Page 16 of Magic Lessons

“I’m not,” she was quick to say.

“Good. I would hate for you to be jealous.”

“You don’t have to worry about that, Goat. Just worry about living long enough so there will be a hundred and one women who have told you lies.”

He laughed, enjoying sparring with her. She was not like any of the women he’d known, for she was unafraid to argue, and she often bested him, making him feel a fool, the color rising in his face, until all other women were forgotten.

At night Maria curled with her baby and sang her to sleep, the same tune Hannah once sang to her.

The water is wide, I cannot get o’er it

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that will carry two

And both shall row, my Love and I.

I leaned my back against some oak

Thinking he was a trusty Tree:

But first he bended, and then he broke;

and so did my false love to me.

Maria studied the child’s face in the pale light that filtered through the small, shuttered window. She had the red hair of her grandmother and Maria’s own wide, generous mouth and gray eyes. Her features were narrow, as her father’s were, with high cheekbones and a straight nose. Despite these resemblances, she was unique, a rose of a girl Maria could study for hours on end.

“All sleepers should dream as she does,” Samuel Dias said one night, for he was often awake till all hours, thinking about the life he’d lived, knowing how closely he had walked beside death. The child reminded him of what was good in the world, and he often told her stories his own mother had told him. There was one about a cat that was far more clever than its master, and another about a wolf who had been a man until he’d been placed under a spell, and still another about a child lost in the woods.

“Hush,” Maria told him. “Try sleep for yourself. That’s what you need.”

Maria closed her eyes and imagined Faith in a large garden, the one she had seen in the black mirror, where trees bloomed with white flowers and lilacs grew beside the door. She was in that vivid garden, in the midst of her dream, when Cadin woke her before the first light of morning. He tapped at her and made a harsh clacking noise. There was the wretched sound of struggling, as if someone had been caught in a net. In an instant, Maria was wide-awake, her heart pounding. Samuel was having convulsions. She left the baby in the hammock and went to throw her arms around Samuel to ensure he wouldn’t harm himself as he thrashed around. The fever was still in his body, it always would be, and there would be times when it would return unexpectedly. Illness had robbed him of some of his strength; he was gaunt, in a weakened state, otherwise Maria would have never been able to hold him down. He shouted for her to let him go, as if in her arms he was in chains and not merely in her embrace, but she held on until he quieted, finally exhausted by the fit brought on by his disease.

“You’ll be fine,” Maria told him, as she stroked his head. “You’re here with me.”

She filled a pan with water from the rain barrel outside their door, then slipped off his shirt and washed him with cool water and black soap, her hands stroking his chest and arms. His body ached so badly he thought this must be what it was like when a prisoner was placed on a rack, then stretched beyond all reason. Dias turned his head so that she would not see that he wept. He had done things in his life that were cruel and terrible, actions he didn’t wish to share with anyone and might be paying for now if God’s judgment was upon him. He’d been a robber and a thief. He’d been with women he remembered only too well and those whom he’d completely forgotten. All the same, he wanted Maria. She looked at him and knew. After that, she kept her hands to herself. She had promised herself to another, and she wasn’t one to break her word.

“Maybe you should give up on me,” Samuel said. She was still beside him and he could feel her heart beat. His own heart was jumpy and uncontrolled, ruled by fever. “Don’t worry, my father won’t throw you overboard. He’s a better man than he appears to be. He’s likely due a better son.”

By now Samuel was exhausted. Maria knew that an illness became worse before it was better. To help with his cure, she made him talk, for that encouraged him. That was who he was inside, a man who loved stories.

“Do you want the one about the wolf or the cat?” he asked.

“The one about the goat,” Maria said. “Tell me about you.”

And so he did, although he rarely spoke of the past, and for good reason. Once, when he was a boy, he’d had a family, a mother and two sisters, but that was long ago. He and his father had left Portugal and traveled to Brazil, but the Inquisition had followed, and soon the sea was the only place left for them. For more than ten years, they’d commandeered Spanish ships and fought the people who had so cruelly murdered and expelled their people. Because of this, Samuel hadn’t counted the dead for whom he’d been responsible. This very ship had been taken from the Spanish navy. Though father and son had begun as thieves, they now were respectable traders. All the same, they continued to consider anything belonging to the Spanish to be fair game. When the winds were bad, or when trade was difficult, they wouldn’t think twice about returning to their original line of business.

“Do you judge me for this?” he asked Maria.

“My own father was a robber,” Maria admitted. “So I can hardly judge.” It was less offensive to say Robbie was a thief rather than to admit he’d been a player in a theater troupe.

When Maria asked what had happened to Samuel’s mother and sisters, he shook his head.

“My sisters were converted and married to men they didn’t know. My mother was burned.”

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them. They burned books about medicine and magic, books in Hebrew and in Spanish and Portuguese. Samuel’s mother could read and write; she was a healer and a midwife, and had written a book of cures, but there had only been one copy and it had been destroyed. That was why Samuel and his father always transported books, even those that had been outlawed by slave owners in the West Indies.

“I’m glad I memorized my mother’s stories,” Samuel said. “That way they can never be forgotten.”