Chapter Eleven #2
“Late as usual,” the sister-in-law called Kit commented.
“Oh, leave the boy alone,” the other one, Cynthia, suggested, giving Jamie a peck on the cheek.
Ava realized her choice of makeup had been a mistake.
She had on black eyeliner and red lipstick, and all the women in the Mather family seemed to favor a palette of muted colors; they were demure in style, their blond hair swept up, their lips blushing pink.
Ava was glad she was wearing Lauren’s black Chanel dress with gold buttons, patent leather heels, and the cashmere coat that was beyond critique.
Jamie’s father and brothers were throwing a football around on the back lawn.
Ava had been teaching Jamie ornithomancy, the practice of predicting the future by observing the flight patterns of birds, an ancient art of divination.
If the birds flew to the right, the answer to a question would be yes.
To the left, the answer was no. Now, when his brothers motioned for him to come outside and join the game, Jamie noticed a bird flying against the wind, a sign that someone nearby might not be trustworthy and that it was best to be wary.
The birds drifted to the left, and Jamie stayed where he was.
“Hey, asshole,” his brother Brent shouted. “Come join us.”
Jamie acted as if he hadn’t heard, but he had, and perhaps that was what set the tone for the rest of the day.
There were greetings all around when they at last gathered in the kitchen, and a bit of a dustup when the Labrador retrievers caught sight of Jack, who growled and was immediately relegated to the second floor, where he would be kept in Jamie’s old bedroom.
“You can stay up there, too,” Jamie’s mother, Louise, told Ava.
“Jamie can stay in one of the servants’ rooms.”
Although servants no longer lived in the house, there was a warren of tiny rooms in the attic where maids and a butler had once lodged, and it was a running joke in the family that the one who exhibited the worst behavior over the holidays would have to stay there.
The men, who had stopped for a drink in the parlor, were now hustled into the huge dining room just before the appetizers were served.
“So, this is the unlucky girl you’ve managed to drag here,” Brent remarked with what he clearly thought was charm. He looked Ava up and down, eyes narrowed, impressed by how gorgeous she was.
“What do you think you’re looking at?” Jamie said, his hackles raised.
“If you don’t know, you must be blind,” Brent shot back.
“Boys,” Louise said, accustomed to being a referee. They’ll grow up and stop, she always told herself, but that had turned out to be untrue.
“Get out while you can,” the middle brother, Sawyer, told Ava, who was already flushed and uncomfortable.
Both brothers were lawyers who worked in their father’s firm on State Street in Boston.
They always jockeyed over who was at the top of their father’s list, and Paul Mather clearly enjoyed their jabs at one another, for he considered intimidation a skill.
“Let her be,” Mr. Mather said. His words were friendly, but his tone was not. He was imposing and cold, especially when he nodded at Jamie. “How lucky we are that you grace us with your presence.”
Jamie had already begun drinking, and when Ava gave him a look he didn’t stop.
She’d been served a glass of wine, which she’d gulped down too quickly, so she felt tipsy.
Halfway through dinner and a second glass, she was utterly light-headed.
“I don’t usually drink,” she said, interrupting a conversation about a vacation in Nantucket, and everyone turned to look at her in chilly silence.
She could not have felt more awkward or ill at ease.
Even the Chanel dress didn’t help. She was the apple orchard girl from Maine who didn’t know how to behave at a proper dinner, and they knew it. They could see right through her.
All through the holiday meal the brothers teased Jamie, and he soon dropped his usual arrogant attitude and said nothing, eyes downcast. Ava found herself wishing she had known him when he was a little boy.
She could have spirited him away from this place.
They could have followed the fox into the woods; they would have never looked back.
There was a world that was meant for them, but this wasn’t it.
“How are your classes?” Mr. Mather asked Jamie.
“Don’t you mean how many is he flunking?” Brent, the more obnoxious of the brothers, said mockingly.
Jamie shook his head, as if he regretted what he was about to do. “My apologies on behalf of the assholes at the table,” he said to Ava before he stood and stomped off. They could all hear the front door slam as he left the house.
Now alone with the family, Ava blinked and said nothing.
She felt parched and tossed down another glass of wine far too quickly.
She’d thought nothing could be worse than Christmases at home, where the food was always terrible and no one spoke, but she’d been wrong.
Being at the Mathers’ table was so uncomfortable that Ava didn’t say another word all through dinner and found herself shifting in her seat until Paul Mather said, “I hear a rustling. Is there a mouse loose in here?” He gave her a sharp look.
“No,” Ava said. “It’s me.”
“She needs a nickname. We can call her Mouse,” the horrible Brent said, and Sawyer agreed, as always, but the sisters-in-law laughed and told Brent not to provoke their guest. All the same, when Ava stood up to leave the table, he called out “Bye, Mouse.”
Ava wished this brother of Jamie’s would get what he deserved.
She whispered a shatter spell, even though she knew that magic should never be used for revenge, and had been taught at Sunday meetings that whatever you sent out into the world came back three times over.
But it was too late to take back her wish; the wineglass had shattered in Brent’s hand.
All around the table there were gasps, and the brothers’ wives made sure none of the shards were on the table.
Paul Mather narrowed his eyes and stared at her.
“Be careful,” Ava advised Brent as she went down the hall to the kitchen. She was more furious with herself for losing her temper than she was with any of the Mathers.
The housekeeper had the day off, so Ava slipped on rubber gloves, rinsed off plates, and piled them up on the dish rack.
She took an onion and chopped it into four pieces, the skin still on, so it would cleanse the atmosphere.
She then washed the sink with salt and water and peppermint soap, a good way to banish arguments.
“You don’t have to clean up,” Louise told her, after she’d followed the girl, embarrassed by her family’s behavior.
“No trouble.” Ava felt as if she were the help, just as she’d been at Eliot House, and so she might as well act the part.
The men were playing cards, except for Jamie, who’d come back to get Jack from the bedroom to take him for a walk.
“My son is not like other people,” Louise Mather said, eager to make amends.
“He hides his true self because he’s so easily hurt.
” She surprised Ava by taking Ava’s hand, the left hand, where the eleventh finger had once been.
Louise Mather had seen who her visitor was the moment she walked in the door.
“I think you understand him the way someone else wouldn’t. ”
“He’s magic,” Ava said softly.
“Exactly. I did him a disservice when I pretended he was something he wasn’t, but I was protecting him.
” She looked closely at Ava and could see that she possessed a strength that Mrs. Mather herself had been lacking.
“You won’t do that, I can tell. You won’t let him get away with everything the way I did. I babied him.”
“You’re a mother, he’s your baby, it makes perfect sense,” Ava said.
“I can see he was smart to pick you,” Louise said admiringly.
“Oh, he didn’t.” Of that, Ava was certain. “I picked him.”
“Just know my husband won’t accept it,” Louse said. “He’ll figure out who you are. He’ll keep Jamie away from you.”
“I don’t think it’s his choice,” Ava found herself saying. “It’s ours.”
While the family began to play a vicious after-dinner round of poker, Ava was left on her own in the enormous house, relieved to have been forgotten by the family.
She took the opportunity to snoop around in the library.
There were several very old volumes, and Ava found herself drawn to a leather-bound book she quickly grabbed off the shelf.
The text had been handwritten in the seventeenth century and documented births and deaths in the family.
When she paged through, she found a white feather, and then, to her surprise, a letter written by Cotton Mather.
It occurred to her that the librarians at Harvard would go mad with joy if they were told of her find, but when she read the letter, she knew she must leave it where it was, for it contained pure evil.
I have taken care of Rose Bridewell. There will be no more magic.
Shocked, Ava went up to Jamie’s childhood bedroom, got into the old-fashioned iron bed, and slipped beneath the blankets.
She wondered what they had done to the first witch of Cambridge.
Being in this house felt like a betrayal of the women who had suffered at Cotton Mather’s hands.
Ava turned off the lights and fell asleep on what had been Jamie’s boyhood bed.
She dreamed of the white crow in the elm tree who couldn’t find his way back to his beloved.
She was running through the wild wood, her feet bleeding, her heart broken.