The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Thy mission hath all the marks of madness,” the Quaker said after she’d finished describing her plight.

  “Doubtless you are correct.” She climbed into the rowboat, seized the penultimate crab-cage, and lifted it onto the quay. “Prithee, rent me your Manatee for the excellent price of three pounds sterling”—she drew the tethered purse from her bodice—“that I might fetch my Rachel.”

  The crabber took the final cage in hand and scrambled free of the rowboat. “Thy daughter sails into Delaware Bay e’en as we speak. Thou hast not a prayer of o’ertaking her.”

  “Four pounds,” Jennet said.

  “Wilt thou make it five?”

  She shook the requisite coins into the crabber’s eager palm, unfastened the Manatee’s line, and sat down facing the stern. Sliding both oars into the water, she brought the boat about, then pulled with all the vigor of Archimedes levering the world.

  “I wish thee good fortune!” the Quaker called after her.

  Stroke upon stroke, yard after yard, she chased the retreating carracks—down the river, into the bay, toward the ascending sun.

  “Hallo, Bristol Maid! Hallo! Hallo!”

  She gave the oars an emphatic yank and, pivoting on her hips, glanced toward the horizon. Already the Antares had dropped from sight, but the Bristol Maid still nicked the sky.

  Turning, she resumed her labors, stroke upon stroke. Mauminikish, she told herself—row harder. Her back spasmed. Mauminikish. Her muscles sang with pain. Mauminikish. The blisters on her palms grew big as grapes—and yet she cleaved to the task, working the oars as furiously as a Nimacook brave driving his war canoe into battle.

  “Hallo! Hallo!”

  Her vision went muzzy with her tears, and she apprehended that she was close to blacking out. Again she turned. The Bristol Maid was gone, claimed by the planet’s imperceptible curve. She shipped the left oar, then the right, and slumped forward, gasping and groaning like some half-drowned hag who’d just endured the cold-water test.

  “I’m here, Rachel!”

  The sun pounded on the bay, scorching her brow and neck. Her throat felt as raw if she’d eaten sand. She set her shredded hands in her lap, staining her dress with blood.

  “Your mother’s right behind you!”

  Gradually but inexorably an ember of logic caught fire within her brain. If she continued to pursue the carrack, the likely outcome would not be a reunion of mother and daughter but rather, for Jennet, death by exposure, and, for Rachel, a meaningless bereavement.

  “Damn thee, Tobias Crompton!”

  Whereas if she quit the chase—if she tipped her king, sheathed her sword, hoisted the white flag—she would be abandoning Rachel to a man of liberal means and generous intentions. A child could do far worse in this world.

  “Damn thee to Hell!”

  A gust of wind caught her tears and flung them overboard, adding their number to the Atlantic’s brackish infinitude. For an indeterminate interval she stared at the bottom of the boat. Seawater sloshed amongst the oaken ribs. A solitary blue crab scuttled along the keelson. Under other and better circumstances she might have submitted the crab to philosophic scrutiny, but instead she picked up the creature and, after gazing briefly into the black seeds that were its eyes, hurled it into the bay.

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Seventh

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  A Young Benjamin Franklin Receives Instruction in the Virtues of Older Women, amongst Them Prudence, Passion, and Electric Conductivity

  j

  Twenty-seven years after the event, the public burning of his Satanist aunt remained for Dunstan Stearne the supreme religious experience of his life. The pulse of the flames, the hurrahs of the crowd, the screams of the heretic, the apocalyptic fragrance—he would not forget these sensations as long as thoughts roved within his skull and blood beat through his veins. So memorable, in sooth, was Isobel Mowbray’s cleansing that, shortly after the chartering of the Massachusetts Bay Purification Commission, Dunstan had decided that in certain exceptional instances his band would import such spectacle to the American shore, favoring stake over gallows as the medium of execution.

  The present case was special not only because both the heretics were male but also because they were twins—Hosea and Malachi Clegg, so notorious throughout Cohasset for sheep-thieving and whore-mongering that nobody was terribly surprised when they turned out to be Devil-worshippers as well. In the interests of economy, Dunstan and the other Commissioners had set both Cleggs on the same pyre and chained them to the same stake. Winter was coming. There was no point in needlessly depleting the town’s store of communal firewood.

  Burning torch in hand, Jonathan Corwin began his stately march across Cohasset Square, inspiring the gathered citizens to draw back as if making way for the equipage of a duke. Dunstan cast an adoring eye on his wife. Abigail stood majestically betwixt the courageous local magistrate, Mr. Basset, who’d arrested the warlocks in a daring midnight raid on their farm, and the bushy-bearded printer, Mr. Searle, who’d earlier that day done a brisk business in broadsheets recounting the Clegg Brothers’ trial. The October wind pulled the bodice of Abby’s dress tight against her form, even as it swept her skirt southward in a billowing banner of feminine grace. Dunstan released a concupiscent sigh. Although she’d never conceived a child within that admirable frame, this was not for lack of conjugal activity. Probably God had determined that Abby could best serve Him through witchfinding rather than childbearing. Motherhood was a blessed state, but incompatible with a full-time career in demonology.

  As Mr. Corwin thrust the torch into the pyre, the Reverend Parris exhorted the spectators to render Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” in the loudest voices they could find, and soon the stalwart song was resounding across the square and echoing down the village streets. No one sang louder than Abby, whose soprano transcended the general chorus as cream rises to the top of milk.

  Sibyl—that was the word for her, Dunstan decided. His wife was a sibyl. Over the years, her gift for sensing heresy from afar had spared the Commission an incalculable quantity of effort. Emerging from her monthly conversation with the angel Justine, Abby would disclose to her fellow prickers the name of whatever Massachusetts settlement had most recently acquired (unbeknownst to itself) an ambassador from Hell, a revelation that Dunstan would forthwith relay to the editors of The Bible Commonwealth. Upon reading in the Commonwealth that his community had a witch problem, the local magistrate would conduct an investigation, presenting the Commissioners with at least one likely suspect shortly after their Gypsy wagon came rolling into town.

  Sixteen years of service to Crown and Creator—and still Dunstan could boast that he’d never used his band as a tool of personal retribution. Sometimes the temptation to chastise the Nimacooks, those idolatrous savages who’d murdered his father, debauched his sister, and ruined his face, proved nearly overwhelming, but so far he’d managed to forbear. True, whenever Abby saw that a particular Nimacook had crossed the line separating mere depraved paganism from full-blown demonic compact, the Commission would steal the witch away, administer the tests, and—if the expected signs emerged—perform a furtive extermination. This procedure always occurred in a spirit of Satan fighting, however, never vindictiveness. Vengeance, the prophet Isaiah taught, belonged solely to the Lord.

  Gradually Dunstan apprehended that a soft but palpable rain, dense enough to dampen the logs, was falling on Cohasset Square, and he lost no time issuing the necessary orders.

  “Fagots, Samuel! Fagots, Jonathan! Fagots all around!”

  Mr. Parris and Mr. Corwin sprang into action, seeking to fetch the half-dozen emergency bundles of wood that the Commissioners kept in the Gypsy wagon. For Dunstan had never forgotten the admonition his father had given him at the Chelmsford hangings of 1688: a jurist must never bring a needless cruelty to his business, even when punishing Satanists—and needless cruelty would indeed be the outcome if the pricke
rs failed to act quickly, supplementing the pyre with dry wood, as the fire would otherwise burn slowly and subject the Clegg brothers to an unendurable roasting, not the quick incineration that Christian charity demanded.

  In a matter of minutes Mr. Parris and Mr. Corwin emptied the wagon of its fagots, bearing the merciful timber to the stake and adding it to the flames.

  “Bless ye!” cried Hosea, coughing.

  “Ye’re compassionate prickers indeed!” Malachi shouted.

  Within a quarter-hour the cleansing was accomplished, and the spectators drifted away, the porkish odor having doubtless put them in mind of supper. Dunstan watched Mr. Parris set about his book-keeping, severing the brothers’ charred left thumbs and securing them in a baize sack. Tomorrow the minister would deliver the thumbs to Governor Danforth’s office in Boston. In one sense this accounting was a mere formality, for neither the Governor nor his assistants ever opened the sacks and verified their contents. But it was important, Dunstan believed, for the Commissioners to provide tangible evidence that, like the Kirkcaldy Cleansing League across the sea, they were regularly riding the hinterlands, fulfilling their duties, earning their compensation. Witchfinding was a profession in which a tidy balance-sheet could not be overvalued.

  The demonologists climbed into the Gypsy wagon and set off along the rutted roads betwixt Cohasset and Framingham, reaching the Merry Alewife shortly after dark. Upon depositing the wagon in the livery, they arranged for the inn-keeper to tend the horses, then tramped three miles through the compacted gloom to Waushakum Pond. They removed their dinghy from its cloak of boughs and, as the sun dipped westward, turning the pond into a shimmering golden broth, rowed their way to the salt-box.

  The Heavens declare the glory of God, the psalmist had sung, and the firmament showeth His handiwork, and Dunstan had of late undertaken to celebrate that very firmament in colored wax. Entering the front parlor, he swept a satisfied gaze across a field of lion-headed sunflowers—an array of water lilies dappling a pond—a willow tree confiding its despair to a placid creek—an incoming tide crashing against a craggy shore to form a great spuming cowl. These days, of course, he could afford oil pigments, canvas too, and camel-hair brushes from Asia, but he still preferred the simpler medium. Wax was so basic, like blood.

  His wife prepared the usual post-cleansing meal. Boiled pheasant, dried venison, cornmeal bread, crisp brown ale. The prickers ate in silence. A luxurious exhaustion washed through Dunstan as, yawning and stretching, he guided Abby to their bed-chamber. Easing himself onto the mattress, he pulled the quilt over his chest and once again let the reverie pass through his mind.

  Smoke-blind, he runs through the glowing house, his breeches loaded with dung, his heart throbbing with resolve.

  He leaps over mounds of flame, the sparks swarming like Hell’s own horseflies, the smoke congealing into spectral shapes, the beams and rafters crashing down everywhere.

  He ascends the stairs to the second-floor hallway, and suddenly he sees it through the black haze, his birthright, nailed to his father’s door.

  There is still time to save the witchfinding license—and time to do something else. A swirling column of fire rises from the floor. He steps toward it. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, he embraces the blazing pillar. He screams. The flames enfold him, purifying his flesh, scorching his soul, seeding a scar whose meaning could not be clearer: here is a man who might one day bring the Fiend himself to book.

  j

  AS HER MELANCHOLY MULTIPLIED and her confusion grew more acute, Jennet inevitably turned to the Nimacooks’ favorite medicine, their balm for grief and woe, the river-cure. Stripped down to Edenic nakedness, she spent an hour each morning swimming in the Schuylkill, imploring its gods to absorb her sorrows and bear them away with the current.

  For reasons not wholly apparent, Rachel’s abduction had become muddled in her mind with both her aunt’s immolation and the death of ill-starred Pashpishia. Pursuing her course through the river’s resisting medium, Jennet imagined she saw Isobel standing on the shore, small-pox pustules stippling her squat body. She pictured Rachel shackled behind Colchester Castle, the flames coiling around her like voracious serpents. She saw Pashpishia sitting in a locked cabin aboard the Bristol Maid. Rachel racked by the flogging sickness. Isobel sailing eastward. Pashpishia at the stake.

  After forty days on the swimming regimen, she judged herself…not cured, exactly, not whole, but sane—sane enough, at least, to renew the fight, though she couldn’t decide whether this improvement traced to Indian magic or simply to the healing hand of time.

  As a preliminary measure, she dismissed Nellie Adams from her employ—the coming ordeal would require absolute solitude and utter silence, no footfalls save Jennet’s own sounding in the hall—but only after securing for the serving-maid a new situation as governess to a prosperous German-Town family named Eckhardt. The second step was equally obvious. She must rouse herself with Euclid, fan her desires with Huygens, and enter into the most intimate relationship imaginable with the Principia Mathematica.

  Sometimes it took her a week, sometimes an entire month, but she never abandoned a Newtonian problem ere seducing it. She became adept at charting, from a given focus, the elliptical, parabolic, and hyperbolic paths of revolving spheroids both real and conjectural. She learned to plot a comet’s orbit from three discrete observations—determine the force by which the sun and the moon raised equatorial tides in both the syzygies and the quadratures—calculate the course the moon would follow but for its eccentricity—and infer from local lunar data the mean motions of the apsides and nodes of the Jovian satellites.

  True as always to his word, Tobias sent her thirty pounds each quarter through the office of his London solicitor, Mr. Horsfals, a portion of which she spent on food and books ere depositing the rest in the strongbox beneath her bed. The possibility of enhancing her wardrobe with a new gown or a fashionable hat never even attained the status of a temptation. Along with each allowance Tobias usually enclosed a letter reporting on Rachel’s welfare and also relating his various successes in the East Indies—for such was the location of his mysterious appointment. “’Tis an entirely amazing Enterprise,” he wrote. “We’ve got sixteen Riders saddl’d at all Times, carrying the Mails five hundred Miles overland from Madraspatam to Bombay.”

  By Tobias’s account, Rachel could now speak French, do simple sums, and recite the Decalogue, and she’d developed “a most affectionate Bond with her Governess,” Mademoiselle Claudette Peltier. Jennet knew that his intention was to reassure her concerning Rachel’s happiness—for all his foolishness, there was no actual malice in the man—and yet she came to dread each new letter from Madraspatam, promising herself she wouldn’t read the thing and then reading it anyway, subsequently flying into a jealous rage upon learning that Mlle. Peltier had undertaken to instruct their daughter in dancing, drawing, arithmetic, or astronomy. The amusing little notes appended by Rachel herself failed to relieve Jennet’s misery, for whilst they bespoke a mind quite delighted by the place in which it found itself, this exotic Eastern world of red silk saris and white marble temples, they also betrayed Rachel’s uncertainty over whether her real mother was Jennet Crompton or the infinitely compelling and supernaturally competent Claudette Peltier.

  The spring of 1718 brought the fulfillment of Tobias’s second promise, the official termination of their marriage. Forwarded from Madraspatam to Mr. Horsfals in London, and thence to Philadelphia, the essential document was no more physically impressive than Walter Stearne’s witchfinding license, but it bore the Lord Chancellor’s seal, which made it a substantive scrap indeed. Even more momentous than this paper was the accompanying letter, wherein Tobias promised to continue sending her the monthly stipends “until such time as you can sustain yourself without my assistance.” Jennet signed one copy of the divorcement decree, mailed it back to Horsfals, and slipped its twin inside Huygens’s Horologium Oscillatorium, where it lay waiting to persuade her hypothetica
l future husband that his betrothed was no bigamist.

  But for now she belonged only to her work: Jennet Stearne Crompton, bride of geometry, kin to conics, novice in the sisterhood of acceleration. She exiled herself from all physical particulars, from her city, her province, her planet—from her own flesh, it seemed—and set about designing the various demonstrations and experiments whose results would constitute the meat and sinew of the new treatise.

  Brimming with dramatic accounts of what happened when roundish objects were dispatched along the eternally curving surfaces of trigonometric tradition, Book One of the Principia Mathematica, “The Motion of Bodies,” provided Jennet with eight procedures for evoking acceleration’s spirits via barrow-wheels, rolling-pins, and lawn-bowls. After perusing Book Two, “The Motion of Bodies in Inhibiting Mediums,” she forthwith assembled a dozen devices for conjuring spirits of resistance, her favorite consisting of two upright metal pipes joined at the bottom by a horizontal tube to form a U-shaped canal, an arrangement that, filled with a quantity of fluid equal to twice the length of her pendulum, enabled her to establish a binding reciprocity betwixt the liquid’s fluctuations and the lever’s oscillations. By casting her memory backward to her childhood adventures with scrying-glasses and pentahedral prisms, then hurling her intellect forward into the Principia chapter called “The Motion of Very Small Bodies Agitated by Centripetal Forces,” she managed to devise eleven radiation experiments, for each time Newton invoked “very small bodies” he was surely inviting the reader to imagine the world’s most fundamental phenomena, light chief amongst them, winnowed like wheat into the tiniest conceivable corpuscles. And then, finally, faced with the imperative of including attraction’s agents in the argumentum grande, she pondered every Principia passage concerning magnetism and friction, subsequently extracting nine demonstrations, the cleverest of which involved a toy windmill such as her mother had oft-times constructed. Pursuant to her experimental design, Jennet made the sails of foil instead of silk, surrounding the array with a corona of lodestones, an imperially impractical machine whose vanes, when they turned at all, moved skittishly. The point, however, was not to grind grain but to crush irrationality.