Hour of the Witch(36)

“But I have done nothing! Why would Goody—”

Her father put his hand on her arm, silencing her with his grip. “This is sage counsel, John. I thank thee for thy candor.”

“Mary, I have urged thee to reconsider, and I understand thou wilt not. That is a choice. I understand thou hast no interest in mediation. That is a choice, too, and I will not enlist the elders. But if thou were to take but two small bits of advice from me, it would be these.”

She waited, cross.

“First,” said the reverend, “give Goody Howland and Catherine Stileman a wide berth between now and thine appearance before the court.”

    “And the second?” she asked.

“Trust thy father and me. I do not want another Ann Hibbens on my ledger—and I do not want to see the madness in Hartford affect us here, too.”

And she knew. At least she thought she knew. She knew because she witnessed the way her parents and the Reverend John Norton were glancing sidelong at each other, conspiratorial eddies drifting among them. She could see in their eyes how, if she weren’t careful, there was a possible fate looming before her that was far worse than a life with Thomas Deerfield.





I was shocked deeply by what I saw. I speak as a witness, not a gossip.

    —The Testimony of Abigail Gathers, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1662, Volume III





Twelve



Benjamin Hull stopped by the home of James Burden to inform Mary that her petition was going to be heard by the Court of Assistants later that week, most likely on Thursday. Based on the other items on the docket, he expected they would get to her soon after dinner. She did not ask who the other petitioners were, because she feared knowing would only make her more restless. But she was, Hull said, the only divorce. Of course.

After the scrivener had left, she went to her room and pulled the small chair to the window. There by the afternoon light she wrote in her diary, her ink on the sill and her ledger in her lap. She wrote not of the pending trial, nor of her fears about the accusations that would be leveled at her with the aim of a fowler’s musket. She did not write about the handsome Indian she had seen trading in the marketplace, or the way the spark and flame at the blacksmith’s had struck her as more beautiful that morning than a sunset. She wrote instead of a moment when she had been a little girl in England and she had rolled over and over down the hill on the estate where her brother Giles now kept his sheep. She had been seven that summer, and the air had been sticky but she hadn’t minded. She’d been alone at first, but then the younger of her two older siblings, Charles, had joined her, and they had pretended they were logs rolling down a ravine, and when they’d stood at the bottom of the hill, the world spun and their legs wouldn’t quite work and they’d pretended that they had imbibed too long at the tavern. They slurred their words. They fell down with great histrionics. But then they would claw their way to their feet, ascend the hill, and do it all again.

    She read what she had written. She’d always assumed that someday she would come to the top of a hill and spy her daughter—and in her mind she had auburn hair beneath her bonnet, and eyes that were playful and round—and see the child rolling in precisely that fashion down the meadow. But no. No. It seemed that was not meant to be.

She recalled how back in England grown-ups played cards. Even her parents. She missed their laughter when they played.

She missed Christmas.

She closed her eyes because the reality that card playing and Christmas should come to her now could only bode ill. She obeyed the scriptures as best she could. But it seemed that her best was not good enough. Perhaps she was frivolous when viewed in the kindest light and wicked when viewed in the worst. She opened her eyes and turned toward the bed. She knew what she had done there just last night when she was alone in the dark, her mind fixated on a man named Henry Simmons who was not her husband.

At one point she looked up from the window and saw a tremendous flock of geese flying south, awed by the size of the V. Winter was coming. The cold and the ice and the snow.

She told herself that there would be justice when she shared her story with the Court of Assistants and that she should be grateful that she lived here in Boston, where divorce was even a possibility. But she remembered the look that had passed between her parents and Reverend Norton and feared that she was being naive.

She scraped a smudge off one of the diamond-shaped panes in the window. Hell was awash in flame. This Mary knew. And God would not justify the wicked. This she knew, too.

But this frigid world of New England? It was no Heaven, either.



* * *





As Mary and her parents and the servant girls were finishing supper that night, they heard the sound of a horse whinnying in their yard. Hannah went to the door, and there stood Thomas Deerfield, his hat in his hands, his horse roped to the post at the edge of the dooryard.

    “Hannah,” he said.

Mary and her mother did not rise, but her father stood.

“What brings thee here, Thomas?” James Burden asked.

“I hoped to speak to thy daughter one last time. I remain open to mediation, even if it means the intrusion of the elders into my life. I am still praying there is a way to stop this madness before it reaches the Town House.”