Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,93

tracked him down and Maria cut him free. From then on, whenever she went to search for her daughter, which was her daily habit, she employed a hired girl named Evelyn to watch him, even though he was annoyed when left in another’s care.

“She doesn’t give a damn about stories,” he would complain about his caretaker, a dull girl who often fell asleep when she was supposed to be watching him. “She’s not like you.”

“Pretend she’s me and before you know it I’ll be back,” Maria said to soothe him.

* * *

Maria continued to search for Faith, and each time she came home, unsuccessful, she turned to the Grimoire, also to no effect. She had no idea what thwarted her, making it impossible to locate Faith. She’d begun to think she’d lost the sight. By now she was known in the neighborhood as the woman with the stolen child, for she’d gone door-to-door asking if anyone had seen her daughter. The other mothers pitied her when they saw her in the short black veil she wore when she was in public. She paid informants, but those who said they had seen a red-haired girl in the care of a tall, thin woman were either out of date or inventing sightings in order to collect some silver.

Keeper was always beside Maria as she searched farther northward, in the wild area beyond the wall built by the Dutch to keep out native people, and pirates, and the British. Wall Street, built in 1685, ran beside the ramparts and crossed the old Indian path now called Broadway. Maria trailed the river on the west side, taking the road called Love Lane, a nighttime trysting place, hiking into the highlands where there were still large Dutch farms, and making her way through the woods where some Lenape people remained, hidden in the old forest where the trees were so big it would take ten men to circle the trunk of a single one. People grew accustomed to seeing Maria and Keeper; some of those they passed called out a greeting to the purposeful black dog and the woman wearing a veil, but there were those, such as the old farmers who had been among those who settled New York more than sixty years earlier, who recognized the wolf for what he was. The Lenape people did as well, but they called him brother, for they knew that when the Dutch and the English claimed the land they’d treated Keeper’s kind as they had the original people, with the intent to own and destroy.

Nothing helped Maria Owens, not even the back pages of the Grimoire, which contained those spells from Agrippa and The Key of Solomon only to be used in the most dire of times. At last, she performed an act of desperation. She lay on her back, naked on the floor, inside a pentagram she had drawn with charcoal. She was surrounded by burning candles, a brass bowl of blood and fingernail clippings and strands of hair on fire. She had made a small wax figure of Martha that twisted in the heat. This was left-handed magic, dangerous to one and all.

Use only when you must, Hannah Owens had written in her perfect handwriting. And know you will pay a price for doing so.

There was always a price when magic was used selfishly, for the practitioner’s own benefit, but Maria no longer cared. The wax figure was stabbed with a single sharp pin and the wax shuddered as it dissolved. This was sympathetic magic; do unto an object what you would wish on an individual. One becomes the other.

Ut omnia quae tibi. Take all that you want.

Quid enim mihi est meum. Give me what is mine.

Maria sat by the window in the early morning light before she went out to search. Perhaps one day Faith would walk up the gravel path. She might return on an ordinary day, whether it be a blue morning in May or a snowy afternoon in the midst of winter. One day Martha would be the one to disappear, Maria’s spell would see to it, and once she did, Faith would find her way to the house on Maiden Lane, where Maria had planted lilacs by the back door, for where there are lilacs there will always be luck.

* * *

In the spring of the third year after their departure from Salem, Samuel Dias returned to Manhattan beset by his old illness. He came back every few months,