Magic Lessons

by Alice Hoffman

  “I’m saving you from evil,” Martha said to Faith calmly, when the girl raced up the stairs to see her room had become even more of a prison than it had been before. “Will you do as I say?” Martha asked.

  “Of course, Mother.” The words burned her mouth, for Faith was not a liar by nature and she didn’t intend to follow this woman’s twisted rules.

  It was a Friday. Faith knew there might be women waiting for her that evening in the cemetery, perhaps they would stay until morning’s first light if she didn’t appear and they were desperate enough. She sat on the floor of her room, a prisoner, and yet even with the window nailed shut she imagined the scent of apple pie, made with cinnamon and brown sugar, a treat her mother would make especially for her on every birthday. Her true mother, the mother she had lost, the one who told her to always be true to herself, even if she had to hide that truth from others. Her life in Essex County came rushing back to her due to the scent of apples. She imagined the woods where the ferns grew so tall, and the bottomless lake, and the serpent that would eat bread from her hand. She recalled her mother’s voice singing her to sleep, and the doll the man named Goat had made for her, and the wolf who had slept beside her bed, and her own natural red hair before it was dyed with bark and ink. She remembered the women who came to the door at night, and the tonics and spells her mother created for them, often asking nothing in return. Apples were used in many of these charms, the seeds worn in an amulet, or a red apple itself pricked with a needle while the name of one’s beloved was repeated. A woman was then to sleep with the apple under her pallet, make a pie out of it, and feed it to the one she loved. Faith remembered the book in which everything she needed to know had already been written.

  * * *

  It was that night, while locked in her room, that she realized if she continued to obey Martha she would betray herself, perhaps even lose herself. She must do what she believed to be right. She would not spend another year pretending to be someone she was not.

  It was the last Friday of the month, and she knew the peddler would be in Gravesend; perhaps he would help her. As soon as Martha went to bed, Faith took up a garden spade she kept hidden beneath her bed. She hit the cloudy window glass until at last it cracked beneath her touch. When she pushed it out, tiny glittering shards rained down into the garden. She threw down a satchel of belongings, then climbed down the vines, holding onto the prickly, twisted creepers. As soon as she touched the ground, she took off running. She knew where the peddler kept his wagon, and she rushed to the Indian path that led through the flatlands of Brooklyn where he and his horse were settled in for the night. Faith gave him everything of worth that the women of Gravesend had given her. Frankly, it wasn’t much, and when she handed over the silverware she’d been given, she worried that he might reject it, for it had all turned black in her hands. All the same Jack Finney knew real silver when he saw it. He’d heard stories of women back home in Cornwall who turned silver black, and he knew what they were thought to be, but he was a practical man, and he stayed away from anything considered to be magic. He believed in buying and selling, and in taking good care of his horse, and in staying off the back roads at night, when robbers might be searching for a man such as himself who might have a tin box filled with silver and coins. He thought Faith was quite calm for a child who was running away, but he could tell she was serious. She slept in the wagon, beneath an old quilt he’d picked up when a recently deceased woman’s belongings were sold at a good, cheap price. When Finney woke in the morning, Faith had already been up for hours.

  “We have to leave right now,” she told him. “We must be as quick as we can.”

  * * *

  Martha had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed she was tied to a chair and drowned in a lake. She was turning blue, struggling for one more breath. When she awoke she was drenched. Pools of water had formed on the floor around her bed. Some dreams connect to the past, some to the future, some to the very moment you are in. Martha went to Faith’s chamber to find that the window was shattered. She peered outside to spy footprints in the sandy earth. They disappeared halfway down the road. Perhaps a wind had come up, or perhaps it was what occurred when a witch’s foot wasn’t nailed to the ground: she managed to escape. It was then Martha heard a clacking sound. It was somewhere in the wall, and when she put her ear to the plaster the clatter was so loud she felt deafened. She went downstairs and the clacking followed her, mocking her it seemed, tracking her like a dog though it was nothing more than a black beetle that had come out from the walls.

  Martha grabbed her cape and left the house, the door swinging open behind her as she took off running. She wore the white bonnet she’d sewn years ago, in Essex County, and she spoke to the Lord as she raced up the lane, for she considered herself to be doing His work on earth. She refused to lose what she had gained and was ready to fight evil with everything she had. When she got to the Indian path, she saw the treads of the wagon and followed. Her breath rattled inside her. She had not come to the end of the earth here in Brooklyn to lose what she wanted most in the world, whether or not it rightly belonged to her.

  * * *

  By now it was early morning and the air was pale but growing brighter, throwing down bands of shadows and light. The peddler had stopped in the village to deliver an order of several bolts of cloth on his way out of town, for he would likely not be back to Gravesend for a long time, and the transaction—how much the fabric was worth was at issue—had slowed down their departure. Faith was anxious, her stomach a nest of nerves. As she waited, she bit off her fingernails, but knowing a person’s nails and hair could be used in a spell, she swallowed the bits of her nails, then felt them scratching inside her.

  “That took long enough,” she said to the peddler when at last he returned to the wagon. She already knew some things were not worth bargaining over, not when you were in a hurry, not when your future depended upon it. The air still smelled like apples, though there was not a single such tree in all of town, and Faith was aching to leave. She knew she was being called home. She thought of her mother’s clear gray eyes and the song she had sung.

  The water is wide, I cannot get oe’r it

  And neither have I wings to fly

  Give me a boat that will carry two

  And I shall row, my Love and I.

  Love is handsome and love is fine

  And love’s a jewel while it is new,

  But when it’s old, it groweth cold

  And fades away like morning dew.

  “Don’t worry so much,” Finney told Faith. He supposed he had no choice but to escort her. “We’re on our way.”

  They headed through the flatlands as the seabirds were circling above the dirt road, dropping their breakfasts of mussels and clams so the shells would split open. Martha had been running through town when she spied the cart in the distance, as it was about to go over a small wooden bridge. She still heard the echo of that beetle in the wall, even out here where there was nothing but marshland. The sky was a brilliant blue, and foxes in the marsh were walking through the muddy shellfish beds, the vixens calling to their kits. Martha called out for the wagon to stop. When she shrieked, the foxes grew silent.

  “What on earth?” Jack Finney turned to see what he at first thought was a ghost in a white bonnet, her gray cape flying out behind her. “Good God,” he said, for she looked a terrible sight.

  “Don’t stop,” Faith Owens told the peddler. She was changing the future right now, minute by minute. If she hadn’t been wearing the iron cuffs, she would have seen the fate she had made in the palm of her hand, a path that led across a deep river. Though her sight was gone, her courage was not. She thought of the tea her mother often made her. Never hide who you are. Do what you think you cannot.

  “If that’s who you’re running away from, I can’t say I blame you,” Finney said as he charged his horse to go forward. The horse was an old steed, one that had been treated cruelly before Jack Finney stole him, and Fi
nney didn’t regret his thievery for a moment. He’d needed a horse and he’d seen this one being beaten by a farmer on the shores of Gowanus Bay. The beast had one eye and a resigned expression. Finney, himself, never used a whip; all he need do was say a word or two, and the horse was ready to comply.

  “Let’s go,” the peddler told Arnold, for that was the name of the horse, dubbed so because his shaggy white mane reminded Finney of an old uncle in Cornwall, a plodding kindhearted gentleman who could always be relied upon.

  Martha was behind them doing her best to keep up with the carriage.

  “You’re stealing that child!” she called. “I’ll have you arrested!”

  Finney looked over at Faith, who was staring straight ahead, as if she couldn’t hear the woman’s voice. “I’d hate to be arrested,” he said.

  “You won’t be,” Faith assured him. She was more herself than ever, despite the iron cuffs. It was freedom that gave her a bit of the sight, it was the wind and the clatter of the horses’ hooves, and the opportunity to say whatever she pleased without being punished for her thoughts. It was simple enough to see this Cornishman’s fate. He talked about his homeland in his sleep. “I’ve seen your future and you live to be an old man in a place called Penny Come Quick,” she told Finney.

  He was a good man and deserved good fortune. In fact, he’d been born in what the Cornish called Pny-cwm-cuic, a village on the Fal River, referred to as Penny Come Quick by outsiders. It was here that his wife and daughter had been buried, and his one wish was to return before he passed on, so that he might be buried beside them. He felt a chill along his backbone. No one on this side of the ocean knew where he’d come from. He thought perhaps he had a special little passenger. As a Cornishman, he understood there were those who had the sight, and this girl was obviously such a person. Whatever she was, he wasn’t likely to let her fall into the hands of the shrew at their heels. He told old Arnold to race; all he need do was to ask him nicely to please gallop and the horse picked up speed. That was when Martha Chase tried to catch up, on the small wooden bridge where there was barely space for a carriage, let alone a woman charging ahead. Arnold was lumbering and huge, and there was not enough room for this woman to run past the carriage on the narrow bridge so that she might reach Faith. They heard her cry out, a sharp cry that chased the gulls from the marshes. The birds rose up in a flapping cloud of white and gray, circling in a swirl above them. There was a thud and then the shouting stopped.

  Jack Finney called for the horse to halt, and Arnold complied, heaving from his exertions. Finney and Faith turned to look over their shoulders. Behind them the bridge was empty. There were hundreds of gulls still wheeling through the sky, as they often do when they spy something that might make a meal.

  “Stay here,” Finney told the girl.

  The peddler climbed down and walked back to the bridge. He had long legs and he wore a brown jacket he’d had for nearly twenty years that had served him well. Finney was a rough man with a tender heart and he had a lump in his throat. He didn’t need the sight to know that something was wrong. He put a hand over his eyes, for the sunlight was bright, and his vision wasn’t what it once was. The peddler was forty, but he’d let himself go, for he’d had no reason not to do so, and the fact of it was, he drank too much. All he saw below the bridge was the brackish water and the weeds and the black stones and the sand, and then he saw that the water was red.

  Finney went in, even though saltwater was bad for his boots. He turned the lady over, but it seemed she was no longer alive. There was blood coming from her skull, a small trickle that mixed with the water in a red swirl. A shadow fell across Finney and he gazed up to see Faith standing behind him, her face set. There was a white bonnet, floating downstream; there was the woman herself in the water, exactly as she had dreamed it, lying in the shallows beside the cattails that were as tall as a man.

  Finney shook his head. “I told you to stay where you were.”

  “I thought you might need help.” Faith gazed down at Martha. The bright light didn’t bother her one bit. She could feel the cold water reaching up to her ankles. She didn’t mind if her boots got wet.

  “I think she’s gone.” Finney waited but Faith was stone-faced, and when there was no response he added wryly, “I can see you’re broken up by the situation.”

  Faith was taking the opportunity to study Martha, something she had never dared to do before. She reminded her of the thin, tall, poisonous weeds that grew in the marshes and burned your skin if you tried to cut them down.

  “Shall we bury her?” Finney asked.

  “If you want to live long enough to go back to Cornwall, I suggest we leave her where she is.” For an eleven-year-old Faith sounded very sure of herself. “If a sheriff is called, we should have the flatlands behind us when the body is found.”

  “It’s not as if we had a hand in killing her. She’s done that all on her own. I suppose we should feel sorry for her.”

  “She took me from my mother and locked me in a room. For five years I’ve been waiting for this day,” Faith told her companion.

  Finney felt it was their duty to honor the dead. He dragged the body to the shallows and set her on the watery bank, beneath the bridge. It was the least he could do even though she was heavier than he’d imagined and he was sweating through his clothes. He felt as old as Arnold, who huffed and puffed at the end of the day.

  “Perhaps we should say a word or two?” Finney asked Faith once he’d scrambled back up to the dusty road. The girl was still below the bridge, on the stony bank, the water running over her boots as she contemplated the scene before her. One of Martha’s legs had been crushed by the wagon and was twisted underneath her body, her stocking torn off, her flesh white among the black stones.

  “What you do comes back to you threefold,” Faith recited. “That’s what happened to this woman.” Faith had a pretty, serious face, but that dyed black hair didn’t look human and wasn’t. She couldn’t pretend to feel sorrow. Now that this day had come, it was no surprise that Faith had no feelings at all. It wasn’t just the lines on her left hand that had changed.

  “If what you say is true,” Finney said, “this woman was evidently responsible for some terrible actions, for this is a terrible death.”

  “She made horrible jam,” Faith said. “And she tried to have my mother drowned.”

  “That’s enough for me.” Finney felt lucky to have such a smart horse, and an even smarter girl beside him. It was only now that he was in constant conversation that he realized how much he had despised being alone. “We can leave her where she is and let her discuss her actions with the Lord.”

  “I’ll take a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  Finny nodded and walked back toward the wagon. Faith stayed there beside the creek while he hoisted himself back on the carriage bench and took up the reins. It was then that Martha spit out some water, which trickled into the rising tide. Faith didn’t move or shout out. She had been told lies for so many years: why they had to leave on the ship to New York, how evil would find her if her hair was red, how her mother had never cared for her. Standing in the shallows, she closed her eyes and let the person she’d been forced to be go, that obedient girl Jane she’d pretended to be, who did as she was told. She breathed in the chill morning air, the salt stinging her lungs, and she might have forgiven Martha her wrongdoings, but she could not forget that she had been robbed of five years of her life. She would not allow another minute to be stolen. Inside Faith’s mind Martha Chase disappeared, a shadow growing smaller until it was the size of a wasp, then a stinging ant, and then no size at all, a spirit vanished. A death wish can be a powerful spell, by witch or mortal alike, and Faith shook with the bitterness she felt and her willingness to ignore the rules of magic. If Martha wasn’t quite dead yet, she would be by the time she was found, her eyes open, looking at the flat blue sky. And if she was aware of her surroundings at the very last moments of her life, if the black beetle crawled out
from the folds of her clothing, if she called out Faith’s name, no one would have heard, for the seabirds were screaming like mad and circling above and the tide was rising quickly, the way it does in the marshes, so that one moment it was possible to see a figure of a woman, and the next it seemed that a long gray dress was floating in the deepening water.

  Faith climbed up the embankment, then hopped into Finney’s carriage. The soles of her boots were covered with muck and her stockings were soaked. The lines on her left hand were changing before her eyes and she noticed a red splotch in the palm of her hand, as if Martha’s death had marked her. She paid it no mind. The past was behind her now and the future lay ahead. And yet she blinked back tears, not for Martha, but for all the years that woman had cost her. Finney wasn’t the kind of man to speak about such matters. Anyway, the likely cause was the bright Brooklyn sunlight.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, practical as ever.

  Faith’s mouth was set. She might be eleven, but she was extremely sure of herself. “To look for my mother.”

  Finney might well have argued against that notion. Brooklyn was a big place, but since this girl had shown herself to know more than most, he decided to do as she said. He found that he was suddenly more curious about the future, nearly hopeful, which was something he hadn’t felt for many years.

  “And what happens when we find her?” he asked.

  “Then I’ll be where I’m meant to be,” Faith said. “And you’ll be rich.”

  * * *

  When they stopped for the night, Faith looked through the cart until she found a handsaw, which she quickly handed over to Finney. She nodded to the iron bracelets.

  “Work away,” she told him.