Page 56 of The Witches of Cambridge

THE FIRST WITCH OF CAMBRIDGE

1695–1705

Dear Reader,

One morning I came upon the white crow in the Common. He had fallen from the hangman’s tree. His life on this earth was done, and so I wrapped him in my shawl and buried him at the rear of my garden, and I mourned as if I were mourning the man I loved. The bird had been there in the Common ever since that poor girl was hanged. He had been faithful until his last day, never leaving that tree. I wept as I buried him, for I knew that Amadis would have been just as faithful to me. I sent three white feathers in a parcel to the town where he’d been born, even though I knew it was highly improbable that anyone could rescue him. All during that cold, blue winter when he’d stayed with me, I had secretly given him every remedy in my garden, garlic, fennel, hawthorn, boiled flowers of St. John’s wort that turned as scarlet as blood, teas from the bark of oak and elm, from white willow and red willow. I did it even though I knew nothing would save him. The crow’s feathers marked both his sorrow and his faithfulness, more than I had ever expected to find in this world, more than most women would have in a lifetime. At least his mother would have this token of three milky white feathers when the parcel arrived. She would know that far away, in the fields of Cambridge, a woman had loved her son so completely she couldn’t bear to lose him, for he was my beloved, and he always would be.

I went to sit in the orchard where I used to go with Amadis, the place where I fell in love with him. I cut open an apple and saw my fate. In spite of all I had lost, I remembered all I still had. Acres of apple trees, women who were my sisters, crows filling the sky, and a daughter who would know the importance of magic, the first language of the world, the gift that has always been prized above all others. Let her have everything. Let her have the whole wide world.

My daughter had been born in the month of March, the season when the willows turned green. Twenty-three witches gathered in the orchard to help me welcome my child into this world, there to urge me on and protect me as best they could with ointments of lavender, for my daughter’s birth was a struggle and I was surrounded by darkness. I came so close to death I peered through the veil of this world into the next. I witnessed those who had passed on: the man I loved, and my own dear mother, and all the women who had come before me. I saw that no one was immune to the sorrows of life, and that we all return from whence we came. I was ready to take a step forward and embrace those I had lost, but then my daughter arrived, and I was in the light once more, and this world had never been sweeter. Twenty-three witches danced in the grass, the old dance, the one we all knew by heart, celebrating the life we had and the life we created.

All the same, she had a child without the help of a midwife, and on the night she gave birth her screams could be heard down in the marshes. She kept her baby in a pen made of thorns and roses. The baby girl and all her descendants would have chalk-white hair. They would be loved, but they would grow up with warnings: Trust no one other than yourself. Tell no one your stories. Bury bones, forget the past, never allow your heart to be owned by another.

I hadn’t understood how easy it would be to love your child. I supposed I hadn’t understood love at all until that day, and I loved the man I had lost more than ever. Amadis’s mother wrote to me, but it took so long for her letter to reach me that our daughter was already a year old by the time it arrived in Cambridge. He spoke of you as he left this world for the world to come, she wrote. He said your love was a blessing and that he didn’t regret a single day.

I could appreciate his mother’s heartbreak far better now that I was a mother myself. I wished I could sit beside her in the marshland that Amadis had told me about, the place he’d loved so much when he was a boy, a land of clouds and water where it was sometimes difficult to distinguish one from the other, for the whole world looked blue. If I closed my eyes I could see his mother, sitting there, weeping. She wrote, I can never thank you enough for loving my son. Thank you for sending him home. Don’t forget him, she wrote, as if I ever could. There was never a day when I took off his ring.

My daughter had black hair and her father’s pale blue eyes. She looked like a flower, and so I called her Hyacinth, a name that suited her well. How could she be so beautiful and belong to me? What had I done to deserve her? I realized she was a gift, one that made me want to go on living, something I hadn’t been certain I wanted to do when I lost Amadis. The world was brand-new to me now, and I was grateful. When I cut my baby’s hair for the first time, I sent a curl of it to Amadis’s mother. He lives on, I wrote. Perhaps this was heresy, but I knew it was true that for us he did.

Hyacinth could call birds to her with a single whistle, cause flowers to bloom in the palm of her hand, and turn cold water hot merely by stirring it with a spoon. One day, when she was barely more than three, she was digging in the garden and there, not far from where the parsley grew, she found the crow I’d buried months earlier, wrapped in my shawl, the fabric turned to tatters now. She was already bringing the crow back to life when I caught her. I shouted out. My daughter had a thousand gifts, but this was one I was quick to explain she must not use. We could not bring anyone back from the dead, just as we could not end a life for revenge or due to pride. What we did would come back to us, a death for a death, revenge met with vengeance. Our craft was to bring life into the world, to help with pain and sorrow, to allow love to blossom and thrive. She listened to me and nodded, but later that afternoon I spied a white crow nesting in the mulberry bushes, and I knew she’d disobeyed. I should have been stricter; I should have killed the bird myself and returned it to its grave. She had more power than I did, being strong enough to enter the world of the dead, and she would have to train herself not to show who she was inside.

Your daughter, I said to my beloved, as if he were there beside me and I could talk to him whenever I pleased. She’ll find herself in trouble if she’s not careful.

The bird that Hyacinth had brought back to life began to follow her everywhere. She named him Branoc, the Celtic word for crow. He was her familiar and had no interest in me, never coming to me when I called, not even if I set out apples and seeds. Perhaps the little crow knew I was the one who had buried him and that I would likely do so again if given the chance. Sometimes I sat out by the mulberries and thought about the year of snow and spring when Amadis came to visit for an hour and stayed all winter long. I thought about the day my daughter was born, when the hyacinth bloomed. I was glad that the witch-hunter Tom Boyle had been sent to prison for the deeds he had done and was no longer a threat to us.

My girl was five and then seven and then she was ten and then she was nearly grown. That was the way time passed now. The apple trees grew taller as I taught my daughter all I knew. How to set a love spell, how to ease a fever, how to set a curse for protection, how to harvest a garden in the dark late autumn. I understood now that love makes us all mortal. It keeps you grounded to the earth, forcing you to worry and fret over the future. Will my daughter prosper, will she be healthy, will she be kind, will she fall in love? I heard my beloved’s voice in everything my daughter said, and then his voice faded away and she was herself, our Hyacinth, who wasn’t afraid of death or of crows. Her childhood was just a chapter, but it was one that mattered. I hope that sort of happiness comes to you, Dear Reader. When it does, hold it in the palm of your hand, let it light up the night. It’s all that you have to take with you when you leave this world, but it may just be enough.