Hour of the Witch(8)

“Sometimes speaking—”

“Gives voice to our thoughts. Nothing more. Words aren’t potions.”

No, Mary thought, but they are spells. But she didn’t say that. She knew that Beth Howland understood that, too. “I saw Sara outside just now,” she said instead, changing the subject to the woman’s six-year-old daughter because she didn’t want to argue. “That’s a lovely ribbon on her hat. I saw her with other children, but not her brothers. Are the boys about?”

“They’re around somewhere. They may be down at the harbor, watching the ships. I wouldn’t be surprised if Edward has gone to watch his father. That lad will be a cooper, too, I warrant. Born with an auger in one hand and a plane in the other.”

    They saw Catherine emerge from the room where her brother was lying, her face composed. She looked to Beth and asked, “Would there be another cloth, prithee? One I could use to wash William’s brow?”

“Yes, of course,” Beth answered, a ripple of exasperation in her voice. “I will get thee one.”

While she led the servant girl to the blanket chest, Mary went to the front door and peered outside at the goodwife’s daughter. The girl was still so little. When she laughed, Mary could see the gaps where her baby teeth had fallen out and her adult teeth were coming in. She had a lovely, infectious smile, Mary thought. When she giggled, the other children giggled with her.

If someday God gave her a child, Mary prayed that it would be a girl who would laugh like that and whom she could dress in straw hats with yellow silk ribbons.

Behind her, she heard Beth and Catherine bringing a cloth and a bowl of cool water into the sickroom, and she turned away from the children and joined them. There she dressed William’s sores with comfrey, placed dill on his swollen tongue, and read to him from the almanac. Once his body shivered, but were it not for the occasional rise of the sheet above his chest, someone might have presumed that she was reading aloud to a corpse.



* * *





Catherine did not return home with Mary that morning. She offered, but Mary saw that it was paining the girl to leave her brother in such evident weakness and discomfort. Besides, Beth needed to tend to her own family, not her dying indentured servant, and so Mary suggested that Catherine remain. She reassured her that she would prepare both dinner and supper, and she and Thomas would be fine.

The sun was still high when Thomas arrived, and there was a film of white dust from the mill on his doublet. He was moving with the careful bearing to which he resorted when he wanted to hide the reality that he had had too much to drink. It was a gait that reminded her of the marionettes she used to see when she was a child back in London. Her stomach lurched, a turbid little wave that caused her to pause with the heavy pot in her hands. It was a small miracle that he was capable of riding all the way from the North End without falling when he was like this, since he had to traverse the Mill Creek as well as the drawbridge at Hanover Street. She reminded herself that the vast majority of the time when he came home for dinner this way nothing unpleasant occurred. He’d probably had an extra pint or two with one of the farmers when he was cutting a deal. Or maybe the morning had been slow and he’d drunk with his own men or with the fellows who ran the sawmill next door.

    When he saw she was alone, he asked where Catherine was. Mary answered that the girl was at the Howlands’ with her brother. He nodded and sat down at the table near the fire.

“What did she leave us to eat?” he asked.

“We went straight from the garden to the Howlands, so she didn’t leave us anything. But I boiled us a nice salad with the herbs we picked this morning, and we have bread I bought from Obadiah.”

“No meat? No fish?”

“There wasn’t time. But if thou wouldst like—”

“A man needs meat, Mary. Hast thou forgotten that?”

“Thomas, prithee.”

“I asked thee a question,” he said. He spoke carefully, enunciating each word, but no longer trying to rein in his frustration. His eyes narrowed. “Hast thou somehow forgotten that a man needs substantial food to do the work of the Lord?”

“Of course, I haven’t. I just thought—”

“Thought? That is thy problem. Thou art always thinking. Never doing. Thy mind is like…what? It’s like…cheese. It’s softer even than most women’s.”

“There’s no call for that.”

He shook his head, his eyes reproachful though half shut with alcohol and annoyance, and sighed. “Maybe that’s why thou art incapable of taking seed. The Lord God knows it’s best not to strain a woman that has the mind of cheese. White meat.”

    “What wouldst thou have me do? Not allow Catherine to visit her brother?”

He seemed to think about this, his face growing flushed. He picked up the knife on the table and held it before him as if it were an unfamiliar animal. “I wouldst have thou put that pot down is what I would have. Sit,” he commanded, and she couldn’t read his tone. It had a hint of menace, but was this just because of the way he was holding the knife? She put down the pot and sat across from him in the chair in which Catherine usually sat.

“No,” he said. “Sit beside thy husband.”

She obeyed, but she never took her eyes off the knife. He ran his thumb over the edge of the blade. “?’Tis not as sharp as I’d like. ’Tis not as sharp as it should be,” he continued. “My fortune seems to be surrounded by all things dull.”