chapter 7

Best of al , no one in this university town knew me, and if there were witches in the city that summer, they stayed wel away. I returned home, declared a major in history, took al the required courses in record time, and graduated with honors before I turned twenty.

When I decided to pursue my doctorate, Oxford was my first choice among the possible programs. My specialty was the history of science, and my research focused on the period when science supplanted magic-the age when astrology and witch-hunts yielded to Newton and universal laws. The search for a rational order in nature, rather than a supernatural one, mirrored my own efforts to stay away from what was hidden. The lines I'd already drawn between what went on in my mind and what I carried in my blood grew more distinct.

My Aunt Sarah had snorted when she heard of my decision to specialize in seventeenth-century chemistry.

Her bright red hair was an outward sign of her quick temper and sharp tongue. She was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense witch who commanded a room as soon as she entered it. A pil ar of the Madison community, Sarah was often cal ed in to manage things when there was a crisis, large or smal , in town. We were on much better terms now that I wasn't subjected to a daily dose of her keen observations on human frailty and inconsistency.

Though we were separated by hundreds of miles, Sarah thought my latest attempts to avoid magic were laughable -and told me so. "We used to cal that alchemy," she said.

"There's a lot of magic in it."

"No, there's not," I protested hotly. The whole point of my work was to show how scientific this pursuit real y was.

"Alchemy tel s us about the growth of experimentation, not the search for a magical elixir that turns lead into gold and makes people immortal."

"If you say so," Sarah said doubtful y. "But it's a pretty strange subject to choose if you're trying to pass as human."

After earning my degree, I fought fiercely for a spot on the faculty at Yale, the only place that was more English than England. Col eagues warned that I had little chance of being granted tenure. I churned out two books, won a handful of prizes, and col ected some research grants.

Then I received tenure and proved everyone wrong.

More important, my life was now my own. No one in my department, not even the historians of early America, connected my last name with that of the first Salem woman executed for witchcraft in 1692. To preserve my hard-won autonomy, I continued to keep any hint of magic or witchcraft out of my life. Of course there were exceptions, like the time I'd drawn on one of Sarah's spel s when the washing machine wouldn't stop fil ing with water and threatened to flood my smal apartment on Wooster Square. Nobody's perfect.