Hour of the Witch(109)

Mary whispered to her scrivener, “Secretly? Why does he assume my visits were clandestine?”

“Were they not?” he asked rhetorically.

She sighed. They were; but why would Adams cavalierly jump to that conclusion? And the answer, of course, was because Adams was a man, and Constance was a woman of independence.

“Again, sir, it should not be for the likes of me to conjecture about such things,” Catherine was saying.

“The magistrate asked,” said Daniel Winslow. “Prithee, feel free to…conjecture.”

“Well,” she said, “my mistress does not like her husband. That seems clear since she attempted to sever her marriage covenant with him.”

    “And what has this to do with Constance Winston?” asked the governor. “The woman does not mediate schisms between men and their wives.”

“No, sir,” said Catherine obediently, and that might have been the end of it, but Adams was not about to let a connection between Mary and the woman from the Neck remain unexamined.

“Is Mary Deerfield unnaturally cold to her husband?” he asked.

“She is colder to him than I presume is natural,” the servant girl said.

“Has she been icier since her divorce petition was denied?”

“She has been gone more. This I know.”

“Because I have been with Reverend Eliot. Because I have been trying to return the Hawkes to the Lord,” Mary interjected.

Adams rolled his eyes, but the governor nodded. “Yes, Mary. ’Tis kindness thou hast bestowed upon that family. But, prithee, it is not thy time to speak.”

She nodded respectfully.

“Catherine,” said Adams. “Thou sayest Mary Deerfield was gone more. What didst thou make of this?”

“I believe she may have learned things—dark things, evil things—from Constance Winston. Goody Howland has told me what kind of person Constance is.”

Adams raised his hand to pause Catherine, and whispered something to Daniel Winslow. Then they both spoke in hushed tones to Governor Endicott. He nodded and motioned for the captain of the guard to step forward, and though Mary could not hear every word, she heard enough to know that both Constance Winston and Goody Howland were being summoned to the Town House to testify. After the captain had been dispatched, Endicott said, “Catherine, thou mayest continue. Thou were telling us about Mary Deerfield’s visits to the Neck.”

Catherine took a breath. “I did not understand the point of the Devil’s tines during her divorce petition. I was only scared. But as I have watched her unnatural coldness toward her husband every day and every night, I have come to believe this: in the autumn, she made a covenant with Lucifer to murder him. She wanted to cast a spell on him with the Devil’s tines and the pestle. They were not an offering that had to do with her barrenness, but for something far worse.”

    Mary was utterly shocked: the girl had cracked the code and parsed the meaning of the spell. Maybe this girl was a witch, one with more guile than any person she had ever known, one who could feign obsequiousness with verisimilitude. But there was something else, too, and she watched with the same horror one watches a house burn, because she had a dreadful confidence in what Catherine would reveal next.

“And what was the spell? An attempt to poison him?” asked Adams.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why the Devil’s tines? Was it but a symbol?”

“I am neither a preacher nor a scholar and do not wish to overstep my place,” she answered, bowing her head.

“No, I asked thee,” said Adams. “We are all interested in thine opinion.”

“I thank thee,” she replied. “Yes, it is a symbol. A symbol for the tongue of that most wretched creature: the snake. The form the Devil took when he first seduced Eve. The pestle was there as a symbol for the grinding of its poison into use.”

“Thou art wise beyond thy station, Catherine,” Adams said, praising the girl. “Prithee, continue.”

“When I caught my mistress that night in the autumn, she must have feared that she could not proceed with her plan, because now I knew. At least she thought I knew. At the time? No. But she resolved instead to divorce Thomas Deerfield, making up odious stories of his cruelty. And when all of thou saw through her fabrications and did not grant her petition, she once more went to the Devil, enlisting His help now with her husband’s murder.”

Mary looked at her scrivener, terrified, but he simply shook his head. She must remain docile and steadfast, even as Catherine uncoiled the rope that would hang her.

“How didst thou come to understand the point of the Devil’s tines—of thy mistress’s intent?” Adams inquired.

“From my reading of the Lord’s word. And from what I found in my mistress’s Bible.”

    This was it: this was that something else. The evidence, a proof as damning as if the girl had held up before the court the bottle of wolfsbane. Mary knew what the girl was going to say next, and she felt dizzy and sick. She had not seen this coming, this was a surprise, and she bent over and put her hands on her knees as the world grew dark. But she heard. Still, she heard.

“It didn’t make sense to me at the time,” Catherine was saying. “It only did later when I found the Devil’s tines and His coin in her apron. She had left her quill in her Bible one night, and it was on the page with the 140th Psalm: ‘They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders’ poison is under their lips.’ I remembered she had been reading that psalm, and it must have mattered to her greatly to have left her quill in her Bible marking the verse.”