Sally Owens, who had always been so somber and had often held forth about the rules of silence and decorum when she’d run the library, had cast away her dreary black clothes and instead wore a vintage sixties Biba minidress patterned in yellow and magenta, bought in a thrift shop on Westbourne Grove. The Black Rabbit was so crowded there was a line out the door. Many of the clients who’d come to the Owenses for cures over the years were in attendance, along with the board of the library, and the mothers of the children who steadfastly brought their children to story hour, and who, if the truth be told, hung around the edges of the room to hear what happened next. Miss Hardwick gave a speech dressed as Emily Dickinson, all in white. She would remain to oversee the library until Kylie finished her degree and officially took over. The truth of it was, Miss Hardwick would stay until the morning she died, in bed, reading, which was not to happen for quite a long time.
People were well aware that this was Sally’s third marriage, but the curse was over, and love was love, and everyone could see the way Sally gazed into the Englishman’s liquid black eyes when he arrived with Vincent and his guest. Some folks in town swore they had heard Sally let out a burst of laughter when she was in the arms of her husband-to-be, not some hasty sarcastic hoot, but real joy that lingered, as if she were truly happy, and if that was the case, why, then, anything was possible.
Sally’s girls had given her their blessings when she first told them she would be returning to England after Franny’s funeral, and Gillian had held her close and whispered, Live a lot. Ian had already given up his place on Rosehart Mews, and they had begun to renovate a ramshackle place known as the Witch’s House at the edge of the fens, bought cheaply and with the approval of the town council. As for Sally, she had taken a position at Cat’s Library, and in the afternoons, Ian went off to join her at the library to work on his new book, The Uses of Magic. He had taken Franny’s advice and had begun researching local women who had written Grimoires, which, at the rate he was going, would likely take him another twenty years. During the cleanup of Lockland Manor, a desk had been found among the trash, and had been brought over to the library where it was now known as the professor’s desk. Local people, especially those who had been affected by the Red Death, left pens as tokens of their pride that one of their own had published his first book, which was over eleven hundred pages long, though Ian had been more concise with a simple dedication on the very first page.
To my mother who introduced me to magic, and to Sally Owens who introduced me to love.
* * *
Not long after Sally had returned to Thornfield after Franny’s funeral, on a day when Ian was at work plastering what would be a guest bedroom, Margaret Wright had arrived and had discreetly taken Sally aside.
“I can teach you the Unnamed Art,” she’d told Sally. “It has its failures and disappointments, but you’ll be quick to pick it up. Perhaps we should start now, before I forget all that I know.”
The Unnamed Art was an acquired skill and Sally was an excellent student. She quickly learned which local herbs were useful and which were so dangerous that plucking them was often a drastic error, with results that could cause spiritual distress and physical agony. Once, when she’d failed to heed Margaret’s directions, she’d picked stinging nettle, an error she never made again, and she was thankful that she knew to use jewelweed to cure nettle’s agony. She had learned how to make elixirs for fevers and rashes and potions for love, and as it turned out, magic came back to her, not the bloodline magic she’d been born with, but the magic she made for herself. This was the fate she had chosen.
Sally was happy to live at the edge of the world with the herons who fished in the shallow water. When the light was thin and pale, she held a hand over her eyes and looked out over the fens, searching for the dark-haired girl she had seen across the distance of three hundred years. She saw her only once, going knee-deep in water to try to reach her, one hand held over her eyes.
“It all worked out,” Sally called to her. “We fell in love and we paid the price, but it’s finally over and you don’t have to worry about us.”