Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(77)

“We have to leave right now,” she told him. “We must be as quick as we can.”



* * *



Martha had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed she was tied to a chair and drowned in a lake. She was turning blue, struggling for one more breath. When she awoke she was drenched. Pools of water had formed on the floor around her bed. Some dreams connect to the past, some to the future, some to the very moment you are in. Martha went to Faith’s chamber to find that the window was shattered. She peered outside to spy footprints in the sandy earth. They disappeared halfway down the road. Perhaps a wind had come up, or perhaps it was what occurred when a witch’s foot wasn’t nailed to the ground: she managed to escape. It was then Martha heard a clacking sound. It was somewhere in the wall, and when she put her ear to the plaster the clatter was so loud she felt deafened. She went downstairs and the clacking followed her, mocking her it seemed, tracking her like a dog though it was nothing more than a black beetle that had come out from the walls.

Martha grabbed her cape and left the house, the door swinging open behind her as she took off running. She wore the white bonnet she’d sewn years ago, in Essex County, and she spoke to the Lord as she raced up the lane, for she considered herself to be doing His work on earth. She refused to lose what she had gained and was ready to fight evil with everything she had. When she got to the Indian path, she saw the treads of the wagon and followed. Her breath rattled inside her. She had not come to the end of the earth here in Brooklyn to lose what she wanted most in the world, whether or not it rightly belonged to her.



* * *



By now it was early morning and the air was pale but growing brighter, throwing down bands of shadows and light. The peddler had stopped in the village to deliver an order of several bolts of cloth on his way out of town, for he would likely not be back to Gravesend for a long time, and the transaction—how much the fabric was worth was at issue—had slowed down their departure. Faith was anxious, her stomach a nest of nerves. As she waited, she bit off her fingernails, but knowing a person’s nails and hair could be used in a spell, she swallowed the bits of her nails, then felt them scratching inside her.

“That took long enough,” she said to the peddler when at last he returned to the wagon. She already knew some things were not worth bargaining over, not when you were in a hurry, not when your future depended upon it. The air still smelled like apples, though there was not a single such tree in all of town, and Faith was aching to leave. She knew she was being called home. She thought of her mother’s clear gray eyes and the song she had sung.

The water is wide, I cannot get oe’r it

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that will carry two

And I shall row, my Love and I.

Love is handsome and love is fine

And love’s a jewel while it is new,

But when it’s old, it groweth cold

And fades away like morning dew.



“Don’t worry so much,” Finney told Faith. He supposed he had no choice but to escort her. “We’re on our way.”

They headed through the flatlands as the seabirds were circling above the dirt road, dropping their breakfasts of mussels and clams so the shells would split open. Martha had been running through town when she spied the cart in the distance, as it was about to go over a small wooden bridge. She still heard the echo of that beetle in the wall, even out here where there was nothing but marshland. The sky was a brilliant blue, and foxes in the marsh were walking through the muddy shellfish beds, the vixens calling to their kits. Martha called out for the wagon to stop. When she shrieked, the foxes grew silent.

“What on earth?” Jack Finney turned to see what he at first thought was a ghost in a white bonnet, her gray cape flying out behind her. “Good God,” he said, for she looked a terrible sight.

“Don’t stop,” Faith Owens told the peddler. She was changing the future right now, minute by minute. If she hadn’t been wearing the iron cuffs, she would have seen the fate she had made in the palm of her hand, a path that led across a deep river. Though her sight was gone, her courage was not. She thought of the tea her mother often made her. Never hide who you are. Do what you think you cannot.

“If that’s who you’re running away from, I can’t say I blame you,” Finney said as he charged his horse to go forward. The horse was an old steed, one that had been treated cruelly before Jack Finney stole him, and Finney didn’t regret his thievery for a moment. He’d needed a horse and he’d seen this one being beaten by a farmer on the shores of Gowanus Bay. The beast had one eye and a resigned expression. Finney, himself, never used a whip; all he need do was say a word or two, and the horse was ready to comply.

“Let’s go,” the peddler told Arnold, for that was the name of the horse, dubbed so because his shaggy white mane reminded Finney of an old uncle in Cornwall, a plodding kindhearted gentleman who could always be relied upon.

Martha was behind them doing her best to keep up with the carriage.

“You’re stealing that child!” she called. “I’ll have you arrested!”

Finney looked over at Faith, who was staring straight ahead, as if she couldn’t hear the woman’s voice. “I’d hate to be arrested,” he said.

“You won’t be,” Faith assured him. She was more herself than ever, despite the iron cuffs. It was freedom that gave her a bit of the sight, it was the wind and the clatter of the horses’ hooves, and the opportunity to say whatever she pleased without being punished for her thoughts. It was simple enough to see this Cornishman’s fate. He talked about his homeland in his sleep. “I’ve seen your future and you live to be an old man in a place called Penny Come Quick,” she told Finney.