Page 59 of The Witches of Cambridge

“Do you know where she is?” Lauren asked.

“Do you think Ava gives me her schedule? She doesn’t speak to me.”

The sister of a classmate Jamie had known in boarding school arrived by taxi to tour Radcliffe. She had told her parents that she would be bunking with a girlfriend for the weekend, but the truth was she thought the visit might be the beginning of a fling with Jamie, something she and every girl she knew in Sudbury had hoped for. The visitor got out of the cab, dragging her suitcase behind her, a bright smile on her pretty, young face.

“Really?” Lauren said, disgusted as the obviously infatuated girl approached. “You’ve already got someone new? You couldn’t wait five minutes?”

“She’s here to look at schools. She’s nothing.”

“Is that what I am?” the girl said, taking offense and sadly realizing that what people said about Jamie being selfish was correct. She made a snap decision to get back in the cab and go to stay with her friend, but it was too late. Lauren had run over and already flung herself into the backseat, and now the taxi was pulling away.

Jamie stood in the road watching the cab disappear even though he could hear the girl who’d arrived shout for him to help her get another taxi. “You are so rude,” she declared, and he couldn’t have agreed with her more. He would have given anything to go after Ava, but if he did his family would ruin her life. He knew that his ancestor May Mather had chosen to give up magic, but surely there had been times when she’d wished to disappear into the fields of hyacinth and let the magic of the world wash over her. Standing there in the road, Jamie realized that he was no different. He wished he could do that, too.

Lauren questioned several drivers at the taxi garage and at last found one who remembered an old woman who had picked up a barefoot girl with red hair.

“She was a looker,” the driver said.

Lauren gave him a hard stare. “Just tell me where you took her.”

The older woman had asked they be driven out to Fairfield Hospital in a nearby suburb. Lauren immediately got into the taxi, demanding a ride to the same location.

“And don’t stop for red lights,” she told the cabbie, and since he was a Boston driver, he didn’t find this an unusual request and was happy to oblige. Once they had set off, Lauren brushed her hair and dabbed on some lipstick so that she would seem presentable. Just a visitor and nothing more. Her mouth was red, and she could taste blood. She was in a fury already. That grandmother of Ava’s was most likely claiming that Ava was in the grip of a psychotic episode, imagining that she was a witch or a demon. She likely would have said anything to have them lock Ava away.

“What are you staring at?” Lauren demanded when she caught the cabbie eyeing her in the rearview mirror.

“You,” he said bashfully.

“You wouldn’t like me if you knew me,” Lauren told him.

All the same, when she glanced at herself in the mirror, she saw that she had changed. Her skin had lost some of its pallor. Her eyes were more gold than brown. She’d heard that doing a good deed could change you, and that worried her. She wanted to keep the cold, dark heart she’d worked so hard to create so that she would never be hurt again, but here she was, on her way to rescue someone.

When they arrived at the hospital, Lauren got out, having given the driver a twenty so he would wait for her. She entered the admissions office and asked if she could see her sister. Who could deny her access to a blood relation, and weren’t they sisters of a sort?

“Sorry, darling,” an orderly told her, and she didn’t like the way he looked at her. She glared at him with her sharp, clear eyes and chanted soror mea soror mea until he remembered that he, too, had a sister who had troubles of her own, and so he looked for Ava Abbot in the patient directory. She was in a building called Harte House. He might have asked for a kiss as payment on any other occasion—he had no manners—but if he did something so boorish, he might never be able to face his own sister again. Once Lauren was gone, he wondered if he might have imagined the girl who had spoken to him, for he didn’t even hear her go out the door. She’d merely disappeared; perhaps she had been nothing more than a fantasy.

It was a large campus, with dozens of buildings and extensive lawns. Lauren did her best to make her own way, intending not to draw attention to herself by asking anyone official for directions. When the hospital first opened, the clientele was extremely wealthy and doctors and patients would play badminton together. Women wore white, gauzy dresses and had their hair washed by their own maids, and picnics were held on the lawn. But this day, the grounds were deserted; there were a few nurses taking their break, chattering about work, and two young men tossed a ball back and forth without much interest. A young blond woman sat on a bench. She threw Lauren an amused look when Lauren sat next to her and offered her a cigarette, which she gratefully accepted.

“This is against the rules,” the young woman said, also accepting a light and inhaling. “Thanks.”

“I’m looking for Harte House,” Lauren said.

“You don’t want to go there. It’s a lockup. They do horrible things to you until you become ordinary. By the time they’re through, you’ve become nothing but air. I learned the game, and now I have privileges, if you call sitting on a bench a privilege.”

“Why are you here?” Lauren asked, for her new companion seemed perfectly fine.

The young woman gave a tiny shrug. “I’m a victim of my own introspection. What about you?” She narrowed her brown eyes. “Depression? Obsession? Mania? Sexual perversion?”

“I’m here to rescue someone.”

“I’m here because I’m afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married and being normal and living my life to please others but never myself. Spare me from cooking three meals a day, spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. I want, I think, to be omniscient. Know all, tell all, write all.”

Lauren realized that she had stumbled upon a poet. She wondered if the other young woman’s fingers were ink stained, if she thought in rhyme, if she felt the same sort of loneliness that Lauren did, the kind that could be cured only by words. “What do you write?” Lauren asked.

“Anything. Everything.” She gave Lauren a knowing look. “Just like you.”

“I’m not a writer,” Lauren said. “Not really.”

The blond woman choked back a laugh. “I say the same thing. I tell them I’m nothing, but inside I am everything. I’m on fire. They just can’t know it, or they’ll drown me alive.”