This was that time. The seventh day. Jet’s last day on earth.
When she reached for the book, the binding scalded her fingertips. She could feel the darkness within the text. She knew left-handed magic when she saw it, black magic so perilous that every page was inflamed. She thought of the time her brother, Vincent, had discovered The Magus, a compilation of the history of magic first published in 1801. The Magus had shaken the bureau drawer whenever it was locked away, as if it had a life and a mind of its own. At the turn of the century it had been deemed so fearsome that copies had been burned on bonfires in Washington Square.
The Book of the Raven had been written by the first woman to publish a book in England, Amelia Bassano. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, her volume of poems, had been written from a woman’s point of view, defending Eve, thought to have caused sin in the mortal world. Bassano had gone largely unrecognized due to her gender, but that hadn’t stopped her from writing. Jet had now rediscovered this second book no one but its users knew about, Amelia Bassano’s private Grimoire, an ode to the Dark Art sometimes referred to as a Book of Shadows. It was a volume made up of equal parts love and revenge, meant to help a woman in need, a woman who’d been cursed, who was in love, who was desperate, who was at the end of her life and the end of her rope. On the very first page Un desiderio was written in pale blue ink. One wish. That was what the book promised to grant its reader.
Amelia Bassano was the daughter of a Jew from Venice, from a family of musicians who had lived on the outskirts of power, attached to the court of England, where she learned more than most educated men about politics and falconry and music and myth. At the age of thirteen she’d been a mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s patron of the theater, said to be Anne Boleyn’s son, and she was said to have had an affair with Christopher Marlowe, who had taught her the art of writing for the theater. Language was everything. Trust was for fools. Love came and went. Words could be stolen. There were those who said she was the Dark Lady William Shakespeare wrote about and that it was she who taught him to write plays. There had always been rumors that he had loved her, but in this book she claimed even more. She had not only taught him how to write, she had written the plays.
The last chapter of The Book of the Raven was titled “How to End a Curse.”
I didn’t know that what you sent into the world came back to you threefold, and that I would be the one to suffer. To begin a curse is done with ease, to break it takes a great sacrifice.
Everything worthwhile is dangerous.
Jet could hear Sally returning books to the shelves in the travel section; fortunately she was too far away for her to observe Jet slip the slim volume into her coat pocket, then hastily replace the brick in the wall, her hands now stained with blood and mortar. Sally might have seen the abnormality in the wall had she been able to see the color red, but as it was, she was still disconnected from her emotions, and had walked past it daily without a glance. She’d never once noticed what was right in front of her.
* * *
Gillian and her nieces drove up from Cambridge, leaving before rush-hour traffic set in. The sky was bright and blue and the magnolias were so spectacular that people from all over the commonwealth came to gawk as soon as the buds began to bloom in creamy cups.
“Home sweet home,” Gillian said when she and Antonia and Kylie unfolded themselves from her black and white Mini, which, considering how huge Antonia was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, could not have fit anything more than the three women and a tray of heirloom tomato seedlings called Blue Zebra that Gillian had brought for her aunt Jet.
Jet had always been especially fond of Gillian, despite the fact that Gilly had been a wild girl who had looked for trouble in her youth, and had made certain to find it. Sally had pulled her back from the brink, and Gillian would always be grateful to her sister.
But that was long ago, and Gillian had learned her lesson. She blushed when recalling her mistakes and all those dreadful men she’d taken up with; she had long ago come to understand she was entitled to kindness and comfort. Gillian had thought she was through with love, until she’d met Ben Frye. He’d been her niece’s science teacher, the opposite of the men she’d gone for in the past, steady and earnest and kindhearted. She still laughed to think he’d been attracted to her because of her ability to work complex figures in her head. Halfway through her life, she’d been lucky in love. She’d avoided the curse by following the rules. Don’t live together, don’t declare your love, no wedding rings, no displays of affection in public. Ben had been puzzled and somewhat hurt by these strange traditions.