Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(78)

He was a good man and deserved good fortune. In fact, he’d been born in what the Cornish called Pny-cwm-cuic, a village on the Fal River, referred to as Penny Come Quick by outsiders. It was here that his wife and daughter had been buried, and his one wish was to return before he passed on, so that he might be buried beside them. He felt a chill along his backbone. No one on this side of the ocean knew where he’d come from. He thought perhaps he had a special little passenger. As a Cornishman, he un derstood there were those who had the sight, and this girl was obviously such a person. Whatever she was, he wasn’t likely to let her fall into the hands of the shrew at their heels. He told old Arnold to race; all he need do was to ask him nicely to please gallop and the horse picked up speed. That was when Martha Chase tried to catch up, on the small wooden bridge where there was barely space for a carriage, let alone a woman charging ahead. Arnold was lumbering and huge, and there was not enough room for this woman to run past the carriage on the narrow bridge so that she might reach Faith. They heard her cry out, a sharp cry that chased the gulls from the marshes. The birds rose up in a flapping cloud of white and gray, circling in a swirl above them. There was a thud and then the shouting stopped.

Jack Finney called for the horse to halt, and Arnold complied, heaving from his exertions. Finney and Faith turned to look over their shoulders. Behind them the bridge was empty. There were hundreds of gulls still wheeling through the sky, as they often do when they spy something that might make a meal.

“Stay here,” Finney told the girl.

The peddler climbed down and walked back to the bridge. He had long legs and he wore a brown jacket he’d had for nearly twenty years that had served him well. Finney was a rough man with a tender heart and he had a lump in his throat. He didn’t need the sight to know that something was wrong. He put a hand over his eyes, for the sunlight was bright, and his vision wasn’t what it once was. The peddler was forty, but he’d let himself go, for he’d had no reason not to do so, and the fact of it was, he drank too much. All he saw below the bridge was the brackish water and the weeds and the black stones and the sand, and then he saw that the water was red.

Finney went in, even though saltwater was bad for his boots. He turned the lady over, but it seemed she was no longer alive. There was blood coming from her skull, a small trickle that mixed with the water in a red swirl. A shadow fell across Finney and he gazed up to see Faith standing behind him, her face set. There was a white bonnet, floating downstream; there was the woman herself in the water, exactly as she had dreamed it, lying in the shallows beside the cattails that were as tall as a man.

Finney shook his head. “I told you to stay where you were.”

“I thought you might need help.” Faith gazed down at Martha. The bright light didn’t bother her one bit. She could feel the cold water reaching up to her ankles. She didn’t mind if her boots got wet.

“I think she’s gone.” Finney waited but Faith was stone-faced, and when there was no response he added wryly, “I can see you’re broken up by the situation.”

Faith was taking the opportunity to study Martha, something she had never dared to do before. She reminded her of the thin, tall, poisonous weeds that grew in the marshes and burned your skin if you tried to cut them down.

“Shall we bury her?” Finney asked.

“If you want to live long enough to go back to Cornwall, I suggest we leave her where she is.” For an eleven-year-old Faith sounded very sure of herself. “If a sheriff is called, we should have the flatlands behind us when the body is found.”

“It’s not as if we had a hand in killing her. She’s done that all on her own. I suppose we should feel sorry for her.”

“She took me from my mother and locked me in a room. For five years I’ve been waiting for this day,” Faith told her companion.

Finney felt it was their duty to honor the dead. He dragged the body to the shallows and set her on the watery bank, beneath the bridge. It was the least he could do even though she was heavier than he’d imagined and he was sweating through his clothes. He felt as old as Arnold, who huffed and puffed at the end of the day.

“Perhaps we should say a word or two?” Finney asked Faith once he’d scrambled back up to the dusty road. The girl was still below the bridge, on the stony bank, the water running over her boots as she contemplated the scene before her. One of Martha’s legs had been crushed by the wagon and was twisted underneath her body, her stocking torn off, her flesh white among the black stones.

“What you do comes back to you threefold,” Faith recited. “That’s what happened to this woman.” Faith had a pretty, serious face, but that dyed black hair didn’t look human and wasn’t. She couldn’t pretend to feel sorrow. Now that this day had come, it was no surprise that Faith had no feelings at all. It wasn’t just the lines on her left hand that had changed.

“If what you say is true,” Finney said, “this woman was evidently responsible for some terrible actions, for this is a terrible death.”

“She made horrible jam,” Faith said. “And she tried to have my mother drowned.”

“That’s enough for me.” Finney felt lucky to have such a smart horse, and an even smarter girl beside him. It was only now that he was in constant conversation that he realized how much he had despised being alone. “We can leave her where she is and let her discuss her actions with the Lord.”