Hannah glanced away, as she did when she didn’t wish to reveal her emotions. But she needn’t have bothered attempting to hide her sorrow, for Maria could sense what a person was feeling so strongly she might as well have been able to hear someone’s deepest fears and wishes spoken aloud.

“It can’t be,” Maria decided.

“It was for me,” Hannah told her.

“And for me?”

“You looked in the black mirror. What did you see?”

It was a private matter, but this was a time for truth rather than privacy. “I saw a daughter.”

“Did you now? Then you’ll be a fortunate woman.”

“And a man who brought me diamonds.”

Hannah laughed out loud. There they were in their ragged clothes, half a day’s walk from the nearest village, with nothing precious between them, save for their wits and Maria’s stolen hairpin, as far away from a man with diamonds as they could be.

“I wouldn’t be surprised by anything that happened to you, my girl,” Hannah told Maria. “But I believe you will be amazed at the turns of fate, as we all are when it comes to our own lives, even when we have the sight.”

A church bell rang miles away. Maria had never been to the closest village; she had never seen the blacksmith’s shop where irons were cast, and knew nothing of constables, or churchwardens, or toll-takers, or surgeons who believed in using leeches and live worms and foxes’ lungs as cures, and medical men who disdained folk remedies. Hannah placed her faith in washing her hands with clean water and her strong black soap before any examination, and because of this she lost far fewer patients. None, as a matter of fact, except those who were too far gone for any remedy, for things without remedy must be without regard. She made her own black soap every March, enough to last the year long, burning wood from rowans and hazelwoods for the ashes that would form her lye, using licorice-infused oil, honey, and clove, adding dried lavender for luck and rosemary for remembrance. Ladles of liquid soap were poured into wooden molds, where they hardened into bars. Maria had written down the recipe in her Grimoire, for this soap was most often asked for by the women from town. They said a woman grew younger each time she used it; if she had sorrows the soap washed them away, and if there was an illness in the house it would not spread, for the herbs in the soap defeated fevers and chills. It was the sort of recipe one could add to however one saw fit. Mistletoe for those who wished for children. Vervain to escape one’s enemies. Black mustard seed to repel nightmares. Lilac for love.