one for white magic, one for black, a plant that could heal or hurt and was called “Dead Man’s Fingers” in a play written by the man who adored the author of The Book of the Raven. Near the Minetta Stream there were old trees with hollows in their trunks, doors to other worlds where words were said backwards, widdershins, spinning left, the witch’s path that was counterclockwise. It was here that Faith gathered blackberries, long used against serpent’s bites and for setting curses. The Book of the Raven had taught her transference magic, shifting the sorrow or disease or the ill fate that a person carried into another object or being. She had small glass bottles filled with hate and fever and rage and grief, which were stored in a cabinet in her chamber, and at night they glowed with green light, as if stars had fallen from the sky.
In time she could turn a blooming flower black, stop a bird’s heartbeat, confuse men so they forgot their own names or lost the power of speech. Love was a common thing to her now, the foolish territory of those without her discipline. She knew that to undo an attraction one needed black paint, blood, a bird’s broken wing, pins, and a thin strand of lead, handled carefully, and with gloves. One night she cut her arm and let her blood sink into the ground, and in that place a stem arose with a single red rose. That rose was the magic inside of her, and every day the rose grew darker, until one morning the petals and the stem were black and the thorns were so sharp not even the bees would come near.
Faith wrote down the skills she had studied onto slips of paper to see what practice would best suit her. Invisibility. Sight. Healer. Love Magic. Revenge. She left the papers to float in a bowl of water overnight to see what her future might be. In the morning one scroll had bloomed opened. Faith’s heart beat quickly as she reached for her fate.
Her place on earth had been decided. She’d known what it would be before she read the floating word, for it was already in her heart, and the black rose in the garden had grown to be as tall as she.
Revenge was what she wanted.
III.
Magic continued to flourish in Manhattan, for most New Yorkers looked the other way when faced with the unusual, be it magic or not. There was a freedom of spirit in the city that couldn’t be found in the other colonies, perhaps because of the settlement’s Dutch heritage. Respected Amsterdam minister Balthasar Bekker had published The Enchanted World, arguing that Calvinism was mistaken in stating that Satan walked through the human world. The devil was nothing more than a symbol of all the evil that resided inside mankind, and belief in witchcraft was the work of ignorant, superstitious men. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, agreed that the search for witches was far-fetched nonsense. He’d been schooled on this issue when his own sister-in-law Judith Varlet was accused in Hartford in the witch craze of the 1660s and rescued from Connecticut in the dead of night to avoid prison. That near-tragic incident was close enough to the governor to give him pause when it came to supernatural claims. He was a logical man who demanded proof; proving Satan’s existence was a fool’s errand, and he had declared so in his remarks concerning such arrests, stating that sentences for witchcraft should not end in execution, no matter how dark the accusations might be.
In Massachusetts scores of people had been arrested and held for preposterous reasons, with claims that they were in league with the devil and could torment people from miles away. Though not present in bodily form, those charged were said to be able to ruin crops, induce babies to fall ill, make loyal husbands go mad with lust. Serious men, including Cotton Mather, son of the illustrious Increase Mather, president of Harvard, believed that evil could be found in the personages of old women and fishwives and children, that it emerged from their mouths, that the dark world had encroached on everyday life so that the line dividing the two had vanished into thin air.
Cotton Mather was at work on The Wonders of the Invisible World, a treatise that claimed Satan wished to overturn the Massachusetts Bay Colony and used witches to do so. He was convinced that black magic grew