Page 79 of The Book of Magic

“The book is where it always is. In the greenhouse, where it belongs.”

“You know what I mean. The Book of the Raven.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sally truly didn’t understand.

“You don’t know anything about The Book of the Raven?” Kylie asked.

Sally piled up the bills in a messy tower, too concerned to finish her chore. “Let me close up and get my coat. We’ll have dinner, then I’ll go with you to the hospital in Boston.”

Kylie glared at her mother.

“Wait here,” Sally said.

Kylie remained where she was, unsure of what to do next. She wasn’t about to eat dinner or go to Boston with her mother. There was something here that she was meant to find.

“Oh, Jetty,” she moaned softly. “Tell me what to do.”

Kylie looked around, and when she did she finally noticed Miss Hardwick, who, due to the day of the week, was wearing a dowdy old-fashioned dress with a blue bodice, along with a bonnet made of straw and ribbon. The librarian played the part of Marmee from Little Women every Thursday at the children’s story hour and as usual she hadn’t bothered to change her clothes. People at the Black Rabbit enjoyed seeing her in her costume on Thursday evenings. “Where’s Jo?” they would call. “Amy’s been asking for you,” they would tease, which was all fine and good, for these jokers usually picked up the tab for her drink.

“I didn’t realize you were here,” Kylie said, embarrassed that Miss Hardwick had seen her outburst when she confronted her mother.

“I’m here all right, just as I was when Jet brought the book in.” Kylie looked at her openmouthed, so Miss Hardwick went on. “The one about the raven that you mentioned. Jet said it was too special to be listed in the catalogue, so she put it on the magic shelf. I’m the only one who knows where it is.”

Kylie was stopped cold. Her need for the book twisted inside her, a snake that circled her heart. That is how left-handed magic began, with a desire that matters more than anything else. “I’m the person who’s come for it.”

Miss Hardwick took a well-measured pause before she said, “I had the impression she meant Franny.” Then the librarian shrugged. The less she had to do with crotchety Franny Owens the better. “But now it seems that someone is you.”

Miss Hardwick led Kylie to the section that housed the oldest manuscripts set inside glass cases in the rear of the rare-books room. The temperature here was always set at sixty-five, with a humidity level of fifty percent, for such texts needed a cool, dark place. The library’s greatest treasure was a first-edition copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems, published in 1890, of which only five hundred copies had been printed, found by Isabelle Owens at a flea market in Pittsfield. There was also an envelope on which the poet had scrawled the beginning of a poem in her birdlike scrawl, discovered at the same used-book stall one lucky October day.

One Heart instructed to be Two—

As Lightning splits a Tree—

Can be—but No one knows

The Truth of it—

Except for Thee and me.

Harvard University had done its best to claim the scrap for its Emily Dickinson Collection, but the Owens Library had refused to hand it over. There was also a rare first edition of Wuthering Heights, the same printing that had recently sold at auction in London for six figures. To see these volumes and other treasures, a patron must have Miss Hardwick sit beside them, for she alone could turn the pages, wearing white cotton gloves. As for Emily’s scrap, the librarian visited it every day, merely to check on its well-being.

As they approached a glass case at the very rear of the room, Kylie heard something rustling, much like the wingbeats of a bird. There was a collection of magic books here, one that most of the library’s patrons never noticed. Sally had considered ridding the library of all magical texts, but Franny and Jet had insisted they stay, and so they’d remained, uncatalogued and out of the way, collected by Maria Owens’s daughter, Faith, who had traveled to New York and London in search of such volumes. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, written in 1584, contained lists of charms and conjurations, all while trying to convince the reader that there was no such creature as a witch. Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches, a feminist retelling of the creation story that included folk medicine and magic from Italy. The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, filled with folktales, an exploration of witchcraft in the ancient world.

Kylie ran her hand along the books, but eager as she was to find the book Jet had hidden, the text escaped her.

“We made it difficult to find,” Miss Hardwick said. “It’s not for just anyone, you know.”

Miss Hardwick led Kylie to the book Jet had placed on the shelf on her seventh day when she ran out of the house to attend to the last mission of her life. The library door had been unlocked, and Jet had discovered Miss Hardwick passed out at her desk; she often fainted when a dip occurred in her blood sugar before she could leave for the Black Rabbit and have her drink and a platter of fries. She sometimes forgot to eat lunch and the results were such spells. Jet had swiftly taken hold of the Owenses’ first-aid kit, which included garlic and ginger and smelling salts.

“Can you keep a secret?” Jet had asked once Miss Hardwick had been revived.

The hour was late, and when Miss Hardwick nodded, Jet confided that she was adding a book to the library’s acquisitions and that at some point her sister might come to retrieve it. It had been there waiting ever since, a black book meant for a woman in need, ready to be found by the person who was willing to do whatever was necessary to save someone she loved. The book was filled with Black Magic, dangerous not only to the intended subject of the Dark Art, but to the practitioner as well. What you send into the world would come back to you three times over, for good or for evil. Maria Owens could not bring herself to destroy the book, written with so much care and longing, and neither could Jet.

Kylie followed Miss Hardwick down the narrow aisle, until the librarian paused. There it was, among the rarest of the rare. A slim book bound in black leather that had been tied together with knotted silk thread. The text had been shoved between two of John Hathorne’s journals, which consisted of little more than financial details. His books were so mundane they had masked the power and magic of The Book of the Raven. The text had been waiting, quite impatiently, to be selected for more than three hundred years. The prose on the thin pages of vellum had been carefully crafted in alternating red and black inks.

“It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Miss Hardwick said. “The best ones never do. I suggest you use gloves.”

“Thank you, I can take it from here,” Kylie assured the librarian as she accepted a pair of white cotton gloves.