Children of Salem

The following day in the village

Jeremiah had gotten back to the parsonage the night before at so late an hour as to have found everyone fast asleep, and not wishing to disturb the house, he’d discovered the stable empty, and bedding down his horse, he decided to sleep here. He had given only slight curiosity to the whereabouts of Tituba, but he had been far too weary to concern himself beyond a thought. The night’s storm had abated somewhat when, shadowing Serena, he’d seen that she’d indeed gotten safely back home. From the Nurse home, he’d ridden back to the village, the euphoria of having made love to Serena crowding out every other thought.

Asleep in the hay this morning, dreaming of Serena and undisturbed by the mewling of animals and chickens clucking about him, Jeremy was rudely awakened by the booting of one Reverend Samuel Parris, insisting that the young apprentice go with him once again to the troubled Putnam home.

Jeremy, eyes still encrusted with sleep, brushing away straw from his clothes as they went, asked in a tone reminiscent of Mrs. Parris on the subject of the Putnams: “What is it this time?”

“Appears a regular demon inside that niece of mine.”

“Mercy or Mary?”

“Mercy. They’ve evidence she’s corrupting their daughter, Anne.”

“Corrupting? How?”

“Please, sir, don’t be naïve. How do you imagine?”

“Ah, I see.” Jeremy knew that corruption was a euphemism for any sexual contact outside of a man’s bearing children with his wife. Something he himself was guilty of now, but if this feeling for what he and Serena had was corrupt, then he privately asked for more corruption.

They arrived at the Putnam doorstep, the trip uneventful—no street altercation between Parris and Goode or any other of his parishioners—and Jeremy, still woozy from lack of sleep and all that’d happened the night before, thanked God for that. Even now set on this grave business at this grim house, all he could think of were the welcoming arms of his love.

At the same time, facing the stout Putnam door before them, Jeremy again wondered at the noticeable absence of Tituba Indian from the barn, and now the seeming disappearance of the old bottle collector, a typical sight about Salem streets this time of day, as it was early mornings that Goode went about trash piles. However, Jeremy believed it wise to not bring up either ‘lady’ at the moment.

Mrs Putnam opened the door this time, dark circles like gray coal sludge deepening her sad eyes. Inside the cramped little Putnam home, Thomas and his wife had the two girls standing at attention and awaiting the ministers. Parris immediately took charge, going to Mercy and pinning her by the ear. He began not a lecture but an exorcism of sorts so far as Jeremy could see.

Parris first made the girl kneel before the fire, then to stare hard into the flames. So close was Mercy’s face to the hearth fire that her skin glowed and reddened.

“The devil loves fire, Mercy! The devil wants to boil all of us in his churning sea of flame and brimestone, and you, child, are well on your way! Confess now of your sins, Mercy, and be done with it!”

“I didn’t do nothin’ to confess!” Mercy defiantly cried out, despite the heat so close to her cheeks and eyes as to make Jeremy fear a cinder might blind her.

“Confess and Satan can do no harm!”

Putnam took this up like a chant. “Confess! Confess and the Devil himself can do you no harm! Parris held her by the neck now, the flames licking closer toward Mercy as if curious and interested in the child. “Through contrition and pleading God’s merciful help, we rid you of this devil plaguing you!”

“Leave her alone!” shouted the scrawny, bird-legged Anne Junior, rushing at Jeremiah and grabbing his hand, pleading, “Don’t hurt Mercy! She’s my only friend! Please don’t let them hurt her!”

This prompted Jeremy to intervene. “Reverend, you’ll blind the child so near to the flames!”

“Then blind she’ll be if necessary!” he shouted back. “Whatever it takes to rid the devil that plays within’er!”

“She’s a child, sir!”

“A possessed child!” He pushed Jeremy out of his way and forced Mercy’s already reddened face back toward the flames. “We have my black servant and old Goode under lock and key for bringing this child and others to Satan! So don’t interfere, Mr. Wakely!”

“Tituba? Goode, locked away?” Jeremy asked. “But I saw Goode only last night wandering about the storm like a mad-hatter.”

“Williard rounded her up. Warrants’ve been sworn out against the two of ’em!”

Mercy’s singed hair filled the room with a bad odor, and Mercy began a horrid screaming as her torso and face felt the flames, even as burning embers from the hearth continued to sizzle her long, red hair. Jeremy rushed back to snatch the crazed Parris off the child when suddenly Mercy began a ratcheting, stuttering growl that came up from deep within, and she suddenly began gasping, her body heaving and convulsing until vomit spewed forth in a rich brown gruel looking like something dredged from an outhouse.

The Putnams and little Anne had jumped back, and Jeremy held himself in check, but Parris grabbed Mercy by the neck and pushed the girl’s face toward her own vomit and shouted, “There! There it is in its raw, ugly form! The demon has leapt into the flames, leaving a vile residue of itself!”

Mercy continued spitting and spewing and attempted to pull away from her uncle’s grasp.

“Enough!” Jeremy shouted.

“Thom! Get the dustbin and sweeper!” Parris’ huge hands flew about his head like two angry birds.

Putnam shouted, “What?”

“Do it! Sweep the vile stuff up and cast it into the flames after the source that your home be rid of it! The smoke will take it up and out the chimney, man!”

Putnam, fearful, stood with dustbin and broom, shaking. Mrs. Putnam grabbed these items from her husband. “For God’s sake, Thomas! I’ll do it.”

Do-as-Parris-says appeared the watchword here, and Jeremiah caught his glare, as he had dared to interfere. Parris still held Mercy in his grasp, and he spoke to Mrs. Putnam as she ‘handled’ the demonic residue, working it into the black dustbin, careful not to come into contact with the brown gruel.

Parris told her, “Leave not a trace of it in your home!”

Parris, triumphant the moment Anne Carr Putnam cast the vile juices of Satan into the flames, finally released Mercy, who, simpering and panting, her face scorched by the fames, crawled into a corner in the manner of a frightened animal. Young Anne took tentative steps toward Mercy, but her mother swiftly lifted the black, wrought iron dustbin like a stout wall between the two children. Mother Putnam then asked, “Reverend Parris, do you think now that it is safe for these two children to hug as normal children might?”

“I do not think so, Goodwife Putnam. I know so. You saw for yourself the result of my exorcism of the demon. Poor Mercy, all this time misunderstood and maligned.” He patted her red head several times, Mercy flinching with each touch.

Thomas straightened as if at attention. “Seen it with our own eyes, even your apprentice can attest to it, right, Mr. Wakely?”

Jeremy sucked in a deep breath of air, frustrated as the superstition of the backwoods people and how adroitly Parris played this instrument. “Yes, yes, Goodman Putnam. We all saw it.”

Something in his tone caught Mrs. Putnam’s ire. “Did you not, Mr. Wakely?”

Back to the wall on the point, Jeremy, knowing he must remain the doting apprentice a little longer, nodded as vigorously as he could muster, but at the same time, he could muster no sincere words of agreement.

“Rest assured, this child is without an evil bone now,” came Parris’ final word on the subject. He then shook Putnam’s hand and bowed to Mrs. Putnam. With a quick glance at Mercy, still in a ball in the corner with Anne holding her, Parris bid the family adieu. Jeremy, too, glanced back at the sad little scene of the two girls in the corner. They had the look of a pair of trapped animals.

On the street and in public view, Samuel Parris lambasted Jeremiah, shouting at the top of his lungs. “You are here to back me up, not to challenge my—”

“I’m sorry, but I feared the girl’s hair afire, sir!”

“Quiet! I’ve not finished.”

“Sorry, sir.” Jeremy fell silent, thinking, how much more cow-towing to this miscreant can I stomach?

“You weren’t sent here to undermine, to question or raise doubt, or—”

“But isn’t it in the nature of theology to ques—”

“Never! Not in my philosophy are you to-to knowingly challenge my word or my procedure, to destabilize, demoralize or dishearten or deflate my efforts, Jer—Mr. Wakely! Is that clear?”

“Sir, I am not one of your servants!”

“You are my apprentice, which by definition makes you my inferior, young man, and if I deem you a servant, then you shall be a servant—”

“I serve only God, sir,” he retaliated, immediately sorry but he could not stop himself. “God and truth! And what I saw inside the Putnam home is—was—hardly truth. More like a parlor trick.”

Parris took him aside and between two buildings for more privacy. “Aye, to some degree, yes, I confess. A parlor trick as you call it, but Jeremy, you see its effectiveness. Its efficacy, my boy! You must see that!”

“Then you agree with me?” asked Jeremy, his jaw set.

Parris frowned at this. Then he gave out with a light, birdlike chuckle. “I suppose I do. That is to say, yes, we do agree on something at last.”

“To use such superstitions, Mr. Parris, it can only, in the long run, perpetuate superstitious notions and misleading beliefs.”

“Damn it man, can you for a fact say that the devil is not the root cause of illness in body, mind, and soul?”

“No, but by the same token—”

“That the Sly One is not behind all corruption?”

“—but in terrifying children—”

“Can you say it is not so?”

“No, but—”

“Not our finest physicians, judges, or theologians know the answer to that—not even Increase Mather. I’ve read his sermons!”

Jeremy gritted his teeth, but to end the friction over this event, he quietly nodded and muttered, “Agreed, sir.”

They continued homeward, Parris slapping Jeremy on the back now. “Just in future, man, always, always back me up.”

“Yes, of course.” Jeremy must maintain his cover, but it tasted like bile.

“Good, good. You’re about to have another opportunity to back me, Goodfriend, sooner than you realize.”

“Oh? Has it to do with the Goode woman and Tituba Indian being arrested?”

“It has all to do with those two conniving wenches and the problems plaguing both this parish and my house.”

“Can you be more precise, sir?”

“I’m afraid somehow—I know not precisely how—they have poisoned Betty.”

“Poisoned?” Now Jeremy stopped Parris, taking hold of his arm.

“Poisoned her small body, her mind, and perhaps her soul.”

“But I thought it just a recurrence of her fever, the ague?”

“The doctor is with her now.”

“Do you really suspect Tituba of harming your child?”

“I do. I do indeed now.”

Even as he asked, Jeremy recalled the likeness of Betty in Goode’s possession. “But to poison a minister’s daughter?”

“Brazen, I know. I fear Tituba, in league with Goode, meant some tainted food for me, but Betty ingested it instead.”

“But I’ve watched Tituba with the child, and she seems to love her.”

“As I said, it was likely an accident, the poison meant for me, but now I fear Tituba’s gone completely over . . . in league with Goode, I tell you. Joined to harm me through the child.”

“I find it so hard to believe.”

“There is ample evidence, and who better than one with access to my morning and evening meal?”

“Evidence? Do you have the tainted food?”

“Better yet, I have Tituba’s confession.”

“She’s confessed to harming the girl?”

“Put up to it by Goode, yes.”

“M’god.” Jeremy hadn’t seen this coming, and yet all the signs were there. The missing sword from over Parris’ hearth mysteriously gone, mysteriously returned, the so-called chicken blood stain on the floor, the witch pie that was meant to solve problems of being bewitched, but which could contain worse things than a ‘witch’s urine’, say like blood, bile, tainted crushed meats. There’d been no reluctance on Tituba’s part to take to the stable, a place where she may or may not have continued her dark plan with Goode.

Jeremy recalled the bloodstained straw. And what about Betty Parris? Had she been lured outside to the barn to witness a ‘blood sacrifice’ and to be told that the Black Man who carried his Black Bible, the minister of Satan himself, had written Betty’s name in his god-awful book, because she had been a bad girl with Mercy?

All supposition on Jeremy’s part. All enough to hang a witch so far as a man like Samuel Parris was concerned. His target was Goode, but he’d take out another, his Barbados servant with Goode, if necessary.

Parris again started toward their destination. He kept fingering some paper folded lengthwise and posited in his inside breast pocket.

As they continued in silence, Jeremy gave a moment’s thought to the rights of an accused witch in New England. Here the law of England prevailed, despite the overthrow of Governor Andros, which had left things in such disarray that Increase Mather must go to the new King of England—himself seated after a revolution coinciding with what had occurred in the colonies, law must prevail. Guilty until proven innocent ruled, but Goode and Tituba did have some rights: the right to face accusers, the right to a speedy trial, the right to a rope rather than being burned at the stake—considered barbarous. After all, witch or no, they remained English citizens, under the law.

“We’ll burn that bitch Goode at the stake,” Parris blurted out as they neared the parish house, but rather than go in the gate, he kept going, Jeremy trying to keep up. Parris’ face had become red. His remark about putting witches to the torch informed Jeremy that Parris knew less of the law than he’d pretended. However, this was no time to correct the man. If Jeremy wished to avoid another lecture on the horrors of disagreement, and the absolute need to concur with one Samuel Parris, he must choose his battles wisely. For the moment, he simply wondered where they were going.

“Tituba will also feel the full brunt of the law,” continued Parris, “but at least she has brains ’nough to’ve confessed.”

“So-ah . . . when were they apprehended?” began Jeremy, slogging onward. “And where’re these wretches being held?”

“Last night, during your strange absence, sir.” They passed the barn where inside Dancer still waited for feed. “As to where they’re being kept? Where do you suppose?”

“Your root cellar? The village jailhouse?”

He wheeled on Jeremy. “Absolutely not. This is no simple civil matter, Jeremy.”

“Salem Town Jail?” A place for pirates, thieves, cutthroats, and murderers, Jeremy thought. He also thought about the sudden, swift progression of things here, and knew that by placing Goode and Tituba into Salem Town Jail that he had automatically upped the ante. There was a village jail where they might have been housed, but to house them at the Town sent the message that they were not simple miscreants who’d be dealt with by the church assize or the village civil court, but rather the criminal court. It made Jeremy wonder how long had Parris been preparing to hatch these complaints and arrests? Which launched a vivid memory of that first night when Parris may well have seized upon the moment of Jeremy’s arrival to encourage Tituba’s contacts with Goode by putting his servant out of the house.

Jeremy recalled how he had protested her treatment at the time, saying that he’d be perfectly willing to take the stable that first night. Tituba Indian had gone from living beneath the stairwell like a cur, to living with the dumb animals in the stable, to living in a filthy, disease-infected jail cell the likes of which was the worst in Jeremy’s experience anywhere—save for the hovel that passed for a jail in the village.

In fact, the quick progression from housekeeper-servant to enemy of the family, and now the colony, had so many levels as to resemble the layers of an onion; Jeremy could not help but wonder just how much of it might be manipulation on the part of Samuel Parris—how to get rid of not one major thorn in his side, Goode, but a second, Tituba with one fell swoop.

Jeremy also wondered about the nature and weight of the so-called evidence against Goode and Tituba might be: a doll in the likeness stuck full with pins? A portion of witch pie? The minister’s sword? What? But Parris had also spoken of a confession. How many bruises, welts, and waves of the whip, had it taken to elicit this confession?

But for now he must keep step with Parris, who did not go toward his barn or orchard but onward toward the center of the village.

“Curious, Samuel, but have you anything beyond the black woman’s confession?”

“I do.” He nodded vigorously as if he’d discovered the secret of youth. “I do.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“You will in due time; in due time, everyone will.”

Jeremy wondered what he meant by everyone? Everyone in the village? Salem Harbor? The entire colony of Massachusetts? He also wondered what Parris meant about revelations yet to come? “What possible revelations, Samuel, can be had in this matter if everyone in the village already accepts that Sarah Goode is a bona-fide witch who works in both white magic and black?”

Parris again stopped but this time he posted a notice on a post outside Ingersoll’s. He’d brought his own small hammer and pocketful of tacks, unseen until now. Jeremy assumed it was a birth notice and paid no attention to the document except to see that Parris had another copy yet in his pocket.

Again they were on the march, this time straight across the street, going back toward the parish house and barn, where Jeremy hoped to feed Dancer and find a quiet moment to weigh all that had happened in so short a time.

“She’s a blackhearted witch, that Goode,” Parris shouted to anyone passing by. “Everyone’s heard her curses on me!”

“But as I say—” Jeremy tugged at his sleeve—“the village knows that Goode is, was, and always will be.”

“A witch, yes!”

“A witch she has always been, sir. No surprise in it. One in every village, accepted as part of village life, sir.”

Parris’ lips curled in an inscrutable smile, and he repeated some of Jeremy’s words. “Always a witch, raised a pagan by her mother.”

“That’s what people say.”

“And raising her child the same—the reason I took the child from her!”

“Everyone knows that as well, sir.”

“Despite a front of her being a Christian by joining the village parish—so long ago no one recalls the event—the woman continues to practice her agnostic, heretical practices.”

Jeremy read the hatred that’d taken root between the lines in Parris’ little speech. “So what do you propose happens to Tituba?”

“She’ll burn, by damn, right alongside Goode!” Parris wheeled in the middle of he street, shouting it for all to hear. “She’s a traitor to me, to my family, and to God ’imself.”

“Witches and convicted traitors get the rope in English law, sir. Besides, you say she’s confessed.”

“Traitors to God are burned at the stake!”

Perhaps in Romania, Germany still, Great Britain hundreds of years before, thought Jeremy, but he didn’t wish to argue. Apparently, no one’s informed Parris that you don’t burn people in modern day Massachusetts, that the King’s colony extended to its citizens the laws of England, and that the days of witch hunts and witch burnings were long over.

Jeremy realized that they hadn’t returned to the parish house but to the meetinghouse where Parris busied himself again with tacks and notice. This time, Jeremy took a moment to read what the minister had prepared. The notice proclaimed two witches had been discovered operating in the Devil’s arts and arrested within the village limits.

Jeremy noticed a gathering crowd around the notice put up at Ingersoll’s now. He realized that the village was filling up with the curious by the minute. How business at Ingersoll’s was suddenly booming. Some congregated about Ingersoll’s steps, while others on the street came for the meetinghouse door, anxious to read the minister’s words. In fact, word had already spread of the warrants sworn out and the arrests of Goodwife Goode and Tituba Indian—the two witches named in the warrants and now publicly posted.

Jeremiah had seen and felt such electrified air once before, in a hamlet along the Connecticut River. The mob had lynched a witch in that instance. No trials, no delays, just a lynching of a perceived threat, and he and every sensible man present, counted on one hand, could do nothing to stop the violence. In fact, Jeremy had suffered a concussion when he had stepped in and tried.

“I’d like to interview Tituba, sir,” he said to Parris who looked stricken at the suggestion. “You say she’s confessed, so I’m sure she’ll not burn at the stake or hang for that matter, and I should like to learn as much from her as I might—about how these dark measures can seep into the thoughts of a servant.”

“You beware, Jeremy, lest she taint you. I suggest you keep your distance. She’s not fully confessed.”

Is this a confession on your part? Jeremy wanted to ask but thought it wise to simply listen.

“I mean, Tituba’s only confessed to an association with Goode whom we know to be guilty beyond question.”

“Tituba confesses only to entering into a covenant with Goode?”

“Thus far, yes.”

“A conspiracy to make your child fall ill?” Jeremy again recalled the strange doll that he’d seen in Goode’s possession not once but twice.

Parris looked off into the distance as if studying the Nurse homes nestled a-ways off. “But that Barbados black knows more, Jeremy . . . far more. And I will break her. Make no mistake about that.”

Chapter Eighteen

April 13, 1692, late evening

Two weeks had passed and tonight at the village home of Judge John Corwin, Jeremiah Wakely sipped brandy where he stood at the hearth fire. Corwin had opened his wine cellar and brandy cabinet to his guests, and none had more spirits in the village than did the judge. Jeremy stared hard at the accused witch, Tituba Indian, who was bound hand and foot to a chair in the middle of the common room. Her back made stiff by the ladder-back chair that’d become a part of her, she quietly wept as the men talked of the weather, the poor crop season, the news from Boston and London, and little Betty Parris’ condition, which had, like a disease, begun to infect other village children, most notably Mary Wolcott and Mercy Lewis, the minister’s nieces, and Anne Putnam Junior, the daughter of a militia lieutenant and deacon in Parris’ church. Furthermore, as Putnam and Parris were related, and so too the children, it appeared on the surface an attack against a single godly family of the village parish.

People were aghast at the notion that bewitchment could be so contagious but somewhat pleased to think it directed at one family and not everyone in the Salem.

“Don’t you see the pattern here?” Parris burst out when Judge Jonathan Hathorne suggested a medical condition and mentioned the lack of proper medical people in the village, and that he’d never had any relief at any time in his own ailments from Dr. Porter.

“But sirs,” continued Parris, palms extended in a plea, “they strike at my daughter, nieces, I tell you, and now my cousin’s daughter!” Parris paced and ranted. “Who’ll be next? Your honor’s grandchildren? Not that I’d wish it ’pon anyone’s child but if they dare strike at a minister, why not a magistrate like yourself?”

Hathorne stricken features at the suggestion spoke of sheer horror.

Parris continued. “I tell you this is Satan transformed, working through the weak-minded Goode and this—” he pointed at the bound Tituba—“this disturbed and misguided servant of mine.”

The sheriff had escorted Tituba to the Judge’s house in chains. The chains remained rattling about the thin woman now as she heaved with fear and whimpering.

“So you see it as a run at us from the Devil himself, Mr. Parris,” said Mr. Noyes, who’d been caring for Reverend Higginson and taking up the slack at the First Church of Salem Town.

“Aye, precisely what it is!” Parris turned on Noyes, who’d come as eyes and ears for the ill and bedridden Reverend Nehemiah Higginson.

Jeremy had carefully watched Noyes, trying to ascertain if he did or did not have Reverend Higginson’s complete trust—if he did or did not support Samuel Parris’ bid for the parsonage deed. If he did or did not know of Jeremy’s ruse.

So far, Jeremy feared Noyes a noisy little man not capable of forming his own opinion on the matter of the threat to Salem either way—be it Parris or the forces of the much-touted forces of the Invisible World. So far, as with Judge Hathorne, Parris handily led the man.

In fact, Noyes—and it seemed both village civil magistrates, Corwin and Hathorne—were all too willing to follow Parris’ twisted logic as he spewed forth his version of events. He even recounted the parlor trick that day at the Putnam hearth when he “exorcised” a pile of vomit from a frightened child.

Not one of these supposed learned men had questioned a single precept or assumption that Parris had laid before them.

Outside yet another drenching winter rain had settled over a sodden gray Salem. Corwin’s home and jurisdiction extended only to the village limits, whereas Hathorne’s bench was in Salem Town, but both courts handled small claims and suits, and whenever a case smacked of a theological matter, the judges bowed to the churches to conduct their own trials, as in the decision to excommunicate Sarah Goode and to divest her of her child. Corwin had signed off on that bit of justice.

If a farmer believed by some means his cart wheel had been sabotaged by a neighbor, if his cows, hens, pigs, or sheep had been bewitched, if his crops had in any manner been tampered with—often the claim being witchcraft or devilish chicanery and curse—again Corwin and Hathorne acted in the best interest of everyone by keeping it a local matter and most often a church assize matter, wherein the church elders and minister made the final ruling on a matter.

At the same time, Jeremy knew that such magistrates earned their living by the number of cases they decided. All quite loose for a ‘system of government’, and Jeremy was often aghast at what provincial judges moved forward with—cases that should never have seen the light of day.

Even so, Jeremiah Wakely hoped and fervently believed that the judges of Salem would nip Parris’ fiery claims in the bud, here and now, tonight. Before this witch-hunt went any further or got out of hand. After all, Corwin and Hathorne were the two wise men in this, Jeremy told himself. But he had misgivings. It seemed everyone was following Parris’ lead like so many puppets on a string, and so he cleared his throat and commented.

“Gentlemen, I have seen this sort of thing in Maine and in Connecticut, and I can tell you that you do not want to turn matter into a spectator sport.”

“Sport? You talk of sport?” countered Parris immediately. “What’re you saying, Mr. Wakely.

“I am saying that to feed fears of witchcraft among us to the general population only breeds the worst kind of chaos, and you might well have lynchings and barn burnings on your hands.”

“Mr. Wakely, you of all people,” shouted Parris, charging toward Jeremy. “You’ve seen my daughter’s affliction. You heard what Dr. Porter and Dr. Swain have diagnosed.”

“True I’ve seen her condition, and I did hear Dr. Swain pronounce her beyond his help.”

“Beyond his help? He said the same as Porter—bewitched—which put her condition beyond them both, beyond medical help.”

Jeremy’s last look at Betty had come only hours ago when Parris insisted he see her condtion at its worst. He had for once not exaggerated the circumstances. While Mary Wolcott suffered from fever and nightmares and talking gibberish, Betty’s body lay twisted in poses impossible to imagine or to be believed without one’s having seen it. The girl had gone into a catatonic state. All the same, Jeremy defended his position in a calm manner.

“I am only suggesting that we have a duty, sir, to seek other answers, other solutions, more experienced medical help perhaps . . . before we begin hanging witches from every tree and turning Salem Village into a-a Goya painting.”

“Sound idea,” said Reverend Joseph Hale of nearby Waverly. Hale had entered from the storm late, removing his wet overcoat just as Jeremiah and Parris had crossed swords. “We must go slowly, carefully, gentlemen.”

“Who is Goya?” asked Corwin, pouring himself another brandy.

Parris had cornered Judge Hathorne now and whispered in his ear while the fire at the hearth invited Hale near, spitting embers and blue flame within the red. Flames were tamped now and again by rainwater seeping down the flue. The flames were welcomed by Hale, a tall, good-looking man below the black uniform of minister as he kept up a noisy appreciation of warming his hands.

Jeremy stood near the hearth as well, but the same flames that warmed Hale only recalled Parris phony exorcism to Jeremy’s mind. He imagined Noyes would have applauded Parris’ performance at the Putnam hearth, but he withheld judgment on Hale for now.

Then everyone was surprised when at the door stood the stooped over Reverend Nehemiah Higginson. Young Reverend Noyes immediately flew to him, helping him with his coat and hat. “What, sir, are you thinking? Coming out in this weather? In your condition? You could catch your death.”

“Quiet Nicholas!” The old man was interrupted by a chronic, gut-wrenching cough. “We both know I’ve already caught my death.” More coughing as the others muttered and mumbled their welcoming words to the elder minister. “What little time I have left, I mean to make the best of, gentlemen. Now, please, shall we dispense with curtseys and courtesies, eh? For the sake of time and an old man who has precious little of it?”

“You know the purpose then of our meeting?” asked Jeremy, who had been fawning as if meeting a saint, saying how much he had heard of Higginson’s good works in Salem Town. Meanwhile, Jeremy was thinking: This is the man who’s pinned his final hopes on me.

“I am well aware of the accusations flying about, Mr. Ah . . .Wakely is it? Mr. Parris, are you at all aware of the demons you’ve already let loose?”

“I’ve let loose? Me?”

“Rumor and gossip already has it down, sir, that the village is rife with bewitched children. The population is no longer content with bewitched mules and cows, now it must be children.”

“There’s no gossip about it!” countered Parris, pacing before them. “My child and others’ve fallen victim to witchcraft.”

“And you’re sure of that?” asked Hale.

Parris pointed to the unfortunate Tituba in her bonds. “As sure as you see this witch before us!”

Higginson found a seat for himself, gaffawing as he did so. “Samuel, your house is not in order.”

“Order? Order? What order can there be in a house that’s long before me become a-a fulcrum for attack?”

“And your parish, all of Salem Village, is it all under attack too?”

“I tell you, sir, it is all true! Not rumor. Invited in is He and not by me!”

Higginson’s eyes bore into Parris. “ By He, you refer to Bael, Lucifer, Loki, Beelzebub?”

“He who has many names, yes.”

It seemed Higginson wanted Parris to say it. “He who calls himself Legion?”

“Satan. Yes, the Devil himself, Mr. Higginson.”

Higginson struggled to his feet, Noyes helping at his side. The old man’s cane tapped out an anthem as he moved toward Tituba and circled her prison chair. “You, Mr. Parris, you look on this servant of yours and you see a devil worshipper?”

“Indeed, I do, sir.”

“What of you other men? Mr. Hale, Corwin, Hathorne?” Hale held his tongue. Corwin sipped his brandy. Hathorne shrugged.

“I know what Mr. Noyes believes, sadly I do. He is among the most superstitious men I have ever encountered, but what about you, Mr. Wakely?” asked Higginson. “What do you see looking on this woman of color?”

Jeremy found all eyes on him. “I see a frightened untutored child without Christ.”

“Is that truly what you see, Mr. Wakely? Can you be sure of your senses?”

“I am sure.”

“Anything you wish to add?” Higginson rounded Tituba like a scientist studying a specimen.

“I have it on good authority that a confession was beaten out of the woman.”

“Good authority? What authority?”

“Her master, here, Mr. Parris.”

Parris leapt in, shouting, “I have labored years trying to educate Tituba to Christ’s teaching, and she was doing well for a time. She sat in God’s house with my children and my wife, but some cruel evil filters through this place, a passion for wickedness fanned by my enemies, and they latched onto poor Tituba here to turn her from Christ and from my teachings.”

Higginson understood the twisting, gnarled roots of Parris’ arguments better than any man present. As a result, Parris’ words left the old man cold. The others in the room waited in rapt attention to Higginson’s rebuttal. It came as a long, halting, ratcheting cough.

Fearing the moment lost, Jeremy leapt in. “What Mr. Higginson is saying strikes me as sound. Caution must be taken. Caution must be our watchword.”

“Good,” said Higginson between coughs. “Goode, the woman Sarah Goode is a vile and dirty person whose soul is likely the devil’s own for many years now. Hang her and be done with it, Hathorne. Sacrifice Goode and send everyone home happy, and do it quickly and efficiently, so as to move on with your real duties.”

It’d worked before, Jeremy thought. Throw one sacrificial lamb to the mob and they often went home and tended their farms and the witch-hunt was over. “It’s perhaps our best and only option,” agreed Hale, which lifted the man in Jeremy’s opinion. Better that one should die than two or three or to see this witch hunt multiply.

“Fools, all of you!” countered Parris. “This is not Goode’s doing alone! That old bat has no power to harm me, and yet she has. I ask you from whence this sudden power comes?”

“Of course, a minister attacked,” challenged Hathorne. “This is no simple case, and certainly no simpleton’s curse!”

“What gall it must take to attack a minister’s daughter with their black arts!” agreed Mr. Noyes, shaken. “It could be any one of us next.”

“There is a war raging, and you men sit sipping brandy and talking as if this nigger here is innocent!” added Parris. “I tell you, she and Goode are but the tip end of this iceberg.”

“Don’t go down that road, Samuel!” warned Higginson.

But Parris raced down it. “There’s an entire coven meeting some nights just beyond my apple orchard in those deep woods, and the coven, not Goode or even Tituba here alone’ve cursed our parsonage and parish, but a bevy of ugly-soul’d, devil-worshipping scum!”

Jeremy saw the smooth-faced, young Noyes shiver as he listened to this news.

Hale’s expression, beyond a widening of the eyes, remained unreadable.

Corwin lifted his glass to lips and continued drinking; his reputation had him doing this a great deal of the time.

Hathorne nodded vigorously and went to Parris, standing beside him in a show of solidarity.

Higginson shook his head in what, if put into words, might mean damn fools are at it again.

Jeremy gnashed his teeth, a growing sense that practical and reasonable argument had all but flown up the chimney.

Judge Hathorne stepped to Tituba’s tied and chained form, standing at her shoulder. “Is this how you repay your master, girl? Harming his child with your ugly friend Goode and her coven?”

“I don’t do voodoo ‘gainst Betty! Not me! Goode! Goode do it.”

“Goode and who else?” interrogated Hathorne, his thinning dark hair streaked with gray, his steely eyes coming round to match her stare, to read her.

“I don’t know none of dem. I don’t go wid dem.”

“Ignorant, eh? Ignorant and innocent?”

“Yes, massa. Innocent.”

The small black woman wore a simple gray cotton dress and sat on the edge of her chair, pulling at her bonds. Anyone could see she was in pain from the scars on her back, scars inflicted by Parris’ whip. Jeremy wondered where the beating had taken place. He imagined it had gone on at the jail, a black dungeon built into the side of a hill away from polite society. Jeremiah had seen jail cells in every community he’d ever been to and nothing compared in depravity to the Salem jails; they were little more than rat holes. The jailkeeper was a rat-faced, filthy man named Weed Gatter and if ever a man looked the devil, this one did.

Hathorne circled Tituba now as he continued to interrogate her, looking down his nose at her as if looking on trash. Jeremy wondered if the judge kept his distance due to her being trash, or the possibility she was a witch.

Tituba tried at first to follow Hathorne with her eyes, but this proved impossible as he circled. Jeremy wondered at the complete loss of her former pride and fire. All gone. Beaten from her. She’d gone from lioness to cowed house cat.

Hathorne came in close behind this submissive Tituba, and he shouted into her ear, making her jump. “We will brook no more lies, girl!”

“I already say hundred time, I don’t do it!”

“Lies! More lies!”

“Goode and her witches do it!”

Higginson slammed his cane across one of Corwin’s tables, the sound like a gunshot. “I was given to understand, Mr. Parris, that this Bermuda Indian woman of yours is a witness, yet you are treating her as a threat? Locked in chains? Educate me, please.”

“That was the original report, sir,” replied Parris, “but the crisis has deepened and changed.”

“Evidence against the woman has increased,” added Hathorne.

It was the first moment that Jeremy was privy to the fact that all these men had met on this matter before tonight. That this night’s meeting was a continuation of suspicion of witchcraft running rampant in the village. Was this the information that old Higginson had wanted to convey to him before he entered the village that first night? The information that had never come?

“What evidence do you have that condemns this woman before us now?” asked Jeremiah, emboldened by Higginson’s example.

“Goode tells a different story,” replied Parris, staring out at the rain-soaked village. “According to the old bat, Tituba here created the conditions necessary to the efficacy of the coven’s curse on my house.”

Jeremy thought of the doll stuck with pins, the sword, the blood at the hearth, and the blood in the barn.

“—And what Mr. Parris calls a deepening of the crisis,” added Hathorne, a hand on his buttons, “refers to a terrifying increase in the number of children in the village suddenly and inexplicably afflicted in the same manner as his daughter.”

“I’ve heard rumors, but who?” asked Hale, going stiff at the fireplace. “Whose children?”

Parris turned from the window and his thoughts. “My niece, Mary Wolcott under my roof, exhibiting signs, and my other niece, Mercy Lewis, in the Putnam household, along with the Putnam girl.”

“Oh, poor woman, that Mrs. Putnam,” moaned Corwin, “to have this put upon her after enduring so much.” Corwin swallowed more Brandy.”

“Thomas Putnam’s child is it?” asked Hale, who has his own flock to worry about in Waverly. “Thank God we’ve had no such troubles in our village.”

“Convulsions and fits she endures, the little one,” continued Parris.

Higginson held a hand up. “Hold, that child’s been afflicted in one manner or another all her life.”

“Not my Mercy and not my Mary but they’re falling prey to the same fits and discontent and disobedience!”

“Mary Wolcott, Mercy Lewis, Anne Putnam, Betty Parris,” Noyes quietly enumerated. “I heard too that Bray Wilkins’ maidservant, the Sheldon girl, that she’s of a sudden down with an awful sickness, too. Perhaps she’s also under attack by invisible forces?”

Parris nodded solemnly. “It is spreading like a disease, I tell you. It is a disease, one spawned of Hades.”

“Attack the children,” mumbled a frightened Noyes.

“It’s what the Fallen Angel does,” declared Parris. “Attack the weakest among us.”

Shaking his head, Noyes added, “Exactly as the books tell us how He will come with his invisible minions.”

Jeremy didn’t like the way this was going.

“How many children must suffer and die before we take action?” cried out Parris.

“By what stretch do you prove death and murder, Mr. Parris?” asked Higginson.

“I point to Thomas Putnam’s nine dead children, and it can’t be long before my own is dead of her contortions and afflictions. Thomas Putnam’s also informs me same as Noyes here of a young girl named Susana Sheldon, also showing signs of it. He has seen her up at Will’s Hill, Wilkins’ place. I am told, she had been seen in the company of Sarah Goode.”

“In all the years no one has ever suspected foul play in the deaths of the Putnam children, so why now?” pressed Higginson, fire in his ancient eyes.

“It has taken an outsider to see it clearly,” countered Parris, going to the old minister and standing over him where he sat. “It took me, sir.”

“I see. So now you can see into the Invisible World of Satan?”

“I have it on authority of those arrested, Goode and Tituba here, that those Putnam infants were murdered by those who midwifed at what should’ve been their birthing.”

“Confessions beaten from an addled hag and a frightened servant?” asked Jeremy, going to Hathorne t plead for logic. “You can’t trust a confession tortured from a man or woman.”

“You stay out of this, Mr. Wakely,” Parris said, rushing at him, their noses nearly touching. “You are not one of us, and you have no stake here.”

“You said yourself it might take an outsider’s eye here, Mr. Parris.” No one challenged this, not even Higginson. Jeremy dared continue. “Your evidence of murder of the Putnam unborn appears as flimsy as blank parchment, sir.”

“I have more evidence. Much more.”

“Then reveal it.” Higginson tapped his cane hard on the floor.

“Very well.” Parris went to a door, opened it and called to someone in an anteroom to come in. “I’d hoped to spare the children this, but you press my hand, Mr. Higginson, you and Wakely. Though I know not why.”

From the anteroom, Thomas Putnam ushered in both his charge—Mercy Lewis—and his daughter, Anne, to stand before the ministers and the magistrates. “We’re here to give in evidence,” said Putnam as if he’d practiced the line.

I’ll bet you are, Jeremy thought but held his tongue.

Higginson shook his head. “These, I suppose, are two of the so-called afflicted girls?”

“Two of the bewitched, sir, yes,” replied Putnam. “Me daughter and Mr. Parris’ niece, Anne and Mercy beseech you, sirs, respectfully so.”

The girls both looked as if they’d not bathed since Mercy had been taught her lesson by Parris at the hearth; in fact, the two girls appeared so disheveled they might’ve been in a fight with one another just before coming here.

Higginson stepped close to the two children, who huddled together. It seemed to Jeremy that they were working hard to not meet Tituba’s eyes even as they stole glances her way. Seeing Tituba in chains and bonds seemed to have a chilling effect on the girls, or so Jeremy secretly prayed. This situation needed a bucket of cold water thrown on it. Perhaps Parris had just overplayed his hand.

“And I thought not to see any Mercy here tonight,” Higginson attempted to lighten the moment, but it could not be done. “And here is Mercy genuflecting and respectfully doing so. Two lovely children, Mr. Putnam, Mr. Parris, and you believe them witches, too?”

“No, no sir. You have it wrong,” complained Putnam. “These girls are victims of cruel witchcraft at its foulest, the sort that’s killed my other children!”