Children of Salem

Chapter Two

Watch Hill, outside Salem Village, same time

Jeremiah Wakely in black riding cape reined in his pale horse and brought the gray-speckled mare to a soft trot. He and Dancer rounded the base of the gravelly hill that Jeremy recognized as Watch Hill. Must be careful . . . discreet. He urged the horse now up the gentle slope beneath the moonlight. Must arrive in Salem Village without notice. “Perhaps an impossibility?” he asked the horse, leaning in to pat the animal.

As Jeremiah and his horse Dancer scaled the ancient hill, he wondered if it had not been a mistake to make this pact with Mather. Wondered if he shouldn’t ‘ve told both ministers the previous night—and in no uncertain terms that he was…what? Uncertain? “Hardly strong enough language for what ails ye tonight, eh, Wakely?” he spoke aloud to himself in the cold night air. Any moment now, he expected to see Higginson coming up the other side of this wretched hill, but so far no sign of the man.

In a pace that stirred so much emotion in Jeremy, he wondered if the Mathers, and now Higginson, had not placed their confidence in his ability to remain neutral and above the fray possible. An attitude necessary to accomplish what amounted to a conspiracy against Reverend Parris. Am I the right man for this affair? Suppose the others are wrong? Suppose I’m the worst possible choice for this grim and complicated undertaking? Am I up to it?

Then there was the fear that had welled up and engorged his heart with every hoof beat bringing him closer to Salem and Serena. His mind played over this fear…played over the moment that he’d most assuredly again lay eyes on her.

The feel of the white steed beneath him sent a slow and easy rhythm through Jeremiah. A calm had settled over man and horse after the full gallop from Boston. Nonetheless, Jeremiah could feel the animal’s heart racing still—a kind of chant, reminding Jeremiah of his mission, its gravitas and significance. More rumor than fact but in earlier attempts to unseat Samuel Parris, people had fallen gravely ill and others had died—some said of poison, some pointed to poisoned thoughts, while others cried witchcraft! After all, a minister who practiced magic was not altogether unheard of in Salem as people there recalled Reverend George Burroughs who on occasion had performed magic tricks and displays of so-called superhuman strength at the altar.

Coincidence or not, the latest and most outspoken of Parris’ critics was none other than Rebecca Nurse, Serena’s mother, who—if word could be believed was herself abed with a condition bordering on death. Of course, there might be no connection whatsoever, but it smelled mightily to some, and it raised suspicious minds to a fevered pitch, especially as Serena’s father, Francis, had also been an outspoken member of the group opposing Parris. Odd for certain, yet not surprising that Serena’s family—serious churchgoers—would be in the thick of any parish business. It amounted to yet another reason why Jeremy questioned his ability to pass fair judgment one way or the other.

Regardless here he was, poised to enter the fray himself. And regardless of how he was selected or why, he’d soon enter that cursed village of ill memory; enter it along a dirty cow path west of Ipswich Road.

Man and horse reached the summit of Watch Hill, a place where once, as a boy Jeremiah Wakely worked for the village and room and board at Deacon Nathaniel Ingersoll’s Inn and Apoethcary. As a scrawny boy, Jeremy guarded the entire expanse of what had been called Salem Farms. He stood watch, prepared to torch a bonfire and to ring a huge bell so large it’d been mounted on a heavy oaken frame. Jeremy had been proud in those days—acting as eyes and ears against the then troubling pagans of the bush as Ingersoll, his overseer, had routinely called the native Massachusetts Indians.

Bonfire and bell were long gone now. In their place a scorched area of earth that looked for all the world to be the remnants of a pagan dance altar what with that familiar spike of a boulder squarely in it. Jeremy took in the old place even as he cursed the apparent absence of Nehemia Higginson. He had expected the creaky old minister to have taken the easier approach on the northwest side in a comfortable buggy, but no sign of horse, buggy, or minister. Groaning aloud, he scanned the distance all round from the top of Watch Hill. No sign whatsoever of the aged minister reported back.

It appeared the decrepit minister had broken off their meeting, and he’d so hoped to inform Higginson of the many misgivings bouncing about in his head—to confess his strong ties with the Nurses and Serena, to plead for a postponement, and to bring in another man for this employment. It was as if Higginson feared just this might occur—as if the wiley old gentleman had surmised that Jeremy might question his mission, and so the old man chose to stay away and leave him no counsel.

“Nothing I can prove, mind you,” he said to Dancer, “but it certainly feels we’ve been prematurely abandoned, girl. Perhaps events beyond Higgison’s control’ve taken over.”

He now saw in the distance the whole of Salem Farms—the lands stretching along the Ipswich Road and the valley, the most prominent being the Nurse family compound and homes.

He’d meant to avoid the Nurse family home, but how? It stood between Salem Town and Salem Village, and their land holdings had increased enormously in the decade he’d been away—as he’d kept an eye on the court records. The Nurse family compound had in fact quadrupled, making any effort to go around out of the question. The Ipswich Road would take him to within feet of the front porch of the old homestead, whereas the back road, the cow path, also cut through Nurse property, but it was the lesser of two evils tonight.

Jeremiah stood high in the stirrups now, allowing himself a moment to stare down at the old main house. Beautiful old place really, and it held many memories for him.

The original home sat nestled in the crook of a split forge, roughly the shape of an anvil. It stood sentinel between the Frost Fish and Crane rivers, tributaries of a peninsula stretching from Salem Harbor and the seaport. These waterways made the land rich and easy to work, affording two speedy avenues to harbor trade, even when frozen over. Anyone living along the Ipswich road had that avenue overland. The Nurse-Cloyse clan had the Ipswich road and the waterways, as did Giles and Martha Corey with their nearby gristmill at the terminus of a third tributary of the Woolston River called the Cow House.

Jeremiah recalled playing about the Corey mill with Serena and her brothers; recalled how Serena loved to watch the giant wheel turn with the force of the Cow House current. The memory created a sad refrain in his mind’s eye: the image of children at play on that last day he’d gone splashing in the Frost Fish with Serena, the beautiful, youngest Nurse daughter. He recalled a glorious memory of them canoeing, too, sometimes with one or more of her brothers at hand, and her father or mother watching from shore.

With the breeze tugging at his hat and cape, Jeremy gave a thought to a time when the Nurses had informally made him one of theirs. For years he’d helped them work this land. This after Jeremiah’s excommunicated father, a poor dish turner by trade, had died of consumption—or had it been of a broken heart?

Jeremiah’s father, John Wakely, had died a few years after the loss of his second wife to cholera. Her death came shortly after the villagers voted to shun their family for his father’s having married outside the faith—to a French woman no less. Jeremiah’s birth mother had died in labor, a not uncommon end in the colonies.

“’Twas the Nurse family took me in, Dancer.” Jeremiah spoke to his horse, stroking the mane. “Showed mercy they did. But at the time, I was so damnably angry at the world. I threw it back in their faces.” His memories turned to regret. “Hurt everyone who loved me, especially Serena.”

Even her name caused his heart to stir. People in Salem, and Puritans in general, named their children after desired traits: Piety, Charity, Chastity, Fidelity, Serenity. Men were saddled with Biblical names from Moses to Solomon, Ezekiel to Abraham, but saddled too often with Prosperity, Industry, Honor, Loyalty, Alacrity, Remorse, Steadfast, Wisdom, and Increase—qualities praised in biblical text. Go forth and Increase as certainly Mather had with thirteen children, despite the large percentage who’d not made it to manhood. Mather’s certainly increased around his middle over the years, to be sure! Jeremy laughed aloud at the thought.

The problem with naming an infant such a thing as Redemption was that it asked mere men to live up to such names. With these thoughts and biding time for Higginson’s arrival, Jeremy said to Dancer, “I’m a lucky one, eh girl? No Industry for me! All I need do is spread word of dreadful tidings!” Jeremiah’s reference was to his namesake, a biblical-doomsday-prophet, the man who had foreseen the captivity of the Israelites in Babylon and the fall of Judah and Jerusalem. Salem itself derived from Jerusalem, meaning place of peace. “What an irony there is in that? And why am I talking to you? What does a horse know of irony?

So…here I am alone again. Holding tight to the reins, he dismounted. Dancer snorted and scratched at the ground when suddenly her head came up, ears pricked. What did she hear? Higginson approaching? But just as quickly, the horse settled back to searching the bare earth here for tufts of grass to feed on. Jeremy stroked her neck and back to soothe her jitters. Perhaps the wind had frightened her as it’d begun to whip his cape and burn his exposed skin. A light dusting of gritty, hard snow and sleet had begun to add to his misery as well.

Under the moon, which came and went, he again scanned for the old minister but saw no clue. Instead, his eye fell on the light at the Nurse home, and he imagined the warmth of the once familiar hearth down below in the lush green meadow. A life he’d forfeited. Dancer tugged at his hold, pulling to nibble at grass shoots about her hooves. Jeremy imagined that his horse must be curious as to why they’d held here, in the middle of nowhere with a cold night becoming colder by the minute, and her master staring out across the empty land. Dancer’s forelocks had relaxed, but her skin remained lathered from the long ride and a visible chill rippled through her. Jeremy imagined the horse must think their journey at an end, that they’d remain here, finished for the night.

Growing more and more impatient and dubious of Higginson’s coming, Jeremy thought of how long he’d been working for the Boston authorities—seven years now.

Jeremiah had left Salem to seek out a wider world and a trade, and to become worthy of Serena’s hand, worthy in her parents’ eyes, and not just some ‘foundling’ or stable hand. He kneeled and lifted a handful of dirt in his black glove, allowing it to sift through his fingers. “Home it is…yet it never was.”

Along with his musings, the biting night air began to chill, and a light dusting of feathery snow began to trickle down, large flakes contrasting sharply against the black minister’s cloak he wore.

He let go the reins, rose and clamored high on the altar-shaped pinnacle of stone, his boots slick. From this vantage point, the wind cutting, biting, he stared out at the road, hoping to see movement toward his position. “Nothing. Where the deuce is that man?”

How much longer do I give it before deciding that, for whatever reason, the minister isn’t rendezvousing with the likes of me after all. Perhaps the man was sick and abed. Poison crossed Jeremy’s mind like a shooting dart, followed by another evil of a worse kind. Something had certainly kept him away, but Jeremy didn’t want to believe that Samuel Parris of his agents bright enough to have caught on, at least not yet.

“Perhaps old Nehemiah came earlier and we simply missed him,” he suggested to the horse and leapt back to earth from his stone perch. “Else the man fell asleep over his brandy at the fireplace.” Rumor had it that Higginson enjoyed drink, and why not? He was on his last leg. “Likely be of little help in this stew he’s stirred up!”

The horse snorted as if in answer. Jeremy erupted with a guffaw. “Well we’re fools to sit here any longer,” he muttered and remounted. He then eased Dancer down the slope for the back road into the village, starting out for the home of Reverend Samuel Parris armed with very little information save the rough outline of a family tree that connected Parris’ house with that of the Porters and the Putnams.

Jeremiah had just gotten up to full gallop when suddenly Dancer reared, frightened. As Jeremiah fought to control his animal, he searched for the source of the animal’s fear. He scanned for a slithering snake, but there was none to be seen. He listened for the sound of a night bird—anything. Only the windswept snow reported back. But then out of the dimness and what seemed a reasonless fog, Jeremiah caught snatches of a walking flurry of rags and rattling bells and bottles tied about a woman’s neck; home-made charms to ward off evil. A crone of unspeakable ugliness with a face of pockmarks and welts, some looking to explode with pus so large and pulsating did the pustules appear under the shimmering moonlight.

Showing herself from behind a gnarled bush, the old crone turned and spat at the noisy, rearing horse, unafraid. But on seeing Jeremiah in black cloak astride the horse, she chanted a mantra to save herself. “It’s you! The black one himself! Gawd save me but master, I am yours.” She had gone to her knees, bowing and scraping at the earth.

On hearing the aged voice, Jeremiah recognized the toothless, tobacco-smoking oddity known hereabouts even when he was a child as Salem’s own witch—old Sarah Goode. As close to a living, walking, talking witch as Salem ever had; even as a boy, he’d been warned to steer clear of Goode. But now a grown man and all he’d seen of witch hangings along the Connecticut River Valley and up in Maine, he did not believe in witches. He believed in frightful old crones like this, disease-spreading, walking corpses, yes, but not witches who rode astride magical brooms about the wending clouds.

“Careful, me lady!” But his sarcasm was lost on her. Who travels afoot on a night like this, and at such an hour?

She cursed under her breath, mumbling and climbing up to her feet as if rolling a log. She then stared up at the horse and rider, and finally, raised a tightly balled fist to the horse’s snout. “You’re a horse! And you up there,” she called to Jeremy as if he were a mile distant, “you are only a man!”

“I am indeed!” Jeremy could not hold back a chuckle.

“Arrrgh! A pox on ye then, and ye cursed animal, too!” She’d decided he was human and not satanic after all. Her tone and rancor proved as much.

For a moment, Jeremiah thought he saw a small babe with blonde hair held tightly against Goode’s breast when in the next instant he recognized it as a stiff wooden doll. Next moment, Jeremiah wondered where Goode had gotten off to; she’d simply disappeared as quickly and as quietly as she’d appeared through the grim veil of night.

“From out of nowhere to into nowhere,” he muttered and patted Dancer, trying to soothe the still shaken animal. “Easy girl . . . easy. That Goode, she’s always been an addled one.” At least, he could comfort himself with one certainty: the first person of Salem Village he’d come across knew naught of his past ties to the village, but the old crone and everyone else would know soon enough.

Jeremy set his heels to his mount, and they were off again for the home of one Samuel Parris, the parsonage home that had remained in legal limbo now for three years.

Gratefully, he saw no more of Goode or any other living creature as the moon, like a galleon, slipped behind restless clouds the color of Jeremiah’s cloak just as the Salem Town clock down at the seaport rumbled and struck a single bell: 1AM.

He’d delayed an hour in wait for Higginson and for what? In order to run down a mad woman named Goode? “God works in mysterious ways,” he muttered to the wind.

He and Dancer now followed the north-south confluence of the river—one of several tributaries that spiked like fingers from Salem Harbor all the way to Bridget Bishop’s Inn. And very near the little shack that’d been the Wakely home, which doubled as a dish-turner shop so long ago. Various rivers here created a boggy backwash in winter and a backwater flood in spring and fall. Four tributaries in all ran into the wider, fast-flowing Woolston, which in turn ran past the First Church of Salem Harbor. Finally, the Woolston fed into the salt-water inlet to mingle with the ebb and flow of the Atlantic where lay an exquisite, perfect, natural jetty that made for an unequalled seaport in the New World.

In fact, every whaler and cargo ship arriving at the Crown Colonies stopped here before going on to Boston. Salem was the port-of-call in the Bay Colonies. Salem Harbor thrived. Commerce served in the seaport town inlet well, while God served the distant and dark, tree-ringed Salem Village, which looked surreal to Jeremy now as he entered this historically troubled place.

He walked Dancer now with the horses’ characteristic high step past a bevy of modest cabins and saltbox homes of clapboard siding, past Ingersoll’s Inn and Apothecary, and past the village common to halt before the meetinghouse and nearby parsonage home and outbuildings. What he stared at from horseback represented a plot of land hotly contested. A plot most recently carved out by Samuel Parris as his—a contested parish house and meeting hall, which had split the parish down the middle over what was right and what was wrong. A contest that had for too long tied up the courts and troubled the ecclesiastical authorities in Boston.

With the snow creating see-through ghostly dervishes before him, Jeremy searched for Samuel Parris’ doorstep.

Chapter Three

At the parsonage door in Salem Village, 1:20AM, March 7, 1692

A stocky, short man, nonetheless Reverend Samuel Parris felt the walls of the small parish home—his property by way of contractual agreement with his flock—closing in on him. The stairwell proved so tight that Parris could hardly make it up the narrow passage to his daughter’s room, where he looked in on little Betty, who’d been battling a fever—symptoms of an ague so often seen in little ones. Betty slept fitfully, as if assailed by nightmares, but at least she slept. Her cousin, the Reverend’s niece, slept too but in a separate bed in the corner.

Every inch of space was accounted for and filled.

Parris slammed a balled fist into his palm and muttered, “Damn my bloody dissenting brethren.” He referred to a faction within his flock. People who resented him and begrudged him this ordinary place with its modest yard and orchard, hardly large enough for his family, hardly more than a common Barbados army barracks. Yet many– too many–begrudged him. Nearly half the village parishioners in fact, and they’d taken to withholding tithes and fees and his rate. As a result, he’d had to find other means of support.

If his rage were given full vent it’d keep him pacing all night, so he attempted to calm himself. At least and at last, he’d found a place to finally settle his family—wife, child, niece, and his once exotic black servant, a Barbados acquisition, named Tituba, whose last name was unpronounceable in English, so he’d had her Christianized and given the last name of Indian. After all, she was Indian native to Barbados.

Parris gave some thought to how little he’d accumulated in life; how little he’d accomplished, and how often he’d failed. One venture after another gone bad. Now it was threatening to happen again. At my age, I simply can’t allow it!

His appointment three years earlier as minister in Salem, Massachusetts was to be his last adventure, and the parsonage his last home. He wanted it to work. Wanted it badly . . . worst than any desire he’d ever held. He’d struggled to become a community leader here, an influential voice, and the spiritual guide in Salem Village.

The Select Village Committee had given him the parsonage house and lands in perpetuity. And yet it was being questioned. Suits were being drawn up against him. The courts might soon be arbiter over his life, thanks in large part to a handful of litigious and arrogant landholders—men who had theirs who wished to deny him his! This scrubby little plot—a mere clump of relatively worthless earth.

Tonight he’d wandered the house from top to bottom and from cubicle to crevice, worried. He’d looked in on everyone, especially checking on Tituba who’d been sneaking out of late. But thankfully, everyone was abed, mother, daughter, niece, servant and his usually squawking bird. He felt a pang of relief at having gotten Mercy—his delinquent niece—out of his home, but she’d been replaced with yet another niece, Mary Wolcott, and he feared Mary might be just as useless as Mercy’d been. Still, he’d had no choice. This rotating of young women and boys among the parishioners was part of his duties, and as such, he collected a tithe on each child for his trouble.

Samuel wound up back in his small room, as he no longer slept in the same bed as his wife Elizabeth. He gritted his teeth at the thought of her snoring and sleeplessness. He gritted even harder at the thought of those in his parish who’d decided to do everything in their power to break what he judged a binding legal contract. True none of the other nearby municipalities—Andover, Ipswich, Wenham, Topsfield, Rowley, or Beverly—had ever relinquished their common parish lands to a minister.

True that ministers were viewed as itinerants who didn’t customarily hold title to their parish homes and lands, but this was after all part and parcel of a package of promises made to him. He meant to hold the people who had sent their emissaries to Barbados to recruit him for their troubled parish accountable. Promises were made. A list of them in fact, one he meant to make them adhere to at any cost.

“Those deacons and elders gave their word—Thomas Putnam, Revelation Porter, Bray Wilkins,” he muttered under his breath. “How was I to know they hadn’t the backing of that nuisance Francis Nurse or John Proctor, from whom they’d broken ranks?”

He suspected too that crotchety old Nehemiah Higginson at the First Church of Salem Town was behind the resurgence of interest in his holdings. The old miscreant was a mischief-maker to be sure. Higginson had, early on, fired up a number of his parishioners against the infamous contract, and now he wanted it settled in his favor before he should pass from this life.

He sat on the edge of his bed, muttering, “Perhaps he’ll die before the court acts. Damn him. A contract is a contract.” He stood and wandered the rooms again. Tight doorways and even the small hardwood furnishings made him feel awkward and obese.

He now pulled a chair to the hearth where embers threatened to leap out at him as they began falling all around, as if filled with a life of their own. A noise from the kitchen area where beneath the steps Tituba Indian slept made him snap to his feet. Going toward the steps, he reached and snatched back the mildewed curtain to expose the thin black woman, Parris half expected to catch her with that black servant of Porter’s, the one who’d been hanging about the house. But no, the male named Moses—also of Barbados—dared not come into this house. No, the noises emanated from a fitful sleep. Tituba rolling over and grumbling unintelligible chanting in her pagan language, but he caught a single English word, a name: Betty, his daughter.

The bony black woman looked to be made of hickory limbs. Nowadays their relationship was merely that of master and servant, and if honest with himself, his shame surrounding this woman had him hating her for what she had taken from him. As for any lingering feelings, he had more concern tonight for the bird and the goats in the barn. He’d atoned so far as he was concerned, and he certainly no longer felt tempted by Tituba. The only thing left between them was a mutual residual anger for what’d occurred years before in Barbados.

Little witch had put him into an untenable position, not simply with his wife but with God.

He returned to the hearth and pulled a book from the bookcase. He owned several books, an Old Testament, a New Testament, and a treatise written by Increase Mather on how the godly life must be led. Parris was, in effect, a man of one book, the Holy Bible. All else paled in his eyes. He strove to live by a strict interpretation of Jehovah’s Ten Commandments and the Pentateuch now as never before.

Parris now took a deep breath and opened his bible to Leviticus, about to read himself into weariness, when he heard a sudden rapping at the parsonage door.

What damned oaf comes at such an hour? Parris mentally shouted. He approached the door, shouted aloud, “Who needs what of me now?” They come to me for all their ills and every petty problem, but do they make my salary?

Each villager’s tithe to him had come slower and slower, until some had stopped altogether, while others paid in pumpkins, squash, oysters, and the occasional lobster. Worse than ordinary thieves, he thought, one hand on the doorknob, his ear against the wood.

Who could it be at such an ungodly hour? Another death in the parish? A sick child who’d wandered from the faith? These Salem people want courtesy and hard work from me, yet they fail me in miserable fashion.

Again three quick, strong raps on the door. From the sound of it, a strong man stood on the other side of the stout door.

“Who is it?” Parris shouted.

“Wakely, sir! My name is Jeremiah…”

“What?” The door still separating them.

“My name is Jermiah Wakely—”

“I know no Wakely!” came the muffled response.

Jeremiah wondered if the minister meant to come through the door with a blazing firearm or hot poker.

“I’ve come from Maine, sir.”

“Maine?”

“By way of Boston, sir!”

“Boston?”

“Have a letter of introduction, Mr. Parris, sir!”

“Letter? A post this time of night? Bah!”

“Can you hear me, sir? Through the door?”

“What letter?”

“From Mather, sir, Reverend Increase Mather.”

This brought on a chill silence. Finally, Parris replied, “Mather? Did you say Increase Mather?”

“I did, sir!” Jeremiah cursed the impenetrable door. He wondered if Parris meant for him to sleep on the porch tonight. “I’d like to settle my horse, sir, in your barn.”

But Parris’ breath had caught in his lungs. Can it be true, he wondered, that the greatest theological mind in the colonies has sent me a letter by midnight courier? Has Mather finally answered my repeated requests for intervention on my behalf? Ha, the delinquent parish members will be well fined now.

“Will you open the door, Reverend?” shouted Jeremiah. “Or shall Mr. Mather’s protégé sleep in your barn?”

What if it’s the Devil at my doorstep? Parris asked himself. This man calling himself Wakely could as well be some evil scratching to get in. The Devil would know that a letter from Mather would tempt him to make an invitation to cross his threshold. “Or has God sent this—what’d he call himself? Protégé?” he muttered aloud.

The pounding continued. So loud in the silent night that it sounded demonic.

Parris braced himself, lit a lantern, and pulled the door open just a crack, staring out at Jeremiah Wakely, who managed a smile. Jeremy then extended a letter with a heavy red wax seal reading IM—for Increase Mather.

The lantern glow divided Wakely’s face down the middle; one side lit bright, the other side in total darkness. The image had a strange, hypnotic hold on his reluctant host. “You look like a highwayman, Mr. Wakely.”

“I am sure, sir, but I am after all in my riding cloak and boots.”

“Give me a moment with the letter.” Parris grabbed the sealed note, pulled it inside, slammed the door closed, locked it from within, and left Jeremy in the drizzle.

Jeremy stepped off the porch and rubbed down his horse’s face. “A careful man,” Jeremy said to Dancer, the horse now shivering in the sleet. Dancer snorted, her entire body quaking when a chill ran the length of her.

The door was then pulled wide. Parris stepped onto the porch, and holding the lantern higher, looked Jeremy and Dancer over with more care. “Lovely animal.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“If you are truly from Mather . . . why do you come in at such an hour? Under darkness? It’ve been best to come in daylight.”

“A bridge was out,” lied Jeremy.

“I would’ve liked my parishioners to see your coming, to know you are here from Mather, and that Mather backs me against my enaaa . . . those who stand against me here.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir. I’m just an apprentice . . . to be apprenticed to you, Mr. Parris, until which time—”

“Apprentice? I thought you simply a courier?” He waved the sealed note in his hand.

“You haven’t read it, sir?”

“I assumed…I mean, seeing the seal and Mather’s signature…well…” Parris gritted his teeth and read by the lantern now held by Jeremy, his riding boots squeaking and wet on the porch boards.

“I am no commoner to be taken in by a forgery; I happen to know that Mather has set sail for England, so how long has this note been circulating?”

“Circulating? No time at all.”

“How long in your possession?”

“I saw him off at the pier in Boston, and I came there by way of Wells, Maine, sir, Casco Bay area.”

“Wells?”

“Maine, Wells is in Maine, sir.”

“And you saw Mather off yesterday?”

“I did, indeed,” he lied only slightly, having missed Increase Mather by a day.

Parris fell silent. “Strange that I should finally get the man’s ear on the eve of his leaving the colonies.”

“He may be a minister but he’s a politician, too, sir—and has wisely placed his son in charge at the North Church.”

“Cotton Mather? Is that supposed to be humorous, Mr. Ahhh . . .”

“Wakely, sir, late of Wells.”

“The Senior Mather, he will be back, of course?”

“Yes, to be sure.”

There was another daunting silence between them. Finally, Jeremiah cleared his parched throat and said, “Mr. Parris, I am aware of your worldliness, sir.”

“You are?”

“That you were a merchant in the West Indies—”

“Yes, Barbados, but what has that to do with—”

“—and a seaman before that. All before becoming an ordained minister at Harvard College.”

“What is your point, man?

“Why that I am…will be honored to work under your tutelage, sir.” Jeremy worked hard to affect the attitude of a novice scholar.

“Indeed…lucky for both of us,” Parris countered.

“Reverend Mather provided me with a modest outline, sir, of your history.”

“He did?”

“Filled me in, yes. It’s one reason that Mr. Mather has linked us, you and I as minister and mentor.”

“Mentor?”

“Protégé, apprentice, sir.”

Parris’ features took on a menacing look. He had assumed the letter from Mather a confirmation of his land holdings in Salem Village. He now placed a pair of rickety old magnifying glasses on his nose so as to truly look at the note—as if searching for what he’d lost in translation.

Jeremy watched his lips move as he read:

Dear Rev. S. Parris 14^th March 1692

Honored Minister at Salem Village Parish –

I present to your care one Jeremiah Wakely prepared to serve as your apprentice and helpmate for a period of six months to a year under your tutelage as favor to the governing body of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and myself, minister, the North Church of Boston.

Mr. Wakley has proven uncommonly sincere, studious, and industrious for one so young. All virtues that will serve well both Salem Village and you, sir. If your independence from the First Church of Salem, Mr. Higginson’s parish, is ever to become a reality, you will require more hands. For Mr. Wakely’s part, he will be working toward his own enlightenment and eventual ordination. Wakely may one day carry the yoke well.

As result, Mr. Parris, you shall both prosper. May your parish continue in peace and tranquility, and may all misunderstandings among your parishoners be resolved.

Your Obedient Servant,

Rev. Increase Mather

Parris heaved the heaviest sigh Jeremy had ever seen before muttering, “Where the deuce’ll you sleep? We have extremely tight quarters here.”

“I can take the stable tonight . . .for now, that is until settled elsewhere.”

Parris hesitated then said, “Don’t be silly.”

“I mean ’till arrangements can be made, I—”

Parris considered this for only a moment before exploding into action, rushing inside, leaving his door swinging open. “Tituba!” he shouted, rushing into the house, leaving the door wide, waking his servant. “Wake up! I want you to prepare a bed in the stable for—”

“For whooo, Massa Reverend?” The dark woman stared hard at the man in black who stood now warming himself at the fire. She looked wide-eyed, frightened of Jeremiah.

“For whom?” replied Parris, correcting her English. “Why for you, for yourself, Tituba.”

It was the first time Jeremiah had heard the woman’s name pronounced, and it was, he thought, rather Shakespearean and melodic: Ti’shuba. The strange, dark woman in shadow repeatedly asked, “What? What I do now? What?”

“You’re to remove yourself tonight to the barn, to sleep out there.” Parris pointed to the door. “Now, out!”

“Out the house? Now?”

“Hold on, sir,” started Jeremy. “I don’t wish to displace anyone.”

“She’s a Barbados black, Mr. Ahhh . . . Wakely, or are you blind and deaf?”

“Even so—”

“My servant. I’ve had her for years.”

“Still, I’m the newcomer here and—”

“Are you questioning my judgment already, young man?”

Samuel Parris had eyes as black as grapes, but no seeds showed in them, not even so much as a twinkle in the lantern light; light which otherwise filled the small rooms here, creating giants of their shadows along with the pinching odor of whale oil.

Tituba did not question her master. After a furtive glance at Jeremiah, and a look of anger flaring up behind the minister’s back, she trundled out, clutching a single woolen blanket and a straw-tick pillow. Parris watched her go down the steps into the drifting snow and icy rain.

“There, Mr. Wakefield, now you have a place below the stairwell.”

Jeremy thought to correct him but decided not now. Instead, he stared at the space below the stairs vacated for him. It looked large enough for a big dog. “Still, I need to stable my horse before retiring, sir.”

“Yes, yes, of course, but steer clear of the servant. She has a dislike for strangers, us ahhh . . . white men in who wear the cloth in particular.”

“Is she not civilized? Christian?”

“Trust me, I’ve done my level best to make her so, however, you can never be sure of the pagan mind. Most inscrutable.”

“I know nothing is harder than to convert a heathen, sir.”

“Clings to her Barbados superstitions.”

“I see. I’ll do then as you suggest.”

“I’ll have the door unlatched for your return. Again, avoid the woman.”

“As you wish.”

“She is a . . . mischief-maker, Mr. Wakely. You are forewarned. Make no small talk with Tituba.”

“As you wish, sir, and as I am fatigued to the bone, all I want is a bed.” Jeremy laughed and stepped back outside and onto the porch knowing that his mandate from Mather dictated that he indeed talk to Tituba. He wondered what, if anything, Tituba knew, overheard, or saw of the comings and goings in the parsonage home, what merchants or ships’ captains she might speak of. Hearing Parris behind him at the door, he repeated the name as it sounded to him, “Ti’shu-ba, yes, to be sure, I’ll not speak with the black woman.”

Chapter Four

The entire time Jeremy spent in the stable unbridling his mare, he felt the cold and icy stare of Tituba Indian square on his neck. She may’ve created a bed of hay, but at least one eye studied him from every angle. He hadn’t a clue what was going through her mind, but he imagined it a complete tale, one he’d like to hear.

After all, this soft-spoken, cat-padding little woman had been around Samuel Parris for more years than most of his flock. She’d come with him and his wife and child from their last known residence, Barbados, where general knowledge had him trading in his sea legs to become a trader, a businessman.

Does Tituba hold the key? She appeared to both fear and hate her master. Not the best of relations.

Jeremy had an enormous task facing him. What had drawn this former merchant of Barbados to Salem? Not the mere promise of the parsonage and its damnably small apple orchard and rickety out buildings? There had to be more.

Jeremy thought of how Parris had ordered the black woman out of her bed as if she were a detested cur. And that look the servant had shot the minister when he turned his back on her—pure, unadulterated hatred and venom.

How that venom came to be, wondered Jeremy.

A great deal could be learned—and thus reported—about a man just in the manner of how he handled those in his care, and those he called his servants, and those he called his congregation.

Jeremy had uncinched and unbridled the horse, and he now placed the saddle on a rail. He used his own bedroll to place across Dancer’s back.

“May I have it?” asked Tituba in a surprisingly resonant, deep voice that filled the small outbuilding.

“May you . . . have what?”

She pointed, her nail like a talon. “Your saddle, Massa . . . ”

“My saddle?”

“For my head rest with pillow.” She lifted her pillow.

“You miss Barbados?” he asked as he placed the saddle where she’d created a bed of hay.

“I do . . . my family all there. My baby, too.”

“You left your baby in Barbados?” Jeremy was incredulous, and he heard Parris’ warning again at the back of his head. “Don’t talk to the woman.” All the more reason to speak to her.

“Dead baby . . . dead an’-an’ buried.”

“I . . . I’m terribly sorry. I can imagine no worse torture on earth than to lose a child.”

“There can be worse.”

“Really?” Jeremiah squinted at her. “Such as?”

Her eyes met his squint. “Not never holding your child, ever.”

“I . . . I don’t understand.”

“N-Nor seeing it.”

“You never saw the child?”

“Not never no.”

Jeremy tried to decipher this; he had a sense that her cryptic words were fraught with meaning. He was about to inquire when Tituba gasped, and her snake eyes fixed him. “Tell me, are you . . . are you de Black Man who comes in darkness?”

“Black Man?”

“De one we keep hearin’ ‘bout in Massa’s sermons.”

“Ah, yes, I mean no! I mean, I see now…understand your confusion, that is.”

“De one who come invisible outta de forest.”

“No, no, Tituba, I am quite human and no spirit or demon or familiar of Satan.”

“De one who makes you sin, and den makes you put your mark in de book—his black book.”

“No, I assure you—”

“A-And once your mark is there, he has your soul, ’less you confess it to God.”

She’s certainly learned the dark side of the Puritan and Christian catechism. “Trapped for all time,” he said, nodding. “I know the belief.”

“For all eternity. So says Massa.”

“Your Master speaks of Satan when he says the Black Man with the Black Book, I know, but I have no book, and I am not black.”

“Yes, de Devil comes lookin’ like a white minister in black cloak.”

Satan may take a pleasing form. Jeremy realized he was dressed entirely in black, from head to toe. “You can be sure, Tituba, I am not Satan or his emissary.”

“Fool!” shouted Parris, standing now at the door, having eavesdropped on them. “I told you not to pay any heed to the heathen. She can’t be redeemed. I’ve done everything. She’s incorrigible. Learns nothing. Nods and nods and says yes a thousand times but understands nothing of Christ or his mercy.”

“I know Christ,” countered Tituba, spitting. “He don’t help me! He take my baby boy!”

Parris ignored this as if not hearing, or as if hearing it too often. “Wakely, I had hoped you’d demonstrate more sense than to get sucked into a conversation about Heaven and Hell with a slave wench.”

“I am not witch!” Tituba came at him. “I am voodoo woman!”

Parris advanced like a jackal and slapped her hard across the face, shouting, “Wench, I said! Not witch!”

Jeremy reacted instinctively, stilling Parris’ hand from inflicting a second blow. He wanted to strike the man and send him to his knees, but such an act would destroy any chance of success here. Instead, he shouted, “It was entirely my fault, Mr. Parris! I should’ve heeded you.”

Parris’ dark eyes bore into Jeremy’s steely gray pools, searching for any sign of deception. With his jaw quivering, and his eyes traveling now to Tituba, he said, “I quite understand, Mr. Wakefield.” There seemed more unsaid between these two than spoken here tonight. Jeremy wanted to hear the minister apologize to the black woman, but he knew that was unlikely.

Instead, Parris spoke now as if nothing had happened. “Now go to sleep, woman, and you, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Wakely, Mr. Parris.”

“Wakely then…come away. Let us all find sleep, shall we, Mr. Wakely.”

Jeremy glanced back at Tituba who wiped blood from her lip onto her nightshirt. He silently looked back at her and thought he saw a crooked smile. Was Tituba secretly pleased at having upset her master? But realizing that Jeremy was looking, her smile instantly vanished.

# # # # #

Jeremy literally followed in Parris’ snow and mud-sucking footsteps as they trudged through the thickening slush back to the parsonage door. Parris missed the excitement at two windows overhead, but Jeremy saw in one an elderly blonde-headed woman, no doubt Mrs. Parris, and at the other second story window two small faces—one a small caricature of Mrs. Parris, the daughter most likely, the other a scarecrow-faced Mercy Lewis, Jeremy assumed. What few notes he had on Parris’ household told him that Mercy Lewis, an orphaned niece, had been taken into the Parris home. His notes had said nothing about the black servant, Tituba. She’d come as a surprise.

Apparently, Jeremy’s arrival, and the subsequent shouting, had awakened the remaining family members. Parris glanced back at Jeremy, preparing to say something, when he noticed where his apprentice’s eyes were focused. Parris stopped and stared at the upstairs bedroom windows. Immediately, the wife, the daughter, and the orphan scampered from Parris’ sight like mice found in the cupboard.

Is everyone terrified of this man, wondered Jeremy. Be damned if I’m afraid of this petty tyrant.

Tituba had revealed a surprising secret, a stillborn child in Barbados . . . and mother denied a moment with her child. This in itself set Jeremiah’s imagination aflame. What more was there to the story?

He followed Parris inside, both men now chilled to the bone. “I don’t feel right, Mr. Parris, taking a woman’s bed on such a night as—”

“Bah! I’ll hear no more of it, Mr. Wakely, and you’ve got to get control here. You do as I instruct in my house without question or hesitation, do you—”

“I intend to sir, it’s just—”

“No faltering, Mr. Wakely. You are tired…have come a long way.”

“Too true.”

“Get ye then to bed—and I to mine.”

Something about the man and his tone made Jeremy feel like a child being sent off to bed. And fatigued beyond thought, off he went, but before laying down, he closed off the curtain and in the dark, he carefully located his saddlebag and dug into to it. He palmed his inkwell and quill pen, and in difficult circumstances, Jeremy began jotting quick notes to himself in the blank pages of the book he would keep on Reverend Samuel Parris—a book that would eventually find its way back to Mather.

Unable to focus by the weak and flickering candlelight any longer, exhausted from the long day and travel, Jeremy realized his mind and pen were no longer in sync. A quick few words of hope that he was entirely wrong in his first impressions of Parris before he blew out the light, and without knowing it, nodded off and into a fitful sleep.

# # # # #

Jeremy found the cubbyhole below the stairwell dark, dingy, musty, and degrading, a place to keep the house brute, not a place for a man of Jeremy’s stature or frame. In fact, not a place for little Tituba’s frame either. Cramped as a ship’s berth. Part of Parris’ less than subtle method of putting a person ‘in his place’, Jeremy decided. And it did have this affect on the young apprentice.

Given the bed bugs and the odors, he slept fitfully at best.

What little sleep he did accomplish was to the tune of tension pulled taut like a wire, so much that it seemed audible, slicing through Jeremiah’s skull, as this dark house seemed to exhale conflict and breathe in anxiety. Subtle yet present like the distant sound of the ocean waves to shore, or a cradle with an insistent squeak. Most of the night, Jeremy lay stiff, board-like as he played Tituba’s words over in his head so as not to forget, but also in an effort to understand her. When he did come awake entirely, he’d hear a squeak-squeak-squeak. At first he thought it a parrot below a black cloth in its cage walking its floor, pacing on clawed feet.

But after a moment, he realized it was a squeaking floorboard upstairs, one which he assumed Samuel Parris was repeatedly pacing over up in room.

Calming himself, Jeremiah wondered if Parris prayed like other men, or if he prayed differently, or if he prayed privately at all.

Finally, Jeremiah gave up any hope of sleep; instead, he sat up, pulled his saddlebag close, opened it, and located his book. He jotted Tituba’s words down as best he could recall—for the record.

He also jotted down his initial, firsthand reaction to Parris, writing: the man is arrogant, selfish, puffed up beyond his stature, but small in grace and spirit in my humble judgment. I would add….

Jeremy fell asleep over his writing, the quill pen and inkbottle left on the wood floor, his journal lying half under him. He dreamed of his powerful right fist slamming into Parris’ teeth.

The following day, Jeremy opened his eyes on a plump-faced little girl with yellow curls, Parris’ daughter Betty, he assumed. The two stared at one another until she said, “Can I write, too?” She wiped away mucous and her pearl white skin showed blotches of red as if rubbed raw with lye soap, but Jeremy recognized the redness as having done battle with the ague—a fever with coughing enough to turn a child’s insides out.

“You are feeling better?” he asked.

“I am. Can I draw?”

Jeremy realized they were, at the moment, the only two in the house awake. “Oh, oh,” he came to a sitting position. “Your name is Betty?”

“Elizabeth, like my mother I am.”

“Sorry, Elizabeth.” He guessed her at ten or eleven.

“I wanna draw pictures.” She pointed to his pen and ink, her cheeks going wide with her smile. She’s an adorable if chubby doll, he thought.

He tore out a single blank page from the back of his journal. “Draw? Yes, be my guest.”

The little girl took the offering and moved on short legs that pumped fast, taking her to a table where she sat and began work. Jeremy stuffed his journal deep into his bag, stood, stretched, and moved to stand over the girl. Admiring her meaningless markings: Circles within circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles, he softly commented. “Wonderful but what is it?”

“It’s where the witches meet.”

“Really? And where is that?”

“The orchard.”

“Your orchard?”

“Just beyond it, yes.”

In a moment, Betty was mumbling something about having been ill when the second girl from upstairs, perhaps twelve or thirteen, came timidly down to view the newcomer. Once again Jeremy held a staring match.

“You must be Mercy? Mercy Lewis,” he finally said to her.

“Mercy, no!” she shouted. “Mary—my name’s Mary Wolcott. Mercy Lewis’s my cousin like Betty is.”

“Really? And here I thought you Mercy.”

“Mercy’s got sent away,” said Betty over her shoulder. “Father said she was bad.”

“Bad?” he poked at the word.

Mary piped in with, “Uncle beat her, but she stayed bad anyway.”

“And how was she bad?”

“Killed a layin’ hen for no cause,” answered Betty.

“She was sent to live with Mr. Putnam’s family yonder,” added Mary Wolcott, pointing out the parsonage window. “Betty’s father told me she had a devil in her, and if I was bad and didn’t obey, I’d be sent away, too.”

Unsure what to say, Jeremy cleared his throat and muttered, “Another niece, indeed?”

“Oh, yes, he has a passel of us.” Mary’s smile created dimpled balls of her cheeks.

Betty piped in with, “He never claimed Dorcas.”

“Nobody’d claim that brainless child,” countered Mary. “Did you know she eats worms, that one?”

“Dorcas? What happened to her?” asked Jeremy, standing now, stretching in the clothes he’d slept in, uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in the raw in such close quarters.

“She was put up at the Corey’s place, she was.”

“Corey’s mill on Ipswich road?” he asked.

“At the mill, yes. Maidservant. That’s a laugh. Dorcas is a dummy. She can’t talk right nor hear good neither.”

“I see. Sounds as if Mr. Parris helps out all the village children, eh?”

“He bills ’em out mostly.”

“Bills ’em out?”

“Charges a finder’s fee and a monthly one, too,” explained Mary.

“I see. Rather businesslike of him, I’d say.”

Parris wife and Tituba, as if by magic, appeared in the kitchen along with the sound of pots and pans. Jeremy had no idea how the one got past him from the steps, and the other from the door, until he learned of a back stairwell straight to the kitchen, and a back door opening on the kitchen. The two women sounded amiable enough as they worked to create the morning meal.

Parris was the last to rise, sniffing breakfast. All chatter, all talk, even Betty’s drawing, ended when Samuel Parris entered the living area. He called immediately for everyone to drop to their knees and pray with him, Jeremy included. From a kneeling position, Jeremy saw that Tituba went through the motions, hands raised before her lips as if in supplication.

He determined to do the same. One more thing they had in common.

“Make those who make our lives difficult, God,”—began Parris, his voice like a knife—“make them pay this day with a curse befalling each. They that are sinful. They who withhold my rightful income, my salary, and by extension withhold food from the mouths of all who are present here today, Lord. Smite them all in Thy name . . . amen.”

Finished with the brief, spiteful prayer, Parris broke off the handholding. He rose, saying, “Now let us eat and give thanks for what meager bits we do have, shall we? And then I will formally introduce you all to my young apprentice here, Mr. Wakely, sent by none other than the Reverend Increase Mather himself, children. Sent here to your husband woman, and your father, Betty.”

“And my good uncle,” said Mary with a quick smile.

“Ah . . . and my good Master,” added Tituba, her eyes twinkling at Jeremy as if they shared a secret. It was an almost girlish competing for Parris’ attention, Jeremy felt. He represented a new excitement— something unusual in her day, and he had given her the gift of his saddle for her headrest, and he had shown sympathy for the loss of her only child. Still, she remained as inscrutable as the parsonage door. Although quite a bit more exotic, and handsome for a woman of her age—which he guessed at forty, close to her Master’s and Mistress’ age.

While these thoughts fluttered about Jeremy’s brain, a messenger showed up at the door. Parris grimly received the delivered news and walked back to the dining table. After a dramatic sigh, as yet standing over them, he said, “Jeremy, you’re going to witness for me today—an ordeal.”

“How’s that, sir? An ordeal?”

“I’ve rounds to make. Come along.”

“But where are you going, Goodman?” asked his wife, who till now hadn’t uttered a word.

“The Putnams again.” He held his wife’s gaze for a moment. “In need of me.”

“Nothing good will come of those people,” she muttered, her eyes on the uneaten meal.

“Enough, Goodwife.”

“And that sickly child of theirs, and you putting Mercy in harm’s way by—”

“Enough, woman!”

Tituba dared add, “Curse ’pon dat home, dare is.”

“Quit such talk now, both of you!” Parris’ face had gone red, veins in his neck bulging.

“I’m sorry, Samuel, but there’s some curse on that sad and peculiar family.”

Parris pulled Apprentice Wakely by the arm to end Jeremy’s meal. “We go, now. Duty calls.”

At the same time a flood of words erupted from Elizabeth Parris, directed at her husband. “One or two of her babes lived but a week, others a month, and to end with that sickly yearling, little Anne Junior—just a matter of time before some fever takes her.”

“We must go,” Parris ordered Jeremy. “Now, Mr. Wakely.”

Mrs. Parris followed, pursuing to the door, adding, “And I wish you’d never gotten involved with that Dorcas Goode affair, Samuel.”

He whirled on her, teeth gritting. “I’ve done the Christian thing, Mother, and it’s for the best for—”

“The best? Are you sure?”

“—for the child, yes!”

“No matter how vile old Goode is, Samuel, she’s the child’s mother.”

Parris’ eyes became darts of controlled anger. “Dorcas Goode is of an age now when she rightly apprentices in the domestic arts beneath another roof—as with any of our village children!”

“It’s a vile custom, and when it comes time for our Betty?”

“Then she goes to another home!”

Betty, hearing this, raced up the stairs to her room, crying hysterically.”

Jeremy tried to look invisible, having found a corner. Parris gritted his teeth. “It’s not just custom here, Mother! Listen to reason, Goodwife, it’s religion and it’s law.” Parris turned and waved a hand at Jeremy. “Tell her, Jeremy.”

Jeremiah knew of the practice of taking children at age twelve and thirteen out of their parental homes to circulate in other houses—girls to be taught kitchen arts and wifely duites, while boys learned under harsh masters—not parents—a trade or at least how to muck out a barn. But Jeremy had never heard it referred to as law. “It is our way, Mrs. Parris, for better or worse.” Worse being the operative word, he said to himself.

Parris glared at him, his eyes encouraging a stronger remark, but when it did not come, he firmly said, “Elizabeth, a child coming on his or her child-bearing years must be placed under a roof run by those other than a doting mother and father.”

“To keep them in strict discipline,” added Jeremy.

Mary Wolcott shrugged at this and as if harping what she’d heard all her life, added, “It’s what’s best. Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

“That child, Dorcas, was a pack mule for that old woman,” added Parris. “And on that note, we are away, Goodwife. Come along, Mr. Wakely!”

But Mrs. Parris persisted, following them a few steps out into the snow-laden yard. “Every time you have dealings with those Putnams, Samuel . . . each time you go into their house, you return in a melancholia.”

“Such comes with the job, dear. We all must persevere.”

“I hate to see it—how those relatives of yours affect you so.”

“Mercy Lewis will be of great comfort to Thomas and Anne, I’m sure, and a great boon to them.”

“Not if she misbehaves, she won’t.”

“She’s learned her lesson well, and she knows what all of us expect of her.”

“She’s had a hard time of it—orphaned so cruelly.”

“God works in mysterious ways…and so we must believe her parents taken from her for good reason—even if by fire at the hand of the pagans.”

“Her parents were killed by Indians?” asked Jeremy.

“They ventured too far westward, settled in an unsavory place,” explained Parris. “Years ago—ten maybe twelve. Time the child got over it.”

“Putting her out, Samuel,” Mrs. Parris began, “you know I believe it was wrong but to place her in that sad home, that may be the cruelest thing you’ve ever done.”

“Enough, woman!”

“I loved that child as if she were my own.”

Parris’ jaw quivered as if she’d slapped him. “We must show Christian charity and patience to our kith and kin, and the Putnams were closer to the Lewises, and Mercy and Thomas’ family will—by God—prosper together, as will we all in time.”

Jeremy wondered what this last meant. Wondered more about what hadn’t been said as what had been said, but Parris tugged at his arm. “Away.” The minister wanted no more words with his wife on the subject of either Mercy Lewis or the Putnam household.

They tramped off together, lifting boots through snow for a house that Elizabeth Parris obviously wanted her husband to avoid as he might the plague.

Chapter Five

“So we go on our rounds, Reverend?” asked Jeremy as the two men in black strode the village path between the parsonage and the Putnam home.

“We go to Deacon Putnam’s, yes.”

“Ahhh, a Deacon is he?”

“That and a Captain.”

“Militiaman? Impressive.”

Jeremy waited for more to come out of the parson’s mouth.

“Mrs. Putnam sends word. She’s a woman with . . . well let us say much grieves her.”

“I can imagine.” He’d gotten as much from Mrs. Parris’ words, but he also foggily recalled the rumors surrounding Mrs. Thomas Putnam and how her womb had killed so many unborn children.

“I doubt you have the least conception.”

“I suppose, sir, you are right on that score.”

“You say, Mr. Wakely, that you’re from Maine?”

“I said so, yes.”

“However, you sound like one of these Salem bumpkins in your speech. Why’s that?”

“Of late from Maine, sir, and besides no one sounds more the bumpkin than those from Maine.”

“Ah-yes. That’s Wells, Maine? Anywhere near Casco Bay?”

“In fact, quite near. But I did not give out Wells.”

“There’s but two colonies there. Listen, young man, had you ever come across my predecessor, a Reverend George Burroughs? Understand he’s preaching in Casco Bay.”

“Predecessor? Burroughs . . . Burroughs. I think not.” It wasn’t technically a lie, as Jeremy, the former citizen of the village had known Burroughs but Jeremy the apprentice did not, so far as Parris needed to know. “Afraid our paths never crossed.”

“He is strangely my undoing here in Salem.”

Jeremy inwardly gasped at this bit of revelation. “Sir?”

“Even before I arrived.”

“But how is that?”

Parris had stopped their progress at the town green where they stood below a huge chestnut tree, its giant gnarled limbs serpentine in their chaotic pattern as if some god had unleashed elephant-sized snakes to run in every direction.

Jeremy had to repeat his question. “Sir, how can this previous minister here be your undoing?” He silently prayed for an answer.

Parris leaned in against the tree as if fatigued, and for certain he’d been up half or more of the night. “Why…why none of his own doing, I suppose . . . not directly I’m sure. I’ve no reason to believe Burroughs wished me any sort of harm.”

“Indirectly then, you think?”

“Yes, indirectly.”

It took another ten seconds of silence before Parris chose to continue. “Indirectly, I should hope, as those who ran him from the parish are my support, you see, while—”

“—While those who’d voted to keep Burroughs here are now your enemies, I presume?”

“Are you in the habit of finishing the sentences of your elders, Mr. Wakely?”

Have to be compliant,” Jeremy reminded himself, and the man is twenty years my senior. “Sorry, sir.”

“Still…astute of you to realize it, Jeremiah,” continued Parris.” No matter who may’ve come along after this Burroughs fellow to take up duties here, he’d have surely faced the same sort of ah…wrath as I’ve felt.”

“Then you’re a victim of misdirected wrath, is it, sir?”

“That’s it in a word, victim of unwarranted wrath.” Parris scanned the movements of people as he spoke, his eyes never on Jeremy but rather studying his parishioners as they went about their morning, most involved in some industry.

“Unwarranted wrath, sir? It must weigh heavily then. I mean . . . it’s a sad state of affairs if it is so.”

“Of course, it is so.”

“I mean to characterize your flock as against you.”

“Trust me, you’ll see it and feel it on yourself soon enough, having chosen to stand so near me.”

Jeremy nodded and kept silent. Parris muttered. “You’ll see their venom soon enough.”

“I should hope not.”

“I should hope so.”

Jeremy gritted his teeth as they made the Putnam doorway. “But why, sir, would you wish it?”

“Mr. Wakely, I do not wish what I have endured on a dog. However, as it is the case, I want you to feel their spite and poison as I do.”

“But to call it up like some…incantation is—”

“I want you, young man, to pass it along to Reverend Mather in that . . . that book you keep.”

Jeremy stared at his new ‘master’ and bowed dutifully, and even as he formed his reply was thinking: Betty’s drawing. She’d shown it to her father, and he’d noted the unusual paper ripped from somewhere. Observant of the minister. “I only keep a record of my inmost feelings and perceptions sir. A learning tool.”

“I see, a diary, eh?”

“A personal, day-to-day reckoning with myself, Mr. Parris.”

“Yes, self-evaluation. I am told tis a good thing!”

“Some believe it so and I among them, yes.”

“Reverend Higginson of the Town certainly harps on it.”

“I’ve not met the gentleman.” The lie hung in the air.

Parris said, “Still, you’ll no doubt also be making reports to Boston, I presume.”

“I am required to give progress reports—ahhh reports of my progress, that is.”

“Of course. Isn’t that one purpose of your being sent to me after all?” Parris actually sounded hopeful that Jeremy would indeed be informing the authorities in Boston of the dire situation poor Mr. Parris found himself faced with. “After all, they’ve not paid my rate, Jeremy, for several months now.”

“I should be happy to report your side of the story, sir, if it’s your wish, but in truth, I only meant to inform only in so far as my growth and progress goes, sir.”

“Hmmm . . . but perhaps you will be persuaded to make amendments to your personal reports—perhaps even attach a sermon I am preparing for next meeting day.”

“Amendments…sermons, sir?”

“Attachments!” Parris caught himself. “Must I spell out everything to you, Mr. Wakely?”

Jeremy gave him a coy schoolboy look. “Are . . . are you saying there’s ah . . . something in it for me, Mr. Parris?”

“I merely mean, Jeremiah—I can call you Jeremiah, can’t I?” The man had been doing so all morning. “While privately addressing you, I mean?”

“Surely you may.”

“I mean once you, too, are a victim of such utter disrespect and heartless actions as I’ve endured since my tenure here, that you will want to report the slander, the double dealing, the back-stabbing, and the venom.”

“The Burroughs contingent, you mean?”

“They set the example, yes. But others follow.”

A jet black raven with blue shimmering about its wings landed on a nearby limb where they stood, curiously looking as if eavesdropping.

“But I was given to believe—told that is—that the previous minister here left this parish a broken convict, a man pitied as much as despised, his family lost to the fever, and he a debtor and broken man.”

“All too true.” Irritated by the staring raven, Parris showed it off.

“I heard talk of the other minister before Burroughs, too, that his family also died while he served in this parish. Of course, I don’t believe in curses, but some in Boston’ve called it a parish cur—”

“Don’t say it! It’s nonsense.” Parris then shouted for anyone caring to hear, “Only hex on this place is human gullibility, greed, jealousy, and sin.”

Parris began to cross the green to finish their walk to the Putnam home. Jeremy rushed to keep up. The other side of the green, Jeremy goose-stepped over sludge that ran down the middle of the village’s main thoroughfare in a foot-wide canal cut for delivering human waste and other foul matter away from the settlement.

They’d stopped in the middle of a cow path, their discussion so intense that neither of them saw the gathering crowd growing around them.

“I was given to understand that a great deal of piety, love, and humane actions had been taken on behalf of both Bailey and Burroughs,” said Jeremy, shaking his head. “That some took pity on these poor ministers, paid their bills, even jail fees in Mr. Burroughs’ case.”

“Yes, so I’ve been told . . . and that they sent him off with the clothes on his—”

“Same with the man before these two, Deodat Lawson.”

Suddenly Parris’ face went white. “How much of the parsonage history do you know, Mr. Wakely?” Parris looked and sounded again like the suspicious creature that Jeremy had encountered the night before.

“I know Salem’s history, especially its theological history, well sir.”

“Aye . . . before coming here.” Parris had retreated tenfold due to thoughts rumbling inside now. Jeremy could see the confusion on his face. “Did much study then before arriving, did you, Mr. Wakely? But never knew Burroughs, despite spending time in Maine, eh?”

“Maine is a large place, and truth be told, sir, I was never one for study, not in truth.”

Frustration made the man stomp, sending a cascade of mud over Jeremy’s boots. “Then how in the name of Jehovah do you know so much about our affairs in Salem?”

“I suspect, Mr. Parris, you knew nothing of the so-called curse when the Select Committee hired you without full consent of the parish.”

Parris blanched. “Verily…next to nothing, in fact—but plenty of gossip since, which is how I’ve always taken it.”

To test the man’s responses further, Jeremy took it a step further. “I thought not; perhaps had you done your homework before accepting—”

“This chat is at end, Mr. Wakely.” He indicated the small crowd in the street gathered around them. Too many prying eyes and ears. But when Parris stepped ahead of Jeremy, the younger man could not help but couch a grin. At the same time, Parris, and to a lesser degree, Jeremy, faced a terrible greeting when the ragged, bottle and rag woman of the village, the crone Sarah Goode blocked their path. She held a crooked old Shillelagh like a wand, and with the walking stick, she punctuated the vile, angry curse spewing from a near toothless mouth. “May your hearth belch fire to burn your house t’ground, Parson!”

“Get from my sight, woman!” shouted Parris, continuing past the obstacle with Jeremy keeping step.

But the wrinkled old woman pursued, chanting. “May your black servant cut your throat as ya sleep! ‘Cause ya stole and sold her baby like you did mine! For pieces of eight!”

Parris grabbed up a huge dirt clod and hurled it at the woman, barely missing.

“May your wife wither and dry up like a diseased cow!”

Parris rushed at her like an angry dog, baring his teeth. “And may God strike you down for the witch you are!”

“If God loves justice, it’ll be you struck down!”

“Your own daughter,” spewed Parris, “Dorcas, she told me of your dark contract with the Devil.”

This did not in the least slow Goode. “And may your child suffer the torments of Hell, till you give my Dorcas back!”

Jeremy feared he’d have to intervene somehow, as the venom between these two threatened to erupt further unless someone broke off. Parris threatened her under his breath. “I swear out a warrant and have you arrested, ye old—”

“Mind my words!” warned Goode. “Return my Dorcas or face my curse on ya and all ya hold dear!”

“The curse of God upon you, hag, bitch!” cried Parris.

“Aha! Swearin’ like a common sailor!” She cackled a sound that filled the street and brought people to their windows and shop doors. “Ya’ll heard ’im . . . swearin’ at a poor old woman now are ya?”

“Foul, filthy creature!” Parris grabbed for her cane, but she snatched it away at the last moment.

“You men in black, all alike.” Goode gave Jeremy a look from head to toe. “Deceivers!” She then pointed her cane at Jeremy and shouted to the maddening crowd, “I seen this one come to the parsonage by cover of night! Him on a white charger, but we all know the Devil does take a pleasin’ form, and that horse looked at me with one eye belongin’ to Beelzebub, or Belial sure ’nough!”

“Shut your ugly hole, you witch!” Parris belted back.

“You may have others fooled—” Goode pointed to her left eye—“but not these eyes.” She ambled off, disappearing between the livery stable and Ingersoll’s Ordinary & Inn. Bottles tied to her, dangling about neck and hips, rattled as she moved off, and yet neither Parris nor Jeremy had earlier heard her approach. Parris remarked on how uncannily the old woman had taken them unawares. Then he waved it off, saying, “Devil take her.”

The battle over, his flushed features softening, Parris waved at someone in the Putnam house at the window on the ground floor. Another window displayed two children’s faces pressed against an attic window.

Jeremy wondered if the children had seen the altercation in the street between Mr. Parris and Witch Goode. But for now, he found himself on the doorstep of Mr. and Mrs. Putnam, where on the inside they could hear faint, whispered yet highly charged argument.

# # # # #

After several raps on the oak door, Parris and Jeremy still stood on the doorstep of the Putnam house—a modest, two-story saltbox-styled cabin home. From all appearances, Jeremy felt that a rather dreary, dark interior awaited within if and when someone opted to open the door and welcome them in. Samuel Parris vigorously knocked on the Putnam door again. “We are come!” he shouted at the door. “Come at your bidding! Hello, inside the house!”

The door creaked in on rusted hinges to reveal a fire at the hearth in the common room, but Jeremy felt only the coldness of this place engulf him. A grim couple stood apart from one another, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Putnam. The man a scarecrow figure with bloodshot eyes, the wife a dried up, frail-looking stick figure herself, her eyes ringed with darkness, and at the center of each—a frightful, unfathomable deadness. How deep can melancholy go, Jeremy silently wondered. How strong can its grip become? He knew it intimately, but gauging by this woman, Anne Carr-Putnam Senior, he’d merely scratched the surface of depression in those darkest hours when he’d given up Serena.

“Welcome, Reverend Parris,” said Thomas Putnam. “Welcome to our humble home.”

Understatement, Jeremy noted, a familiar characteristic of people hereabouts to understate the obvious.

“And do tell,” said Thomas as if the spokesperson here, “who is this young gentleman in your company?”

Suspicion, Jeremy noted in the tone of the otherwise welcoming words and accompanying smile, as the Putnams awaited Parris’ introductions.

Parris formally, stiffly introduced Jeremy as his apprentice, being sure to add that Increase Mather himself had sent Jeremy “to be among us, to be my helpmate, and to apprentice in the Lord’s work under my tutelage. I have a letter signed by Mather to the effect, Thomas, Goodwife Putnam.”

Jeremy bowed dutifully, reminding himself of the role he played here, one of the contrite apprentice to Mr. Parris, his mentor. At the same time, he recognized Captain Thomas Putnam as a key player in current village and church politics, and the likely role he played in fanning the gossip of this current ‘curse’ afflicting the parish. Mather had filled Jeremy in on who stood to gain and who stood to lose by Parris’ continued appointment as minister. While Anne and Thomas Putnam stared stupidly at Jeremy, it took some shrinking for him to appear a mere pawn in village affairs. At the same time, Reverend Parris busily worked to convince the Putnams to allow his apprentice across their humble threshold.

Jeremy only half heard Parris’ words ending with, “The young man is here to observe and learn how I minister to my congregation. That is the extent of his interest.”

“To study in the Word?” Thomas Putnam asked, nodding as if he knew the answer to begin with.

“To one day become an ordained minister.” Jeremy tried to meet Putnam’s eye but found it impossible as the man’s eyes looked everywhere but in Jeremy’s direction.

Putnam pulled Parris inside and closed the door on Jeremy. Through the cracks and crevices, Jeremy caught snatches of conversation inside.

“Mercy can’t stay,” Mrs. Putnam flatly stated.

“She’s corruptin’ little Anne,” added Mr. Putnam in a raised voice.

“Give it time, Thom.”

“She’s caused my wife tears, Sam.”

“These matters take time . . . patience . . . but in time.”

“You talk to the wench. You warned her.”

“I will talk to her, of course.”

Putnam whispered something Jeremy could not make out.

Parris grunted, hemmed, hawed, and muttered, “Would I’ve brought ’im if I thought ’im that?”

Putnam stood back and went to the window where he raised a hand and gave a nod to Jeremy, a gesture meaning everything’s all right. He then cracked the door, saying, “Whatever you say, Mr. Parris.”

Parris stuck out his index finger and curled it in the gesture that said for Jeremy to enter.

Jeremy felt a surge of excitement and a bit of pride that held tight rein on. After all, in the space of hours, he’d won the confidence of the minister and had gotten past a deacon’s threshold. He recalled having told Mather how wrong he was for this assignment, but perhaps the Mathers and old Higginson had been right after all—that in fact, he’d do well in Salem Village…after all.

Jeremy soon met Mercy Lewis who was called and told to come down from the loft room overhead. Little Anne Putnam Junior followed Mercy down, quaking on quill pen legs. Parris made a lecture of it, a sermon directed at Mercy, insisting the girl follow Mrs. Putnam’s teachings and orders without complaint or backtalk. He then blessed both girls and the household, making a rather quick affair of it all. In fact, Jeremy hardly got a look at Mercy or Little Anne, as she was called, save for Anne’s eyes—like two large seedless grapes; no light seemed able to reflect from those eyes.

Chapter Six

They saw other parishioners about the village during the day as well, and Parris took Jeremy to the meetinghouse to show him the place, and by day’s end, they’d returned home to a meal of mostly hot vegetables and rabbit stew. The household remained peaceable all evening, and once again Tituba slept in the barn, despite Mrs. Parris’ offering a corner of her bedroom, but Mr. Parris would not hear of “such an arrangement”, while Mrs. Parris countered with “and you think her sleeping in a cold barn with the livestock is a proper arrangement?”

Again Jeremy offered to take the stall in the barn, but Parris stood adamant about the sleeping arrangements.

The following day felt like an absolute déjà vu sequence for Jeremy, as at breakfast, once again, there came a clamor at the door, yet another message sent by Mrs. Putnam for Parris to come to her aide—again citing Mercy as the cause of her distress.

And so together, Jeremy and Parris again traversed the common for the Putnam home. Along the way, this time, Jeremy decided he must confess something to Parris and he used the term confess.

“Confess? What are you talking about, man?”

“I’m sorry, sir, if it displease you, but you should know something about me, Mr. Parris, about my past.”

This stopped their progress, as Parris, looking perplexed, asked, “Your past?”

“In reference to how I know the history of the parish? You thought me so studious the other day and I confessed not. . . as it will become general knowledge once certain parties recognize my return to Salem—”

Parris right hand shot up to silence Jeremy, and white-faced, he near whispered, “Recognize you, Mr. Wakely?”

“I was previously a citizen here, sir, years ago. It’s why—”

“Citizen? Here?”

“Yes, you see my father’s shop on North Ipswich Road—”

“You have family here?”

“Family, no. History, yes.”

“Riddles I can’t abide, Mr. Wakely. Speak plainly, as plainly as that witch who confronted us t’other day.”

Jeremy planted his feet, causing Parris to halt and meet the younger man’s flame blue eyes as Jeremy spoke firmly, enunciating each word: “I am striving toward clarity, sir, if you will but—”

“Clarity indeed? So you have a history with this parish, and you are just telling the this now?”

“I do. I mean, yes. That is, I did.” Jeremy’s jaw quivered as he bared down on his teeth.

“And from your tone and grimace, it would seem a foul history?”

“Not not unlike your own, sir.”

As if by providence, they wound up at the old chestnut tree again, and both men wondered at the appearance of what appeared the very same raven as before. It seemed either coincidence or sign. “Go on, Jeremy,” urged Parris.

“Reverend Deodat Lawson oversaw my father’s excommunication.”

“My God.”

“And by extension my own, so far as I was concerned.”

“The son is not necessarily heir to the sins of the father,” said Parris thoughtfully.

“He is if he’s in Salem, sir.”

“But you must’ve been a mere boy at the time.”

“Yes, sir . . . a runner for Mr. Ingersoll’s Inn, and I did sit watch a number of times up yonder at—”

“Sit watch?”

“Yonder on Watch Hill with Mr. Ingersoll nights.”

“Aye, I see. The same Ingersoll as is now one of my deacons.”

“Not so at the time, but had he been, I’m sure he’d have opposed what they did to my father and stepmother.”

Parris now stared into Jeremiah’s hard-set eyes, searching the gray orbs. “Your parents then moved off? To the settlements along the Connecticut? Or rather Maine, I suppose.”

“My natural mother died giving me life. My stepmother contracted the fever and died here, but being not of the faith, she was refused burial in the parish cemetery—as was my father for having dared married out of the faith.”

“She was of what faith then?” he asked.

“Catholic…of French decent. Father met her in Salem seaport, saved her from the jailer.”

“Save her, indeed? How romantic.”

“She’d been a stowaway on a Portuguese freighter. They turned her over to the courts. My father, hearing of it, paid her jail fines and took her in as an indentured servant but they fell I love soon after.”

“Married a Catholic. Indeed reason for concern, Jeremy,” Parris paused, patting Jeremy on the shoulder, “but to refuse hollowed ground? To excommunicate a man?”

“Deodat Lawson saw it that way, and so did the congregation, almost every man, woman, and child. I was there. Saw them fired up.”

“I am not a scholarly theologian, Jeremy, and I may not know all the tenets of Puritanism and am perhaps wrong in my condemnation of the wrongs done you, but my God…and in this place…” he waved a sweeping hand to take in the village… “in this hovel, any manner of indignity is possible, Jeremy, and while I might myself balk at having a man in my parish marry a Catholic and presuppose he might sit in my church, I would stop short of excommunication and thereby withhold proper burial to one of my parishioners.”

Jeremiah realized two things on hearing this speech come from Parris. One, the man could convince the bark on a tree to peal itself off, and two, in the single emphasized word ‘hovel’ Parris had given himself away. In that single word, he had revealed his utter contempt for Salem—again calling into question why he’d come here from Barbados if not to, as any business-minded man might, strike a better and more lucrative deal. There had to be a larger motive for his moving his family to Salem than to simply preach here, larger still than his having cut so generous a deal with the parish for lands that were not theirs to deed over to him.

More softly now, Parris said, “Then your birth mother alone is buried in our cemetery?”

“Yes and no.”

“More with the riddles. State it, man! You speak like a poet. Say what you mean outright, please.”

“Both my mothers and my father are buried here but two were outside the churchyard fence originally, but from what I’ve seen, the church yard had to expand the boundaries after ten years. It does appear that now all three of my parents are in your cemetery—sinners or no.”

Parris threw his head back and laughed at this, sending the raven flying from its perch, and for a moment, Jeremy glimpsed the man as he must once have been, a hearty hellion bent on drink and life.

“I see,” Parris coughed out a few words between belly laughs. “I begin to see.”

“She being of the Papal faith, and he being an outcast,” continued Jeremy, knowing that if he weren’t forthcoming that Parris would get the story from another source. “Excommunicated on the heels of burying his wife, my mother.”

“Which makes you what?” Parris did not mean this as any sort of barb, but spoke out of confusion.

“I am my own man, sir.”

“Wakely…Wakely…yes, I’d heard it as Walker or Warfield, but yes, I’ve heard tell of this man, your father. Was he not a dish-turner by trade? Married a Frenchy, yes.”

“And we all know what that portends.”

He gave Jeremy a searching look, trying to determine if his last remark was jest or anger. But Parris said no more on the subject, allowing his dark brown eyes to speak for him. Then he suddenly exploded with more laughter, which drew almost as much curiosity from passers-by as had their run-in with Goode the day before.

“What do you find humorous, sir?”

“Now I understand why you’re here. You in particular, that is.”

“I have no vengeance motive, sir.”

“Sure.” He nodded exaggeratedly. “I am sure.”

# # # # #

With great energy, as if the revelation of Wakely’s having been an ill-treated villager had filled his blood with some strange elixir that fueled this complicated man named Parris, Jeremy watched him march on for the Putnams, to do battle there once again with a little girl causing havoc in his parish—his orphaned niece, Mercy.

Jeremy had to truly rush to keep up, and as he did so, a good fire burned within him as well. Increase Mather had proved a genius, somehow knowing this moment between Jeremy and Parris would occur. For having shared his infuriating past and his anger at the parish with Samuel Parris, Jeremy had forged an instant bond with the maligned minister. Mather had predicted it. While Parris remained suspicious and aloof, he now trusted to a notion that Jeremy’s basest instincts had brought him back to this hovel to minister to these people in the form of some sort of retribution. Something Jeremy imagined that pleased the Reverend Samuel Parris, as if he’d discovered yet another kinsman to stand on his side—Jeremiah Wakely.

And thanks to that false sense of kinship, the man might let his renowned guard down just long enough for me to collect the evidence needed. Evidence that’d perhaps bring Parris to the day of his excommunication from Salem Village. A righteous one, and not the farce that’d devastated the Wakely family.

Again they heard of the abuses Mrs. Putnam had taken from Mercy, and that Little Anne, too, was misbehaving and getting into bad habits, all due to Mercy’s having more and more influence over Anne Junior. Again Parris preached and prayed over the heads of the two little girls who lived beneath the Putnam roof. This time, he called on Jeremy to add his prayer, and having prepared for such moments, Jeremy did not hesitate, asking the children to say the Lord’s Prayer with him. Finally, once more Parris convinced the Putnams to give Mercy more time to adjust to her new master and mistress, and to her new duties and surroundings.

Chapter Seven

The following midnight at the Putnam home

“Your mother is strange, Anne,” said Mercy Lewis from where she lay bundled beneath her woolen blanket atop her straw-tick mattress. Like the younger Anne, she wore a thin and plain linen nightshirt—a feed bag, she called it. Mercy was propped on one elbow where she’d awakened to the noises filtering up to them from below. She felt restless in the small trundle bed here across the attic loft from frail, gaunt Anne Putnam Junior. “I said your ma’s weird, making all those noises in the night.”

“She is not strange nor weird!” Anne replied and sat up, her lips puckering in anger, her own feedbag too large for her tiny frame.

“Then what’s all those nasty sounds coming from her room all night? Gracious! Sounds as much a ruckus as Goody Goode put on my uncle the other day.”

“Don’t call my ma a witch!”

“I didn’t never call her a witch, but I know some who have.”

“Mother . . . she only talks to herself is all.”

“Talks? That’s talk? She screams like. . . like as if your father’s beatin’er!”

“My father don’t beat nobody! You shut up, Mercy! Just shut up!”

“Your father ever come for me, I’ll stab him with this,” replied Mercy, holding up a huge knitting needle.

“Wherever’d you get that?”

“Goody Goode give it to me for protection. Said it had magical powers.”

“That old witch? You’d best steer clear of that hag ‘lest you turn into one.”

“Ah, She’s not so bad as people make her out.”

“Make ’er angry then! See if she don’t put a hex on ya, Mercy.”

“She says your ma’s a witch.”

“She’s a liar. Goode’s a lying witch!”

“Says your ma traffics with the Devil.”

“My ma’s had a horrible life is all, and she’s . . . “

Mercy came to Anne’s bed and sat with her. “She’s what?”

“She’s haunted; that’s what she is. No different than me.”

“You, Anne, haunted? Anne, talk to me.”

“She cries every night for the dead children she brought into this world before me, and—and so do I.”

“All them sisters and brothers, ten, I heard.” Mercy shook here head. “All born dead.”

“Nine, me being number ten, but they didn’t all go at birth. Not all. Some lived for a time.”

“How long?” Thirteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, elder cousin to Betty Parris, had recently discovered her flesh, and her breasts gave her more pleasure than all the sermons her uncle could spew from pulpit and dinner table, but she was always quick to pick up on any gossip and there was plenty at the Parris’ home. “How long did the longest one live?”

“That’d be Thomas the Third. He lived almost six months.”

“I hear you almost died, too.” Mercy studied the younger girl.

“I’m here, ain’t I? I turn’t eleven back in January.”

“And you ain’t dead yet?” Mercy giggled. “So that makes you the longest to live, not Thomas the Third. You beat out your brothers.”

“No, I ain’t, Mercy Lewis! I’m not one of them.”

“Not one of them?”

“The dead brothers and sisters; they’re together. Me . . . I’m alone.”

“Not no more.”

“Whataya mean?”

“You got me. I’ll be your big sister.”

Anne smiled at the notion. “Y-You mean it?”

“My but you look whiter than death. I got to find ways to get you outside in the sun. What little we get here in this dingy place is awful.”

“How? Mother doesn’t let us out of her sight. Work all day in the house.”

Mercy bounced on her knees on Anne’s bed. “That’s what I mean when I say she’s a witch!”

“Shut your mouth!” Anne’s voice traveled through the house.

“Shhh, you want them coming up and yelling again?”

“Then you shush that talk, and quit thinking bad of us!”

“Just saying what I was told.” Mercy sulked while playing with Anne’s hair.

“Then you was told wrong by a mean-spirited old bitch.”

Mercy laughed and covered her mouth with both hands.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your little white face goes all red when you curse.”

Thin, frail, small-boned Anne Putnam Junior dropped her head and wiped away a tear. “My mother and me, we’re both haunted is all. That’s all. You’d be haunted too by your dead fam’ly if . . . ”

“If what? Go on, say it. I hear it behind my back all the time. Say it, Anne!” She squeezed the younger girl’s arm hard.

“If you truly had any heart—Mercy Lewis—but you haven’t any.”

“I got no memory of how my parents died,” Mercy countered, letting Anne go, her eyes flashing anger.

“None? How can that be?”

“Only know what people’ve told me is all.” Mercy pretended sniffles. “So, so it might seem I don’t have no feelings ’bout it, but I do. I surely do.” Mercy worked to imagine it; how horrible her parents had died when hostile Indians had attacked their farmstead eleven years ago, but she might just as well attempt to dredge up ancient Roman soldiers hoisting Christ on the cross for all the good it’d do—as she did not have any feeling for either event, largely due to her having heard these two stories so often and from so many directions for so many years now that she’d become stonily cold to both fairy tales as she considered each.

Mercy had been found below the burned out home, below the floor, and below the bodies. Or so she’d been told so often that it had no meaning any longer. “Your father and mother loved you ’til the end,” Uncle Wilkins, Uncle Revelation, and Uncle Parris had all repeatedly reminded her. “They protected you with the last measure of their blood. They protected you with their very bodies.”

In truth, she had no feelings about her unremembered parents or the incident that they had earned a kind of ‘sainthood’ for in a community that disdained saints. Mercy’s not caring and not remembering, and her disdain for the oft repeated tale had grown into a cancerous guilt within her—one that manifested itself in hurting others in the most devious ways she could manage. And if she should fail in deviousness, she’d make it up in outright theft and lies. She had once told Uncle Samuel that she dared Satan to come near her.

His response was to again tell her how her parents had died so that she might live. All the same, whenever someone reminded her of the defining incident, she could not grasp it. Perhaps I don’t want to, she secretly told herself. Either way, it only nurtured the guilt until she’d become angry toward everyone, because everyone in the village looked at her with curious or pitying eyes. How had she survived?

“Soooo,” Mercy cooed at nine-year-old Anne, “you two—mother and daughter—are-are just haunted, eh?”

“Haunted, yes, Miss Mercy.”

“You mean bewitched, don’t you?”

Anne hesitated. My ma sees ghosts like I do. That’s all.”

Below them in the house, adults continued, voices raised, making a row.

“What’s going on down there?” asked Mercy, standing and going to the trap door, inching it open to eavesdrop on the adults. She started, seeing that her Uncle Samuel was in the house yet again, and again he’d brought the stranger they called Wakely.

Mercy disliked Parris immeasurably. It’d been cruel of her uncle to ceremonially excommunicate Sarah Goode from the church, but doubly cruel then to’ve taken old Goode’s only child, Dorcas, away from her mother. Goode had been hanging about the parsonage too much; in fact, she and Uncle Samuel’s black servant, Tituba, had been exchanging ideas and recipes and incantations.

Worst of all, so far as Mercy was concerned, Uncle Samuel had tired of feeding and housing her—his sullen niece—and he’d refused Mercy’s sharing Betty’s room and bed when he caught them playing beneath the covers. All of this had led to his pushing her off on the Putnams.

Through the crack in the door over the heads of the adults, Mercy saw coins change hands. That stupid Thomas Putnam has purchased me! It’s final now. Thomas Putnam now owned her, lock, stock, and barrel as the woodsman’s ballad said of his livestock, traps, tools, weapons, and women. Mercy felt a pang of terror; she felt like an animal trapped. She’d disliked the look in the middle-aged Putnam’s eye when her uncle had first broached the subject of taking Mercy in as maidservant to Mrs. Putnam. That’d been a month earlier. Apparently, Putnam and Uncle Samuel had settled on an agreeable price, with Putnam having to make payments over time.

Mercy gulped. She slammed the trap door, the noise like a gunshot. She did not intend to let her uncle for a moment think she was as dumb as Dorcas—that she didn’t know what was going on here. She leapt into Anne’s bed, saying, “Did you hear them jump? I made your father and my uncle go off their feet!”

Anne giggled in response.

Mercy pulled the covers over them, and together they laughed at the image of serious grownups, a minister and a deacon, starting with fear at the trap door’s falling. Anne, like Mercy, liked the reaction Mercy had elicited from the adult world.

“Makes me feel good inside to make grown men jump,” Mercy said between laughs.

“Me, too,” added Anne. “Me, too.”

# # # # #

The following night in the Putnam home

Mercy Lewis sat up in bed. She’d awakened to a hot, sweaty hand rising along her leg toward her private parts.

On awaking, she found no one in the attic bedroom aside from Anne, who appeared asleep. If it’d been Anne, Mercy would be more than willing to allow the touching, but if it’d been her father, she wanted nothing to do with it. In fact, the thought made her shiver and want to vomit.

“Anne? Anne? Were you in my bed?”

No response.

“Anne!”

No reply.

“I know you were touching me, Anne, and it’s all right.” Mercy touched herself there. “Do ya hear me?”

No reply.

Mercy sighed and decided to go back to sleep, but once more the crying coming from Anne Senior’s room downstairs kept her awake. Then she heard little Anne’s voice cut through the attic. “It’s my Uncle Henry touched you, Miss Mercy, not me.”

“Your Uncle Henry?” Mercy was aghast at the thought. “What Uncle Henry?”

“I don’t really know him.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know him?”

“He died before I come ’long.”

Mercy swallowed hard. “A ghost? A ghost was touching me?” She really shivered now.

“He comes, my brothers come, my sisters. They all come with the same message.”

“Message? What message?” Mercy sat up at this news.

“They all say they didn’t die properly . . . normally, I mean.”

“You mean naturally?”

“They claim murder.”

“Murdered?” Mercy gasped. This is interesting and strange.

“And they can’t rest in peace cause, cause . . . ”

“Cause why?” Mercy had pulled her legs in tight, gripping her bedclothes.

“Cause they want things righted.”

“They want you to fix things?”

“Me and Mother, yes . . . fix things so’s they can rest in peace.”

“What do ya mean, Anne?”

“Find some justice.”

“Justice in this world? Ha! Vengeance maybe, huh?”

“Like that, yeah—my ma calls it settling of scores.”

“But I never did nothing to your uncle, so—”

“Don’t matter. Neither did me nor my ma.”

“—s-so why’s he got his dead hand on me?”

Anne stuttered, “Ah-ah-h-h . . . ”

“The hand wasn’t cold neither! But ‘twas warm and big like a man’s hand, Anne.”

“C-Can I come over there?” asked Anne.

“Yes, Anne. Yes, you can.”

The moment Anne came into Mercy’s bed, she felt for the first time that it was no longer strange to have a big ‘sister’ other than her two ghosts sisters who’d died ahead of her. Seven brothers, two sisters, all phantoms now, all crying out for reprisal, and Anne the only one of ten infants who’d cheated death. She and Mercy had this in common—guilt at having been spared. Guilt at being alive. But Anne’s guilt was even stronger, far deeper, and Mercy sensed this, and she wondered how she could use this information.

She wondered if she could use it as she had the trap door to frighten the adult world. A world she hated.

And she further wondered how she might use this strange new knowledge to fend off any advances from Anne’s father, and even more urgent advances she felt certain to come.

“Tell me more about Old Goody Goode,” Anne asked, snuggling into the crook of Mercy’s arm. “You’ve made me curious ’bout her.”

“Little liar.”

“Am not.”

“You’ve always been curious of the old witch. Whether she really has any powers or not. Don’t lie.”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll tell ya everything about Goode, if you’ll tell me more about Uncle Henry.”

“Not much to tell.”

“Then the other ghosts haunting this house and your mother. Like why they only haunt her and not your father?”

“Men don’t see ghosts like we women do.”

“I s’pose not.”

Anne snuggled more deeply into her newfound, live older, wiser sister, whose developing breasts jiggled like water beneath Annie’s head.

# # # # #

Anne Putnam Junior felt it wonderful sharing her loft with Mercy Lewis. She hadn’t had a nightmare in all the nights spent with Mercy, and she’d not had one of her paralyzing fits in all the days since Mercy had come to live with her.

The fits were horrible; they turned Anne into a drooling vegetable. She’d bite through her tongue if her mother or father should fail to act quickly and to put the ever present wedge in her mouth. During such fits, she went blank in the head. Her mind seemed to overload and go black, eyes rolling back in their sockets, while limbs uncontrollably quaked. At the same time, her extremities became stone: fingers, toes, feet, and hands like stubby tree branches reaching to the sky.

Anne’s mother had repeatedly explained away the fits as a bewitching, a curse that’d been placed on the Thomas Putnam family from the days when Anne Carr-Putnam, the mother, had made her feelings for the married minister, James Bailey, known. Bad timing as the minister’s wife and children lay dying of a plague on Bailey’s house.

Against her parents’ wishes, Anne had publicly made it known that when the minister’s wife died, that she would marry Bailey, and one night she went to Bailey and bared her soul and body to him even as his family lay in the back rooms coughing their last. Bailey had soundly cursed and rebuked Anne Carr, and in his anger, he had thrown her naked from his home.

Anne, immature and unmarried, was told by her parents that her advances on Bailey had been a sinful display; that she’d be cursed if she did not repent of her foolish passion for the minister, and that she must do so at the meetinghouse before everyone. She refused and she never recanted her love for Bailey.

Today, Anne Senior still suffered for that mistake. And now her only daughter, named for her, suffered for the sins of her mother in the form of quaking fits and an unhealthy body. In fact, all of the mother’s nine other children had paid the ultimate price. Nine dead children before Anne Junior—all lost.

How many times had mother told Anne the story? How could a minister, a man of God, a man Mother professed her love for—how could he place such a terrible curse on the unborn, on all of the issue of Thomas Putnam? Unless . . . unless Bailey was not a man of God after all but an imposter! Else his grief over the sudden end of his own family had turned him to the darkness and the Devil.

Perhaps . . . or worse.

Some word went around that Bailey, being the Devil himself used the parsonage badly, and was punished by an angry God. How else to explain why his entire family was destroyed?

Some went further to say that the next minister, a man named Burroughs, who displayed superhuman strength on more than one occasion, was Bailey returned in a new guise as Salem Village parish minister, again bringing a family with him, and again watching that family wither and die in yet another plague on the parsonage home. A necessary plague brought down upon it by the wrath of God Himself.

Some went further to say that the next minister, Samuel Parris, was again the Devil who’d found yet another family in order to cover his cloven hoof prints, so as to rejoin the battle for the cursed parish and parsonage home, and that this time the Devil had hold of the deed!

Anne now believed, magically enough, that Mercy’s presence had dispelled the decade’s curse, and in Anne’s eyes Mercy had indeed cast off the ghosts bedeviling the Putnam home—and quite possibly the entire parish. Now Anne saw Samuel Parris as just a man with a family and a desire to do right and good in the parish. The Devils—if there were any in the parish—were those who stood against their minister, just as her father and mother had said so often in conversation, and to which Mercy agreed.

For Anne, Mercy proved a godsend. Mercy truly loved Anne, who’d never felt anything approaching unconditional love or even simple affection from anyone, including her parents. The relationship between Anne and her parents had the character of a deathwatch even now after nine years.

Besides, Mercy told fortunes by the sieve and scissors—a proven method. She also told the future by flames on a log, ripples on water, tealeaves even. Mercy knew all about the planets, stars, stones, and plants. She knew something of poisons too. She knew the magical properties needed to make a person fall sick or come well and heal, and she claimed to know how to bake a witch pie.

Again in the middle of the night, the children were awakened by Anne Putnam Senior’s night terrors, or rather the result of these—screams and loud argument. Mercy lifted the trap to hear the details. From below, Anne’s mother shouted, “I’m only one person! A woman at that! What can I do? It’s nothing I can manage alone! Haunt Thom! Strike Thom! Bite and pinch and tear at Thomas as ya do me! Wake him with hot coals and bloody pins and needles!”

Mercy, seeing that Anne had awakened and returned to her bed to sleep alone, asked, “How come these ghosts never go after your father?”

“Never,” mumbled Anne. “He’s blind and deaf to ’em.”

“Afraid of him are they?”

“No, he’s got no eyes for spirits.”

“No eyes for ghosts?”

“Like most men, blind to the Invisible World all round us.”

Every child of Salem Village had the notions of the Invisible World with all its punishments drilled into them.

“You sayin’ it’s a woman’s lot to be haunted?”

“Women being more open to invisible creatures, yes.”

“Women and children like you, you mean?”

“Yeah, women and children.”

“Why do you s’pose it’s so?”

“Dunno.”

“I could ask Goode or Tituba to do some magic that’d stop the curse on your family forever, Anne, if you wish me to.”

“You can?”

“I could.”

“You think it’d stop my mother’s being haunted?”

“Depends on how strong the curse is.”

Anne sat considering this for several silent moments.

Mercy climbed in beside her and took her hand in hers. “You know on dark nights when there’s no moon, that’s when Goode gets past the sheriff and the curfew.”

“Yes? And?”

“And she goes to somewhere in the woods.”

“Woods?”

“Swampscott, it’s called. It’s where she meets with the others.”

“Others?

“Other witches, and together—well together, their magic is stronger. Tituba has met with Goode out at the swamps in the forests.”

“Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Met with Goode in the forest.”

“Me and Betty have, yes.”

“Betty Paris? When?”

“The last night I was in my uncle’s house. Tituba woke us and guided us.”

“Tituba? Did she fly you and Betty on a broomstick?”

Mercy laughed. “No! We walked, but I saw a black wolf following us.”

“A wolf?”

“A wolf who turned into a man, and we all knew a man wearing the black robes who watched everything.”

“A minister? A werewolf?”

“A minister with cloven feet, and he slobbered and drooled.”

“God, a wolf man. W-What’d you do?”

“Danced with ‘im.”

“No!”

“Round a fire, it was.”

“No! A bonfire?” Anne’s eyes went wide. “I’d love it!”

“Was only a small fire. We didn’t want to draw attention.”

“Then Tituba is a witch like Goode?”

“She’s a good witch.”

“But Goode is not?”

“Depends whether she likes you or not.”

Anne scratched her head over this.

Another horrid scream came from Mrs. Putnam’s bedroom. Anne shivered and confessed that since Mercy’s arrival, she’d had no visits from her dead siblings.

“I’m a charm, a good luck charm,” Mercy told her. “Tituba made me a charm.”

Another scream from below and Anne clutched to her newfound charm.

“Easy, my little doll,” said Mercy. “Why’re you so afraid? Don’t be afraid. I’ll protect you.”

Mercy tightened her hold on Anne. For whatever reason, Mercy pictured the old crone, Goode going about her day in Salem Village. It’d always been Goode’s habit to go door-to-door, begging scraps, begging for tatters of cloth, collecting bottles, tin cups, bells. She liked bells and jars. Mercy would see her at the seashore, collecting shells, pebbles, and periwinkles for periwinkle stew. Mercy always saw little Dorcas with her mother, and she imagined what it must be like to be the child of a witch. Yet it made no sense; if Goode were such a powerful cunning woman, then why couldn’t she fix her own daughter’s addled brain?

And why wasn’t the old woman’s curse on Parris’ house working?

And why’s it seem I have more influence over Anne and her family than that so-called witch, who can’t even regain her own daughter from Uncle Samuel?

In the short span of time that Mercy had been under the Putnam roof, she’d been frightened countless times by the night screams. Shortly after her first night the father attempted to corner her in some private place, obviously wanting to put his hands on her. This followed by Anne’s mother’s beating her with the tattling rod when she dared complain. Add to it all how little Anne now hung on her to forget her dead brothers and sisters, and the entire mix boggled the mind.

Mercy lifted Anne’s frightened little face, tilting it to her lips, and she kissed the younger girl full on the mouth, her tongue exploring. Anne responded to the sensations that Mercy imagined the younger girl had never experienced. Anne hungrily returned the kiss. Mercy then moved Anne’s mouth to her bared breast, offering a nipple, which young Anne grasped with hungry lips and smothered with lapping tongue. “Right . . . right . . . good, my little doll, my little darling. You do this, and I’ll ask Goode to lift the curse on your home.”

Anne’s warm breath and small mouth filled Mercy’s nightshirt, and the two fell asleep in one another’s arms.

Chapter Eight

At the Nurse home the following morning

Twenty-four-year-old Serena Nurse awoke that same morning with the unhappy condition of still living under her father’s roof. Her three sisters, and all of her older brothers had all married and were raising children. They each busied themselves in building their own homes and families while Serena was becoming increasingly referred to as the unfortunate one—a role fate had placed her in since birth, or so it went. A huge invisible S hung about her next like an albatross—S for spinster. She might just as well stitch the word to her dresses and shirts.

Her mother had said only last night, “Your sister Becca’s to have another child.”

Becca’s third. Serena had replied with a pasted on smile: “Sweet, smart, beautiful Becca, how wonderful for her and John Tarbell.”

Becca was the eldest sister, named after her mother, Rebecca. Mary, the younger sister, already had three boys, Elizabeth a boy and a girl. Nephews and nieces to spare for Auntie Serena.

Dressed in a shift-dress and her brother’s white shirt tucked and covered by a cowhide vest, Serena frowned at her reflection and angrily pulled a brush through her hair as if the effort might push unwanted thoughts away. She hoped Mother might later braid her hair, but for now, she tidied it into a ponytail. She was so very tired of having it up in a severe bun in the style of her mother and grandmother; she was even more tired of wearing plain and colorless, baggy clothing—gray, beige, and brown items that hung like a sheet from thick, ugly shoulder straps as big as a harness. To make matters worse, people expected her to then cover this with an equally ugly apron—a symbol of oppression so far as she was concerned. The damnable apron and bonnet. In general, women had one purpose in life—to learn the trade of the good and dutiful wife—the Goodwife or slave to a Goodman! She must conform—as assuredly as all men must learn the frugal and sensible management of resources or husbandry.

She said to her reflection, “Serenity Nurse—despite your name—you’ll never be treated like someone’s herd animal.” She would never be a resource in that sense, but most good men in their society thought of and treated their wives and children as chattel, and their maid servants had it even worse.

She picked up an awful gingham bonnet that her father always pestered her to wear. She flung it across the room. Finished primping, she stepped away from the mirror and out of her bedroom and into the great room to find it empty. Unusual. Where is everyone, she wondered. “Mother? Father?”

No answer.

Stillness. The house felt heavy with emptiness.

The night before they’d celebrated with ale and melon when Mother Nurse had found the strength to climb from her months’ long sickbed. She’d been ill the entire winter. Mrs. Rebecca Nurse had aged over those months, losing much of her hair, her sight weakening, the old strength in her voice and body now a ghost of itself—until last night. Last night she’d spent several hours at the hearth here in the great room in grand spirits and having a dram of spirits as well.

But where was Mama now? And Papa for that matter?

“Can ya do something with your mother, Serena?” Her father poked his head in at the window. He stood out on the porch, waving his arms.

Serena rushed to his side. “What is it?”

Francis Nurse, stooped with age and a head shorter than Serena, nodded in the direction of the three oaks. “Look at her. Fool woman.”

Serena watched her mother walking amid the snow-covered ground where outdoor tables for picnics stood upended against the oaks. While she had a homespun shawl pinned over her shoulders, Rebecca wore a thin sack-cloth dress, socks and shoes. “I don’t understand. What is she doing with that broom?”

“Dusting the snow away. She’s insisting we ready the tables for a meal.”

“What? Now? In this cold? How could you let her, Papa!”

“I tried to stop her! You know how stubborn she is!”

Serena watched her mother, broom in hand, waddling about beneath her three oaks. Her “precious trees” as she called them. The huge oaks adorned their front yard. Rebecca whisked snow from the upturned tables that leaned in against the trunks. Serena leaned into her father and said, “But it’s so cold; it’s only March.”

“Tell her that. I’ve tried.”

“Obviously not hard enough.”

“‘No sitting on cold ground or benches in any month with an R in it’ I told her!”

“Is she out of her head?”

“Stubborn, ornery is what, like I said. Like you, she is.”

Ornery or uncertain, ornery or fearful, Serena wondered. Was her mother afraid if they waited longer for the traditional Easter gathering beneath the oaks that she wouldn’t be on hand? That she would’ve passed on before April or May when the more clement weather prevailed?

Her long illness and convalescence had had the entire family thinking such thoughts, Serena included. But now her mother was putting down the tables, dusting them with broom. “Perhaps you should lend a hand, Father.”

“I thought it’d dissuade her when I refused to help,” Francis said, a year older than Rebecca.

Serena stared a moment at her square-shouldered, short father, his skin as brown the bark on the oaks, a result of years of labor beneath the sun. “Now you’re being stubborn.” Barefoot, Serena rushed to help her mother with the chore.

“Persuade her away from there and back inside,” he shouted after Serena.

“Why’re you still under my roof, child?” Rebecca Nurse asked Serena now alongside her, helping her to bring down a second table to set it upright.

“I’m too tall perhaps? Too thin maybe? Perchance too awkward . . . ”

“Men like women with rumps as soft and round as the bread we bake.”

This made mother and daughter laugh. Then Rebecca added, “I think it’s your mouth, child.”

“But I don’t swear . . . not often.”

“No, but you’ve never learned to hold your tongue. Men can’t abide a woman—”

“—Who talks back! I know, I know.” Serena had heard this now habitual remark so often that it no longer held any hurt. “Little wonder no one will have me, eh, Mother?”

“Indeed. Candlewick.” It was an endearment Rebecca had given Serena when she was a preteen, one that spoke of her thin and sinewy stature then but hardly anymore. She had filled out, her tomboy appearance gone with her curvaceous body.

From beneath her bonnet, Rebecca said,“I sent your brother, Ben, to call everyone here.”

Serena hadn’t heard the nickname, Candlewick, in perhaps six or so years, but here was Mother saying it as if her youngest daughter was still a child and a tomboy at that.

“Men want women who can work a field,” said Serena while taking the broom from her mother’s hand.

“Like a good mule,” joked her mother.

“Work a field by day, deliver sons by night,” Serena said as they swept away snow and ice from the tables they had leveled.

“But you’ve got good teeth and gums! As good as any mule in Salem,” Rebecca joked on.

“First thing Papa looked for when he met you? I’ve heard you say so!”

They laughed so hard snow fell from the leaves overhead.

“Mother!” pleaded Francis from the porch. “Do come in now the tables are dusted, please!”

Serena, her bare toes pinching with cold now, remembered to wipe the sleep from her eyes. “Father worries.”

“Oh, the old fool. Do you think he’d lend a hand? Not so much as a finger!”

“Mother, we’re done here.”

Serena twirled the broom, its bristles gleaming in the morning sun. Neighbors passed by the gate at Ipswich Road, most with bundles of kindling, vegetables, bags of grain, some pushing carts, and all curious at Mother Nurse’s antics in the snow. Most politely waved and shouted their morning greetings. Serena waved for Rebecca who’d remained oblivious of the outsiders. Any who were not family, according to Rebecca’s teachings were suspect and to be considered ‘outsiders’ and quite possibly mischief-makers to boot.

“There’s too much yet to do, Serena,” began her mother. “If we’re to gather the family and bake and cook and set table.”

“Three tables you mean?”

“Yes, enough for the entire clan.”

“Mother, none will come for an outdoor gathering when’s so cold and blustery.” As if to punctuate her words, a chill gust defied the warm sun to swirl about them.

Rebecca placed a hand on Serena’s forearm and looked her in the eye. “You know full well that if I ask it of my brood, they will come.” Calm assurance from both voice and eyes came through. In fact, Serena saw none of the watery, bleariness of her mother’s illness. Instead it’d been replaced by a certainty and a clarity Serena had missed for too long in her mother’s pale blue eyes.

“Have you really sent word round the compound?” asked Francis in the tone of a slap. He’d ventured out to help Rebecca negotiate the stairs.

“Yes. I have.”

“By Benjamin, I suppose.”

“By Bennie, yes.”

“Mother,” interrupted Serena, “you said Joseph too, earlier.”

“Both, yes—I’ve sent both riding off!”

Benjamin remained her baby, youngest of her children; he too lived in the main house, the old Towne home that had belonged to Rebecca’s father. Serena thought Ben conspicuously absent this morning, and now she knew the reason why. Mother had dispatched him to all the surrounding homes filled with little Nurses, little Eastys, little little Cloyses, and little Tarbells—Rebecca’s twenty-seven grandchildren. She meant to have an outdoor gathering with food, drink, children and grandchildren all in one place. A feast, a spring festival.

“We could as well do this indoors, Mother.”

“No, no,” she absently replied. “He told me specifically that it be outside and today. Beneath the new sun.”

“But today is Sunday. Hold . . . wait. Who told you?”

“A voice . . . a voice inside.”

“A voice?”

“All right, my Maker . . . your Maker.”

“Ah-ah . . . I see. But Mother, everyone will be off to church.”

“They’ve been told to forgo Parris’ vile sermons for this one day.”

“How long’ve I told ’em all to do just that?” asked Serena, her features tightening at the mention of Parris’ name. “I heard a rumor that he’s gotten himself an apprentice, oddly, someone named Wakely.”

“Wakely? Be it our lost Jeremiah?”

“No . . . most unlikely.” Serena gave thought again to the possibility—one she had dreamed on since hearing the nasty little rumor. “But if it is Jere Wakely—” Serena gave her broom a strong forward push to punctuate her point—“I’ll, I’ll give him a piece of my mind, I assure you.”

“Whoever the poor man is, he’ll be filled with Parris’ venom soon enough if he’s apprenticed to that man.” Rebecca negotiated the steps with husband on one side and daughter on the other.

Francis replied, “Just galls me to hear that country parson speak.”

“Galls me,” added Serena, “his likening himself and his situation to Christ’s condemnation.”

Rebecca grimaced and shivered with a sudden chill. She clutched her shawl, one that she had knitted during her convalescence, tighter to her. “My sisters tell me he’s now likening his own flock to the money changers and Pilate and swine.”

“I told those sisters of yours to mind what they say and to not to pester your mind with such nonsense as goes on in the village meetinghouse!” Francis erupted.

“No, instead you want to bring me all the nonsensical news sweetened and strained like porridge!” Rebecca laughed as she found her favorite porch rocker. “And if you won’t convey the truth no more, Deacon Nurse—”

He’d plopped into a rocker beside her and instantly defended himself. “Now that’s not true and you know—”

“True enough! Keeping me poor dear old feminine ears from harm…keeping me in the dark!”

“Mother,” interceded Serena.

“So then it will be my faithful sisters—and Serena here! She never sugar-coated a thing in her life.”

“You needn’t be upset by that place,” he promised. “I have it on good authority that our Mr. Parris is not long for Salem.”

“Indeed?” asked Serena, who’d remained standing and towering over her elderly parents.

“I imagine June or July and we’ll have seen the last of the Mr. Parris.”

“So you’ve been to see Mr. Higginson again, have you?” asked Rebecca.”

“I don’t understand the depth of Mr. Parris’ venom toward members of his own congregation,” confessed Serena, pacing the porch, lifting the broom anew and sweeping to quell her restless pacing.

“Why it’s mainly due our withholding his payment.” He searched for a pipe and tobacco in his vest pockets.

“Ne’er thought it a good plan, Francis. And don’t smoke so near me.”

“Just till this matter of the parsonage deed is cleared up, you see. But you know, Mother,” continued Francis, “even some of our brothers and sisters disagree with us on the matter of the parsonage grounds.”

“So?”

“So? So who’s to say if they’ll come to my table?”

“Our table! And they’ll come no matter. Disagreements will be put aside,” Rebecca assured her husband and daughter, and then she cheered on seeing a red-brested robin land atop one of the cleaned tables and step about like a sea captain inspecting the deck. “It’s a wonderful sign that!” she erupted.

Mother Nurse then turned her attention on their large holdings, smoke curling from distant chimneys at other homes on the compound. “They owe me that much,” she spoke of the people in the homes on the compound. “They know I’ll give ’em a righteous sermon, sure, and enough gumption to see us through another harvest.”

Serena snickered. “A righteous sermon.”

“What of it?” asked her mother. “Out with it.”

“Just that it’s become something…well, rare in these parts—a righteous instead of a self-righteous sermon.”

“You mea self-serving,” corrected Francis, who’d clamored to his feet and found the other end of the porch where he puffed on his pipe.

Rebecca had for years preached in the absence of an ordained minister in the area. Many people still came to pray with her at the house, including Serena’s aunts.

Their morning’s conversation had Serena convinced that Mother was as sharp-witted as ever; perhaps it’d been her wit that’d kept her going throughout the long winter’s illness. Certainly, Mother had the measure of Mr. Samuel Parris.

# # # # #

The home of Bray Wilkins at Will’s Hill, Essex County, the following morning

Anne Putnam’s father, Thomas Putnam, had spent the night at the home of a business partner, cousin, and friend—Bray Wilkins. Bray as he brayed like a mule whenever he laughed. So far as Thom Putnam felt, a man could never be counted poor if he should stop to count his friends, though he did not fully believe it himself and would rather be wealthy than befriended by such as Bray.

Bray was a lanky, bull-shouldered man, a gray-bearded grandfather many times over, something Thomas believed he’d never be. He held a strong suspicion that his eleven-year-old daughter, Anne, would not live a long life, and another certainty—that he’d never have a son to carry on his name, nor a grandson for that matter.

Thomas could not imagine any man desperate enough to take Anne Junior for a wife, as everyone in Salem Village knew the Putnam girl was frail of heart and weak-limbed, and rather useless, and nothing much to look at; worst of all, she’d lived a life of sickness and fits from birth, a birth defect, perhaps the same as took the lives of her brothers and sisters before her.

Putnam had slept poorly here on Wilkins’ maidservant’s bed. The sixteen-year-old servant girl, Susana Sheldon, had been ordered to give up her bed to Thomas, that she could as well sleep on the floor at the hearth.

Now with everyone in the cramped house gone to sleep, Thomas inched closer and closer to the servant, and in a moment he aroused the comely young thing. “Why don’t you come back to-yer-bed, honey?”

“No sir, if it please you, I am fine here where ‘tis warm.”

“Would please me to be warm . . . warmed by you, Susana.” He ran his hands over her, but she fought off his advances, nearly catching her nightshirt aflame in the effort. In order not to wake Bray or his family, Thomas let it pass, shushing the girl, who certainly could carry his seed as he guessed her age at seventeen or eighteen.

He’d been drinking heavily with Bray all evening, and this morning, he was paying the piper sure. “Head feels split open by the blunt end of an ax,” he said to Susana, trying to elicit a smile from her, but it was no good. “But the look you’re givin’ your dear uncle now . . . now that’s e’en worse than an ax to the head!”

Still no good. Still no easing of the fear in the girl’s eyes. That look as if she might scream at any moment. The same look that had held him off Mercy Lewis up ’till now.

Neither Mercy then nor Susana now had given him any sign of their having any normal, healthy leanings in that direction. Neither seemed to like being touched even on the most innocent of places, a pat on the head, a hand on the shoulder, nor a kiss on the hand or cheek. At the moment, Susana showed no sign of changing or of suddenly acquiescing to his desire. Instead at this moment, she was crouched like an animal, back against the fire, ready to run yet clutching her covers to her bosom at the same time.

A voice in his head told him it was not worth losing friends and respect over. A voice in his head suggested he give it up, and so he decided he must.

As Thomas fought to his feet, knocking things over, the servant girl now stifled her laughter at his discomfort, doing so by pushing thick strands of her own hair into her mouth—which looked to Thomas a sensuous gesture indeed. His back ached from center to shoulder blades, a stinging, radiating pain like a drumbeat. The straw ticking from the rents in the girl’s mattress clung to his back.

He recalled snatches of what he’d said already to the servant girl, not wishing to repeat himself. But the drink had hold of his memory. He gazed again on the pretty young thing. Scruffy and dirty to be sure, this Susana Sheldon.

He suddenly reached out and pulled her into him, and she twisted away like a large snake. Her features displayed a pure disgust and she pleaded, “Please, sir, if’n you wake Mr. Bray, he’ll tear me up for it.”

“I’ll protect you,” he lied. “Just be quiet, and do’s I say, girl. I mean woman. You are a woman, now aren’t ya?”

But she wouldn’t listen or lay down or obey as he pulled her back to the bed he wished to share with her, and the layers of fear and disdain came out in nails ripping into Putnam’s grip on her. He slapped her hard across the face and under his breath said in her ear, “A word from me, wench, and Bray will flay yer backside in a way only that old brute can. Now me…me, I am gentle with you, love.”

“You’ll wake him and there’ll be hell to pay!”

“Then by all means, we’ll be quiet,” he countered.

“No, sir,” she’d replied and tore away from him, her nightshirt revealing a breast.

“No? Don’t say no to me, Susana. It’s time you were made a woman.” He tried a step toward her, reached out again, but she ducked away.

“Touch me again, sir, and I’ll scream out me lungs . . . sir!”

She was sneering at him now, all fear replaced by hatred. Thomas backed off as again the voices in his head warned him against this foolish action. “I’m…I’m sorry, child. It’s the drink, you see. The devil takes me when I drink too much.”

“Get thee behind me then!” she shouted.

“Shhh…quiet,” he now pleaded and rushed back to her bed and threw the covers over himself.

# # # # #

The following morning, Thomas Putnam’s eyes proved bleary and his head felt like an anvil, but propped on an elbow, he watched Susana going about her morning chores. Putnam had to admire the verve with which she’d delivered that line so memorable even to a man without much memory left: Get thee behind me! He felt there was hope yet, as she had not said Satan in her epitaph.

He roused himself, stood, stretched, intentionally being noisy and hoping she might turn and acknowledge him, say something like “Are you hungry? Can I get you water to wash your hands and face? How are you this morning.” Nothing of the kind came from her, of course. Nothing but a flinch when she felt him step toward her, and now standing near, he muttered I her ear, “You know, child, I’d fight that old bastard—” he pointed to Bray Wilkins’ closed door—“to the death, I would, to keep any harm coming to you. One single hair on your pretty head is harmed, and I—”

“She turned and placed a skillet of hot oil between them. “I’m not afraid of Goodman Wilkins,” she let it be known, her eyes like fire.”

“Nor should you ever fear for a thing, Susana. One day our copper mine will pay us well, your Uncle Bray and me, and we will be well off, all of us. Telll me, child, how old are ye?”

She backed off, trembling before him as he reached out, touching her cheek, despite her threatening him. He backed Susana into a wall beside the hearth. He placed stout hands on each of her shoulders. She seemed to relent, giving no resistance this morning, perhaps afraid of his anger. So he pressed closer, feeling her ample breasts, pushing his hand below the linen dress, not much more than a sack.

“Please, sir, please no.”

He believed her protests translated to ‘Please sir, touch me all over’. Instead, she said, “You’re drunk, Mr. Putnam and dunno what you’re doing. S’pose your wife, your church fellows, your child were to hear of—”

In an instant he kissed her, ignoring the threat. His kiss was rough-bearded, savage. He believed that his touching her must ignite a youthful fire in her she’d be unable to resist.

“How unusual and unlike anyone you smell,” he said in her ear.

“It’s a bath I need,” she confessed. “They don’t give me ‘nough water. I haf’ta go to the river—and it’s—”

“Then your sweat is wonderful,” he countered.

“No it ain’t, and you mustn’t talk this way.”

He sniffed her and inhaled more deeply than before. “Neither sweet nor fresh but a surprising wild, animal scent.”

“Are ya calling me a cur, Mr. Putnam?”

“No, I like it—the scent of your curse. Is it that time for you?”

Susannah’s face reddened that he should ask such a question. Then she overturned the hot grease down his front, dropped the pan on his foot, and was gone.

Putnam screamed, burned and hurting. He caught a glimpse of her running out of the house. The little wench had dared do this to him, a Captain in the Militia, a Deacon at the village church. His pants ruined and his penis afire, he hopped about, searching for some way to relieve himself of the pain, knowing his shouts and groans had awakened the house.

At the master’s bedroom door stood Bray, his eyes wide, his mind in obvious consternation. Bray then asked a single question. “Have you violated my servant girl?”

“I have,” Thomas lied, “and she wanted it; she enticed me.”

Bray then lost all control, and he threw Putnam out, saying, “Liar! That girl is a virgin, and she won’t be undone by the likes ’o you, Thom! Now get out!”

“She enticed me, Bray! You’ve gotta believe that.”

“Out!”

“But-but—”

“Not another word! Out!”

Thomas started for the door, angry, when it suddenly opened inward, hitting him. He stumbled back, still hung over. He and Bray had drunk ale and hard cider until they could no longer think. They’d toasted repeatedly to the three men who’d died in the mine collapse only six hours before; his and Bray’s mine—their future now in ruins.

On his rump at the center of the small room, Thomas looked up to see John Williard had entered the cabin home. Williard, the Sheriff, was also Bray Wilkins’ peculiarly strange son-in-law whose withered right arm made him an unusual pick for Sheriff of Salem Village. At any rate, the taller man now stood over Putnam, frowning and reaching out a hand to help him to his feet.

“What’s happened here to the front of your pants, man?” he asked.

Putnam took the hand offered, stood, and pointed at the still warm, upturned pan on the floor.

Williard’s deformed right arm made it about the length of another man’s forearm, yet he was a crack shot with a blunderbuss or a smaller gun, and he proved a fine hunter and fisherman as well. He could also bring a larger man down with his one good arm. Williard, with his children, ran a thriving timber mill along Ipswich Road northeast of the village. “I told you two fools you’d need twice the buttressing you placed in that damned mine!”

“So you’ve heard the bad news, have ya?” muttered Putnam. “Accidents happen.”

“This one needn’t’ve if you and Bray’d just heeded my word!”

“You don’t know that, John!” shouted Bray Wilkins, still standing in his bedroom doorway—his horse-faced wife beside him now, blinking and trying to shake off sleep. “Sit and take breakfast, John. Putnam here was just on his way.”

Williard dropped into a chair at the table. Mrs. Wilkins shouted in an ear-shattering voice, “Susana! WhereinGod’sname! Good for nothing child!”

Hefting a bucket of water she’d taken from the well, Susana scurried in like a shadow past Putnam and the others. She placed the water onto the hearth rack to boil, and she quickly picked up the fallen skillet and worked to clean the grease-stained floor.

“You listen to me, Putnam, old man,” began Williard, pointing an accusing finger at his father-in-law, Bray, who’d plopped down in a chair across from him. “What’d I tell you two just a fortnight ago? Heh? Didn’t I warn you ‘’bout that damn mine? Those walls? Now two men injured for life, and three lives taken—and for what?”

“Predicted it, you did, John . . . like a witch man, you did, and for all I know,” blustered Bray, “you had something to do with this-this tragedy.”

“You daft fool!” Williard stood and pounded his one good fist on the table. “It’s got nothin’ to do with predictions and magic! It’s all to do with your cheapskate partnership, and that goes for your silent partner as well. Cheap bunch of—”

“Now hold on!” Thom Putnam rushed at Williard, shoving him into a wall that nearly sent the other man’s rifle flying from his shoulder.

“There’ll be no fightin’ under this roof!” shouted Mrs. Wilkins. “Outside with you both if it’s come to that!”

John Williard’s eyes glared at Putnam, and his mustache twitched with his gnashing teeth, but he waved off Mrs. Wilkins with an upturned palm, and he set his long rifle, strapped to his shoulder, down and leaned it against the wall into which he’d been shoved. He turned his attention back to Bray, saying, “You were told to by experts, the bloody ground round here runs like water through a sieve, and you two know it’s true, Bray. It’s no place for a mining venture you got up ’bove your house, man.”

“And no swearin’ in this house neither!” came Mrs. Wilkins next order to her son-in-law.

“It’s God’s will the collapse,” returned Bray, “and so it be done.” He crossed himself where he sat at table.

“Told you it’d take more than God’s will to hold up those walls.”

Thomas Putnam slipped out to the sound of the two kinsmen tearing into one another until Bray’s wife erupted, shouting and pushing John Williard out the door. By this time, Putnam was well away from the fray.

But Williard rode his horse hard, and going in the same general direction for the village, he soon caught up. “And you, Putnam, will you go to tell young Hodnett’s family he’s dead? Or Wiley’s? Or Cornwell’s? Died of swallowing dirt?”

“Look here, neither Bray nor I wished this tragedy!”

“I’d like to take a shovelful of sand and put it against Bray’s pipes. See if he’d call that God’s will.”

“You blaspheme, Williard. All and all that happens is God’s will.”

“Talkin’ with a fool only makes me one!” He kicked his horse to ride on, muttering to himself.

“We gave a lot of thought to the injured!” Putnam shouted after the sheriff. “Toasted them on to eternity!”

“The dead you mean!” Willliard shouted back and was gone as quickly as he’d come to do his duty as he saw it, to serve notice that they were to shut the mine down until it was shored up properly and steps were taken in the name of safety, but Thomas wondered where would the money come from?

# # # # #

As he made the overland journey home to Salem Village by horse, Thomas Putnam tried to shake the incident with Williard, the memory of the great loss to Bray and himself, his hangover, and his failure with Susana. To the silent woods all round him, he shouted loud enough to frighten birds into flight, “That girl of Bray’s should be honored, proud I’ve taken a liking. A man of my standing in Salem.”

The trees did not answer him.

After all, he thought and spoke again to the air, “I rose to rank of lieutenant during the Indian wars, and now I’m a captain with the company, and by God, girl, you can call me Captain Putnam.” At least he’d finally gotten that Mercy Lewis trained to properly address him.

But only the birds in the trees heard him now.

Captain Putnam’s aged horse struggled to keep footing over the rough, boulder-strewn cow path. Still woozy, the rider must be cautious. As he picked his way back to Salem Village and home to Anne and little Anne Jr., and now Mercy, his thoughts went back to Susana, Bray’s so much prettier maidservant. Just as with Mercy Lewis now placed in Putnam’s care, Reverend Parris had placed Susana in Bray’s. They were told to not spare the rod, to bring these girls up in a righteous manner, according to custom and the dictates of Puritanism, so the young person might learn discipline and chores. To be trained to one day easily step into the role of Goodwife. A woman’s trade. Putnam thought it a well-born custom.

Putnam started when first heard and then saw movement out of the corner of his eye, just over his left shoulder. Then he gasped to see that it was young Susana—or a dream of such. She was running like a fawn amid the trees. How’d she get here? It seemed as if she must have flown. She was kneeling at the water’s edge where Will’s Brook played over the stones—distracted and unaware of him, focused it seemed on her reflection in the water. Her shoulders heaved. She was crying.

Putnam turned his horse and carefully moved toward the clearing, and so as to not frighten her off, he cleared his throat and said, “Susana?”

She turned her head and the beautiful features he expected behind the long, loose, yellow hair turned into those of Sarah Goode, the witchy woman. “Can I help you, Goodman Putnam?”

“No, no, no! I mistook you for-for someone else.”

“If it’s a warm shanks you’re needin’ Goodman, it’ll cost ya two shillings.”

“You vile old woman! Wash your mouth while you’re at it!”

“My mouth is not so vile as your mind!” she countered and cackled.

“Steer clear of my hearth and family!”

“If you’ll have a word with Paris, restore my child to me!”

He gritted his teeth. “Someone ought to see you to the hangman!”

Goode had regained her feet, and now she again cackled and leapt into the brook and splashed and danced like a madcap monkey.

Putnam rushed off for village and home and the semblance of safety, realizing that if she was a witch, he could be at mercy of her curse here and now. He turned his horse and kicked. Forgetting the rough terrain, he was taken by surprise when his mare snorted and abruptly balked, throwing him headlong between the nag’s ears to land among fallen tree limbs and stones.

Putnam’s body hit with a horrendous thud to Goode’s cackling delight. He sat up, her awful laughter filling him with a venomous rage when he realized he could not stand, that one ankle was broken. He’d need a crutch; he’d have to go about the village like an old man. And it had all happened the moment old Goode had cast her eye on him.

The crone bewitched my horse, made him throw me, he thought while struggling to remount and move on—twisted ankle, cuts, bruises, and a curse of his own on his busted lip for Goode, and one for Sheriff Williard for good measure for having held him over at Bray’s place. Had Williard not shown up with his self-righteous speechifying, Thom Putnam would not have crossed paths with this despicable witch.

Chapter Nine

Not long afterward, Sarah Goode saw Susana Sheldon at their private meeting place in the woods near Will’s Brook at the bend called Three Forks. With Susana’s grimy face tear-stained and smeared, she spoke between sobs. “I hate them! I hate both of them and their friends!”

“The Wilkinses is ugly people sure.” Goode gave the child a smoking pipe to suck on. “They all calls me ugly, and sure I am on the outside—ha! Given me age, and me spots, and me warts, but they’re uglier’n me by degrees with their black innards and their black hearts.”

“They never let up.”

“But is the bear grease helping, child?”

“Helps when he’s sober, but not when he’s drunk.”

“Never know’d a man with no sense-a-odor like Bray; likely all that tobacco he chews and snorts and smokes.”

“He’s disgusting, and she’s hateful—and now I’ve got that other one after me, too.”

“We’ve got to find of that snake pit, child. We must.”

“You got your own worries now with Dorcas.”

“Aye, I do. But I’ve not forgotten ye! Maybe, if we work things right, dearie, you can come live with Dorcas and me, and I can teach you the arts.”

“The black arts?”

“Them arts, too, but mostly the art of protection.”

“What’d you bring me this time?” asked Susana, hands behind her back, eyes closed, swaying as if a toddler again.

Goode held up a small sack. “Open yer eyes, girl! Put this into his bed.” The sack moved, wriggling with some life within.

“Wh-h-h-at is it? A rat?

“Nay, a poisonous snake.”

“I-I ain’t sure I-I can . . . ”

“Yes you can. Choose which of the two you hate most—Bray or the hag he calls Goodwife, and use the snake. He’s charmed against harmin’ you.”

The wool bag changed hands. “I best get back.” Susana rushed off, going back toward the house, wondering where to hide the snake until she might use it.

“Men’re an ugly, sorry lot, they are!” shouted Goode after Susana.

Susana shouted back, “They ought hang every sorry one of ’em, ’specially those calling themselves reverend and deacon and elder and captain!”

“Reverend, ha! Nothing reverent ’bout Sam Parris. May he rot in hell for his dirty blasphemies. Using the Lord’s own words when he’s got nothing but evil for a heart.”

# # # # #

The following day in Salem Village

Samuel Parris called Jeremiah into his sparse private quarters. He asked Jeremy to sit in a chair in one corner while he straddled a second, nothing between them. “I want to count you more than my apprentice alone, Mr. Wakely,”

“Really, sir? How so? I mean, whatever I can do to be of service, you know—” Jeremy had affected his role as naïve stumbling apprentice well up to this time, and he hoped to continue on with his true nature invisible to the minister and his network of friends, relatives, elders, and deacons.

“I wish to count you, Jeremy, as . . . as a reliable Goodfriend.”

Goodfriend Wakley, Jeremy thought, a nice ring to it. There were Goodmen, Goodwives, and Goodfriends in Puritan life. “Ah . . . Goodfriend, me, sir?”

“I hope in our short acquaintance, Jeremy, that I have earned the title along with your trust and companionship? Jeremiah?”

“Yes. . . yes, Goodfriend Samuel, you have it.” The lie had Jeremy biting his tongue.

“And your backing in all things.”

“I would likewise hope for the same in re-reciprocation, sir . . . ah-ah Goodfriend.” Jeremy had been taken by surprise at this turn of events, and he wondered what he’d done to warrant this declaration of trust from the reverend.

“Good, good!” Parris smiled in a manner Jeremy had never seen from him before except when he played with little Betty, tossing her in the air. “I need to know you are on my side in any fight, Jeremy.”

Jeremy swallowed hard. “I hope you have no fights you cannot win, sir. . . I mean Goodfriend.”

“I like the sound of it, Jeremy. Like the arrangement, and you can dispense with the sir-sir-sir.”

“But in public, sir.”

“Yes, most likely best, and perhaps best that we keep this between us for the time being, not to be too openly aligned. Most of all, I like you, young man! And I will do my utmost to be a good friend to thee.”

“Excellent…excellent.” Jeremy felt a rising sense of guilt. He had always been told that people warmed to him, even strangers; that he had a gift for putting people around him at ease, and that it was not so much what he said and did as what he didn’t say and didn’t do that afforded him the trust of others. It was a trait that Increase Mather had ceased upon early on.

“Now about our talk yesterday?”

“We’ve had many talks, sir.”

“Regarding George Burroughs.”

“Ah, yes, the former minister here.” Parris seemed to have a fixation on this man who had preceded him in the village parish. Time and again, he brought up stories and rumors that had swirled about the name Burroughs for years here.

“Do you know there is talk among my enemies about this man.”

“Talk? What sort of talk?”

“Talk of importing him back here to reinstate him in my position. Can it be believed?”

“Smells of a bad rumor, sir, and you know how people love to talk, but honestly, I’ve heard nothing of it.” This was new information, and Jeremy tried placing it in the scheme of things and in the context of Higginson’s wishes and Mather’s string-pulling. When Parris said no more but fell silent, running both hands through his hair, Jeremy offered, “Why would anyone in his right mind speak of such foolishness? The village parishioners ran this Burroughs fellow off for nonpayment of debts!” Jeremy thought of how Reverend Burroughs’ debts had been incurred. They’d accumulated due to successive funerals for his three children and his wife.”

“There was more to it than simple nonpayment of debt, although that was the charge that placed him in lockup.”

“There were other charges brought against him?” Jeremy had perfected wide-eyed wonder with Parris, who responded well to any facial cues Jeremy sent.

“Not any that could be proven, but the baser people here began rumors to do with Burroughs’ athletic prowess. Or so Thom Putnam tells me.”

“Ah! His reputed superhuman strength, yes! I’ve heard, but the man was a gymnast at Harvard where he studied Divinity and he ran track. I understand you did most of your studies at Harvard? Were you, too, an athlete? Did you know James Burroughs?” Jeremy hoped to hear more about Parris’ time at Harvard and perhaps why the college had no record of his ever having been ordained.

“His name is George, not James. James was Bailey—James Bailey—before him, and no . . . I must’ve been at the college different years.”

“But you were on an athletic team?”

“No, no! I was in the study of Business Practices, but I changed to Divinity a bit later. Look here, worse yet is this business of rumors that this Burroughs fellow . . . that he had some dealings in the dark arts.”

“Witchcraft? Charges brought or was it talk of witchcraft?” Jeremy’s face gave way to horror.

“Some say there was no confusion of his being a necromancer or wizard. In league with the Wizard over all wizards.”

“Satan? Really?” Jeremy had heard such charges leveled at any man others despised or disliked for any number of reasons. In fact, the charge was so common as to be foolish, yet the lower church assize courts collected heavy revenues on trying such cases, and so it went.

“You know as well as I, Jeremy, that any time that a congregation, or half that population wants to rid itself of a man or woman . . . to ban or worse, to excommunicate as in your father’s case, the foul slander of being in league with Satan and his invisible minions is leveled.”

To excommunicate as you did with Sarah Goode, Jeremy thought but said, “You speak the truth, Reverend Parris.”

“In private moments, please, call me Samuel or Goodfriend,” he reiterated.

“Well then, Samuel, as I mentioned, the charge of heresy was leveled at both my parents when it was expedient to dredge up invisible evidence, so I am not convinced of your predecessor’s having used his pulpit badly.”

“Expedient invisible evidence . . . using his pulpit badly,” Parris repeated and laughed. “How politic your are, Jeremy.” Parris continued mulling over Jeremy’s words like a chant. “And now I, Jeremy, I am in line for their poisonous gossip, innuendo, half-truths, rumor and slander—for which they will pay if the courts in these colonies are fair and impartial! God, how I miss London. Even in Barbados a man of my stature could count on speedy redress of slander from the courts.”

“I am sure that’s true, Samuel.”

“They’d love to prove me a heretic and a Satan worshipper, the dissenting ones here!”

They might settle for liar and thief, Jeremy thought. “Some say you’ve slandered them in your sermons.”

Parris’ most dangerous stare drilled into Jeremy.

“I mean . . . this is what I have heard bandied about.”

“Bandied about by whom?”

“No one I know; just overheard bits and pieces, sir—ah Samuel.”

Parris dropped his angry gaze, nodding. “Too true.”

Jeremy was angry with himself, thinking: Should’ve held my tongue. First rule of subterfuge. Allow your target to talk. But then my disguise is a naïve apprentice. “Sir, I am not so naïve as you may take me. I am well acquainted with slander from a young age—”

“As you’ve harped, I know. Don’t give it another thought.”

“It is easy enough to condemn publicly, but not so simple a matter to turn libel into evidence in a courtroom.”

“Too damnably easy in our church assize courts, I can tell you, especially when the wrong element has the ear of the judges.”

“Agreed. Fortunately, the secular courts take a dimmer view of hearsay.”

“And testimony from the addle-brained people who bring such suits,” added Parris, who then laughed. It was the first time Jeremy had heard him utter a mirthful sound in days except, again, while playing with his daughter. While his mirth here and now began lightly enough, it ended dismally, like something dead at the bottom of an ale barrel. Then Parris added, “It’s good that you know something of the law, Goodfriend. I may have need of your counsel soon.”

“My counsel? Soon?” Jeremy tried to get more from the man.

“I didn’t know Burroughs.” Parris sounded thoughtful yet again harping on his predecessor. Parris stood at the window, staring out over the village he meant to set straight. “However, I’ve succeeded him, and now am faced with the bitterness of his supporters, people who allowed his disgrace then, and are bent on my disgrace now.”

The man one moment is repeating awful rumors about Burroughs, and now he is aligning himself with the man? Distance yourself if Burroughs is found guilty of such nonsense, stand beside him if he is found innocent? Jeremy realized he must choose his words with great care. “I have traveled to many of our settlements. Salem is like all others in one respect.”

“And that is?”

“All hamlets have the ill-minded who haven’t the least respect for Christian rule, or for our calling, or for the law.”

Parris smiled. “You’ve certainly a clear eye on the situation here. “

Jeremy translated this in his head as meaning: You understand my side, and that it is a terrible cross to carry. Tiptoeing now, Jeremy said, “I believe it’s come to a war of words and wills.”

Parris stepped away from the window and crossed the small room with a single stride. He snatched up his bible and pulled some loose notes from it. The pages he held at Jeremy’s eyes. “Here . . . read my sermon for the Sabbath.”

Jeremy’s mouth dropped open.

Parris added, “I want your counsel on it. I believe every condemnation I make here is only the truth.”

Jeremy took hold of the papers, Parris hesitating only a moment before completely releasing them. “What do you wish in the way of commentary, Samuel?” Jeremy found it difficult to call him Samuel.

“I want an intelligent man of the cloth to remark on the details, the point, the facts and supporting words from the Bible itself. Afterward, we’ll again talk.”

Parris replaced the chair he’d earlier straddled, and next he shook Jeremy’s hand like a co-conspirator. “We will drive a righteous nail into every black heart in the Meetinghouse this coming meeting day.”

We, Jeremy silently thought, when did Parris and I become we?

# # # # #

Alone with Parris’ absolutely loathsome and dreadful sermon, Jeremy found it threatening and repugnant. The gist of the sermon set Parris up as a modern day Christ on the cross, with his parishioners role as so many Judases and Pilates. Jeremy also gave more thought to the Reverend George Burroughs—a minister whose rate was withheld from him for months by one faction of the parish, and when his family died while in this very house, the debts Burroughs incurred were burial debts. Penniless, he’d left Salem to reemerge as a successful minister in Casco Bay, Maine.

Parris definitely had something in common with Burroughs—as each man had managed to raise the ire of half the congregation against himself. However, each man had the opposing side as it were; those for Parris now had been against Burroughs then, and those for Burroughs then were against Parris now. Curious how the numbers changed and told a tale in and of themselves, that Burroughs’ detractors were Parris’ champions. That a long-standing feud existed among the parishioners was plainly evident. All fodder for his next report that he meant to post to Cotton Mather. Thus far, he’d only had the opportunity to forward his first preliminary findings but this…this next would be a meaty document indeed.

Jeremy had in fact jotted all of the facts he’d gathered thus far into his notes for Mather. As always, when he wrote, he heard his own voice in the words. He worked diligently to be as clear and transparent as India glass. But at the same time, he acknowledged the complexity of both the situation in Salem and the difficulty in conveying that complexity. To put it in a summary for Mather, in the proverbial nutshell, Jeremy’d written:

It amounts to neighbor here being set against neighbor, no matter the parson or the business about the parsonage. However, Mr. Parris has done nothing to quell the furor or tenor of the argument, but rather has fanned the flames—a condemnation leveled at him from Mr. Higginson if memory serves me. Still, with these parochial types, even as one issue is resolved, another is discovered. The frightening aspect of it all is the level of acrimony and poison already set loose among villagers of every stripe. It is a poison in the hearts of men here poured into cups provided by their minister.

However, the villagers are no innocents in this either. Their days and nights have an underlying scaffolding of suspicion, rumor, and doubt that in the end sets neighbor against neighbor. You might ask for what? Why? Barring further discovery, for want of another set of facts coming to light, it would seem a need in people to find and feed on discord and dissolution. I cannot overstate this fact. The grip that rumor and common gossip holds on this place. The poison I speak of is like belladonna, on the surface alluring, yet ready to spew forth if one incident should open the floodgate of this blood-root feud—and that could cone from either side.

Yours in good faith,

Jeremiah Wakely,

Officer of the court

Jeremy put aside his pen and book with far more ease than he did a sense of growing alarm and fear for the people of this troubled place. He was unable to shake off an eerie sensation that somehow he and everyone in Salem were being sucked into a malefic storm. A maelstrom that had made up its own mind, one that wanted to consume them all—and all sides be damned.

It wasn’t a storm easily foretold or prophesied, and Jeremiah Wakely felt no more capable of predicting it or seeing the parameters, front, back, sides than the least self-aware resident here, or those in authority at the various levels: church fathers in Salem Town and Village, the church courts, the true courts, and the Boston hexarchy who ruled by virtue of the Hexateuch—experts on the first six books of the Old Testament. Was there any man among them who might see the full measure of the impending tempest? Increase Mather, perhaps. Cotton, no.

Jeremy recalled sitting at Watch Hill as a child in the employ of Mr. Ingersoll, there to keep an eye out for anything smacking of an Indian incursion into the village. But what he saw that one day on the horizon, he could only see the outer edges of—a massive black cluster of storm clouds, lightning, and wind bearing down on the village. That long ago storm had torn through Salem and lasted an entire night. No one, not Mr. Ingersoll, not the minister, not the judges—none of them could tell the beginning or end of that storm borne of nature. Now here he was, back in Salem as a man with needs of his own, yet fearful of the un-seeable deluge that could well swamp them all, and he feared for the truly innocent ones here—children like Betty Parris and Mary Wolcott, Anne Putnam and even Mercy Lewis, who seemed not at all innocent, and he feared for whole families, among them the Nurse Family, Serena, her mother and father, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles.

Jeremy hesitated naming any individuals other than Parris as instigators, yet he knew the poison existing between the Putnam-Porter clan and the Nurse-Towne clan. He decided to say nothing of their feud dating well before his own birth—as it was well documented in court records for decades now.