Page 20 of Magic Lessons

The North River flowed inland and there were marshes and tide pools dotting the land. Salem itself was bustling, and was always so, no matter the hour. This seafaring community had been settled in 1626 at the site of a native village, and was the second oldest settlement in Massachusetts, named after the Hebrew word for peace, shalom. It was here the first Puritan church had been built by those who’d fled England in search of freedom, but once the refugees arrived in a land they claimed as their own, they became as intolerant as their persecutors had been. They insisted upon purity that did not deviate from their beliefs, ensuring that all would live within the Scriptures as they saw them, rejecting the ways of sin practiced in England. The soul was said to be divided into two halves, the immortal half, which was male, and the mortal half, which was female, set in place by Eve’s original sin. It was women who were more likely to carry sin, to keep it in their hearts, to veer from the path of the righteous. The settlers believed with utter certainty that the world to come was predestined; some were condemned to hell in an unbroken fate that could not be altered, while others would receive God’s grace no matter what their earthly deeds might be. The only mercy that could be shown was divine. It was not for men to forgive; they were merely to enforce the rules of God, and make certain they were obeyed. Deviation from the rules meant severe punishment—lashings, whippings, the stocks, prison, being sent into the wilderness.

Women in Essex County were not allowed to wear fine clothes, for such attire might awaken the evil impulses of both demons and men. Female members of the community were expected to dress plainly in austere gray dresses of a color known as liver. Brown and indigo were sometimes used, for the dye was cheap, but only the wealthy wore black, for it was an expensive color to produce. Vanity was not allowed, and silk and lace were considered sinful; there were to be no scarves and no embroidered needlework. There had recently been cases in the nearby town of Newbury of women who had been arrested for wearing silk hoods. Long hair was outlawed, for it called up unwanted desire; there were to be no kid gloves or silk-laced shoes, no gold or silver jewelry. Puritans placed meaning in the color of clothes. Black symbolized humility; russet and brown, made from madder root dye, was the color of poverty; gray meant repentance; and white, the color of caps and cuffs and collars, was purity and virtue.

Wickedness could easily be found in this part of the world; hands must be kept busy to prevent evil deeds and to keep God’s favor, which many thought had been lost when there were several years of failed crops and famine. It was in God’s name that the Puritans made their attack against the native people and the French, a vicious endeavor called King Philip’s War, named after the Wampanoag chief who had taken the name Philip and led a bloody uprising that had lasted fourteen months. The English took what they wanted and felt was divinely given to them, land they claimed for God, but kept for their own use. One must be careful to keep oneself in God’s light and not in the devil’s darkness. Women must keep their eyes lowered, their voices soft. They must not ask for what they did not deserve, or think themselves above others, or pursue any vile needs or desires.

Mrs. Henry had told Maria to keep her head covered so that her glossy black hair wouldn’t be seen. Puritans rejected beauty in a woman, Mrs. Henry warned, just as they feared independence in the sex they deemed responsible for Adam’s downfall and the trials of all men who had followed. Maria carried the baby on her hip and Cadin in his case made of reeds. From the start, the crow made it clear that he was unhappy with their destination, clattering nasty clicks, as if scolding his mistress. Cadin put up such a racket that at last Maria paused on the street to open his cage. He peered at her with his glittering eye, sulking as he had on the day when Rebecca Lockland had knocked at the door, as annoyed as he’d always been when John Hathorne had come to call in Curaçao.

“Go on,” she urged when he glared at her with fierce disapproval. Cadin would always be her dearest friend, but perhaps he was jealous of John; certainly he had never taken to him. “You asked to be free. Go have a look at this town.”

The crow disappeared above the rooftops, a black streak in the sky. If he didn’t wish to help her find John, so be it. They’d make amends; they always did, for they had similar temperaments, cool and mistrustful, but ultimately, forgiving. She had decided she would no longer have doubts. A black heart could belong to anyone, and she would ignore the image she had seen. This was the day when she was to step into the future. She wore a serge dress, hand-stitched by Mrs. Henry for the occasion, dyed with blue composition, an inexpensive dye made of indigo and sold as a liquid in small glass bottles, a common enough color in Boston, but one which stood out here in Salem, where the women most often wore gray. She had on her red boots, still as good as new, and in her hair were the blackened silver hair clips that she considered to be good luck, even though a witch makes her own luck, and silver meant less to her than remembrance. Her lovely face shone in the sunlight, perhaps even more than it might have elsewhere, for sunlight was a rare occurrence in this city.

Maria had brought along some johnnycakes for Faith to eat on the journey, and some salt cod for herself, and as they went along the road she’d picked handfuls of ripe blackberries. Although the baby was hungry, Maria’s stomach was a nest of nerves and she couldn’t bring herself to eat. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw herself holding a black heart in her hands.

Turn it over once for love, twice for betrayal, three times for heartbreak.

Maria was young, her looks striking with her black hair, silver-gray eyes, and slim, reedy body. Puritans are men, Samuel Dias had warned her. No matter how many prayers they say. Instinctively, she searched for a woman’s help, which she found when she approached an inn on the wharf. When she mentioned Hathorne to a barmaid there, she was directed to Washington and Court Streets. If Maria was in search of the magistrate, that was where he would be found, at the court or city hall. His house was on Washington Street as well.

“But if I were you I’d avoid that place,” the barmaid confided. She was a Dutch protestant, and did her best to live in the Puritans’ world. “They’ve got their rules and we’d do best to stay far away from them.”

Maria followed the directions she’d been given. She stood on a corner of the cobbled street and observed a row of elegant houses. Better to find him at home, she decided, as they’d found one another in the blue dining room in Curaçao. She would know which house was his when she came upon it. As she closed her eyes, she saw it in her mind’s eye, a large house with black shutters that were thrown open on summer mornings before the heat turned brutal, the cloudy windows where he stood to watch snow fall on dark winter days. She felt the tug inside her and there she was standing in front of John Hathorne’s house, a world away from the country of heat and light where they’d met, where women went barefoot, and men were willing to jump into the sea-green water, and no one who saw such behavior would give it a thought.

The bricks in front of the house were patterned in diamond shapes, a formation that is said to bring bad luck, but Maria would not think of luck. Still, the mark on her inner arm had begun to burn, as though it were a star that had fallen from heaven to earth. When a witch’s mark burns, she had best be aware of the dangers that surround her, for it is a warning that should never be overlooked. Hannah had taught her not to ignore her intuition, telling her not to look away or think all will be well if she wished it to be. Pay attention, pay heed, listen to the voice inside.

The two large elm trees in his yard displayed a peculiar black leaf. When the leaves fell in autumn, a black carpet led to the gabled entranceway, but in summer they provided a welcome bower of shade. When Maria approached, the leaves that had only recently unfurled began to fall as if autumn had come early. She could see nothing through the small casement windows with leaded diamond-shaped panes. To summon John to her she rubbed her wrists with lavender oil. She had a pocket full of bird bones, gathered from the grass of grazing land in Boston, then strung on a bit of rope that she wore around her wrists. They were spells for love and for remembrance. She wore Cadin’s black feather in a charm at her throat.

They waited for nearly two hours, until Faith grew cranky and hungry. Little Faith was not as patient as Maria had been as a baby; she had a bit of a temper, as red-haired children often do. Maria hushed her, but some things have only a single remedy. Because the baby needed to be fed and because there was nowhere else to go, Maria made her way up the path to the garden, where she sat in the sunlight, the baby at her breast. Someone had carefully tended the kitchen garden here, planting seedlings of parsley and chervil, summer savory, thyme, sage, and spearmint. The black leaves continued to fall, their shapes forming black hearts in the grass.

As he approached the house, John Hathorne spied a crow in the tree. A chill went through him even though the day was fine, or at least it had been until this very moment. He had a true distaste for such creatures, and had ever since Curaçao when that horrible pet of the Jansens’ housemaid spat stones at him. Hathorne was accompanied now by the captain of one of his fleets of ships, scheduled to leave soon for the West Indies. A stone hit him as they spoke of sugar and slaves, grazing his cheek and drawing blood. He gazed upward and there was the vicious feathered beast. Although few men could tell one crow from another, he swore it was the same foul bird he’d known in the West Indies who had taken pleasure in tormenting him. It was the glint in the creature’s eye that gave him away, the way he held his head, proudly, as if he were as good as any man. If it was the bird he knew, it occurred to him that he was being threatened. He quickly made his excuses to the captain; he was so sorry to change their plans, but they would have to speak in the morning. He professed to be ill, and perhaps he was. Certainly, he couldn’t think straight and his gut was lurching. Like many in this world, he had two souls residing inside him: the man he wished to be and the man he actually was. Here, in Essex County, he was the man he’d been trained to be, his father’s son, a magistrate who did not stray, whose judgments were cast upon others, never upon himself.

He saw a woman’s figure in his own garden and was completely baffled. It was as if a wolf had come to lie beside the hollyhocks, or a lynx had climbed upon the roof, or worse, a witch had followed him across the seas. It was she; he knew her as he’d known the crow. His deeds had come back to haunt him. He rubbed his eyes hoping the vision would disappear, but the scene remained the same: a woman wearing red boots, which were outlawed in this town, intent on the child in her arms. He had never imagined her here in this landscape where the clouds billowed and the sky turned gray late in the day and black leaves fell. They fell now, as if the trees had been shaken and the world had fallen apart and not even seasons knew their time and place.

She was still a beauty, but he was now the other man, the one he’d been born to be, his father’s son, and Curaçao was only a dream to him. He considered his own behavior on that island to be a mystery. Men were undone in mysterious ways; they stopped thinking and only felt when they wanted what didn’t belong to them, and they often did as they pleased in a strange country where rose-colored birds stood on one long leg in a blue-green sea and the women could bewitch you if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t keep your head and remember exactly who you were—a man who owned ships and wharfs and warehouses and a house with black shutters, whose father and grandfather had been men of honor, all magistrates, all respected citizens who kept their word and made certain others kept theirs. These were men who would never have leapt into the sea fully clothed, shouting with joy, grinning like a fool, as if a demon had entered to use the darkness inside of them for ungodly purposes.

Maria sat beside a bank of tall, snow-white phlox. Nearby, in the kitchen garden, fennel and purple cabbage and radishes would soon be grown. There were no lilacs, as there had been in the vision in the black mirror, but surely she could plant them when she was John’s wife and this was her house. She would have Persian lilacs in shades of purple and violet and blue, with blooms so sweet women passing by would stop, unable to go any farther, called to the spot as if their names had been spoken aloud.

A bee came to examine Faith’s hair, red as a flower in the bright sunlight. Maria sent it off with a polite nod. “Be elsewhere,” she whispered, and it happily complied. In the tree with black leaves, Cadin was clacking and tossing down pebbles. Maria gave him a dark look, but otherwise paid him no mind. She could not let a crow make her decisions. Her fate was her own, and she would most certainly make the best of it before it made the best of her.

She set her sleeping baby in the grass. To call John to her, she took a laurel leaf from her satchel and held it in the palm of her hand, then set it on fire with a single breath, not minding that she scorched her own skin. The smoke was thin and green, so fragrant it was impossible to ignore. She said his name backwards, chanting beneath her breath. From behind the gate he felt the thrill of seeing her again. She was like no other woman he had ever seen or known, and when she called to him he felt his desire in the pit of his stomach. Sins were committed every hour of every day, and it was clear that this woman was unnatural in some way. But who among them had not committed a sin? The eternal torments of original sin had waited for mankind from the moment Adam ate the apple, which was handed to him by Eve, an act that proved to him and his brethren that women were spiritually inferior to men, weak with human frailty, sinful at their core.

John entered the garden and closed the open gate behind him, always bad luck. He was wearing the same black coat he hadn’t bothered to take off when he swam alongside the turtle, when he didn’t know the difference between a miracle and a monster. It had been laundered with hot water and lye soap and yet there was still sand in the seams. He looked at Faith, dozing in the afternoon light. She might be anything at all, an angel beside the snowy phlox, a wicked changeling sent in the guise of a red-haired girl, but her features were not unlike his, the same narrow nose and high cheekbones. She was merely his child. He softened then, and perhaps he smiled, for as Maria gazed up to see him she believed she saw his heart beating beneath his black coat.

Maria turned her attention to the bee that now came to sting Faith. The child let out a cry so filled with shock and pain that the sparrows in the garden took flight all at once. For a moment the sky was dark as the leaves from the black elm fell to litter the path as if they were bats falling from the branches. Maria quickly removed the stinger from her baby’s arm, then rubbed some lavender oil on the rising welt. “Hush,” she told the child. “All better.” She picked up the dying bee and cast it into the bed of phlox. Some creatures do not care how polite a person might be, they will hurt you for no reason, and then all you can do is heal yourself with whatever ingredients are necessary.

John’s heart was twisted in two between what he wanted and what he must do. He took her hands in his and drew her to her feet. He embraced her then, and so it came as a surprise when he said, “We must leave this place.”

“What do you mean? I’ve brought you your daughter.”

Hathorne gazed at the child’s hair. It was a time when many people believed red-haired women to be witches and imagined those with freckles had been marked by the devil, especially if they were left-handed, another evil trait. Redheads were said to be violent in temperament, false in nature, evil in intent. But this darling baby smiled up at Hathorne. “Gogo,” she said in her sweet voice.

Maria laughed. The babe thought Samuel Dias had returned. “No, no. This isn’t Goat. He’s another man.”

At the mention of a man, and one with a name that called Satan to mind, Hathorne flared with jealousy. What was his was his alone, even when he wasn’t certain he wanted the prize. “Am I not her father?”

“Yes, yes,” Maria assured him. Dias was her patient, nothing more. A friend, perhaps, a confidant, the man of a thousand stories, far away and out of mind. The one she embraced in bed, the one she allowed to kiss her until she was burning, but she always stopped him before she was completely his. There was John to think of, and loyalty, and their daughter. “Of course she’s yours.”

“Then we must go now. For safety’s sake.”

He led her from the yard, the baby still whimpering. When at last they reached the far end of the street, Hathorne drew Maria into a doorway so he might kiss her. Once begun, he could not get enough of her, though she held the baby in her arms. He knew that his desire could be his undoing. He was not young, though he was handsome enough so that women in town failed to lower their eyes when they passed him by, daring to smile and perhaps take his arm so they might make their interest clear. But those were inappropriate flirtations, nothing more. This was an enchantment, and he, who judged others harshly when they came before him in his chambers, did not judge himself for his wrongdoings. A spell was at work, and as he had leapt into the water in Curaçao, he embraced her now, but only for a moment, for this was not the time or the place.