Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(87)
In time she could turn a blooming flower black, stop a bird’s heartbeat, confuse men so they forgot their own names or lost the power of speech. Love was a common thing to her now, the foolish territory of those without her discipline. She knew that to undo an attraction one needed black paint, blood, a bird’s broken wing, pins, and a thin strand of lead, handled carefully, and with gloves. One night she cut her arm and let her blood sink into the ground, and in that place a stem arose with a single red rose. That rose was the magic inside of her, and every day the rose grew darker, until one morning the petals and the stem were black and the thorns were so sharp not even the bees would come near.
Faith wrote down the skills she had studied onto slips of paper to see what practice would best suit her. Invisibility. Sight. Healer. Love Magic. Revenge. She left the papers to float in a bowl of water overnight to see what her future might be. In the morning one scroll had bloomed opened. Faith’s heart beat quickly as she reached for her fate.
Her place on earth had been decided. She’d known what it would be before she read the floating word, for it was already in her heart, and the black rose in the garden had grown to be as tall as she.
Revenge was what she wanted.
III.
Magic continued to flourish in Manhattan, for most New Yorkers looked the other way when faced with the unusual, be it magic or not. There was a freedom of spirit in the city that couldn’t be found in the other colonies, perhaps because of the settlement’s Dutch heritage. Respected Amsterdam minister Balthasar Bekker had published The Enchanted World, arguing that Calvinism was mistaken in stating that Satan walked through the human world. The devil was nothing more than a symbol of all the evil that resided inside mankind, and belief in witchcraft was the work of ignorant, superstitious men. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, agreed that the search for witches was far-fetched nonsense. He’d been schooled on this issue when his own sister-in-law Judith Varlet was accused in Hartford in the witch craze of the 1660s and rescued from Connecticut in the dead of night to avoid prison. That near-tragic incident was close enough to the governor to give him pause when it came to supernatural claims. He was a logical man who demanded proof; proving Satan’s existence was a fool’s errand, and he had declared so in his remarks concerning such arrests, stating that sentences for witchcraft should not end in execution, no matter how dark the accusations might be.
In Massachusetts scores of people had been arrested and held for preposterous reasons, with claims that they were in league with the devil and could torment people from miles away. Though not present in bodily form, those charged were said to be able to ruin crops, induce babies to fall ill, make loyal husbands go mad with lust. Serious men, including Cotton Mather, son of the illustrious Increase Mather, president of Harvard, believed that evil could be found in the personages of old women and fishwives and children, that it emerged from their mouths, that the dark world had encroached on everyday life so that the line dividing the two had vanished into thin air.
Cotton Mather was at work on The Wonders of the Invisible World, a treatise that claimed Satan wished to overturn the Massachusetts Bay Colony and used witches to do so. He was convinced that black magic grew in the woods and in the pastures, a bloody black weed. Magistrates continued to rule on spectral evidence, which was supernatural and invisible and therefore impossible to refute. A madness had taken hold in the colony, and each day more women were arrested: those with property, those who were poor, those who had married the wrong man, or who were spinsters, or had angered a neighbor. The original accusers were young girls, beginning with the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Paris and their slave Tituba, who had little choice but to agree when questioned, and the mania spread like a fever to more girls and young women who swore witness against satanic acts they had witnessed. Bite marks, bruises, cows whose milk ran red with blood, stars that exploded in the sky, a black horse seen from a window, a mark on a woman’s face in the shape of a moon or a star or a sickle, all could be counted as proof. In a wicked turn of events, several of the accusers soon found themselves suspected of witchcraft. Many of the settlers of the town of Salem had come from Essex County in England, home of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder general who had sent one hundred women to their deaths, persecuted simply for being women without power in the world.
No one in New York had been arrested for any such reason. The two trials that occurred decades earlier, one in Queens County, the other in the town of Setauket on Long Island, both involved people from Massachusetts and no one was found guilty. Still magic continued, the sort of practical magic that cured and healed and helped both with love desired and love gone wrong. Everyday people had their horoscopes written out and visited fortune-tellers on Miller Street, also known as Mud Avenue after downpours in the spring. There were magical items for sale in many of the markets, often hidden behind the counter or found in a back room or kept under cloths. Most residents did not trust doctors, who were often unschooled and lost more patients than they saved, using worthless remedies: saltpeter, tinctures of distilled powdered human bone used as a cure-all, a false remedy that was called skull moss, a plant grown from the remains of violent criminals who had been hanged which was inserted into a patient’s nostrils and was said to staunch bleeding and stop fainting and fatigue. Folk medicine was far less dangerous than the work of medical doctors. Practitioners of the Nameless Art were held in high regard when it came to their talents and their knowledge of curative tonics, seeds to induce sleep or cure insomnia, packets of dried lavender and rose hips for teas that would calm the nerves.