Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,140
named Anneke, who writhed in pain. Anneke was in a fever, her bedclothes drenched, her delicate face set in an expression of agony. The girl’s mother could not look at her without bursting into tears. They had tried leaching and cupping, none of it effective, and Dr. van der Berg had been stymied in his diagnosis, for he was most familiar with diseases of the Netherlands and New York and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and this girl was in the grips of a tropical disease. Maria immediately recognized the illness as breakbone fever, so common in the West Indies. The family had been to Aruba to visit relatives, and when questioned closely, Hannah recounted that the children had often been at the shore, where mosquitoes clouded the sky on hot summer evenings.
Maria had brought along a selection of dried and fresh herbs, including two it was clear the girl needed: dried blue violets as a tincture for mouth sores and linden root and yarrow for a racing heart, for the child’s heart was pounding so hard she kept her hands on her chest, frightened her heart would fly out from her body. Fortunately, Maria kept Tawa-tawa at hand, and grew it in pots on her windowsill, ready if Samuel Dias should return with a recurrence of the disease, though it seemed unlikely he would ever come back, for she hadn’t received a single letter from him since his departure.
The Dekker girl’s illness was far worse than Samuel’s. She had begun to bleed internally, and when she cried her tears were red. There were purple bruises blooming along her arms and legs; she could barely stand to be touched without crying out. She could not open her eyes when asked to do so, for she was too weak. Maria decided she would stay beside her patient until there was some improvement. On her way via a small corridor to the kitchen that was attached to the house, she passed a room that was filled with books. She went inside and stood at the desk. The minister had been working on a letter, open on his desk.
Too much is attributed to the devil and the witch or sorcery.
The minister was well acquainted with the Mathers, a family that had been instrumental in the witch trials, whose beliefs Dekker had come to believe were ridiculous opinions for godly, rational men. Maria thought over the minister’s writings as she soaked clean rags in cold water and vinegar to bring down the girl’s fever and then asked the cook to begin a fish bone broth. She boiled water to make Tawa-tawa tea for her patient and Courage Tea for herself. There was a reason fate had led her here, and she wished to be strong enough not to back down from what would come next. She was fighting darkness, which arose when it was least expected, in this case in the heart of a young girl, her own daughter.
Though the minister’s wife did not believe in magic, she said nothing when Maria poured a line of salt along the window ledge and hung the brass bell above the door, or when she dressed the child in a clean blue nightdress. Maria rubbed rosemary-infused oil over Anneke’s aching bones before spooning Tawa-tawa tea between her parched lips. The poor child had been speaking to herself in a fever; she wished to be put out of her misery and no longer had the will to live. Hannah sat on a chair beside the bed, quietly weeping until Maria whispered they must show the girl they had faith in her recovery. She then went to tend to the child.
“We will rid you of misery and you will live until you’re a very old woman with white hair,” Maria assured Anneke. But you will never be a child again, she thought, not after such pain. You will be a person of compassion, who will be unable to walk past another’s suffering without doing your best to aid them. She crooned Hannah Owens’ song, the one that had comforted her when she was a babe, and that she had then sung to Faith on board the Queen Esther and in the woods of Essex County. Anneke begged for her to sing it again and again, and Maria was happy to comply, for the song always reminded her of home.