Magic Lessons

by Alice Hoffman

  But if, she had said.

  Anything you wish, he had assured her.

  Maria had little faith in this world, where every woman must behave. She had grown up without a mother, and now Faith would likely do the same. She trusted that Martha would keep Faith inside today, and close the shutters, and that when she spoke of Maria she would say, at least, that she had loved her daughter, and that when Samuel Dias came to the door she would unlock it, for he had agreed to take Faith and raise her as his own if need be, and show her that there were other worlds, far across the sea.

  There were swifts in the air as they crossed the pasture where Cadin had been murdered. Maria concentrated on the blades of grass and the warmth of the sun on her shoulders. When they came to the hill, there was a crowd assembled, not a raucous, wild gathering, but a solemn throng, as if they were attending a church service, and, in fact, there were those who held hymnals. The constables acted as the gallows men; the older one had overseen a hanging, but the young one, named Ellery, had not, and he had been sick all morning and had come to the gallows late and had rushed to prepare. The frame was a simple hanging construction, hastily built for the event. There were not even stairs leading up to the platform. Maria was lifted up by the jailor, who wore heavy gloves so he would not have to touch her and risk becoming bewitched, for to look at her was said to be dangerous.

  Risk or not, people couldn’t take their eyes off Maria Owens. Most of the women who had come to her for help stayed home, refusing to attend the hanging; some feared they would somehow be implicated, others could not abide such a terrible wrongdoing; still others, the most grateful among them, were in attendance. Anne Hatch was there, doing her best not to cry, losing her faith on this day, not in God, but in mankind and in those who sat in judgment and saw evil where there was none.

  It was a fine day, of the sort when it was possible to forget the snows of winter, for the world was fresh and green. Maria was asked if she wished her eyes to be covered, but she waved the blindfold away. She remembered that when she had looked in her black mirror, she had not seen her fate conclude at the end of a rope. The magistrates had gathered to watch their will be done. The air was so still the cries of the swifts echoed, and a mass of swooping crows called to each other, gathering as they were known to do when one of their kind was threatened.

  If it was Maria’s fate to live, she wished to make sure everyone in attendance knew it. She waved the hangman away so that she might speak. “If I do not die, am I then innocent and allowed to go free?” she asked the magistrates. She looked so young with her hair cropped short, there in her billowing white shift.

  “Sister, you would,” the first magistrate said. “But that is unlikely.”

  As they placed the rope around her throat, Maria gazed at the tree line. She saw the white horse tied to a tree and she thought about the day her father came for her mother, and the look of joy on Rebecca’s face. That was the moment Maria had decided she would never fall in love. That was her mistake.

  After the noose was looped around her throat, the constables unlocked the iron cuffs. Maria once more felt the stirring of the heat of her bloodline, carried from mother to daughter for as long as time had existed. She saw John Hathorne among the crowd, and she couldn’t stop herself. She cried out a curse that opened the skies, and a squall arose, a drenching rain that would flood every farm and every house. The man who had brought her to Essex County stood in the field and nearly drowned as he gulped down rain. She would protect herself and her daughters and all the daughters who might follow from any such betrayals in the future. “To any man who ever loves an Owens, let this curse befall you, let your fate lead to disaster, let you be broken in body and soul, and may it be that you never recover.”

  * * *

  Had anyone bothered to look at the magistrate, they would have seen he was chalk white and shaking, even though he was still the same strong man he’d been when he’d come to Gallows Hill. If he had looked at the palm of his hand, he could have read the truth. His fate had changed on this day. He thought to run, but could not move. He could not stop watching her.

  Maria leapt from the platform, the rope around her throat. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and there was silence as the trees dropped their leaves. The crowd drew a breath, expecting to view the horrible contortions of a hanged person who dangled in the air, but instead the line of rope broke. It snapped in two, and Maria landed with her feet in the mud, the rope still around her neck, as alive as anyone, as alive as she’d ever been.

  People began to run away. They dashed through the muck in the field, hauling the startled children they’d brought to witness the hanging. Men who’d previously thought they were brave were afraid to turn back, for they remembered that an individual who looks back on evil may be turned into a pillar of salt. There were those who saw the horse approach, and the stranger who took Maria’s hand to pull her up to ride behind him. Later some people said it was the devil who’d been waiting for her, and that they had been tested and had failed, but there were others who said God always grants a pardon to those who are blameless and the fact that Maria couldn’t be killed was proof of her innocence.

  Those who ridiculed the Nameless Art began to doubt that courts and laws could control magic. There was no need for them to know that Samuel Dias had replaced the constables’ original rope early that morning with one he’d used at sea, an old length rotted through by salt and exposure to the weather. He’d used it to tie up the magnolia tree, and when the rope split, he grew convinced that the tree had saved Maria. When spring came to Essex County, years later, the magnolia would bloom on the same day every year, a miracle and a joy to all who saw the white flowers blossom, the glory of the world.

  * * *

  They rode to Martha Chase’s house, where the chimney was falling down and the windows were shuttered. There was no sign of life. Maria felt a wave of darkness as they approached, which hit her like the heat from an oven. Her child was her heart and now she was hollow. When she pushed open the door, she saw that jars of raspberry jam had been left to cool on the table, and the place smelled sticky sweet. There was the small pallet where Faith had slept. Everything else was gone. They had left in a hurry.

  Maria went into the garden. Samuel tried to comfort her, but she could find no comfort here. Then she heard a moaning from a storm cellar where Martha Chase stored her provisions and jars of jam. Samuel came to help unbolt the lock and then open the heavy wooden doors. When they peered into the dark, there was the wolf, Keeper, chained to the wall, his ribs showing, starved and abandoned. Made vicious by his ill treatment, he growled when he spied a human form.

  Samuel put a hand on Maria’s arm as she went forward. “That’s a dangerous animal,” he said, concerned.

  “Every mistreated creature is dangerous,” she replied.

  She ran down the rotted wooden steps into the dark and let the wolf off his chain. He only glanced at her with his silver eyes, before he lurched past her and ran up the steps and into the house, in a mad search for Faith. When he found she wasn’t there, he lay down beside the pallet where she had slept, exhausted and hoarse from weeks of howling. Martha had duped him, tricking him into the cellar by tossing Faith’s clothes down the stairs. She’d then thrown a chain around his neck, attached to the mud-caked wall. Whenever Faith had heard howling, Martha had said it was the wind, and she’d vowed that the wind here always sounded like crying, and it was best to ignore it.

  * * *

  They went through the woods, the wolf following at a distance. At the lake Maria stripped off the white shift she had worn for weeks. Dias could not take his eyes off her, so he didn’t try. He gave her his coat to wear once she had bathed, then spoke to her in Portuguese. “We’ll look through every house in this damn county.”

  But the sight had returned to Maria and she could see and feel what an ordinary woman could not. She knew her daughter would not be found in Massachusetts. The green rain she had called dow
n upon the people of Salem had also washed away any trail that might have been left, making it impossible for the wolf to track Faith. Keeper knew it as well. The girl was gone.

  They spent the night at the cabin, with Dias setting up his hammock on the porch. When she couldn’t get any rest, Maria came to lie beside him.

  “What made you come here now?” she asked.

  “The tree.” They could see the magnolia, the blooms like white stars. He had come here to let the tree speak for him. His heart was hitting against his chest, and he hoped Maria couldn’t feel its ragged rhythm, despite the curse she had called down from the gallows. He, a man who could talk to anyone in six languages, was now tongue-tied in her presence. If he could speak he would say the magnolia was his heart, given to her to do with it as she wished.

  * * *

  When Maria awoke in the dark of morning, she found that Samuel had gone to the harbor and returned with news. Martha had paid for two passages to New York. She’d had a red-haired girl with her. Maria threw her arms around him, as she had when he was so near death. She’d thought he didn’t know how close he’d come to the end, but he’d always known, just as he knew that she would ask him to take her to New York Harbor, and that he would agree.

  “You will not find New York to be like any other place,” he warned her. “You can go there as one person and become someone else entirely.”

  Searching a city of nearly five thousand people would be all but impossible. It was easy to disappear in New York. It was here that men who wished to avoid their marriages vanished without a trace, women who yearned for a world where there were no rules settled in, sailors who jumped ship found that no sheriff could find them, and Dutchmen went off into the wild land beyond the wall that marked the limits of the city and were soon forgotten.

  Before they left, Maria went inside her cabin one last time. She’d been barefoot, and now she pulled on the red boots her mother had bought in the first Essex County. She took the blue blanket and the poppet Samuel had made for Faith and packed them along with the Grimoire and the black mirror. She peered into the glass before she stored the mirror, but didn’t recognize herself. Maria was more magic than mortal, but even a witch can be changed by sorrow. Nothing would ever be the same, but Hannah had taught her that there were times, rare as they were, when what was done could be undone.

  PART THREE

  Divination

  1686

  I.

  They took up residence in Manhattan on a street called Maiden Lane, not far from Minetta Creek, where the surrounding land was farmed by free men who had once been slaves. Originally called Maagde Paatje by the Dutch, the street began as a footpath near a stream where lovers often met and women gathered in the mornings to do laundry. At the most southern end stood the Fly Market, where fish and vegetables and fruit were sold, a crowded, filthy place where housewives could find anything they might need and witches could find rare ingredients, such as the bark and berries of the Dracaena draco, the red resin tree of Morocco and the Canary Islands, if they knew where to look.

  The house on Maiden Lane was well furnished, with hand-knotted rugs from Persia dyed with indigo, and satin curtains. There was white tableware from France and expensive cutlery that had immediately blackened as soon as Maria unpacked it, though every knife and spoon had been marked by the stamp of a fine silversmith in London. There was a yard in which to grow herbs, including tall plumy sage and aromatic rosemary, along with feverfew and wormwood, and currant bushes whose young leaves made a fragrant mixture when lemon zest and rosemary were added for Maria’s Travel Well Tea that helped to prevent scurvy. In the rear of the garden, there was a spiky fence to ensure that children from the neighborhood would not stumble upon certain plants and mistakenly ingest herbs that would make them ill, the darker ingredients such as bittersweet nightshade, foxglove, laurel, castor beans.

  Samuel’s father, Abraham, often sat in the garden on fine days, wishing he were at sea alongside his son. He still had on his leather hat that he’d always worn when sailing. The old fellow was a charming man with a thousand stories, more even than his son, but he had been ailing and Samuel had purchased the house so that his father could comfortably live out his final years in Manhattan. He’d bought the small manor from the first Jewish resident of New York, Jacob Barsimon, who had arrived in the city in 1654, traveling from Amsterdam with the Dutch West India Company. Although Samuel bought the house for his father, he’d chosen it with Maria in mind. Right away he had a team of workers come to stake out the garden plot and cut down the weeds and nettles that grew wild, and he made certain there was a chamber for Faith, ready when she was found.

  When they first arrived, Maria had locked herself in her chamber with the Grimoire. She attempted every spell that might bring a missing person home. She lit candles, laid out stones and bird feathers on the wooden floor, slit the palms of her hands so that her blood could call out to Faith. She cut up one of Faith’s dresses and dropped the fabric into a flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, a spell meant to call a person to arrive on your doorstep in less than twenty-four hours. None of it worked. Try as she might she could not use the sight to find her daughter. When she gazed into the black mirror, all she saw was a land that seemed to stretch on forever where hundreds of rabbits gathered, nothing more.

  During her first weeks in New York, Maria didn’t eat or drink or sleep, and she didn’t answer when Samuel knocked at the door. Her loss was too enormous. She could not bear to speak to another person. Early in the mornings she sneaked out to search the city streets, hoping that luck would allow her to spy a girl with red hair. In time, she found several, but none were her daughter, and she came home exhausted. After a while she seemed to give up, and she took to her bed and slept for days, until Dias woke her and said if nothing else she must drink water or she would make herself ill.

  “When she does come back, she will need you alive,” he told her.

  He made adafina, a chicken stew his mother had often served, consisting of chicken, fava beans, onions, chickpeas, garlic, and cumin, and a sponge cake called pan de España that had been baked by Jews in Spain since the year 1000, often using potatoes instead of flour. When Maria sat down at the table, she realized she was starving. She was still eating her supper long after Abraham had gone up to bed.

  “Do you think this will win me over?” she asked Samuel Dias when she was done. The food had been delicious and he had spent hours making it. He also baked a chocolate cake, using his mother’s recipe, a sweet so drenched in rum a single slice could make a person tipsy. For some reason Maria felt alive again, and guilty that her heart still managed to beat, though it was broken in two.

  “I don’t have to win you over.” Dias shrugged. “I already won.”

  Maria couldn’t help but laugh at his arrogance. “That was before. Now there’s a curse.”

  “I don’t care,” Dias said. “I loved you before there was a curse.”

  They were both stunned by this admission, so they said nothing and ate more, tearing apart oranges from Spain that were fragrant and sweet. Then they discussed their situation and the terms of their living arrangement, including the fact that he must not love her, it was too dangerous to do so. She thought back to the gallows, how she had looked at John Hathorne and set a curse upon anyone who might fall in love with a member of the Owens family. She’d sought to protect herself and her daughter and any of their descendants from the grief she’d known.

  “You can’t be in love with me,” Maria told Samuel.

  “If you insist, I will say that I’m not.”

  The butter in a dish on the table had already begun to melt, a sign that someone in the house was in love.

  “Why is that happening?” Maria asked when she saw how it melted.

  “When it’s hot, things melt.”

  “I see.” Maria was burning as well.

  “What’s love?” Samuel shrugged. “You can’t hold it in your hand. You can’t see
it. It’s something you feel. Perhaps it’s not even real.” He thought his argument was excellent, until Maria laughed at him.

  “How many women have you told this story to?” she wanted to know.

  Then Samuel was serious. “Only you.”

  With that, he won the argument and they went up to bed. Maria insisted they make no vows to each other, no contracts of love, no promises, nothing that could call down the curse. Of course he agreed; he would have agreed to anything in order to have her. When Maria woke the next morning, she gazed at Samuel’s broad back as he slept, and she felt something that she couldn’t name in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps it was desire, or affection, or perhaps it was more, the thing you couldn’t hold in your hand or see with your own eyes, but was there all the same.

  Whatever it was, it was a mistake. At the age of ten Maria had vowed never to be in love; she had seen what it had done to Hannah and Rebecca and the women who arrived late at night, desperate for spells. She’d only been infatuated with John Hathorne, the flirtations of a girl, and there’d been disastrous results. She set stricter limits for herself with Samuel. She would sleep in his bed when he was at home and she would care for his father when he was at sea, but he must never ask her for more. The problem was, they couldn’t keep to the rules and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They lived like this for nearly a year, their life at night a secret, so that Maria often entirely ignored Samuel during the daylight hours. And then one morning Maria saw a beetle in the yard and she felt a chill. Upon examination she found it was not the wretched deathwatch beetle; all the same she feared for Samuel’s safety. She was grieving over Faith and she didn’t think she could survive losing someone else. From then on she locked her door and didn’t answer when she heard Samuel at night. One morning she found that he had slept in the hall. When she woke him, Samuel stood to face her. It was clear that he was stung by her rejection.