Page 58 of Magic Lessons

Maria had not been back to Essex County since the night she left for New York with Samuel. She had been so young the first time she’d seen these green fields and the marshy land abutting the North River, only seventeen. It was impossible to know then what she knew now. The carriage stopped on Washington Street. Maria had looked in the black mirror to see Faith standing on the path to the door, empty now, and covered by fallen leaves. She thanked the driver and went up the path. Ruth heard a knock at the door and she knew who had come. She felt a shiver inside of her, the same feeling she’d had when she was a girl and the sheriff had told her that her parents were gone.

When Ruth opened the door they recognized each other as if it had been only days since Maria had been driven along the road in an oxcart wearing a white sackcloth, her hair shorn. The truth of it was that Ruth had imagined running after her, but she had stayed here, behind the gate.

“All I want is my daughter,” Maria told her.

Ruth understood a mother’s love and concern. “I knew she was his daughter. She resembles him. But she’s not here now. He sent her away.”

Hathorne had punished Ruth for taking on the girl without his permission. Look where it had led. He was still coughing up small bits of bird bone. Ruth had been made to get on her knees and recite passages of Scripture for hours without a drink of water or a bit of rest.

Maria could hear the thudding of Ruth’s heart. She did not envy her life. “Tell me where she’s gone.”

“If I knew I would. I promise you that.”

“Did he know her for who she was?”

During Ruth’s punishment the tea Hathorne had been given was still at work and he’d told her the truth. The girl was his flesh and blood.

“He did. I could tell he thought she was clever,” Ruth said. He had not said as much, but she knew from the way he looked at the girl each time she hadn’t backed down. “Now I see, she’s very much like you.”

“Did she hurt him?” Maria asked.

“Oh no,” Ruth said. “If anything I suppose she was hurt by him.”

Relieved, Maria threw her arms around the other woman, then just as quickly she broke off the embrace and hurried through the garden gate. The black leaves unfurled and fell like rain. Standing in the doorway, Ruth put a hand over her eyes. Maria was already gone, as if she had flown, as people once said she did, when they swore she rose like a crow above the fields at night.

Pine, oak, chestnut, plum tree, elm, walnut, ash, witch hazel, wild cherry. Maria could find her way without thinking, running as fast as she could. It might be possible that Faith had escaped the darkest reaches of left-handed magic; either way, she was desperate to get her girl back. She went through the fields and didn’t think about Cadin and the night when the men of Salem set out to kill as many birds as they could. She didn’t think about the winter when eight feet of snow fell, the coldest winter, when bread rattled on the plate. She didn’t think about her loneliness, a well so deep she couldn’t bear it. She didn’t think of the man waiting in the trees when the rope broke, waiting for her all this time, waiting for her still. Perhaps she flew as crows do, for in no time she had made her way to the shed that had been their home, the roof covered with grape vines, and the tumbled-down fence meant to keep rabbits and deer out of the garden. She looked at none of it, for on this day every flower on the magnolia had opened so that the sky appeared to be filled with stars, and beneath the tree was the man she loved.

They were older than they had been, but they saw each other as they once were. A sixteen-year-old girl with diamonds in the palm of her hand. A man of twenty-three who kept the note she’d left for him in his coat. That was who they were beneath the tree. They had no time, so they didn’t think, and for once Samuel didn’t talk. They belonged to each other and they didn’t stop, not even to take off their boots.

They could hold what they had in their hands, they could see it with their own eyes, and they weren’t about to give it up now.

They went to town to search the taverns; they looked in the windows of the house on Washington Street, and in Martha Chase’s abandoned house, where the roof had fallen in. They hunted through the woods, peering into shadowy caves where bears slept, investigating the stony ridgetops where there were still wolves, despite all that had been done to destroy them. Faith was not to be found. After midnight, they were back beneath the magnolia tree. They climbed into the tallest branches so they might look for sparks in the sky or bonfires lit in the fields, any signs of life. Maria fell asleep for a brief time, there in the branches, nesting like a crow. She dreamed of dark water and when she woke she was drenched, even though there had been no rain. Samuel was sleeping still, holding onto a bough of the tree.

Long ago, before they’d ever met, before either of them had come to the second Essex County, they had each made the same promise. They would never watch another woman burn. But there were other ways to be rid of a woman who didn’t behave, who did as she pleased, who had courage, who talked back. You held her head under water until she could no longer speak.

The farmers locked Faith in a neighbor’s barn, for their own barn was smoldering ash. They would have brought her to the magistrate, but the governor had outlawed the witch trials, so they tried her themselves and found her guilty. They had been the judges, and they would be the executioners. It was the Lord’s day when they dragged her to the lake in chains. It was early morning, with a mist rising and the sky breaking into bands of color. The men had frightened themselves with their own cruelty and their own imaginings. They had convinced themselves they had caught a servant of the devil and not a thirteen-year-old girl who pleaded for her life until she realized it wasn’t any use to beg. Now she was speaking backwards, an incantation from The Book of the Raven, hidden in her cloak, that beautiful book a woman had written to help other women save themselves. Women who were bought and sold, women who had no voice, women forced to have secret lives, women who knew that words were the most powerful magic. Faith had vowed to leave the left side and forsake black magic, but she turned to it now. She was wrapped in irons, therefore the spell couldn’t do much damage; still the men’s throats began to close up, and when they tried to speak to each other they could only grunt, as if they were animals. Their hands appeared to be changing, as if they had claws rather than nails. It was the spell of the beast, when an individual shows what resides within him, and it is only dark magic if there is darkness within.

The farmers were brothers, Harold and Isaac Hopwood, cruel men who were even more brutal after drink, and they had been drinking all night. Their barn had burned down and they needed someone to blame. Blame a woman, drown a woman, let the Lord be the judge. They carried her to the lake, which was as deep as the end of the world, the waters where her own mother had been tested as a witch, a lake that no man, woman, or child would enter for it was said to be cursed, and certainly there were leeches in the shallow reedy water, and the lilies were attached to black weeds that reached all the way to hell.

The brothers carried a chair that Faith had been bound to with rope. There were still irons around her arms, chains the farmers used to keep their cows in place. Ready to be rid of her, they could tell she was bad luck, and even though she was a girl, they feared her. They sent her out as if on a boat, so that she drifted out from the shore. Courts and magistrates meant nothing to the brothers; they would make their own law on their own land. The Hopwoods were sweating through their clothes, but they were chilled as well, and they still felt the tightness in their throats. What was done was done, and surely they were in the Lord’s favor, and yet there was fear seeping into their bones, as if they were as brittle as twigs, as if they might break and turn into a heap of dust.

Faith’s black cloak rose up, a dark flower that was disappearing as it sank below the surface. Her face was white, a lily. She remembered when she had a vision in Maude Cardy’s parlor in Brooklyn, when she was underwater and about to enter hell, and she knew this is what she had foreseen, the dark water rushing in, and her own tears, a witch’s tears, tears that burned as if they were made of fire.

When Maria climbed down and stood in the grass, she saw a dozen crows winging across the sky. The day was bright and she could spy the blue center of the lake in the distance. She took off running without a word. Samuel Dias called to her, but she wouldn’t stop, and so he followed through the woods, not knowing where he was going, disoriented as he made his way through the brambles. Maria was in front of him, and when he looked through the trees she seemed to be flying, untouched, whereas he had to dodge tree stumps and branches, cursing as he ran.

Maria spied the men at the shore. She knew right away they were the ones who had her daughter. Metal, ropes, fire, water. She saw a long red hair on one of the Hopwood brothers’ coats. She spied the aura of disaster, a dark, ashy shade. Maria was almost upon them when she stumbled upon a book that had been dropped on the rough path. Once held in her hands, The Book of the Raven fell open to a spell of protection meant to stop an attack and hold the assailants at bay. She began the incantation right then, and as she spoke the branches swayed and leaves fell down and turned the water green. She could not stop speaking it; she must continue until they were driven off. There was the scent of fire, and the brothers felt as if their skin was burning; still they waded into the water, pushing the chair out farther.

It was then Maria heard the deathwatch beetle. Her breath was sharp and cold. The clacking sound was louder; it echoed now. She continued the incantation. She would not lose Faith a third time. She recited the spell faster until her lips were burning, until the brothers’ skin was aflame. They turned to see her, and later they would swear she was levitating, standing in the air rather than on the ground. They were cursed and they knew it. There were leeches in their boots and they had forgotten their own names. They let go of the chair, unable to do any more harm to Faith, watching the witch on the shore as she hexed them. The chair was sinking into the center of the lake that was so green it seemed made of grass. Faith’s red hair was still above the water, the color of blood and of hearts torn asunder.

By now Samuel had reached the lake; he had already stripped off his black coat as he ran into to the shallows, nearly stumbling as he pulled off his boots. The Hopwood brothers tried to stop him as he raced past, perhaps they thought he was the devil himself and it was their duty to attack him, but Maria still had the book of magic in her hands and she made it impossible for them to cause any more damage. They were stuck where they were, unable to move, hip-deep in the water, yet convinced they had been set on fire. The water had turned from green to black, so murky it was impossible to see anything at all. For a moment Maria stopped speaking. Faith and Samuel had both disappeared. In that moment of silence, when she stopped reading from the book, the brothers all but trampled one another as they ran to shore and through the woods, afraid for their lives, desperate to be as far away from Maria as possible, as if distance made any difference to a curse.

Samuel resurfaced, then dove again. He was an expert swimmer, but the lake was muddy and he had to feel his way. A dark creature swam beneath him, a huge eel he could barely see, but the eel pushed Faith upward so that Samuel could grab the girl by her cloak, hauling her out of the chains that bound her to the wooden chair, which now sank and went on sinking to the endless bottom of the lake. When Samuel tried to swim to the surface, he realized the waterweeds had hold of him, wrapped around his ankles and legs. He was caught, but he pushed Faith upward and watched her rise to the surface through the bits of sunlight that pierced the cloudy water.

Samuel knew that he was drowning. His leg was trapped no matter how he tugged. He moved his arms, still trying to swim, not yet giving up, but it was happening whether he fought against it or not. He had seen other men drown, they had fallen from the riggings of ships, or leapt into the currents while drunk, and he had wondered how it felt to be taken by the water, if it was a struggle or if it was more like a dream. He hadn’t had a breath for so long his heart was stopping. He thought of Maria on the dock in Curaçao and how he had fallen in love with her then, even though he was bent over with pain.

Samuel now felt an even sharper pain across his chest from the pressure of the water; it began in his heart and seared through his arm, then his throat, and finally his head. He had a single thought and it was she, and then he gave that up as well though it burned inside him. The way he was dying felt like a dark bonfire in a lake that had no end.

Faith was spitting water, alive, and so Maria didn’t wait another instant. She quickly filled her boots with stones, then shoved them back on. She repeated the incantation for protection, calling to Hecate, offering her devotion if only she could be granted this one thing. One time underwater, that was all she wanted. Maria ran into the lake, past her shoulders, past her neck. She dove and went under, the stones in her boots weighing her down. She saw through the darkness and there was Samuel Dias, floating in the mucky water, already a dead man. She dragged him out of the tangle of waterweeds that had held him down. The threaded roots were green and slimy and black, even though they opened into flowers on the surface. To float once more, Maria kicked off her boots, and as the stones fell into the bottomless darkness, she arose.