Margaret Wright, who was visiting America for the very first time, made a rum punch that people couldn’t get enough of, a drink that cheered up even the most contrary people. The porch was festooned with paper lanterns, and candles set into sand-filled white sacks marked the bluestone path to their door and would be lit when twilight fell. Margaret was delighted when Vincent invited her along on the tour of the greenhouse with David. “This is marvelous,” she declared, deciding then and there that Ian must build one for her so that she could grow herbs all winter long.
Women here in Massachusetts had been drowned and beaten and hanged, especially if they were found to have access to books other than the Bible, for the Puritans had been convinced that they alone had the ear of God. On the morning of the wedding day, when several women in the family were sleeping off their hangovers, Margaret decided that she wished to see the spot where the witches here had been hanged. No one knew, she was told. The bodies had been buried secretly, in remote places, for they were not allowed into hallowed ground, although a few were dug up and reinterred in the town cemetery when the witch mania passed. All the same, that morning, before anyone else was awake, Sally had driven Margaret out to the hill where the gallows were thought to have been. There’d been a mist over the ground and the world was beautiful, as if it were brand new. Margaret Wright was a tough individual, but she cried on the hillside as the crows all rose from the trees.
“You’ll take care of him, won’t you?” Margaret had said to Sally.
“Ian can take care of himself.” Sally held Margaret’s hand in her own. They’d become quite close during Sally’s studies of the Unnamed Art. “You taught him that.”
It was likely true, but once you started worrying about someone it wasn’t easy to stop.
“Now, he’ll take care of you,” Sally told Margaret, and perhaps she was right. Just after the wedding service, while everyone was drinking rum punch, Ian had offered to go make his mother a cup of tea, for she’d always abstained from alcohol. True, he’d never returned to the garden with the promised tea, and Margaret had been forced to go in search of him, finding him reading at the kitchen table, ignoring the chaos around him. He had indeed put the kettle on, but then he’d been distracted by an old copy of The Magus that had belonged to Vincent.
“The kettle’s whistling,” Margaret said. She had never seen her son look happier. He was a handsome man, even with all that ink, and of course she saw that for what it was—his pain rising up, his story and his vow to look for magic.
“So it is.” Ian hugged her on the way to the stove and Margaret flung her arms around her son, for a moment not wishing to let him go. Such a display was very unusual for both, for they were not ones to easily show their emotions for one another. They stepped back after their embrace, a bit stunned. Love had done this to Ian Wright. He’d never quite understood it before, why it was written about with such fervor, why people did such profoundly stupid things because of it, sacrificing their futures and their lives, making foolish mistakes they’d live to regret. He knew scores of spells and incantations, in Hebrew and ancient Persian, in runic and Italian, but they’d meant nothing to him. Now he had stepped forward blindly into love, a madman and a fool and proud to be so.
“Where’s our Sally?” Margaret asked.
“Paying her respects to the dead.” When Ian saw worry arise on his mother’s face, knowing she thought it might mean bad luck if they were apart on their wedding day, he added, “I’ll have her for the rest of her life.”
When he was young and in jail, Ian had been told that the one tattoo a man should never get was his woman’s name. People would lie to you and betray you; they would cheat on you and make you wish you’d never met them, and there you’d be, marked by their name. Only fools made a pledge announcing a love that lasted forever, but he had done exactly that before they set out for Massachusetts. Across the wrist of his left hand, there was the fate he’d made for himself, a direct line to his heart, the last story he wanted to tell, Sally’s name, the most important bit of magic, the end and the beginning of his story.