Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,127
in the woods and in the pastures, a bloody black weed. Magistrates continued to rule on spectral evidence, which was supernatural and invisible and therefore impossible to refute. A madness had taken hold in the colony, and each day more women were arrested: those with property, those who were poor, those who had married the wrong man, or who were spinsters, or had angered a neighbor. The original accusers were young girls, beginning with the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Paris and their slave Tituba, who had little choice but to agree when questioned, and the mania spread like a fever to more girls and young women who swore witness against satanic acts they had witnessed. Bite marks, bruises, cows whose milk ran red with blood, stars that exploded in the sky, a black horse seen from a window, a mark on a woman’s face in the shape of a moon or a star or a sickle, all could be counted as proof. In a wicked turn of events, several of the accusers soon found themselves suspected of witchcraft. Many of the settlers of the town of Salem had come from Essex County in England, home of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder general who had sent one hundred women to their deaths, persecuted simply for being women without power in the world.
No one in New York had been arrested for any such reason. The two trials that occurred decades earlier, one in Queens County, the other in the town of Setauket on Long Island, both involved people from Massachusetts and no one was found guilty. Still magic continued, the sort of practical magic that cured and healed and helped both with love desired and love gone wrong. Everyday people had their horoscopes written out and visited fortune-tellers on Miller Street, also known as Mud Avenue after downpours in the spring. There were magical items for sale in many of the markets, often hidden behind the counter or found in a back room or kept under cloths. Most residents did not trust doctors, who were often unschooled and lost more patients than they saved, using worthless remedies: saltpeter, tinctures of distilled powdered human bone used as a cure-all, a false remedy that was called skull moss, a plant grown from the remains of violent criminals who had been hanged which was inserted into a patient’s nostrils and was said to staunch bleeding and stop fainting and fatigue. Folk medicine was far less dangerous than the work of medical doctors. Practitioners of the Nameless Art were held in high regard when it came to their talents and their knowledge of curative tonics, seeds to induce sleep or cure insomnia, packets of dried lavender and rose hips for teas that would calm the nerves.
Cures for Common Illnesses
Linden root and yarrow for racing hearts.
Oatmeal and almond meal for cleaning one’s face.
Rosemary oil for the hair, or a tonic of lemon and rosemary.
Lavender for sleeplessness.
Ginger root for diarrhea.
Cabbage leaf poultices for wheezing.
Darker ingredients were in demand as well: squid ink, thought to make tangible whatever was written in script, the hollow bones of birds for divination, mushrooms for erotic adventures or for revenge, seeds and oils to end a pregnancy, a knotted rope to burn and the ashes then eaten to bring forth a child. And there was love, always love, which was in the highest demand. Some unscrupulous vendors sold merchandise that was nothing more than wilted weeds, or a smudge of ashes said to be made of a dove’s heart but were nothing more than pipe leavings swept into tins, or perhaps rosemary oil flecked red with paint pigment or madder root, all of it dubbed with false Latin names. These unprincipled merchants played at magic, cheating clients in exchange for false cures that either wouldn’t work or, in some cases, might cause real harm if ingested. The names of those who were true to the Nameless Art and could be trusted were passed from friend to friend and sister to sister, as valued as silver.
Women came to the door of the house on Maiden Lane, as they had in both Essex Counties. They came at dusk, making certain they would not be recognized by neighbors or friends. Some had recently traveled across the sea in search of missing husbands, of which there were many, men who had left their wives behind in Ireland or England so they might disappear into new lives in Manhattan, often claiming not only new names after they’d