Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,133

as if Finney were a long-lost friend.

* * *

Faith came home with her purchase from the butcher shop to find Maria waiting for her, furious. “You’ve created mayhem, and it’s unbreakable. There’s nothing I can do to amend it. I told you, you aren’t ready to work magic.”

Faith returned her mother’s gaze and held it. As it turned out they were now the same height. “I am ready.”

Maria felt a chill go through her. “When I say so.”

“It’s my fault,” Finney was quick to claim. “She did so on my behalf.”

“I believe it was on my behalf,” Catherine said.

Already, Catherine Durant could not be kept from him or he from her. They had an unspoken pact that they would never be parted, two spellbound people who left together for Catherine’s farm on the Bowery without looking back.

Maria narrowed her eyes. It had been too long since she had really looked at her daughter. Now she saw the edge of darkness inside. “You haven’t enough practice for such things.”

Faith shrugged. “It’s only love.”

“You think love is so simple?” Maria thought of the day she saw John Hathorne in the blue dining room in Curaçao and the morning Samuel had brought the magnolia tree to Salem so she thought that snow was falling. “Take my advice,” she told Faith. “Stay away from it.”

“If that’s how you feel about love, why are you still wearing Gogo’s ring?”

Maria had tried everything to remove the gold band from her finger, but the wedding ring wouldn’t come off. It was likely the reason she thought of Samuel Dias so often. She wondered if Abraham had known that would happen and why such rings were worn, to make you think of the one who had given it to you.

“You’re the one that played with love,” Faith said to her mother. “You called down a curse on us. You didn’t care what I thought or what I wanted.”

Try to do what’s best for your children, and still it could all go wrong. What you knew today, you didn’t know yesterday. What you wished for then, you might come to regret.

“You never told me what happens if someone falls in love with us.”

“We ruin their lives,” Maria told her daughter.

“It seems you’ve already ruined the Goat’s life,” Faith told her mother that day. “You might as well love him.”

PART FIVE

The Remedy

1693

I.

There were so many women in love and in trouble in the city of Manhattan that Maria hadn’t time for all who came in search of a charm or a cure. Often a dozen or more waited in the garden, some disguised by shawls or cloaks, others so desperate they didn’t care who might spy them visiting the witch’s house. What was a witch if not a woman with wisdom and talent? Here in New York, such things were not a crime. Maria’s clients perched on benches or sat in the dewy grass counting out pieces of silver, removing wedding bands, reciting small prayers that Maria Owens might help them find health or solace or love. When she looked out the window to see how many women were in need, she was overwhelmed. A woman who had renounced love should not be so close to so much emotion. It would surely affect her. Love was contagious, it passed from soul to soul, it woke a person up and shook her even when she wanted to be left alone. There were times when Maria looked in the black mirror to search for a client’s fate and all she could see was Samuel Dias. She had no heart, she was sure of it, and yet something inside of her ached.

“I could be your assistant,” Faith said as they looked out the window at the women waiting there. “In Brooklyn, people came to me to be healed.” She had recently learned how to construct figures out of the bark of the black hawthorn; when melted over a fire the love for the wrong person would melt as well and a client would be freed of foolhardy desires.

“Well, that was in Brooklyn,” Maria responded. “They should not have gone to a girl.”

“I know more than you think I do,” Faith insisted. She knew the expression on a woman’s face when she realized she had only a few more breaths to take in this life, she knew that when she was in a cemetery at night she could hear the heartbeats of the dead, she knew that a girl whose father doesn’t want her