Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,58
family, he explained, and their austere view of the world that was at issue, and the differences between them. Maria had not been raised in any church, she did not live by the tenets of Puritan beliefs, she had a child without the benefit of marriage. She would not be accepted, and yet he returned. He could not stay away, he told her. Was this love? she might have asked herself, if she hadn’t feared the answer.
On nights that she spent alone in the second Essex County, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had been the one who had mistaken a monster for a miracle. She was a world away from Devotion Field, far from everything she had known. She could hear owls and the sound of deer mice in the pine needles. At night, when she was alone in her bed and John had left her, she could hear her own heart beat. She had seen this before, a woman arriving at Hannah’s door, love gone sour, love gone wrong, love that wasn’t love at all.
* * *
October came quickly, a glorious month when the fields turned yellow. The leaves might appear green in shadow, but when sunlight pierced through there were threads of scarlet and orange. So many pigeons crossed the sky they blocked the sun from sight, and the day seemed as if it were night. Maria felt there was a power in this place as she knelt by the lake that was said to have no bottom. The twiggy shore was home to birds she had never seen before—scarlet cardinals, red and black woodpeckers, flickers, white owls sleeping in the hollow trees. She imagined she felt as Hannah had when she left the world of men and crossed through Devotion Field to enter into a world of magic and silence. The only sound she heard was the song of the earth when she lay in the yellow grass. Perhaps this was a blessing, for during this time the lines on her left hand began to change and she saw for herself that if you had the strength, you could change your fate.
The crows stayed on past autumn, as they always did. They would remain all through the coming snows, fearless creatures that they were, eating winterberries and snatching eggs from henhouses, managing to survive. Through the autumn, rumors spread about a young woman living in the woods. People said she was fearless, for it was a wild, thorny woodland, with creatures that had never been seen in England. Spikey porcupines, deer that were twelve feet high and thought to be so strong that the teeth of their fawns were strung into necklaces by the native people for babies to wear when teething. There were beaver that were said to contain both sexes, whose powdered tails were mixed into wine by those who claimed to be physicians and swore the false remedy would cure stomach ailments, and fox with pelts that were silver or red or black, and bats of all sorts flickering through the night. Raccoons that lived in hollow trees could open the doors and windows of houses in town, as if they had human hands, then slip inside to steal flour and day-old bread. Ground squirrels were so ravenous they would devour entire fields of corn, inspiring farmers to pay two pence apiece for each one killed and brought to town hall. What woman would live in such a place with a young child other than a sorceress, or a wild woman, or a witch?
* * *
One blue evening when the flocks of sparrows and warblers were beginning to migrate south, Maria saw a huge dark creature of more than three hundred pounds standing in the lake in solemn silence, sniffing at the chill in the air. Perhaps there were monsters in Essex County. Surely people here believed in such things. Wolves that would track a man for weeks and devour him whole, poisonous snakes that favored young women and were said to hide beneath their beds, birds that drilled holes in the wooden planks of a house as if they had knives on their beaks, rabbits that turned from brown to white when the snow fell, magicked in front of your eyes. People in town vowed that a sea serpent resided in the leech-filled lake where Maria and her child bathed. The native people had always believed there was a mysterious creature in the depths, one that had dragged itself inland from