Page 49 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ava folded the witch’s letter into the shoebox kept beneath her bed, adding it to the others she’d collected. But this one was different. It was a story that belonged to Lauren, and the legend of the Bell sisters burned through Ava as if she held a red-hot coal in her hands. No wonder the family had not passed this story down through the generations. She could only imagine how Lauren would react if she knew the horrid deeds of Cotton Mather that had affected her family. Some things were best kept hidden, and this story was one of them. Ava had decided to say nothing about the fact that more than two hundred years earlier, Amelia Bell had planted the hedges that made it impossible to see the house on Brattle Street. She’d added on room after room until hers was the finest house in town, and she left her original shed as a home for women in need, and many of the women who’d followed the first witch moved into Lilith House, one by one. Women who had been mistreated, those who had been accused of crimes, those whose children had no fathers, older women with no one to look after them, girls who ran away from families who abused them.

Amelia lived in the house behind hedges, the one that was nearly impossible to find. For the rest of her life, she wore only black, for she was in mourning every day. She wore black when her daughter was born and when she planted her garden, but she kept her story to herself so that her daughter and granddaughters wouldn’t spend their lives in mourning. She left fruit on the doorstep of Lilith House, where women in need lived, and when she saw Rose Bridewell on the Common she always stopped and nodded before she walked away. Her history would have been forgotten if the first witch of Cambridge hadn’t written it down one cold winter when the river froze solid, and once you read a story you’d carry it with you. Even if it’s hidden, even if it’s tossed onto a bonfire, it will remain a part of who you are, and one day you’ll find it, it will rise up in your blood and your bones to be remembered no matter what.

Lauren meant no harm when she went into Ava’s room. They were friends again, but they had gone there cautiously, and were sometimes excessively polite. Still, they were working on it, and entering a friend’s room after making certain she wasn’t there was not the sort of action Lauren should now be taking. Still, a buzz of words had called to her, as if there were bees on the other side of the door, and yet when she opened the door, she found the room was empty. There was a sound, like water now, cool springwater in the words. Lauren was sensitive to stories, and she often heard them as if they were music. Shakespeare’s plays were like symphonies. Emily Dickinson’s poems were a single flute played in the forest where the tallest trees stood. There was definitely a story in Ava’s room. Words rose toward the cracks in the ceiling. Elm, hedge, ivy, oak. Mother, daughter, sister, bread, you. She crouched down and pulled the cardboard box out from beneath the bed, and there were the letters. Once she began to read, she couldn’t stop. That was how she came to know about Cora Bell, who had been so brutally murdered, and to learn that Amelia had planted hedges and built houses and had always dressed in black, orphaned by a single act of hatred by a man let loose from jail by Cotton Mather. Now Lauren understood why Amelia’s daughter and granddaughters had decided to keep the past from their children. For the rest of her life Amelia practiced left-handed magic. She had taken the Crooked Path.

There is no forgetting the story once it has been read, and that’s what had happened now. Read it and you knew you had to protect yourself from those who would judge and destroy you; you had to be rid of them before they were rid of you. The Mathers were dangerous, and clearly they always had been. Lauren decided that she owed it to Ava, and to Cora and Amelia Bell, to keep Jamie Mather as far away as possible. More than ever she believed she was right to try to keep Ava and Jamie apart, and now her fierce distaste for the Mathers had bloomed like a black rose, fed by vengeance and grief. She stormed out the front door, and as she walked through Cambridge she rose off the ground, as Amelia Bell used to do. Children passing by noticed and ran away, watching her from behind trees. I saw a witch and she was beautiful, one of them reported to his mother. No such thing, he was told, but that wasn’t true and he knew it. When Lauren reached the hanging tree, she thought of all the women who had never been allowed to tell their own stories. Once upon a time, three women in her family had been lost, one to the hanging rope, one to a river of sorrow, and one to a life of black stones and mourning. Revenge might be an acquired taste, but Lauren could already sense how sweet it might be. Ava had saved her from the wrong man, and now Lauren would return the favor.

She would end Jamie Mather’s claim on her friend for good.

When Lauren finally got through to Paul Mather’s secretary, she insisted it was an emergency, but Mather took his time picking up the phone. He refused to believe that Lauren had any worthwhile information until she told him, “It’s about Jamie.” Then he listened when she said it was in his best interest to meet her at the bar of the Ritz Hotel across from the Public Garden. If he failed to do so, his son would likely ruin his own life.

Lauren took a taxi and arrived early at the hotel. She didn’t like surprises and wanted any advantage she could get, and she imagined that Paul Mather was the sort who might have a trick up his sleeve. Perhaps he’d bring Jamie with him, or his personal attorney, or maybe a police officer who was in his pocket and willing to arrest her for harassment. Lauren sat at the bar, and no one spoke to her. She looked vaguely dangerous in her black Chanel dress and her pointy red boots and a slash of dark red lipstick, stained even darker when she sipped red wine. She wasn’t the sort who came to drink pretty rum cocktails at one of the little round marble tables, a wealthy wife or a woman who could be bought for the evening, who was looking for a man to pick up her tab.

Paul Mather walked in at a little after six, when Lauren had been there for over an hour, nursing her drink and reading T. S. Eliot, who had lived on one of the loveliest streets in Cambridge in 1913, when he studied anthropology at Harvard. Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far to go. For a moment, Mr. Mather seemed as if he might change his mind and leave, for he knew trouble when he saw it, and it was right there in front of him; all the same, he was intrigued. He had marveled at how brazen this young woman had been to call him, and so he sat beside her at the bar and ordered a gin martini.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was a prayer to be recited again and again, a song bursting through with the shine of lilacs. When Lauren began recording in her grimoire a list of words she loved, she included portions of the poem.

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

“Are you the one who intends to ruin my son’s life?” Mather asked. She looked like a schoolgirl with her pale pixie hair, but she was nothing of the sort.

“No, although I wish I could claim that distinction. The one who will ruin him is Ava.” She took a sip of her drink. “I think you know what I’m here to tell you before I say a word.”

Mather had not been worried about Ava, the red-haired Radcliffe student who’d barely spoken during her visit at Christmastime, the one from Lilith House he hoped would disappear from Jamie’s life. He’d paid little attention, although he remembered his oldest son had nicknamed her Mouse and she seemed to have taken offense. He hadn’t thought the little mouse would be problematic, even if she came from Lilith House. She’d been timid and shy, escaping from dinner as soon as she could.

“Exactly how will she manage that?” Mather asked. He ordered a second martini as his glance flickered over Lauren. This girl certainly wasn’t shy. In fact, she looked like a dose of poison. “She seemed perfectly ordinary,” he said, offering his opinion of the timid guest who’d been forced to sit there on her own after Jamie fled the dining room like a child.

“You think she’s nothing special because she’s poor and on scholarship, which only means that you’re a terrible judge, just like the rest of your family. If you paid the least bit of attention, you’d know that she’s strong.”

“In what way?” Mather asked. He didn’t like to speak to those he distrusted, Ava and this girl included.

“Don’t pretend,” Lauren said. “I can tell that you know what she is. Your people have been hunting ours throughout time.”

“And you’re here to protect Jamie? I find that hard to believe.”

“Is Ava what you want for your son, a witch in his bed whispering in his ear, telling him how awful his family is?”

Mather finished his drink and called for the bill. He hadn’t seen anything special about the girl Jamie had brought home, but witches were like that, they let you see what they wanted you to see, they hid what they were capable of. Except Lauren, who seemed to be proud of herself for taking him on.

“If you don’t break them up now, you won’t be able to do so later,” Lauren told him. “She’ll be there at every holiday, and before you know it your house will be hers.”

“Just curious,” he said to Lauren, who didn’t seem the least bit nervous to go up against him. Her self-possession made him worry. “I thought you were supposed to keep your existence secret. What does coming here today do for you?”

It saves Ava from the likes of you, Lauren thought. But there was more; Paul Mather was right. She smiled then, and he could see her sharp teeth. “It allows me the pleasure of seeing that after all your family has done to us, you’re still afraid of me.”

The men of the extended family were waiting when Jamie arrived at the old summer house on the outskirts of Salem, which was used only for family get-togethers. Uncles and cousins and brothers all stood together. No one ever wanted to stay there overnight, not even on summer weekends, even though it overlooked the cold blue sea. The sprawling homesite had once been an inn where Increase Mather and his wife stayed during the witch trials, and there were those who believed that the place was cursed. There were occasional fires that started for no reason, and water rats lived in the cellar. Still, there they all were, on a windy day, all of the male cousins and uncles and brothers. They said it was a birthday celebration for Jamie’s brother Brent, but there was nothing celebratory about the gathering. There was no cake or wine, no party at all. The family had held interventions for alcohol and drugs and gambling, and now they were holding one for love. They had come to a decision. If Jamie didn’t disengage from Ava, cutting off all attachments to someone who practiced witchery, he would be denied his inheritance, and his tuition at Harvard would no longer be paid. At first when this was announced, as if it were a court sentence, Jamie had laughed, thinking it was a joke, but they were a legal family, and the disinheritance papers had been drawn up and no one thought it was funny. When Jamie was told the conditions of his continuing at school, he shook his head. “Go ahead. Do it,” he said. “Pull the plug. You’d be doing me a favor. I’ll quit school and get a real job.”

The family was prepared for his refusal. They always had a plan B. When they’d all had their say about his duty to his family, they left him alone with his father so he could hear the rest of what his punishment would be if he didn’t do as he was told.

“You clearly don’t care about your future,” Paul Mather said with a sneer. “But what about hers?”

Jamie’s father now informed him that Ava’s anonymous endowment could easily disappear if the Mathers began to question its legality. Jamie looked at his father as if seeing him for the first time. “Are you threatening Ava?”

“I’m just telling you a story,” his father said. “A story that can have many different endings. The choice is yours.”