Hour of the Witch(71)

“Of course.”

The woman smiled cryptically. “Not all are. I am flattered by thy change of heart. And I understand when people would rather converse with me in the privacy of my”—and here she swept her hand over the small, smoky room—“estate.”

“I sought thee. I am not ashamed.”

“Well. What a brave goodwife thou art. Today.”

“Constance, I—”

“Or mad. Or desperate,” she said, cutting her off. Then she told her girl that she would be back from the cabinet maker before too long and they could resume their spinning after eating. Mary was wearing snowshoes and expected Constance to put on a pair, too. Instead, however, she pulled on fur-lined boots of the sort that Mary had seen on trappers, but they were feminine and lithe—and quite clearly a costly import from London.

    “The treadle is broken,” Constance continued offhandedly as they started off.

“I am grateful once more to be in thy company. Thou must know…” And here Mary’s voice trailed off. This time, Constance waited. “I did not mean to expunge thee from my life.”

The woman narrowed her eyes and smiled in a fashion that was indecipherable to Mary, but she felt as if Constance were reading her mind. “I would, if I am going to speak plainly, have preferred that thou had plucked me from thy world like a weed because my simples failed thee than because thou trembled before the gossips. There are many things in this world we should fear, but to bend one’s knees to the smallest of minds? That is beneath a mind as sharp as the one that the Lord God has given thee. It suggests a cowardice incompatible with a woman sufficiently courageous to attempt to divorce a monster who wants to claim title over the very air that she breathes. I am sorry thine effort to escape that beast of a man failed.”

Mary nodded. There was nothing she could say in her defense. She was surprised, but not greatly, that Constance already knew about the ruling at the Town House.

“Yes,” the other woman continued, “thy tale? It travels like a schooner with a good wind. But I applaud thine initiative; I wish the men in their black robes had risen to the majesty of their clothing. Timid little creatures they are.”

Constance was walking quickly now, but she slowed when she saw that Mary was having trouble keeping up.

“How much hast thou heard?”

“Which aspersions upon thy character art thou pondering? The idea thou art an adulterer or thou art a witch? I am going to speculate it is the latter. People don’t come to me with questions of the heart. No one suspects an old woman has wisdom of that sort.”

“Thou art not old.”

“I know what I am.”

They passed a potter, his kiln in a shack with a door so decrepit they could see him inside at his wheel. “I am not an adulterer,” Mary said, but she knew that she spoke without conviction.

“I am neither beadle nor magistrate. I couldn’t care less.”

    “But I can assure thee: that is not why I have ventured to the Neck.”

“As I said: no one seeks a crone’s wisdom if they need counsel of that sort.”

“Thou knew Ann Hibbens?” Mary asked.

“Yes. But much of Boston did.”

“I do not believe she was a witch.”

“Why?”

“She was gentlewoman—a woman of standing.”

“I don’t think the Devil makes that distinction when He searches for disciples and acolytes.”

Mary had expected Constance to defend Hibbens. Certainly no one in Mary’s own circle believed she was a witch. “Were thou Ann’s friend? Truly?”

“Truly I was.”

“Was she possessed?”

“No.”

“But she was excommunicated from the church.”

“That was years ago. Thou were still a child. Thy family had not even arrived here. She lived sixteen years separate from the church.”

“Why was she excommunicated?”

“People are excommunicated for many reasons. Think of Edmund and Esther Hawke. They simply prefer the wilds of the woods to the alleged civility of the First Church.”

“And Ann Hibbens?”

“She was difficult and opinionated, and she fought with the joiners who overcharged her for work that was shoddy. She might have been hanged then, but her husband was still breathing.”

“So, she was hanged unfairly?”

“She was sent to the scaffold because she had a sharper tongue and a shrewder mind than her accusers. It is always the case when men hang women. Look at Magistrate Caleb Adams: there is nothing that frightens that man more than a woman who does not live happily under a man’s thumb.”

“God has His plan,” Mary replied, but her heart was not in her response.

    “He does. And in it a woman is a man’s helpmeet, not his slave. There is a difference. A woman has a mind, too, and that scares the likes of our esteemed magistrates.”

“Sometimes, my husband insists that my brain is but white meat. If that is the case, then perhaps I should take comfort that whatever indignities loom before me, they will not involve a rope,” she told Constance.

“Men call bright women dim whenever they are threatened. So, take no relief in the names that any man calls thee. There is no safe harbor there.”