Hour of the Witch(121)

“Yes, Thomas, it is I.” She held up her thumb and its two nearest fingers and said, “Meet the Devil’s tines.” Then with that thumb and those two fingers, she twisted the pommel at the end of the handle, turning the dagger like a knob.

His knees buckled, and he crumpled at her feet and beside his own daughter.

Peregrine rolled away from him and sat up.

“I am sorry,” said Mary. “But only that first he was in thy life and then in mine.”

Peregrine shook her head. “Thou dost not need my forgiveness.”

Sam started toward his horse, but Mary grabbed him by his coat. “Say a word ever about what thou hast seen, and I will be sure that thou dost perish the next day. Remember: they say I am a witch.”

    “They hang witches, Mary Deerfield,” he said, but his voice was without conviction.

“But not before we—baleful and bitter—leave behind us a trail of desiccated fields and dead animals. Of babies that rot in their mothers’ wombs and men such as thee who fall like stones from their mounts, their hearts cold and still.”

“Thou art going to be dead in the morning,” he murmured, but again his tone was fearful and weak.

“Then I will bring thee with me,” Mary told him.

He might have said more. He might have attempted to climb back atop his horse. But instead he grunted and stood up straight, turning his head to see Peregrine behind him. She pulled her knife from his back and he winced, and then she slashed it across his neck, the fellow’s blood geysering like a fountain. He sunk to the ground, choking, and then—with a suddenness that surprised Mary—he was gone. Peregrine wiped the blade on the sleeve of Sam’s own coat.

“One hates to lose a good piece of cutlery,” she said.

“And Thomas’s dagger?” Mary asked, pointing at it with the toe of her boot.

“Dost thou want it?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

Peregrine took her hand and said, “Let us leave before a sentry comes upon them. Let them think it was bandits or whoever attacked Rebeckah’s Uncle Spencer and set thee free.”

“They will suppose it is me.”

Peregrine nodded. “Perhaps. But if they deem it likely thou left Boston with two dead men in thy wake? Thou wilt be feared as most potent. They will believe that in their lifetime they were indeed present for the hour of the witch.”

“A witch? No, not merely a witch. The Devil.”

“Ah, the Devil Herself,” said Peregrine. “We really don’t know whether the Devil wears breeches or a skirt, now do we?”

    Mary contemplated the idea of the Devil in the guise of a woman as they rushed to the wharves, and at one point she looked up into the sky, awed by the stars. There were just so many. She thought how she would see them again from a ship at sea in eighteen or twenty hours, the same God behind them. There were people in the world who were good and people who were evil, but most of them were some mixture of both and did what they did simply because they were mortal. And her Lord? Peregrine’s Lord? He knew it all and had known it all and always would know it all. But the deliberations of His creations? Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Still, there was one thing of which she was certain.

“Oh, I think we do know,” Mary said finally. “Yes, this may be the hour of the witch. But the Devil? He most definitely wears breeches. The Devil can only be a man.”





EPILOGUE





Mary sat on the grass and bounced the child on her knees. She looked into her eyes, which were the same blue in this light as the sky on the day she had been sentenced to death, but when they were indoors could appear the color of slate. They were round in much the same way that the child’s remarkably beautiful face was cherubic. When the girl’s hair was longer, Mary imagined the silk ribbons she would place in it, ribbons very much like the kind Beth Howland had used in her little Sara’s. Mary had named her daughter Desiree but called her Desire, after the child who had come to her in a dream—a vision—back in Boston. The girl was a year old now, and Mary’s memories of New England were growing distant. So were her memories of her brief winter in Jamaica, after she and Henry had wed. She remarried as a widow—though no one in Jamaica knew she had a husband who had died, because no one knew she was the infamous Mary Deerfield from Boston.

Now Mary and Henry and Desiree were ensconced in her brother Giles’s estate, while Henry built a more modest house on a tract of land that her father and Giles had conspired to give them.

There was a breeze this afternoon, and Mary could smell her brother’s sheep, even though they were but a slow, rolling mass of off-white as they grazed on the far hillside. She could see one of the dogs running aimlessly in circles near the herd, and occasionally she heard the animal bark at a bird or something it spotted in the brush. In the sky, to the west, were waves of flat, fibrous clouds haloing the sun. Henry had spread a blanket on the grass, and when she looked over at him she saw that he was handing her a piece of bread. She thanked him and broke it into an even smaller piece—tiny, really—and placed it on her baby’s tongue. Communion, she thought. Communion. She wasn’t barren. She just wasn’t meant to bear a child with Thomas.

    Less often these days she wondered what the gossips were saying in Massachusetts. In one letter to her mother she had asked if they had ever found the bandits who had murdered Thomas and his drinking companion: her mother, of course, knew the rumors that Mary had taken both lives before disappearing, but Mary suspected it gave her mother great comfort that she denied anything to do with those deaths. Her mother had written back that so far no one had confessed, though some were starting to believe it must have been savages. Perhaps it was also Indians who had had something to do with her escape. Maybe it was praying Indians she had met while ministering to the Hawkes. Who else could have smuggled in knives and behaved with such vicious disregard for human life? John Eliot had said this was unlikely, but increasingly people had come to doubt that one woman could leave such a trail of blood in her path, not even a barren one who had had the temerity to accuse her husband of such inexplicable violence.