Page 12 of The Witches of Cambridge

“Clever girl.” He himself drank far too much.

“Don’t call me that again,” Ava told him.

“Clever?” Jamie’s date was tugging on his arm, but he ignored her. He hated the fact that he was interested in Ava, but he was.

“Don’t call me girl,” Ava said.

She realized she was blocking the exit, so she stepped away, and Jamie and his date went past her. All the same, there was something that she recognized beneath his arrogant attitude. He’d dreamed of her and now she dreamed of him and in her dreams she ran through the woods without shoes, her feet bleeding. There was the water, dark and deep. There was the key to a door. She’d heard about Jamie’s ancestors’ crimes against women, and she wanted to know more. As she stood on the café threshold and watched him walk away, Ava had already decided that her next stop would be the library.

Widener Library, built by the mother of a graduate who had gone down with the Titanic, had opened in 1915. Unlike Lamont Library, where women had no access to the stacks, Widener allowed female students to use the main reading room, but only till 6:00 p.m., with specific routes to follow through the hallways so as not to distract male students. The official excuse for the exclusion of women was the fact that there were no ladies’ rooms. In fact, there were no toilet facilities for women in all of Harvard Yard, except at Memorial Church. However, a few serious female students were allowed to do research at the Divinity School library, on the far side of campus, and although women wouldn’t be admitted as students for another five years, undergraduates could occasionally do research there. Of course, women had been part of the Divinity School as cleaners and staff, helping to run the library, editing manuscripts, and cataloging materials.

Ava found her way to the Moses Stuart Reading Room in the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, then made her way up to the stacks. As a lover of libraries, she immediately felt comfortable here. She soon discovered that the Mathers’ history was as well documented as it was tragic. Time passed quickly, especially once she discovered that the Mathers were involved in the witchcraft mania of the seventeenth century, when accused women were brought to Gallows Hill in carts while stones were thrown and blackbirds circled. It was a time when the world had gone mad with hatred, and such madness could spread through the population when you least expected it to; it happened all the time. The evidence used in the Salem trials was the same as it always was when fear and hatred were stitched together with a sharp needle and coarse thread. If a woman walked along with a black dog, that was enough proof of guilt, and she was blamed if halfway across town a child fell ill, or a man drank himself to death. Someone had to be held responsible, especially if she had red hair or extra teeth or an eleventh finger that was soon enough chopped off with a carving knife.

Soon the study tables and desks in the library were all but deserted. It was almost the end of October, and the trees outside were brilliant. Though a light rain was falling, the gold and red leaves lit up the arched windows. Ava was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sifting through sermons, when she found an envelope. She took a deep breath. It was as if the envelope had been left for her, just as surely as if her name had been printed upon it. Inside she found a sheaf of yellowing paper, which had never been catalogued. On impulse, Ava placed the paper into her bag. She was a borrower, not a thief; still her pulse had gone wild, the way it does when you know your life will never be the same again, when the words you haven’t yet read are already burning through you, when you will soon know something that will change the way you look at the world and may just change your life.

The world began with words, and so did magic.

Speak and you shall create. Abra kadabra.

If Ava wanted to know the truth, all she had to do was read.