Hour of the Witch(66)

“Tell me something,” he commanded.

“Yes,” she said carefully, alert for whatever physical or verbal brutality was looming.

“Dost thou know why I lied in the Town House?”

She was taken aback by his candor. She knew there were a dozen answers she could offer, ranging from the vacuous and false to the most damning and true. She could say that he loved her or she could say that he was prideful and hoped to salvage a semblance of his reputation. She could suggest that he couldn’t bear to lose one-third of his estate. She could even say that he had risked his immortal soul with lies because he wasn’t in fact gambling at all: he knew already that he was most assuredly not among the elect, so what did one more falsehood, even one this brazen, matter?

Perhaps if she had begun to understand how she would have the last word—the absolute last word, justice, not merely the last word tonight—she would have known what to say. But unsure, she replied simply, “I do not know. But…”

“But what?”

“I am pleased that—at least with me, here beside our bedstead—thou dost acknowledge the truth.”

He released her hand. He raised an eyebrow and told her, “I had to lie. Oh, it was in my best interests, too. That is obvious to angels and demons alike. It was the only way to get thee back under my roof where, as my wife, thou dost belong. But listen carefully to what I am about to say because it is true: I did it for thee, too.”

    “For me?”

He nodded. “We did it for thee,” he said, emphasizing that first pronoun. “Thy father and his friend at the Town House. The magistrate.”

She was surprised, but more by the idea he was telling her this than by the notion that there were conspiratorial tides washing about her. She had been feeling them since that day when she and her parents had first met with Richard Wilder.

He continued: “It was—and, yes, thy father and that magistrate and I discussed this two times—the only sure way to protect thee from the charges of witchcraft. Recall the accusations of our girl downstairs. Recall the innuendo lodged as fact by Goody Howland. Think hard on the death of William Stileman. I am an imperfect husband and an imperfect man. This, too, is fact. But I care for thee enough to school thee, even if sometimes that knowledge is administered in a fashion that causes us both pain. And Mary? Think hard on this, too: I am a far better alternative than the noose.”

She started to stay something but he put a finger on her lips. “All along, from the very beginning, thy petition had but the chance of a small bark in a hurricane. No, not even that. Of a butterfly through a blizzard. Thy scrivener did his work, but thou art but a woman—and a woman whose behavior has been more suspect than her husband’s has been unkind. Yes, thou hast a powerful father. But, as we have seen here and in Hartford, even the most powerful man is powerless against a mob—especially a mob of magistrates—that sees a witch in its midst.”

He put his hand on her neck, but he didn’t squeeze. The grip was as gentle as it was threatening. “I know my hands, in thine opinion, have been unkind to thee. But they are not a rope. And I know this, too: We can move forward as man and wife. We can. I can be better. But thou must meet me halfway if thy father and I are going to be able to protect thee.”

    She swallowed hard, aware that he could feel the muscles moving in her neck. Her mouth had gone dry. “Meet thee halfway? What dost that mean precisely?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly hoarse.

“I’ve no idea what designs thou hast and what thou were thinking with the Devil’s tines; I’ve no idea how far thy dalliance with Henry Simmons progressed. I don’t even know if thou hast continued to visit that strange woman out on the Neck. Constance Winston.” He dropped his hand from her throat. “But understand that thou must be careful. Do not court the Devil. He is a far crueler master than I.”

He pulled on his sleep shift. Then he turned from her and lifted the chamber pot from the floor and went to the corner of the room. She sat at the edge of the bed and wrapped the quilt around her, unmoored by what he had said, but not wholly surprised. It was only what she had suspected. She thought back on her days at the Town House.

But she recognized this also: she had done nothing wrong and—somehow, some way—she would yet be free of this man. Moreover, her liberation would not come because the magistrates who had sentenced her to a life with him had added to their iniquity and turpitude by sending her from this world to the next via the hanging platform.

“Mary?”

He was back now and sitting beside her on the bedstead.

“Yes?”

“Thou needest rest after what thou hast endured. Close thine eyes and calm thy mind.”

She nodded, outwardly obedient. But it would be hours before her mind would be calm enough to sleep.



* * *





And in the night she dreamt, and the dream was so real that when she awoke she stared at the wall from the bedstead and pondered in her heart whether it was a sign—and if it was a sign, what it meant. She wrote it down in her ledger because she wanted to preserve forever what she had seen.

    The dream (if that’s what it was) was of a little girl who was no more than six years old and was dressed in a sky-colored shift and eating raspberries from a sky-colored bowl. The child’s hair was yellow and fell down her back in a ponytail held tight with a pink silk ribbon, and her eyes were so green that Mary thought of a cat. She was wearing the sort of elegant slippers that Mary herself had worn as a little girl, the pair that one of her father’s friends had imported from Bombay. The child did not speak like a child, however, she spoke like an adult who was sensible and wise, and who had lived a long and sensible life.