hasn’t sent you here?”
Faith was kept inside the house during this conversation, but afterward Lydia had spied the child looking out the window before a hand drew her away.
“Go back,” Maria pleaded. “Ask again if she’ll bring my girl here. I’ll pay any price!”
“I dare not go. That woman said she would report me as your accomplice if I returned. She would write to the magistrates if she had to, as she did to call their attention to you.”
That was how Maria learned that Martha had implicated her for her own satisfaction. She’d been a fool to trust her, that simple woman who cherished her neighbors and her town. Some people can lie while they look at you and manage to hide their falseness; it’s a form of witchery to be so disloyal, a terrible talent that is both rare and despicable. “Surely they won’t believe her lies. They’ll see she’s stolen my daughter.”
“You’re a stranger here,” Lydia said. “I’ve lived here all my life and I know that people see what they wish to believe.”
“We’re all strangers if they should decide for us to be so,” Maria responded. “They can turn on anyone if it benefits them.” She then asked if Lydia would keep an eye on Faith, from a distance if necessary, to make certain she wasn’t being mistreated. “I would do the same for you if you needed me. Someday I’ll pay you what I owe you.”
Though the child was only eight, Elizabeth Colson vowed she would try to watch over Faith, and because of this her grandmother relented and said she, too, would try to see to the girl’s well-being as best she could.
That night, Maria dreamed of her daughter, for although iron cuffs did away with the sight, they couldn’t prevent dreams. In Martha Chase’s house, where the raspberry bushes hit against the windows, and rabbits gathered in the yard, Faith Owens dreamed the same dream. She heard her mother tell her that when you were loved by someone, you never lost them, no matter what might happen next. Despite the curse, despite the losses you might endure, she knew now that love was the only thing that lasted. It was inside you and with you for all eternity.
* * *
The day drew near. It was spring and the world was green, but in jail the earthen floor and walls were cold. Maria heard the beetle calling, the same one Hannah had searched for in her cottage, the warning sign of a death to come. Maria covered her ears with her hands, yet heard it still. She closed her eyes and tried to dream even in the daylight hours, for it was her only escape from this dank and terrible place. In her dream snow was falling, with huge flakes dashing against her cheeks and eyelashes. When she opened her eyes and gazed out the window, there appeared to be white flakes, though the morning was warm and fine.
Maria went to the window and reached her hands through the bars as far as her cuffs would allow, so she might collect the snow and let it melt and drink what was left. It was then she discovered it wasn’t snow that fell, but large creamy petals. She wondered how this had come to be, and if indeed it was a miracle. And then she saw a face she recognized, and dark eyes staring at her. The man who couldn’t stop talking had come to Essex County to bring her a flowering tree belonging to an ancient genus, twenty million years old, existing before there were bees, so that it was pollinated by beetles. This one had come all the way from the Martinique, where people referred to it as a tulip tree or a sweet bay. It was said that the original flowers on earth were much like those on this tree, with white leathery petals and tough waxy leaves, impervious to the work of beetles or ants.
On the island the Carib people called Madinina, “Island of Flowers,” Samuel Dias had met a man who told him of a sort of tree people swore could make a woman fall in love if she stood beneath its boughs. Perhaps, if he brought Maria Owens this tree, it would open her heart, for he was already convinced that he belonged to her and that he had ever since she had saved his life.
He’d hired two men to take him into the hills, and when he saw the