Hour of the Witch(67)

In the dream, Thomas was asleep beside Mary and didn’t stir when she saw the child with the raspberries. The room was lit well by the moon, and the girl was radiant. Mary was not afraid of her. Nor was she worried about why this young thing was out in the night and wearing clothing so helpless against the New England cold. She was merely surprised. She sat up and swung her legs over the bedstead and asked her who she was and whether Catherine had seen her enter the house and come up the stairs.

“Catherine doesn’t know I’ve come,” the girl replied.

“And the berries? We haven’t had fresh raspberries in months.”

The child took one of the berries and extended it to Mary as if this were part of Communion, and Mary ate the berry as if it were bread. She held it on her tongue a long moment before biting into it. It was delicious, the perfect combination of sour and sweet.

“But who art thou?” Mary asked again. “What art thou? An angel? Tell me, prithee, that thou art an angel.”

“I was given the name Desiree, but all who know me will call me Desire.”

“All?”

The child smiled as if the single-word question was absurd—as if it had been asked by a child herself. “All who know me,” she repeated.

“Art thou mine?”

The girl was quiet and her calmness unreadable. And so Mary persisted: “By thy silence, am I to suppose that I am not barren and will yet have a baby?”

    And now Desiree held up her index finger, and the tip was stained red from the berry. She took the pad and pressed it against Mary’s forehead and then took a step back to survey her work. The finger had been warm, and the touch had been firm.

“There,” the child said. “I have marked thee.”

“Tell me, prithee,” Mary begged. “Art thou my child? Art thou the daughter I would pray for until…”

“Until what? Until thou gave up hope? Until thou lost faith?”

She sat up straight in her defense. “Until I understood that rearing a child was not God’s plan for me.”

But this time the girl did not respond, because she was gone. Vanished.

In the morning when Mary wrote down all that she could remember, she wished she could recall how the girl had disappeared. Had she walked from the room and back down the stairs? Or had she ascended into the sky to sit before—not beside, no, not that—their heavenly Father? It was only when she had finished writing and Thomas was beginning to stir on his side of the bedstead that it crossed her mind to go to the looking glass and see if there was a mark on her forehead.

There was not, and it was only then that her eyes welled up and, despite Thomas’s confusion, she began to weep.





Expect no leniency from this court if thou art convicted.

    —The Remarks of Governor John Endicott, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1663, Volume I





Twenty-One



After Thomas had left for the mill, Catherine cleaned their clothes in water she had boiled in a great pot over the fire and then hung lines in front of the hearth because it was too cold now to dry them outside. It was spitting snow, and Mary thought that the flat, gray sky to the west suggested that soon snow would be falling in earnest. Perhaps the first blizzard of the season was nearing. Again this morning, she and her servant had found a heavy frost on the ground when they went to gather eggs from the chickens and feed the animals. They’d planned to make soap in the hopper out back, but it was too cold.

“I am glad Goody Howland treated thee well,” Mary said to Catherine as she sewed a tear in one of Thomas’s sleeves.

“Yes, she did,” the girl replied.

“Dost thou miss living with them? Were thou happier there?” Mary hadn’t planned to bring this up. But her mind had roamed to the questions, and she spoke before thinking.

“My needs are few and mean. I was content.”

“And here?”

The girl was hanging a pair of Mary’s woolen stockings beside one of her petticoats. “May I speak honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Thy husband is a better man than thou art willing to acknowledge. Better and kinder. I accept where God has placed me.”

Mary did not look up from her needle and thread when she said, “Thou left because thou feared me. Thou supposed I was a witch. And now?”

“I am alone with thee.”

    “So, thou dost not believe I have become a handmaiden to the Devil.”

“Or that I have no choice.”

Or that thou art too happy by far to be in the presence of my husband, Mary thought, but said nothing. She knew that if she were her mother, she would have chastised the girl for her impertinence. But she wasn’t her mother. After a quiet moment, the only sound the crackling of the wood as it burned in the hearth and the occasional gust that rattled the windows, Catherine said, “May I ask thee something?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“If thou didst not bury the pestle and the Devil’s tines, then who did?”

Mary sighed. “They were forks, Catherine. They were forks. They were no more the Devil’s tines than they were my father’s tines or Governor Endicott’s tines or the tines of the hordes of men and women in the Netherlands or France who use them now. I will not debase the majesty of our Sovereign in Heaven ever again by attributing to them any sort of power beyond their ability to skewer a piece of meat or a scallop from the sea.”