Page 35 of The Witches of Cambridge

“We don’t have to stop,” she told him. “Just because we’re in your parents’ house. We’re living our lives, not theirs.”

Jamie ran his hand over her hair. He had dreamed this once, and in his dream, there was sleet against the window just as there was now. “I have protection,” he told her.

“Good,” Ava said, her heart unmasked. “Because I don’t.”

He’d always been careful when they were together, but IUDs were illegal, and nothing was fail-safe. In earlier times lily root and rue were used to prevent pregnancies, along with bayberry, pennyroyal, juniper, and cardamom, but nothing was foolproof then or now. Jamie reassured Ava that he would not get her pregnant, but the rhythm method worked less than eighty percent of the time despite what men might declare and promise. Married women would not be able to buy birth control until thirteen years later, when Massachusetts and Connecticut became the last states to legalize contraception for married women, and it would be another twenty years before single women could possess birth control or condoms. Abortion had been legal in Massachusetts in colonial times if completed before the quickening, when the fetus began to move, but in 1873 the Comstock Act outlawed abortion in part because the American Medical Association wanted to take health care out of the hands of cunning folk and midwives, ensuring that women could no longer control reproduction. In Massachusetts these laws were called “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order.” In bed, a mistake could be perilous. It was an old story, one in which people could lose themselves, one in which love was everything and anything, when it was all you wanted and all you needed no matter how it turned out.

Jamie had dreamed he was called before three judges, all dressed in long black robes. They had tied him to a chair that was being dragged into a lake, for they knew he had sinned. There were snakes in the water and ropes twined around his wrists as he was taken into the deep. He knew that it was only a matter of time before he could no longer breathe. The judges around him warned him. You’ll drown before you know it. She’ll take you to the very bottom, and there you’ll be, and we’ll have to glue you back together with bird bones and stones and even then you’ll never be able to walk away.

Jamie had gasped when he’d woken that morning, and he’d spat water. It was nearly dawn, and Ava opened her eyes as if she were a flower blooming. She looked so delicate, he thought he would crush her if he wasn’t careful.

As they were packing to return to Cambridge, Ava glanced out the window and once again saw the fox, this time on the patio. She went downstairs to have a better look, then stopped. From where Ava stood in the hallway, she could overhear his parents talking.

“It won’t last,” Jamie’s mother was telling her husband.

“If it does, we’ll lose him,” his father replied. “I’m not about to let that happen.”

“There’s one in every generation,” Jamie’s mother said. “Look at you. Despite the legacy, you turned out quite well.”

“Unlike Jamie, I knew it was wrong. I fought it and did what I had to do to fit in. Our son never could control himself.”

Soon after their youngest son was born, both parents knew he’d inherited the bloodline of May Mather. The eleventh finger was not easy to ignore, and then there had been the incident when a nanny left Jamie forgotten in the bath. As soon as Louise Mather discovered this, she ran to collect him, in a panic. Thankfully, Jamie hadn’t even come close to drowning; he’d been floating, and that was when his mother knew he couldn’t be drowned. When her husband found her cradling Jamie, tears in her eyes, he knew what the problem was. Even if you didn’t believe in witchery, you had to believe your own eyes. Paul Mather took the baby from his mother’s arms and dunked his son while his wife begged for him to stop. Eventually he did, for no matter how many times he held their son underwater, the baby floated once again.

“I’ll do what I must to set this right,” Ava now heard Paul Mather say to his wife. “You’ve babied him and let his worst traits rise to the surface, and this is the result. He brings home a witch from Lilith House.”

“Maybe we should have told him about that place,” Louise wondered.

Paul Mather shook his head. “Better not to know.”

“But now he must know.” Jamie’s mother had always feared their lies would come back to haunt them. “He should know about himself.”

The Mathers knew more than most about the society, and they always had. Later, the housekeeper would be called in and told to burn the sheets on the bed where Ava had slept and then instructed to scrub all the floors, and to burn sage, as if they could undo what had already been done, but love wasn’t so easily destroyed. Jamie’s father didn’t come to see them off, but Louise Mather stood on the slick grass holding an umbrella, waving goodbye. The fox was beneath a huge elm tree, and the lawn had turned white with icy sleet. As they headed out, Ava realized that Jamie’s mother was crying.

“She’s so unhappy,” Ava said as they drove away.

“Likely my fault,” Jamie replied.

“No, it isn’t.”

By now the fox had run away, a streak of red in the wild woods, good fortune disappeared. Ava could still see Paul Mather’s figure looming in the window, looking out disapprovingly. He would never understand his son, nor would he ever fathom the love a mother might have for her child, adoring him no matter who he might turn out to be. There would be trouble, of that Ava was certain, for Jamie’s father was a man to whom love meant nothing at all.