Chapter Two #2
When they went inside, Lionel made them hot chocolate.
To anyone watching, it would have seemed the day was like any other.
But it wasn’t. Lauren had changed, the joy she’d had inside had dissolved, and the notion of love now seemed ridiculous to her.
By the time their grandmother came into the kitchen, she had already decided to hide the fact that she felt nothing at all.
On the anniversary of their parents’ deaths, Lauren and Lionel walked the paths in Mount Auburn Cemetery, bringing along food for the dead—olive oil, springwater, and honey—so that the spirits of those who had passed would know they were loved and remembered.
Mount Auburn was the first garden cemetery in the country, created in 1831 out of a seventy-two-acre farm.
The glorious landscape was meant to remind visitors that even after a loved one’s death there was still beauty to be found in the world.
The extraordinary grounds had been inspired by the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, filled with Gothic and Neoclassical monuments that looked at eternity as not an end but a beginning.
There were hundreds of species of trees, some to be found nowhere else in New England, along with botanic gardens and an arboretum.
The landscape was so glorious that when Emily Dickinson visited, at the age of sixteen, she wrote about her experience at Mount Auburn in a letter: It seems as if Nature had formed the spot with a distinct idea in view of its being a resting place for her children, where wearied if you believed in magic, if you were different, if you spoke your mind, if you loved someone you weren’t supposed to, they would come after you.
They used spectral evidence in courtrooms, evidence that was nothing more than gossip and hearsay, just as they had in Salem three centuries earlier.
Books were removed from libraries, actors were blacklisted, women had no power over their own bodies.
The government was especially suspicious of the city of Cambridge, home to poets and professors, known for progressive thought ever since the first witch of Cambridge had made the city safe for their kind.
But safety lasted only so long, and every witch needed to remember the past as she walked into her own future, for what had been could come again.
In the days after their grandmother’s passing, Lauren spent even more time in the family’s vast library of ancient manuscripts.
She felt as bitter as she was hurt, as angry as she was lost. Now that Lillian Bell wasn’t there to guide her, Lauren didn’t have to pretend to be on the healing path that had been set out for her, and she certainly didn’t have to hide the fact that she was drawn to the dark side.
She felt like a creature who was in a cocoon, about to transform into a different sort of being.
After her parents’ deaths she had studied books that would lead her onto the left-handed path of magic.
She read The True Black Magic, also known as The Secret of Secrets, a book so precious the only other copy could be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and she did her best to decipher a manuscript known as The Key of Solomon, a mysterious text written by Jewish magicians on parchment so fragile it was kept under lock and key to ensure the pages wouldn’t disintegrate into ash.
There was also a series of French grimoires with vibrant emerald-colored covers in a shade called Paris green, dyed with copper acetoarsenite, a substance so toxic readers needed to wear gloves, for one could easily be poisoned by even the briefest contact.
Inside there were recipes for elixirs and potions, along with dozens of love spells.