Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(82)
Seagulls wheeled in the clear sky, their quick yellow beaks ready to snatch any fish they might spy in the flat water below. Maria dashed toward the ferry as it docked, elbowing past an unruly throng of people waiting for the boat to be unloaded so they could then have their turn to board and be taken across the water. She pushed back her veil, so she might see what was before her more clearly. And then she felt it; the heartbeat she had once carried. Her daughter, born in a circle cast for protection on the luckiest day of the month of March. The time had come. It was happening right now. Maria felt weightless, as though she were rising, as the first of the arriving passengers pushed and shoved to make their way onto the dock, alongside carriages pulled forward by teams of horses, some calm, others in a panicked state, desperate to get to solid land. There were wagons piled high with vegetables grown in the sandy flatlands, barrels of potatoes and cabbages, and men carrying bags of live chickens and ducks, and women who had never before left Queens or Kings county and now blinked in the mad whirl of Manhattan. The crowd disembarked, all headed in the same direction in a crush of flesh and blood, some ready for the chaos that awaited them, others cringing at the sight of the mass of humanity before them. None of it mattered to Maria. They might as well have all vanished. She saw not a single one.
The wolf bolted on board before the boat was completely unloaded, leaping onto the seat of a wagon before anyone dared try to stop him.
“Keep it moving or I’ll charge you double,” the ferryman called to the petrified wagon driver who now found a wolf beside him.
It was Jack Finney who sat motionless, a block of sheer terror in his chest, even though his young passenger laughed when the beast leapt up. She threw her arms around the wolf, insisting the huge, devilish creature in the wagon was a dog and nothing to worry over.
“He’s mine,” she assured Jack Finney. “And I am his.”
Though it seemed madness to Finney, this girl could convince him of nearly anything, so the peddler clucked his tongue to urge his horse on, even though poor, gentle Arnold was shaking from the nearness of a predator.
From where Maria stood on the dock all she could see was the nervous Cornishman driving a wagon drawn by an old horse with one eye, and Keeper beside a girl who scrambled in order to stand on the seat of the wagon. Maria narrowed her eyes. This tall, angular girl had raven-black hair falling to her shoulders. She was pale and lanky and wearing a dress that fit like a sackcloth and fell nearly to her ankles. She was all arms and elbows and freckles, unfamiliar in every way, and yet she was calling out “Mother,” waving her arms as joy spread across her face. There was her darling girl, her vanished daughter, who now, five years after she had disappeared, stood on the carriage seat, a fearless eleven-year old who had gleefully journeyed through Hell Gate on an ordinary day when miracles happened.
* * *
In the time they’d been apart, Faith’s gray eyes had paled to silver; her red hair had been dyed with ink, although a few blood-red hairs shone through. Her narrow, expressive face was marked by a sharp intelligence that included both wit and suspicion. It was possible to see the woman she would become, and yet something of the child she’d been when she’d been taken still showed in certain aspects of her features: her wide grin, for instance, and the brand of mischief in her eyes, the black mark of her bloodline on her left hand, which Martha Chase had tried her best to scrub away with the use of a stiff wire brush and lye soap, rubbing until Faith yowled with pain. Try as she might, none of Martha’s efforts had made the slightest difference. When you are so marked, you are marked for life.
Faith climbed down from the wagon and raced to her mother, and Maria hugged her close. Her child smelled of salt, for she was still a girl of the flatlands, sunburned and wild. Yet in her mother’s arms she was a child again. Maria might have never let go of her if she hadn’t caught sight of Jack Finney climbing down from the wagon. She didn’t take the time to look inside him, for the instant she spied him she imagined he’d had a part in abducting Faith. Maria ran toward him in a fury. Before he could step away, she held up a paring knife she always carried, so close to his throat he felt the blade.
“What you’ve done, you’ll pay for,” she told him.
“You have it wrong,” Finney assured the outraged woman. He’d broken into a sweat, which made him appear to be a guilty man all the more. “I’m the hero,” he said in a voice that wavered as he spoke.
“Don’t bother to lie.” The blade had already nicked Finney’s throat so that a bead of blood oozed through his flesh. If he was a liar, he was a good one, for there were no white spots on his fingernails and no blisters on his tongue and she saw no evil within him. Still, he had her girl, didn’t he?
Faith ran to her mother. “He is the hero.” She spoke with the authority of someone twice her age. When a child is forced to save herself, she is a child no longer, and Faith had no issue speaking her mind, even to her mother. “He should be rewarded. Without him I’d still be in Brooklyn.”
Maria apologized to the peddler, and was soon convinced to invite him to stay with them on Maiden Lane, for he had nowhere else to go and Faith was insistent that they treat him like family. Truthfully, she knew him better than she knew her own mother.
“Thank you. Much appreciated.” Finney could use the rest, for sleep had eluded him ever since they’d left Gravesend. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw an image of the tall, awkward madwoman who thought she could outrace a horse over a narrow bridge. He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d cried out at the moment she fell to the marsh below, and worse, if she’d still been alive when they left her there. That was the thing that haunted him. When he’d gone to peer down into the shallows, the woman was facedown, her gray dress and bonnet soaked with saltwater, unmoving. She didn’t give any sign of life when he dragged her to a higher watermark. And yet, looking back on it, he could swear he’d seen the flutter of her back as she inhaled more water than air before he climbed back into the carriage to wait for Faith. Go on, Faith had told him. And he had. He had done as an eleven-year-old girl ordered him to do because she was fearless and he was not. Finney had actually been shaking as he stood there gazing into the creek. He knew the difference between life and death—a flutter, a heartbeat—and yet he had climbed up in his wagon and he hadn’t looked back.