Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,94
to sleep in the barn, doing his best to ignore Maria. By now they barely spoke, and she missed the man who could not stop talking. This time, he said nothing at all. Breakbone fever was the devil inside him, but the disease was his teacher as well, for it reminded him of his own mortality and instructed him in the ways in which men were powerless over their own fates.
He arrived in a rented carriage and was helped out by the driver, for he was too weak to navigate the street. Maria had insisted she wanted nothing from him; all the same, she wore the sapphire hidden beneath her collar. She often thought of the other gift he had given her, the magnolia tree in Essex County that had predicted her freedom. It was a tree of fortune, blooming not in season, but whenever it chose to do so. Even now, in the bitter and austere Massachusetts Bay Colony, where women were being jailed every time a neighbor accused them of hexing sheep and cows or setting a pox on their children with the devil’s help, often from miles away, while the accused was asleep in her own bed, the magnolia tree had bloomed all winter long. Some people said that it, too, was the work of the devil, but others went to sit beside its flowering boughs, even when there was snow on the ground.
No other specimen could compare to this miracle tree, and yet Samuel brought back other trees for Maria every time he returned. Each time he did so, he gave her his heart. The trees did his talking for him now, if only she would listen to what he had to say. He’d given her date palms and bridal bloom, jujube trees called zufzuuf, tamarisk, thuja trees, monkey puzzle trees, floss trees—some of which were too delicate for the climate and needed to be kept in pots in the parlor through the winter. Maria never said she was pleased, but he could tell that she was from the look on her face. This time he’d found a specimen on St. Thomas called the Tree of Heaven. He’d gone hiking with some local men to find it, and they’d mocked him for being so love-struck he had been willing to hack through the weeds to get to the perfect sapling. In the spring, the hillsides on St. Thomas turned red as blood and birds came from northern lands a thousand miles away to build nests in its branches; even if it wasn’t a miracle tree, it would be one of a kind on the island of Manhattan.
Dias appeared more hardened than he had in past years. Now that he commanded the Queen Esther, he was often put in a position where cruelty was the only choice, even for a fair man. There were strands of gray in his coarse black hair, but when he grinned he still looked like a young man in his twenties, as he was when Maria first met him. As time went on, he had discovered that it wasn’t that he merely enjoyed talking, he wanted someone to talk to, not the strangers he encountered in foreign lands that he would never see again, not the sailors who drank enough so that they forgot his stories as he was telling them. He wanted someone who truly knew him. He wanted her.
When Maria spied him through an open window on the day of his return, she knew something was wrong. She went to meet him without bothering to pull on her boots or close the door behind her. No matter how much she wanted him to stay away, he was the man who had saved her life with a rope trick and had been beside her as her heart broke apart in the second Essex County. She quickly paid the driver and helped Dias into the house. As always, he’d arrived without notice and had no idea how long he would stay.
“We weren’t expecting you,” Maria said to reproach him, worrying over the state he was in. Usually he cared about his appearance, but now his clothes were in disrepair and hung on his frame. He’d lost a good deal of weight, and some of his strength was gone. Still he was the handsome man whose stories Maria could listen to again and again. His dark hair was tied back with a leather band and his boots hadn’t been cleaned for months. Maria,