Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(63)

During her first weeks in New York, Maria didn’t eat or drink or sleep, and she didn’t answer when Samuel knocked at the door. Her loss was too enormous. She could not bear to speak to another person. Early in the mornings she sneaked out to search the city streets, hoping that luck would allow her to spy a girl with red hair. In time, she found several, but none were her daughter, and she came home exhausted. After a while she seemed to give up, and she took to her bed and slept for days, until Dias woke her and said if nothing else she must drink water or she would make herself ill.

“When she does come back, she will need you alive,” he told her.

He made adafina, a chicken stew his mother had often served, consisting of chicken, fava beans, onions, chickpeas, garlic, and cumin, and a sponge cake called pan de Espa?a that had been baked by Jews in Spain since the year 1000, often using potatoes instead of flour. When Maria sat down at the table, she realized she was starving. She was still eating her supper long after Abraham had gone up to bed.

“Do you think this will win me over?” she asked Samuel Dias when she was done. The food had been delicious and he had spent hours making it. He also baked a chocolate cake, using his mother’s recipe, a sweet so drenched in rum a single slice could make a person tipsy. For some reason Maria felt alive again, and guilty that her heart still managed to beat, though it was broken in two.

“I don’t have to win you over.” Dias shrugged. “I already won.”

Maria couldn’t help but laugh at his arrogance. “That was before. Now there’s a curse.”

“I don’t care,” Dias said. “I loved you before there was a curse.”

They were both stunned by this admission, so they said nothing and ate more, tearing apart oranges from Spain that were fragrant and sweet. Then they discussed their situation and the terms of their living arrangement, including the fact that he must not love her, it was too dangerous to do so. She thought back to the gallows, how she had looked at John Hathorne and set a curse upon anyone who might fall in love with a member of the Owens family. She’d sought to protect herself and her daughter and any of their descendants from the grief she’d known.

“You can’t be in love with me,” Maria told Samuel.

“If you insist, I will say that I’m not.”

The butter in a dish on the table had already begun to melt, a sign that someone in the house was in love.

“Why is that happening?” Maria asked when she saw how it melted.

“When it’s hot, things melt.”

“I see.” Maria was burning as well.

“What’s love?” Samuel shrugged. “You can’t hold it in your hand. You can’t see it. It’s something you feel. Perhaps it’s not even real.” He thought his argument was excellent, until Maria laughed at him.

“How many women have you told this story to?” she wanted to know.

Then Samuel was serious. “Only you.”

With that, he won the argument and they went up to bed. Maria insisted they make no vows to each other, no contracts of love, no promises, nothing that could call down the curse. Of course he agreed; he would have agreed to anything in order to have her. When Maria woke the next morning, she gazed at Samuel’s broad back as he slept, and she felt something that she couldn’t name in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps it was desire, or affection, or perhaps it was more, the thing you couldn’t hold in your hand or see with your own eyes, but was there all the same.

Whatever it was, it was a mistake. At the age of ten Maria had vowed never to be in love; she had seen what it had done to Han nah and Rebecca and the women who arrived late at night, desperate for spells. She’d only been infatuated with John Hathorne, the flirtations of a girl, and there’d been disastrous results. She set stricter limits for herself with Samuel. She would sleep in his bed when he was at home and she would care for his father when he was at sea, but he must never ask her for more. The problem was, they couldn’t keep to the rules and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They lived like this for nearly a year, their life at night a secret, so that Maria often entirely ignored Samuel during the daylight hours. And then one morning Maria saw a beetle in the yard and she felt a chill. Upon examination she found it was not the wretched deathwatch beetle; all the same she feared for Samuel’s safety. She was grieving over Faith and she didn’t think she could survive losing someone else. From then on she locked her door and didn’t answer when she heard Samuel at night. One morning she found that he had slept in the hall. When she woke him, Samuel stood to face her. It was clear that he was stung by her rejection.

“If you want me to leave, say so,” he told Maria. “I’ll go now. Today.”

“This is your house. Are you sure you want me?”

He did, too much, but he didn’t respond.

That night she recited an incantation to send love away. The next morning he packed to leave.

“You shouldn’t go away,” Abraham told his son. “Life is short and getting shorter. I know you want Maria. Stay with her.”

“She won’t let me.” Samuel continued packing his bag. “She says we’re cursed.”

“Everyone is cursed,” the old man assured him. “That’s life.” He shook his head and thought that young people were fools. “You might as well do as you please.”