Hour of the Witch(89)

She sighed. “Why this anger, Thomas? Tell me: what have I done to merit such a statement?”

He swallowed. “I do not know what thou art planning,” he said. “I do not know what thou hast in mind. But thou art contemplating something sinister. I know not what, but—”

“Either I have white meat for a brain or I am plotting evil,” she snapped at him. “Cheese is not known for its perniciousness. Which is it: am I a dullard or a witch?”

“Be careful with thy tone,” he said, lashing back. “I would hate to see thee have another accident.”

They both turned when they heard the back door opening and Catherine returning with an armful of wood. “I think thou bringest much to the Hawkes, Mary,” he said. “So long as Catherine doesn’t feel an onus because of thine efforts—”

    “My calling,” she corrected him, and though this was yet another challenge, she was careful to smile when she spoke.

“So long as Catherine doesn’t feel a disagreeable increase in her work while thou art away, thou mayest continue thy…calling.”

“I thank thee,” Mary said. She watched Catherine place two logs on the hot coals and the bark start to catch. It was beautiful, and she was reminded of the woodcuts of John Rogers and his family as their skin was peeled off by the flames and their bones turned to ash.



* * *





She had to see Henry Simmons. It wasn’t a physical craving the way food and warmth were; it was, she told herself, a matter of practicalities. Yes, she knew that she—and when the word came to her, it gave her an unexpected ripple of happiness—desired him. But this wasn’t that. He simply needed to know that things were about to happen and they might happen with a rapidity she could not control, but she was determined that the two of them, eventually, would be together. (He could never know her plan, and she would deny it if he ever suspected. If she were damned, she was resolved not to damn him, too.) She considered writing him her intentions, but she couldn’t risk the existence of a note. It would be too easy for it to be discovered. She knew after her failed divorce petition that she couldn’t trust even her parents; they loved her, yes, but they were more fearful of the magistrates than they were, it seemed, even of their Lord God. To protect her from the noose they had consigned her to this prison of a marriage. And they would be aghast at her intentions. They would be ashamed. She could never tell them such things.

And so she was going to have to risk a walk to the wharves where her father and Valentine Hill had their warehouses. But to minimize the chance that any of the gossips might note her presence, she walked the long way: she detoured around the market and the Town House. Boston had grown so fast that now even the side streets were alive with commerce. She passed a cobbler’s shop, an apothecary, another bakery—not Obadiah’s, a new one she had never used—a brazier, a tailor, a cooper, a cabinet maker. She did not doubt that her people were doing good work here, the work of the Lord, civilizing this corner of the earth. And yet it all felt increasingly like…London. At least what she remembered of London. Boston was smaller, yes, and cleaner. At the same time, it also lacked much of the refinement and the accoutrements of great wealth. But that would come. It came daily on the ships. Increasingly when she was out and about, she felt the bustle and she felt the crowds and she felt purposeless. Had they separated from the church and all that they knew merely to create a smaller, less refined version of the metropolis they had left behind? She thought of the university across the river. Just this year they’d finished the Great Bridge, linking the city with Cambridge.

    She watched a hawk circling overhead and wondered what prey he spied. Quickly, she lowered her gaze back to the street, alert for anyone she might know, prepared to choose another day to go to the harbor if she saw someone she recognized.

What she could not decide as she neared the warehouses, however, was whether she felt a distance from her Lord because of what she was planning—whether this was the Devil working His way inside her—or because the speed of Boston’s growth was blinding them all to His vision. Her doubts about what they were striving to build in this new world felt woeful and lurid, but what, in fact, had they accomplished if she looked rather specifically at her own home? She had a husband who was vile, a servant girl who was either evil or deluded, and parents who had relegated her to the dungeon of Thomas Deerfield. Yes, John Rogers had willingly walked into the fire for God, and yes, he had willingly consigned his wife and children to those very flames. God wasn’t asking that of her. She wasn’t sure that God was asking anything of her. Certainly, her good works for the Hawke children were but an inadvertent result of her plotting and scheming. But God knew all: Had He not set all of this in motion so that she would bring to those girls the sorts of things they desperately needed? Boots and cloaks?

    She paused before the warehouses. There they were: her father’s and Valentine Hill’s imposing monoliths. There were the sailors and the men working in their leathers against the cold and wet spray, hauling the crates and casks from the two ships that had docked at the far end of the wharves. She pulled her hood tight and walked faster. Her heart was thumping hard, but she took comfort in the fact that she had spoken to no one on the way here and no one had spoken to her.



* * *