The Book of Magic, page 30
If she wanted an argument he’d give her one. He was always ready for that. “We still have magic together.” And because they did, she kissed him rather than argue with him, at least this time.
Gillian watched them walking back through the field, slowly, for Ian was still reeling from the illness, and their arms were around one another’s waist. Even from a distance it was possible to see that Sally was what she’d always wished to be, an ordinary woman with no ties to the other world. Her gray eyes, the ones the Owens were known for, had turned pale blue, but she looked young again, at least from a distance, as if her life was starting anew.
Already, people were forgetting that Tom Lockland had ever been among them, although every May there would be a town gathering to remember this day so that no one would forget how easily everyday life could be suddenly disrupted, for disaster was always a moment away, in the wind, in a red rain, in the illness that had spread through the village on a beautiful spring day.
IV.
Antonia dreamed that a toad had stopped in front of her on a grassy path. She was barefoot, frantically searching for her sister, but the toad was in her way. “Go on,” she told it. “Move.” In response it burped up a silver key. Don’t you understand anything? someone said to her, and when she looked toward the lake she saw Jet, young again and a bit disappointed by how dense Antonia was. You already have everything you need.
Antonia scrambled out of bed, waking Ariel, who was confused. They’d gone to bed early and had barely slept an hour.
“Is it the baby?” Ariel asked, but Antonia didn’t answer. She had already gone to the living room to search through her purse. Ariel had followed her, a sheet wrapped around her body.
“We have to go now.” Antonia did feel a strange pressure inside of her, but that wasn’t what caused her to hurry.
“Where are we going?” Ariel asked as they went into the bedroom and pulled on their clothes.
Antonia leaned on the bed. The pressure was deep, a tight band around her middle. A few breaths and it was gone. “The law office.” She held up the silver key that would open the box of Maria’s papers.
“Right now?” Ariel asked.
“It should have been yesterday,” Antonia answered. “It should have been three hundred years ago.”
* * *
The metal box was stored in the subbasement, at the bottom of an old filing cabinet that contained the Owenses’ documents, the deed to the property on Magnolia Street, along with an accounting of bills from the carpenters, birth and death certificates, wills, records from the Owens School for Girls, letters written in Portuguese tied in blue ribbon, and a faded envelope on which Do not read unless you have the book had been scrawled in pale ink. Antonia had asked to be alone, and Ariel, though concerned that Antonia’s pains seemed to be sharper and closer together, went up to her office to brew coffee that turned out to be too bitter to drink.
The paper was so thin Antonia could see through it, the ink fading as she read, worrying her as it disappeared, word by word.
The Book of the Raven nearly ruined my daughter Faith’s life. I could have destroyed it, but it was written by a woman of knowledge who wrote it in order to grant the reader her heart’s desire, whether it be revenge or love. It will instruct you on the way to end our affliction, then you must pass it on to the next woman who needs the raven’s knowledge.
I thought a curse would protect us, but curses come back to you threefold. There is only one way to put an end to it. Courage. My letter is written for the bravest among us. To save a life, a life must be given.
To end the curse, the book in which it was originally written must be destroyed. The Grimoire which was mine must be no more.
The future rises from the ashes of the past,
Begin at the beginning and end at the end.
To have a blessed future, dispose of a cursed past.
Return it to its element, no matter how deep.
Antonia sat back on her heels and took a breath, feeling a wave within her that she had no power to fight or resist, nor would she want to. She panted until the burst of pain diminished, then scrambled over to her purse on her hands and knees to search for her phone. As she punched in the number she looked up to see Ariel perched on the stair, her face drawn with worry.
“I don’t know if you realize this, but you’re having a baby,” Ariel said.
“Not yet,” Antonia insisted. She knew who to call, the bravest among them, the bravest of the brave.
Ariel had already contacted Scott and Joel to meet them at Mass General, which thankfully wasn’t very far. An ambulance had pulled up on Beacon Street. Antonia had dreamed she was walking into a lake, and now she was surrounded by a puddle. Her water had broken and the phone was ringing. “Pick up,” Antonia muttered.
“It’s time,” Ariel said, refusing to be put off.
At last the phone was answered, which was a huge relief. There was a baby to be born, after all. “You’ll never believe this,” Antonia told her aunt Franny, even though she was the most practical person among them. “I know how to end the curse.”
* * *
Now that the red rain had passed, stopped, as it had begun, by The Book of the Raven, the inn had fallen so quiet the mice felt free to wander the pantries and the hallways. Kylie was upstairs in a small bed in the smallest room. They had tried every cure in the Grimoire to break Kylie’s fever and bring her back, and none of it had worked. Margaret was sitting with her now, with a steam vaporizer filled with rosemary and lemon water to help her breathe.
“Go have a rest,” Margaret suggested to Sally, who had not left the room. It was long past midnight. “It will do no good to make yourself ill.”
Sally nodded. “For an hour or so.”
Ian was stretched out in the hallway, asleep on the wool carpet. She had saved him twice, there really was no fighting it, he belonged to her now. Sally leaned down and told him he needed a proper bed, rather than the floor. Ian thought he was dreaming, but as it turned out, he was not. He remembered that he must not speak, so for once in his life Ian said nothing, knowing, as he followed her down to her room, only a fool would question what was meant to be.
* * *
Down in the bar, Jesse had recovered. Craving a bath and a good night’s sleep, she was locking up for the night, leaving Vincent the keys to the liquor cabinet.
“Have whatever you like,” she’d told him. Vincent took a good bottle of scotch whiskey up to Franny’s room, where she was studying The Book of the Raven.
They were both in rotten moods, all the same they toasted and drank down the whiskey in gulps. “I hate to bring it up,” Vincent murmured as he poured them a second drink, “but our girl Sally has lost her magic.”
Vincent had briefly lost his magic, years ago, but that hadn’t been a permanent situation. Franny had known the moment she glimpsed Sally with her hair shorn down to her scalp and her eyes turned pale blue. What had happened to Faith Owens when she used the book had now happened to Sally. Sally had her wish come true. She was finally like everyone else, without the Owens-inherited protections. “If she’s not careful, she’ll fall in love,” Franny said.
“You know she will. You sent her to his house.”
“Still in light of all this chaos around us it’s highly unusual, wouldn’t you say?”
“It happens all the time,” Vincent assured her.
“Not to people like us.”
“More than anyone, to people like us. Just look at us, Franny, we lived for love.”
“Well, no one said we were very smart.”
Vincent laughed. “No one did.”
“Would you have changed things?” Franny asked.
“Never. I had what I wanted. Once upon a time.”
“You still have time, Vincent.” He would always be young to Franny, her little brother, always trouble, always loved.
“Live a little?” It was an old joke between them.
“Darling boy.” Franny put her hand to his heart. He most certainly wasn’t done yet. “Live a lot.”
When the telephone rang, Franny looked and saw something black dart by. It was most definitely not a mouse, and although she said nothing, her pulse had begun to race. There was Antonia on the other line, in the throes of early childbirth, on her way to Mass General, revealing Maria’s instructions on how to break the curse. “You’ll never believe this,” she said, but Franny did. She believed every word.
“What was that all about?” Vincent asked when the call was over. Franny drank her scotch in one gulp. “Bad news?”
“Good news,” Franny said. “Antonia is having her baby and I’m going to bed.”
She embraced Vincent, then kissed his cheek. That was when he understood. They could always read each other, from the very start.
“I can tell when you’re lying,” Vincent said.
“You were always good at that. We can’t have another generation suffer as we did.”
Vincent looked like a boy standing there and Franny could not have loved him more. How lucky she’d been to have seen him again after all this time. How she wished Jet was here with them.
“Is there no other way?” Vincent urged.
“There’s only one way to break the curse.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. Together.”
“We will not.” It was always going to be her and her alone.
“I can’t stop you?” he said.
“When could you ever?”
“You were always difficult,” Vincent said, his eyes brimming with tears.
“You were worse,” Franny told him. “But you know the truth as well as I do,” she said, and he did. Love was a sacrifice. It was all things and everything. It was the way they had lived their lives.
* * *
The Book of the Raven was open on the desk. It was late, but not too late for what she must achieve. Franny understood that the book itself was magic. Words were everything, they built worlds and destroyed them. Alone in her room, Franny knew what she must do. Before she made the sacrifice and destroyed the part of their past that held them back, she would make certain to keep their history. She copied everything in their family Grimoire into a red journal found in a desk drawer that was stamped with the logo of the inn, three hedges in whose branches perched three blackbirds. She began and didn’t stop until every spell and cure had been copied down. Wood avens to cure toothache, black horehound for nausea and monthly cramps, salted leaves to heal the bite of a dog, elderberry and cherry bark for coughs, dill seeds for hiccoughs, hawthorn to calm a frantic heart, and nettle, which made a fine soup, ladled out to treat burns, infections, and inflammations. Apple for love, holly for dreams, ferns to call for rain, feverfew to ward off colds. List after list of all that mattered, silver coins, pure water, willow, birch, rowan, string, mirrors, glass, blood, ink, paper, pen.
As she wrote, the ink on the pages of the original Grimoire rubbed off onto her fingertips and sank into her flesh and bones, so that her veins turned dark blue and then black, threading up her arms, straight to her heart. She could feel the years unwinding. She could feel the magic inside of her. She had always wanted time to move backwards, and now it did. As she wrote she was a young woman with long red hair in love with Haylin Walker, she was a girl quarreling with her mother over the strict rules she’d set forth to keep her children away from magic, she watched over Vincent when he was a boy looking for love. Franny wrote out the enchantments of the women who came before her, going back through the generations until she reached Maria, who stood on the gallows and cursed a man who had betrayed a sacred trust.
At last, Franny had transferred everything from their Grimoire. When the new book was completed, Franny heard something in the wall beside her bed. She recognized the clacking. She had finished just in time, for the deathwatch beetle was waiting for her. That was the black shadow she had seen slipping by. It had begun to follow her as soon as she took the call from Antonia. Now it emerged from the wall. In a short while the sun would begin to rise, the sky would lighten and then turn red. Red for blood, for magic, for love.
As she prepared to go, Franny noticed her reflection in the silvered mirror above the bureau. She looked so young she laughed to see herself. What a life she had, most of it unexpected. She would not have it any other way, not even the losses. This life was hers and hers alone.
The deathwatch beetle was beside her as she pulled on her red boots, it was dark as ink, curious and devoted to its mission. “Stop being so bossy,” Franny told it. “I know where I’m going.”
Give a life, save a life. That was the way to break the curse. Kylie would wake in the morning as if she had never been ill and the curse would be broken after three hundred years. Franny didn’t need to drink tea for courage; it was something she’d been born with. She looked down to spy her fate in the palms of both her left and right hands, the future she’d been given and the one she had made for herself crossing over each other to become one. This last day, this final deed of love. A life for a life. And even now she knew the truth, how lucky they’d been. Franny scrawled two notes, one to leave on her pillow beside The Book of the Raven, the other to slip under Vincent’s door.
You did everything right, my dear brother. Live a lot.
On her way along the corridor, she paused at Sally’s room and fit the red book under the door. It was not as large as the first book, for Franny’s script was small and not as elegant as the writers of the past. There were no striking illustrations of plants and symbols, she hadn’t time for that; the pages were plain, but they would do. It was a book of practical magic, containing their history, past, present, and future, with plenty of blank pages for the future, Franny had made sure of that. Write what you must, write what you will leave behind, write magic.
* * *
It was still dark when Franny took the carpeted stairs to the lobby, holding on to the oak banister to take some of the weight off her knee, stopping to grab a coat from the rack. A maid who came in early to sort the laundry would later swear she’d spied a young woman with red hair go out the door. She was carrying a large book and she didn’t look back. There were bees swarming the chimney of the Three Hedges Inn and swirls of pollen in the air, dusting rooftops and windowpanes as the bees’ hum entered into people’s dreams so that everyone in town slept more deeply, with many not waking until noon had come and gone.
Franny proceeded down the High Street, then turned and found her way on the small lanes where the hedges were twelve feet tall and the birds were still sleeping in their nests. It was a beautiful morning, perhaps the most beautiful day there had ever been. She’d had everything. A breath, a blink, a kiss, who needed more? Like any witch, Franny could smell water. She crossed Devotion Field where there were oxeye daisies, and poppies, and wild chamomile, and, in the shadows, enchanter’s nightshade, named for Circe, who changed men into animals with her curse. Franny did not blame Maria, who swore her oath with a rope threaded around her throat. For those few instants, Maria Owens had forgotten that love was more important than life itself, even if it was a riddle no woman could solve.
Love was inside every story. Love lost and love found, red love that stained your heart, the darkest love that twisted into despair or revenge, love everlasting, love that was true. You carried love with you wherever you went. The sky had cracked open with fragile blades of light; greenfinches flew over the tall grass and magpies chattered with their arrogant calls. Crows soared above the treetops as Franny tread through the grass. For a moment the sky was black, then when the crows passed by the world was ablaze. Franny stood there for a moment to take it in. She understood why her sister had felt lucky even when she knew the end had come. Oh, beautiful world; most glorious day. Franny paused in the place where Hannah Owens’s cottage had been. Perhaps she knew, or perhaps the past called out to her. It was possible to spy scraps of charred wood in the weedy grass. The earth was still marked by the fire, black and ashy in spots where only nettle and bindweed would grow. There were shoots from the poison garden Hannah had kept, stalks of yarrow and black nightshade, wolfsbane with its magenta hooded flowers, foxglove that could slow a heart, a mysterious plant named lords and ladies laden with berries that should not be touched, that could be used as a poison or as a cure depending on who gathered them.
Franny heard the clacking that was meant for her, and so she walked faster. She had no need of a cane or an umbrella to lean on. She had business to attend to. She walked just as quickly as she had when she was a girl, when it was all her brother and sister could do to keep up with her. There was the pond, so reedy and green. When she reached the shore, she knelt for a moment to catch her breath. A dozen toads sat in the grass. She could hear the song she and Jet had always turned to when Sally and Gillian were young, frightened by storms. The water is wide. I cannot get o’er it, and neither have I wings to fly.
Darling girls, Franny thought, who came to show us how to love again.
By now the sky was a vivid blue. All the same, Franny was glad she’d taken a raincoat from the rack in the hall. It was Gideon’s old coat that she’d grabbed, left on a peg to dry out, huge and ill-fitting on Franny’s form. In the quiet of the morning, she could hear Gideon’s heartbeat. He would be the last victim of the curse and the only one to survive it. To be young and alive was a glorious thing. When you possessed it, you were likely unable to fully comprehend that it was a marvel and a gift, no matter your circumstances.
The glade was overgrown, smelling sweetly of grass. Franny realized just how heavy the book was and placed the Grimoire beside her in the grass, then grabbed off her boots and her stockings. Here she was, where she was meant to be, no protection, no blue thread, no beloved, no brother, no sister, only herself on her last day.
Franny gathered flat black stones from the ground. Their weight was comforting and cold when she filled the oversized pockets of the coat. The stones here were nothing like the craggy gray shards of granite at Leech Lake. Franny and Jet and Vincent would lie out on the cliffs on hot August days until their bare shoulders and backs were sunburned. Everything was delicious back then, even their sweat was sweet. No wonder that bees had buzzed around them. No wonder they could spend all day being so lazy and happy. Time lasted forever, with each hour so thick and slow the minutes were honey pouring from a jar. Franny remembered the day Vincent leapt from the highest rock. She remembered Jet floating in the water, as beautiful as a lily. There were lilies here as well, cream-colored buds attached to thick, waxy green leaves. Franny was reminded of the blooms on the magnolia trees all around their house, a genus so old it had existed before there were bees, the leaves tough as leather so that it might protect itself from harm, the flowers glorious and wild.
