Page 4 of Magic Lessons

Hannah glanced away, as she did when she didn’t wish to reveal her emotions. But she needn’t have bothered attempting to hide her sorrow, for Maria could sense what a person was feeling so strongly she might as well have been able to hear someone’s deepest fears and wishes spoken aloud.

“It can’t be,” Maria decided.

“It was for me,” Hannah told her.

“And for me?”

“You looked in the black mirror. What did you see?”

It was a private matter, but this was a time for truth rather than privacy. “I saw a daughter.”

“Did you now? Then you’ll be a fortunate woman.”

“And a man who brought me diamonds.”

Hannah laughed out loud. There they were in their ragged clothes, half a day’s walk from the nearest village, with nothing precious between them, save for their wits and Maria’s stolen hairpin, as far away from a man with diamonds as they could be.

“I wouldn’t be surprised by anything that happened to you, my girl,” Hannah told Maria. “But I believe you will be amazed at the turns of fate, as we all are when it comes to our own lives, even when we have the sight.”

A church bell rang miles away. Maria had never been to the closest village; she had never seen the blacksmith’s shop where irons were cast, and knew nothing of constables, or churchwardens, or toll-takers, or surgeons who believed in using leeches and live worms and foxes’ lungs as cures, and medical men who disdained folk remedies. Hannah placed her faith in washing her hands with clean water and her strong black soap before any examination, and because of this she lost far fewer patients. None, as a matter of fact, except those who were too far gone for any remedy, for things without remedy must be without regard. She made her own black soap every March, enough to last the year long, burning wood from rowans and hazelwoods for the ashes that would form her lye, using licorice-infused oil, honey, and clove, adding dried lavender for luck and rosemary for remembrance. Ladles of liquid soap were poured into wooden molds, where they hardened into bars. Maria had written down the recipe in her Grimoire, for this soap was most often asked for by the women from town. They said a woman grew younger each time she used it; if she had sorrows the soap washed them away, and if there was an illness in the house it would not spread, for the herbs in the soap defeated fevers and chills. It was the sort of recipe one could add to however one saw fit. Mistletoe for those who wished for children. Vervain to escape one’s enemies. Black mustard seed to repel nightmares. Lilac for love.

This year, there was a coughing illness in the village, and people still feared the wave of fatalities that had passed among them only a few years earlier when the Black Death was everywhere. Small towns had disappeared entirely, with none left behind to bury the dead, and cattle soon enough had made their homes in abandoned houses where there were no roofs or windows or doors. In their village, women turned away from the doctor, for he had never been to school and believed in bloodletting and using stones and petrified wood to discern both the illness and the cure. Instead, they came to Hannah, in the night, along the path where the ferns were green and sweet, so that the world seemed brand-new, and anything seemed possible, even salvation.

For Health

Wash your hands with lye soap before treating the ill person.

Horehound, boiled into a syrup, for coughs.

Tea of wild onions and lobelia to soothe.

Beebalm for a restful sleep.

Vinegar elixirs stop nosebleeds.

Eat raw garlic every day and a cup of hot water with lemon and honey.

For asthma, drink chamomile tea.

For chills, gingerroot tea.

Licorice root gathered from the riverside for chest pain.

Dragon’s blood from tree bark and berries of the Dracaena draco, the red resin tree from Morocco and the Canary Islands that can only be found in one market in London and can cure nearly any wound.

A live snail rubbed on burns will help heal the blisters.

Feed a cold, starve a fever.

In the summer of 1674, a time of unusual heat, a woman with red hair arrived at the cottage. As fate would have it, she brought the future with her. She knocked at the door, and Hannah said, “Come in,” even though she seemed to hesitate. Bad news often came this way, without warning, on what appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary day. The visitor had on beautiful, muddy clothes. Her shoes were made of kid leather, dyed red, decorated with buckles, and she carried a cloak made of fine blue wool, fringed with the fur of a fox. She wore a linen gown dyed scarlet with madder root and a silk, corded petticoat. Yet beneath her lovely, ruined clothes, purple bruises bloomed upon her skin, and there were marks left from a rope that had been tied around her wrists. From her place by the fire Maria stared at the red-haired lady. The stranger was so elegant, with a pretty, calm voice. She said her name was Rebecca and that she needed to spend the night. Hannah allowed her to sleep on a pallet of straw, knowing that though good deeds should bring good luck, such results aren’t always the case.

The red-haired lady announced she was in search of a remedy to quench her husband’s fire for her. Hannah explained to Maria that the lady was running away from her husband, which was a perilous proposition, especially when there was another man in the picture, the one she truly loved. She needed a cure to protect her and allow her to leave her wedded life.

“Is this what love does?” Maria wished to know.

“That’s not the name I’d give it,” Hannah responded.

“Is it so different than your man, who claimed you had a tail?”