Magic Lessons

by Alice Hoffman

  “If you want me to leave, say so,” he told Maria. “I’ll go now. Today.”

  “This is your house. Are you sure you want me?”

  He did, too much, but he didn’t respond.

  That night she recited an incantation to send love away. The next morning he packed to leave.

  “You shouldn’t go away,” Abraham told his son. “Life is short and getting shorter. I know you want Maria. Stay with her.”

  “She won’t let me.” Samuel continued packing his bag. “She says we’re cursed.”

  “Everyone is cursed,” the old man assured him. “That’s life.” He shook his head and thought that young people were fools. “You might as well do as you please.”

  Samuel did one thing he knew Maria wouldn’t wish him to do. He left a leather pouch on the table. Inside was a sapphire on a silver chain.

  This one is real, he’d written in the note he left behind.

  Você não pode finger algo real não existe.

  You can’t pretend something real doesn’t exist.

  * * *

  After Samuel left, Maria and Abraham Dias settled into the routine of two people in mourning. They comforted each other, for each knew sorrow. Men who were sailors rarely became accustomed to living on land, and Abraham Dias longed for the life he’d once had. He spent his days waiting for his son, even though Samuel might be gone for months at a time. The old man’s memory had begun to fail more each day, still he knew that he was in New York, and that he lived in his son’s house with a beautiful woman whose name he sometimes forgot, especially in the evenings when Maria returned from searching for Faith and poured him a glass of port. All the same, Abraham shared his stories with her as he sipped his nightly drink. He always remembered these stories, even though he’d often forgotten what he’d had for his supper that very day. He told her about the joy of riding on the back of a whale, the salt spray filling his mouth, and about a land where all the bears were white and it was so cold the earth was covered with ice even in the heart of August, and about the Barbary Coast, where the leopards and lions would eat beef from the palm of your hand if you had the nerve to reach out to them, and where diamonds glittered up through holes in the earth, as if there were stars not only above but below. The stories that she loved best were when Abraham recounted his son’s early days at sea, when the young Samuel was so captivated by the starry heavens above he didn’t sleep at night, but instead lay on his back on the deck memorizing the position of the stars so that he might chart the sky.

  Abraham Dias tired easily and went to bed directly after he had his nightly meal, which was just as well. He would have been confused by the women who came to the door in search of remedies once darkness had fallen. He likely would have looked among them for his wife, who had been gone for so long. She had been young and beautiful when he first met her and he had loved her too much, so much that she still appeared in his dreams, although she had been burned to ash long ago. Her name was Regine, but she was called Reina, for to Abraham she was a queen.

  Maria had a deep affection for the old man, who had taught her how to make Chocolate Tipsy Cake, and she hated to leave him on his own when she left the house, for he was prone to wander, often finding his way to the rough area of the docks. Once he’d been tied to a post by a gang of unruly boys and left there in the rain, unable to escape from the ropes that bound him until Keeper at last 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, 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, too, was not at her best. “I’m not at all prepared.” She had dirt from the garden under her fingernails and her hair was in knots.

  Samuel’s fever was raging, and he was still a man who either said too much or said nothing at all. When they went inside, he immediately felt at home, a comfort he experienced only when he visited New York. But it was all too much on this day. Samuel found he needed to take a moment to sit and catch his breath before greeting anyone properly.

  “What do we have here?” Abraham Dias said, his voice trembling. There was a handsome man with dark eyes who seemed exhausted and wore a familiar black coat. “You look like my son.”

  “He should,” Maria assured the old man. “That’s exactly who he is.”

  Samuel gathered his strength and went to embrace his father. The two men were not afraid to show their raw emotions when they were together. They had seen and done terrible things and had worked side by side for a lifetime, until Abraham could no longer stand upright for more than a few minutes at a time without the pain in his back and legs overwhelming him. Age had come upon him quickly, like a thief, and an injury he’d suffered when they first took their ship from a royal merchant and renamed it the Queen Esther, had worsened with the years so that he limped and could no longer walk very far. On this day, neither man could stand for long. Abraham could deal with his own failing body, but to see his son in such bad health caused him to weep.

  “It’s that damn fever,” Abraham declared. “It won’t leave you alone.” He turned to Maria, frustrated. “I thought you had cured him!”

  “I cure him every time. That is the only way to treat this disease. Some things return no matter what, and we must deal with it when it does.”

  “I’m fine,” Samuel insisted. “I can stay in the barn.”

  But Maria insisted he must take the chamber being saved for Faith’s return. Samuel was mortified that she had to help him up the stairs, and yet he wondered if perhaps he had willed the illness to return, if he wanted nothing more than to have her arms around him, despite the price. Everything inside of him hurt, as if his bones were made of glass once more. A single touch was agony, and yet he yearned for Maria’s embrace, for glass could burn as well as break. Once in bed, he moaned and turned his face to the wall. He hated to show his weakness; all the same he hadn’t enough strength to take off his boots.

  “You should have come home before this,” Maria told him. “I can tell you’ve been ill for a while.”

  Abraham had a right to fault her, but breakbone was a tricky disease that lurked inside a person’s body. You chased it away, only to have it return unexpectedly. Samuel found he was comforted by Faith’s belongings that were stored in this room, the blanket with the blue stitching, the poppet doll he had made.

  “There it is,” he said, happy to spy the doll. “You’ve kept it safe.”

  “Of course I have,” Maria answered. “Didn’t you tell me I must?”

  She went to collect the dried Tawa-tawa leaves that were stored in her herb cabinet so that she might fix a pot of the curative tea, and when she returned, Samuel was already asleep. He was talking as he dreamed, this time about the burning of his mother. The prisoners had been dressed in sackcloth, with dragons and flames painted upon their shirts and hats; they had ropes around their necks, and were forced to carry rosary beads and green and yellow candles. Dias was haunted by the shocking scene he had witnessed as a boy, and in his dreams he often revisited the square where it had occurred. The smoke that arose from the burning bodies was bloody and bitter. He could hear his mother’s voice ringing through a crowd of a thousand. Maria removed his boots and slipped into bed beside him so that she might hold a cold, wet cloth to his head. She reached under his shirt to find that he was burning, his heart red-hot.

  “Don’t leave me,” he said, convinced it was she who was the true remedy, not the bitter tea she insisted he drink or the broth she made for him out of fish bones to keep him strong.

  At first, Maria thought he was speaking to his mother in his dreams, until he embraced her and called her by her name. This was what happened every time he was home. If she kissed him once, she would not stop. It was wrong, and she knew it. It was dangerous as well. She spoke both to him and to the curse. “Don’t say any more, and do not speak of love, this is not love, this is something else, it’s my life twined together with yours. You are only home because you are ill, not because you look at me the way you do. You must go away as soon as you can, far across the sea, where you will be safe. This is a dream, it isn’t real, it won’t affect you. I will never be yours.”

  Samuel Dias tore at his clothes, and Maria helped him. He was burning and so was she. The broth on the bedside table would wait. The world could wait as well. Outside, rain had begun to fall. Maiden Lane was silent and green, but nothing outside this chamber mattered. Soon the quilt began to burn and they tossed it away. The city had grown so small it only included one room. Samuel kept his eyes open so that he could see Maria at all times. The world was her and her alone. He remembered the way sh
e had leapt from the gallows, her eyes meeting his as he waited in the trees with his heart in his mouth, praying the rope was frayed properly so that the jute would split apart. The world ended and began when it did.

  Do you know how much I wanted you, still want you, will always want you?

  In the small bed, in the room under the eaves, she told him he must not love her. “If you want to live,” Maria said, “you must stay away from me. That’s why I always tell you to leave.”

  “That’s the only reason?”

  “You’re very annoying, it’s true.”

  They both laughed.

  “As are you,” he said, his arms around her.

  He was convinced what they did didn’t matter. He was ruined already. What sort of curse could be worse than the way he’d been cursed on that burning day in Portugal? Let his life be over if it must be, let the last thing he see be the rain on the window glass, the white plaster walls, Maria’s black hair falling over her shoulders, the line of daybreak over Manhattan, a sky that was the purest cobalt-blue, the blue of heaven, which, no matter what they might wish or what they might do, signified the end of a night of love.

  * * *