Hour of the Witch(74)

“It would seem that Jonathan put it into games of chance with sailors.”

She heard an animal skittering in the wall, a mouse most likely. “Really?” She hoped that she sounded surprised.

“He is in waters that he thinks will drown him. Two children, a third on the way. His own family has no means to help him.”

“How much did he ask for?” she asked. Now she was taken aback. She had never imagined it was this bad.

    “He had no precise figure. But he suggested my daughter and grandchildren could anticipate a miserable winter without my help. A miserable future.”

“Is he now going to avoid the temptations at the docks?”

“Wilt thou?”

“What?” she asked. The revelation of the depth of Jonathan’s gaming problem combined with the idea that Thomas suspected that she herself had sometimes looked at the sailors had her aghast.

“Mary, I know thou hast great affection for the abundance that arrives here daily. I see no sin in gaping at the fabrics and furniture thy father imports,” he said, and she was relieved. He wasn’t referring to the sailors, but to the plenty they brought.

“What wilt thou do?” she asked. She presumed that Jonathan made a good living as a carpenter. But, then, she knew little of economy.

“I will help some. I will provide him with ground corn and flour.”

“I can’t imagine the family ever needing the almshouse or becoming the responsibility of the selectmen.”

“Or giving up on Boston and settling elsewhere. I agree. I think the problem is not that they will ever be flirting with destitution or hunger, but that the fellow has ambitions beyond the Lord’s plan for him. He wants…”

She waited. And when he continued, he was almost chuckling, “He wants the world that comes and goes through thy father’s warehouse. It’s not so much that he and my daughter will ever be among the town poor; it’s that neither will they be among the town rich.”

“Thou art generous to help fill their store for the winter.”

“No. I just don’t want my daughter or grandchildren hungry,” he said. “That wouldn’t reflect well on me.” Then he rolled onto his side and grumbled—his small attempt at humor more ominous and disconcerting than funny—“It seems that Jonathan should have married thee, Mary, instead of my daughter. He wants thy family, not mine.”





It was about the size of a coin. A shilling. But it was not a shilling. It was made of wood, and it had carved into it a five-pointed star in a circle: the sign of the Dark One.

—The Testimony of Catherine Stileman, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1663, Volume I





Twenty-Three



On Sunday morning before dinner, Mary Deerfield sat in her pew beside her mother at the First Church and prayed to her Benefactor and listened to all that the Reverend Norton said from the high pulpit in the corner. She was aware of both Thomas and Henry Simmons across the church but honestly wasn’t sure if her husband knew the proximity of the other man. Henry was seated in the second-to-last row, while her husband was, as always, among the wealthier men of the city. If Henry was still in pain from the lashing, he wasn’t revealing it. But Mary, though tempted, had been careful not to look back with any frequency. When her mind wandered, she wondered if he was watching her.

She also found herself contemplating the presence of Jonathan Cooke and thinking less of him. What a duplicitous couple he and Peregrine made: one was gaming himself into poverty and needed now to access his father-in-law’s plenty, and the other may have sprinkled venom onto apples to sicken (or kill) her mother-in-law, even if it meant afflicting others.

Today John Norton was preaching from Deuteronomy, and she tried to concentrate on all that Moses had shouldered. When the pastor reached the thirty-third verse of the thirty-second chapter, she gasped ever so slightly, but with such anguish that both her mother and Catherine turned to her.

“Their wine is”—and the minister emphasized the verb, just as it was emphasized when she looked down at her own well-read copy of the Bible in her lap—“the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps.” She had gasped reflexively, in awe, because this was a sign, as clear as any that the Lord God had ever shown her. And it had to be her risen Savior speaking to her, it had to be; it could not be Satan. Not here. Not now. Not in this place, this church, this pew. She nodded at her mother and Catherine, reassuring them that she was fine, they needn’t fear that she was either frightened or possessed, and stared down at the word: asps. There it was. Snake. Serpent. Adder. Asp.

    The poison of dragons, the venom of asps.

Not a fork. A forked tongue.

She recalled her walk with Constance. Was it possible that whoever had planted the pestle and forks was hoping to poison her with a spell more toxic than Peregrine’s polluted dessert? A spell that demanded the hand of Lucifer Himself? Or had Peregrine done this, too, and only resorted to the apples when Mary had discovered the forks?

“I will make mine arrows drunk with blood,” Norton continued, raising his voice as he quoted the Lord in the chapter, speaking with a passion so heated that everyone in the sanctuary could feel it as if it were July and they were outside and this was the sun beaming down upon them, and then he pounded the sides of his pulpit with both hands and abruptly went silent. Somewhere in the back of the church a woman was weeping. Mary understood that anguish: the pain of knowing the grievous sin that was in one’s heart and the way that it disappointed the Lord, and what it meant when one contemplated the fires of Hell that awaited. To be among the damned and not the chosen? There was and there could be nothing worse.