Page 41 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was the time when witch-hunters were hard at work with their nasty business, only now they were in search of Communists and those they considered to be anti-American. Actors, writers, musicians, university professors, politicians, and poets, all were targeted. By November, Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected president, with Richard Nixon as his vice president, having won with a political platform that concentrated on stopping Communism and the war in Korea, using people’s fears to isolate anyone who might be different. One poet later wrote in a letter, calling to mind another poet’s earlier grief, that their inauguration was the funeral day of all of my hopes and ideals. The progressive candidate Adlai Stevenson had been defeated, and the witch hunt for those who spoke their minds continued.

Citizens were sentenced for unknown crimes, and people did their best to be invisible. Fear can do that. It takes away your strength, a dark enchantment all its own. The Lilith Society no longer met on the Common, where the police often patrolled, or at the cemetery, where guards with flashlights wandered through the dark. At Lilith House, the shades were always drawn, and people spoke in whispers.

Now that Ava refused to have anything to do with her, Lauren stayed to herself. She ate her meals alone and never came to the Sunday meetings, which only four society members attended. On nights when the moon was full, she watched the other women gather on the lawn as if they were nothing more than leaves. Lauren carried her aloneness as if it were a burden that was hers forevermore. And then one day she happened to pass by the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, which had been a fixture in the Square since 1927, a tiny store where beautiful and unusual books were sold and poets gathered in the cluttered space to read from their work. A sign on the door declared No law books, no text books no science books. ONLY POETRY. This was the first store in the city to have a smuggled copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, banned in most places, along with books by Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

Lauren had spent hours looking through volumes of poems at the Grolier, the ink staining her hands, but she’d never expected to see herself there. And yet there she was, a small painting that was the exact image of her face in shades of back and blue, there in the window beside the first editions and the one-of-a-kind private press books. Carrick had taken out the paints he’d stored long ago from beneath the sink. Even though the woman in the painting was far too beautiful to be her, the word conjure had been painted over the woman’s heart. She realized that if she wasn’t careful, she might have something to lose, and she worked a forgetting spell that night so it would be as if she had never walked past the poetry bookshop. She would forget why he had painted her.

That was when she knew that she wanted a man like Professor Sharpe, someone who knew magic, who had something to teach her, one she might desire but would never love. She was convinced they were perfect for one another, and that if she let him get away, she would regret it. She burned a candle down to the pins she’d inserted into the wax and held her hand over the flame until her flesh was singed. She told herself her heart was cold and she needed a man who didn’t care about such things, someone who would never expect her to belong to him heart and soul. In the middle of the night she went to the garden and collected the ingredients that were needed to create a black magic love spell she’d found in the Book of Forbidden Arts, in which the anonymous author had written, I am not responsible for the events that follow your practice. It was to be used with care, if you dared to use it at all. She left it on the professor’s desk, where it looked like nothing more than a bouquet left by an admirer, a gift that brought a smile to his face. He tossed the flowers in the trash, for love was a far-off country to him, one he didn’t intend to visit anytime soon.

After that, Sharpe stared at Lauren when he passed her in the corridor, clearly intrigued. Then one day he leaned down to ask if she wouldn’t mind staying after class. As it turned out, she didn’t mind at all. Lauren had worked a protection spell against falling in love, an amulet made of black cloth sewn with red thread in which there was bits of clove and blackthorn. The professor might be an academic expert when it came to magic, but Lauren knew its everyday uses and had been taught simple spells as a young girl. Return to Sender, Happy Trails Travel, Fall in Love Twice. When asked if she might consider working on his research at the museum, Lauren blushed, for she desperately wanted that position. Emily Bright had been bragging about being chosen as Sharpe’s research assistant this semester, and Lauren had felt spikes of jealousy.

“I wouldn’t want to disrupt Emily’s work,” she said, to be polite.

“She’s gone whether you take the position or not. Unfortunately, she’s not in the least original.” Lauren knew what he was saying: She’s definitely not you. “If you work for me,” he went on, “I’ll help you get what you want.”

“I want Oxford,” Lauren said. “The graduate program in anthropology.”

Eugene Sharpe looked pleased. He had worked in that department for several years before coming to Harvard, and he could easily write personal letters to his old colleagues. “Not a problem,” he said with assurance.

Lauren felt a line of heat through her body just from being near him. The male students at Harvard all seemed like smart, spoiled boys, whereas Sharpe felt dangerous and exciting, a man who wasn’t afraid of the dark. Becoming involved with a man like Eugene Sharpe was not for the fainthearted, and when he leaned in to kiss her, Lauren knew it was a test. Was she brave enough to kiss him back? She backed away and said, “Don’t you think you should ask first?”

The professor laughed at her moxie. She was different from his other students, who did as they were asked. Her youth and slender frame belied how tough she was. “Would you like me to say please?” he asked with a grin.

“No. But you can say thank you later on.”

He unbuttoned her blouse, then was surprised to see her tattoos. She was more interesting than he would have imagined. They smiled at one another. Each was exactly what the other had been looking for. “You are something special. What do these letters spell?” He was studying her as if she were a research project.

“That’s for me to know,” Lauren said.

That evening as she walked along in the dusk, she spied a couple holding hands, and their happiness made her feel old and sad. She would never hold hands with a man like Sharpe. It was kid stuff, and yet Lauren yearned for the joys of young love. She had gotten what she wanted, yet she felt hollow inside. She walked through Harvard Square, stopping at the window of the poetry bookstore. The shop was dark, but she could see her face staring back at her from the window. She felt a pang, which made her turn and run the rest of the way to Lilith House. The professor was right for her. She told herself this again and again. It wasn’t love, and it never would be, but at least he could never break her heart.

From then on, Lauren’s afternoons were spent in the storerooms of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, crouched among collections of bones and amulets, snakeskins and crystals, magic stolen from cultures all over the world. There were bits of hair clipped from a witch’s head, filled with magic and spite, along with the hair of native children forced into government schools. There were talismans carved with names of those magicians and everyday people who had long ago been robbed of their magic and forgotten. The museum cases had been constructed of mahogany and local cherrywood, and all were crammed haphazardly with birds and bones, whole skeletons and chipped pieces, often unlabeled, a mishmash that Lauren was tasked to organize.

Emily Bright had been relieved of her duties as a researcher, and soon afterward, she dropped the class. She became quiet and withdrawn, her face splotchy, her long dark hair tangled and unwashed. If anyone should tap at her door, concerned, she would call for them to leave her alone, and she took special care to avoid Lauren. One day when they ran into one another in the kitchen, Lauren tried to pass by, but Emily stood her ground. “He didn’t care about me, and I doubt he’ll care about you,” she said.

“That’s the difference between us,” Lauren informed her. “I don’t want him to.”

Lauren usually went to the professor’s house late at night, a scarf covering her pale hair so that no one would recognize her. A professor in Sharpe’s position might be spoken to harshly should their romantic situation be discovered, but a Radcliffe student having an affair with her professor would immediately be asked to leave the college. They rarely spoke before they went upstairs to his bedroom. They both favored rituals, which Lauren appreciated. He always lit a black candle before tying her wrists together as if she were an offering. It should have been exciting, it should have been everything she wanted, but Lauren knew she could escape if she wished to. One night, bored of the same old thing, she did exactly that, just to prove what she was capable of. She whispered the words of a spell that many women in prison had spoken three hundred years earlier, and the rope fell away in twisted strands.

Sharpe laughed, impressed. “How did you do that?” He was endlessly fascinated by the magical talent she possessed.

Lauren shrugged. “Abracadabra. More or less.” It had been easy enough to escape. Sharpe had used a thin silk twine, not the sort of heavy, rough rope used on witches when they were tied to chairs and dunked in ponds until they drowned.

Increase Mather had once vowed that the word Abracadabra had no power, and yet it was more ancient than the words in the Bible, said to have originated from the Hebrew phrase ha brachah dabarah, name of the blessed. Just as the world was created by words, so was magic. The first written mention of the word Abracadabra was on amulets worn in Rome by those stricken with malaria in the second century. It was a spoken cure for evil and fire, and during the great plague of London people painted the word above their doorways to ward off disease.

Lauren was allowed to accompany Sharpe to the attic storerooms of the museum, which were off-limits to students. He brought her to the custodial office in the basement of the attached Natural History museum to show her the furnace that had figured in a murder in 1849 when a museum archaeologist killed and burned his benefactor, who was demanding his investment back. The skeleton of the mammoth that the archaeologist had found in the marshes of New Jersey was still in a prominent class case in the museum. Tim Randall the head of the janitorial staff, was told that Lauren should be allowed to enter the museum even when it was closed to the public. He looked uncomfortable with the idea. “I can’t trust a student to have a key. I’m responsible for everything here,” he said hesitantly.

“You’re responsible for cleaning up,” the professor said, pulling rank.

Randall handed over a key so that Lauren could work as late into the night as was needed. He was often there as well, and he intended to keep an eye on her. He didn’t like the looks of her, with her nearly white hair and her arrogant manner. Lauren ignored him from then on. She was too busy to engage in a feud, for she’d found that the storerooms were better than the Bells’ library, better than the magic shop in Provincetown. It was a true treasure trove choked with priceless finds, gems and stones and statues unseen since the time they’d been stolen from other cultures, some older than Rome or Athens. Packed in shredded paper and wedged into cardboard boxes were spoons used to feed the dead, amulets filled with powdered elk horn, and river stones. There were Iron Age skeletons and the bones of horses from Slovenia and Bronze Age bowls from Mesopotamia used to call spirits. When Lauren held up a bowl and ran her fingers around the edges, she could hear distant voices.

“You’re not afraid of black magic?” Sharpe asked.

“Do I look like I’m afraid?”

“You should be, Lauren. The farther you go down the Crooked Path, the higher the price you have to pay.” He smiled at her, and she saw why he had such a large fan club. “I’m warning you,” he told her.