Page 12 of Magic Lessons

When the first of January finally arrived, she would start a bonfire on the shore to mark the end of her contract. She would let it burn all night long.

Everything might have been different if she hadn’t walked into the dining room at nine in the morning, a room she entered every day to polish the silver, which she did wearing heavy cotton gloves, and sweep away the red dust that filtered inside even when the wooden shutters were closed. Had she come an hour later, had she chosen to first set to work on preparations for dinner, had she done the washing and not waited for the afternoon sun, fate would have shifted. As it turned out, she was prompt. The day was blistering, and she had on her blue skirt and blue bodice, for blue was the color servants wore, since the dye was so cheap. Still the dress showed off her lovely shape and was short enough to show her long legs. She threw a passing glance at herself in the mirror above the sideboard. Oddly, she saw a glimpse of her mother’s reflection instead of her own. It was a startling sight that stopped her cold. True, she resembled Rebecca, with the same cool gray eyes and delicate features, though she was already taller and far more skilled at enchantments. But even a witch can possess a woman’s flaws, and a woman’s desires. Maria thought she knew what was to come, but she was wrong. Anyone can fall in love, despite vows to the contrary. Any woman can make a mistake, especially when she is young, and sees the wrong man through a haze so that he appears to be something he’s not.

Maria wore her long hair piled atop her head, held with the hairpins no one would suspect to be silver, for they appeared to be black, and were thought to be worthless. In her position it was best to have nothing, and all that she had she made certain to keep concealed, including the fact that she was now fluent in Dutch and Spanish and Portuguese. She was barefoot; her red boots were made for snow and foul weather, not heat and fair skies, and called attention to her differences. All of the housemaids went barefoot, priding themselves on how tough the soles of their feet were. It was an island of people who could survive an arid land, like the iguanas in the desert that could go weeks without water. This was not a place for the faint-hearted, and the beauty of the island belied its trials. The winds could raise a man into the air and toss him back down half a mile from where he’d originally stood. Rain rarely fell, and when it did it was collected in barrels, and even then it carried the taste and sheen of salt.

On the day she met the man who changed her fate, Maria had come from the sun-drenched courtyard, her skin still warm from the glints of sunlight sifting through the leaves. She always hated to leave that lovely spot, with its painted tiles and a fountain that was the home of three golden fish that hid beneath a lily pad whenever Cadin was near. She was dizzy, her head filled with sun, when she came inside to find a man gazing out the window at the sea, as if it were the enemy that divided him from everything he was accustomed to, pine and birch trees, fields of sheep, a house with black shutters closed against winter storms, a red fire that burned all night long. Even before she saw his face, Maria sensed he was the man she had seen in the black mirror. In the mirror he had been walking away, and so she had never spied his face, but he was tall and he wore a black coat, and he had been at sea, staring out at the waves, much as this man now did.

Caught off guard, she stopped where she was and began to recite an incantation that would prevent her from suffering the fate of her mother and so many of the women who came to her at night, when the Jansens were asleep. Women searched her out when they saw that a candle was burning in her room, when the nightjars flew from tree to tree, when the thorns on the hedge were said to be so sharp they would reach out to you as you walked along the path and wound you in places so deep you would never recover, piercing your throat, your sex, your heart. Most women in Willemstad knew that Maria Owens attended to love that had been lost, love that was broken, love that was meant to begin but hadn’t, love that had become a fever despite every remedy.

They came to her and she was bound to help them, as Hannah had, but who was she to go to?

Cadin was outside tapping at the window. He was relentless and frantic. All the same, Maria didn’t let him in. She knew what he would tell her. Burn mandrake in a brass bowl. Write his name on a candle and throw it far into the sea. Repeat three times: Fly away as fast as you can.

She thought of the way her mother had looked at her father, as if nothing else mattered. It was dangerous for a woman to give up her power. Under her breath, Maria uttered the first verse of an invocation she had learned from Hannah as she sat by the fire in a place she might have felt she had only dreamed, had she not had Cadin to remind her of who she was and who she would always be. She was the woman who couldn’t be drowned, who had fled from fires and the country where a woman couldn’t be free. It was an ancient conjure Hannah had found in a book of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, perhaps part of a powerful manuscript called The Fourth Book. It was among the most potent charms and incantations Maria had copied into her Grimoire.

You are not mine, I am not yours, you have no power, I walk where I wish, my heart is protected.

“You are not mine,” Maria said under her breath. But she had no pins, no red thread dyed with madder root, no rosemary, no St. John’s wort, no mandrake torn from the ground, no myrrh oil, no will of her own, and she stopped the chant before it was complete, in mid-sentence, leaving herself defenseless. That was when he turned to her.

I will never love you, she should have said—it was the last line of the invocation—but instead she stood there like a fool, not unlike the women who came to her at night, their faces damp with tears, their minds made up, convinced they would walk through a door they knew full well should be kept bolted shut.

Maria told Mrs. Jansen she grew rue in the garden to keep away flies, without mentioning that it also checked lust, something her clients often wanted to feed to their men, along with a tincture of wild lettuce to reduce longings. Perhaps Maria should drink such a mixture herself, perhaps she should bathe in lettuce water, as she had suggested to others in dire situations, for the pale green water was helpful in extinguishing desire. Instead she stood where she was, and that was how she came to tie her life to John Hathorne’s, despite the fact that she had sworn she would never belong to any man. Love begins in curious ways, in daylight or in darkness, when you are in search of it or when you least expect to find it. You may think it is one thing, when in fact it is something else entirely: infatuation, loneliness, seduction.

John Hathorne had been so deep in thought he hadn’t noticed her presence until he turned to see her. At first he believed he might have conjured her, for there were people who said a dream could be brought to life in the waking world. He had faith in the goodness of God, but he was also certain that life was a mystery and that one must fight against the forces that opposed mankind. All the same he was a man of thirty-seven, with a man’s flaws and weaknesses. He had never seen a young woman who was as captivating as Maria, and what was even more charming, it was clear she didn’t even know she possessed the power to enchant.

“I’ve acted in error,” Hathorne murmured. It was something he would say forever after; he would say it in his sleep, in his own bed at home, and on his last day on earth.

He was more than twenty years older than Maria, but that made no difference. He was tall, quite handsome, with distinctive features and an intense gaze. She saw the person he was at that very moment, the one he’d become ever since he stepped onto the dock here in Curaçao. He’d let go of the darkness that was always pooled inside him in his Massachusetts life, and along with it the burden of being his father’s son, for William Hathorne had come to the new world in 1630 and was one of the first men to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The elder Hathorne was a well-known, respected magistrate and trader, an assistant to the governor and a deputy representing the town of Salem for many years, a fierce persecutor of the more freethinking Quakers, a man who owned most of Salem Village. Everything John had done was to please William Hathorne, but the upright man John had forced himself to become had flown away like a night bird upon his arrival on the island and left him to return to the person he’d been as a boy, before he, too, had become a magistrate trained to judge others, before he’d taken over the family shipping business in which every cent must be accounted for, and every bargain must be in his favor.

He’d come to the house to take coffee with Mr. Jansen before they continued on to the Jansens’ warehouse, where they were to discuss their trade, but the courtyard had confused him, and he’d found his way to the dining room rather than the study and had entirely missed Jansen, who by now, annoyed to have been kept waiting, had already left for the docks. Jansen wasn’t the only one who was frustrated. Hathorne himself felt the trip would likely be a waste, and it had been, until he saw Maria Owens, who was wearing a blue ribbon in her hair for protection and luck.

Hathorne was a man from a county north of Boston, who often traveled into the White Mountains, so called because they were said to have snow all year round. He had a house in Newburyport and another in Salem. His ships brought iron ore and lumber from Massachusetts to trade for tobacco and sugar and coffee in Curaçao and Jamaica. He had undertaken this trip to better know his business and understand how it might further prosper. He thought of the Antilles as places to be tolerated, full of uneducated, superstitious people, but as soon as he stepped off the ship he felt a sort of enchantment. The blistering heat had overwhelmed him, and the palette of endless blues was blinding in the stark light. The charm and heat of the island brought up a welter of emotions that Hathorne was unused to experiencing. New England was a place of darkness and, in the evenings, of fear. Wild beasts roamed the mossy woods, and the native people were angry at how much land had been stolen and settled. Where he came from, every moment must be accounted for, in the meetinghouse and at home, and punishments were fierce. There were the stocks for those who were known to commit crimes concerning both legal matters and matters of faith. There were rules that were never to be broken. But here on Curaçao, he felt himself to be a different man, and that was the man Maria stumbled upon in the dining room.

She saw him not as he had been, or would be, but as he was at that very minute. He had been listening to the birds outside the window, and he stood in a block of yellow sunlight when she first spied him. Now that they were face-to-face, he ran a hand through his dark hair, confused by his own strange emotions. Hathorne looked younger than his age and he felt as if he was no more than twenty. He was not a man who easily let his appetites arise, and now he supposed it was joy he was experiencing; perhaps it was a gift to feel this way. Certainly, it was a feeling that was most uncommon. He came from Essex County in Massachusetts, named after the very place from which Maria fled in England, an omen she would not fully understand until much later, when she stood in a green field outside his house, a cold ocean away, a place where the ferns turned black in the winter, and evil was seen by those who lived their lives with fear and intolerance.

“I’ve somehow made a mistake. I’ve missed your father and I should be at the warehouse. If you could direct me, miss, I’ll be on my way.”

Clearly, he had made yet another mistake, taking her for a member of the family.

“I’m happy to guide you there,” Maria offered. She had laundry to see to in the huge pots in the courtyard, and Juni would be waiting in the kitchen so they might set preparations under way for that evening’s dinner, but instead she went back out through the garden, the man from Massachusetts following closely, drawn by what he would later swear was pure enchantment. He’d been warned that black magic was invoked in the caves by the sea on this island and that pirates were welcome in the city of Willemstad, especially if they spent gold stolen from Spanish ships. Yet as they walked under the inkberry trees, on their way to the harbor, he forgot the life he’d led. He forgot his house with its fine pottery brought from England, and the people who lived in that house in rooms that were continually gloomy throughout the year. In summer, the air was filled with flies and gnats. In winter, darkness fell at four in the afternoon. But that was there, a world away. He squinted in the sunlight and stayed close to the girl. She smelled of lavender and salt. Once or twice she gestured to chase away a black crow that seemed to follow her, wheeling through a slice of the sky, then careening down toward Hathorne, so that he might have believed it was his enemy, if birds could think and feel and plan such things. He didn’t yet know the girl’s name, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. This is how it felt to be free of everything you had been trained to do. Be cautious, be sure of yourself, be careful of outsiders, beware of women who have the nerve to meet your eyes, who think they’re your equals, who do as they please, who please you as well, who will never do as they’re told.

Maria glanced behind her when they reached the sea. The water was blue-green and clear enough to see the shadows of large, lumbering shapes cast onto the white sand by the creatures that swam beneath the waves. John stopped to kneel so he might better see them. He was wearing leather boots made in London that cost more than what most people on the island earned in a year.

“A monster,” he said of the huge sea animal that came nearer the shore.

Maria crouched beside him. He saw that she was barefoot, and that the skirt of the dress she wore was hemmed with blue thread.

“Sir, I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” she told him. “That is no monster. It’s a turtle.”

Hathorne grinned at her, then pulled off his boots. “We’ll see about that.”

He must have been enchanted, for he leapt into the sea fully clothed, wearing his loose linen shirt and his trousers and even his coat. Only a man possessed would do such a thing. He was so far from the darkness of Massachusetts anything seemed possible. The water was warm and the current helped him along. He remembered feeling this way when he was a boy, at the sea in August. He approached the turtle, for that was what it was, and ran his hands over its bumpy shell, then swam beside it, gliding through the flat water, then floating on his back, his eyes half-closed, a smile on his lips. Hathorne had large, handsome features and a smile that changed his expression so thoroughly he might have been another man entirely. He was inside of a dream, not thinking how he would explain his drenched appearance to Mr. Jansen, not thinking of anything at all other than this island, this woman, this moment he was in.

“Now I see what it is,” he called, joyous. “It is a miracle.”

Maria knew what was happening. She tried to recite a spell backwards, but the words dissolved in her mouth. She remembered that Hannah had said it was difficult to set a spell upon oneself. And now, if she wasn’t mistaken, it was already too late.

After his swim, Hathorne climbed up a ladder to the dock, soaking wet, but laughing. “I think I look to be the monster now.”