Hour of the Witch(59)

Adams stabbed a finger at him, smirking. “And vengeance? We know to whom that belongs.”

“I would not be so glib,” said Wilder.

“The question is relevant because of the potency of Mary’s allegations and the magnitude of her petition. Do we not have a right to know more about the woman’s character?”

The governor looked back and forth between Adams and Wilder and weighed in. “The question is allowed. Abigail, thou mayest answer the magistrate’s question.”

Abigail seemed to think about this. Then: “I like her much. She is very kind.”

“I thank thee,” said Wilder, but Adams again raised his index finger.

“Is she a sinner?” Adams asked.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Hast thou ever seen her sin?” he asked, and Mary feared that somehow, some way, he knew something.

    “I do not know what dwells in her heart,” she replied.

“But thou knowest the meaning of adultery, yes, Abigail?”

The girl nodded.

“And thou knowest an unclean thought when one is brought forth in body and action?”

“I hope so. I listen attentively to the Psalter readings of my master, James Burden, and to the sermons of Reverend Norton.”

“Very good, Abigail. So, prithee, hast thou ever seen Mary Deerfield behave in a manner that is unclean?”

“He is but fishing,” Hull whispered into Mary’s ear. “He is merely trying to build upon what Goody Howland said.”

But Mary could see that Abigail was stalling, when she asked, “Unclean?”

“A fashion that suggests her willingness to allow her defiled soul to roam free.”

“I am but a small bird and my sight is clouded by youth. Besides…”

“Yes?”

Abigail glanced at James and Priscilla Burden. Mary realized how meticulously her scrivener or her parents had coached the girl. “Besides,” she continued, turning back to the bench, though her eyes were lowered, “who am I to cast a stone?”

Adams folded his arms across his chest. He cleared his throat and asked, his exasperation evident, “Hast thou ever seen her sin, Abigail? And answer knowing that thy Lord and Savior are watching thee as intently as I.”

She nodded her head ever so slightly, and her voice cracked when she responded. “Once. Perhaps.”

“Tell us, child.”

“Once—just the one time—I saw her and Henry Simmons holding hands and kissing. No, perhaps, they were only about to kiss. It all happened so quickly.”

“About to kiss?” asked Adams, wanting more. He sounded lustful himself.

“I am not sure I saw them, in fact, kiss.”

“Art thou suggesting they stopped because they saw thee?”

    “Or they stopped because they came to themselves. They knew it was wrong what they were contemplating. Mary Deerfield is kind, sir. She is good.” Still, the girl looked forlorn.

“Why do I have a feeling there may be more to it than that?” Adams pressed.

“I know not what else there could be,” she said, her voice timorous. Mary thought the girl might cry at what she had to view as her betrayal of her master and his family.

“Speak, child!” roared Adams, his voice all frustration and pique.

And so the girl did, though her voice was halting and broken: “Perhaps they stopped because I dropped my bowl of eggs.”

“Elaborate.”

“I surprised them and I was surprised, in turn, by what I saw: Mary’s hand in his and their faces so close. I dropped my eggs.”

“And they heard thee?”

Abigail nodded.

“This is a grave accusation,” Wilder told the girl. “Art thou convinced of the rightness of thy memory?”

When she responded now, she was in tears, her shoulders heaving with every syllable. “I was shocked deeply by what I saw. I speak as a witness, not a gossip,” she mewled. And she was saying more, but her words were garbled by her crying, and Mary felt her skin tightening and thought: This is the price of my sin. I have earned this because I am craven and low, and I have brought this danger upon myself. I earned every bruise and broken bone, and I merited the wrath of my husband and having him dump a boiled salad upon me as if I, too, were but rubbish and ruin. I am…damned. I am a wastrel and a whore, and I have taken my Lord God’s love and treated it like sewage. She wanted to disappear, to vanish, to shrink into nothingness.

She might have gone on that way until, like Abigail, she, too, was wrecked before the magistrates, but then the crowd was parting and there—and she saw his shadow first, the darkness on the floor cast by the sun pouring in through the eastern windows—was Henry Simmons, striding up toward the magistrates. Confused, she looked toward her scrivener and her parents. Were they as shocked as she? She couldn’t decide. The constable, roused either by Abigail’s bleating sobs or the outrage of the crowd that this seeming interloper had appeared out of nowhere, rushed with his pike and stood between Simmons and the magistrates as if he expected the young man to attack one of the important men behind the great wooden balustrade. He held his wrought-iron spike as if it were a piece of horizontal field fencing, a barricade of sorts.

    “I would like to speak, governor, if I may,” Henry said, his voice firm.