Hour of the Witch(39)

The girl rolled her eyes and then wiped her hands on her apron and said, “I need a great many eggs right now for these fritters. Rest thy hands and when I return thou canst show me thy talents.” Then she left for the back of the house to retrieve the eggs from the family’s chickens.

“Is she always so delightfully forward?” Henry asked Mary when she was gone.

“No. Thou dost bring out the worst in all of us, Henry,” she told him, but her tone was playful, not scolding.

“Now that is a noble calling. That is a reason for me to have journeyed all the way here.”

“Oh, the Devil may come with a handsome face, but it takes more encouragement than that to lead one astray.”

“I have a handsome face? ’Tis good to know.”

“Thou knowest it too well.”

    “There it is again: that particularly deadly sin of pride. I succumb to it often. It will be the death of me yet.”

“Ah, but who among us will be the agent?”

“It won’t be thee,” he said, and he went to her. He stood so close that she could feel his breath on her face.

“And why is that?”

He looked at her intently. “Because, I think, we are much alike.”

“In what fashion? We know each other but little.”

“A falcon knows its kin at a very great distance.”

“And its prey.”

He smiled. “Exactly. I am in thy talons.” Then he leaned in closer still, and she felt him taking her right hand in his. “And, Mary, never lose sight of this: thou art far more comely than I am handsome. ’Tis a fact as unassailable as the waves in the harbor and the way the leaves here grow red before falling.” She realized that he was about to kiss her, and the idea stopped her short. But then without thinking, her body moving with a will of its own, all want and need, she stood on her toes and opened her lips to his.

And it was then, that moment, she heard the bowl fall and the eggs break, and there stood Abigail with her hand on her mouth.





We see the Devil’s work in the temptations He dangles before us all, and most clearly in the inducements He offers the nulliparous—those persuasions He will offer the barren.

—The Testimony of Reverend John Norton, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1662, Volume III





Thirteen



On the day her divorce petition was to be heard, Mary ate little for breakfast. At dinnertime, just before noon, at her mother’s insistence she nibbled a piece of sourdough bread, picked at a turnip, and tore some meat from a turkey leg. Abigail and Hannah said almost nothing to her, but they had said little since Abigail had seen her mistress on her toes leaning into Henry Simmons, her hand enmeshed in his. Mary now lived under the same roof with Abigail and she had known the girl since she had arrived in the colony, but it was as if rather suddenly they had become strangers. Mary understood Abigail’s predicament: the girl’s testimony could enrage her employers, but lying came with far greater consequences, because they were eternal. Mary had confessed to her parents precisely what she had done with Henry and what Abigail had seen, and Mary’s father had pressed the girl on what she might say. “I hope, Abigail,” he had said with Mary present, “thou wilt never forget the injuries that Thomas Deerfield has inflicted upon my daughter. Look at her hand. Recall what it looked like when she returned to us. There already will be allegations about her that may dog her forever. Weigh earnestly in thy mind the smallness of what thou might have seen with the greatness of the harm that will befall my daughter’s reputation if this petition became a tale of something other than the basic facts of her husband’s meanness.”

“I will remember that, sir,” she said, but Mary had felt more embarrassed than relieved. She knew what she had done. She knew how she had been tempted and how that moment of weakness might cost her. Her father had also gone to see Henry Simmons. He would not share with her specifically what he had said to the younger man, but he had reassured her that if this trial turned upon adultery, Henry was prepared to shoulder the blame and take the lashing. Her father had reminded her that Abigail had only seen them kiss and then demanded from his daughter confirmation that, indeed, they had never done more than kiss. Adultery, after all, was a capital offense.

    Still, she knew what she felt toward Henry. This was allure. This was temptation. She felt a giddiness around Henry that she had never felt around Thomas. For weeks now she had thought of him during the day, and she had thought of him when she was alone in her bedstead at night.

Mary and her parents were aware that her husband had retained a lawyer and that the lawyer had spoken yesterday to both of the Burdens’ servant girls. The attorney, among the few in the colony, was a pudgy fellow with black-and-white caterpillars for eyebrows named Philip Bristol. He was universally detested, principally because of his profession, though no one doubted his intellect. But it was one thing to retain a scrivener such as Benjamin Hull; it was quite another to ask a lawyer to plead one’s case before the court. That was unseemly. Still, among the magistrates were men who had received legal training back in England, and so it was no longer unheard of to see a lawyer at the Town House.

The attorney told the servant girls that he wanted to understand Mary’s actions the morning she had come to her parents’ home; Abigail had assured Mary’s father that he hadn’t inquired about Henry Simmons—Why would he? she had asked James Burden—but of the two servants, so far only Abigail’s presence had been requested at the Town House for the trial. This was ominous, it seemed, a bad augur of what might be part of her testimony.