Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,43

yet.” She was not the sort to tell a lie, even when it might have ended the conversation.

“And do you even know where he is?”

“Essex County,” she said primly, as if it were a proper address.

“Essex County and Boston are not one and the same. This is a vast land, Maria. It’s not the island of Curaçao.”

She threw him a dark look. “You ask too many questions.”

“So I’ve heard,” Dias said.

He sensed that something wasn’t right. He certainly had known men who led a woman on with false information, those who had two wives who never knew of each other, those who left in the middle of the night, disappearing with all the household valuables. Dias squinted at the stone this man of Maria’s had given her. He knew the worth of gems, and this one had no spark. The blue was an empty color, dead inside. “I’m not sure this is genuine.”

Maria laughed out loud. “I see what you’re doing. You just want to make trouble. He’s a Puritan of high moral quality.”

“I know men, and I’m sorry to say a Puritan is a man like any other. A man who disappears is either dead or wishes you to think him so. Perhaps it’s best if you do.”

Maria gave Dias a sidelong glance. “You talk too much,” she told him.

“I thought women liked men who talked,” he said, knowing he would annoy her and wanting to do so for reasons he was only beginning to understand. “That’s what I’ve been told.”

“Really? How many women have told you that? A hundred?” she teased. He had such dark eyes it was best for her not to stare into them for too long.

“I haven’t counted,” he admitted. “But I will now if you’re so interested.”

“I’m not,” she was quick to say.

“Good. I would hate for you to be jealous.”

“You don’t have to worry about that, Goat. Just worry about living long enough so there will be a hundred and one women who have told you lies.”

He laughed, enjoying sparring with her. She was not like any of the women he’d known, for she was unafraid to argue, and she often bested him, making him feel a fool, the color rising in his face, until all other women were forgotten.

* * *

At night Maria curled with her baby and sang her to sleep, the same tune Hannah once sang to her.

The water is wide, I cannot get o’er it

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that will carry two

And both shall row, my Love and I.

I leaned my back against some oak

Thinking he was a trusty Tree:

But first he bended, and then he broke;

and so did my false love to me.

Maria studied the child’s face in the pale light that filtered through the small, shuttered window. She had the red hair of her grandmother and Maria’s own wide, generous mouth and gray eyes. Her features were narrow, as her father’s were, with high cheekbones and a straight nose. Despite these resemblances, she was unique, a rose of a girl Maria could study for hours on end.

“All sleepers should dream as she does,” Samuel Dias said one night, for he was often awake till all hours, thinking about the life he’d lived, knowing how closely he had walked beside death. The child reminded him of what was good in the world, and he often told her stories his own mother had told him. There was one about a cat that was far more clever than its master, and another about a wolf who had been a man until he’d been placed under a spell, and still another about a child lost in the woods.

“Hush,” Maria told him. “Try sleep for yourself. That’s what you need.”

Maria closed her eyes and imagined Faith in a large garden, the one she had seen in the black mirror, where trees bloomed with white flowers and lilacs grew beside the door. She was in that vivid garden, in the midst of her dream, when Cadin woke her before the first light of morning. He tapped at her and made a harsh clacking noise. There was the wretched sound of struggling, as if someone had been caught in a net. In an instant, Maria was wide-awake, her heart pounding. Samuel was having convulsions. She left the baby in the hammock and went to throw her arms around Samuel to ensure he wouldn’t harm himself as he thrashed around. The fever was still in his body, it always