Page 124 of The Book of Magic

On weekends there was often a full house on Magnolia Street. Gillian and Ben came to visit nearly every weekend, glad to be out of the city. Margaret’s remedy had worked and Gillian had the daughter she’d always wanted, a little girl named Francesca Bridget after the aunts, but called Birdie by one and all. Birdie had been born at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge on March 21, a date that was no longer considered unlucky. Oh, beautiful day. Oh, March 21. People who were born on this day had a unique brand of courage and what more could a woman wish for her daughter? Ben Frye had handed out chocolate cigars to anyone he could stop in the corridor. He and Gillian were both deliriously happy to step blindly into whatever was to happen next. Birdie had a tuft of red hair and her features resembled Franny’s; she was stubborn and serious and could call birds to the window with a wave of her hand, sparrows and hawks alike.

“Something tells me she’s not like all the other little girls,” Ben said of his daughter. He had never understood the Owens curse, but now that it was over he had moved downstairs and was happy to forget whatever it was that had kept them apart. Frankly, nothing could have kept him from his daughter. The baby had silver eyes and she never cried and her father was over the moon every time he saw her.

“She’s not like the other girls,” Gillian said proudly. “She’s extraordinary.”

The baby girl Antonia had expected, however, had turned out to be a boy named Leo, now nearly a year old, adored by his four parents, adored by one and all. Scott Morrison, Leo’s biological father and his husband, Joel, loved to come up to the house on Magnolia Street whenever they could, and Antonia, busy as ever, still came for dinner with Ariel and their son every Sunday evening.

Leo was pure trouble, delightful from the start, and when Antonia saw baby pictures of Vincent she was amazed by how much her son resembled him. In public places, where he might easily be lost, Antonia kept Leo on a baby leash, but he was already close to figuring out how to unsnap the harness, and once that happened Antonia was grateful that he had four people to run after him. Often, when she was over at Mount Auburn Hospital on rounds with the attending physician, she bumped into Scott and they would sneak a look at photos of their little boy and mull over what their high school selves would think of their current lives, in which their utmost concerns were day care and consumption of apple juice.

“We would think our lives were perfect,” Antonia told her dear friend. “We would think we were the luckiest people on earth.”

Sally still had the keys to the library, which she used to enter the building on the night before her wedding, even though it was after hours and meant she would be late to her own bachelorette party, an Owens tradition the night before the wedding, since weddings had been so rare. She flicked on the lights, delighted to see the library was exactly as she remembered it. She went to the rare-books section and found the shelf she’d always ignored, the one Franny and Jet had insisted they keep for magic books. There was a Grimoire written by Agnes Durant’s sixth great-grandmother, Catherine, along with a brand-new copy of Ian’s book, The History of Magic.

She’d gone back for The Book of the Raven after Franny’s drowning, and had kept it ever since, knowing it should be returned to the library. It was such a small volume that it nearly disappeared when Sally fitted it in between two larger, more imposing-looking volumes of English magic. Some people vow that a book contains the soul of the writer, and often the best ones are written by those who have no voice, yet still have a story to tell. Amelia Bassano knew there would be women who would do anything to fulfill a wish or break a curse or fall in love.

Make one wish and pay the price. Make one mistake and it can haunt you. All the same, love who you will. Know that language is everything. Never give your words away.

The Book of the Raven was meant to go to the next woman who needed it. It might sit on the shelf for another three hundred years or it might be discovered the very next day, either way it would continue to live, for people often find the books they need.

Sally locked up the library for the last time, then ran all the way to the inn. She was the last to arrive and threw up her hands, flustered by the size of the crowd at the Black Rabbit and all the fuss that was made when she walked in and everyone shouted, Congratulations, and applauded like mad. She wasn’t used to being the center of attention, but after her first cocktail a feeling of recklessness came over her and after her third, a signature drink that Gillian had concocted, called the Toad, which included crushed mint, vodka, grapefruit juice, and rosemary with a splash of rum, Sally got up on the bar of the taproom with Gillian for a hilarious chorus of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”

Sally Owens, who had always been so somber and had often held forth about the rules of silence and decorum when she’d run the library, had cast away her dreary black clothes and instead wore a vintage sixties Biba minidress patterned in yellow and magenta, bought in a thrift shop on Westbourne Grove. The Black Rabbit was so crowded there was a line out the door. Many of the clients who’d come to the Owenses for cures over the years were in attendance, along with the board of the library, and the mothers of the children who steadfastly brought their children to story hour, and who, if the truth be told, hung around the edges of the room to hear what happened next. Miss Hardwick gave a speech dressed as Emily Dickinson, all in white. She would remain to oversee the library until Kylie finished her degree and officially took over. The truth of it was, Miss Hardwick would stay until the morning she died, in bed, reading, which was not to happen for quite a long time.

People were well aware that this was Sally’s third marriage, but the curse was over, and love was love, and everyone could see the way Sally gazed into the Englishman’s liquid black eyes when he arrived with Vincent and his guest. Some folks in town swore they had heard Sally let out a burst of laughter when she was in the arms of her husband-to-be, not some hasty sarcastic hoot, but real joy that lingered, as if she were truly happy, and if that was the case, why, then, anything was possible.

Sally’s girls had given her their blessings when she first told them she would be returning to England after Franny’s funeral, and Gillian had held her close and whispered, Live a lot. Ian had already given up his place on Rosehart Mews, and they had begun to renovate a ramshackle place known as the Witch’s House at the edge of the fens, bought cheaply and with the approval of the town council. As for Sally, she had taken a position at Cat’s Library, and in the afternoons, Ian went off to join her at the library to work on his new book, The Uses of Magic. He had taken Franny’s advice and had begun researching local women who had written Grimoires, which, at the rate he was going, would likely take him another twenty years. During the cleanup of Lockland Manor, a desk had been found among the trash, and had been brought over to the library where it was now known as the professor’s desk. Local people, especially those who had been affected by the Red Death, left pens as tokens of their pride that one of their own had published his first book, which was over eleven hundred pages long, though Ian had been more concise with a simple dedication on the very first page.

To my mother who introduced me to magic, and to Sally Owens who introduced me to love.

Not long after Sally had returned to Thornfield after Franny’s funeral, on a day when Ian was at work plastering what would be a guest bedroom, Margaret Wright had arrived and had discreetly taken Sally aside.

“I can teach you the Unnamed Art,” she’d told Sally. “It has its failures and disappointments, but you’ll be quick to pick it up. Perhaps we should start now, before I forget all that I know.”

The Unnamed Art was an acquired skill and Sally was an excellent student. She quickly learned which local herbs were useful and which were so dangerous that plucking them was often a drastic error, with results that could cause spiritual distress and physical agony. Once, when she’d failed to heed Margaret’s directions, she’d picked stinging nettle, an error she never made again, and she was thankful that she knew to use jewelweed to cure nettle’s agony. She had learned how to make elixirs for fevers and rashes and potions for love, and as it turned out, magic came back to her, not the bloodline magic she’d been born with, but the magic she made for herself. This was the fate she had chosen.

Sally was happy to live at the edge of the world with the herons who fished in the shallow water. When the light was thin and pale, she held a hand over her eyes and looked out over the fens, searching for the dark-haired girl she had seen across the distance of three hundred years. She saw her only once, going knee-deep in water to try to reach her, one hand held over her eyes.

“It all worked out,” Sally called to her. “We fell in love and we paid the price, but it’s finally over and you don’t have to worry about us.”

One afternoon, in the chilly blue month of March, on the day when Franny was born and Jet had left the world, Sally was walking through one of her favorite fields, where daisies grew wild and she thought she spied a black heart in the grass. It was a young crow fallen from its nest in the wet gusts of the previous evening, who came to her of its own accord. She named the bird Houdini, after the great magician. She brought it home and nursed it, and when Ian saw it he grinned and said, “Be prepared. He’ll never leave.”

Much to Sally’s delight, he hadn’t. She’d left Houdini with Jesse Wilkie at the Three Hedges Inn to be cared for during their wedding trip to Massachusetts. He was meant to stay in the large iron cage the inn kept in the old milking room, but Jesse had a big heart, however, and couldn’t keep the crow caged, allowing Houdini to sit at the bar, where he often behaved badly, stealing cherries and orange slices and crossly refusing to accept any pats from those who’d had a drink too many. Occasionally he’d swoop across the barroom so he could stare out the window, lovelorn. The crow made a clattering sound that was quite heartbreaking. “Sally will come back to you,” Jesse told him. “Wait and see.”

Unable are the Loved to die, for love is immortality, the Reverend quoted at the end of the marriage service, a blessing not only for the happy couple exchanging vows, but also in remembrance of Jet, whose favorite poet was Emily Dickinson, and of Franny, who had sacrificed so much for those she loved. The entire ceremony took under four minutes. Sally wore the black dress Franny had worn at her wedding, and her red boots. The color red had come back to her slowly, first in Ian’s flat on the day she met him, in flashes of rose and scarlet, until one day she was cutting an apple for them to share and the color was so brilliant that she burst into tears. Red, after all, was the color of love.

Sally wore Maria Owens’s sapphire pendant, as was customary at an Owens wedding. When Sally and Ian kissed they couldn’t seem to stop, and a sigh went up among the crowd as people remembered what true love was like, and how lucky those who found it were. The babies in attendance were surprisingly well behaved during the ceremony. Birdie, only two months old, was utterly silent, in awe of the magnolia trees with their huge saucer-sized flowers. Antonia had let Leo run around beforehand so he could tire himself out and yet he still had enough energy to hide under the table where the wedding cake was being plated, refusing to come when called. “He’s your spitting image,” everyone declared when Vincent came to claim his great-grandson, and even the Owenses from Maine, who were notoriously argumentative, had to agree. Antonia laughed and told Ariel that if that was true they were in for some big-time trouble. Vincent had never adhered to the rules.

Sally adored the little boy, and didn’t mention to Antonia that when she and Vincent had taken him into the parlor, Leo had made the books in the study jump off the shelves simply by waving his hands. They’d looked at each other and laughed. Antonia had no idea what she was in for.

“I had to practice for ages to do that,” Vincent confided.

When Antonia came looking for Leo, and asked what had happened to the books, Vincent shrugged and said there were known to be little earthquakes in this part of the commonwealth. Sally had then unclasped the necklace she had worn during the ceremony so that she could give Maria’s sapphire to Antonia. “To wear at the next wedding,” she said to her darling daughter. “How lucky to be able to fall in love.”

Vincent sat in the sunlight, where he removed his tie and his jacket and grinned at David, who was so enamored of America he was wearing a Red Sox cap. Oh, how Vincent wished he could tell his sisters how unexpected everything was. He wished they could sit down at the table, today, in the sunlight, so that he could tell them everything. Once, a long time ago, before we knew who we were, we thought we wanted to be like everyone else. How lucky to be exactly who we were.

The guests had a lavish wedding supper of lobster and scallops baked into a rosemary crust, with salads of every sort of lettuce, all fresh from the garden, and at last there was Tipsy Cake with cream, served while they all admired Leo and how precocious he was. Why, if you weren’t watching him like a hawk, he’d climb into the lilacs and disappear. He might have shaken down the cake table that he ducked beneath, had his great-grandfather not coaxed him out with the promise of a biscuit.

Margaret Wright, who was visiting America for the very first time, made a rum punch that people couldn’t get enough of, a drink that cheered up even the most contrary people. The porch was festooned with paper lanterns, and candles set into sand-filled white sacks marked the bluestone path to their door and would be lit when twilight fell. Margaret was delighted when Vincent invited her along on the tour of the greenhouse with David. “This is marvelous,” she declared, deciding then and there that Ian must build one for her so that she could grow herbs all winter long.