Page 70 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Once you leave the Crooked Path, the darkness inside you fades and the world is once more sweet and green, greener than it has ever been. As soon as Lauren had regained her strength, she went out to the poison garden she’d planted. She knelt down to pull out the black stalks, wearing gloves to protect herself from the toxins. In the place of the hellebore, henbane, and oleander, she planted pink fairy roses. When she finished, her arms were streaked with soil. She sat in the sun and felt herself grow stronger. She’d brought along some paper and a pen, and sitting in the grass beside the roses she at last found the right words to send to Carrick.

It’s not what you think it is.

Love is cold and hard and bright,

I heard you speak but I couldn’t answer.

I can answer you now.

I saw the world as far away even when I was looking through the window.

I’m looking out there now.

Lauren folded the poem into an envelope and mailed it to the address the boy in the alleyway had given her. Days passed, and every afternoon she waited for the postman. By now, they’d gotten to know one another. “Anything for me?” she’d always say, and the postman would shake his head and say, “Sorry, Lauren, no.” But then one day he waved a thin envelope. “Today’s the day,” he said.

And it was. Lauren sat on the porch steps to open the letter. The light was bright, and the roses she’d planted were already growing. There were blackbirds everywhere, in every single tree. There was only one line scrawled on the note she received; all the same, it was enough. It was all she needed to know.

I’m waiting for you, he’d written back.

It was the end of finals week and the campus was quiet. All of Cambridge seemed sleepy, as if the city had reverted to the time when it had been called Newtowne, when there were more sheep than there were men and Harvard was little more than a dream, five buildings in the marshes where the wolves gathered at night. Ava passed by the Schlesinger Library, built with funds donated by Andrew Carnegie in 1907 and by Radcliffe alumnae, which was soon to become a renowned center for the study of women’s history. She continued on to the admissions office at Fay House. Six o’clock in the morning, the time when the offices were empty, the doors bolted shut.

All that was required to get into the admissions office was a hairpin and an unlocking spell. A twist of her wrist and a whisper—Sine me intrare (Let me in)—and Ava stepped inside the dark hallway. She needed to find the final piece of the puzzle of her life. She began to rummage through the files, but after only a few moments, the door was flung open. An unexpected early bird had arrived, a woman in her sixties ready to get some work done before anyone else arrived and who didn’t look pleased in the least to find Ava pawing through the files.

“Are we in need of the police?” the admissions director asked.

“Please don’t call them,” Ava begged, a look of panic on her face. “I’m trying to find out information about my scholarship. I think my mother might have something to do with it. I never knew her, but she may have been a student at Radcliffe.”

The admissions director, a serious woman named Andrea Lane, had lost her own mother at a young age, and that loss had defined her and helped her understand many of the young women she worked with. When Ava introduced herself by name, Miss Lane recalled that a powerful Boston law firm had written to question the legality of her scholarship. They had mentioned that she lived at Lilith House, a place the staff stayed clear of, for the alumnae of the society were very large donors to the school. Miss Lane had never responded to the firm’s letter, but this girl’s request was something entirely different. It was personal.

Ava brought out the photograph of her parents, and as soon as she did, Miss Lane recognized the young woman who was fiercely embracing a man she was clearly mad about. This same woman had come to see Miss Lane more than twenty years earlier to withdraw from Radcliffe. Though she was only a few months shy of her graduation, she had lost her husband and been forced to give up her child.

“At least my little girl will be safe,” the withdrawing student had said.

“The woman who set up your scholarship was Daisy Bridewell Abbot,” Miss Lane told Ava. “She would have been in the class of 1930 if she had graduated.”

Ava’s legs felt wobbly as she sank into the closest chair, grateful to accept the glass of water that Andrea Lane was quick to fetch. Once there had been a daisy on her windowsill. Another time she had found a daisy by the gate the sheepdogs guarded. Daisy Abbot had endowed the scholarship that had brought Ava to Cambridge, and she had hidden the first witch’s letters in the library for Ava to find. Know your story and don’t be afraid to tell it.

There was a note in the endowment file, there to find for the person who came searching for it. Ava was that person, she knew it right away. She thought of the woman at the window and the apples left on the sill and the nights when someone watched over her. Whenever she waved at the stranger, who’d always waved right back, she’d never once been afraid.

Dearest darling reader, her mother had written, I have always loved you.

On graduation morning, Ava and Lauren were awakened by the sound of birds. Sparrows were everywhere, on the lawn and in the branches, their gathering always a sign of good fortune. Today Lauren and Ava would join the ranks of the women who had graduated before them, women who went on to live in Chicago and London and Paris and New York, who became doctors and professors and artists, all the while practicing the Nameless Art. Lilith alumnae had been notified that the house was now safe for their daughters, and there had been so many applications that Ava and Lauren had simply chosen the first six students who applied. They would find invitations under their pillows when they arrived. They would live in Lilith House along with two alumnae who had returned to Harvard for graduate school, who would board in the upstairs rooms and teach the Sunday afternoon magic lessons. As they wrote out the letters for next September’s initiates, Ava and Lauren remembered the night when they were summoned to the hanging tree, when they climbed out the window and ran across the grass, when their lives were just beginning, when they realized they were meant to be in one another’s lives.

Harvard Square was crowded with families and well-wishers. There was nowhere to park and the flower shop had sold out of corsages. The graduating class gathered in Radcliffe Yard dressed in their black caps and gowns, many wearing red lipstick, a rebellious slash of scarlet they hoped would annoy anyone who believed women shouldn’t be seen or heard. It was graduation, and Lauren and Ava felt the scars in the palms of their hands burning as the ceremonies proceeded. There were crows in the trees and the sky was bright, just as it had been on the day they first arrived.

“What if I hadn’t met you?” Ava wondered aloud as they stood side by side.

“You would have worn a proper skirt and handed your well-written, proper papers in on time and gotten engaged to a proper medical student and lived a proper and miserable life unhappily ever after.”

Ava laughed, holding up her hand to show the spot where her eleventh finger should have been. “We had too much in common. It was always going to happen this way. We were fated to be friends.”

“No,” Lauren said. “We made our own fate.”

Once upon a time it had been their first day at Radcliffe, and now it was their last. Lilith House would be closed for the summer, windows shuttered, weeds growing in between the rows of herbs. In the fall, the new girls would arrive with their suitcases on a day when the leaves were already beginning to turn yellow, curling at the edges. Crows would be perched in the trees. Lauren and Ava would come back to place the letters of invitation beneath the new girls’ pillows in their dorm rooms, and on initiation night they would stand across the street and watch as the society gathered beneath the hanging tree. They would remember they had saved one another’s lives, and then they would go to the Peacock Café and have mint tea and tell each other everything.

After the graduation ceremony, Lauren didn’t have a minute to waste. She needed to make her way to South Station to catch the train to New York. She had cut her white-blond hair even shorter, a true pixie. In New York, you could do whatever you pleased, or at least that was what she’d heard. You could be an artist or a poet, you could fall in love, you could start all over again. Lauren planned to wear her red boots every day and in the evenings she would go to the public library, where she would write in her notebook in the Reading Room with its glorious sky murals on the ceiling and gilded rosettes. When she became a bookseller at the Strand, she would read as many books as she sold. But most important, she would let herself love someone. She’d do that right away. She had the little black and blue landscape in her suitcase; she wouldn’t have thought of leaving it behind. She had come to realize that if she narrowed her eyes she could see her name written into the blur of the blue trees. It had been there all along.