Page 31 of The Witches of Cambridge

“Then maybe I need yours,” he admitted.

He remained with me all that winter as our child grew within me. When the snow began to melt, and only a dusting was left, we let the deer free. We clapped our hands to chase him off, because by then he didn’t want to leave. I feared that soon enough I would have to do the same with Amadis, otherwise he would stay on and when he left me I wouldn’t be able to bear my loss. Did I say I could see inside him? I had the gift of sight, and although I could not tell what would happen in my own life, I could see others’ fates quite clearly. My darling had been born with a heart that was too big. I loved him madly by then, too much, I often thought. I did my best not to tell him how I felt, but I couldn’t keep it from him, and I soon confessed my love.

“It was wrong of me to let you love me,” he told me. “My heart has been damaged since birth. One thing I can assure you. I’ll never grow old. Perhaps that’s a plus. You’ll never see me limping about with my head full of white hair.” He laughed, but I didn’t. This was too serious a matter, and he knew it. “I want you to know so you can be rid of me if you wish to,” he said in a tone I hadn’t heard from him before. “But don’t forget me.”

I couldn’t even if I had wanted to. He held my hand to his chest, and that was when I knew I was already broken. “I will never tell you to leave,” I said. “You’ll have to go on your own.”

He looked so sad then. I could see him as he’d been in England, a boy who wanted the whole world, who crossed the sea even though his mother begged him not to leave, who had found his way to me. Luck is a funny thing. Fortune is something that can sneak up on you. I would have given anything to save him, but because I couldn’t, I just vowed that I would never forget him, and that was enough.

That is what life is like, even if you practice magic. Loss in the darkness, love in the light. We decided not to discuss it anymore. A heart was a heart, and there was nothing you could do to change it. That night, after Amadis had fallen asleep, I went out to stand in the last patch of melting snow. I told myself to be grateful for all that I had in that moment. Stars, black trees, a man I loved. It would have to be enough.

Time passed, and Amadis was still in my bed. I marveled that we still had more to say, for we talked until dawn. He told me he came from a village in Cornwall, a place called the shining land, where every day was a marvel. He’d intended to go home, but here he was. People in town said he’d been enchanted; they said there were more witches in Cambridge than anyone would ever imagine. The woman at the shoemaker’s who was known for her red boots was one, and the new owner of the bakery, and the woman who raised goats and delivered cheese in a black carriage pulled by an old horse, and the many women who’d been cast out of their families or had run away to begin anew.

Certain years are like the chapters of a book, and this was my chapter of happiness. We locked the world away. Amadis recited his mother’s remedies, for she was a cunning woman who practiced the Nameless Art, and I wrote down each one in a leather-bound book. How to call crows to you, how to distinguish a lie from the truth, how to cure coughs, how to find your way through a storm, how to fall in love. I didn’t need to leave lavender under my beloved’s head as he slept or give him a tea composed of nettle. I heard his brokenness when I lay my head upon his chest, and still, I couldn’t give him up. Love was greedy, it was all you wanted once you’d had it, it was the reason to wake in the morning and go to bed at night.

“I want you to remember me as I am, not as I soon will be,” he told me one night, and so I wasn’t surprised to find him gone from my bed on a windy, blue morning. It was March by then, the most unreliable month, when the gusts could chill you on the sunniest of days. After that whenever I saw him in town, we merely nodded to one another. We acted as if we were strangers now, ones who happened to be in love even though we had no future. We couldn’t stop ourselves from meeting out past the cemetery. We did it in the dark, so we didn’t see the pain on one another’s faces, and when we were together, we didn’t speak. We wanted each other too much to waste time talking. I couldn’t have stopped what happened out there beyond the cemetery. I took what I could. Sometimes I laughed when I realized how tongue-tied he was in my presence. I had the sight and saw the future, but I loved him so much I put a forgetting spell on myself. Burn the candle, drink sage tea, never think about what is to come.

Soon enough I was huge with our child. I could feel it turning inside me, a restless soul, ready to be free and enter the world. Amadis no longer came to see me, and I’d heard he had booked passage back to England. I went looking for him, finding him outside the blacksmith’s.

“If I was another man, I would marry you,” Amadis told me. “If this was another life, we could live it together.”

I wanted him to stay. I wanted him more than anything. But he wasn’t the sort of man who would let me take care of him, and even though he didn’t want to leave me, in the end, he went back to England. He wanted to die where he’d been born, in the countryside where a toad’s bone was thought to protect men from evil. After he’d gone, I wept as if I were an ordinary woman, but my tears burned me and turned black as they ran down my face. They left marks that were impossible to erase, and in certain slants of light people could see the tracks they had left behind. I went to the room he’d rented, which was empty now. But there on the windowsill I found the gold ring he had left for me. He knew me as no other ever would; he knew both my heart and my soul. I slipped on the ring, and in that way, I married him.