Hester(44)

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AT HOME I bathe my feet in cool water from the well and try to put the day and the docks out of my mind. The scrimshaw buttons at my bedside call out to me, but they do not tell me what they want—only that they were once in Nat’s hands, and then they were in mine, and now they are beside me.

I roll them in my palm. The rhythm is soft and cunning, and the sound of their clacking brings the cat curling around my legs.

Night sounds come through the walls and shutters—bullfrogs and wildcats and dogs in the distance. I light a candle, prop up a pillow, and find the new magazine Charlotte Silas pressed into my hands. I read a poem about faith, a sad missive about the loss of a child, and begin a long tale told by a gentleman who has returned home to Boston only to discover that his childhood friends cannot be found. The sadness of his desolation puts me in mind of my own solitude, and I am about to put aside the magazine when I see the words witchcraft delusion.

Nat told me that no one in Salem speaks of the witchcraft delusion anymore. Yet here are those very words in a story titled “The Manuscript, Charles Cunningham.”

Now I’m wide awake and reading again from the beginning. The story is long and strange, told by a man who claims he fought in the colonial rebellion and saw trunks full of English tea dumped into Boston Harbor. The storyteller harks back to a lady in Boston who keeps a hidden manuscript, and those passages reference the Salem witchcraft delusion.

I pore over the story again, and it is just as Nat said in front of the Gazette office: witch trials, a manuscript, and tales of long-ago Salem. I run my hand over the printed letters. The cat’s body vibrates at my feet and warms the blanket. The cottage is quiet, and I can picture Nat reading the story aloud to me, tilting his head as he does when he knows he’s hit upon something clever.

Witchcraft. Solitude. Open doors that draw in a man before he has time to think twice. I can feel him with me at the precipice of something, much as I stood today at the Silas house, much as the man in his story peered through a doorway that opened like a secret and invited him inside.





Salem, 1692


Tituba is the first accused.

“You dare to make a witch cake in my house?” Parris beats his slave to the kitchen floor. “You will confess or endure torments you cannot imagine.”

Goodwife Sarah Good, a beggar much despised for slinking about the village with her young daughter, is second.

Widow Osborne, accused and acquitted of witchcraft before, is third.



* * *



On the morning of their examination, John Hathorne strides into the court of Oyer and Terminer with a single intention: he will make the women confess.

Sarah Good is brought before the court in chains, and the young accusers—Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam, and Betty Hubbard—cower and shriek. Hathorne quiets the room as best he can, recites aloud the Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts concerning the identification of witches, and opens A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft to the passage from Exodus 22, verse 18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

He is ready to begin.



* * *



“What evil spirit have you familiarity with?” Hathorne demands of Sarah Good.

“None.”

“Do you dare to say you made no contract with the Devil?”

Again, Sarah Good answers in a single word.

“None.”

“Why do you hurt these children?”

“I do not,” Good says.

The afflicted girls shriek. Hathorne rises from his chair.

“Then what creature have you empowered to do so?”

“None.”

Hathorne directs his attention to the children and orders them to “look to Goodwife Good and tell me if this is the person who has hurt you.” The four girls twist in their chairs like tortured puppets and scream, though no one has lain a finger upon them.

“Then how do you explain their torment?” Hathorne demands.

Sarah Good doesn’t feel well. She needs to relieve herself, to curl into a corner and retch as she did when she carried her little Dorcas to birthing.

“It’s Osborne,” Sarah Good cries. “Widow Osborne torments them, not I.”

From the edge of the crowded meetinghouse, William Good shouts, “She is a witch or she will be one quick enough,” and Hathorne calls Sarah’s husband to stand beside his wife.

“What proof have you? What has your wife done to hurt you?”

“Nothing yet.” Good eyes his wife, who has taken hold of a chair and is trembling. “But her bad carriage to me tells me she is an enemy to all that is good—and I have seen a wart below her right shoulder only this week and known it to be the Devil’s mark.”

Through a crack in the meetinghouse door, four-year-old Dorcas peers at her mother and closes her ears to her father’s words. Dorcas tugs on her red braids. She has no one to speak to of her fear, only the bright welts along her arm where she sucks for comfort when there is no food or Mama at home.





FOURTEEN





The harbor postmaster pushes a parchment scrawled with my name across the counter.

“Came by one of Captain Derby’s schooners from the South,” he says.

At the sight of Edward’s handwriting, my heart hardens to a shield.