Hour of the Witch(62)

She sighed. Why couldn’t people just desire the people with whom God had blessed them? Catherine may (or may not) have craved Thomas; Peregrine feared that Mary was desirous of Jonathan and, conceivably, that Jonathan thought too highly of her; and she herself was lusting after Henry Simmons. It was all so complicated.

“Mary?”

She looked up. It was Hull. “More Madeira?” he asked, leaning across the desk.

“Maybe in a few minutes,” she said. She watched her father pat her mother’s right hand good-naturedly, which made Mary think of the bones so recently broken in her left.



* * *





    For the next half hour, Mary and her mother said little. Occasionally Hull and her father conjectured about what may have been transpiring at the Town House, but it was all speculation. By now the messenger had reached her husband’s mill, and he was on his way back to the center of the city. Carefully she pulled off her left glove and gazed at her hand. The swelling was down considerably and the wound healing well, but still there were moments when her store of valerian was little match for its ache. She watched a spider scuttle across the desk near the bottle and then disappear down the side of the wood. She asked the scrivener to refill the tankard and took a long swallow, finishing the wine and hoping both to quench her parched tongue and to silence the rhythmic throbbing in her hand. She hoped to calm her nerves. It was unsettling that where she would sleep tonight remained a mystery even now.

“Does it hurt much?” her mother was asking.

“No,” she replied. “I’m fine.”

“Mary,” her father said, his tone grave, “whatever happens, rest in the knowledge that the Lord knows what is best and holds thee in His hands. Take comfort in the fact that thou hast a fine scrivener.” He smiled in a paternal fashion at the other man, and Hull shrugged modestly.

Mary tried not to give greater meaning to her father’s words than probably he had meant. But she could not help but hear foreboding in them. She recalled the moments during the last few weeks when she had seen or felt signs of conspiracy—the lengths they would go to…

To what? To protect her?

And yet returning to Thomas Deerfield was no protection, unless there were dangers out there far worse than his base cruelties. She put the tankard on the scrivener’s desk beside his inkpot. Once again, she ran the tips of the fingers on her right hand over the wound on the back of her left and thought of the forks, including the one that Thomas had wielded as a weapon. She thought as well of the pestle.

“Mary, art thou with us?” her father was asking.

She watched the wind off the harbor cyclone the scarlet leaves in the streets up and off the cobblestones, and was struck by their beauty. Even dry and dead they were lovely. God’s work. God’s world.

    “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

The men chatted for a few more minutes and her mother watched her, worried, but said nothing. And then, almost abruptly, they all saw through the window a boy of perhaps fourteen, an apprentice to one of the magistrates, running toward the office. Even before the lad rapped on the scrivener’s door, Hull clapped his hands together and said, “?’Tis time. They have rendered their decision. Let us return.”



* * *





Their faces were inscrutable. The men behind the bench. Did Caleb Adams look satisfied and self-righteous, was he feeling contentment that justice had been done and a marriage preserved? Mary couldn’t decide. Was Richard Wilder frustrated that his friend James Burden’s daughter was being sent back to the beast, or was he relieved that her petition had been granted and she was going to begin her life anew? His eyes were impenetrable. Daniel Winslow seemed intent largely on whatever paper was before him on the bench. Governor Endicott looked only exhausted. When no one would make eye contact with her, she felt a quiver of anxiety.

And there was Thomas standing across the floor from her. He smiled at her, but it was derisive and mean. She feared that he knew something. Beside him was Philip Bristol, his hands clasped behind him as he rocked ever so slightly back and forth on his heels and toes. She had been aware that the lawyer was shorter than her husband, but only now was she struck by how much: Thomas was a head taller than the man.

She heard the governor saying to the constable, “I see that everyone has returned. Let us proceed.”

The constable rapped his pike on the wooden floor, and the murmuring in the Town House grew silent.

“Richard, it is for thee to render the verdict,” Endicott said, and for a moment Mary was engulfed by a wave of confidence. The idea that it was Wilder who was going to announce her fate might be a sign that God was smiling upon her and offering deliverance.

    “Whenever we ponder a petition of this magnitude, I am obliged to ask myself this question,” Wilder said. “If now I were dying, how would I wish I had behaved during my life? For what would I crave remembrance, and for what will I have to answer to our Lord God and Savior? A court such as this is a most imperfect vessel, and our judgment is dyed badly by our frailties and by sin. We have neither the wisdom nor the glory of our Maker. We all know in our hearts the myriad ways that daily—daily!—we offend Him.”

She felt an ache in the small of her back from standing and thought of her mother and father, so much older than she, who had been standing all this time yesterday and today beside her.