The Last Witchfinder

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by James Morrow


  She was manifestly the Indians’ unwilling prisoner, not an adopted bride now reconciled to her fate or a sentimentalist playing at savagery, for they kept her on a halter, the cruel strap running from her neck to the wrist of a Nimacook hag, probably her mother-in-law. Beyond this evidence was the fact of Bathsheba’s visage, with its endless sadness and chronic grief—the face of one who longed for an Englishman’s kiss.

  A plan formed in Tobias’s throbbing brain. He saw himself galloping onto the plantation like a knight seeking to save a maiden from a dragon, then swooping up Bathsheba in a gesture so heroic that she could not help but requite his adoration. It was the sort of derring-do he might have rendered in a poem, were he a poet, or in a painting, were he an artist, or in reality, were he a man of action.

  But, alas, there beat within the mail-carrier’s breast the heart of a procrastinator, if not an outright poltroon. I am a sorry Lancelot, he told himself. I make a puny Percival. But as the harvest ended and the autumn air stiffened with intimations of winter, he realized that Bathsheba would soon depart the maize field, and so he picked an imminent date for the great rescue, the twentieth of October, the very day that, four years earlier, Harriet Easty of Amesbury had told him, “Given a choice in marriage partners ’twixt yourself and a boar-pig, I should vastly prefer the latter.”

  He rose before dawn, dressed hurriedly, and secured beneath his belt the two essential tools: his pistol, loaded and ready, and his knife—the one he used for opening undeliverable epistles (“dead letters” in the parlance of his trade) in hopes of learning the whereabouts of the sender or intended recipient. As the sun’s first rays touched the shingled peaks and whitewashed steeples of Boston, he saddled Jeremiah, slung the mail valises over the gelding’s rump, and rode out along the cobblestoned streets. Reaching the post road, he urged his mount to a trot. Bathsheba rarely stayed on the job past noon, but if his horse kept up the pace, he would reach the plantation no later than eleven o’clock.

  He broke his fast in Stoneham, fed and watered Jeremiah, then continued north. Three hours later, Tobias cast an eye on his beloved.

  Tethered as always, she stood farther from the road than usual, braiding together maize ears by their husks with an élan worthy of Ceres herself, then hanging them to dry on a gallows-like lintel. A full five yards separated Bathsheba and the hag, a gap sufficient for his escapade. He unsheathed his knife and, jabbing his boot heel into Jeremiah’s ribs, charged across the field. Reaching Bathsheba, he leaned down and with a grand flourish simultaneously severed the halter, freed his beloved, lost his balance, and tumbled off his horse.

  A bundle of sheaves cushioned his fall, and after a brief episode of flailing about in the dirt he gained his feet and glanced all around him. Much to his delight, he saw that the day was not lost, for during his interval on the ground Bathsheba had seized the reins and hauled herself onto the horse’s back. Tobias had but to join her in the saddle anon, and the two of them would ride off together.

  But Bathsheba had a different idea. She guided the horse along a rank of standing stalks and reigned up before her mother-in-law.

  “Tell Okommaka I shall remember him with affection!” Bathsheba shouted, after which she exclaimed a brief sentence—presumably the identical message—in the incomprehensible Nimacook language. The hag replied loudly and angrily using the same confounding tongue, whereupon Bathsheba wheeled the horse around, galloped across the field, and disappeared down the road, taking the mail valises with her.

  No sooner had this distressing development occurred than Tobias noticed the hag running toward him, her bony hand clamped around a fowling-piece. She paused and fired. The ball whistled past his cheek. He drew forth his pistol and cocked it, but before he could take aim the old woman vanished amidst the drying-racks. He jammed his pistol into his belt and sprinted madly away, as fixed in his purpose as any mother determined to retrieve her stolen baby from a band of Gypsies.

  Throughout the subsequent hour, as he puffed and groaned his way down the Amesbury Post Road, Tobias’s mental disposition oscillated betwixt stupefying humiliation and near dementia. With each passing farm he devised yet another narrative by which he might convince his employers that the loss of the valises had been unavoidable—brigands, Indians, a lightning-bolt, a tornado, a bear with an appetite for paper—but none enjoyed the ring of plausibility. He did not know which situation chastened him more: his imminent dismissal, or his woeful misassessment of Bathsheba’s nature.

  Shortly after three o’clock—so said Tobias’s pocket-watch—he encountered an itinerant peddler, his wagon a rattling concatenation of pots, pans, knives, and scissors, and the next thing he knew the gnarled old man was offering him a ride to Boston. Tobias blessed his luck and climbed aboard. At three o’clock the peddler dropped him off in Treamount Square. A serrated wind arose, cutting through Tobias’s benumbed and humbled flesh. He walked down Sudbury Street to Hannover, followed the flagstones to his door, and entered the townhouse, at which juncture his despair evaporated with the suddenness of a sneeze.

  Still dressed in her Nimacook leathers, though missing her grotesque bonnet, Bathsheba sat in the drawing-room, holding a glass of his best Rhenish and paging through his Æneid. Her moccasined feet rested on the Oriental stool, beside which lay both mail valises.

  “If this be the taste of civilization, I’m entirely in favor of’t,” she said, taking a sip of wine. A sensual, smoky voice, each syllable bathed in molasses. “Fear not for your amiable horse—I stabled him round the corner at Chadwick’s Livery.”

  “Thou art a skilled equestrienne,” he said admiringly.

  “I apologize for stealing your mount, Mr. Crompton, but I thought you a highwayman with designs upon my virtue. Only after noticing these valises did I realized that you’d contrived a rescue, and so I made such inquiries as brought me to your house.”

  “Your deliverance was in sooth my aim,” he said, his voice quavering with awe. The goddess was right here—in his own parlor—barely six feet away! “May I speak bluntly? From the moment I saw you laboring in the heathen field, my heart became yours to do with as you will. Indeed, but for one stark fact I would now make bold to ask for your hand in marriage.”

  “What stark fact? That I might spurn you?”

  “That I know not your name.”

  “Waequashim,” she said.

  “Your given name, I mean.”

  “Waewowesheckmishquashim.”

  “Your real name.”

  “Jennet…Stearne,” she said slowly, as if speaking the words for the first time in her life. She snapped his Virgil shut. “Now ’tis my turn to indulge in the crudest candor. Your antics today bespeak a chivalrous heart, and this house is undeniably convivial. I seek a kind of patron, someone who might feed and clothe me whilst I undertake a philosophic project.”

  He stood up straight as a pike, throwing back his shoulders. “At present I am a lowly mail-carrier, but ere the year is out I shall command the entire Boston Post Office.”

  “Most ambitious. Do you perchance enjoy access to the library at Harvard College?”

  “My younger brother attends that very institution, in training for the ministry!”

  “Then I assent to your proposition,” she said.

  “Oh, my dear lady, do my ears deceive me? You would become my bride?”

  “On the understanding that my loyalties will also extend to my Baconian investigations.”

  “I should love my wife even if she were an alchemist!”

  “And on the supplementary understanding that I shall ne’er count myself a Puritan.”

  “There be but six-score baptized Anglicans in Boston, and yet your Tobias is amongst ’em!”

  “And on the further understanding that ’tis no apple-cheeked virgin you’ll be taking to your bed.”

  “I have long supposed you the victim of many brutal ravishings by your heathen husband.”

  “No ravishings to speak of, merely a mutual enthusiasm c
oncerning the carnal domain. But if you’ll forgive me my past, I believe that Providence will smile upon our future.”

  “’Tis axiomatic I should absolve the woman I love.”

  Possessed by a wild and unaccountable impulse, he reached into both valises simultaneously and, gathering up a great mass of mail, threw the lot into the air. As the myriad packets settled to the floor, he pictured himself a-float on a magic sea, bits of foam descending all around him. He glanced toward his bride. Once again the Æneid had entranced her. How marvelous, he thought. Before her abduction, she’d evidently been a kind of sage. Their marriage, it seemed, would never lack for stimulating conversation, and might soon bid fair to become the loftiest in Boston.

  j

  JENNET WOULD BE THE FIRST to admit that marriages of convenience were not the noblest arrangements on Earth, but no one could deny that the institution boasted an impressive history. What was the affair of Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar if not a marriage of convenience binding Egypt to Rome? What was the Catholic Church if not a marriage of convenience fusing an emergent Christianity to a venerable paganism? What had Magna Carta consecrated if not a pragmatic conciliation betwixt King John and his barons? Should a loveless union be the price of her demon disproof, she was willing to pay it, though she hoped she would not break her husband’s heart in the bargain.

  True to his prediction, with the coming of summer Tobias ascended to the position of Boston Postmaster, which meant he no longer spent protracted and depleting days on horseback. For Jennet this promotion proved a mixed blessing. On the asset side of the ledger, his increased salary enabled him to hire a maid-servant from amongst the Long Wharf rabble newly arrived on the brigantine Flying Fish: Nellie Adams, a stout young Chelmsford widow whose competence at marketing, cooking, mending, and laundering secured for Jennet sufficient time each day to pursue what Tobias called “this admirable campaign against your brother’s unholy band.” Alas, her husband’s less strenuous regimen had him coming home each evening abrim with residual vigor. Jennet’s despair lay not so much in the failure of his ungainly frame, equine face, and weather-vane ears to arouse her, but rather in his refusal to allow that the carnal arts had progressed considerably since Adam had first lain with Eve. Her rhapsodic accounts of the secrets revealed in “Labia North and South” and “The Lust of the Goat” brought to his cheeks not the flush of concupiscence but the blush of embarrassment, until at last she decided to terminate his connubial education and scandalize him no more. Whilst she would hesitate to call Tobias a man for whom ignorance was bliss, it seemed likely that in matters of bliss this man would always be ignorant.

  When he learned that her marriage to the Nimacook trapper had resulted in a female infant, a fit of jealousy seized Tobias—evidently he’d managed to convince himself that Jennet and Okommaka had swived but rarely—though he immediately became the soul of condolence upon hearing that the child had died of the small-pox. Unfortunately, his reaction to Bella’s passing went beyond mere sympathy. He wanted to efface the tragedy itself. Jennet’s grief, he insisted, would truly subside only after she’d produced a second child—and of course nothing would bring him greater satisfaction than to father a strapping baby boy or entrancing little girl.

  Although pregnancy was the last circumstance Jennet wished to endure at this point in her life, she resolved to maintain Tobias’s goodwill by feigning enthusiasm for the prospect, even as she arranged to keep her body unencumbered. Each time she entered the house bearing pennyroyal or marjoram from Pratt’s Apothecary, she would allude to her philosophic pursuits, when in truth these ingredients were the key to Hassane’s unguent against conception. She rarely experienced any difficulty, prior to the copulative moment, finding a pretext for slipping briefly away, subsequently applying the paste to her womanly canal, and by pleading a contrary stomach or a troublesome tooth she generally succeeded in avoiding Tobias on her days of peak fertility.

  Thanks to her brother-in-law, Wilmot Crompton, whose privileges as a divinity student included a borrower’s license from the Harvard College library, she came into temporary possession of the major works by “the three John W’s,” as Aunt Isobel had termed witch-hunting’s most conspicuous opponents: John Webster, John Wagstaffe, Johann Weyer. But it was the labyrinthine Beacon Street bookshop called Darby’s that proved for Jennet a true cornucopia, equipping her with not only a fresh copy of the Principia Mathematica but also the particular treatises Newton had recommended as stepping-stones to his opus. Inevitably she happened upon volumes by Royal Society fellows other than Newton—Henry More’s An Antidote against Atheism, Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist—but she decided not to squander her husband’s money, for Isobel had labeled these men witch believers all.

  Darby’s also carried newspapers, including The London Journal, The New-England Courant, The American Weekly Mercury, and, most energizing for Jennet, the Calvinists’ own periodical, The Bible Commonwealth, which routinely reported on the Massachusetts Bay Purification Commission and its Scottish counterpart, the Kirkcaldy Cleansing League, in a style that oscillated unpredictably betwixt sober detachment (“We must not forget that our best Defense against Demons lies in Praying, not Pricking”) and giddy enthusiasm (“These brave Cleansers have hasten’d the Day when Satan will quit Christendom forever”). A project soon suggested itself, and Jennet subsequently secured from Darby’s an unruled leather folio, decorating the first page with fat blockish characters: The Devil and All His Works, she wrote. In the months that followed, upon the appearance of a new Bible Commonwealth, she would scissor out each article concerning Dunstan’s band and paste it into the folio. Whenever the quest exhausted her, whenever it seemed that she would never align the Greek immutables with Newton’s principles and thereby recover his demon disproof, she would peruse The Devil and All His Works, forthwith finding her anger renewed and her ambition replenished.

  Although she’d intended to spend the winter studying the three John W’s, she was barely ten pages into Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft ere noticing that the author did not doubt the existence of wicked spirits, and it happened that an analogous credulity infected Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated and Weyer’s De Præstigiis Dæmonum. True, these men held views that would enrage a Cotton Mather or a Walter Stearne. The John W’s variously argued for the impossibility of developing unambiguous cases against accused sorcerers, for the possibility that Satan’s vanity prevented him from granting magical powers to hags, and for the probability that human misery traced to forces other than maleficium. But none dared mount a frontal assault on demonology itself.

  She set the John W’s aside and delved into Newton’s intellectual ancestors. It took her two months to negotiate the whole of Euclid, but she absorbed all the postulates and ingested all the proofs without mishap (though she deliberately skipped Book X and its impenetrable discussion of incommensurable magnitudes), and she had an equally gratifying experience with De Witt’s Elementa Curvarum. When she turned to Bartholin’s Commentaries on Descartes’s Geometry, however, she managed to solve only seven problems out of the thirty Newton had prescribed, and she endured even more humiliation at the hands of Huygens’s Horologium Oscillatorium, a work of maddening obscurity, preternatural opacity, and intractable trigonometry.

  She was on the verge of despair when late one evening, acting on an impulse whose origins she could not divine, she began turning back the pages of the Principia Mathematica itself. For a full hour she meandered through Newton’s rarefied realm, whereupon a strange unbidden radiance suffused her being, the sort of benign seizure a Philadelphia Quaker might have called the Inner Light. She understood this book! Not in its particulars, certainly, not in the details of its lemmas and proofs, but the author’s overarching design seemed suddenly, utterly, wonderfully clear.

  For all its grandeur, the universe posited by Euclid had been from its inception a frozen domain. Five centuries of such stasis ha
d elapsed, ten centuries, fifteen—and then, mirabile dictu, enter Isaac Newton, bestowing time and motion on geometry. Under Newton’s persuasion the Euclidian shapes had grown wings and gone soaring across the sky. The Lucasian Professor had made butterflies of parabolas, wrought eagles from hyperbolas, and set spheres dancing like seraphs.

  Whilst her qualified comprehension of the Principia made Jennet buoyant of heart and joyful of mind, these feelings did not endure, for the impossible task still lay before her, looming like the mile-high minaret of the Tall-Tower Problem. Somehow she must synthesize all this Newtonian kineticism with the Aristotelian immutables from which God had built the world.

  Her epiphany occurred in, of all places, St. Mark’s Anglican Church. She was sitting in the front pew, Tobias’s thigh pressed against her own, the hare-lipped Reverend Dowd presenting his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Wedding at Cana—he averred that the wine Christ had wrought from water that day was not wholly consumed, the surplus reemerging months later at the Last Supper, where it underwent a further transfiguration—when she fell upon a train of reasoning that she sensed might lead, God willing, Kautantouwit assenting, to her philosophic Grail.

  As any educated person knew, Aristotle and Newton had each reduced the cosmos to underlying components, Aristotle anatomizing its matter, Newton its motion. Newton’s system was by far the more complex, and yet Jennet believed that she detected, in both the Principia Mathematica and “A New Theory About Light and Colors,” an assumption that the kinetic universe, like its Aristotelian counterpart, consisted of four basic elements, namely acceleration, attraction, resistance, and—when you considered the great prism paper of 1668—radiation. Ah, but look how simple it was to map one universe onto the other! For radiation, the Aristotelian connection was obvious: Newton’s experiments with light depended upon the sun, source of the Greek immutable called fire. Concerning attraction, she was quick to associate this entity with the Greek element earth, magnetite being amongst the most essential components of the planet’s crust, with other such minerals doubtless awaiting discovery. When it came to acceleration, a match with the element air seemed warranted: even if you rejected Cartesian vortices, you were obliged to recognize that Earth’s atmosphere and the æther beyond held immaterial substances that gave gravity its gravitas. In the case of the remaining entities—Newtonian resistance and Aristotelian water—she did not hesitate to link them, for Book Two of the Principia had much to say about the behavior of pendulums slicing through inhibiting fluids.

 

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