Magic Lessons

by Alice Hoffman

  “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.

  Anyone who had the sight and the ability to see inside Faith to her core would see the damage there, the iron wound, the nights in a locked room, the open window, the cemetery in Gravesend, the salty land and the seabirds in the sky, the loneliness, the bitter taste in her mouth, the father who never showed himself, the mother who wished to believe that all was well with her daughter when there was a crack in everything and the world was coming apart. Faith would be ready for magic when she said she was ready, not when her mother allowed it. She had said yes to magic years ago in the flatlands, with the salt stinging her eyes so that she almost cried, not that she had the ability to do such a thing, not then and not now. Maria Owens could cry, but that was unusual for a witch, and was likely a sign of weakness in Faith’s opinion. Faith, herself, was nothing like that. Even if Maria had wanted to see inside her daughter, Faith had blocked her from doing so. It was a murky and solemn spell she had worked at the Minetta Stream, a fitting place for dark acts; she had used her own blood and hair and the bones of a small sparrow, and had thereby grown invisible to the person who loved her best in the world.

  A part of her longed to be saved from the path she had taken, so that she could become the person she might have been if she hadn’t been a stolen child, if she hadn’t learned early on that there was evil in the world. What plunged her further into the dark was an ordinary day when she was cleaning out the barn after Finney moved out. She stumbled upon an old satchel, one that belonged to Samuel Dias. Inside was a rope, a book of maps, and a letter from Maria Owens, left for him when the Queen Esther docked in Boston after their trip together from Curaçao. He had kept it all this time, though he could only tolerate reading it once, for once was more than enough.

  I don’t know what might have happened between us. I am in search of a man named John Hathorne, he is my fate and the father of my child.

  Faith sat back on her heels, her heart pounding. She had never known her father’s name. To her eyes the letters were sharp as glass. She could hear her mother calling to her from the garden, where she was planting rosemary and mint. Instead of answering, Faith lay in the straw. She paged through the book of maps until she reached Essex County. Navigators can never touch a map without plotting the journey ahead, and Samuel had marked the path with spots of ink. Faith thought of the unfurled paper that told her future, and how vengeance had settled inside her like a bird in a nest, fitted close to her heart. From the start, she had been ready to seek revenge.

  That evening she had supper with her mother, a cod baked with spring onions and cream, then Faith went up to her room under the eaves. She had been trained to keep her feelings to herself. She set the lock and burned a black candle. Her father was the magistrate who had judged the women who stood before him with their wrists in iron chains and their legs bound by ropes. If she reached back inside of herself she could recall his appearance, a tall man who had stared as if willing her to disappear. When your father doesn’t love you, a stone forms inside of you, hard and sharp enough to pierce through bone. The dark was rising in her soul and she was glad of it. She was at the age when innocence seems like a flaw. Do what you must or do what you will. Adhere to the rules or break them in two. Faith would not be thirteen forever, but that’s what she was now. She had picked up her red boots at the cobbler and they fitted her perfectly. Before she left she wrote a note to her mother, folded it, and placed it upon her bedside table.

  Faith had been stolen once before, and she wanted Maria to know that this time she was leaving of her own accord. She would stand before the magistrate and she would judge him, although she already knew she would find him guilty. She would see that he paid the price for all that he’d done.

  * * *

  On the day that Faith left New York, the air swirled with a cold mist that soon changed to a smattering of hail, for out at sea there was an unexpected storm that raced toward harbors and coastlines. Everything was white, air and sea and sky, but the weather and the high seas didn’t deter her. She had looked in the black mirror and ha
d seen that it was her fate to go to Salem. She paid for her passage with coins earned from women in need of her talents, those who wished for revenge and escape and reprisal, and she silently thanked them as she stood on the dock, equally ready for revenge.

  The ship’s purser thought the coins were false, for Faith was only a girl and how had a girl come into possession of such a sum? Then he rubbed one with his kerchief and found that it shone in his hands. “Go on, then,” he told Faith, though his gaze was on Keeper. “But that beast stays.”

  Faith certainly didn’t intend to leave Keeper behind, for the loyal creature would have leapt into the freezing river to follow her if he must. When the purser went off to see to his other duties, Faith withdrew a figure made of hemlock bark. She held a match to it and recited an invocation from The Book of the Raven, watching as the wood melted into a black pool. Each time she recited a spell from the text she felt a change inside her, as if her blood burned more hotly and her bones became sharper. Her hair was so darkly red it looked black in the shadows, as if the person she once was and the child Martha had stolen had magicked into one being. She was made of blood and heart and soul, and it was blood magic that she practiced. She was no one’s little girl now. From a distance she appeared to be a full-grown woman and men were attracted to her; she seemed different than other girls. It was the manner in which she looked at the men who stared at her, so directly, as if to see who they truly were.

  When the purser returned, he no longer noticed Keeper and failed to say another word about the wolf’s presence. In fact, the purser’s vision was cloudy and would remain so. It was the first time Faith had used left-handed magic for her own selfish reasons, and later, in the evening, when she bit into a slice of bread she’d brought along for her supper, she tasted blood and found that a tooth had broken. Blood magic had a price. Faith felt a chill, and she wondered if she was about to go too far. What you send out comes back to you threefold. What you give to the world returns in kind. Blood begets blood.

  She huddled close to Keeper to stay warm. Several of the sailors looked her over, for a girl of thirteen traveling alone was considered fair prey. Keeper growled low down in his throat to warn them, but that was not the only thing that kept the sailors away. It was Faith’s silver eyes, cold as coins; it was how she appeared to be one thing, a red-haired girl, and then suddenly she seemed to be a woman with black hair it was best not to cross.

  * * *

  They arrived in the morning light with Salem glittering before them in the cold spring sun. The harbor had nearly frozen solid even though the new leaves on the trees gleamed green. Men in rowboats had to cut through the forming shell of blue ice so that the ship might dock. It was foul weather and people on board whispered it was a sign of foul things to come. As for Faith, she pricked her finger on a piece of wood and her blood boiled on the deck and red steam rose into the chilly air.

  She remembered little of arriving in Salem when she was a babe, only the bumpy carriage ride and the deep forest and the trees with black leaves that were strewn along the path to an imposing house with diamond-patterned glass windows. The docks were quiet now because of the storm, and Faith’s red boots made a clicking sound on the ice. She went to a tavern where there were sailors who were more raucous than usual, trapped on land as they waited for the ice to thaw and their ships to set sail. When Faith took a table, no one disturbed her as they might had she been another girl who had wandered in unaccompanied. They were wise enough to let her be, for she had a protector who lay at her feet, his eyes glinting. Not one of the men in the tavern had ever seen a dog that looked like this one. The girl and her beast appeared as a single creature that had been joined in some wicked way, she in her black cape, he with his long black fur. A young serving maid was told to wait on her, for the older server could already tell this red-haired girl was trouble.

  Faith asked for two bowls of stew, one for herself, one for Keeper, and a pot of boiling water for her own brew. Tea was dear and often unavailable; and so Faith carried her own Courage Tea. She placed a tarnished silver coin on the table. She could see the serving girl’s hunger, as well as a silence she had been trained for. The girl was being mistreated on a regular basis. Across the room, the owner of the tavern was watching them with a lazy eye. He had the nerve to nod at Faith.

  “Is he the one?” she asked the girl.

  The maid was quick to look over her shoulder and even quicker to turn her gaze away. “I don’t know what you mean. He’s nothing.”

  “If you say he is, I should believe you.” Faith knew from her own experience there were times when it was impossible to do anything other than lie. “I want to find a man named John Hathorne,” she went on to say. When there wasn’t a flicker on the serving maid’s face, Faith set another coin on the table.

  The server swept the silver into her hand before anyone could see. “You’d do better to stay away from the magistrate,” she murmured. She confided that a cousin of hers had been brought up on charges and was awaiting trial. Her only crime was to have taken a walk with another woman’s betrothed. She’d been accused of witchery shortly thereafter. “Most of us don’t dare to say his name aloud.”

  “Do I look as though I’m afraid of any man?” Faith’s voice was soft, but steady. “And you shouldn’t be either.” She reached into her satchel and handed the girl a figure stitched from red cloth and black thread. “Burn this and the man causing you trouble will disappear.”

  “Will he die?” The mild serving girl was shocked by the idea, despite her wish to be rid of her abuser. In her experience, punishment came with every attempt at freedom.

  “He’ll only disappear.” When the girl continued to appear nervous, Faith added, “To Rhode Island or Connecticut, not to hell, just far enough away not to bother you.”

  Faith and Keeper were given two heaping bowls of stew, and by the time they left, the serving girl had managed to unearth the address of the magistrate’s house, south of the courthouse on Washington Street. Faith’s breath came hard as she walked through town. The streets were slippery and the roofs of the houses looked slate-blue in the dusk.

  She saw the elm trees before long, the leaves unfurling, the black bark slick and wet with melting ice. The temperature had risen, and the ice storm was all but forgotten. Now that she had returned, Faith remembered the banks of white phlox in bloom and the boy she had waved to and the shock on her mother’s face when she saw him. She felt her heart beat faster as she approached the door. Her heart had been beating just as fast on the day they ran away from the little boy in the garden and the woman who was calling out to him.

  Keeper went off toward the woods where he could go unnoticed, for he certainly would not be welcome here. Faith, however, was just what Ruth Gardner Hathorne had been looking for. There was a hired woman who came to help with the laundry and another to cook on the Sabbath, but the household work was never done. When Ruth opened the door to find a lovely girl in need of work, one who declared herself an orphan, but solemnly promised that she could cook and bake and clean as well as anyone, and had no aversion to using strong lye and washing sheets in the large kettle set over a fire pit in the yard, Ruth Hathorne thanked the Lord for this day and for His wisdom. Caring for six children had worn her down. This girl with nowhere to go was a godsend.

  “You must be freezing,” Ruth said, as she drew the girl inside. “Snow in April means a hot summer to come.”

  Ruth was a kindhearted woman; you didn’t need magic to discern that, all you had to do was gaze into her calm blue eyes. She had been a year older than Faith when she was married with no say in the matter, having lost her parents to exile in Rhode Island because they were Quakers and considered to be enemies of the Puritan colony. Her experience had caused her to be generous to girls who had nothing other than their own abilities, for she wished someone had come to her rescue and let her be a girl awhile longer; perhaps then she might have had a choice in whom she was to wed. She no longer thought about the yea
rs when she stood at the garden gate, her hands gripping the posts, wondering what would happen if she walked down Washington Street and just kept walking, through the colony, through Connecticut, going as far as she could. But she had the children, after all, and the fact that her husband paid her little attention suited her fine. He assumed she was still a foolish girl who had cried when he took her to bed, and wept when she was confronted with running a household at such a tender age. He thought she knew nothing at all. But she’d learned quite a bit during their years together. She had seen the mud on his shoes back in the time when he would disappear at night; she remembered the woman with black hair who came to knock at their door. If anything, these things made her even more compassionate to those who had nothing, for no matter how fine her house was, or how much china and silver were in her pantry, she sometimes wished she could change places with them.

  “I hope you’ll be happy here with us,” she told the reserved girl who had appeared at the door, calling herself Jane. Faith had given the last name she’d been made to use in Brooklyn, when she was her other self, the well-behaved girl. To Ruth’s eyes, she looked in need of a good meal and a place to lay her head.

  “I’m sure I will be,” Faith assured her. She was now fully the obedient girl who never talked back. She had a certain smile when she acted this part, a shy, innocent expression.

  “Then you were meant to be here.”

  Ruth was happy to lead the girl through the house, reciting a litany of what her duties would be. The snow had all but ended, and was just a flutter of soft flakes. The April sun was strong and beneath the ice the world was already green. It would be a perfect day. Ruth Gardner Hathorne showed Faith the cot in the scullery where she could sleep, and the peg where she could leave her damp coat, and if the inappropriate red boots the girl wore gave Ruth pause it was too late, the offer to work had been extended, and the girl had hugged her as if Ruth were her own mother, then carefully hung her coat upon the hook.