Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,111

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