Hour of the Witch(40)
Mary had thought often that week on her conversations with Thomas, trying to parse his motives for investing such effort in preserving their marriage. Was it pride? The risk of losing one-third of his estate? Or did he actually love her? She didn’t know the answer, but she presumed the third of the possibilities was the least likely. After all, in his eyes, she was either a foolish wench or a prideful sinner; in either case, she was in dire need of tutelage in the form of barbarism and beatings.
She had spent part of the day before the hearing with Benjamin Hull and her mother at this very table in her parents’ house, reviewing the testimonies that Hull had meticulously written down, but Mary couldn’t see how anything anyone had said would help all that much. At one point she had grown so ill—so appalled at Thomas Deerfield’s untarnished reputation and Catherine Stileman’s obsession with witchcraft and forks—that she had gone outside into the garden and there, behind the small coop with their chickens, vomited. When she went to wipe her mouth on her apron, she had looked at the wound that was going to forever mar her left hand. The gooseneck on a teakettle? Who could possibly believe that was the cause? One could almost see the mark of the three tines.
But only almost.
She presumed the bone was mending, but still it hurt and she did as many of her chores as she could with only her right hand.
When she went back inside, her mother asked her if she was feeling poorly because of anxiety or whether she was ill. She replied that she was fine. Had she not menstruated since leaving Thomas, the notion might have crossed her mind that she was pregnant. But she wasn’t pregnant, this she knew.
Just as she knew she never would be.
The scrivener said that he had brought to the Town House some of the testimonies he had recorded, but there were others that he had not presented to the magistrates to read. They weren’t useless, he had explained; they just weren’t helpful. But Hull said he might spend that afternoon rounding up a few additional people to appear at the Town House the next day to provide oral accounts of their history with Thomas and Mary and what they may (or may not) have witnessed.
“Tell me something,” Mary had said to the scrivener that Wednesday.
He had sat back in his chair and waited. Her mother had, too.
“When the aspersions upon my character are complete and I am perceived as a sinner unworthy of angels…”
“Go on,” said Hull, but her mother’s face was growing alarmed, more worried even than when Mary had risen to go outside a moment earlier.
“When it is clear to the magistrates that I am disobedient and prideful and drawn to the most sinful pleasures; that I am, perhaps, already a handmaiden of Satan—”
“Cease such talk,” her mother commanded. “No one shall ever believe such a thing.”
“Oh, Mother, they will. They will. Thou hast seen what Benjamin has written. We all know what Catherine will say and what Abigail saw.”
The scrivener looked back and forth between the women. “Prithee, Mary, continue.”
“What is likely to be my future? Thou hast spent many a day at the Town House. Thou hast watched the magistrates rule and seen the sinners fined and whipped and sent to the stocks. Have I any chance at all?”
“I cannot presume to foretell the future,” he said, and he glanced at her mother. “But a man may not strike his wife. The law is clear. I most definitely do not see the stocks in thy future.”
“The hanging platform, perhaps?” she asked, willfully ignoring his optimism.
Her mother took her hand and said, “Mary, thou art being silly. Thou hast no such blackness in thy soul that anyone tomorrow will actually believe Catherine Stileman’s nonsense. Besides: it was thine own father who imported the forks.”
“And people will say that it was I who buried them.”
“But thou didst not,” said Priscilla Burden.
“I did not the first time.”
“Yes. The first time,” the scrivener repeated, almost a murmur.
“We do not know whether it was man or woman or demon who first pressed the tines into the earth—or the pestle. I just know that it was not me,” Mary continued.
Benjamin dipped his quill and wrote himself a short note. Then he said, “Let us not stew upon these details, Mary. As thy mother said: thou hast nothing to fear in that regard.”
And once again the eyes of the older adults met for the briefest of seconds, sharing the sort of conspiratorial secret that she had detected in the exchanges her parents had had with magistrate Richard Wilder and Reverend John Norton. She was unsure whether she found comfort or fear in whatever machinations were in the minds of these elder saints.
* * *
There were the county courts in Cambridge, Boston, Salem, Springfield, Ipswich, and York. They were the inferior courts and weighed in on civil disputes when the stakes were smaller than ten pounds. But they also heard the petty criminal offenses: those in which a guilty verdict would not lead to banishment, the severing of a limb with an ax or a knife, or death by hanging. They were known for disciplining the idle, punishing those whose apparel was deemed too ornate, and fining anyone who bought and sold from the savages without proper license.
Above them was the colony’s Court of Assistants. It was composed of the governor, the deputy governor, and twelve elected assistants, but rarely were all fourteen magistrates in attendance together for a full session. They were busy men, and only a quorum of seven was required to render a verdict on the civil petitions—such as Mary Deerfield’s request to divorce her husband—or the criminal accusations brought before them. They listened, they asked questions, and sometimes they deliberated in private. Then they voted and the majority ruled.