feel what an ordinary woman could not. She knew her daughter would not be found in Massachusetts. The green rain she had called down upon the people of Salem had also washed away any trail that might have been left, making it impossible for the wolf to track Faith. Keeper knew it as well. The girl was gone.

They spent the night at the cabin, with Dias setting up his hammock on the porch. When she couldn’t get any rest, Maria came to lie beside him.

“What made you come here now?” she asked.

“The tree.” They could see the magnolia, the blooms like white stars. He had come here to let the tree speak for him. His heart was hitting against his chest, and he hoped Maria couldn’t feel its ragged rhythm, despite the curse she had called down from the gallows. He, a man who could talk to anyone in six languages, was now tongue-tied in her presence. If he could speak he would say the magnolia was his heart, given to her to do with it as she wished.



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When Maria awoke in the dark of morning, she found that Samuel had gone to the harbor and returned with news. Martha had paid for two passages to New York. She’d had a red-haired girl with her. Maria threw her arms around him, as she had when he was so near death. She’d thought he didn’t know how close he’d come to the end, but he’d always known, just as he knew that she would ask him to take her to New York Harbor, and that he would agree.

“You will not find New York to be like any other place,” he warned her. “You can go there as one person and become someone else entirely.”

Searching a city of nearly five thousand people would be all but impossible. It was easy to disappear in New York. It was here that men who wished to avoid their marriages vanished without a trace, women who yearned for a world where there were no rules settled in, sailors who jumped ship found that no sheriff could find them, and Dutchmen went off into the wild land beyond the wall that marked the limits of the city and were soon forgotten.

Before they left, Maria went inside her cabin one last time. She’d been barefoot, and now she pulled on the red boots her mother had bought in the first Essex County. She took the blue blanket and the poppet Samuel had made for Faith and packed them along with the Grimoire and the black mirror. She peered into the glass before she stored the mirror, but didn’t recognize herself. Maria was more magic than mortal, but even a witch can be changed by sorrow. Nothing would ever be the same, but Hannah had taught her that there were times, rare as they were, when what was done could be undone.





PART THREE

Divination





1686

I.




They took up residence in Manhattan on a street called Maiden Lane, not far from Minetta Creek, where the surrounding land was farmed by free men who had once been slaves. Originally called Maagde Paatje by the Dutch, the street began as a footpath near a stream where lovers often met and women gathered in the mornings to do laundry. At the most southern end stood the Fly Market, where fish and vegetables and fruit were sold, a crowded, filthy place where housewives could find anything they might need and witches could find rare ingredients, such as the bark and berries of the Dracaena draco, the red resin tree of Morocco and the Canary Islands, if they knew where to look.

The house on Maiden Lane was well furnished, with hand-knotted rugs from Persia dyed with indigo, and satin curtains. There was white tableware from France and expensive cutlery that had immediately blackened as soon as Maria unpacked it, though every knife and spoon had been marked by the stamp of a fine silversmith in London. There was a yard in which to grow herbs, including tall plumy sage and aromatic rosemary, along with feverfew and wormwood, and currant bushes whose young leaves made a fragrant mixture when lemon zest and rosemary were added for Maria’s Travel Well Tea that helped to prevent scurvy. In the rear of the garden, there was a spiky fence to ensure that children from the neighborhood would not stumble upon certain plants and mistakenly ingest herbs that would make them ill, the darker ingredients such as bittersweet nightshade, foxglove, laurel, castor beans.

Samuel’s father, Abraham, often sat in the garden on fine days, wishing he were at sea alongside his son. He still had on his leather hat that he’d always worn when sailing. The old fellow was a charming man with a thousand stories, more even than his son, but he had been ailing and Samuel had purchased the house so that his father could comfortably live out his final years in Manhattan. He’d bought the small manor from the first Jewish resident of New York, Jacob Barsimon, who had arrived in the city in 1654, traveling from Amsterdam with the Dutch West India Company. Although Samuel bought the house for his father, he’d chosen it with Maria in mind. Right away he had a team of workers come to stake out the garden plot and cut down the weeds and nettles that grew wild, and he made certain there was a chamber for Faith, ready when she was found.

When they first arrived, Maria had locked herself in her chamber with the Grimoire. She attempted every spell that might bring a missing person home. She lit candles, laid out stones and bird feathers on the wooden floor, slit the palms of her hands so that her blood could call out to Faith. She cut up one of Faith’s dresses and dropped the fabric into a flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, a spell meant to call a person to arrive on your doorstep in less than twenty-four hours. None of it worked. Try as she might she could not use the sight to find her daughter. When she gazed into the black mirror, all she saw was a land that seemed to stretch on forever where hundreds of rabbits gathered, nothing more.