Page 23 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER NINE

That year it rained on the night of the initiation, and although they might have stopped the rain, such weather was thought to bring good luck, something they were clearly in need of. They wore black raincoats and held black umbrellas. Everything smelled like damp grass. The invitations had been left under the pillows of the two new girls, who had checked into South Hall. Hailey was from Duxbury, a legacy whose grandmother had long ago been a librarian who went from town to town on horseback carrying bags of books that women weren’t allowed to read, novels and spell books sneaked through windows and doors. The other new girl, Cleo, had grown up on a horse farm in Connecticut using magic however she pleased and had early on been taught how to charm a wild beast, how to fall without breaking any bones, and how to navigate by moonlight.

“My parents had their doubts about my moving into Lilith House,” Cleo admitted. “They had some strange idea that this place might bring me bad luck, but I talked them into it.”

Ava would continue working at the café and Lauren would stay on at the Peabody Museum, although she would no longer be leading tours but would sell tickets instead, which gave her free hours to wander through the museum or write in her grimoire while she sat at the front desk. Maureen had also left Eliot House to work as a nursing assistant in the emergency room at Mount Auburn Hospital. She had been keeping a notebook of hospital incidents, a medical grimoire so filled with illness and death it broke her heart to read it. In it she wrote the story of a woman with bruises whose sullen husband had left the hospital when Maureen mentioned that her brother was a member of the Cambridge Police.

Ava invited Lauren to come along when she met up with Maureen, but Lauren had made it clear that she found Maureen supremely uninteresting. “She’s so normal,” Lauren complained.

“How can you say that? She’s one of us.”

“Not exactly. She’s not a member of the society, which means her family wasn’t in Cambridge when the Lilith Society was formed.”

“Neither was mine,” Ava said.

“There are no mistakes. You have to be a legacy.”

Well, fine, Ava thought, let Lauren be a snob and feel superior. The truth was that ever since the turn of the century women in trouble had often found their way to the Healys’ back door. Maureen’s great-grandmother had also been a midwife in Cambridge, her garden full of useful herbs. Tansy, quince, pennyroyal, rue, hellebore, many used since colonial times, cultivated for women’s needs, including limiting or ending births and regulating monthly cycles. Maureen’s mother used remedies that reached back to biblical times, some of which had not been made illegal until the mid-1800s, when the American Medical Society banned them, along with the nurses and healers who performed them.

What men feared most about magic was what Lauren wanted. She had spent much of her time this past summer sifting through the shelves of an unkempt shop in Provincetown called the Alchemist, which sold crystals and herbs. Lauren had always been drawn to left-handed enchantments, the magic of revenge and curses and hexes, and at last she found what she was looking for in a back room of the Alchemist, hidden behind a heavy velvet curtain. On her last day in Provincetown, she came upon a most intriguing find on the highest shelf in the shop, a dusty black box few dared to open. That was where she found the instructions she’d been looking for. How to Seal Your Heart. The ingredients included a black thread and pins, pennyroyal and lobelia, an amulet in the shape of hearts and hands, the blood of a dove, a silver thimble, and a vial of gin.

She set the spell on herself in the cold cellar of the shack on the beach, a crypt-like place that had been used as a storeroom for potatoes and onions back when her grandmother was a girl. Lauren mixed her own blood with the blood of a dove, which she made certain not to seriously harm, releasing it out the open window. But the dove remembered, and it haunted the beach shack, an ominous white shadow. It was clear that walking the Crooked Path would serve only to further freeze Lauren’s own heart, which was exactly what she wanted. Once the enchantment had been completed, birds refused to sing when she was near and flowers withered at her touch. The ends of her hair turned black, and she cut them off so that no one would see that she was on the Crooked Path.

Upon her return to Lilith House, Lauren went to the garden to plant all she had chosen at the Alchemist. Belladonna, thorn apple, bramble, ash tree, hemlock, black nightshade. The members of the society shied away from Lauren and wondered why Ava didn’t seem to notice the dark aura that surrounded her closest friend. They joked that if anyone found proof that Lauren had a heart, they would be treated to a free sundae at Bailey’s Ice Cream Shop.

Let them judge her, let them laugh, let them fear her when they saw how her garden grew. Lauren had begun avoiding the Sunday meetings, where people discussed their spell work and their classes. She was too busy for such things. She had registered for an extremely demanding Shakespeare seminar that usually accepted only seniors, but Lauren had persuaded Professor Brooks to allow her to enroll when she recited Sonnet 142, in which love is a sin and hate a virtue, speaking so artfully in the professor’s office he leapt to his feet to applaud her.

“Well done,” the professor had announced.

Lauren had been the top student in every class at her private high school, and she intended to continue making certain that her classmates understood they would have to live up to her academic talents. Although male and female students met in separate classes, mixed-gender discussions were held at a weekly tea in the living room of the professor’s shabby townhouse only a few blocks from the river. Lauren had observed that Professor Brooks’s young wife, who had been class president at Smith College, was never included in the discussion. Instead, the wife served cups of tea and Triscuits topped with melted brie, then was banished to the kitchen as the students discussed the plays. Lauren suspected she’d be bored out of her mind by the level of the discussions. She intended to excuse herself and make her escape to the kitchen, where she could eat more crackers and cheese, but then she was asked to be the first to read a scene from Macbeth. She read each word as if it were a piece of glass, sharp and clear and true.

When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the hurly-burly’s done,

When the battle’s lost and won.

That shall be ere the set of sun.

Where the place?

Upon the heath.

There to meet Macbeth.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair,

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

There was silence when Lauren’s reading was complete. She realized she had scared her classmates. Perhaps her sharp teeth had shown while she was speaking.

“It’s just a play,” she told them, wanting to conceal who she was, but they all knew that it wasn’t and that it never had been. This was no love sonnet that she’d read, it was a witch’s lament, a plea to the cruel world that judged women by a completely different standard. This was why women at Harvard sat in corridors rather than in laboratories, and why they had separate classes, and why it was said that any girl who was too afraid to visit Mrs. Healy might be one more body left in the tangled weeds alongside the river after a botched abortion. Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. Let me be treated equally, let me have the heart to be cruel. The truth of who and what she was stuck in Lauren’s throat, like a wicked bone, and the other students observed her in stunned silence. That’s not who we are, three wicked sisters, crones with hell at our feet. She left them there and went to the kitchen, where she found the professor’s wife opening a bottle of sherry.

“Isn’t he amazing?” Brooks’s young wife edited and typed her husband’s lectures, for she’d been something of a Shakespeare buff, once upon a time.

“I’m not really listening to him.” Lauren shrugged. “I’m more interested in the text.”