Hour of the Witch(15)

She pulled it from the earth and looked at the two forks together. There were myriad ways to try and keep the Devil at bay, just as there were innumerable ways to invite Him into one’s life. She feared this was an invitation, given the fact that everyone knew a three-tined fork was the Devil’s instrument. Certainly, He wouldn’t be deterred by a pair of them in the ground.

She brushed off the dirt and put them in the pocket of her apron, and wandered to the rear of the house where Catherine was already on her way inside with a wicker basket of eggs. She stepped around the chickens and caught up with her servant in the back doorway.

“I found something in the flowers in the dooryard,” she said.

    “Yes?”

“Something I believe was placed there with wicked design,” she continued, watching the girl for a reaction. When she got none—at least nothing that Mary construed as a precursor to a confession—she pulled the forks from her apron, as if she were one of the street conjurers she’d seen from carriages when she’d been living in London. “These,” she said, “were planted tines down in the dirt near the front door.”

“Tines down, thou sayest?”

“Indeed.”

Catherine’s eyes grew a little wide now, a little alarmed. She studied the forks. “Whatever for?”

Mary shrugged. “Thou knowest nothing of this?”

“Of course not!”

“Thou didst not sow these like seeds or see someone else do such a thing?”

“I would have told thee if I had.”

Mary nodded, unsure if her servant’s indignation was genuine, but giving her the benefit of the doubt. Still, the air felt charged. “I do not want thee to have secrets from me,” she told Catherine, “just as I will not be obscure in our companionship. There are already too many secrets in this world.”

“I thank my mistress for that courtesy.”

“But I cannot understand who would court such impiety. I cannot imagine who would invite the Devil in. I do not believe it was my mother—”

“No!”

“Or my father or Thomas. And so I am troubled.”

“Yes, ma’am. I am, too.”

Mary ran her thumb over the silver handles. “I heard a story the day after my father imported the forks of a man impaling the hand of his trencher mate with one of these. It happened back in England. In Farrenden.”

“The worst things occur there. The Devil’s playground.”

“Perhaps I will tell Thomas. He may not know who did this, but he might know why someone would.”

    “He is very wise,” Catherine said, and they both went silent. Finally, Catherine raised her face to Mary and said, “We have so many eggs, should I make an Indian pudding?”



* * *





In their bed in the dark, the candles extinguished, Thomas entered her, and she wished that he still believed this might result in a child and wasn’t merely the remedy for the inner lip of his lust. But she knew that he, like everyone else, was convinced that she was barren. He moved atop her and grunted, and her mind wandered away from him. This time, however, it roamed not to other boys and men she had seen in her life, including her own son-in-law, Jonathan Cooke. Instead she saw a vision of Thomas’s seed inside her—the infant the size of a raindrop—dying because there was no sustenance there. Nothing to which it might cling and take root. She imagined the deserts in Hebrews, Exodus, and Deuteronomy, and she saw her womb now the way she had heard different preachers describe those unfathomably arid, waterless worlds. Barren. A word, it seemed, for worlds and for women. Did Thomas’s driblet-sized child shrivel inside her once its watery pond was gone, did the thing become as dry as old grain? A particle of inland sand? Or did something else happen to the minuscule baby? She had held Thomas’s seed in her fingers when it had trickled down the insides of her thighs, wondering what this yield needed that she could not give it.

When Thomas was finished, he brushed a lock of her hair away from her eyes and felt the moistness on the side of her face.

“We have applied ourselves indeed,” he said, and he laughed, mistaking her tears for sweat.

She nodded though he couldn’t see her and then he rolled off her and lay on his side on the bedstead. Soon he would be asleep, the remnants of his exertions would stream from between her legs, and once more she would reach there with her fingers and take pleasure from the small gift the Lord had given her in lieu of the ability to conceive and bear a child.

Assuming, of course, this was a gift and not the root cause. She recalled once more the forks in the dooryard and Thomas’s casual disregard of her concerns when she had broached them at supper. No doubt, he had said when she told him of her discovery, a child had done it. When she pressed him, asking where a child would have acquired three-tined forks, he suggested that perhaps her mother had dropped them and someone—anyone—had driven them accidentally into the ground with his boots. No deviltry to it, he had said, and not likely witchcraft. Still, she could see in his face a whisper of trepidation, as he, too, was chronicling in his mind who might wish ill fortune upon them.

    When Thomas’s breathing had slowed and the sound was nothing more than a small, scratchy whistle as he exhaled, she spread her legs once again and draped her hand lazily between them. She rubbed herself slowly with her fingers, but her mind kept returning to the two forks. For years now, she had prayed for a child and her prayers had been unanswered. In her prayers, she had made promises to the Lord that, sinner that she was, she knew she couldn’t keep: She would be as obedient as God’s truest saints, she would fast and pray, fast and pray, she would ignore the flesh and its pleasures. She would never again do…this.