Hour of the Witch(17)

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Mary saw that the sores on William’s arms and neck had started to ooze once again, and there were stains the color of rotten apples on the coverlet. For a second, she presumed that the boy had died in the time it had taken Edward to fetch them. He was lying on the bedstead with only his arms and his head atop the quilt, and the comforter atop his chest was as flat as the face of a pond. She touched his feet under the blanket and they were cold. Only when she felt heat radiating from his forehead like a warmed brick did she realize that he was alive. Still, she had to place her ear against his lips to hear the small, almost imperceptible whispers of his exhalations.

    “We’ve sent for the minister,” Beth said from the doorway, her arms crossed. “But I tend to doubt Reverend Norton himself will come. I expect an elder.”

Mary stood back so Catherine could sit beside her brother and then went to the kitchen for a cloth. She dunked it in the cool water in the drum and was returning to William’s bedstead when Beth stopped her.

“What dost thou really think that will accomplish?” she asked.

“It will make him more comfortable,” she replied.

“He is beyond comfort. Let him go. Thou art only prolonging his pain.”

“I will be content to let him go if that is the Lord’s will. But there is no reason for him to suffer in the meantime.”

“Suffer? Dost thou believe he feels anything anymore? Not ten minutes ago he wasn’t even breathing. He—”

Mary looked beyond Beth into the shadows and the gloom, and then pushed past her.

“Mary—”

“I will see to him,” she said. Then, concerned that she had sounded peevish, added, “Thou hast done more than anyone could have asked.”

Catherine was holding one of her brother’s hands, massaging the joints on his fingers, and telling him that she would write their father to inform him of all he had accomplished here in Boston: how much of his servitude he had worked off, how many friends he had made. She would share how the children in the Howland house had revered his son, and how much William would be missed.

Mary leaned over the bedstead and draped the cloth on his forehead, and then knelt on the floor beside the siblings. She hadn’t been there long when the breathing, already shallow, stopped, and with neither a final spasm nor flinch William Stileman died.



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At supper that night, Thomas offered tales of the men who had brought their grains to the gristmill from Roxbury and Salem, and how high the water was in Mill Creek for this time of year. He was in fine spirits, and Mary had to remind him that William had passed. He scowled, but then looked to Catherine to express his condolences. A moment later, still pleasantly drink-drunk, he resumed his storytelling, and Catherine listened in a fashion that suggested either a patience beyond her years or a fondness that was inappropriate—and, given how little Mary thought of the man, undeserved.

    And yet Catherine did like him. Her master. Mary could tell. But whether she saw in him a substitute for the father she had left behind in England or something more, Mary couldn’t decide. He was old enough to be her father, a makeshift parent, but the girl didn’t look at him quite that way. Oh, she was cognizant that he was married. And yet there was something in the girl’s gaze that held within it an unmistakably amorous tinge. That did not mean the girl had adulterous designs. So, perhaps, it was not an affection that was improper. It was merely one that was unmerited and misguided, and that the girl could not fully restrain. A reflex.

Maybe it was reminiscent of the embers that seemed to exist between her and Jonathan Cooke but would never, ever be billowed into flame. Something harmless.

Mary glanced down at her trencher and imagined eating with one of those forks. She shook her head ever so slightly to clear her mind and returned her attention to her husband and Catherine. She knew that Peter and Beth Howland would not want to pay a stone carver to chisel a death’s head for William, and so she had told the girl that her father would incur the costs of the burial. She had gone to see him immediately after the boy had died, and her father had agreed.

After dark, once they had gone upstairs and extinguished the candles, Mary lay on her bedstead beside Thomas a long while, and then said, “All we really knew of William was what Catherine told us. I wish we had known more. I wish we had spent more time with him before he grew ill.”

Thomas said nothing, and she realized that he had already fallen asleep. And although she had lain there for at least fifteen minutes, she was too restless to nod off, and so she climbed off the mattress, took one of the long tallow sticks from the table by the nightstand, and went downstairs. She stepped carefully around Catherine, who seemed to be sleeping as well, lit the candle with one of the last starry cinders in the fireplace, and went outside.

    The moon was almost full, and the air felt as cool and damp as the ocean. Tonight for sure there would be the frost that would finish the gardens, and so tomorrow she and Catherine would be chopping the great browned pumpkin leaves into mulch. Down the street she heard horses and men laughing, and she guessed they were revelers on their way to or from the ordinaries. She presumed that Thomas would have gone out tonight, too, had he not had so much to drink on the way home. Was it also possible that he felt Catherine’s pain and the way the household had been sobered by William’s death? No, it wasn’t. That wasn’t Thomas.