Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,9
hardened into bars. Maria had written down the recipe in her Grimoire, for this soap was most often asked for by the women from town. They said a woman grew younger each time she used it; if she had sorrows the soap washed them away, and if there was an illness in the house it would not spread, for the herbs in the soap defeated fevers and chills. It was the sort of recipe one could add to however one saw fit. Mistletoe for those who wished for children. Vervain to escape one’s enemies. Black mustard seed to repel nightmares. Lilac for love.
This year, there was a coughing illness in the village, and people still feared the wave of fatalities that had passed among them only a few years earlier when the Black Death was everywhere. Small towns had disappeared entirely, with none left behind to bury the dead, and cattle soon enough had made their homes in abandoned houses where there were no roofs or windows or doors. In their village, women turned away from the doctor, for he had never been to school and believed in bloodletting and using stones and petrified wood to discern both the illness and the cure. Instead, they came to Hannah, in the night, along the path where the ferns were green and sweet, so that the world seemed brand-new, and anything seemed possible, even salvation.
For Health
Wash your hands with lye soap before treating the ill person.
Horehound, boiled into a syrup, for coughs.
Tea of wild onions and lobelia to soothe.
Beebalm for a restful sleep.
Vinegar elixirs stop nosebleeds.
Eat raw garlic every day and a cup of hot water with lemon and honey.
For asthma, drink chamomile tea.
For chills, gingerroot tea.
Licorice root gathered from the riverside for chest pain.
Dragon’s blood from tree bark and berries of the Dracaena draco, the red resin tree from Morocco and the Canary Islands that can only be found in one market in London and can cure nearly any wound.
A live snail rubbed on burns will help heal the blisters.
Feed a cold, starve a fever.
In the summer of 1674, a time of unusual heat, a woman with red hair arrived at the cottage. As fate would have it, she brought the future with her. She knocked at the door, and Hannah said, “Come in,” even though she seemed to hesitate. Bad news often came this way, without warning, on what appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary day. The visitor had on beautiful, muddy clothes. Her shoes were made of kid leather, dyed red, decorated with buckles, and she carried a cloak made of fine blue wool, fringed with the fur of a fox. She wore a linen gown dyed scarlet with madder root and a silk, corded petticoat. Yet beneath her lovely, ruined clothes, purple bruises bloomed upon her skin, and there were marks left from a rope that had been tied around her wrists. From her place by the fire Maria stared at the red-haired lady. The stranger was so elegant, with a pretty, calm voice. She said her name was Rebecca and that she needed to spend the night. Hannah allowed her to sleep on a pallet of straw, knowing that though good deeds should bring good luck, such results aren’t always the case.
The red-haired lady announced she was in search of a remedy to quench her husband’s fire for her. Hannah explained to Maria that the lady was running away from her husband, which was a perilous proposition, especially when there was another man in the picture, the one she truly loved. She needed a cure to protect her and allow her to leave her wedded life.
“Is this what love does?” Maria wished to know.
“That’s not the name I’d give it,” Hannah responded.
“Is it so different than your man, who claimed you had a tail?”
“Perhaps not, but at least he was a coward and never set his hands on me.”
In the morning, after a quiet night of sleep, their visitor was in better spirits. Hannah crafted an amulet of apple seeds. She then added mandrake, the heart of all love potions, first mentioned as such in Genesis, referred to as Circe’s plant by the Greeks. The roots of this plant grow in the shape of human limbs, combining the aspect of a dragon and a man. It was so powerful that some refused to pick it themselves, and instead attached the plant to a rope wound around a dog’s neck, so that the dog would be