The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Oh, no, sir, not in the least.”

  Lord Wroxeter said, “Need we remind you of Martin Luther’s statement that, quote, ‘I would have no compassion on these witches. I would burn them all’?”

  Luther’s views on Satanism were but dimly familiar to Walter, though he decided to pretend otherwise. “I have always counted the monk’s motto amongst my favorites.”

  “Then mayhap you’re also aware that John Calvin once said, quote, ‘God expressly commands that all witches and enchantresses shall be put to death, and this law of God is a universal law.’”

  “I have inscribed those very words inside the cover of my Bible,” Walter said, fully intending to do so before sundown.

  “The Protestant religion is a witch-fighting religion,” Lord Gurney said. “Of the several hundred thousand Satanists switched off since our Redeemer’s advent, nearly a quarter of the convictions may be credited to Reformation magistrates.”

  Walter made a fist, slamming it into his open palm. “The more for that, the infernal Papists had a head start by fifteen centuries!”

  “Well spoken, sir!” Halifax declared. “My Lords, ’twould appear that in Mr. Stearne we have a patriotic, a pious, and withal a Protestant witchfinder.”

  “Agreed,” Wroxeter said.

  “Hear! Hear!” Gurney shouted.

  Walter heaved a sigh of such force it could have snuffed a candle.

  A smiling Halifax said, “At its forthcoming meeting with His Majesty, the Privy Council will recommend that, pursuant to the Conjuring Statute, you be appointed Witchfinder-Royal for the Crown’s colonies in New-Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, with an annual salary of two hundred pounds, or one guinea per detected Satanist, whichever sum is higher, plus a Basque coach and team.”

  Having completed his epic exhalation, Walter now found himself gasping for breath. “Pardon, my Lord. Did you say…Massachusetts?”

  “Correct,” Halifax replied.

  “Is that not in…America?”

  “America’s the proper place for a man of your ambitions,” Gurney said. “’Tis the land of opportunism.”

  Walter said, “My Lords, if you please, I’d prefer not to live in Massachusetts—a barbaric place, I’ve heard, o’errun with violent aborigines, wild animals, and maniacal Puritans. Can I not be Witchfinder-Royal for my beloved England instead? Scotland, perhaps? Ireland? Wales?”

  “Sir, we shall be blunt,” Wroxeter said, probing his left nostril with a cloaked finger. “The longer you remain on this side of the Atlantic, the more you place yourself in jeopardy. ’Tis no secret His Majesty’s Secretary of State would see Walter Stearne drawn and quartered for treason.”

  Hearing his own name and the word “treason” spoken in the same sentence rattled Walter like a thunderclap. “Treason? Treason? My Lords, you address as loyal a subject as e’er walked on English soil.”

  Gurney gathered the folds of his forehead into a byzantine frown. “You burned a woman of property, you wall-eyed cod-swallower! What sort of doltish thing was that to do?”

  “She was guilty,” Walter said.

  “She was gentry,” Halifax said. “To wit, you pompous nincompoop, you have no future here. Hie yourself to America and proceed to make the best of’t.”

  “We’ve found something to cheer you,” Gurney said, handing Walter a bound booklet of some twenty pages. “Last month this worthy specimen of Calvinist exegesis arrived in London.”

  Walter examined the slender volume, whose cover identified it as A Discourse on Witchcraft, a sermon preached the previous year in Boston by a Puritan minister named Cotton Mather. He turned to page one and read, “Witchcraft is the Doing of strange (and for the most part ill) Things by the Help of evil Spirits covenanting with the woeful Children of Men.” A passing piquant definition.

  “The New-England Calvinists might be slavering fanatics, but they’ve ne’er shrunk from prosecuting the Dark One,” Wroxeter said. “In recent years they’ve convened a dozen witch-trials throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts.”

  “But how am I to move in Puritan circles when my faith is of the Anglican variety?” Walter asked.

  “A fair question,” Halifax said. “Methinks a tilt toward the Calvinist austerity might suit your purpose.”

  “I shan’t do it!” Walter protested. “’Twould be an act of sheer hypocrisy!”

  “We speak not for hypocrisy but for compromise,” Halifax said, setting his palm on Walter’s shoulder. “Betwixt the two lies a universe of difference. Within government circles I am rightly called the Trimmer, an epithet I wear as proudly as a general his medals. When traveling with Tories I find myself disposed toward the Tory outlook. Amongst Whigs I enter a Whiggish frame of mind. To wit, through the subtle art of equivocation I have made myself obnoxious to all, with the result that no man durst oust me for fear of pleasing his enemies.”

  Walter returned his gaze to the sermon, alighting on a passage in which Cotton Mather argued that the demonic compact was as palpable as any other crime. “Many Witches have confess’d and shew’d their Deeds. We have seen those Things done that are impossible a mere Disease or Deceit could procure.” An important point. Those who would reduce maleficium to physical sickness or legerdemain were not looking closely at the evidence. This Mather was a divine worth knowing.

  “Two hundred pounds per annum—was that the figure?” Walter asked.

  “In the interests of efficiency,” Wroxeter said, nodding, “you will draw your salary from the Massachusetts Governor.”

  “And in the interests of economy,” Halifax added, “you will occupy the property of my late uncle, a modest farm on the Merrimack in the Puritan community of Haverhill.”

  “Haverhill?” Walter said. “Not Boston?”

  “’Tis all His Majesty can afford,” Halifax said, smiling. “The War of the Grand Alliance hath emptied his coffers.”

  Walter stared into the impenetrable blackness of his tepid coffee. “I would have a proper license,” he said at last. “Signed by the King.”

  “The Defender of the Faith’s agreeable,” Wroxeter said.

  “’Twill grant me the title of Massachusetts Witchfinder-Royal and specify that upon my death the office transfers to my firstborn son—and to his firstborn son after that.”

  “Such can be arranged,” Halifax said.

  “We’ve saved the best news for last,” Gurney said. “As you might surmise, the red Indians of New-England, whose numbers easily surpass one hundred thousand, know naught of the Christian faith, nor of any religion at all save their own deplorable paganism. Do you grasp the implications?”

  “I surely do, my Lord Gurney.” Walter took a gulp of cold coffee. “One hundred thousand?”

  “One hundred thousand.”

  Rolling up Mather’s sermon, Walter thanked the aristocrats for their generosity. One hundred thousand disciples of Satan, and not a single licensed cleanser on the whole continent. The Massachusetts Witchfinder-Royal, it seemed, would never want for employment.

  j

  EVERY TIME JENNET REMEMBERED how she had once regarded Barnaby Cavendish as just another of England’s itinerant charlatans, she experienced a withering chagrin, for in sooth he was closer to a saint. On the morning following the Colchester Castle execution, the curator’s Samaritan sensibility asserted itself once again when he offered to donate his entire profit from showing his monsters about the town, three pounds sterling, to the cause of Aunt Isobel’s interment.

  The wooly-bearded executioner parted with her blackened bones for a guinea, and an identical sum inspired Oswald Leech, the pussel-gutted sexton of St. James’s Church, to dig her a resting-place. For a site Mr. Leech selected an unhallowed patch of ground along the churchyard’s eastern edge, just beyond the Roman wall. Hearts-ease and daisies bloomed everywhere. Standing atop a slate outcropping, a gray raft of stone adrift upon sea-green hills, Jennet and Dr. Cavendish watched silently as the sexton laid Isobel Mowbray’s remains in a pinewood box, nai
led the receptacle shut, and lowered it into the dank wormy cavity.

  “Methinks I’ve deciphered her final words,” Jennet said, dropping a handful of earth onto the coffin lid.

  “About Aristotle and the elements?” Dr. Cavendish added a second clod to the grave. “Tell me your deduction.”

  “I believe that as the executioner went to strangle Aunt Isobel, Mr. Newton’s calculation against witchery appeared to her as in a mystic vision. She saw that his lost proof turns on the Greek immutables.”

  “Earth, air, water, fire,” Dr. Cavendish said.

  “Earth, air, water, fire,” she echoed.

  “Ashes to ashes,” Mr. Leech said. “Dust to dust.”

  Two days later, Jennet’s father ushered her into the seclusion of his garden, asserting that he wished to confront her with “some issues of passing urgency.” At first she assumed that he intended to box her ears again for attending the execution, but this time she had overestimated his wrath. He directed her to sit on the stone bench, then settled down beside her and solemnly announced that all their lives were about to change. At the end of the week they would take a coach to Gravesend and subsequently board a carrack, the Albion, bound for the New World, where he’d been appointed Witchfinder-Royal for Massachusetts Bay and New-Plymouth.

  To Jennet it seemed as if her beautiful fœtus, her embryonic argumentum grande, had just died in the womb. How could she master the Principia Mathematica whilst trapped amongst barbarians so preoccupied with marauding mountain lions and savage Redmen they had no energy left for building libraries or founding colleges? How could she become a great natural philosopher when surrounded by bumpkins who didn’t know Greek chemistry from curdled cream? The world’s worst thrashing would be better than this dreadful news.

  “I would prefer to stay in England,” she said.

  “Myself as well, but that path is not open to us.” Her father crushed a scattering of acorns underfoot. “We must now discuss a rather different matter. A troubling matter.”

  “Aye?”

  “A matter you will belike find painful, as it concerns the maternal aunt of whom you were so fond.”

  “Father, you hold me on tenterhooks.”

  “As Lady Mowbray received her punishment,” he said, shifting on the hard marble, “the two of you entered upon a cryptic dialogue concerning an entity called ‘Newton’s proof.’ Evidently she sought to impart some arcane alchemical formula to you.”

  “Her message was no secret,” Jennet said, rising. “She was plainly averring that demonology will one day crumble before an alliance ’twixt Newton’s principles and the Greek immutables.”

  “One day our Savior will return. One day the world will end.”

  “But not before your profession hath been trampled into the dust.”

  “Mayhap,” he sneered. “But hear me now, child. My eye is evermore fixed on you. Let me catch you practicing some dark art or performing some diabolical experiment, and your regret will defy the limits of common imagination.”

  “You needn’t suspect me of sorcery, sir.” She strode past the trellis, heading for the garden gate. “Philosophy doth not hide its light beneath a bushel.”

  On Thursday morning Dr. Cavendish drove her out to Mirringate Hall, that she might bid Rodwell good-bye. Much to her astonishment, she found the manor occupied by the late Edward Mowbray’s obese first cousin, Henry, and his equally adipose wife, Clarinda. In tones betraying not one atom of remorse, this self-regarding couple reported that upon learning of his mistress’s execution Rodwell had taken to bed and died in his sleep. When Jennet expressed a desire to visit the old steward’s grave, Henry Mowbray revealed that no such plot existed, for he’d sold the body to an anonymous surgeon in Maldon.

  As the tense and unpleasant visit progressed, the two usurpers passed up no opportunity to insinuate that the girl in their midst had somehow betrayed Isobel in particular and the Mowbray family in general. It took Jennet the entire morning to convince them that she’d played no part in Isobel’s arrest—that, indeed, she regarded her father’s business as an abomination. At last a belated air of cordiality descended upon the gathering, and the conversation turned to the disposition of Isobel’s estate. The Mowbrays made it clear that, though Rodwell’s corpse was first amongst the Mirringate Hall accoutrements they’d converted to coin, it would not be the last. They fully intended to sell the telescope, the microscope, the alchemical equipment, and the library, all two thousand volumes.

  The longer Jennet listened to their schemes, the more greatly she desired to sever all connection with these vultures. When they invited her and Dr. Cavendish to stay for the midday meal, she was pleased to reply, quite truthfully, that she must instead return to Colchester and pack her belongings for her imminent voyage.

  “’Twould seem the best thing about stumbling upon long-lost relations,” Jennet remarked as she and Dr. Cavendish rode away from the manor, “is that it takes no particular effort to lose them all over again.”

  Beyond the singular volume called A Woman’s Garden of Pleasure and Pain and Aunt Isobel’s copy of the Principia Mathematica, the only earthly possession Jennet wished to bring with her was the toy windmill her mother had constructed as a child. But Walter forbade her this remembrance, as its size and bulk would consume an entire sea-chest, and the Stearne family was permitted to place only three such containers in the Albion’s hold. Two mornings before they were to sail from Gravesend, Jennet carried the windmill to the summit of North Hill and gave it one last run. The machine worked splendidly, and yet she took no pleasure in its performance, as the vanes’ cruciform pattern put her in mind of suffering and martyrdom.

  “Father, forgive them,” she muttered, fixing on the spinning sails, “for they knew not what they did.”

  With the coming of noon the wind grew dispirited, declining from a gust to a breeze and thence to utter stillness. She resolved to leave her mother’s mill in place atop the ridge: no doubt some passing Colchester child would take a fancy to the toy, conclude it was there for the stealing, and joyfully bear it away.

  “Upon further consideration, I have decided that they knew exactly what they did”—she lifted her head toward the clouds—“and so I bid Thee give carbuncles and gout to all who danced that day on the green.”

  The following afternoon she parted company with Dr. Cavendish and his monsters outside the Fox and Fife, where he’d rented rooms following his expulsion from the Red Lion, whose pious proprietor believed that the curator was profiting by the Devil’s handiwork. Much to Dr. Cavendish’s amusement, Jennet entered the Gypsy wagon and took leave of each freak individually. “Two heads are better than one,” she informed the Bicephalic Girl. “Ugliness is only skin deep,” she assured Perdition’s Pride. “Think on’t this wise,” she told the Cyclops of Bourne. “When the time comes for you to get optical spectacles, you’ll pay but half the normal price.”

  The Lyme Bay Fish-Boy, she predicted, was destined to wed a beautiful mermaid. The Smethwick Philosopher would one day assume the Lucasian Chair at Trinity College. The Bird Child of Bath would become the envy of eagles. She thanked the Rat-Baby, the Bloodsucker, the Maw, and the Kali for their help with the great Adramelech hoax.

  “I hope you find a customer for your stillborns,” she told Dr. Cavendish.

  “I’Christ, Miss Stearne, your attitude toward my Kali and her kin hath revived mine own affections. For all I feel a weariness in my bones, I mean to show these freaks till the end of my days, falling down dead one afternoon whilst lecturing on the Bicephalic Girl.”

  “Oh, my dear Dr. Cavendish, you shall do no dying ere I’ve recovered Newton’s lost calculation, borne it back to England, and sought out my old friend the prodigy-monger.”

  “Then let me ask a boon of thee.” He caressed the Smethwick Philosopher. “In America you may very well come upon a fœtal aberration, and when that happens you must preserve it in brine till our reunion.”

  “You have my solemn word.”r />
  “I hereby appoint you Curator of the Cavendish Museum of Wondrous Prodigies—Colonial Branch.”

  She flung her arms wide as if preparing to embrace a tree, then gave her colleague a vigorous hug.

  “I shall ne’er forget thee, Barnaby Cavendish.”

  That evening she undertook the most difficult farewell of all. She searched through the Basque coach until she found her father’s lanthorn and his largest pricking needle. A half-hour later, as gloom enveloped the grounds of St. James’s Church, hallowed and unhallowed alike, she trimmed the wick, set the globe to glowing, and, kneeling beside the grave, scratched thirteen words into the slate outcropping.

  MENSUS ERAM CŒLOS, NUNC TERRAE METIOR UMBRAS MENS COELESTRIS ERA, CORPORIS UMBRA IACET

  Aunt Isobel had always admired the epitaph that Johannes Kepler had composed for himself shortly before his death. Indeed, the last time she was in Germany, she’d attempted to find the great astronomer’s tombstone, only to learn it had been pulverized by a passing cavalry troop during the Thirty Years War. Jennet felt certain that Isobel, looking down from God’s eternal domain, would be pleased to see Kepler’s words shining beside her resting-place.

  “I measured the skies, now I measure the shadows,” she recited. “Sky-bound was the mind, Earth-bound the body rests.”

  She looked heavenward. Venus blazed above the northern horizon. Slowly the stars blinked into visibility like candles lit by an unseen votary. The Creator was perfect. His Creation was perfect. Ergo, every planet moved in that most perfect of shapes, the circle. No fact could be clearer. No other conic deserved consideration.

  “Good-bye, Aunt Isobel. I loved you so much…”

  Except the planets didn’t move in circles. They simply didn’t. Her blood leapt up, alive to the brilliance of that astonishing first law. The orbit of a planet describes an ellipse, with the sun at one of its foci. Thus were two millennia of received astronomical wisdom neatly and irrevocably overturned. Oh, Kepler, brave Kepler, how did you do it? The orbit of a planet. Did God tell you? Describes an ellipse. By what path doth a person come to think this way? With the sun at one of its foci. If I live to be a hundred, will I e’er vault past the beautiful circle to see the true ellipse beyond?