Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(92)

Faith came home with her purchase from the butcher shop to find Maria waiting for her, furious. “You’ve created mayhem, and it’s unbreakable. There’s nothing I can do to amend it. I told you, you aren’t ready to work magic.”

Faith returned her mother’s gaze and held it. As it turned out they were now the same height. “I am ready.”

Maria felt a chill go through her. “When I say so.”

“It’s my fault,” Finney was quick to claim. “She did so on my behalf.”

“I believe it was on my behalf,” Catherine said.

Already, Catherine Durant could not be kept from him or he from her. They had an unspoken pact that they would never be parted, two spellbound people who left together for Catherine’s farm on the Bowery without looking back.

Maria narrowed her eyes. It had been too long since she had really looked at her daughter. Now she saw the edge of darkness inside. “You haven’t enough practice for such things.”

Faith shrugged. “It’s only love.”

“You think love is so simple?” Maria thought of the day she saw John Hathorne in the blue dining room in Cura?ao and the morning Samuel had brought the magnolia tree to Salem so she thought that snow was falling. “Take my advice,” she told Faith. “Stay away from it.”

“If that’s how you feel about love, why are you still wearing Gogo’s ring?”

Maria had tried everything to remove the gold band from her finger, but the wedding ring wouldn’t come off. It was likely the reason she thought of Samuel Dias so often. She wondered if Abraham had known that would happen and why such rings were worn, to make you think of the one who had given it to you.

“You’re the one that played with love,” Faith said to her mother. “You called down a curse on us. You didn’t care what I thought or what I wanted.”

Try to do what’s best for your children, and still it could all go wrong. What you knew today, you didn’t know yesterday. What you wished for then, you might come to regret.

“You never told me what happens if someone falls in love with us.”

“We ruin their lives,” Maria told her daughter.

“It seems you’ve already ruined the Goat’s life,” Faith told her mother that day. “You might as well love him.”





PART FIVE

The Remedy





1693

I.




There were so many women in love and in trouble in the city of Manhattan that Maria hadn’t time for all who came in search of a charm or a cure. Often a dozen or more waited in the garden, some disguised by shawls or cloaks, others so desperate they didn’t care who might spy them visiting the witch’s house. What was a witch if not a woman with wisdom and talent? Here in New York, such things were not a crime. Maria’s clients perched on benches or sat in the dewy grass counting out pieces of silver, removing wedding bands, reciting small prayers that Maria Owens might help them find health or solace or love. When she looked out the window to see how many women were in need, she was overwhelmed. A woman who had renounced love should not be so close to so much emotion. It would surely affect her. Love was contagious, it passed from soul to soul, it woke a person up and shook her even when she wanted to be left alone. There were times when Maria looked in the black mirror to search for a client’s fate and all she could see was Samuel Dias. She had no heart, she was sure of it, and yet something inside of her ached.

“I could be your assistant,” Faith said as they looked out the window at the women waiting there. “In Brooklyn, people came to me to be healed.” She had recently learned how to construct figures out of the bark of the black hawthorn; when melted over a fire the love for the wrong person would melt as well and a client would be freed of foolhardy desires.

“Well, that was in Brooklyn,” Maria responded. “They should not have gone to a girl.”

“I know more than you think I do,” Faith insisted. She knew the expression on a woman’s face when she realized she had only a few more breaths to take in this life, she knew that when she was in a cemetery at night she could hear the heartbeats of the dead, she knew that a girl whose father doesn’t want her will be both stronger and weaker than she might have been had he ever loved her. “I’ll take the ones seeking revenge,” she chirped.

“We don’t do that here,” Maria said.

“You do all sorts of things,” Faith said archly.

“For the benefit of those in need.”

“Maybe you don’t think I have the power.”

“That’s not true. I believe in you. You’re just not ready.”

“I have been ready since I was six years old and you left me.”

Maria stepped back as if slapped. “I told you I never wanted to leave you. I had no choice.”

“I thought we all had choices,” Faith said, her gaze turning to ice. “If you hadn’t gone to Massachusetts, none of it would have happened.”

The lies Martha had told Faith had done damage, and she carried the scars of abandonment. She went inside and sat on the floor beside Keeper. He had a distant, somewhat removed character and resembled Faith in that way, but now he put his head in her lap and she stroked his fur. Here she was, in her own home, and she was still invisible, her true self lurking in the shadows. Every witch wishes for a pair of red boots, and Faith had hoped her mother would grant her a pair as a gift on her thirteenth birthday, but when the day came she was given a sky-blue shawl. She didn’t need protection. She didn’t need luck. She wanted her one and only life and the freedom to live as she pleased. She had been paid well by her clients, which was a good thing. She would order her own boots at the cobbler’s.