The women stared at each other. To come this far alone, a woman must be willing to take a risk. What she wants she must want desperately. Maria wished to have nothing to do with the pains of love; still her heart went out to Anne. In point of fact, this wasn’t love, but love gone wrong, a different story entirely.

“What did you have in mind?” Maria asked.

“I need poison,” Anne said softly, her chin up, her eyes meeting Maria’s.

There were many toxic potions that could be made from the local plants: hogweed, lily of the valley, castor bean, tansy, bittersweet nightshade, mountain laurel, yew leaf, white baneberry, henberry, horse nettle, pokeberry, pure cyanide in the pits of wild cherries. But what was done could not be undone, and vengeance always returned to its maker.

“Neither one of us wants death on our hands,” Maria told her. “It would come back to us and extract a price we wouldn’t want to pay.”

Anne’s eyes were swollen from crying. “How then am I to be rid of him?”

“You have to be certain this is what you want.” Maria looked over her shoulder. Faith was still sleeping peacefully. “Once he’s gone, he won’t return.”

Anne Hatch smiled then, the first smile in a very long time. She was ready to begin.

Maria had Anne cut a lock of her hair to burn in a brass dish. This was the end of an old life and the beginning of a new one, and the transition must be marked. From black cloth and red thread a small poppet was fashioned, stuffed with blackthorn and cherry bark, and then Anne’s husband’s name, Nathaniel, was stitched upon the cloth. Anne pierced her finger in the process and her blood stained the cloth, but she had bled many times before on her husband’s behalf. The incantation for the end of love was written on a slip of paper that she attached to a candle that burned brightly.

Let our bond be broken by the powers above. You will wish to run, and you won’t look back. When I look for you, nothing will remain. You will not remember me and you will be nothing to me.

This was magic that needed words, for literary magic held the greatest power. Once home, Anne was to bury the poppet outside her front door, then burn the incantation and walk the perimeter of their property, laying down the ashes. When she went inside the house, she must dust his clothes with salt.

“This will drive him away,” Maria said. “Once he leaves, his fate is his own and neither you nor I are responsible for what happens then.”