Page 7 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER FOUR

The six young women who stood in a circle on the Common might resemble flowers if you were to glance at them in the falling dark, but they were more like the branches of a hazel tree, strong and nearly impossible to break. Among them were Stella, Claire, Ashton, Bailey, Emily, and Sophie. They could each read a book in half an hour and write a term paper in the time it took another student to write a single page. They studied botany and herbalism, literature and art. The society also insisted each one enroll in the Anthropology of Magic, taught for the past few years by a legendary professor from Oxford. Stella and Claire were seniors and were in charge of the house, assigning rooms and duties and teaching the Sunday classes. Ashton and Bailey were juniors who had known one another since nursery school on Beacon Hill, and who planned to develop a line of herbal cures when they left school. Then there were the sophomores. Emily, whose last name was Bright, which entirely suited her, had roots in Concord, where her great-great-great-grandmother had been a friend of the Alcott family, and Sophie painted miniatures whose eyes seemed to follow you around the room, for she was an empath who wept whenever she was in public, as she felt other people’s pain.

The Lilith Society had begun in the years when there were more sheep than people in Cambridge, after European colonizers spread their view of magic as evil and women were punished for imagining that they were the equals of men. The magic of men was called religion and science, while the magic of women was witchery, always suspect, always hidden. Witchcraft had been a felony both in Britain, since the year 1563, and in America, since the time of the first settlers. In Scotland, one death was not enough and witches there were killed twice, first strangled and then burnt at the stake. Those accused of practicing magic would be declared innocent only if it was possible to drown them, for it was said that their blood made them buoyant, but what good would the test do once they were dead, for even a fish will drown if you tie it to a stone. Witches were bound and gagged, then stuffed into sacks and tossed into murky ponds, their deaths said to prove something that was unprovable.

During the Great Hunt in Britain, between the years 1560 and 1630, eighty thousand people were accused of witchcraft, with more than half of the accused punished by death. Their bones had gathered at the bottoms of rivers and bogs; they were buried at the crossroads, for it was believed that if witches were between roads they could not rise and walk again. Hecate, the goddess associated with witches, was said to appear at crossroads on dark nights with a following of spirits and dogs.

The Lilith Society began not long after the first witch of Cambridge came to settle in the marshlands in 1693, making her way among the pine trees, where so many bees buzzed through the air it seemed the whole world was singing. Although most of Rose Bridewell’s story had been lost, the members of the society knew that she had always offered refuge to any woman in need when others began to cross the river from Boston. The women who followed her lead built houses out of sticks and stones on her land, far from the constables and the witch-hunters, who believed in the innate wickedness of women. One of these shacks had been built of brambles and painted black by a woman whose name had long ago been forgotten, although there was talk that she was one of the Bells. Every generation added on to the original rickety building: a roof, a porch, a staircase. In the yard there was an old elm a hundred feet high and six feet around that was called the Queen of Trees. Lilith House had been created as a shelter for those who had none, and there were those who said she had left her handprint in the dried mud of the original fireplace, which showed that whoever she was, she’d had the eleventh finger and was one of their own.

By the time Lauren and Ava arrived, students lived in a tall wooden house that had always been painted black, hidden behind hedges of thorns, only a few blocks away from the Radcliffe Quad. Those who took up residence in small dark rooms all studied the Unnamed Art, for they not only took academic courses, they gathered on Sundays in the library on the first floor to study alchemy, what was called The Way, a mystical path in which science searched for the hidden reality beneath ordinary perceptions. Even when there was magic in a woman’s bloodline, there was a great deal she needed to learn. Who to trust and who to curse. When to hide yourself away and when to practice your art to the fullest extent of your capabilities. How to be invisible in a crowd. How to bring love to the loveless. How to escape from knots, traps, love triangles. How to grow a garden that would bring health and peace.

There were eight bedrooms in Lilith House, along with a library, a kitchen, and a parlor. In the garden grew roses, hawthorn, blackthorn. An initiate had to be invited to join, and history mattered. A mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother had been here. They’d learn magic lessons on Sunday afternoons at the hour when they drew the curtains and lit candles. How to remember. How to forget. And, most important of all, how to be brave.

If you don’t try, you will never know, the younger students were told. See into the past as well as the future. See all that you can.

When the Harvard Annex for women students began, in 1879, the women who resided at Lilith House were admitted to the school. Most met with success, but some turned onto the Crooked Path. They chose the wrong men or the wrong course of action. Every now and then, a member of the society disappeared down overgrown paths and was never found again. By the time the school was called Radcliffe College, the rules of the Lilith Society had long been in place.

Everything you need is within you and without you, in the fields and the woods and in your own heart. Magic is who you are.

Women in the society were able to live off-campus by special permission of the dean, with tuition and housing paid for by alumnae. For extra cash, most found jobs as waitresses or tutors; they worked at the Mount Auburn Hospital or the Harvard Book Store. Other students gossiped about the women who boarded at Lilith House, considering them strange. Witchery was never mentioned, no one believed in that anymore; instead it was said the women of the society were lucky by nature, especially in matters of love, and that if you wanted good fortune to rub off on you, it was best to leave an apple on their porch. Most women ran away after doing so, watching from behind the black metal gate to make sure their offering was accepted. On solstice nights you could hear them singing out in the huge garden, with the members of the society all dressed in white, yellow lanterns set in a circle.

Praise the world around us, praise the night as well as the day, praise our sisterhood.

Cross the water, hide in the hedges, wait until your time comes, trust one another.

In these acres of wild land, women could return evil to the sender, love could be found in every apple that was cut in half, blue undergarments were worn for protection, a woman in need must never be turned away from the door. Witches greeted one another with the sign of the fox, holding up two fingers. Their kind had had stones thrown at them even though they could heal the sick and see the future; they reached out their hands to one another in both the worst and the best of times and wrote down their knowledge in grimoires that were hidden in walls or buried under brick floors or set on library shelves.

Men at Harvard had their own societies, called finals clubs, which owned huge brick buildings with ornate interiors and were funded by their wealthy alumni. There had always been secret societies for men at Harvard. Elite students had joined finals clubs since the exclusive Porcellian Club was founded in 1791, with the motto Dum vivimus vivamus. While we live, let us live; or the Owl Club, founded in 1896, whose members wore black ties decorated with green owls; or the Delphic Club, a secret society said to have been begun by J. P. Morgan. Each of them had their own hazing rituals and legacies.

Finals clubs were social worlds that were exclusively male and privileged, many begun in the mid–nineteenth century so that the wealthiest and most connected students had access to each other, helping one another at school and throughout life. In punch season, the time when invitations to the societies were sent out, men who were being recruited received notes slipped under their doors, and there were many, including a former president, who said that not being punched was the biggest disappointment of their lives. More and more clubs were begun in the nineteenth century, until there were seven that truly mattered.

Officially, there were no such social clubs for women, but the Lilith Society had existed even before Radcliffe College was founded, before the Porcellian Club began to keep outsiders out and insiders in. The Lilith Society had begun before any of these, as a safe haven in the marshes of Cambridge, with the motto Simul fugimus.

We fly together.

No matter how different they were, the residents of Lilith House adhered to the rules of the college. Female students were not allowed to take a science class without the permission of the president of Harvard, but the society enriched the curriculum in their Sunday afternoon meetings, with subjects including botany, herbology, chemistry, anatomy, astrology, astronomy, plant science, and psychology, alongside mythology, poetry, witchery, tarot, divination, remedies, spellcasting, rituals, healing, and incantations. Veritas, the pursuit of truth through learning and scholarship, had been Harvard’s motto since its founding in 1636. The Lilith Society wanted more; they wanted truth in all things, the kernel inside the secret of who they were and always would be.

In the dormitories the rules were more suited for little girls than for grown women with minds of their own. Curfew was 10:00 p.m., with graham crackers and glasses of milk set on a tray on the sign-in desk. At Lilith House there were no curfews. There were no housemothers to watch over them, or maids to clean their rooms and change the sheets. They were not afraid of the dark; they often sat in the garden late at night, and when they sang, the children in the neighborhood fell asleep, not the least bit frightened. There was something healing in the air around the house, for each student tended her own bit of garden, planting lemon balm, basil, borage, chamomile, chervil, chives, lavender, dill, fennel, rue, rosemary, tarragon, tansy, and thyme.

At the weekly meetings, it was made clear that women were more legally vulnerable and considered inferior to men on spiritual, moral, intellectual, and physical levels. Those with inherited bloodlines were suspect, the children born with extra teeth or an eleventh finger, the girls who could leap from trees and never break a bone or draw blood, the women who had always known they would be wise to keep their talents to themselves. The shades were drawn as they learned their lessons. They learned what circumstances warranted burning a small poppet stuck with straight pins in order to remove a person’s power over you. They were taught how to use incantation bowls for blessings and amulets for protection, and how to translate the flight of birds in order to divine the future. They peered into bowls of water and black-painted mirrors, which allowed them to see what would happen next. White magic was needed for protection and healing, gray magic for weather, green magic for the natural world, red magic for love. There was candle magic; the magic of runes and language known to only a few; folk magic, which had to do with well-being and cures that had been handed down from one generation to the next; along with alchemy, which was a science all its own. Last, there was black magic, which was used for revenge, retribution, and spite, the sort of magic that was best avoided, for once you began to walk the Crooked Path, you might never be able to return.

At the gathering on the Common, on that first night, Ava and Lauren were initiated into the society. They all linked their arms around one another’s waists, and they danced the dance that women have known since the beginning of time. The initiates promised to keep Lilith’s existence a secret, and in exchange for room and board, they would attend Sunday meetings and excel in all of their courses, and they would continue the tradition of practicing the Unnamed Art. Every spring two women graduated and went out into the world, and each fall two women arrived to take their places and learn the rules of magic, including the Threefold Law: Harm no one, know that whatever you set into the world will be returned to you three times over, know that love is the answer to the cruelty in the world. If you are willing to work your magic with good intentions, to connect with the natural world, to respect your sisters, to keep secret what must be kept so, you are one with us. We meet in a circle, in the wind or the rain, we meet with the birds above us and the grass below us, with our hearts in our hands.

The group scattered when dawn was near, to ensure that no one would see them. Lauren and Ava grabbed their suitcases and followed along, marveling at what the night had revealed. They were opposites in every way, darkness and light, the flower and the hazel branch, but they now possessed the same scars in the centers of their palms, and that connection would last for the rest of their lives. They would always be reminded that they had saved one another’s lives; they had walked into their futures together. This was the beginning, they could feel it in their bones, and it made them light-headed and dizzy and overjoyed. When the wind came up, they ran as fast as they could, and anyone seeing them would have sworn they were flying. They were too busy thinking about the future to notice that someone was watching from the shelter of the old hanging tree.

The tenth great-grandson of the most heartless man who had influenced the Salem witch trials had always been a light sleeper. He had trouble finding peace of mind, for he carried the guilt of many men and many centuries. On this night, he’d heard a voice in his dreams. In your sleep, you lose the future. If you wake, you have a chance. He had left his bed immediately upon waking, then had pulled on his clothes and headed into the street. Now here he was, standing with his back against the wind. It was still dark, but it would soon be morning, and the streetlights were turning off, one by one.

He watched as two young women ran to catch up to a group on the Common who were all dressed in black, but he paid attention to only one. It was the same girl he’d seen countless times in his dreams, the one with red hair. He wanted to believe that he was in control of his own fate, and because of this he did exactly what men had chosen to do for hundreds of years whenever women appeared dangerous and seemed to know too much. On this night, the ten times great-grandson of a witch-hunter told himself he needed to stay away from the girl in his dreams. Should he ever see her again, he would definitely avoid her; he’d turn his back on her, even though that would mean he would have to pretend that as he stood there in the dim morning light he didn’t already know she was the one.