Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,36
at all like him. He himself seemed surprised by his ardor. But on this night he was so outspoken, he quickly turned to observe the others around the table, and was relieved when he saw they hadn’t noticed his behavior. “Please, miss, meet me there.”
When Maria could get away, she did so. She blushed to think of what she had conjured up, the first man to be in love with her. She was fifteen, the same age Rebecca had been when she first spied Thomas Lockland. Maria left her apron on the counter next to the pile of dishes in the kitchen, and she didn’t respond to Adrie’s disapproving expression. Men went to war and women fell in love, heedless and for reasons they might never understand. She could stop this and put it to rest right now. She could make an amulet for protection and speak the words that would keep him away; she could fashion an image of him and bury it in the earth outside her window where the centipedes nested, and he would never return. Instead, she ran a comb through her hair, and found her way to the courtyard. Turn back, something inside her said, but there was an element of defiance in her soul ever since the fire. Rebecca had told her that life was short and she should do as she pleased.
They met beneath the Jamaican apple trees, which bore pear-shaped fruit with red skin and white flesh. Cadin was perched in one of the boughs, and he created such a racket that Maria waved him away. But before he obeyed her, he dove at the stranger in a flutter of feathers, knocking the hat from Hathorne’s head.
“That’s a foul creature,” John declared.
“No more than I am,” Maria said, hurt by his estimation.
“If you believe so, then I’m mistaken.” By then the bird had flown from the garden and was no threat to him. “He must be another miracle.”
“He is, as a matter of fact.”
“If this is your opinion, I will agree.”
“Will you?” Maria was pleased.
He might have agreed to anything at that moment, for he received a kiss for agreeing with her, and then many more. Juni was asleep, her face to the wall, when Maria finally came to bed. The Jansens were in their chambers, sprawled out on newly pressed sheets woven in Amsterdam. Maria sat at the window when she returned to her room, her hair undone, her mind racing. She knew nothing about this man and yet she had given herself to him. This was what had befallen her, a madness of sorts, powerful and potent, brought on without a potion, without a spell. She did not wish to understand her mother’s actions, which had always seemed foolhardy and irresponsible, and yet she did.
This is the way it happens. You walk into a room with blue walls. You kiss a man in the garden. You feel your heart and bones and blood. You wait for him like a bird in a cage.
* * *
On the second night they were together John vowed that he loved her, on the third night she was his, on the fourth night he gave her a sapphire on a silver chain that she said she would never take off, on the fifth night he brought her a small packet of diamonds to do with as she pleased. This was what she had seen in the black mirror, her future and her fate. He had presented her with what seemed an impossible gift for a girl such as herself, and yet here were seven small diamonds, shimmering in the palm of her hand. This was her future, a man who promised to cherish her. And so she let him slip his hands beneath her dress in a dark corner of the courtyard, she let him do whatever he pleased, for he said she was his heart’s desire, that he would always adore her. She told him that when they lived together she would plant lilacs outside the door; she would make a special entrance so that Cadin could come and go as he pleased; she would always wear blue, because Hathorne favored it so. Five days of dreams can seem like years, that was how well she thought she knew him. She did not need the sight, and instead let her heart lead her. But on the sixth night he didn’t appear. Maria sat in the courtyard until the sunrise of the seventh day, a