The Book of Magic, page 8
They had a quick dinner, and then Vincent excused himself and went up to the guest room. He sat at the dressing table, seized a pair of scissors, and cut the string to unwrap the mirror, which he placed on the walnut table. He thought about the first time he’d looked into a black mirror, in the greenhouse of the Owens home in Massachusetts with his aunt Isabelle beside him. It was the first time he had truly seen who he was.
He used a handkerchief to clean the dust from the mirror, then gazed down. There was a black book and a girl he didn’t recognize. Left-handed magic arose in a circle of smoke, the brand of the Art he’d been attracted to as a younger man. He’d been wise to give it up, yet he remembered the dark side’s pull. It was there once again. Something was about to happen. Something that hadn’t happened for years. The mirror told him that he would soon see his dear sister Franny, his protector from the time he’d been born, his coconspirator in all things, the person he’d missed most during his disappearance. A mirror such as this always told the truth about a person’s fate, and that was why only a few had the courage to look. The future was an unsteady place where anything might happen, but Vincent intended to look no matter the cost. Whatever his flaws might have been, he had always had courage. That was what he needed now as he observed the inside story of everything that would come to be.
He would see those he loved and the past would come back to him in three ways. His fate was before him and he now had the key. There was the treasure map, there was the treasure, there was the curse that had afflicted them all.
IV.
April had arrived, the most beautiful month of the year, but time had stood still for Franny ever since the funeral. It was the spring of sorrow when the beautiful world had turned dark. There was a scrim of ash over everything, covering the trees; black leaves fell onto sidewalks all over town. Death was in the air and the birds were hushed. Lilacs refused to bloom. People went through the cemetery gates to leave tokens of their respect on Jet’s grave: apples, mint, sage, blue ribbons, photographs of babies who had grown up to be men and women because of Jet’s tonics, wedding pictures of those who had found love after knocking at her door. Now that she was gone, there was no one to go to for help. On the day after her funeral, Franny brought out a stepladder and removed the bulb from the porch light.
“We can just keep it turned off,” Sally suggested, but Franny wanted to make certain no one accidentally switched on the light. She might have offered her expertise in matters of the heart, as Jet had done, but she no longer had reason to do so. Without her sister, magic meant very little to her, and the problems of her neighbors even less. She went to bed before it was dark. She refused the dinners Sally insisted upon offering her. She saw death everywhere. Mice neighborhood cats had left on the doorstep. Spiders curled up in corners. Sparrows fallen from the sky.
The weather was warming, yet Franny had on her winter coat and her red boots when she went out to walk. It was a tradition among the Owens women to wear such footwear, and the wearing of red shoes had a long history. Louis XIV favored red heels to show his right to be king, and Kings Edward IV and Henry VIII were buried in red shoes. Dyed with madder or cochineal, they were worn by Roman senators as well, but it was women who dealt in magic who were best known for donning red shoes, and the idea of a scarlet woman who did as she pleased made wearing red shoes an act of defiance; they might just take the wearer places she would not otherwise go.
Though she was warmly dressed, Franny continued to be chilled to the bone. She was stuck in the past and she didn’t care to go forward. She wished there was a door to open so that she might step back through time. The best she could do was to make her way into the woods, past the tangled saplings, down to Leech Lake, which was vast and blue, aglitter in the brilliance of the afternoon light. Franny and Jet and their brother, Vincent, came to swim here when they were young, splashing each other and dissolving into laughter when the toads followed Franny, gathering round as if she were their queen. Vincent was as brash as he was charming. He always dared Jet and Franny to leap from the highest ledge, and when his sisters refused, for they’d been warned by their mother to always avoid water, Vincent dove off the cliff by himself. Filled with courage and youth he would make a mad swan dive even though he knew he would land hard on the calm surface of the water, for the Owens bloodline didn’t allow them to sink. They floated no matter what, as did all witches, which was both their salvation and their downfall, for it revealed who they were.
In their youth, only Vincent had been drawn to magic, why, he was made for it, while his sisters were still alarmed by their heritage. Now Franny understood that you must be yourself no matter what; anything else was a lie, and a denial of who you were would always cause grief. What you put out into the world came back to you threefold. If you could not accept yourself, you would be reviled and cast out, adrift in the world.
One afternoon, Franny had finally accepted Vincent’s dare. She still remembered Jet calling for her to stop before she made her own wild leap, long arms and legs flailing in the blue summer air, her narrow shoulders pulled in as if to protect herself. It had indeed hurt to land on the surface, and her body ached from the force of impact, but even though she could not sink, the unfolding sensation of feeling the water against her skin was numbing and utterly delicious. When you couldn’t drown, water was the element you were drawn to, and Franny had floated on her back all that afternoon, getting a wicked sunburn in the bargain, still, it had been worth it. Jet jumped in as well, a water nymph gliding through the lilies. “This is the most fun,” she cried out, for she took to swimming immediately, vowing to never adhere to their mother’s rules again.
“You should listen to me more often,” Vincent had said as they tromped back to their aunt Isabelle’s house, towels thrown over their shoulders. That year Franny had been seventeen, Jet sixteen, and Vincent fifteen. They were perfect and they didn’t know it. They laughed at each other as they slipped and sank into the mud, making their way through tall weeds strung with spiderwebs. Franny tied her long hair in a knot and let the water puddle in red pools that stained the ground. Did she think then that she would ever see an old woman when she gazed into a mirror? Perhaps that was why the mirrors in the house were covered by white cloths, so that those among them of a certain age wouldn’t have the shock of spying their own faces.
Franny recalled a story that the locals told which vowed that a sea monster of some sort had made its home in the lake. It had arrived at the docks on a wave from the harbor during a huge squall hundreds of years earlier, dazed and in need of water, and had managed to find its way to this deep, blue-green pool. Franny used to crouch on the water’s edge with an offering of salt, which was said to draw such creatures to the shallows. Like was attracted to like, after all. She was eager to see something miraculous, and when she was married to Hay and he came home from Vietnam after losing his leg, they would sit here together in the evenings on canvas chairs, a picnic basket beside them. Hay was never impressed by the notion of wondrous beasts. “I’ve already seen monsters, another one doesn’t interest me,” he told her. “All I want to see is you.”
But once when there was an unexpected ripple in the water, Hay had startled and fell off his chair and they had laughed themselves silly. They had loved each other madly for their whole lives, only Franny’s life had been longer, and now here she was, walking home alone, with a single crazy wish, that she would spy Hay on the lane, waiting for her, calling out for her to hurry. As a girl, before Haylin, she’d been a loner, a defiant outsider, but now her aloneness haunted her; even when she was in a crowd at the bake sale to raise funds for the library, or in the kitchen with Sally and Kylie and Antonia at Sunday evening supper, she might as well have been locked in a room by herself. When you had a familiar you had a soul mate, but she’d never had another after her beloved crow, Lewis, had passed on. Their family had a passion for crows, creatures who were as intelligent as most men and smarter than many. Franny often wished that one would choose her again, but it had never happened. There are some things you have only once in a lifetime, and then only if you’re lucky.
* * *
Franny’s route home led her through a damp field where swamp cabbage grew in the ditches and celandine bloomed blue on tiny, wavering stems. The lake was in the migration path of scarlet tanagers who had recently returned to Massachusetts and there were flecks of red in the hedges, as if each branch had a beating heart. It was the time of year when the magnolias were fully abloom and the distance was riddled with a pink haze. The trees had been brought here for Maria Owens by the man who loved her, and some were now thirty feet tall, with lustrous black-green leaves. Franny made her way out of the woods, the green scent of the ferns clinging to her skirts. She walked past houses whose residents had come to see her and Jet for help over the years. Mostly they searched out Jet, it was true, for she was kinder and more compassionate. Franny often told people the harsh truth without any fudging or fabrications. Are you sure? she would say. Everything has a cost. Why on earth did so many of them want love charms to trick people who wanted nothing to do with them into falling head over heels? Ridiculous, Franny thought. If that’s being normal, then normal is madness.
Franny rounded the corner onto Magnolia Street. Here the flowers on the trees were all a lustrous creamy white and there were sparrows in the branches, already nesting. There was mud on the soles of Franny’s red boots, not very proper for someone of her age, as if she cared. What mattered now that so many of the people she loved were gone? Very little, it seemed, for it was more and more punishing to get out of bed in the morning and face the day.
But this was not a day like any other. Franny saw the mail truck and she knew. She could feel the thrum of her pulse. She would have run if she still could do so. Instead she walked at a brisker pace, carrying the umbrella that everyone knew was used as a cane, her coat flaring out behind her. She went up to the truck and pounded on the door, insisting that the flustered postman prop open his window, which he did immediately, though he was clearly nervous in her presence, as he always was, his large hands clammy.
“Well, come on,” Franny said, impatient. “What do you have for me?”
“I already delivered the mail,” the postman said. He was a big fellow, but he sounded like a boy who dreaded that his teacher had just discovered he’d made an error in his homework. “Was I not supposed to?”
In the past, the postman had dealt with Jet Owens, who was a lovely person no matter what people said about the family. He’d delivered boxes of herbs from India and seeds from Maine and once he’d brought a crate that had arrived airmail from Tennessee, in which there was a small black cat that had been abused, rescued from a shelter. Jet had run out to claim the poor creature while still in her bathrobe. “Oh, you’ll be happy here!” the postman had remembered Jet saying to the little cat. She’d tipped him twenty dollars and told him to go to the Black Rabbit and have a drink on her, but of course she had been the cheerful aunt, and Franny was the one everyone feared.
Franny clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “You most certainly are supposed to deliver the mail,” she said. “Isn’t that your job?” She shook her head at the fellow’s foolishness, then went up to the gate, in a hurry. She opened the black mailbox knowing what she would find. She could almost hear her brother’s voice. A message from Vincent. Thrilled despite the black border around the envelope, she took the letter into the garden where she would have some privacy without Sally buzzing around.
All of the early seedlings had been planted, including Gillian’s Zebra tomatoes, and the herb garden was flourishing in the mild April weather. She remembered when she and Vincent had sat knee to knee in the kitchen in their family’s apartment on Eighty-Ninth Street and together they had made the table rise. Their very first act of magic. “We have it, Franny,” he’d said, as enthralled as she was terrified. Now she sat in a garden chair that was damp with droplets from yesterday’s rain shower. With the letter in hand she felt a swell of love for her brother. She swiftly opened the envelope, slipping her finger under the flap. In her hurry, the paper cut across her skin and a drop of blood flowed, staining the envelope with a dark, nearly black flush. She noticed that Vincent had written his return address in Paris. He hadn’t done that when he sent the card about William’s passing. Then she knew. He wanted to be found.
Franny scanned every word, then read the letter again. Vincent wrote that when they lost something dear to them, he would help find it again. As a boy he always managed to navigate without a guide or a map, and lost objects were his specialty. Their parents might hide books or clothing they found unacceptable, but Vincent always tracked down the confiscated belongings hidden in the cellar or in the back of a closet. All Franny could think of was Vincent, whom she had missed terribly. She could feel the sun on her skin, and the breeze from the east. Her dear brother, back from the dead and the disappeared, a victim of the curse, a believer in love, the person she trusted most in the world, assuring her that fate would bring them together again.
V.
Four weeks after the funeral, Kylie remembered that she had her aunt’s copy of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. She had planned to read a poem a day, but the loss of her aunt Jet continued to sting and she felt paralyzed by grief. She hadn’t read a single one, still, there was the book on Kylie’s night table. She reached to turn on her lamp, then let the pages fall open.
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
It was then Kylie noticed that a letter had dropped from in between the pages. It was addressed to Franny, but here it was, a bird that had flown into her lap. Kylie unfolded it, her heart thudding against the cage of her ribs.
My darling girl,
If there be a cure, seek till you find it. If there be none, never mind it.
The curse Maria Owens placed on herself and us to protect us from love has nearly ruined our family. Look where we keep our books. There is a cure in The Book of the Raven.
But beware, it is the most dangerous book of all. It grants your heart’s desire, but the price you pay is steep. I was already dying, so I couldn’t be the one.
The one among us with the most courage will break the curse.
It’s always been you.
Kylie thought of the cousin at the funeral, going on about an Owens curse. It was nothing, she’d been told. It was a myth. Clearly, her aunt Jet had thought otherwise. All the same, Kylie folded the note and stored it in her drawer. As far as she was concerned, she already possessed her heart’s desire, and he was waiting for her just around the corner.
* * *
Kylie and Gideon Barnes were sprawled in the grass on the Cambridge Common where General George Washington had amassed his troops during the American Revolution. May had come at last, bringing with it the end of the term. Gideon was studying, and she was looking at the sky, thinking about the letter she’d found.
“Do you believe in curses?” Kylie asked.
“I believe Latin is an impossible language.”
“Seriously.”
He kissed her as his answer.
She drew away. “Does that mean no?”
“I believe in us,” Gideon said.
“Do you?” Kylie grinned. It was a very good answer.
“Oh, I do,” he assured her, better still.
She let it drop then. Her aunts had some strange practices, and surely the note from Jet must have another meaning, for curses were fairy tales, not part of real life. Kylie and Gideon were so young they didn’t notice this spring was a season of darkness. All they saw was the world around them, the small triangle of Cambridge that contained their lives, and each other. They paid no attention to the fact that the sun often didn’t break through till late afternoon. There were sudden frosts and the temperature rarely rose above fifty, most often lingering in the thirties so that squill and trout lilies turned to bruise-colored ice carpeting the gardens of tall Colonial-era houses. All along Brattle Street, the lilacs faded, their heart-shaped leaves turning black around the edges. People who had been married for thirty years suddenly filed for divorce, children refused to sleep and couldn’t be comforted with warm milk and stories they’d heard a dozen times before. People knew something had gone wrong, not just with the weather but with fate itself. Yet all Kylie and Gideon saw was each other. They were in love and always had been, but they kept their love secret, it was theirs and theirs alone. They lounged beneath the canopy of the beech trees, studying for exams, longing for summer when they intended to travel through France, taking a route Gideon had planned, which included wineries and campgrounds.
“We’ll sleep and we’ll drink,” he boasted.
Gideon gazed at her with hazel eyes speckled with green or yellow, depending on the light. When he did that, there really was no one else in the world. Maybe we’ll never come back, Kylie thought, for she’d always considered her hometown to be provincial and did her best to stay away. She flicked at her waist-length braid of brown hair streaked with red and gold. If they ran off together, she wouldn’t miss Harvard one bit; she felt she was an imposter who only pretended to care about her studies, an outsider yet again.
At this time of year, Cambridge was quiet, with only the coffeehouses jam-packed with bleary-eyed students in need of caffeine and sugar so they could pull all-nighters and prepare to pass or fail, win or lose. Kylie and Gideon had been best friends ever since they were twelve, which had made falling in love easy, once they gave in to it. Gideon had too many winning traits to ignore. He had large, handsome features and an open face that hid little. In high school, he had been the president of the chess club, the county spelling champion, the tallest boy in their class, which mattered greatly to Kylie, and the smartest, which mattered even more, and the one Kylie fell for once she stopped fighting her attraction to him. For years they told each other they didn’t want to ruin their friendship with anything as complicated as sex, then went ahead and ruined it anyway. When they admitted that they were indeed in love, and likely always had been, it was a great relief to both. Kylie continued to tell her mother that she and Gideon were just friends; she didn’t need anyone prying into her business, least of all her mother, who always looked so concerned when questioning Kylie about her love life. Kylie kept her thoughts and dreams and deeds to herself. She and her sister, Antonia, had made a pact never to tell their mother more than she needed to know.
He used a handkerchief to clean the dust from the mirror, then gazed down. There was a black book and a girl he didn’t recognize. Left-handed magic arose in a circle of smoke, the brand of the Art he’d been attracted to as a younger man. He’d been wise to give it up, yet he remembered the dark side’s pull. It was there once again. Something was about to happen. Something that hadn’t happened for years. The mirror told him that he would soon see his dear sister Franny, his protector from the time he’d been born, his coconspirator in all things, the person he’d missed most during his disappearance. A mirror such as this always told the truth about a person’s fate, and that was why only a few had the courage to look. The future was an unsteady place where anything might happen, but Vincent intended to look no matter the cost. Whatever his flaws might have been, he had always had courage. That was what he needed now as he observed the inside story of everything that would come to be.
He would see those he loved and the past would come back to him in three ways. His fate was before him and he now had the key. There was the treasure map, there was the treasure, there was the curse that had afflicted them all.
IV.
April had arrived, the most beautiful month of the year, but time had stood still for Franny ever since the funeral. It was the spring of sorrow when the beautiful world had turned dark. There was a scrim of ash over everything, covering the trees; black leaves fell onto sidewalks all over town. Death was in the air and the birds were hushed. Lilacs refused to bloom. People went through the cemetery gates to leave tokens of their respect on Jet’s grave: apples, mint, sage, blue ribbons, photographs of babies who had grown up to be men and women because of Jet’s tonics, wedding pictures of those who had found love after knocking at her door. Now that she was gone, there was no one to go to for help. On the day after her funeral, Franny brought out a stepladder and removed the bulb from the porch light.
“We can just keep it turned off,” Sally suggested, but Franny wanted to make certain no one accidentally switched on the light. She might have offered her expertise in matters of the heart, as Jet had done, but she no longer had reason to do so. Without her sister, magic meant very little to her, and the problems of her neighbors even less. She went to bed before it was dark. She refused the dinners Sally insisted upon offering her. She saw death everywhere. Mice neighborhood cats had left on the doorstep. Spiders curled up in corners. Sparrows fallen from the sky.
The weather was warming, yet Franny had on her winter coat and her red boots when she went out to walk. It was a tradition among the Owens women to wear such footwear, and the wearing of red shoes had a long history. Louis XIV favored red heels to show his right to be king, and Kings Edward IV and Henry VIII were buried in red shoes. Dyed with madder or cochineal, they were worn by Roman senators as well, but it was women who dealt in magic who were best known for donning red shoes, and the idea of a scarlet woman who did as she pleased made wearing red shoes an act of defiance; they might just take the wearer places she would not otherwise go.
Though she was warmly dressed, Franny continued to be chilled to the bone. She was stuck in the past and she didn’t care to go forward. She wished there was a door to open so that she might step back through time. The best she could do was to make her way into the woods, past the tangled saplings, down to Leech Lake, which was vast and blue, aglitter in the brilliance of the afternoon light. Franny and Jet and their brother, Vincent, came to swim here when they were young, splashing each other and dissolving into laughter when the toads followed Franny, gathering round as if she were their queen. Vincent was as brash as he was charming. He always dared Jet and Franny to leap from the highest ledge, and when his sisters refused, for they’d been warned by their mother to always avoid water, Vincent dove off the cliff by himself. Filled with courage and youth he would make a mad swan dive even though he knew he would land hard on the calm surface of the water, for the Owens bloodline didn’t allow them to sink. They floated no matter what, as did all witches, which was both their salvation and their downfall, for it revealed who they were.
In their youth, only Vincent had been drawn to magic, why, he was made for it, while his sisters were still alarmed by their heritage. Now Franny understood that you must be yourself no matter what; anything else was a lie, and a denial of who you were would always cause grief. What you put out into the world came back to you threefold. If you could not accept yourself, you would be reviled and cast out, adrift in the world.
One afternoon, Franny had finally accepted Vincent’s dare. She still remembered Jet calling for her to stop before she made her own wild leap, long arms and legs flailing in the blue summer air, her narrow shoulders pulled in as if to protect herself. It had indeed hurt to land on the surface, and her body ached from the force of impact, but even though she could not sink, the unfolding sensation of feeling the water against her skin was numbing and utterly delicious. When you couldn’t drown, water was the element you were drawn to, and Franny had floated on her back all that afternoon, getting a wicked sunburn in the bargain, still, it had been worth it. Jet jumped in as well, a water nymph gliding through the lilies. “This is the most fun,” she cried out, for she took to swimming immediately, vowing to never adhere to their mother’s rules again.
“You should listen to me more often,” Vincent had said as they tromped back to their aunt Isabelle’s house, towels thrown over their shoulders. That year Franny had been seventeen, Jet sixteen, and Vincent fifteen. They were perfect and they didn’t know it. They laughed at each other as they slipped and sank into the mud, making their way through tall weeds strung with spiderwebs. Franny tied her long hair in a knot and let the water puddle in red pools that stained the ground. Did she think then that she would ever see an old woman when she gazed into a mirror? Perhaps that was why the mirrors in the house were covered by white cloths, so that those among them of a certain age wouldn’t have the shock of spying their own faces.
Franny recalled a story that the locals told which vowed that a sea monster of some sort had made its home in the lake. It had arrived at the docks on a wave from the harbor during a huge squall hundreds of years earlier, dazed and in need of water, and had managed to find its way to this deep, blue-green pool. Franny used to crouch on the water’s edge with an offering of salt, which was said to draw such creatures to the shallows. Like was attracted to like, after all. She was eager to see something miraculous, and when she was married to Hay and he came home from Vietnam after losing his leg, they would sit here together in the evenings on canvas chairs, a picnic basket beside them. Hay was never impressed by the notion of wondrous beasts. “I’ve already seen monsters, another one doesn’t interest me,” he told her. “All I want to see is you.”
But once when there was an unexpected ripple in the water, Hay had startled and fell off his chair and they had laughed themselves silly. They had loved each other madly for their whole lives, only Franny’s life had been longer, and now here she was, walking home alone, with a single crazy wish, that she would spy Hay on the lane, waiting for her, calling out for her to hurry. As a girl, before Haylin, she’d been a loner, a defiant outsider, but now her aloneness haunted her; even when she was in a crowd at the bake sale to raise funds for the library, or in the kitchen with Sally and Kylie and Antonia at Sunday evening supper, she might as well have been locked in a room by herself. When you had a familiar you had a soul mate, but she’d never had another after her beloved crow, Lewis, had passed on. Their family had a passion for crows, creatures who were as intelligent as most men and smarter than many. Franny often wished that one would choose her again, but it had never happened. There are some things you have only once in a lifetime, and then only if you’re lucky.
* * *
Franny’s route home led her through a damp field where swamp cabbage grew in the ditches and celandine bloomed blue on tiny, wavering stems. The lake was in the migration path of scarlet tanagers who had recently returned to Massachusetts and there were flecks of red in the hedges, as if each branch had a beating heart. It was the time of year when the magnolias were fully abloom and the distance was riddled with a pink haze. The trees had been brought here for Maria Owens by the man who loved her, and some were now thirty feet tall, with lustrous black-green leaves. Franny made her way out of the woods, the green scent of the ferns clinging to her skirts. She walked past houses whose residents had come to see her and Jet for help over the years. Mostly they searched out Jet, it was true, for she was kinder and more compassionate. Franny often told people the harsh truth without any fudging or fabrications. Are you sure? she would say. Everything has a cost. Why on earth did so many of them want love charms to trick people who wanted nothing to do with them into falling head over heels? Ridiculous, Franny thought. If that’s being normal, then normal is madness.
Franny rounded the corner onto Magnolia Street. Here the flowers on the trees were all a lustrous creamy white and there were sparrows in the branches, already nesting. There was mud on the soles of Franny’s red boots, not very proper for someone of her age, as if she cared. What mattered now that so many of the people she loved were gone? Very little, it seemed, for it was more and more punishing to get out of bed in the morning and face the day.
But this was not a day like any other. Franny saw the mail truck and she knew. She could feel the thrum of her pulse. She would have run if she still could do so. Instead she walked at a brisker pace, carrying the umbrella that everyone knew was used as a cane, her coat flaring out behind her. She went up to the truck and pounded on the door, insisting that the flustered postman prop open his window, which he did immediately, though he was clearly nervous in her presence, as he always was, his large hands clammy.
“Well, come on,” Franny said, impatient. “What do you have for me?”
“I already delivered the mail,” the postman said. He was a big fellow, but he sounded like a boy who dreaded that his teacher had just discovered he’d made an error in his homework. “Was I not supposed to?”
In the past, the postman had dealt with Jet Owens, who was a lovely person no matter what people said about the family. He’d delivered boxes of herbs from India and seeds from Maine and once he’d brought a crate that had arrived airmail from Tennessee, in which there was a small black cat that had been abused, rescued from a shelter. Jet had run out to claim the poor creature while still in her bathrobe. “Oh, you’ll be happy here!” the postman had remembered Jet saying to the little cat. She’d tipped him twenty dollars and told him to go to the Black Rabbit and have a drink on her, but of course she had been the cheerful aunt, and Franny was the one everyone feared.
Franny clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “You most certainly are supposed to deliver the mail,” she said. “Isn’t that your job?” She shook her head at the fellow’s foolishness, then went up to the gate, in a hurry. She opened the black mailbox knowing what she would find. She could almost hear her brother’s voice. A message from Vincent. Thrilled despite the black border around the envelope, she took the letter into the garden where she would have some privacy without Sally buzzing around.
All of the early seedlings had been planted, including Gillian’s Zebra tomatoes, and the herb garden was flourishing in the mild April weather. She remembered when she and Vincent had sat knee to knee in the kitchen in their family’s apartment on Eighty-Ninth Street and together they had made the table rise. Their very first act of magic. “We have it, Franny,” he’d said, as enthralled as she was terrified. Now she sat in a garden chair that was damp with droplets from yesterday’s rain shower. With the letter in hand she felt a swell of love for her brother. She swiftly opened the envelope, slipping her finger under the flap. In her hurry, the paper cut across her skin and a drop of blood flowed, staining the envelope with a dark, nearly black flush. She noticed that Vincent had written his return address in Paris. He hadn’t done that when he sent the card about William’s passing. Then she knew. He wanted to be found.
Franny scanned every word, then read the letter again. Vincent wrote that when they lost something dear to them, he would help find it again. As a boy he always managed to navigate without a guide or a map, and lost objects were his specialty. Their parents might hide books or clothing they found unacceptable, but Vincent always tracked down the confiscated belongings hidden in the cellar or in the back of a closet. All Franny could think of was Vincent, whom she had missed terribly. She could feel the sun on her skin, and the breeze from the east. Her dear brother, back from the dead and the disappeared, a victim of the curse, a believer in love, the person she trusted most in the world, assuring her that fate would bring them together again.
V.
Four weeks after the funeral, Kylie remembered that she had her aunt’s copy of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. She had planned to read a poem a day, but the loss of her aunt Jet continued to sting and she felt paralyzed by grief. She hadn’t read a single one, still, there was the book on Kylie’s night table. She reached to turn on her lamp, then let the pages fall open.
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
It was then Kylie noticed that a letter had dropped from in between the pages. It was addressed to Franny, but here it was, a bird that had flown into her lap. Kylie unfolded it, her heart thudding against the cage of her ribs.
My darling girl,
If there be a cure, seek till you find it. If there be none, never mind it.
The curse Maria Owens placed on herself and us to protect us from love has nearly ruined our family. Look where we keep our books. There is a cure in The Book of the Raven.
But beware, it is the most dangerous book of all. It grants your heart’s desire, but the price you pay is steep. I was already dying, so I couldn’t be the one.
The one among us with the most courage will break the curse.
It’s always been you.
Kylie thought of the cousin at the funeral, going on about an Owens curse. It was nothing, she’d been told. It was a myth. Clearly, her aunt Jet had thought otherwise. All the same, Kylie folded the note and stored it in her drawer. As far as she was concerned, she already possessed her heart’s desire, and he was waiting for her just around the corner.
* * *
Kylie and Gideon Barnes were sprawled in the grass on the Cambridge Common where General George Washington had amassed his troops during the American Revolution. May had come at last, bringing with it the end of the term. Gideon was studying, and she was looking at the sky, thinking about the letter she’d found.
“Do you believe in curses?” Kylie asked.
“I believe Latin is an impossible language.”
“Seriously.”
He kissed her as his answer.
She drew away. “Does that mean no?”
“I believe in us,” Gideon said.
“Do you?” Kylie grinned. It was a very good answer.
“Oh, I do,” he assured her, better still.
She let it drop then. Her aunts had some strange practices, and surely the note from Jet must have another meaning, for curses were fairy tales, not part of real life. Kylie and Gideon were so young they didn’t notice this spring was a season of darkness. All they saw was the world around them, the small triangle of Cambridge that contained their lives, and each other. They paid no attention to the fact that the sun often didn’t break through till late afternoon. There were sudden frosts and the temperature rarely rose above fifty, most often lingering in the thirties so that squill and trout lilies turned to bruise-colored ice carpeting the gardens of tall Colonial-era houses. All along Brattle Street, the lilacs faded, their heart-shaped leaves turning black around the edges. People who had been married for thirty years suddenly filed for divorce, children refused to sleep and couldn’t be comforted with warm milk and stories they’d heard a dozen times before. People knew something had gone wrong, not just with the weather but with fate itself. Yet all Kylie and Gideon saw was each other. They were in love and always had been, but they kept their love secret, it was theirs and theirs alone. They lounged beneath the canopy of the beech trees, studying for exams, longing for summer when they intended to travel through France, taking a route Gideon had planned, which included wineries and campgrounds.
“We’ll sleep and we’ll drink,” he boasted.
Gideon gazed at her with hazel eyes speckled with green or yellow, depending on the light. When he did that, there really was no one else in the world. Maybe we’ll never come back, Kylie thought, for she’d always considered her hometown to be provincial and did her best to stay away. She flicked at her waist-length braid of brown hair streaked with red and gold. If they ran off together, she wouldn’t miss Harvard one bit; she felt she was an imposter who only pretended to care about her studies, an outsider yet again.
At this time of year, Cambridge was quiet, with only the coffeehouses jam-packed with bleary-eyed students in need of caffeine and sugar so they could pull all-nighters and prepare to pass or fail, win or lose. Kylie and Gideon had been best friends ever since they were twelve, which had made falling in love easy, once they gave in to it. Gideon had too many winning traits to ignore. He had large, handsome features and an open face that hid little. In high school, he had been the president of the chess club, the county spelling champion, the tallest boy in their class, which mattered greatly to Kylie, and the smartest, which mattered even more, and the one Kylie fell for once she stopped fighting her attraction to him. For years they told each other they didn’t want to ruin their friendship with anything as complicated as sex, then went ahead and ruined it anyway. When they admitted that they were indeed in love, and likely always had been, it was a great relief to both. Kylie continued to tell her mother that she and Gideon were just friends; she didn’t need anyone prying into her business, least of all her mother, who always looked so concerned when questioning Kylie about her love life. Kylie kept her thoughts and dreams and deeds to herself. She and her sister, Antonia, had made a pact never to tell their mother more than she needed to know.
