Hour of the Witch(53)

Or…

The idea was too depressing to contemplate, but consider it she did.

Perhaps her friend Rebeckah had poisoned the dessert. She chastised herself for suspecting for even a moment the other woman of evil, and could conceive of no reason why Rebeckah might wish ill upon her or her family. But the possibility had lodged there, one more pebble in her boot.

More than anything tonight, she was disappointed that the trial had oozed into a second day. She wanted it done. In every way she could imagine, this was a more humiliating spectacle than the stocks or the pillory—and perhaps more painful than a lashing. She gazed down at her left hand. Could the whip hurt more than what Thomas had done to her with the fork? It seemed unlikely. How was it that so much of the testimony that afternoon had been about her and not about him? How had it centered so much on her behavior and so little on his?

Tomorrow, she knew, he was going to speak at the Town House and he was going to lie. He was going to tell the magistrates that he had not plunged a fork into her hand. He had not hurled her into the hearth. He had not beaten her about the face. She was just a clumsy wench with white meat for a brain—though, of course, he would not say that precisely—who walked into clothes pegs and fell upon teakettles. He would add that he feared for her soul and did his best as her husband to school her. The worst he had done? He had accidentally banged her with the cooking spider while Catherine was gone and he was trying to assist with their supper.

    He was despicable.

Yes, she, too, was a sinner. Perhaps she was not among the elect. But neither did she believe that she was capable of that kind of cruelty. Lust was a terrible and terrifying affliction, and it might lead to her damnation; but her worst crime was kissing Henry Simmons. And while she may have defiled her own body, she had neither debased anyone else’s nor degraded in any way the magic of the Lord’s myriad works.

She sighed. She wondered what Henry Simmons was doing tonight. She thought of him often, her mind taking comfort in fantasies of him when she was alone in this room. Surely tales of what had occurred today at the courthouse had reached him. No doubt, he had heard what people had said about her. The discussions of her barrenness. The debate about the forks. How could he possibly be attracted to her? Good Lord, for that matter, how could Jonathan? She should have said that to Peregrine: no one could ever want her who wanted children.

And yet Henry Simmons had desired her, hadn’t he? He had. He had pulled her into him to kiss her. That was a fact, as undeniable as the way the leaves turned crimson in this new world before dying or the marvels of those magnificent lobsters. Their size and their sea-monster-like claws. He had been drawn to her as she had been drawn to him, a magnetism as real as that which spun compass points to the north and as indisputable as the presence of Satan. Even here. A person could traverse an ocean so wide it took six or seven weeks to navigate, invariably storm-tossed and sickened, and here the Devil would be waiting. Yes, He had taken a knee before the Lord, but He hadn’t bowed.

Henry Simmons wanted her, just as she wanted him. She could speculate her entire life on whether this was a temptation from the Devil—a lure to coax her to Him. She would never know until her life was done and her soul gone to Heaven or Hell.

Now she allowed herself a daydream: her petition for divorce was granted, and with one-third of Thomas’s estate, she and Henry married and set off for Hadley to the west or Providence to the south. Somehow, she proved not to be barren and they had children, and the boys and girls lived.

    They lived.

It was then that she saw the cat spring, pouncing upon a massive rat. The feline rolled onto its back, holding the animal with its forepaws and using its back legs to tear out the rodent’s intestines. Then it sat up and gazed down at the corpse almost curiously. Another bat raced past her window. The cat looked up toward the bat and saw her still behind the glass. The animal bobbed its head between her and the dead rat as if to say, I have thee in my sights, too, Mary Deerfield. I do.





There were nights when I chose not to refill his mug.

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





Seventeen



Neither Mary nor her parents summoned the physician in the morning because Hannah insisted that she felt somewhat improved. But she had been sick again in the night, and she did not stir from her bed. Before Mary and her parents and Abigail left for the trial, Hannah rolled over and faced them, giving them a small, weak smile. She said she would be up and about by the time they returned and offered to have dinner waiting. Priscilla commanded her to do no such thing.

Meanwhile, James looked at the rest of his family and concluded that there had been nothing insidious about the apples; whatever was afflicting Hannah was most likely attributable to the change in the season.



* * *





At the base of the stairs on the first floor of the Town House, Mary and her parents and Benjamin Hull ran into Beth Howland. The weather had grown icy in the night and Beth’s eyes were running from the cold, and she was wiping at them with the edge of her coif. For a moment she was so focused on her eyes that she was oblivious to Mary. When she saw her, she blinked and started to say something. Then, just as quickly, the awkwardness of the encounter led her to stop.