Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,114

her where she is.” For an eleven-year-old Faith sounded very sure of herself. “If a sheriff is called, we should have the flatlands behind us when the body is found.”

“It’s not as if we had a hand in killing her. She’s done that all on her own. I suppose we should feel sorry for her.”

“She took me from my mother and locked me in a room. For five years I’ve been waiting for this day,” Faith told her companion.

Finney felt it was their duty to honor the dead. He dragged the body to the shallows and set her on the watery bank, beneath the bridge. It was the least he could do even though she was heavier than he’d imagined and he was sweating through his clothes. He felt as old as Arnold, who huffed and puffed at the end of the day.

“Perhaps we should say a word or two?” Finney asked Faith once he’d scrambled back up to the dusty road. The girl was still below the bridge, on the stony bank, the water running over her boots as she contemplated the scene before her. One of Martha’s legs had been crushed by the wagon and was twisted underneath her body, her stocking torn off, her flesh white among the black stones.

“What you do comes back to you threefold,” Faith recited. “That’s what happened to this woman.” Faith had a pretty, serious face, but that dyed black hair didn’t look human and wasn’t. She couldn’t pretend to feel sorrow. Now that this day had come, it was no surprise that Faith had no feelings at all. It wasn’t just the lines on her left hand that had changed.

“If what you say is true,” Finney said, “this woman was evidently responsible for some terrible actions, for this is a terrible death.”

“She made horrible jam,” Faith said. “And she tried to have my mother drowned.”

“That’s enough for me.” Finney felt lucky to have such a smart horse, and an even smarter girl beside him. It was only now that he was in constant conversation that he realized how much he had despised being alone. “We can leave her where she is and let her discuss her actions with the Lord.”

“I’ll take a minute, if you don’t mind.”

Finny nodded and walked back toward the wagon. Faith stayed there beside the creek while he hoisted himself back on the carriage bench and took up the reins. It was then that Martha spit out some water, which trickled into the rising tide. Faith didn’t move or shout out. She had been told lies for so many years: why they had to leave on the ship to New York, how evil would find her if her hair was red, how her mother had never cared for her. Standing in the shallows, she closed her eyes and let the person she’d been forced to be go, that obedient girl Jane she’d pretended to be, who did as she was told. She breathed in the chill morning air, the salt stinging her lungs, and she might have forgiven Martha her wrongdoings, but she could not forget that she had been robbed of five years of her life. She would not allow another minute to be stolen. Inside Faith’s mind Martha Chase disappeared, a shadow growing smaller until it was the size of a wasp, then a stinging ant, and then no size at all, a spirit vanished. A death wish can be a powerful spell, by witch or mortal alike, and Faith shook with the bitterness she felt and her willingness to ignore the rules of magic. If Martha wasn’t quite dead yet, she would be by the time she was found, her eyes open, looking at the flat blue sky. And if she was aware of her surroundings at the very last moments of her life, if the black beetle crawled out from the folds of her clothing, if she called out Faith’s name, no one would have heard, for the seabirds were screaming like mad and circling above and the tide was rising quickly, the way it does in the marshes, so that one moment it was possible to see a figure of a woman, and the next it seemed that a long gray dress was floating in the deepening water.

Faith climbed up the embankment, then hopped into Finney’s carriage. The soles of her boots were covered with muck and her stockings were soaked. The lines on her left hand were changing before her eyes