The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  P A R T I I

  abababababababab

  Earth

  Air

  Water

  Fire

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Fifth

  abababababababab

  The Salem Witch-Court Declines to Cast the First Stone but Instead Places It upon Giles Corey’s Breast

  j

  Chill rains, razoring winds, and relentless sleet plagued the Albion from the first league of her Atlantic crossing onward, forcing the steerage passengers belowdecks, huddled in their hammocks like cocooned caterpillars awaiting metamorphosis. For Jennet the tedium proved almost unendurable, but then at last the captain, reversing an earlier edict, decreed that every literate voyager could burn a whale-oil reading lamp for three hours each day. Thus it was that, as the crossing progressed, Jennet drew insight and energy from the crepuscular pages of A Woman’s Garden of Pleasure and Pain, unending perplexity from the dimly lit and obscurely written Principia Mathematica, and, after borrowing the first mate’s English translation, the pleasures of picaresque adventure from the tenebrous text of Don Quixote de la Mancha.

  Her father and brother, meanwhile, relieved their ennui by entering into the various card tournaments and draughts matches that occurred almost continually within these cavernous confines. Unhappily for the Witchfinder-Royal and his son, maritime custom dictated that no game could commence ere the players had wagered on the outcome. Being amongst the more honest folk aboard the Albion, Walter and Dunstan quickly saw their cash reserves depleted, the sounds emitted by their purses declining precipitously from the delightful jingle of guineas to the less gratifying clank of crowns to the melancholy tinkle of shillings.

  Walter chose to make light of their bankruptcy. “Considering the sheer quantity of heathen sorcery with which the New World’s infested,” he told his children, “I would guess we’ll all be living like kings anon.”

  As the Albion blew within view of the severe and scowling Massachusetts coastline, Jennet finished giving A Woman’s Garden of Pleasure and Pain its fifth successive reading, taking care as always to conceal the manuscript from her father, who would surely throw the thing overboard the instant he saw that its author was Isobel Mowbray. In the first paragraph of the first chapter, Aunt Isobel had boldly declared her theme. “If a Woman wishes to count her Soul complete, she must avail herself of Love in all three Forms: pious, Platonic, priapic. But even as she opens her Heart to Cupid’s Arrows, she must ally her Head with Reason’s Axioms. Pregnancy and the French Pox are merely the most conspicuous amongst the Disasters that await the unwary Maiden as she makes her Way, Hopes aglow and Passions a-flame, to her Gallant’s Bed.”

  To count her Soul complete: the phrase resounded in Jennet’s skull like a taunt, the cruelest gibe yet sprung from the vindictive lips of Elinor Mapes. Dear God, how could she ever count her soul complete after that unthinkable event on the Colchester execution field? What alchemist yet born could refine a glue of sufficient stickiness to mend her fractured self whole?

  When Jennet’s father first told her of his appointment as Massachusetts Witchfinder-Royal, she’d naturally assumed that upon their arrival they would take possession of a large and splendid Boston mansion. The position indeed came with a house, but it was neither large, nor splendid, nor in Boston. To mitigate the gloom of their ramshackle Haverhill salt-box, Jennet papered the front parlor with Dunstan’s most cheering vistas—a wheat field shimmering beneath an August sun, an abandoned stone barn rising from a hill of larkspur, a towering oak made golden by a lightning-stroke—all rendered in luminous wax. Her father, meanwhile, decorated his bed-chamber door with his cleansing license, an object to which he accorded such stupefying reverence it might have been a map disclosing the Seven Cities of Cibola, though it was in truth but a scraggly scrap of parchment signed illegibly by King William III.

  Jennet could find nothing in Haverhill to call her own. It was a town of cows and people with the intellectual aspirations of cows. The ruling sentiment amongst the populace was fear. They feared famine and disease, wolves and wicked spirits, outsiders and one another—but most of all they feared the Algonquin Nimacooks, a tribe of savage tawnies who had recently raided the nearby settlements of Topsfield and Andover, slaughtering scores of men and abducting a dozen wives and daughters.

  The possible fates of these women occasioned much speculation in Haverhill, but it was generally agreed that each abductee initially had to run the gauntlet—a ritualized torture in which the captive endured a savage beating, whereupon she was delivered to the tribe’s most virile males for the purpose of breeding further Nimacooks. Whether or not a person believed this ghastly rumor, it was certainly congruent with the broader narrative favored by the Colony’s most famous Christian, the renowned and talkative Cotton Mather. According to the Reverend Mather, the Indians of Massachusetts Bay were descended from an ancient Devil-worshipping race whom Lucifer had transported to the uninhabited continent so they might adulate him free of Christian interference. Whilst this theory struck Jennet as doubtful in the extreme, the Nimacooks nevertheless terrified her, and she nightly implored her Creator to spare Haverhill their flaming arrows and cruel knives, their brutish clubs and sharp tomahawks.

  Unfortunately for her father, though happily for New-England’s supposed Satanists, his franchise began and ended with his shabby little license. Within a week of landing in Haverhill, Walter learned that the Massachusetts Governor, Sir Edmund Andros, had been deposed, and so the anticipated salary of two hundred pounds per annum never materialized, despite Walter’s entreaties to the interim administration in Boston. Throughout his first year in the Colony, he convinced the selectmen of only two neighboring towns, Amesbury and Beverly, to sponsor witch-hunts and pay him a guinea for each heretic he unmasked. By late winter, thanks to Walter’s efforts, four women lay shackled in Massachusetts gaols, awaiting the trials that could not occur until the Colony got a new charter and a new Royal Governor to execute it. As she pored over the pages of her Woman’s Garden, Jennet often thought of those wretched prisoners, shivering in their own dung, praying for their prosecutions to begin so that they might know the warmth of a courthouse.

  To minimize the threat of starvation, her father planted a vegetable garden, but he succeeded in coaxing from the soil only a few anemic turnips and feeble beans. When he tried catching fish, the trout inhabiting the Merrimack proved too devious for him, routinely eluding his net. Desperate, he took up the flintlock musket left behind by Lord Halifax’s uncle and marched resolutely into the woods. Before a week was out he’d tracked and shot a doe, and the following week he appeared in the doorway with a stag slung over his shoulders like an ox-yoke. And so it came to pass that the Massachusetts Witchfinder-Royal was reduced to the status of common deerslayer, a humiliation in which Jennet could not forbear to take a secret pleasure.

  Like her father, she attempted to augment the family’s larder through fishing, but her expeditions proved unavailing. She never netted a trout, only crayfish, minnows, and the occasional carp. Although the poverty of her catch depressed her, she found ample compensation in the intemperate beauty of the Merrimack Valley. Walking along the river’s banks each day, observing the corpulent green bullfrogs croaking atop their podiums of mud, the golden butterflies floating above the wildflowers, and the precise and urgent dragonflies as they flitted amidst the cattails, she decided that Cotton Mather’s theory must be turned inside out. Far from being the Devil’s backyard, this untrammeled continent partook of whatever postlapsarian goodness the planet still could claim. In her more rhapsodic moments she pictured God as a pregnant woman, wincing and gasping as lovely Eden spilled from her womb—Eden, “that unthinkable Arcadia,” as Aunt Isobel had once put it, “inhospitable in its perfection”—whereupon the great messy placenta came forth, Eden’s afterbirth, inferior to Paradise in every way save habitability, and God called it America.

  As her life in Haverhill pursued its unsurprising
course, Jennet’s body underwent the very changes forecast in her Woman’s Garden. Her hips grew round. Her bosom swelled. Next the bloody flow commenced, growing heavier with each successive month. By her thirteenth birthday she’d experienced every phenomenon predicted by Isobel’s treatise save one, the longing for a young man’s touch. But this, she knew, would come.

  With nary a philosopher, geometer, or sage in the vicinity, she was obliged to try deciphering Isaac Newton on her own. She could manage the Latin well enough, but what did it all mean? Where was the sense in a statement such as, “The areas that revolving bodies describe by radii drawn to an immovable center of force do lie in the same immovable planes, and are proportional to the times in which they are described”? Not long after Isobel had introduced her to the Principia Mathematica, Jennet had found amongst her aunt’s geometry volumes a monograph in which Newton boasted of making his book as abstruse as possible, “to avoid being bated by little Smatterers in Mathematics.” This same monograph specified the works a person should master ere approaching the tortuous tome. “After all thirteen books of Euclid, you must read De Witt’s Elementa Curvarum, as this will increase your Knowledge of the Conics. For the Algebra, you should acquire Bartholin’s Commentaries on Descartes’s Geometry and solve the first Thirty Problems. Finally, any Mind that imbibes the Whole of Huygens’s Horologium Oscillatorium will emerge the richer for it.” Small wonder the Principia Mathematica seemed as opaque to her as barrel-tar.

  Time and again she returned to the Merrimack, and one afternoon she forsook the linen net for a method perfected by Dunstan. You located a piece of twine, fastened a crab apple to the midpoint, knotted one end around a willow wand, tied a bent sewing needle to the other end, impaled a caterpillar on the needle, set the apple a-float, and waited. The technique worked splendidly. Shortly before dusk Jennet snagged and landed a trout. For a full minute she crouched beside her prize as it lay twitching on the shore, tethered to the wand, friendless and alone. Staring into its unblinking eye, she grew grateful for René Descartes’s deduction that all such animals were essentially machines, oblivious to sensation, immune to misery.

  She pressed one palm against the dying trout, feeling its squamous complexity, then reached toward the bent needle and twisted the shank free of the fish’s mouth.

  She looked up. A tall young man stood on the far side of the river, harvesting marsh marigolds. He was bare to the waist, his flesh as brown as cedar wood and smooth as bronze. He wore deerskin leggings. Their gazes connected. He smiled. She shivered. His hair was greased, cut short on one side, black as a Colchester crow. His cheekbones were high, nose elegant and aquiline.

  Lowering his head, he inhaled the fragrance of the golden bouquet, then once again fixed his dark eyes on her.

  Only much later, as she hurried home through the gathering dusk, surrounded by the sawing of the crickets and the tremolos of the tree frogs, the trout secured in her leather satchel, did she make sense of the encounter. This had been a momentous afternoon. There would not be another like it soon. For on this day Jennet Stearne, future author of the argumentum grande, had caught a trout, seen an Indian, and experienced her first sweet rush of desire.

  j

  STEPPING OFF HIS PORCH, Malleus Maleficarum in hand, Walter skirted his miserable crop of pole-beans and headed toward Kembel’s Ordinary. All the way down Mill Street he made a point of not looking west. Thither lay an entire continent, vast beyond imagining and infested with Devil-worshippers—and withal he could do nothing about it. Until he persuaded the Boston Puritans to supply their Witchfinder-Royal with a salary, he would have to waste his days hunting and fishing and otherwise scrabbling for a living. Such an irrational state of affairs. When your cellar was full of rats, you didn’t lock your cat in the attic.

  No matter how vigorously Walter prayed, how much Scripture he read, or how mightily he strove to think well of his benefactors, he could not shake his conviction that Lord Halifax and the others had betrayed him. He wanted to believe that it was all an unhappy accident—that when the aristocrats sent him packing to America, they’d had no inkling of Governor Andros’s imminent eviction. But Walter smelled conspiracy. He could practically hear the three lords cackling over how they’d foiled the controversial pricker, deftly maneuvering him out of England without resorting to the cumbersome formalities of exile.

  Whenever Walter supped in Boston with his remarkable new friend, Cotton Mather, the jelly-jowled minister reminded him that there was considerable cause for optimism. Even as the two Satan-haters ate their fowl and venison, the Reverend Mather’s ambitious father was in London negotiating with the King’s Colonial Secretary, drafting a new charter for Massachusetts Bay and helping to select Andros’s replacement. In the meantime, Mather advised, Walter should continue detecting heretics whether the local magistrates paid him or not, the better to impress the new governor when that worthy arrived.

  “Imagine you’re the Crown agent in question,” Mather said. “On reaching Massachusetts Bay you hear rumors of the Colony’s official witchfinder—how he so despiseth the demon world, he hath been dispensing his services for free. What would your inclination be?”

  “To recompense that cleanser handsomely,” Walter said, basking in the warmth of Mather’s madeira. “’Sblood, Reverend, for a pastor, you think rather like a politician!”

  “’Tis a habit I must continually cultivate—at least until that unlikely day when our politicians start thinking like pastors.”

  Owing to this expectation of ultimate reward, Walter experienced an unbridled delight when, early in March, the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem-Village solicited his expertise in circumscribing Satan. “The 25th of this Month will find me in your Town of Haverhill, buying Boots and Gloves,” Parris’s letter began. “My fond Hope is that, come the noon Hour, we might meet at Kembel’s Ordinary. You will know me by my ministerial Garb.” At first Walter decided that Parris merely intended to bring him, the Colony’s most famous non-Puritan, into the Calvinist fold, but then he read the closing line—“Lucifer hath been rais’d amongst us, and his Rage is vehement and terrible, and we sorely require your Skills”—and he forthwith scribbled a note confirming the rendezvous.

  Striding into the tavern, Walter instinctively clapped an eye on the Reverend Samuel Parris. With his high-crowned hat and elegant gray cape, the minister stood out from the Haverhill farmers and tradesmen as would a diamond atop a dung-hill. A cadaverous, beak-nosed man of sallow complexion, he sat by the window, leafing through a Bible bound in Moroccan leather. Walter slipped his license from his Malleus and set it before Parris. The men shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and ordered pots of cider, and by midday they’d formed the sort of iron bond enjoyed by those who place Devil-fighting above all other matters.

  Beginning the previous January, Parris explained, a strange malady had overtaken a half-dozen girls in Salem-Village. The children routinely lapsed into trances, suffered convulsions, and endured bites from invisible teeth and pinches from phantom fingers. Amongst the afflicted were Parris’s own daughter, Betty, and his orphaned niece, Abigail Williams. After ruling out all possible mundane causes, the local physician had offered a diagnosis of maleficium; the girls, he believed, were bewitched. Soon afterward Betty and the others started naming their tormentors. Thus far five Salemites had been examined, indicted, and sent to the gaol-house, and every week the girls sensed yet another wizard or enchantress in their midst.

  “’Tis obviously a situation calls for an experienced cleanser,” Walter said.

  “Captain Walcott hath agreed to open his house to you,” Parris said. “We would retain your services anon but for one lamentable circumstance.”

  “Speak no more of’t. Though baptized into the Church of England, I am all eager to join your Calvinist sect.”

  “I feel a prodigious relief,” Parris said, pressing his Bible against his breast as if applying a poultice.

  Walter gulped down the last of his cider, sighing con
tently as the alcohol mingled with his blood. The minister’s splendid cape, he realized, would make a most dignified uniform for a Witchfinder-Royal. “You spoke of invisible teeth and phantom fingers…”

  “Invisible to us bystanders, but not to the afflicted girls. Barely a day goes by without a Satanist sends forth her ghostly apparition, and by these shapes the children know who plagues them.”

  “Were you aware, Mr. Parris, that we licensed prickers regard spectral evidence with the gravest skepticism?”

  “I’Christ, I was not. You can see how great is our need of you. Come to Salem, sir.”

  “My fee’s five crowns per unmasked heretic.”

  “And therein lies my regret, for we cannot offer you any compensation beyond food and lodging. The village selectmen—an incompetent bunch, as you’ll see—barely manage to scrape together my monthly salary and firewood allotment.”

  “The things of Cæsar mean nothing when there be demons to thwart,” Walter said. And governors to dazzle. “I shall join this epic hunt of yours”—he reinserted his license in his Malleus—“ere the week is out.”

  j

  ON THE SEVENTH DAY IN APRIL of 1692, Walter loaded his children and his detection tools into his thrice-owned and grotesquely decrepit one-horse carriage—the promised Basque coach had never materialized—and traveled twenty miles southeast to Salem-Village. They reached Jonathan Walcott’s house in the middle of a ferocious thunder-gust, but luckily the Captain and his wife were prepared for their sodden visitors, providing them with woolen clothes, hot broth, warm wine, and dry beds.

  An auspicious beginning, Walter decided. His fortunes were about to change.

  At first Dunstan and Jennet seemed wholly in countenance with their new surroundings. Though the village was landlocked, the neighboring community of Salem-Town encompassed a bustling harbor, and Dunstan and Jennet passed many agreeable afternoons watching the arrivals and departures of the high-masted ships. Alas, by mid-month Walter’s children were complaining of boredom, a condition they sought to relieve through association with Abigail Williams, a leader amongst the girls whose sufferings had ignited the hunt. Walter did not like Miss Williams. He did not like any of the haunted daughters of Salem-Village. Their temperaments were flighty, their speech unrefined, their submissions of spectral evidence dubious. In the case of the Williams girl, however, he apprehended within her troubled soul an odd sort of holiness, an idiosyncratic sanctity, and so he permitted his progeny to keep company with her, hoping that her piety might somehow rub off on Jennet.