Magic Lessons

by Alice Hoffman

  * * *

  Maria sat beside a bank of tall, snow-white phlox. Nearby, in the kitchen garden, fennel and purple cabbage and radishes would soon be grown. There were no lilacs, as there had been in the vision in the black mirror, but surely she could plant them when she was John’s wife and this was her house. She would have Persian lilacs in shades of purple and violet and blue, with blooms so sweet women passing by would stop, unable to go any farther, called to the spot as if their names had been spoken aloud.

  A bee came to examine Faith’s hair, red as a flower in the bright sunlight. Maria sent it off with a polite nod. “Be elsewhere,” she whispered, and it happily complied. In the tree with black leaves, Cadin was clacking and tossing down pebbles. Maria gave him a dark look, but otherwise paid him no mind. She could not let a crow make her decisions. Her fate was her own, and she would most certainly make the best of it before it made the best of her.

  She set her sleeping baby in the grass. To call John to her, she took a laurel leaf from her satchel and held it in the palm of her hand, then set it on fire with a single breath, not minding that she scorched her own skin. The smoke was thin and green, so fragrant it was impossible to ignore. She said his name backwards, chanting beneath her breath. From behind the gate he felt the thrill of seeing her again. She was like no other woman he had ever seen or known, and when she called to him he felt his desire in the pit of his stomach. Sins were committed every hour of every day, and it was clear that this woman was unnatural in some way. But who among them had not committed a sin? The eternal torments of original sin had waited for mankind from the moment Adam ate the apple, which was handed to him by Eve, an act that proved to him and his brethren that women were spiritually inferior to men, weak with human frailty, sinful at their core.

  John entered the garden and closed the open gate behind him, always bad luck. He was wearing the same black coat he hadn’t bothered to take off when he swam alongside the turtle, when he didn’t know the difference between a miracle and a monster. It had been laundered with hot water and lye soap and yet there was still sand in the seams. He looked at Faith, dozing in the afternoon light. She might be anything at all, an angel beside the snowy phlox, a wicked changeling sent in the guise of a red-haired girl, but her features were not unlike his, the same narrow nose and high cheekbones. She was merely his child. He softened then, and perhaps he smiled, for as Maria gazed up to see him she believed she saw his heart beating beneath his black coat.

  Maria turned her attention to the bee that now came to sting Faith. The child let out a cry so filled with shock and pain that the sparrows in the garden took flight all at once. For a moment the sky was dark as the leaves from the black elm fell to litter the path as if they were bats falling from the branches. Maria quickly removed the stinger from her baby’s arm, then rubbed some lavender oil on the rising welt. “Hush,” she told the child. “All better.” She picked up the dying bee and cast it into the bed of phlox. Some creatures do not care how polite a person might be, they will hurt you for no reason, and then all you can do is heal yourself with whatever ingredients are necessary.

  John’s heart was twisted in two between what he wanted and what he must do. He took her hands in his and drew her to her feet. He embraced her then, and so it came as a surprise when he said, “We must leave this place.”

  “What do you mean? I’ve brought you your daughter.”

  Hathorne gazed at the child’s hair. It was a time when many people believed red-haired women to be witches and imagined those with freckles had been marked by the devil, especially if they were left-handed, another evil trait. Redheads were said to be violent in temperament, false in nature, evil in intent. But this darling baby smiled up at Hathorne. “Gogo,” she said in her sweet voice.

  Maria laughed. The babe thought Samuel Dias had returned. “No, no. This isn’t Goat. He’s another man.”

  At the mention of a man, and one with a name that called Satan to mind, Hathorne flared with jealousy. What was his was his alone, even when he wasn’t certain he wanted the prize. “Am I not her father?”

  “Yes, yes,” Maria assured him. Dias was her patient, nothing more. A friend, perhaps, a confidant, the man of a thousand stories, far away and out of mind. The one she embraced in bed, the one she allowed to kiss her until she was burning, but she always stopped him before she was completely his. There was John to think of, and loyalty, and their daughter. “Of course she’s yours.”

  “Then we must go now. For safety’s sake.”

  He led her from the yard, the baby still whimpering. When at last they reached the far end of the street, Hathorne drew Maria into a doorway so he might kiss her. Once begun, he could not get enough of her, though she held the baby in her arms. He knew that his desire could be his undoing. He was not young, though he was handsome enough so that women in town failed to lower their eyes when they passed him by, daring to smile and perhaps take his arm so they might make their interest clear. But those were inappropriate flirtations, nothing more. This was an enchantment, and he, who judged others harshly when they came before him in his chambers, did not judge himself for his wrongdoings. A spell was at work, and as he had leapt into the water in Curaçao, he embraced her now, but only for a moment, for this was not the time or the place.

  They went to the edge of town, past the fields and woods so dense it was difficult to navigate through the branches. Though many trees had been cut down as more and more land was cleared for Indian corn and other crops, the forests were still deep. Salem seemed destined to grow until it met up with the forest and claimed all the land, but for now, it was still a mysterious and dangerous place. There were great gray owls in the trees here. Gnats filled the air and poisonous plants grew nearby—stalks of horse nettle and chokeberries and toxic wild cherries that contained cyanide. It was dark and damp and so green the world seemed black. Black hearts grew in the lacey leaves of ferns, and there were mushrooms in the shadows, and black forget-me-nots that were already wilting in the sunlight. As they walked, John explained that his father was a stern, overbearing man and that here in Salem the court and the magistrates would consider a child born outside of marriage a crime. He could find himself in jail, for this world was different than Curaçao, with rules that couldn’t be broken. Without marriage, a child would always be an outcast. Here, he explained to Maria, people looked for monsters, not for miracles.

  “What is there to do?” Maria said, her mood darkening. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar landscape that made it seem as though the man was unfamiliar as well. And yet, Maria believed that now that she and Faith had arrived, Hathorne would change back into the man she had known. The man who had fallen in love with her was inside of him. “Our child exists,” she said. “Who could fault us when there wasn’t time to marry?”

  Faith’s encounter with the bee had exhausted her, and she had fallen asleep on her mother’s shoulder, her face hot and streaked with tears. Every now and then Maria patted the baby’s back.

  “They might fault us,” Hathorne said. “But we do not need to fault ourselves.”

  He looked at her the way he had on the island, and Maria was relieved to see the man she had known. She followed John, who was so tall he cast a shadow before him. He had taken her hand and she could feel his heat. They went on through, past the elms and the wild cherry trees already laden with fruit, with its poison seeds. He knew of an abandoned cabin often occupied by hunters in autumn, but deserted in all other seasons. Maria and the baby would be safe there until he could sort out what to do about his family. They were far enough from town, Hathorne said. Hidden, Maria thought. Not fit for the company of others.

  When they arrived, Maria peered inside the cabin. Leaves covered the floor, ashes filled the fireplace, and pottery was broken and scattered about. Cutlery, left unwashed, had been strewn upon a small wooden table. In a corner were straw pallets and several threadbare woolen blankets. Once inside, Maria found a spoon to cast out the door, as her mother had done
time and time again, to be rid of bad luck. But the spoon was tin, not silver. It didn’t turn black in her touch, and rather than being flung into the distance, it landed at her feet, clattering upon her red boots. A dozen crows were in the trees, but Cadin was not among them. He was making himself scarce, and in doing so he made his annoyance evident, as it was whenever she was with John.

  The baby was bundled in her blanket with Maria’s name stitched at one corner and Faith’s name stitched below her mother’s with the blue thread Rebecca had given her. Blue for protection and remembrance. Hathorne embraced Maria fiercely; he would have had her right there if she hadn’t stopped him. His hands were all over her, so hot they burned her skin. She thought of the laurel leaf aflame in her hand; she’d called him to her, but now she backed away. Do good among them, Hannah always said, but do not expect the same in return.

  “If they have set out rules in this town, let us act by them,” Maria said.

  If marriage was what this world insisted upon, then marriage it would be. Here, in these woods, in the second Essex County she had known, Maria thought of Hannah’s burning house. Most witches feared water, but Maria feared fire. She thought of the day when Lockland and his brothers arrived, when the air had filled with the stems and petals from the poison garden. Her eyes had burned for days afterward, perhaps from the billows of smoke, perhaps from the tears she couldn’t shed. It was so easy to make a mistake in matters of love. So many women had made their way across Devotion Field, convinced they must make the wrong man their own. Maria had done her best to help those who came to her in Boston, even the ones who knew they should let go of love. Now she asked for marriage, even though she thought of another man. There was a cure for this, she knew, but to set a spell upon herself was dangerous, and she could stop such thoughts by sheer willpower if she tried. O Amor meant sweetheart, darling, flame, love. That is what Samuel Dias had called out in his sleep, and it was only now that Maria realized he might have been speaking to her.

  “My pledge remains the same,” Hathorne told her. For now he would bring all she might need to stay in the cabin: bedding and pots and pans, baskets of apples and onions, ginger and butter and eggs, odd vegetables Maria had never seen before. He returned the next night and the night after that. They took a late supper together cooked over a fire. Before she’d left Boston, Mrs. Henry had taught her how to fix Salem Pudding, a favored dish made of flour, milk, molasses, and raisins, all boiled for hours, and how to make a quick meal of johnnycakes with Indian meal and flour, one egg, a little sugar, and salt and soda. John praised the tea she made and said it gave him the strength and courage to try to set things right.

  In time, Maria relented, and while Faith slept, she took him to her bed, the straw pallet where hunters camped after the leaves turned, when they came to shoot deer and wild fowl. Spring passed into summer, and some evenings John could not get away. On these nights there was nothing but darkness and the flicker of the fireflies, creatures unknown in England. They rose amid the trees in globes of pale yellow light, signaling to one another. Is this what love is? Maria might have asked Hannah Owens, who’d been betrayed by a man who claimed she spoke with Satan and had sworn to the judges that beneath her skirts she possessed a tail. Is love not more than this? she might have asked her mother, who pledged her life to a man who’d charmed her with words that weren’t his own. She knew something was wrong, even within her own heart, but then John would return, as though he’d never been gone, full of apologies and promises. It was his family, he explained, and their austere view of the world that was at issue, and the differences between them. Maria had not been raised in any church, she did not live by the tenets of Puritan beliefs, she had a child without the benefit of marriage. She would not be accepted, and yet he returned. He could not stay away, he told her. Was this love? she might have asked herself, if she hadn’t feared the answer.

  On nights that she spent alone in the second Essex County, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had been the one who had mistaken a monster for a miracle. She was a world away from Devotion Field, far from everything she had known. She could hear owls and the sound of deer mice in the pine needles. At night, when she was alone in her bed and John had left her, she could hear her own heart beat. She had seen this before, a woman arriving at Hannah’s door, love gone sour, love gone wrong, love that wasn’t love at all.

  * * *

  October came quickly, a glorious month when the fields turned yellow. The leaves might appear green in shadow, but when sunlight pierced through there were threads of scarlet and orange. So many pigeons crossed the sky they blocked the sun from sight, and the day seemed as if it were night. Maria felt there was a power in this place as she knelt by the lake that was said to have no bottom. The twiggy shore was home to birds she had never seen before—scarlet cardinals, red and black woodpeckers, flickers, white owls sleeping in the hollow trees. She imagined she felt as Hannah had when she left the world of men and crossed through Devotion Field to enter into a world of magic and silence. The only sound she heard was the song of the earth when she lay in the yellow grass. Perhaps this was a blessing, for during this time the lines on her left hand began to change and she saw for herself that if you had the strength, you could change your fate.

  The crows stayed on past autumn, as they always did. They would remain all through the coming snows, fearless creatures that they were, eating winterberries and snatching eggs from henhouses, managing to survive. Through the autumn, rumors spread about a young woman living in the woods. People said she was fearless, for it was a wild, thorny woodland, with creatures that had never been seen in England. Spikey porcupines, deer that were twelve feet high and thought to be so strong that the teeth of their fawns were strung into necklaces by the native people for babies to wear when teething. There were beaver that were said to contain both sexes, whose powdered tails were mixed into wine by those who claimed to be physicians and swore the false remedy would cure stomach ailments, and fox with pelts that were silver or red or black, and bats of all sorts flickering through the night. Raccoons that lived in hollow trees could open the doors and windows of houses in town, as if they had human hands, then slip inside to steal flour and day-old bread. Ground squirrels were so ravenous they would devour entire fields of corn, inspiring farmers to pay two pence apiece for each one killed and brought to town hall. What woman would live in such a place with a young child other than a sorceress, or a wild woman, or a witch?

  * * *

  One blue evening when the flocks of sparrows and warblers were beginning to migrate south, Maria saw a huge dark creature of more than three hundred pounds standing in the lake in solemn silence, sniffing at the chill in the air. Perhaps there were monsters in Essex County. Surely people here believed in such things. Wolves that would track a man for weeks and devour him whole, poisonous snakes that favored young women and were said to hide beneath their beds, birds that drilled holes in the wooden planks of a house as if they had knives on their beaks, rabbits that turned from brown to white when the snow fell, magicked in front of your eyes. People in town vowed that a sea serpent resided in the leech-filled lake where Maria and her child bathed. The native people had always believed there was a mysterious creature in the depths, one that had dragged itself inland from the harbor when the countryside flooded in a storm surge and tides engulfed the forest. Perhaps this was nothing more than a story told to chase the English interlopers away; all the same, even after the original people had been dispatched from this area, not a single child from town would dive into that lake, not even on the most stifling days when a swim was the only tonic that might cool heat-struck boys. Instead, they would stand at the edge of the water, throwing rocks, not a one venturing any deeper than his toes. Local men had searched for the serpent with no success, and some of these individuals had disappeared; because the lake was bottomless, they were never seen again, leaving their wives and children to mourn their losses.

  Cadin had made himself at home in t
hese woods. He often disappeared to scour the town for treasures to bring home—a shoe buckle, a carved wooden top, a silver thimble that immediately turned black in Faith’s hands, for magic ran through her. She could call the birds to her with a single reedy cry, and at the lake the leeches never dared to come near when she waded into the cattails, clasping her mother’s hand, for Maria warned her not to go too deeply into the water. Once Faith found a toad, withered and close to death, but when she gently picked it up and held it in her palm, the creature revived. Panicked, the toad leapt from her hand and disappeared into the bramble bushes. Maria happened to see this event and she was filled with a deep pride. Her daughter was a natural healer.

  Had he been there, Samuel Dias would have applauded all of Faith’s endeavors, for she always shone in his eyes. Faith still sang the Portuguese lullabies Samuel had sung to her. “Gogo,” Faith said in a serious tone as they picked blackberries that grew near the shore, for the berries had reminded her of the man who had always shared the fruit Maria had insisted he eat to help him recover, including papaya and mangoes and berries, holding them out to Faith and applauding when she ate the berries.

  “He’s far off at sea,” Maria told the baby, though it was really herself she was reminding that Samuel Dias was not part of their lives.

  * * *

  Winter came early, with huge flakes falling nearly every day, and nothing had changed.

  Three times a month Maria tramped through the dark, past the pear orchards, carrying her sleeping child so they could meet at Hathorne’s warehouse on the dock. She wore black so that no one would take note of her. She took narrow paths at a late hour, though they were icy, and she shrunk into the shadows. Still she was not invisible, and as she made her way one cloudy night, the moon slipped out suddenly, and thinking she was a crow swooping through his fields, a farmer shot at her, peppering her coat with buckshot. Fortunately Maria was only grazed on her arm, and Faith went unscathed, though she startled in her mother’s arms. Before she could stop herself, Maria uttered a curse. “Let he who tried to wound me be wounded in turn.”