The Book of Magic, page 31
Once upon a time she was a girl with red hair who could communicate with birds, who watched over her brother and sister, who fell in love even though she tried desperately not to do so, who lost her beloved and believed there was nothing left for her until she took in two little girls who reminded her of what love was. She had thought it was hard to love, but it had turned out to be easy, all you had to do was have the courage to open your heart. The future was what mattered most, whether or not it continued without her. Let there be courage. Let there be love. Franny had overloaded her pockets, just to make certain she would sink.
You sacrifice yourself and the past and let them start anew had been written in The Book of the Raven.
Jet had returned the book to the shelf in the library in case Franny decided that the cure was too much for her, as if she ever would. She recalled the first time they’d gone to the old house on Magnolia Street, sent there after Franny had turned seventeen, a family tradition. The neighbors had watched their arrival with suspicion. Franny had been out front, as always, with Jet tagging along and Vincent waving his arms to scare off prying eyes. Her life had opened like a flower. Her story had begun on that very day, when she took the bus from Port Authority on Forty-Second Street to Massachusetts and discovered who she was.
Like calls to like, love calls to love, courage calls to courage. Franny carried the book in her hands as she walked into the water, heavy as it was. The sodden Owens family Grimoire was heavier all the time, the thick paper handmade three hundred years earlier, each sheaf so expensive Hannah Owens had saved for months so that she might afford the material necessary to construct a proper book for Maria. There were toads in the marshy shore that edged the water, their skins gleaning green, shimmering as the light fell over them. A few followed Franny as she walked through the ankle-deep mud. She loved the squishy feel of mud between her toes. She always had. She wanted nothing more than sunlight and grass and the sound of calling birds.
Life, she thought, this one was mine.
She had loved all of it, even the terrible times when Vincent had run away to start a new life, when Haylin was injured and then when he had cancer, when Jet told her she had seven days to live. All of it. Every minute.
Franny thought she saw someone on the other shore, out in the distance, beyond the water and the snaky heat waves flickering over the surface, turning the air to mist. There was a girl with choppy black hair, the one who’d spent her last seven days with the people she loved, who had never left Franny, and who never would. When you have a sister, someone knows the story of who you were and who you would always be. They waved at each other across the water.
The Book of the Raven had warned that to break a curse you must love someone enough to pay the price and Franny did. She was willing to drown; it was her time anyway. She thought of the day when her nieces arrived in their black coats, holding hands, certain they were alone in the world. She thought of her brother, whom she’d felt responsible for since the day he was stolen from the hospital nursery, convinced he would never manage to watch out for himself. But he had. They had all managed. Franny was always going to be the one to break the curse. Here was her secret: she loved so deeply the depth could never be charted. She was in a boat out in the ocean; she was ready to do what she must. The water was waist high by now. It was cold but that didn’t matter. How strange to feel weighted down by the stones in her pockets. She held the Grimoire against her chest. It was already waterlogged and as she went deeper the pages disintegrated and ink pooled in black circles. Words floated everywhere, shimmering on the water. Words made up the world. The book was in Franny’s hands, but it was the past, over and done with. There was no point holding on, and so she did what she was supposed to. She let it go.
The skin of the toad became itself again, more green than black, restored and made whole. That was magic; that was how they had lived their lives. How lucky they had been. Oh, beautiful world. Oh, love that never ended. They had been through it all together, and now they were together once more. Franny saw Jet floating in front of her, young again. My darling girl who knew me better than anyone. The curse was dissolving. The toad Hannah Owens had found floating long ago, dead in the shallows, the one she had used to fashion the Grimoire, was alive after all this time. It was a natterjack, most unusual of creatures, one that appeared in a beloved book, The Time Garden, which Franny had read to Sally and Gillian when they were children. She watched as it swam away. This was what was meant to be, this was the path she had taken, this was how much she loved them and how well loved she felt in return.
* * *
People in the village wondered why the crows were putting up such a racket so early in the morning. What on earth could make them so agitated? Sally’s dreams had been filled with the clicking of the deathwatch beetle. When she opened her eyes she thought she was still dreaming, but, no, she was in the Three Hedges Inn, with a man in her bed, his broad back and torso taking up much of the space, the inked crow wings the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. Ian’s breathing was even and deep, he was alive, and Sally was relieved. Last night they had stripped off their clothes and gotten into bed and the only thing he said to her was “I don’t care how we end up.” His mouth was close to her ear and his breath was hot. “As long as we’re together,” she heard him say, but she didn’t answer. They were walking a very thin line; the curse was still out there, and yet they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Ian had told himself this couldn’t be it, but he knew this would come to be when he first saw her standing in his room; he imagined he would have laughed to think fate could happen this way, but there was nothing funny about it. How was it possible to want someone so much? He didn’t say another word until they were done, as if they would ever be done with one another. “This is it,” he told Sally. “You know it is.”
Now, in the first light of day, Sally spotted the red book that had been slipped beneath her door. She knelt on the carpet and turned the first page and there were the rules of magic.
Harm no one.
Know that what you give to the world will come back to you threefold.
Fall in love whenever you can.
The Owens family Grimoire had been copied into this slim journal, and although Sally recognized Franny’s handwriting she couldn’t for the life of her fathom why that would be. She grabbed on her clothes in a terror, leaving Ian to sleep and noticing that now, with her gone, he had sprawled out to take over the entire bed, one more sign she should stay away. She went to Franny’s room to find the bed unslept in. There was also a small black book left behind on the pillow. A white sheet of paper had been left beside it, marked by Franny’s familiar scrawl.
The curse is broken. Live your lives as you please.
Sally ran up to Kylie’s attic room where Gillian had taken over the vigil from Margaret and had fallen into a restless sleep while keeping watch in a chair. Sally went directly to the bed, and as she did, Kylie opened her eyes. Sally felt relief deep in her bones. She touched her hand to Kylie’s head. No fever. No blistered marks on her flesh. No sign of the Red Death.
“Mama,” Kylie said, sitting up, completely recovered. “What’s happened?”
Gillian had awoken when she heard Kylie’s voice and she quickly came to perch on the edge of the bed. “I feel it, too,” she told Sally. “Something has changed.”
The walls in the room were patterned with paper decorated with lilies and leaves. If Sally wasn’t mistaken, the walls were damp, with drops of water falling down. The clicking began again out in the hall.
Gillian and Sally stared at each other, both cold as ice. They both knew what that dreadful sound meant. “No,” Gillian said. “It can’t be. Kylie’s fine.” Sally threw open the door and she saw the beetle climbing into the wall to its nest in the rotted rafters, for its work had been completed.
That was when the phone rang. They expected bad news, but it was a gleeful Ariel Hardy calling to say that Antonia’s baby had arrived and all was well. There was even more news. Ariel had stopped by Gideon’s room at Mass General and he was now sitting up in bed, talking to his mother, with a group of doctors surrounding him, amazed by his sudden recovery.
Kylie wept to hear that Gideon was recovered, but she didn’t understand. “How is it possible? It’s a life for a life. For the curse to end, someone has to give up her life.”
That was when Sally knew who the deathwatch beetle had come for.
* * *
Sally left them to race out of the inn without a word. Bees swarmed around the chimney and crows were circling in the distance. She knew what had been was no longer. What was done had been undone. Her beloved Franny who never showed her heart, unless you looked carefully, unless you understood what she was willing to do for you. Sally was barefoot as she made her way through the inn’s parking lot, waves of panic driving her to race down the street, her pulse beating fast. It was always water that they feared and water to which they were drawn. It was quiet as she reached the far end of the High Street. No birds sang here, no bees gathered in the blooms. Sally met a man walking his dog, who was startled when he spied her running down the road without shoes, her hair shorn. Even the dog, an old spaniel, was too surprised to bark.
“Is there a pond nearby?” Sally asked in a ragged voice. Every word was glass, each one cut her throat.
The gentleman nodded, concerned, and gestured down the High Street past Littlefields Road. “Go to the end of the street and there’ll be a dirt road round the bend. There’s a huge old oak we call the Pondman’s Oak standing there. You have to head toward the fens.”
Sally went off, surprised that she could no longer pick up the scent of water as witches always could. There was always a price to pay, she knew that. You didn’t have to be cursed in love to know that when you loved someone you were open to great loss. The path became grass and the scent rising reminded her of the house where she and Gillian had grown up in California, before their parents died, victims of love and fire and of the curse. She remembered arriving at the airport in Boston, holding Gillian’s hand, afraid of the two old ladies who had come to meet them, especially the tall one with red hair. But Franny was the one who knew that Sally secretly cried over the loss of her parents. She was the one who said, You’ll be safe here.
Sally spied a red boot on the shore. She ran into the water, not stopping until she was shoulder deep. Without magic, Sally now had the ability to dive underwater, but she wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to retrieve the body and could only paddle above it. When Ian awoke to find the bed empty he’d immediately come looking for her, questioning the man with his dog, and running as fast as he ever had. He didn’t bother to take off his coat or his shoes when he saw her. Instead, he ran straight away into the green water where he’d gone swimming so often as a boy. He’d nearly lost his life here one bleak night when he was drunk out of his mind—one minute he was floating and the next he was passed out, facedown, breathing in water rather than air, until he snapped out of it. He’d counted himself lucky that he was a strong swimmer.
“Stay where you are!” Sally called to him. The water weeds could drown a man, but Ian was heedless and reckless and didn’t listen to a word she said, and the truth was she couldn’t stop what was to be. Look what could happen. Look at all there was to lose. Everything worthwhile was dangerous, her aunts had told her and they were usually right.
When Ian reached Sally, he grabbed for her and insisted she swim for shore. Sally had been out there so long her teeth were chattering with cold. “Go to the inn and have them call for an ambulance.”
Sally did as he said and swam to the shallows. But by the time she was out of the water, she realized why he’d demanded that she go back to the inn. He didn’t wish for her to catch sight of Franny as she now was, but Sally turned to see him carry the body to the shore, limp and heavy with water. There was no need for an ambulance. Sally stayed where she was on the shore. Franny was an old woman, but she looked so young, little more than a girl, her red hair wringing wet, leaving scarlet drops of madder root tint on the grass.
Ian delivered Franny to the bank of reeds. Sally knelt beside her, inconsolable, her face streaked with tears. She leaned down to place her ear to her aunt’s chest. No heartbeat. There was no sound at all. It was so quiet here, even the toads were silent, and the beetle had stopped its dreadful clatter. Sally’s weeping was the only sound. She had called Franny on the telephone when she was four years old, when tragedy struck and her parents died in a house fire, and she and Gillian were left alone. We’re coming to live with you, Sally had said, and they had, and everything their lives had become had been due to the loving care of their aunts. It was funny how you could come to love people who began as strangers, how they could change your fate, how surprised you could be by how grateful you were.
“I can’t give her up yet,” Sally told Ian and he understood and sat in silence while she sobbed in the grass. This is what love was, you stayed when you wanted to run away. You held on when you knew you had no choice but to let go.
Later, after the ambulance had come and the family had been asked to sit down in the parlor of the Three Hedges Inn to be told what had occurred, after Vincent had openly wept, and Kylie had been told none of this had been her fault, Ian finally went up to Sally’s room and stripped off his sopping wet clothes. He was still shaking from the cold when Sally followed with an armful of borrowed clothing the bartender kept in a bureau. Black trousers, a white shirt, a black tie. She clasped them to her chest, shy and reserved, but burning all the same. She wondered what it would feel like to be in love without holding anything back, to give everything you were to another person and expect everything in return. The story of Ian’s life was written all over him, but the one place he had never covered with ink was his heart. That was hers if she wanted it. She didn’t have to read his mind to know that, he told her out loud. He had dedicated himself to being alone, no matter how many women he was with, always concealing who he was. No one had ever read his story before. No one knew him. He was well aware that he talked too much, but he didn’t speak now. They wondered if they dared to do this, and then they stopped thinking. Thinking was good for some things, but not for others. They felt the sting of what was to be before it happened, a siren they would answer, gratefully and desperately. Ian went to Sally and unbuttoned her soaking-wet dress. She was slow to kiss him back, and then she wasn’t. His hands were hot even though the rest of him would be chilled for days to come. It was mortal love they had, but love all the same, deeper than the water beyond the fens, as deep as could be. This day had changed them. For this, and for a hundred other things, Sally would always be grateful to Franny, for on the day her aunt died, she was lucky enough to fall in love.
PART SIX
The Book of Life
Franny’s funeral had been small, with only the immediate family gathered at the Owens cemetery, a woodsy plot of land surrounded by a black iron fence no one outside the family dared to cross. Two weeping willows grew in the center of the graveyard and yellow-green moss covered many of the old stones. There was a time when people in their family were banned from the town cemetery, and even though that time was over, this small burying ground was still preferable to most of the Owens relations. Franny’s husband had been buried here, and now she had come to be beside him. A hundred white candles had been lit to celebrate her life and the end of the curse. What begins can end. What is done can be undone. What is sent in the world comes back to you three times over. They all wore white, a tradition among the family. White for funerals, black for every other day.
Vincent had returned to the States for the first time since he was a young man, and oddly enough, Massachusetts looked as familiar as a recurring dream. The oak trees with their enormous star-shaped leaves, the huge drooping hemlocks and pines, the magnolias with their waxy black-green leaves. The pond in the center of town where the swans nested, the houses with their gables and wide front porches, the weeping beeches in the town cemetery, the landscape of Vincent’s past. He wished his sisters were with him as he made his way along the narrow roads, with Franny complaining about the damp weather, and Jet pointing out the fireflies in the trees. He regretted the many years they’d spent apart, and now, just when he’d found his way to Franny again, he’d lost her. From the time they were small, he could always hear Franny’s thoughts, and she his, and he knew she was not the ferocious individual she presented herself to be. They had called her the Maid of Thorns when she was young, for she hid her true emotions. Stone-heart, cold-heart, no-heart, biggest heart he had ever known. The red-haired girl who saved him time and time again, who knew him when no one else did. Her love was the fiercest part about her.
On the morning of Franny’s funeral, Antonia found Vincent in the second-floor bedroom he’d occupied when he’d first come to Magnolia Street, sitting on the edge of the bed, weeping. She sat beside him and let him cry, black tears falling on the white quilt and the hand-knotted rug. Antonia’s bedside manner had improved after her visits with the Reverend. She patted Vincent’s hand and nearly wept herself, then she handed him a tissue from the bedside table and watched as he wiped his eyes. “All better,” Antonia said calmly. It was a statement not a question, reminding Vincent of his beloved no-nonsense sister. “All you have to do is get through today.”
