Page 39 of Magic Lessons

That night the house on Maiden Lane felt much too empty. Samuel had torn his clothes, as mourners are commanded to do. For seven days he sat outside, even when it rained. He wept until his dark, handsome face was swollen; he had stopped talking, as his father feared he might. Instead, he began to drink rum and he didn’t stop, growing more silent and moody with every drink. When he finally came inside, Maria brought him his father’s wedding ring, hoping it would start him talking. Samuel held it up to the firelight, squinting to see it more clearly.

“There’s a reason my father left this with you,” he said.

“Because he wanted you to have it.”

Samuel Dias shook his head. He knew the way his father approached the world and he knew the meaning of the gift. This ring was a message, one he was grateful to receive. One he hoped Maria would accept. “No. He wanted you to have it.”

Maria shook her head. “It’s a family treasure. I couldn’t possibly.”

“If he wanted to give it to me, he would have placed it on my hand,” Samuel said. “No. It should belong to you. We should do as he wished.” Dias knelt before Maria and slipped the ring onto her finger. “This is what he wanted. For you to be mine.”

She didn’t wish to hurt him. “It cannot happen if I don’t agree to it, and you know I can’t.”

“But you have agreed. See! It won’t come off. We’re married in my father’s eyes,” Samuel insisted. He was making a fool of himself, but he didn’t care. “That’s why he gave you the ring. That’s our tradition.”

Maria attempted to slide the ring off, but it was stuck; even when she took a bar of soap to the band, the ring would not move past her knuckle. It seemed impossible, her hand was so much smaller than Abraham’s.

“The ring fits the person it should belong to,” Samuel told her.

“Are you trying to annoy me?” Maria said.

Samuel shrugged. He didn’t care if he was annoying. He’d certainly been called worse. “I’m trying to tell you the truth.”

Rather than argue, they went upstairs. The bed was small, but it didn’t matter. Rain began in the middle of the night, but they didn’t care. Once more and then never again. That’s what she told herself, but it was a lie and her mouth burned even though she didn’t say the words aloud. He saw that she wore the sapphire and he laughed out loud. She was his, he was sure of it, certainly she was his in bed when she told him never to stop. But in the morning, as they sat across from one another at the table, Samuel took Maria’s hand, and she drew away. She’d thought they had a tacit understanding. No love, no commitment, and certainly no marriage. He, of all people, should understand, for he’d been with her on her hanging day.

“You wanted me here last night,” Samuel said. “Was that a favor because my father died?”

“It was a mistake,” Maria said.

“Because of a curse?” He was as outraged as she’d seen him. “That’s a fool’s belief.”

“Because words have power. And they can’t be taken back.”

Samuel Dias was a practical man, yet in his travels he had seen astonishing things he would never have believed could exist. Such miracles had changed him, convincing him that anything was possible in this world. He had seen golden lions sunning themselves on the rocks of the Barbary Coast, whales with long twisted horns floating under the sea, stars falling from the sky, parrots that could speak as well as a man, clouds of pink birds on the coast of Africa all taking flight at once, a woman with dark hair whom he wanted no matter what the cost.

“A curse can be broken,” he told her, convinced that miracles were not so difficult to find.

She shook her head and refused to agree. Causing him harm was not a risk Maria was willing to take. “Sell the house or keep it. I can find somewhere else to live.”

Dias talked for an hour, then two. He was good at it, and had learned from the best. He told her what it was like to stand in the woods and watch her on Gallows Hill; his heart had been ready to explode, it was a bird, he said, struggling to be free of the cage of his ribs to be beside her. But she told him that what was done could not be undone. A witch who cast a spell upon herself could not escape its chains with her own magic. No ritual she called forth could undo the damage. It had happened to her mother and now it had happened to her. There was only one woman she had known who would have been capable of undoing such damage, and Hannah Owens wasn’t there to break the curse.

“If your answer is no, then you stay here,” Samuel told her. “I’ll go.”

He wished that he had told her he loved her before her hanging day. He wished he had admitted that as soon as he knew, when he thought his life was ending in Curaçao and he realized that she was the miracle who had come to him. As they sat across from one another at the table, he gazed at her, doing his best to memorize everything about her. Her black hair, her gray eyes, the mourning dress she had worn since her daughter’s disappearance with its mother-of-pearl buttons, her throat, her moon-shaped fingernails, her beating heart, her beautiful mouth. There was much he hadn’t told her, hundreds of stories, perhaps a thousand, and it pained him to think that it was quite possible that he never would. He should have told the story of stumbling upon the magnolia, how he’d sunk to his knees and cried, overwhelmed by its beauty. He should have told her that while they were on the Queen Esther he’d wished they would never reach Boston, and how he had worried over her fate in Essex County, and how he would worry about her still.

He stood so quickly the chair skittered backwards and fell to the floor. “If you tell me to go, and you mean it, this time I won’t come back.”

Maria Owens looked away, and he had his answer.

She felt something pierce through her as she watched him go out the door and walk across the garden. Hollyhock, lilac, sunflower, lavender, thyme. There were all the trees he’d brought to her, each rarer than the next. If Abraham had still been among them, perhaps there might have been a chance for them; the old man was as persuasive as he was intelligent. As Samuel walked into the garden, he thought he glimpsed his father reclining in his favorite chair near the rows of lettuce and beans, but it was only a shadow. What was gone was gone. The ground was muddy, and the herbs in neat rows turned the air spicy and green. It was a good time of year to plant the tree he had brought from St. Thomas, ignored for as long as he’d been here, its roots wrapped in burlap, its leaves still coated with salt. It was not a magnolia, the one genus that might have convinced even the most contrary woman to fall in love, cursed or not. All the same, the roots of the Tree of Heaven would take hold long after the red flowers fell off and scattered. Samuel hoped it would tolerate the chilly climate of New York and did his best to help it do so, choosing a sheltered place beside the barn where it would be protected in winter. The mourning period had ended. For seven days Samuel had wept. He had torn his shirt and cut off his hair as offerings of his grief, which was twofold now. When it was time for him to leave, he did so. He left most of his belongings in the barn, for he didn’t need much in the world. He didn’t stop to say good-bye and he didn’t plan on returning. There was nothing for him here without Maria. Still, all the while he was gone he would think of her and wonder why if she didn’t want him she had stood at the door on that seventh day. If she had been another woman, he would have sworn there were tears in her eyes.

A witch’s tears burn, they turn her inside out, they are not meant to be, and yet once they began they were difficult to stop. A witch could drown in her own tears if she wasn’t careful; she could scorch the ground beneath her. As Maria watched Samuel go, she was thinking of Abraham, buried a mile away, an expert on love, who had told her in the moments before his death that he saw love inside her. It looked like a dove, he said, but appearances could fool you. Some people mistakenly believed it was peaceful and calm, but that wasn’t what love was. It was a wolf. If you open the door and call it inside, you must sink to your knees and say its name, you must do so whether you are cursed or not.

That was the mystery Abraham had come to understand. Always and everywhere, love was the answer.

PART FOUR The Charm

1691 I.