Hour of the Witch(87)

The older girl looked into Mary’s eyes and said something in Algonquian. Momentarily Mary was taken aback. “She speaks the Indians’ tongue?” she said, and in her incredulity, it came out as a question.

“Honour wants to know if gloves so delicate keep thy fingers warm,” said her mother, translating. “We all speak two tongues. Look at where we live.”

“Yes,” Mary answered the child. “My gloves do their work well. So, thou art Honour. And thy sisters’ names?”

“Dorcas and Serenity,” the girl said. “Serenity is the baby.”

“Hast thou children?” Esther inquired.

“No. The Lord God has not favored me in that fashion.”

“How hast He favored thee?” Esther asked, and Mary could not miss the edge in the question. This woman would have done well as a magistrate on the Court of Assistants.

“He has given me life and the bounties of His world,” she answered.

The other woman rolled her eyes. “Tell me, prithee: why hast thou really come?” Dorcas was staring up at her. “Dost thou honestly believe we want thy help?”

Honour was on her knees, her hands on her thighs, leaning over the book in Mary’s hands. Mary looked at the opening page of Spiritual Milk:

Q. What hath GOD done for thee?

A. GOD hath made me, He keepeth me, and He can save me.



The books were but a ruse; they weren’t why she had come. But she needed them to work her way there. This first tract was a scholarly way to initiate Christian tutelage, but she recalled the woodcuts in The New England Primer. She should begin there instead. She flipped to the pages with the images of John Rogers being burned alive at the stake and the one of his children, their gazes beatific, as they were herded to their deaths. Those were the pictures that held the most allure for her older granddaughter. She recalled the fairy tale book she had owned back in England. Those stories, of course, were inappropriate fare for any Christian, and she understood that now. But she had loved them, and she felt a pang of guilt recalling the pleasure they had given her.

“Perhaps I’ve come but to read,” she answered, and she began to read aloud: “Mr. John Rogers, minister of the gospel in London, was the first martyr in Queen Mary’s reign, and was burned at Smithfield, February fourteenth, 1554. His wife with nine small children and one at her breast followed him to the stake; with which sorrowful sight he was not in the least daunted, but with wonderful patience died courageously for the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Honour pointed at the image. “Why are this man and his children being cooked?” she asked.

“Thou knowest the answer to that,” Mary scolded the child gently. But when neither Esther nor her girls said anything, she continued, “This man loves our God so much that he is willing to die for Him.”

The girl took the book from Mary’s lap and started to thumb through the pages. Esther finished nursing her baby and stood. “I have work to do. If thou desirest to care for my children, Mary Deerfield, they are thine. But don’t suppose that because we live near the Indians, we are so pathetically unschooled as to need thy tutelage. Honour will, with cause, challenge thee.”

Mary rose with her. If Esther was going to be so forthright, then, so be it, she would be, too. “Esther,” she began, “it is I who needs thy tutelage.”

    The woman waited. “I need thy help,” Mary continued.

“I rather doubt an excommunicated soul like mine can offer thee anything.”

“Thou art mistaken,” she said, and she took Esther’s elbow and guided her gently away from her older girls. “We share a friend: Constance Winston.”

“Art thou like Constance?” Esther asked.

Mary couldn’t decide what that question meant: Art thou like Constance? “In addition to being self-sufficient and handling thy excommunication with courage, I believe thy husband and thou art wise,” Mary said, evading Esther’s question.

“Wise? Because we choose living here rather than under the thumb of the likes of John Norton?”

“John Eliot has not cut all ties with thy family.”

“He views us the way he views his praying Indians. Misguided and unschooled.”

“Fine. But here is one point on which I am confident we agree,” Mary said. “The Devil is real, and He is here in Massachusetts.”

“Yes. So?”

“He is using someone in Boston to attack me.”

Esther said nothing. She watched her girls with the book.

“Dost thou understand?” Mary asked again, not trying to stifle the urgency she was feeling.

“How?”

“He is trying to poison me with a spell. He is using a witch to try to poison me and”—and here she exaggerated to enlist Esther’s support—“my husband and our servant girl.”

“And thou knowest who this person is?”

“I do,” Mary said, now speaking an outright lie.

Esther placed her baby on the blanket and went to a deerskin satchel on the floor in the corner of the cottage. She pulled out a small bottle with a cork. “This will heal some poisons,” she said, handing it to her. The tincture inside was watery and brown; it reminded Mary of the water that puddled in her muddy dooryard in the spring. She had seen bottles just like it when she had visited Constance.