Hour of the Witch(117)
Adams banged his fist and demanded that she quiet down.
But she didn’t. She looked steadfastly into Endicott’s eyes, and said, “Governor, may I have but a moment more?”
He was tired, his visage beyond sadness at what loomed. Another hanging. Another dead woman on his ledger. He steepled his fingers and rested his forehead on the tips, and nodded.
“Governor, thou hanged thy predecessor’s own sister-in-law. Thou art going to hang me, too. Fine. I cannot open the minds of men whose brains have doors locked shut. But, prithee, know that thou art hanging an innocent woman. My husband taunts me by insisting that my mind is but white meat. Perhaps. But it still sees the truth of thy rot and the truth of thy fears and—”
“Enough!” Adams bellowed at her. “Enough!”
The crowd was yelling, but she heard the magistrate order the constable to take hold of her, which he did, grasping her upper arms in his hands and pulling her back from the bench. She acquiesced, and Adams said to her and to the men around him, “Have we need any more evidence of possession? Have we? We just heard the Devil speak from the woman’s very lips!”
Wilder looked pale, and Mary saw that her mother had collapsed into her father’s arms, sobbing, and her scrivener looked rueful and lost. So did the governor. He was too old and too frail to stop this, even if it meant a second dead woman on his watch.
“Do we actually need to convene to render a verdict?” Adams said to Endicott. “Is it not clear?”
The governor closed his eyes. Then he shook his head, not disagreeing with the other magistrate, but in despair. He didn’t want more blood on his hands, but more blood there would be.
“John?” asked Adams. “What dost thou say?”
The governor looked up and gazed around at the other magistrates. Most murmured or said with what they must have felt was appropriate gravitas, “Guilty.” Endicott mumbled, his voice weak, that this was too complicated to rush to a verdict, and Wilder suggested that they should bring back Catherine Stileman for additional testimony and perhaps insist that Thomas Deerfield appear, too, but they were the only voices speaking on Mary’s behalf and were outvoted. The majority of the court wanted to hear nothing more about this or about Mary Deerfield. She was a woman who hadn’t gotten her way and had contracted with the Devil. It was simple, really, when one looked at the evidence. It was testimony to the insidious way that Satan could corrupt anyone—even this once proper young woman and the daughter of two of the city’s finest saints.
And so when Caleb Adams announced that tomorrow morning she should be hanged, Mary didn’t weep or fall to the floor or beg for mercy. She was sick and she was tired and she was angry…and she was finished. She was ready. Tomorrow when they cast the rope around her neck at their Golgotha, she, too, would commend her spirit into her Father’s hands.
She said nothing to anyone, not even to her parents, as the constable and the captain of the guard led her through the jeering throng and down the steps of the Town House, and Daniel Winslow was saying something about how he hoped the Lord would have mercy on her soul.
We cannot begin to know who is among the elect and who is among the damned.
—The Testimony of Reverend John Norton, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1663, Volume I
Thirty-Nine
Mary’s scrivener went home first, followed by her mother and father, leaving her alone in the jail. Her mother wanted to remain through the night, and a part of Mary wanted that, too. But the magistrates had insisted that she spend her last night on this earth alone. And so she would pray and write two last letters.
She didn’t expect to sleep.
She was grateful when the magistrates relented and allowed her a candle so she could see the paper as she formed her letters with her quill. The first letter was going to be to Henry and the second would be to Peregrine. In the morning, she would give them to her father. She was confident that he would deliver them without opening them.
It was while she was praying before starting to write, asking her God for forgiveness and thanking Him for her twenty-four years of life and the love of her parents, praying as well that she would die quickly and the agony would be brief, that Spencer Pitts told her she had company. She rose from her knees as he unlocked the heavy door, and there stood Thomas.
He took off his hat and held it boyishly in front of him, as if he were courting a girl he presumed was above his station, either literally or because in some impure, cavalier fashion he esteemed too much.
“I am sorry it has come to this,” he began, his tone uncharacteristically sheepish.
“I am, too.”
It was awkward and strange, but mostly, she thought, because they had so little to say to each other. Here they had lived as man and wife for five years, and now her principal thought when she saw him was this: I haven’t the time for thee.
“I regret much.”
“Is that why thou appeared at the Town House today to speak on my behalf?” she asked sarcastically. “Is that why thou came to visit me so many times this week?”
He shook his head. Instead of answering, he said, “I heard thou accused me of witchcraft today.”
“Not precisely. I simply observed that Catherine and thee were as likely suspects as me to have carved the Devil’s mark into our doorframe.”