Page 5 of The Book of Magic

Sally had been embarrassed and had quickly apologized. They’d gone to a coffee shop where Sally had been treated to an ice-cream soda, then she had taken the train home, leaving Jet to do as she pleased. But Sally had the sight, and she knew there was more to the story, then and now. She so rarely used her bloodline talents, that the sight came to her in little sparks, almost as if she’d had a slight electric shock. She blinked and took a step closer to her aunt. There was the scent of smoke and the ceiling above them was shadowed with a black smudge. Could it be that the room needed to be repainted? Hadn’t they had the Merrill brothers do so only two years earlier?

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Sally mused.

“Gillian and the girls are joining us for the evening,” Jet explained. “Isn’t that a lovely surprise?”

“Why didn’t you mention it this morning? I have nothing to serve for dinner other than canned soup!” Antonia was such a picky eater now that she was pregnant and Kylie was a vegetarian, and lately Sally and the aunts had mostly eaten pasta and tomato soup, quick easy meals that took no care or thought.

“We’re meeting Franny and having dinner at the inn.”

“Franny loathes the inn,” Sally said, even more suspicious.

“We want it to be a special night,” Jet explained. “We’ll all be together.”

“Well, then, the inn it is,” Sally agreed.

While Sally saw to her end of the day’s duties, Jet sat down and observed the room. She took in everything she usually would have ignored: the skittering sound of mice beneath the floorboards, the clock ticking off seconds, the wind hitting against the cloudy windows. There were fingerprints on the glass cases of the rare books, and the ceiling fan spun in a cockeyed circle. She noticed that the hems of the curtains that were original to the library were decorated with an intricate pattern of moons in every phase. Funny how she’d never seen that before; she’d never looked deeply enough. Jet gazed around the room, wondering what else she had never noticed, and there it was. The bricks directly beneath Maria’s framed journal page were not fitted properly. The mortar was a dark crimson. Jet crossed the room so she might place a hand on the wall. You can live a whole lifetime without knowing what was right in front of you. Seeing has little to do with opening your eyes; it’s what you feel inside that counts, it’s what you know without anyone telling you.

Behind the bricks there was a steady rhythm, the pulse of a book that had been hidden for more than three hundred years. Jet loosened one of the bricks by scraping a pen against mortar. She wriggled the brick back and forth until it gave way and could be pried loose. The space behind the wall was dank and icy cold. It appeared to be empty until Jet reached her hand inside. A shiver ran through her as she brought forth a small black book. The Book of the Raven.

Maria Owens might have rid the world of this slim volume, for it had nearly ruined her daughter Faith’s life, but to destroy a book seemed an unnatural act, especially one written by a woman of great talent and skill. Instead of burning it, Maria had come here to the library, then set to work hiding The Book of the Raven, a dark spell book that had brought her daughter to the left-handed side of magic long ago. She’d deposited this Grimoire behind the loose bricks, mixing in three drops of her blood to seal the mortar, well aware that some things should stay hidden until they were meant to be found, for the knowledge this book held was so dark it was intended for a reader who possessed the ability to handle its power. Maria had just had a child with the man she loved and was in no position to use The Book of the Raven. In time, however, an Owens woman would discover the book, and use it as it should be used, with love and courage.

This was that time. The seventh day. Jet’s last day on earth.

When she reached for the book, the binding scalded her fingertips. She could feel the darkness within the text. She knew left-handed magic when she saw it, black magic so perilous that every page was inflamed. She thought of the time her brother, Vincent, had discovered The Magus, a compilation of the history of magic first published in 1801. The Magus had shaken the bureau drawer whenever it was locked away, as if it had a life and a mind of its own. At the turn of the century it had been deemed so fearsome that copies had been burned on bonfires in Washington Square.

The Book of the Raven had been written by the first woman to publish a book in England, Amelia Bassano. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, her volume of poems, had been written from a woman’s point of view, defending Eve, thought to have caused sin in the mortal world. Bassano had gone largely unrecognized due to her gender, but that hadn’t stopped her from writing. Jet had now rediscovered this second book no one but its users knew about, Amelia Bassano’s private Grimoire, an ode to the Dark Art sometimes referred to as a Book of Shadows. It was a volume made up of equal parts love and revenge, meant to help a woman in need, a woman who’d been cursed, who was in love, who was desperate, who was at the end of her life and the end of her rope. On the very first page Un desiderio was written in pale blue ink. One wish. That was what the book promised to grant its reader.

Amelia Bassano was the daughter of a Jew from Venice, from a family of musicians who had lived on the outskirts of power, attached to the court of England, where she learned more than most educated men about politics and falconry and music and myth. At the age of thirteen she’d been a mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s patron of the theater, said to be Anne Boleyn’s son, and she was said to have had an affair with Christopher Marlowe, who had taught her the art of writing for the theater. Language was everything. Trust was for fools. Love came and went. Words could be stolen. There were those who said she was the Dark Lady William Shakespeare wrote about and that it was she who taught him to write plays. There had always been rumors that he had loved her, but in this book she claimed even more. She had not only taught him how to write, she had written the plays.

The last chapter of The Book of the Raven was titled “How to End a Curse.”

I didn’t know that what you sent into the world came back to you threefold, and that I would be the one to suffer. To begin a curse is done with ease, to break it takes a great sacrifice.

Everything worthwhile is dangerous.

Jet could hear Sally returning books to the shelves in the travel section; fortunately she was too far away for her to observe Jet slip the slim volume into her coat pocket, then hastily replace the brick in the wall, her hands now stained with blood and mortar. Sally might have seen the abnormality in the wall had she been able to see the color red, but as it was, she was still disconnected from her emotions, and had walked past it daily without a glance. She’d never once noticed what was right in front of her.

Gillian and her nieces drove up from Cambridge, leaving before rush-hour traffic set in. The sky was bright and blue and the magnolias were so spectacular that people from all over the commonwealth came to gawk as soon as the buds began to bloom in creamy cups.

“Home sweet home,” Gillian said when she and Antonia and Kylie unfolded themselves from her black and white Mini, which, considering how huge Antonia was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, could not have fit anything more than the three women and a tray of heirloom tomato seedlings called Blue Zebra that Gillian had brought for her aunt Jet.

Jet had always been especially fond of Gillian, despite the fact that Gilly had been a wild girl who had looked for trouble in her youth, and had made certain to find it. Sally had pulled her back from the brink, and Gillian would always be grateful to her sister.

But that was long ago, and Gillian had learned her lesson. She blushed when recalling her mistakes and all those dreadful men she’d taken up with; she had long ago come to understand she was entitled to kindness and comfort. Gillian had thought she was through with love, until she’d met Ben Frye. He’d been her niece’s science teacher, the opposite of the men she’d gone for in the past, steady and earnest and kindhearted. She still laughed to think he’d been attracted to her because of her ability to work complex figures in her head. Halfway through her life, she’d been lucky in love. She’d avoided the curse by following the rules. Don’t live together, don’t declare your love, no wedding rings, no displays of affection in public. Ben had been puzzled and somewhat hurt by these strange traditions.

“Your aunt Franny didn’t hide the fact that she was married,” he reminded her.

Yes, but that was after her beloved Haylin had been diagnosed with stage four cancer, and once there was no cure the curse couldn’t touch them.

“And Sally!” Ben had said. “She was married twice.”

And look at her, twice a widow and brokenhearted. And look at me, without a daughter, what I want most in the world.

To do their best to trick the curse, Gillian and Ben had wed simply and quietly at the courthouse and Gillian refused to have their marriage officially recorded. Whether or not they were legally married was up for debate; certainly Gillian refused to wear a ring. They lived in a two-family house in Central Square, where Gillian resided on the ground floor, while Ben took the upstairs apartment. Whenever he asked why they must live separately—neither earned much of a salary—Ben was a science teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and MIT didn’t pay lab technicians a fortune and clearly it would have made more sense to live in one apartment and rent out the other—Gillian asserted that too much togetherness was certain to ruin a relationship, especially in the Owens family. In truth, they spent most nights together, and when they didn’t Ben would often spy Gillian out in their small garden, sleepless and shivering, scanning the heavens, as if she might find an answer there in the night sky above them as to how the curse had found her despite her deception.

When she saw Antonia blooming in the last trimester of her pregnancy, her red hair pinned up, her freckled skin rosy and flushed, Gillian felt her heart jolt. Her one wish was to have a daughter, but now that she was forty-three she’d begun to wonder if her inability to have a child was the work of the curse. She had been to infertility specialists at Mass General and when that didn’t work, she’d begged the aunts for a cure. Franny and Jet had done their best, attempting any number of traditional botanical remedies. Myrrh, juniper berries, licorice, skullcap, pennyroyal, hemlock, chamomile flowers, unicorn root taken in small doses, butterfly weed, a tea of stinging nettle to strengthen the uterus, motherwort to bolster Gillian’s immune system. She had tried red clover and evening primrose oil, and the oddly named chasteberry, along with black cohosh. She ate pomegranates and olive oil, honey and cinnamon, and had even tried the ancient ritual of bringing a toad to sleep in her bed, all to no avail. Now, to explain her brimming eyes as they stood in front of the old house, Gillian told her nieces she was affected by the spring pollen in the air. Antonia and Kylie exchanged a look, for both had read that the pollen count on this day was zero.

Franny was out on the porch waiting, which wasn’t at all like her. Usually, she was the last to be ready for anything. “Come in. Come in,” she called.