Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,8
hair; perhaps it was a vision of the original owner. Whatever its history, the hairpin was her most valued possession, and would be all her life, even when she was half a world away from these woods.
“Bring me something wonderful,” she always whispered to Cadin when he set off on a flight, and she patted the feathers of her beloved thief. “Just don’t be caught.”
On the day of invisibility, he went off when they were finished hiding, winging across the field. It was very warm and the leaves on the willows were unfolding in a haze of soft yellow-green color. The ground was marshy all around them and ferns covered the heathland. On the way back to the cottage Hannah said, “You’re right.” She looked straight ahead as she spoke, but she had an open expression on her face, as if she were young again. She was remembering something she had done her best to forget.
Maria hurried to keep up with her. “Am I?”
Being told she was right was a rare treat, for Hannah believed that character was built when it was assumed that a child was most often wrong and still had much to learn.
“He was a man like any other, an earl’s servant who had seven years to work off his debt. That is what poor men must do, and I didn’t fault him for it. I was willing to wait, for a year is only as long as you let it be, but then I was arrested. They said I used my skill at writing to send letters to the devil and that I had a tail and that all men were in danger when I walked by, not because I was beautiful, I wasn’t, even I knew that, but because I could cause their blood to boil or go ice cold. I suppose they made it worth his while to turn against me, for after my trial was over, he was a free man with coins in his purse. He was the one who said I had a tail, and that he’d chopped it off himself so that I might appear to be a woman rather than a witch. He gave them the tail of a shrew and vowed it was mine, and if a fool is believed then those who believe him are even bigger fools.”
Maria thought over this new information. “So that is love?”
Hannah glanced away, as she did when she didn’t wish to reveal her emotions. But she needn’t have bothered attempting to hide her sorrow, for Maria could sense what a person was feeling so strongly she might as well have been able to hear someone’s deepest fears and wishes spoken aloud.
“It can’t be,” Maria decided.
“It was for me,” Hannah told her.
“And for me?”
“You looked in the black mirror. What did you see?”
It was a private matter, but this was a time for truth rather than privacy. “I saw a daughter.”
“Did you now? Then you’ll be a fortunate woman.”
“And a man who brought me diamonds.”
Hannah laughed out loud. There they were in their ragged clothes, half a day’s walk from the nearest village, with nothing precious between them, save for their wits and Maria’s stolen hairpin, as far away from a man with diamonds as they could be.
“I wouldn’t be surprised by anything that happened to you, my girl,” Hannah told Maria. “But I believe you will be amazed at the turns of fate, as we all are when it comes to our own lives, even when we have the sight.”
A church bell rang miles away. Maria had never been to the closest village; she had never seen the blacksmith’s shop where irons were cast, and knew nothing of constables, or churchwardens, or toll-takers, or surgeons who believed in using leeches and live worms and foxes’ lungs as cures, and medical men who disdained folk remedies. Hannah placed her faith in washing her hands with clean water and her strong black soap before any examination, and because of this she lost far fewer patients. None, as a matter of fact, except those who were too far gone for any remedy, for things without remedy must be without regard. She made her own black soap every March, enough to last the year long, burning wood from rowans and hazelwoods for the ashes that would form her lye, using licorice-infused oil, honey, and clove, adding dried lavender for luck and rosemary for remembrance. Ladles of liquid soap were poured into wooden molds, where they