Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,57
was broken and scattered about. Cutlery, left unwashed, had been strewn upon a small wooden table. In a corner were straw pallets and several threadbare woolen blankets. Once inside, Maria found a spoon to cast out the door, as her mother had done time and time again, to be rid of bad luck. But the spoon was tin, not silver. It didn’t turn black in her touch, and rather than being flung into the distance, it landed at her feet, clattering upon her red boots. A dozen crows were in the trees, but Cadin was not among them. He was making himself scarce, and in doing so he made his annoyance evident, as it was whenever she was with John.
The baby was bundled in her blanket with Maria’s name stitched at one corner and Faith’s name stitched below her mother’s with the blue thread Rebecca had given her. Blue for protection and remembrance. Hathorne embraced Maria fiercely; he would have had her right there if she hadn’t stopped him. His hands were all over her, so hot they burned her skin. She thought of the laurel leaf aflame in her hand; she’d called him to her, but now she backed away. Do good among them, Hannah always said, but do not expect the same in return.
“If they have set out rules in this town, let us act by them,” Maria said.
If marriage was what this world insisted upon, then marriage it would be. Here, in these woods, in the second Essex County she had known, Maria thought of Hannah’s burning house. Most witches feared water, but Maria feared fire. She thought of the day when Lockland and his brothers arrived, when the air had filled with the stems and petals from the poison garden. Her eyes had burned for days afterward, perhaps from the billows of smoke, perhaps from the tears she couldn’t shed. It was so easy to make a mistake in matters of love. So many women had made their way across Devotion Field, convinced they must make the wrong man their own. Maria had done her best to help those who came to her in Boston, even the ones who knew they should let go of love. Now she asked for marriage, even though she thought of another man. There was a cure for this, she knew, but to set a spell upon herself was dangerous, and she could stop such thoughts by sheer willpower if she tried. O Amor meant sweetheart, darling, flame, love. That is what Samuel Dias had called out in his sleep, and it was only now that Maria realized he might have been speaking to her.
“My pledge remains the same,” Hathorne told her. For now he would bring all she might need to stay in the cabin: bedding and pots and pans, baskets of apples and onions, ginger and butter and eggs, odd vegetables Maria had never seen before. He returned the next night and the night after that. They took a late supper together cooked over a fire. Before she’d left Boston, Mrs. Henry had taught her how to fix Salem Pudding, a favored dish made of flour, milk, molasses, and raisins, all boiled for hours, and how to make a quick meal of johnnycakes with Indian meal and flour, one egg, a little sugar, and salt and soda. John praised the tea she made and said it gave him the strength and courage to try to set things right.
In time, Maria relented, and while Faith slept, she took him to her bed, the straw pallet where hunters camped after the leaves turned, when they came to shoot deer and wild fowl. Spring passed into summer, and some evenings John could not get away. On these nights there was nothing but darkness and the flicker of the fireflies, creatures unknown in England. They rose amid the trees in globes of pale yellow light, signaling to one another. Is this what love is? Maria might have asked Hannah Owens, who’d been betrayed by a man who claimed she spoke with Satan and had sworn to the judges that beneath her skirts she possessed a tail. Is love not more than this? she might have asked her mother, who pledged her life to a man who’d charmed her with words that weren’t his own. She knew something was wrong, even within her own heart, but then John would return, as though he’d never been gone, full of apologies and promises. It was his