Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,160

children.

The Maria Owens School for Girls held its first classes soon after, with ten girls in attendance, aged six to thirteen. Faith Owens taught both Latin and Greek, along with poetry and classics. There were still many in town who thought it was a danger and a disservice to society to educate female students; all the same, several local residents allowed their daughters to register for classes, despite the rumors about the Owens women. Faith was not yet seventeen, but quite well respected by the girls and their families, who ignored the rumors that vowed both Owens women became crows who flew above the fields after dark, and that they would put a curse on you if you wronged them, and that they swam naked in Leech Lake. It was true that Maria went to the lake on summer mornings. She could only float, but that was enough, for she’d been able to dive the one time she needed to do so. If she wanted to swim there, among the waterweeds and the lilies, with no clothes on and her hair tied up with blue ribbon, who was to say such a thing wasn’t a pleasure and a delight?

* * *

No one knew whether or not Maria was married, but there was a man who spent winters with her and went to sea each summer. Some people swore he’d come back from the dead, and that love had returned him to life. His sailors said little about him when they frequented the taverns, other than to note that he paid them well and was a brilliant navigator. They laughed about his personal habits. He liked to tell stories, he always drank a special tea to give him courage, and wherever they might be, he searched out a certain variety of tree, bringing home so many that the road that led to the Owens house was now called Magnolia Street. It was rumored that if you stood there in May, on the day when the trees bloomed, you were bound to fall in love, but no one believed tall tales such as that, except for those it had happened to, and those couples often married there, rather than in church, and were said to be exceptionally happy.

* * *

Faith Owens was regularly seen in town with a book in hand, reading as she walked. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat and men’s trousers, and she carried a satchel of books to ensure that if she should finish one volume she would be handily prepared with the next. There was rarely a time when she didn’t have her nose in a book, and people would come upon her in the woods, sitting on a rock and reading, or on a ledge by the lake, tossing bread crumbs into the murky water as she turned the pages. She’d collected dozens of volumes for the new library, meeting with wealthy families throughout Essex County, as well as in Boston and Cambridge, convincing well-to-do patrons that the entire population, men, women, and children alike, must be literate in order for the colony to grow. Several men fell in love with her, but she turned them all down. If they called her beautiful, that was a mark against them, for what a person was could not be seen with the naked eye. She had learned from her mother’s mistakes. If she ever fell in love, she wanted someone she could talk to.

Although women were not allowed to be students at Harvard College, the esteemed citizen Thomas Brattle, who had written a letter that was critical of the witch trials and was both the treasurer of the college and a member of the Royal Society, had made arrangements for Faith to study in Cambridge. She was closer to Brattle than most people might have supposed, despite their age difference; they appreciated each other’s minds, and she was grateful to him for believing in her abilities as a teacher.

Faith sat in the back row of the classics seminar at Harvard, allowed only to listen and never to speak. She dressed in boy’s clothing in her everyday life, which she found so much more practical than skirts and capes. At Harvard, she could be seen in a black jacket along with trousers and a white shirt and a black tie, the same uniform as the men, so that she might not call attention to herself and her gender, although she hardly went unnoticed due to the red boots she