Page 17 of Magic Lessons

Maria felt a tightness in her chest when she learned the fate of the women in his family. She only hoped he hadn’t seen what she had seen in England, the last moments of a life engulfed in flames. She’d decided she would hem all of his clothing with blue stitches, to protect him from ill intentions.

“A woman like my mother is frightening to those in power,” Samuel said.

Maria understood that a woman with her own beliefs who refuses to bow to those she believes to be wrong can be considered dangerous. In the county where she’d grown up in England they would call her a witch, they would say she had a tail and spoke to Satan, but in Spain and Portugal they would say that the Jews had dark powers, that they could control the seas and stars, they could work magic to curse people or keep them alive.

The voyage passed as though it were a dream. Once Samuel Dias began talking, he didn’t stop. He spoke about Brazil and Morocco, and of the great flocks of birds in Africa and the beaches in Portugal so hidden a man would never be found, and of islands in the middle of the sea where the only residents were the turtles. He told her of places where men wore scarlet scarves and painted their eyes with kohl and women dressed in silk and calico, their heads covered. In time, Maria talked as well, admitting that her robber father could recite entire plays without taking a breath.

“But why would a man in his right mind memorize another man’s words instead of speaking his own?”

“That’s what a player does.” Maria shrugged. “He pretends to be someone he’s not.”

But wasn’t that what they were doing? He pretended to be a man who hadn’t spent his life running away, and she pretended to be a woman who could reveal her true self. And yet they talked, so much, they didn’t notice when the seas changed from blue to gray. Whenever Samuel’s pain was at its worst, Maria went to his bed, her body folding next to his. She wrapped her arms around him so he wouldn’t thrash in his fits of anguish. He was ablaze with fever, although his other symptoms—the headaches and rashes and bleeding—were gone. Night after night, she went to him unbidden, despite her vow to do otherwise. It was a dream, she told herself. Only in the fleeting hours of dimming light, the hours when it is said the soul can travel freely, did she come to his bed without shame, wishing to be nowhere but where she was, in the wide and glittering sea.

As they neared Boston, and his health improved, Maria came to know Samuel’s stories, as she knew him. She hadn’t understood how her mother could love a man who could only speak words written by others, and was pleased that Samuel was nothing like her father. Here was a man who was filled with words, and Maria found she was intrigued. It occurred to her that Hannah had raised her to value words above all else. Samuel could not stop talking, and she could not stop listening. One night as they drifted off to sleep, she thought she heard him say Don’t leave me, but by daybreak she’d convinced herself she’d only imagined his plea. Men like Samuel Dias didn’t say such things, and neither did she; they had both been hardened by burnings, and had good reason not to trust the world.

Cadin often settled down beside the ailing man, making a nest in his quilt, allowing his feathers to be stroked when he usually only let Maria near. The bird was at least sixteen, and likely had aches and pains himself. Whenever Samuel turned his head, Cadin tried to steal one of the gold earrings he wore.

“One thief knows another,” Samuel warmly said to the bird. He had a deep affection for the creature by now. “What happens when you let him free?” he asked Maria.

“He comes back to me.” She felt choked up for some reason, which was not at all like her. She told herself it was the closeness of the room, the flame on which she cooked a broth of fish bones to strengthen Samuel’s constitution.

“Of course,” Samuel said. “Why wouldn’t he?”

Samuel would have come back to her as well and he knew it, without a chain, without a cage, but he said nothing. There was no point in doing so, even though he had found the blue thread marking all of his clothing, stitches he examined with confusion and tenderness. There was another man, one who Samuel suspected was a liar at best, for he was convinced the sapphire was false, and only a false man gives a gift that is a lie. All the same, whoever he was, he was Faith’s father and most likely a man who didn’t spend his life at sea, and therefore a better man than himself.

Most were grateful for the sight of gulls wheeling across the sky, the sign that land was near, but Samuel refused to look outside. He let his assistant use the charts he himself had plotted. They followed the coast northward, for they would unload their cargo of rum in Boston and Newport, then replace it with goods in New York, all manner of cloth and tea and spices, along with English pottery and French wine. By now, Faith was speaking a few words. Momma, Caw Caw—for Cadin—and Gogo for Samuel Dias, her baby talk word for Goat.

“Is that my name?” He’d laugh when the baby nodded, a serious expression on her face. He turned to Maria. “I think you’ve been talking about me.”

“I have not,” Maria insisted, although, in fact, she often did and had a song that made Faith clap her hands with joy.

What should we do with the Goat?

Shall we feed him supper, shall we give him tea, shall we wake him up or let him sleep?

As it turned out, Dias had overheard. He didn’t know whether to be pleased that Maria sang about him, or hurt that she thought of him as little more than a pet.

“What should we do with the Goat?” he sang, with more darkness than Maria would have expected. “Shall we let him live or watch him die?”

“I want you to live or you wouldn’t be here. That was the bargain in exchange for my travel.”

“Is that so? If you hadn’t felt forced to help me you wouldn’t be here?”

Maria was confused. “You knew the terms. You were there on the dock.”

He turned his back on her then, clearly wounded. That night she could tell he was only pretending to sleep. When he truly slept, he talked in his dreams, recalling everyone he had known and every country he had been to, all he had lost and all that he’d found. Lately, when he did sleep, he had begun to say her name. A single word and nothing more. Maria only.

“You’re insulted,” Maria said to him. She had tried to slip into bed beside him, but he made no room for her.

“If I hadn’t been ill, you would have had nothing to do with me?”

“But you were ill, and I was with you.”

“So it was.” It seemed he was nothing more to her then a bargain to fulfill. He kept his back to her, and when she climbed in beside him, he moved away when she tried to slip her hands under his shirt. He was burning still, but now he was hot with anger.

The rain fell and turned into mist. The sky was gray and the sea grew rough as they traveled north. When a disk of sun broke through, it was possible to spy cliffs, and seals sprawled upon the ledges of the rocks. In the very far distance there was a haze of green. Massachusetts was indeed huge and wild.

“You’ve done as you promised,” Abraham Dias told Maria as they neared the coast, pleased by the outcome of their agreement. He had his son, alive and well, and he thought more highly of Maria than he would have imagined. He almost seemed jaunty, wearing a leather cap that had been treated with animal blood and grease so that it would be waterproof, a grin on his sunburned face.