Magic Lessons

by Alice Hoffman

  Let it be so.

  This thing of darkness I acknowledge to be mine.

  What had been done to Faith, she would give back to the world three times over, then three times again. Darkness begets darkness, and nothing could be darker than her own imaginings while locked away in Brooklyn. Had she been capable of ridding herself of her iron cuffs, she would have burned the house down. To carry such vengeful thoughts was a heavy burden, and it was a relief to have found a volume whose author seemed to know her very soul. As Faith paged through The Book of the Raven, her fingers were burning, her mind was inflamed, and her hair turned a deeper, darker red. It was on this day that she became a woman, for there was blood between her legs, and the woman she had become was one who wanted magic more than love. She would have stolen The Book of the Raven if need be, but the bookseller considered it worthless and gave it to her for a single silver coin. A woman with a small white dog was watching, and she looked displeased. “These are not rants meant for children,” the woman warned, for it was such a strange and unsettling volume. Faith was young, with freckles dusting her cheeks and a somber expression in her pale eyes.

  The magic books at this stall were concealed by a white shroud, to keep them from catching on fire and from influencing both the bookseller and his buyers, for such texts were known to change a person’s temperament so they became nearly unrecognizable, even to themselves. Though Catherine Durant did not introduce herself, she was concerned, for she recognized the girl to be Maria’s daughter; she saw inside her, and she worried for her future.

  “I think it’s best if you don’t sell it,” Catherine Durant told the bookseller.

  “Be assured, the book is not for me.” By now, Faith was a brilliant liar. She couldn’t be shaken from a false statement even when interrogated, a skill she’d learned at Martha’s hands. Have you tried to work magic? Have you spoken to anyone in town? Have you collected herbs? Have you been yourself? “I can’t read,” Faith told the woman, a white spot appearing on her fingernail as she spoke. “It’s for my grandfather.”

  “Sold,” the bookseller said. So few females could read or write, it was easy for the vendor to believe her. And there was yet another reason he didn’t argue with the girl. He knew enough of the Nameless Art to know that he didn’t wish to quarrel with someone who could turn silver coins black, and he now realized that the coin Faith had paid him with had turned so; nor did he wish to return it to her, magic or not. Coin was coin, no matter the color. And the woman, Catherine Durant, was not a customer of his. The Grimoire was wrapped in black paper so that it might remain hidden as Faith carried it home; even in New York, witchery was a private endeavor, one best kept to oneself. As for the bookseller, he sold not another book or manuscript all that week; it was only then he realized he would have been wise to take advice from the woman with the small white dog.

  * * *

  On her way to Maiden Lane, the binding of the text burned through the paper wrapping. The package throbbed, as if it had a beating heart, as the most potent books sometimes do. The dark Grimoire itself was a protective talisman, one so strong that when a thief suddenly approached Faith in an alleyway, he stumbled back as if pushed when he tried to grab the package. Faith could hear the snap of a bone breaking in his hand. The thief cried out, then glared at her as if it were she and not the book that had been responsible for his pain.

  “Wait,” Faith called out as the thief ran away, about to do her best to apologize. But then she thought better of it and stopped herself. The truth was, she wasn’t at all remorseful. The time for apologies was over and her mouth was set in a thin line. She’d had enough of being a victim and never intended to be one again. She made a vow then and there to do harm to anyone who might wish ill upon her and those she loved.

  That very night she began to study The Book of the Raven. She told her mother she had a stomachache, forsaking a supper of spring chicken with cream sauce, locking herself in her small chamber. She didn’t stop reading until the first light of day. By then Faith was in a fever, her imagination on fire. She would no longer practice the tradition she’d been born into, she’d forsake the Nameless Art in favor of left-handed magic, black magic, the most ancient form of all such arts, begun before Babylonia had been built, before the flood washed away most of the world, a practice that originated with a secret text titled The Key to Hell. She’d thought of hell quite often while she was in Brooklyn, and how she might send Martha there. If only she had possessed The Book of the Raven then, she would have known what to do, even when restricted by iron.

  Wax, pins, fire, hair, fingernails, blood, bone, Bella donna, skullcap, henbane.

  This thing of darkness I acknowledge to be mine.

  Faith was still a novice, but she practiced the black art faithfully, learning maledictions by heart, until she was skilled at her craft. Soon enough she was nearly thirteen, the odd age between childhood and womanhood when a person becomes more of what she is. A locked door was not enough privacy for her studies. She kept a blanket thrown over her to shroud the magic and contain it within a circle, then drew the pentacle of Solomon on her floor with invisible ink. It was easy enough to hide her practice. Maria Owens had the sight, but all mothers see their children as they wish to, and the truth of Faith’s studies escaped Maria’s sight. Faith had helped that to happen, casting a See What You Please spell so that Maria viewed Faith as a perfect child who set the table for supper, swept the floors, tended to the garden, and kissed her good night. Yes, her hair was a darker shade of red, her skin had a new pallor with the freckles disappearing, her eyes were indeed fevered. She had learned to be deceptive from her years with Martha, and now she did so again quite naturally.

  She was in the midst of the left-handed magic of revenge, using malice and spite to get what she wanted. In no time, the magic had changed her. When she found a baby swallow and lifted it off the ground, it turned to ash in her hands. She dusted off her hands and felt a shiver of fear over what she now carried inside her. But what was done was done. She had chosen her path. In her practice she used the wild purple orchids that have two tubers, one for white magic, one for black, a plant that could heal or hurt and was called “Dead Man’s Fingers” in a play written by the man who adored the author of The Book of the Raven. Near the Minetta Stream there were old trees with hollows in their trunks, doors to other worlds where words were said backwards, widdershins, spinning left, the witch’s path that was counterclockwise. It was here that Faith gathered blackberries, long used against serpent’s bites and for setting curses. The Book of the Raven had taught her transference magic, shifting the sorrow or disease or the ill fate that a person carried into another object or being. She had small glass bottles filled with hate and fever and rage and grief, which were stored in a cabinet in her chamber, and at night they glowed with green light, as if stars had fallen from the sky.

  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.

  Cures for Common Illnesses

  Linden root and yarrow for racing hearts.

  Oatmeal and almond meal for cleaning one’s face.

  Rosemary oil for the hair, or a tonic of lemon and rosemary.

  Lavender for sleeplessness.

  Ginger root for diarrhea.

  Cabbage leaf poultices for wheezing.

  Darker ingredients were in demand as well: squid ink, thought to make tangible whatever was written in script, the hollow bones of birds for divination, mushrooms for erotic adventures or for revenge, seeds and oils to end a pregnancy, a knotted rope to burn and the ashes then eaten to bring forth a child. And there was love, always love, which was in the highest demand. Some unscrupulous vendors sold merchandise that was nothing more than wilted weeds, or a smudge of ashes said to be made of a dove’s heart but were nothing more than pipe leavings swept into tins, or perhaps rosemary oil flecked red with paint pigment or madder root, all of it dubbed with false Latin names. These unprincipled merchants played at magic, cheating clients in exchange for false cures that either wouldn’t work or, in some cases, might cause real harm if ingested. The names of those who were true to the Nameless Art and could be trusted were passed from friend to friend and sister to sister, as valued as silver.

  Women came to the door of the house on Maiden Lane, as they had in both Essex Counties. They came at dusk, making certain they would not be recognized by neighbors or friends. Some had recently traveled across the sea in search of missing husbands, of which there were many, men who had left their wives behind in Ireland or England so they might disappear into new lives in Manhattan, often claiming not only new names after they’d vanished, but new wives as well. Try as Maria might to avoid love, it arrived at her doorstep, time and time again, and, despite her resolve to stay as far away as possible from the madness of raw emotion, she gave her clients what they wanted most in the world.

  How to Bring a Lover Home

  Cook honey with nightshade, add a curl of his hair and let it rest on the windowsill. If your beloved is nearby he will appear, but if he has disappeared into the wilderness a bird will take his place. Tie a scrap of paper with your name written upon it to the bird’s leg and let it fly out your window. If your beloved is alive, the bird will find him and he will return, though it may take months or years.

  Nail a wishbone over your front door.

  Stick two silver pins into a red candle. When the flames burn down to the pins, your lover will arrive.

  Are you sure you want him? Maria would always say about the man in question before she began an enchantment, for it was possible for a woman who had been unburdened by a husband to begin a new life in New York, one that she alone commanded. Oh I’m sure, most would say, not minding Maria’s disapproval. These women had put effort into their desires, arriving in the dead of night, leaving the rented rooms of their boardinghouses or the cots set up in the parlor of a relative’s flat, all to regain what they’d lost. But every now and then there were those who reconsidered, leaving without any help from Maria. And then there were those who found the men they’d searched for only to return for a different sort of remedy. He’s changed, these women said, he’s not the one, it’s all a mistake, save me, help me, give me back my own life.

  Love was complicated; Faith had understood that even before she took to sitting on the stairs to watch these women come and go. She shook her head in wonder at what fools humans could be. Let them throw their lives away and weep over lovers who would only cause them pain and
agony. Let Maria Owens trade in the thing that had caused her grief. Faith had studied love, but it wasn’t her business, and it never would be. She had something else in mind.

  She had been in Manhattan for close to two years, and had grown up faster than most. By now she was tall, with a newfound grace, and a cool, distant gaze. She hadn’t left the practice of acting like an obedient girl, but she was anything but mild mannered. Faith climbed out the window on Maiden Lane, just as she had done in Brooklyn. Habits died hard, and she had the habit of doing as she pleased, even if that meant there were those who must be deceived.

  She set up her practice near the grove of linden trees beside the Minetta Stream, where indigent men lived in canvas tents and the poor were buried without stones to mark that they had ever walked on this earth. This was where her craft had led her, to a hollow where the ferns were as tall as she and the earth was muddy and damp and vengeance came easily. Faith felt it inside her, spreading out from the red splotch in the center of her left hand that she had never been able to wash away. She was called to dark places, such as this. The birds did not sing here and the frogs did not call, although there were hundreds of peepers on the banks of the stream. If a woman wanted something other than what she could find in Maria Owen’s kitchen, she came here. If she had been mistreated and damaged and betrayed, if she wanted revenge, she came up the path, no matter how perilous it might be to walk alone in the dark woods.

  Come to me and I will never judge you. I am just a girl and you can tell me anything, who hurt you, who you wish to defy, who should pay for their acts against you.

  * * *

  The hysteria in Salem began in the winter of 1692, stretching into the spring. Bridget Bishop was the first woman to be arrested, and the first to be hanged, on June 10. By September, twenty people had been executed. When the news about what was occurring reached New York, there was shock, especially among the Dutch community, who did not agree that the devil walked among men, or that it was proper to make use of spectral evidence based exclusively on dreams and visions, with no practical proof. The original Dutch settlers were serious-minded people who believed what they saw with their own eyes, but such was not the case in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.