Kylie was stopped cold. Her need for the book twisted inside her, a snake that circled her heart. That is how left-handed magic began, with a desire that matters more than anything else. “I’m the person who’s come for it.”
Miss Hardwick took a well-measured pause before she said, “I had the impression she meant Franny.” Then the librarian shrugged. The less she had to do with crotchety Franny Owens the better. “But now it seems that someone is you.”
Miss Hardwick led Kylie to the section that housed the oldest manuscripts set inside glass cases in the rear of the rare-books room. The temperature here was always set at sixty-five, with a humidity level of fifty percent, for such texts needed a cool, dark place. The library’s greatest treasure was a first-edition copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems, published in 1890, of which only five hundred copies had been printed, found by Isabelle Owens at a flea market in Pittsfield. There was also an envelope on which the poet had scrawled the beginning of a poem in her birdlike scrawl, discovered at the same used-book stall one lucky October day.
One Heart instructed to be Two—
As Lightning splits a Tree—
Can be—but No one knows
The Truth of it—
Except for Thee and me.
Harvard University had done its best to claim the scrap for its Emily Dickinson Collection, but the Owens Library had refused to hand it over. There was also a rare first edition of Wuthering Heights, the same printing that had recently sold at auction in London for six figures. To see these volumes and other treasures, a patron must have Miss Hardwick sit beside them, for she alone could turn the pages, wearing white cotton gloves. As for Emily’s scrap, the librarian visited it every day, merely to check on its well-being.
As they approached a glass case at the very rear of the room, Kylie heard something rustling, much like the wingbeats of a bird. There was a collection of magic books here, one that most of the library’s patrons never noticed. Sally had considered ridding the library of all magical texts, but Franny and Jet had insisted they stay, and so they’d remained, uncatalogued and out of the way, collected by Maria Owens’s daughter, Faith, who had traveled to New York and London in search of such volumes. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, written in 1584, contained lists of charms and conjurations, all while trying to convince the reader that there was no such creature as a witch. Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches, a feminist retelling of the creation story that included folk medicine and magic from Italy. The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, filled with folktales, an exploration of witchcraft in the ancient world.
Kylie ran her hand along the books, but eager as she was to find the book Jet had hidden, the text escaped her.
“We made it difficult to find,” Miss Hardwick said. “It’s not for just anyone, you know.”
Miss Hardwick led Kylie to the book Jet had placed on the shelf on her seventh day when she ran out of the house to attend to the last mission of her life. The library door had been unlocked, and Jet had discovered Miss Hardwick passed out at her desk; she often fainted when a dip occurred in her blood sugar before she could leave for the Black Rabbit and have her drink and a platter of fries. She sometimes forgot to eat lunch and the results were such spells. Jet had swiftly taken hold of the Owenses’ first-aid kit, which included garlic and ginger and smelling salts.
“Can you keep a secret?” Jet had asked once Miss Hardwick had been revived.
The hour was late, and when Miss Hardwick nodded, Jet confided that she was adding a book to the library’s acquisitions and that at some point her sister might come to retrieve it. It had been there waiting ever since, a black book meant for a woman in need, ready to be found by the person who was willing to do whatever was necessary to save someone she loved. The book was filled with Black Magic, dangerous not only to the intended subject of the Dark Art, but to the practitioner as well. What you send into the world would come back to you three times over, for good or for evil. Maria Owens could not bring herself to destroy the book, written with so much care and longing, and neither could Jet.