Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(64)

Samuel did one thing he knew Maria wouldn’t wish him to do. He left a leather pouch on the table. Inside was a sapphire on a silver chain.

This one is real, he’d written in the note he left behind.

Você n?o pode finger algo real n?o existe.

You can’t pretend something real doesn’t exist.



* * *



After Samuel left, Maria and Abraham Dias settled into the routine of two people in mourning. They comforted each other, for each knew sorrow. Men who were sailors rarely became accustomed to living on land, and Abraham Dias longed for the life he’d once had. He spent his days waiting for his son, even though Samuel might be gone for months at a time. The old man’s memory had begun to fail more each day, still he knew that he was in New York, and that he lived in his son’s house with a beautiful woman whose name he sometimes forgot, especially in the evenings when Maria returned from searching for Faith and poured him a glass of port. All the same, Abraham shared his stories with her as he sipped his nightly drink. He always remembered these stories, even though he’d often forgotten what he’d had for his supper that very day. He told her about the joy of riding on the back of a whale, the salt spray filling his mouth, and about a land where all the bears were white and it was so cold the earth was covered with ice even in the heart of August, and about the Barbary Coast, where the leopards and lions would eat beef from the palm of your hand if you had the nerve to reach out to them, and where diamonds glittered up through holes in the earth, as if there were stars not only above but below. The stories that she loved best were when Abraham recounted his son’s early days at sea, when the young Samuel was so captivated by the starry heavens above he didn’t sleep at night, but instead lay on his back on the deck memorizing the position of the stars so that he might chart the sky.

Abraham Dias tired easily and went to bed directly after he had his nightly meal, which was just as well. He would have been confused by the women who came to the door in search of remedies once darkness had fallen. He likely would have looked among them for his wife, who had been gone for so long. She had been young and beautiful when he first met her and he had loved her too much, so much that she still appeared in his dreams, although she had been burned to ash long ago. Her name was Regine, but she was called Reina, for to Abraham she was a queen.

Maria had a deep affection for the old man, who had taught her how to make Chocolate Tipsy Cake, and she hated to leave him on his own when she left the house, for he was prone to wander, often finding his way to the rough area of the docks. Once he’d been tied to a post by a gang of unruly boys and left there in the rain, unable to escape from the ropes that bound him until Keeper at last tracked him down and Maria cut him free. From then on, whenever she went to search for her daughter, which was her daily habit, she employed a hired girl named Evelyn to watch him, even though he was annoyed when left in another’s care.

“She doesn’t give a damn about stories,” he would complain about his caretaker, a dull girl who often fell asleep when she was supposed to be watching him. “She’s not like you.”

“Pretend she’s me and before you know it I’ll be back,” Maria said to soothe him.



* * *



Maria continued to search for Faith, and each time she came home, unsuccessful, she turned to the Grimoire, also to no effect. She had no idea what thwarted her, making it impossible to locate Faith. She’d begun to think she’d lost the sight. By now she was known in the neighborhood as the woman with the stolen child, for she’d gone door-to-door asking if anyone had seen her daughter. The other mothers pitied her when they saw her in the short black veil she wore when she was in public. She paid informants, but those who said they had seen a red-haired girl in the care of a tall, thin woman were either out of date or inventing sightings in order to collect some silver.

Keeper was always beside Maria as she searched farther northward, in the wild area beyond the wall built by the Dutch to keep out native people, and pirates, and the British. Wall Street, built in 1685, ran beside the ramparts and crossed the old Indian path now called Broadway. Maria trailed the river on the west side, taking the road called Love Lane, a nighttime trysting place, hiking into the highlands where there were still large Dutch farms, and making her way through the woods where some Lenape people remained, hidden in the old forest where the trees were so big it would take ten men to circle the trunk of a single one. People grew accustomed to seeing Maria and Keeper; some of those they passed called out a greeting to the purposeful black dog and the woman wearing a veil, but there were those, such as the old farmers who had been among those who settled New York more than sixty years earlier, who recognized the wolf for what he was. The Lenape people did as well, but they called him brother, for they knew that when the Dutch and the English claimed the land they’d treated Keeper’s kind as they had the original people, with the intent to own and destroy.

Nothing helped Maria Owens, not even the back pages of the Grimoire, which contained those spells from Agrippa and The Key of Solomon only to be used in the most dire of times. At last, she performed an act of desperation. She lay on her back, naked on the floor, inside a pentagram she had drawn with charcoal. She was surrounded by burning candles, a brass bowl of blood and fingernail clippings and strands of hair on fire. She had made a small wax figure of Martha that twisted in the heat. This was left-handed magic, dangerous to one and all.