Page 49 of Magic Lessons

“I have to decide on who the right woman will be and she must drink as well. Once she does there is no going back.”

“That’s not exactly comforting.” Finney patted Faith’s head as if she were a child, then got up to see to Arnold. “I only hope it doesn’t work on horses.”

Faith laughed and went into the house. She and Keeper set off for the butcher, where she would get a bundle of bones and meat scraps. She had a few women in mind for Finney. The fruit vendor’s daughter at the market, a neighbor who had recently lost her husband, a woman who sold books. She’d planned to take the Tenth with her, but in her hurry she left it on the garden table. Faith was happy to be with her beloved Keeper, forgetting that once magic has begun it cannot so easily be put away.

The Tree of Heaven was blooming with the last of its red flowers when Maria set to work in the herb garden that day. She had been attempting to grow mampuritu, an herb from Curaçao that was accustomed to warmer climates. It was a very stubborn herb. She had tried lighting a fire near it, to warm its roots, to no avail. Perhaps she should rid the garden of the herb, for it made her think of Samuel Dias, even when she didn’t wish to, and she was glad to be interrupted when Catherine Durant arrived at the gate, her little white dog following close behind. Catherine had been using Maria’s black soap, which so refreshed her that she looked ten years younger than her age. “Is this what happens to all of your customers?” she called to Maria, who was down on her knees, weeding between rows of parsley and sage. “Once we use your soap, we can’t live without it?”

Maria laughed and clapped the soil from her hands. She would always be grateful for the simple pie magic that had brought her daughter home. “For you,” she told Catherine, “the soap is always a gift.”

Catherine was thirsty from her walk from the Bowery, and when she saw the glass of wine on the table she sat on a metal chair and took a sip. Her dog jumped on her lap, barking, but Catherine ignored him, and, intrigued by the taste, she continued to drink. Her mouth began to tingle once she’d drained the elixir, as if she’d eaten nettles. She immediately knew there was an enchantment at work. Ordinarily she would have been indignant, but not on this day. What was meant to be would be, whether or not you approved. The truth was, she was curious to see what would happen next.

Finney walked out of the barn, smelling of horseflesh and sweat. He intended to tell Faith to stop the spell. There was no point going any further, not in his case. Love was an impossible, ridiculous goal for a person such as himself. What he’d had, he’d lost, and he thought it better to accept his life as it was. Finney would leave Manhattan and the false notion that he had found a home. He would go back on the road, perhaps to Connecticut, unknown territory devoid of memories. He was meant to be alone, and he’d become quite good at a solitary life; his horse was more than enough company. But there in the garden the peddler stopped as if struck. A force went through him, heart and brain, body and soul. The whole world seemed a wonder, the table and the chairs set out in the grass, the red flowers falling to the ground, the beautiful woman before him.

Catherine could read the man in the yard—a peddler, a widower, a man who was lost—but she viewed him through the power of the Tenth and therefore saw that he was a hero who put others first, who cared more for an old horse than most people cared for their neighbors and friends. She could see the young man he’d been, before his heartaches, when he liked to balance on stone walls and raced through fields on his father’s horses, when the women in his village claimed he was the handsomest man alive. Her little dog ran at Finney, barking protectively, but when the peddler reached down, the dog flopped over on his back, ready to be petted, as if Finney were a long-lost friend.

Faith came home with her purchase from the butcher shop to find Maria waiting for her, furious. “You’ve created mayhem, and it’s unbreakable. There’s nothing I can do to amend it. I told you, you aren’t ready to work magic.”

Faith returned her mother’s gaze and held it. As it turned out they were now the same height. “I am ready.”

Maria felt a chill go through her. “When I say so.”

“It’s my fault,” Finney was quick to claim. “She did so on my behalf.”

“I believe it was on my behalf,” Catherine said.

Already, Catherine Durant could not be kept from him or he from her. They had an unspoken pact that they would never be parted, two spellbound people who left together for Catherine’s farm on the Bowery without looking back.

Maria narrowed her eyes. It had been too long since she had really looked at her daughter. Now she saw the edge of darkness inside. “You haven’t enough practice for such things.”

Faith shrugged. “It’s only love.”

“You think love is so simple?” Maria thought of the day she saw John Hathorne in the blue dining room in Curaçao and the morning Samuel had brought the magnolia tree to Salem so she thought that snow was falling. “Take my advice,” she told Faith. “Stay away from it.”

“If that’s how you feel about love, why are you still wearing Gogo’s ring?”

Maria had tried everything to remove the gold band from her finger, but the wedding ring wouldn’t come off. It was likely the reason she thought of Samuel Dias so often. She wondered if Abraham had known that would happen and why such rings were worn, to make you think of the one who had given it to you.

“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.