Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(76)

A witch’s tears burn, they turn her inside out, they are not meant to be, and yet once they began they were difficult to stop. A witch could drown in her own tears if she wasn’t careful; she could scorch the ground beneath her. As Maria watched Samuel go, she was thinking of Abraham, buried a mile away, an expert on love, who had told her in the moments before his death that he saw love inside her. It looked like a dove, he said, but appearances could fool you. Some people mistakenly believed it was peaceful and calm, but that wasn’t what love was. It was a wolf. If you open the door and call it inside, you must sink to your knees and say its name, you must do so whether you are cursed or not.

That was the mystery Abraham had come to understand. Always and everywhere, love was the answer.





PART FOUR

The Charm





1691

I.




One morning Faith awoke to the scent of apple pie, the fragrance so strong she could have sworn that her mother was in the kitchen, baking her favorite treat. She looked out her window to see that her foster mother had pulled up all the plants in her herb garden by their roots, and was busily tossing them into a bonfire. Faith had carefully planted the ingredients for Courage Tea, currants and thyme, and now they were little more than twigs, along with all the rest. Martha hadn’t worn gloves and her hands bled, pierced by thorns and brambles; all the same she ignored her wounds as the pious must, and stood close to the heat to make certain it flared.

When Faith came into the yard, she was distressed to see her ruined garden. She let out a sob that chased the sparrows from the trees, and a wind rose from the sea, filled with stinging salt. Martha grabbed Faith’s hand and surprised her by stabbing her with the small paring knife she’d used to cut down the stalks that now lay in shambles. Two drops of black blood fell onto the ground, burning through the grass.

“It’s still inside you,” Martha cried when confronted with this sight. After all she’d done to save the child, the girl was still tainted. She’d given up everything for Faith: her home, her house, her past. A bloodline witch could not be cured or changed or charmed or made to obey, even if she pretended to be perfect. Martha went upstairs to search the girl’s room and soon found the black mirror and the notebook. She ripped the notebook into shreds, and when Martha broke the mirror, the glass shattered into a thousand black pieces, one of which stabbed her directly below her eye, leaving a small deep mark, as if she’d been pecked at by the beak of a bird. From then on the windows in Faith’s chamber were nailed shut. Her door would be locked from the outside at night.

“I’m saving you from evil,” Martha said to Faith calmly, when the girl raced up the stairs to see her room had become even more of a prison than it had been before. “Will you do as I say?” Martha asked.

“Of course, Mother.” The words burned her mouth, for Faith was not a liar by nature and she didn’t intend to follow this woman’s twisted rules.

It was a Friday. Faith knew there might be women waiting for her that evening in the cemetery, perhaps they would stay until morning’s first light if she didn’t appear and they were desperate enough. She sat on the floor of her room, a prisoner, and yet even with the window nailed shut she imagined the scent of apple pie, made with cinnamon and brown sugar, a treat her mother would make especially for her on every birthday. Her true mother, the mother she had lost, the one who told her to always be true to herself, even if she had to hide that truth from others. Her life in Essex County came rushing back to her due to the scent of apples. She imagined the woods where the ferns grew so tall, and the bottomless lake, and the serpent that would eat bread from her hand. She recalled her mother’s voice singing her to sleep, and the doll the man named Goat had made for her, and the wolf who had slept beside her bed, and her own natural red hair before it was dyed with bark and ink. She remembered the women who came to the door at night, and the tonics and spells her mother created for them, often asking nothing in return. Apples were used in many of these charms, the seeds worn in an amulet, or a red apple itself pricked with a needle while the name of one’s beloved was repeated. A woman was then to sleep with the apple under her pallet, make a pie out of it, and feed it to the one she loved. Faith remembered the book in which everything she needed to know had already been written.



* * *



It was that night, while locked in her room, that she realized if she continued to obey Martha she would betray herself, perhaps even lose herself. She must do what she believed to be right. She would not spend another year pretending to be someone she was not.

It was the last Friday of the month, and she knew the peddler would be in Gravesend; perhaps he would help her. As soon as Martha went to bed, Faith took up a garden spade she kept hidden beneath her bed. She hit the cloudy window glass until at last it cracked beneath her touch. When she pushed it out, tiny glittering shards rained down into the garden. She threw down a satchel of belongings, then climbed down the vines, holding onto the prickly, twisted creepers. As soon as she touched the ground, she took off running. She knew where the peddler kept his wagon, and she rushed to the Indian path that led through the flatlands of Brooklyn where he and his horse were settled in for the night. Faith gave him everything of worth that the women of Gravesend had given her. Frankly, it wasn’t much, and when she handed over the silverware she’d been given, she worried that he might reject it, for it had all turned black in her hands. All the same Jack Finney knew real silver when he saw it. He’d heard stories of women back home in Cornwall who turned silver black, and he knew what they were thought to be, but he was a practical man, and he stayed away from anything considered to be magic. He believed in buying and selling, and in taking good care of his horse, and in staying off the back roads at night, when robbers might be searching for a man such as himself who might have a tin box filled with silver and coins. He thought Faith was quite calm for a child who was running away, but he could tell she was serious. She slept in the wagon, beneath an old quilt he’d picked up when a recently deceased woman’s belongings were sold at a good, cheap price. When Finney woke in the morning, Faith had already been up for hours.