Page 2 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER TWO

It was said that everyone had three fates, the one they were born with, the one they walked away from, and the one they made for themselves. Fate was a mystery, with unexpected twists and turns, yet there were those who were sure of what their futures would bring, and Lauren Bell was among them. She was as obstinate as she was fierce, standoffish in a way that lonely people often are. Perhaps it was her loneliness that had caused her to plan out her future when she was a small child, no ifs, ands, or buts. The women in her family had always attended Radcliffe, and Lauren intended to do the same. She couldn’t wait to become a member of the Lilith Society, a secret organization that had begun for women who had been chased out of the city of Boston long ago, those who need to find solace and shelter on the far side of the Charles River. They’d gathered together in a squat black house that was used for those in need, said to have been built by the very same woman who had built the Bells’ house on Brattle Street.

Although Lauren wasn’t a great beauty, she was something more, a true original, unlike anyone else, with a slender body and pale, almost white hair that nearly reached her waist. Her mouth was wide and turned down at the edges, and her dark, gold-flecked eyes could cut you down to size with a fleeting look. Those who dared to examine Lauren closely might notice both her perfect bone structure and her small, sharp teeth. Lauren had been a rebel from the start, even among the Bells. Her parents had done their best, tying a red string around her wrist to keep her centered and down-to-earth, but Lauren’s daring prevailed. She knew she was different, and was proud of it. Often, she took up a needle and pricked her finger just to see her own dark blood. That was how she discovered that she possessed magic.

The Bell women had all been unusual, but they had never wanted their photographs taken or their stories told. It was rumored that their lives had sprung from tragedy, a long time ago, when their ancestors were among the first residents of Cambridge, but they grew like vines, flourishing despite the misfortune they’d known.

The family house on Brattle Street could be found only if you knew the way; otherwise you would likely walk right past, as the postman did on a daily basis, so thoroughly bewildered that he took to setting the mail beneath the tall hedges, hoping for the best. Built more than two hundred years earlier, and always painted the same dark green, the house was tucked away behind some of the last of the elm trees in the Commonwealth, for most of those trees in North America had been ravaged by disease. Members of the Bell family were born with magic in their blood; it was as real as the eleventh fingers on their left hands or their sharp teeth. It wasn’t a choice to be different, it was a legacy, and all of them, including Lauren, knew that it was safer not to reveal their true identities.

In the past, women who were suspected of witchery had been forced into swimming tests to see if they would drown, for witches were said to always float when dunked in water. In Scotland, in 1597, James VI published Daemonologie, a pamphlet insisting there was innate evil in witchcraft, and this small book had led to mass trials and executions. Magic had once been legal in England, considered a natural skill; it often had to do with crops, bees, cows, love, and healing, for every enchantment was a wish fulfilled. The Witchcraft Act of 1542 was England’s first witchcraft law, announcing that witchery was a crime punishable by death, and then in 1563 Queen Elizabeth passed the act against Conjuracons, Inchantments, and Witchcraftes. That was when the fate of those who practiced magic changed and witch-hunters began to lurk on rural roads or in dodgy city streets where sewage ran black and rats gathered.

When men who despised magic traveled across the ocean, New England began to look for witches as well. Fifty years before the witchcraft trials in Salem began, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony drafted a body of civil and criminal laws in which there were twelve capital offenses, including witchcraft, which was reviled by Increase Mather, the seventh president of Harvard, and even more despised by his son Cotton Mather, a pitiless witchcraft chronicler in Salem who wielded great influence. The Unnamed Art was meant to heal the ill and bring joy to the forgotten, but to the judges of Salem it merited the same punishment as murder.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Exodus 22:18

It had been three hundred years since their family left Scotland and arrived in Cambridge, and now Lauren and her older brother, Lionel, were the last of the Bells to reside there. They were four years apart but had always been close and could read one another’s minds. Their parents had been archaeologists who had traveled to Greece. They’d met with an accident on the white cliffs where the roots of the olive trees were so old the earth around them broke like clay and the cliffs crumbled down to the sea when more than one person walked on the paths. When their parents didn’t return, Lauren and Lionel made a vow to always look after one another, pricking their fingers and letting their blood flow into the ground, where it turned the red roses black.

Their grandmother Lillian always said that members of their family must be careful, and that long ago they had lost women who were too trusting.

“Who were they?” Lauren would ask, but their grandmother would shake her head. “Best to think of the future, not the past, when it comes to such matters.”

Lillian Bell kept a healing garden where licorice was grown to be made into cakes for coughs. There was shrubby hyssop with green leaves and royal blue flowers for good health, along with ground ivy, which made a tonic good for ringing in the ears, and daisy for eye problems. Rue, once thought to be an antidote to the plague, was a remedy for shingles, earache, and nosebleeds. Rosemary and vervain had been used for healing for centuries, and cunning women who practiced what was called the Nameless Art offered remedies and charms along with love magic amulets consisting of wild pansy, pepper, savory, honey, and blood. Best of all was the night garden, with its luminous white flowers: moonflower, angel’s trumpet, night jasmine, evening primrose.

In families such as theirs, magic was an inherited trait, like brown hair or green eyes. It was best hidden from sight, since the women who preceded them had been hunted down whenever they were found out. Because of this, children had their extra fingers removed and their sharp teeth pulled to hide traits that might identify them. Lauren’s parents had thought these were barbaric practices, and her witch’s teeth were intact, seen only when she laughed, which was a rare occurrence. Her mouth was so red she looked like a flower, although her true intention was to be a thorn.

Lauren’s turn onto the Crooked Path began on the night when she and Lionel were told about their parents’ deaths. She had climbed into one of the cherry trees behind their house, and there she sat shivering all night long. Her heart turned colder with every minute she spent in the dark, and a dozen blackbirds, the birds of mourning, came to nest with her in the branches. Lauren was so sleep-shattered, she’d entered into a trance. She didn’t care if everyone said her parents’ deaths had been an accident, she believed she could have stopped them from going on their last, fateful trip. She’d been ill with the flu, and when her parents came to her room to say good night, they discovered that she was burning up.

We should stay home, her mother had said. Or you go, she told Lauren’s father, and I’ll stay here with Lauren. Her father had looked so disappointed; they always traveled together and were rarely apart, for they’d been deeply in love since the day they met.

I’ll be fine, Lauren had insisted. You should both go.

Her parents had kissed her good night, then they’d left and had never come back. Ever since, Lauren had been convinced she should be punished, she should find someone who would treat her badly, for that was all she deserved, and if she couldn’t find such a person, she would punish herself. She had always been able to turn a sparrow into a stone, but turning your heart to stone was something else entirely. It was not necessarily greed or revenge that convinced a person to study Maleficium and take up the Crooked Path. It was anguish.

When Lauren awoke in the treetop on the dim morning of the day after their parents’ death, she spied her brother seated in a garden chair, wrapped in a blanket, watching over her protectively, as he always did. Don’t fall, he had called, and she’d pulled herself back from the edge. Lionel had begun to save lives when he was only a child, whether they be those of mice, or raccoons, or a baby blackbird, whose descendants still lived in one of their cherry trees and called out to him whenever he passed. Now he had brought Lauren back from the darkest place she’d ever been; if her brother had not been with her in the garden when she was so grief-stricken, she might have jumped.

When they went inside, Lionel made them hot chocolate. To anyone watching, it would have seemed the day was like any other. But it wasn’t. Lauren had changed, the joy she’d had inside had dissolved, and the notion of love now seemed ridiculous to her. By the time their grandmother came into the kitchen, she had already decided to hide the fact that she felt nothing at all.

On the anniversary of their parents’ deaths, Lauren and Lionel walked the paths in Mount Auburn Cemetery, bringing along food for the dead—olive oil, springwater, and honey—so that the spirits of those who had passed would know they were loved and remembered. Mount Auburn was the first garden cemetery in the country, created in 1831 out of a seventy-two-acre farm. The glorious landscape was meant to remind visitors that even after a loved one’s death there was still beauty to be found in the world. The extraordinary grounds had been inspired by the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, filled with Gothic and Neoclassical monuments that looked at eternity as not an end but a beginning. There were hundreds of species of trees, some to be found nowhere else in New England, along with botanic gardens and an arboretum. The landscape was so glorious that when Emily Dickinson visited, at the age of sixteen, she wrote about her experience at Mount Auburn in a letter: It seems as if Nature had formed the spot with a distinct idea in view of its being a resting place for her children, where wearied & dissappointed they might stretch themselves beneath the spreading cypress & close their eyes “calmly as to a nights repose or flowers at set of sun.”

Lionel’s favorite headstone was a life-size English setter who steadfastly waited for his master’s return through all eternity. Lionel always found a stick to add to the pile that other visitors had left between the dog’s paws. Who was to say that we were not in death much the same as we were in life, loyal or not, loving or not? Who was to say that a dog wasn’t the best companion, both in this world and the next? As for Lauren, she was drawn to the angels who were bent over in grief with their capes and lanterns.

Beyond Narcissus Path, several tall cypress trees shaded the Bell family crypt, which had been constructed of white marble. Above the rusted metal door there was the carved image of a caterpillar changing into a moth, an image that signified that all lives were eventually transformed. If one gazed through the iron grating, it was possible to see the stained-glass windows that caused the inner crypt to glow with orange light, casting shadows in the shape of black moths. We are not mortals, and yet here we be was engraved above the door that every member of the family would enter someday. All things ended, magic or not. All things passed away to become one with eternity. Mourners often spied Lauren and Lionel beside the crypt on dim, gray days, ducking beneath the cypress trees when the rain began and, when the sun finally came out, climbing into the highest branches as if they were still children when, in fact, they were fully grown, with lives of their own.

In the final week of her life, Lillian Bell called her grandchildren to her bedside. She had always been discreet, but if there had ever been something to say about the uses and perils of magic, now was the time. Her life was fading, but her magic wasn’t. She kept a witch’s altar on her bureau, where there was a sprig of rosemary, stones from the beach in Provincetown, a bowl of rosewater, and a photograph of her beloved grandchildren. Now she asked them to open the windows so she could breathe in the garden air.

Lauren knew the time of her grandmother’s departure was near when she saw the pattern of the sparrows’ flight in the sky. The black candle on the bedside table had begun to flicker with pale yellow light. For someone without a heart, it was curious that Lauren hid under her blankets and wept. Her tears were black, and they stained the sheets, and when she got out of bed and washed her face, she saw what she had been hiding when she looked into the mirror. The pain was like a blackbird on a black branch in the dark of night. There, whether or not you saw it.

Their grandmother had waited to die until they were old enough to take care of themselves, and now that they were extremely capable, with Lionel a graduate of Harvard College about to enter the medical school and Lauren going off to Radcliffe for her first year. The spirit inside Lillian Bell was ready to move on and had already begun to rise above her.

“Stay,” Lauren said to her each time she sat at her grandmother’s bedside.

“She’ll always be here,” Lionel told his sister. It would be only the two of them now, and even though they didn’t look at one another, they held hands.

Their grandmother was very old by then and had lost many of the people she’d loved, yet she had continued to treat every day as a gift. On her very last day on earth, she called her grandchildren closer, both her bitter granddaughter, who was drawn to the dark side, and her kindhearted grandson, who had so much to give to the world. She gave them the secret to the happiness she’d found in life.

The world will break your heart, but you can repair the world every day. You know who you are, even if no one else does.

The attitude toward their kind hadn’t changed over the centuries. There were no nooses or hanging trees, no swimming tests to see who would drown and who would reveal their true nature by floating, no bonfires meant to burn midwives and healers, yet witch hunts still persisted. The judges now wore gray suits and sat in the halls of Congress, and although they might not prick someone’s finger or throw stones, they ruined lives all the same.