Hour of the Witch(30)

“It seems we are walking in the same direction. Shall we?” Constance asked.

To continue toward the scrivener’s would mean continuing to walk with Constance. Mary knew that when she faced the magistrates next week, no good could come from an association with this woman from the Neck. Here was one of those inescapable moments when pragmatism and cruelty were yoked. And so even though it pained her, deepening her contrition, she said, “No, I think I am going in the other direction. I’ve chosen to live with my parents and I am heading there now.”

Constance saw through the ruse and smirked ever so slightly. “Very well. Good day, Mary,” she said, and walked on.



* * *





For the next three days, unnerved by her encounter with Constance Winston, Mary stayed home with her mother and her mother’s servant girls. She and Hannah put the garden to bed and tended the animals, she and Abigail mended clothing for the winter and put up stores of root vegetables, and she and her mother wrote long letters to her brothers back in England. She was neither efficient nor fast, hobbled as she was by her left hand. But she did her best. The scrivener came twice to the house, and that was reassuring, even when on the second visit he told her that he was going to see Catherine Stileman that afternoon. She slept in the room that had been hers before she married Thomas, and it seemed largely unchanged: small and dark and far from the hearth, and she recalled how chilly it would become in the winter. One night when she was seventeen, she had taken the bed warmer and run hot coals beneath the counterpane—as she had most nights that winter—and suddenly the white fabric was starting to smolder. Quickly she poured water from a washing bucket onto the bed and extinguished the fire before it could start. But that night she slept in damp bedding, and for the rest of the winter she slept in a cold bed.

    And now winter once more was starting its remorseless approach; the sun was setting earlier and rising later. The rains were frequent and they were cold.

Her parents insisted that it had rained more in England, but her memories told her otherwise. In her mind, her bedroom as a girl had always been sunny.

Twice her father had brought up the fact that next week the Court of Assistants convened and they would hear her petition for divorce. Both times he had said they must be sure that Benjamin Hull had lined up their witnesses to ensure the magistrates understood Thomas’s violence and drunkenness. When Mary had reminded him that Catherine might testify to his harsh words but that was all, he had nodded gravely and said it was critical at the very least that she did that. He took the liberty of reaching out to the fellow who owned the tavern where Thomas drank most frequently and reassured her that the man had met with the scrivener and would speak ill of Thomas’s habits. Mary was less confident: James Burden was an important figure in the city, but so was Thomas. And while Thomas might not be as esteemed or as wealthy as her father, he was respected enough, and he patronized that tavern often.

    Meanwhile, her mother fretted that Catherine was going to deny having planted the forks, should it come up, and there was no one else they could reasonably accuse. There was no one else they could imagine who had done it.

One afternoon when Abigail was churning butter and Hannah was hauling logs into the firewood rack, Mary took the mysterious pestle from beneath her bed where she had been hiding it and stared at the Devil’s tines that had been carved into its handle. She knew what was occurring that autumn in Hartford and why her mother was anxious. Mary Sanford already had been hanged as a witch. Ann Cole had admitted to her possession. Rebecca Greensmith had confessed that the Devil had carnal knowledge of her body. Mary ran her fingers over the mark on the pestle and thought of what she used to do to herself in her bed, her husband beside her, and questioned as she had dozens of times before whether this was an enticement from the Devil, a gift from God, or something that had as little to do with the Lord and Satan as the hours in her life she spent at the spinning wheel.

But she was certain of one thing: she had not planted those forks that first time in the earth, and never had she planted this pestle. She would make that clear if the divorce trial devolved into some appalling—and, yes, dangerous—litany of accusations into who was a witch and who wasn’t. But if she had not planted the forks, the question quickly would become, who did? Catherine? Thomas? Someone or some thing else? She couldn’t say.

She stripped and searched her body in the cold air of her room to be sure there was nowhere upon her a witch’s teat or Devil’s mark. There wasn’t—which surprised her not at all. As her own husband had said to her that awful night when he had plunged the fork into the back of her hand: she was many things, but she was most certainly not a witch.



* * *





By Thursday, she could no longer endure being inside the ever-darkening house or in the back with the dying gardens and the animals, and so she dressed and managed to carefully slide a glove over her left hand. She walked past the Town House and toward the warehouses down by the harbor. The sky was gray and flat, and the water in the cove was choppy with whitecaps. It was likely going to rain before supper. The anchored ships bobbed as they waited their turn to approach the piers and unload their cargo, their sails wound tight against their masts, and the men on the wharves moved methodically up and down the planks with their crates and casks and the occasional large, elegant cupboard or table built by artisans back in England.