Page 40 of Magic Lessons

One morning Faith awoke to the scent of apple pie, the fragrance so strong she could have sworn that her mother was in the kitchen, baking her favorite treat. She looked out her window to see that her foster mother had pulled up all the plants in her herb garden by their roots, and was busily tossing them into a bonfire. Faith had carefully planted the ingredients for Courage Tea, currants and thyme, and now they were little more than twigs, along with all the rest. Martha hadn’t worn gloves and her hands bled, pierced by thorns and brambles; all the same she ignored her wounds as the pious must, and stood close to the heat to make certain it flared.

When Faith came into the yard, she was distressed to see her ruined garden. She let out a sob that chased the sparrows from the trees, and a wind rose from the sea, filled with stinging salt. Martha grabbed Faith’s hand and surprised her by stabbing her with the small paring knife she’d used to cut down the stalks that now lay in shambles. Two drops of black blood fell onto the ground, burning through the grass.

“It’s still inside you,” Martha cried when confronted with this sight. After all she’d done to save the child, the girl was still tainted. She’d given up everything for Faith: her home, her house, her past. A bloodline witch could not be cured or changed or charmed or made to obey, even if she pretended to be perfect. Martha went upstairs to search the girl’s room and soon found the black mirror and the notebook. She ripped the notebook into shreds, and when Martha broke the mirror, the glass shattered into a thousand black pieces, one of which stabbed her directly below her eye, leaving a small deep mark, as if she’d been pecked at by the beak of a bird. From then on the windows in Faith’s chamber were nailed shut. Her door would be locked from the outside at night.

“I’m saving you from evil,” Martha said to Faith calmly, when the girl raced up the stairs to see her room had become even more of a prison than it had been before. “Will you do as I say?” Martha asked.

“Of course, Mother.” The words burned her mouth, for Faith was not a liar by nature and she didn’t intend to follow this woman’s twisted rules.

It was a Friday. Faith knew there might be women waiting for her that evening in the cemetery, perhaps they would stay until morning’s first light if she didn’t appear and they were desperate enough. She sat on the floor of her room, a prisoner, and yet even with the window nailed shut she imagined the scent of apple pie, made with cinnamon and brown sugar, a treat her mother would make especially for her on every birthday. Her true mother, the mother she had lost, the one who told her to always be true to herself, even if she had to hide that truth from others. Her life in Essex County came rushing back to her due to the scent of apples. She imagined the woods where the ferns grew so tall, and the bottomless lake, and the serpent that would eat bread from her hand. She recalled her mother’s voice singing her to sleep, and the doll the man named Goat had made for her, and the wolf who had slept beside her bed, and her own natural red hair before it was dyed with bark and ink. She remembered the women who came to the door at night, and the tonics and spells her mother created for them, often asking nothing in return. Apples were used in many of these charms, the seeds worn in an amulet, or a red apple itself pricked with a needle while the name of one’s beloved was repeated. A woman was then to sleep with the apple under her pallet, make a pie out of it, and feed it to the one she loved. Faith remembered the book in which everything she needed to know had already been written.

It was that night, while locked in her room, that she realized if she continued to obey Martha she would betray herself, perhaps even lose herself. She must do what she believed to be right. She would not spend another year pretending to be someone she was not.

It was the last Friday of the month, and she knew the peddler would be in Gravesend; perhaps he would help her. As soon as Martha went to bed, Faith took up a garden spade she kept hidden beneath her bed. She hit the cloudy window glass until at last it cracked beneath her touch. When she pushed it out, tiny glittering shards rained down into the garden. She threw down a satchel of belongings, then climbed down the vines, holding onto the prickly, twisted creepers. As soon as she touched the ground, she took off running. She knew where the peddler kept his wagon, and she rushed to the Indian path that led through the flatlands of Brooklyn where he and his horse were settled in for the night. Faith gave him everything of worth that the women of Gravesend had given her. Frankly, it wasn’t much, and when she handed over the silverware she’d been given, she worried that he might reject it, for it had all turned black in her hands. All the same Jack Finney knew real silver when he saw it. He’d heard stories of women back home in Cornwall who turned silver black, and he knew what they were thought to be, but he was a practical man, and he stayed away from anything considered to be magic. He believed in buying and selling, and in taking good care of his horse, and in staying off the back roads at night, when robbers might be searching for a man such as himself who might have a tin box filled with silver and coins. He thought Faith was quite calm for a child who was running away, but he could tell she was serious. She slept in the wagon, beneath an old quilt he’d picked up when a recently deceased woman’s belongings were sold at a good, cheap price. When Finney woke in the morning, Faith had already been up for hours.

“We have to leave right now,” she told him. “We must be as quick as we can.”

Martha had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed she was tied to a chair and drowned in a lake. She was turning blue, struggling for one more breath. When she awoke she was drenched. Pools of water had formed on the floor around her bed. Some dreams connect to the past, some to the future, some to the very moment you are in. Martha went to Faith’s chamber to find that the window was shattered. She peered outside to spy footprints in the sandy earth. They disappeared halfway down the road. Perhaps a wind had come up, or perhaps it was what occurred when a witch’s foot wasn’t nailed to the ground: she managed to escape. It was then Martha heard a clacking sound. It was somewhere in the wall, and when she put her ear to the plaster the clatter was so loud she felt deafened. She went downstairs and the clacking followed her, mocking her it seemed, tracking her like a dog though it was nothing more than a black beetle that had come out from the walls.

Martha grabbed her cape and left the house, the door swinging open behind her as she took off running. She wore the white bonnet she’d sewn years ago, in Essex County, and she spoke to the Lord as she raced up the lane, for she considered herself to be doing His work on earth. She refused to lose what she had gained and was ready to fight evil with everything she had. When she got to the Indian path, she saw the treads of the wagon and followed. Her breath rattled inside her. She had not come to the end of the earth here in Brooklyn to lose what she wanted most in the world, whether or not it rightly belonged to her.

By now it was early morning and the air was pale but growing brighter, throwing down bands of shadows and light. The peddler had stopped in the village to deliver an order of several bolts of cloth on his way out of town, for he would likely not be back to Gravesend for a long time, and the transaction—how much the fabric was worth was at issue—had slowed down their departure. Faith was anxious, her stomach a nest of nerves. As she waited, she bit off her fingernails, but knowing a person’s nails and hair could be used in a spell, she swallowed the bits of her nails, then felt them scratching inside her.

“That took long enough,” she said to the peddler when at last he returned to the wagon. She already knew some things were not worth bargaining over, not when you were in a hurry, not when your future depended upon it. The air still smelled like apples, though there was not a single such tree in all of town, and Faith was aching to leave. She knew she was being called home. She thought of her mother’s clear gray eyes and the song she had sung.

The water is wide, I cannot get oe’r it

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that will carry two

And I shall row, my Love and I.

Love is handsome and love is fine

And love’s a jewel while it is new,

But when it’s old, it groweth cold

And fades away like morning dew.

“Don’t worry so much,” Finney told Faith. He supposed he had no choice but to escort her. “We’re on our way.”

They headed through the flatlands as the seabirds were circling above the dirt road, dropping their breakfasts of mussels and clams so the shells would split open. Martha had been running through town when she spied the cart in the distance, as it was about to go over a small wooden bridge. She still heard the echo of that beetle in the wall, even out here where there was nothing but marshland. The sky was a brilliant blue, and foxes in the marsh were walking through the muddy shellfish beds, the vixens calling to their kits. Martha called out for the wagon to stop. When she shrieked, the foxes grew silent.

“What on earth?” Jack Finney turned to see what he at first thought was a ghost in a white bonnet, her gray cape flying out behind her. “Good God,” he said, for she looked a terrible sight.

“Don’t stop,” Faith Owens told the peddler. She was changing the future right now, minute by minute. If she hadn’t been wearing the iron cuffs, she would have seen the fate she had made in the palm of her hand, a path that led across a deep river. Though her sight was gone, her courage was not. She thought of the tea her mother often made her. Never hide who you are. Do what you think you cannot.

“If that’s who you’re running away from, I can’t say I blame you,” Finney said as he charged his horse to go forward. The horse was an old steed, one that had been treated cruelly before Jack Finney stole him, and Finney didn’t regret his thievery for a moment. He’d needed a horse and he’d seen this one being beaten by a farmer on the shores of Gowanus Bay. The beast had one eye and a resigned expression. Finney, himself, never used a whip; all he need do was say a word or two, and the horse was ready to comply.

“Let’s go,” the peddler told Arnold, for that was the name of the horse, dubbed so because his shaggy white mane reminded Finney of an old uncle in Cornwall, a plodding kindhearted gentleman who could always be relied upon.

Martha was behind them doing her best to keep up with the carriage.

“You’re stealing that child!” she called. “I’ll have you arrested!”

Finney looked over at Faith, who was staring straight ahead, as if she couldn’t hear the woman’s voice. “I’d hate to be arrested,” he said.