The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Mayhap I should prepare some Malay tea,” he suggested.

  “We have many large questions to discuss,” she replied. “God and gravity. Demons and demonstrations. Newton’s apple—and Eden’s too. ’Tis indeed an occasion for tea, Mr. Franklin, as strong as you can make it.”

  j

  IN THE SHANK OF THE AFTERNOON the philosophers sat together on the divan, arm to arm, thigh to thigh. Bracing and aromatic, the Malay tea put Jennet in a mood of remembrance, and ere long she was speaking of her life’s great losses. A child lying in a mound beside the Shawsheen. A second child thriving in Madraspatam under the auspices of a de facto mother.

  “I’faith, Mrs. Crompton, you’ve surely endured your share of sorrows,” Ben said. “Would that I knew some benevolent sorcerer who might instantly translate your lost Rachel from Asia to America.”

  “When I cannot sleep at night, I say to myself, ‘On the other side of the planet the sun is long risen, and Rachel is up and about. At this precise moment some notion or vagary goes flitting through her brain.’”

  “But now she sleeps, and ’tis the mother whose thoughts are on the wing.”

  “Alas, I fear that very mother spends rather too much time in airy habitations, flying where her fancy takes her, as Mr. Crompton knew all too well,” Jennet said. “But for my single-minded pursuit of the argumentum grande, Rachel would yet be at my side.”

  “May I make bold with my opinion?” Ben asked. Receiving her nod, he continued. “Just as some men are not particularly competent fathers, neither are you about to be nominated the world’s most successful mother. But let me in the same breath assert that to thwart the Puritan prickers is a manifestly noble enterprise. On balance I would say you do your daughter proud.”

  “Truly?”

  “Ere Rachel’s grown to womanhood, she’ll be gainsaying all who claim she’s not your daughter.”

  Jennet inhaled deeply. Ben was redolent of philosophy—of sulphur and magnetite and other heady scents. “Since I can no longer hold my child’s delicate hand, I shall instead cling to your exquisite thought.” She swallowed a stimulating measure of tea. “Prithee, tell me what faults and merits you find in my book.”

  For the next twenty minutes her new friend discoursed upon A Treatise of How the Four Aristotelian Elements May Serve to Convince There Are No Elementals. He applauded her “incontrovertible cleverness in trying to make motion-spirits practice maleficium.” He praised her “abiding brilliance in mapping the Greek immutables onto both Newton’s mechanics and Trinitarian theology.”

  “Ah, but if you were a Parliamentarian, would my claims persuade you to o’erturn the Conjuring Statute?” she asked.

  “Oh, Mrs. Crompton, I find so much to admire in your treatise.”

  “But would my claims persuade you?”

  “Not being a Parliamentarian, ’tis impossible for me to answer. I can only say that your every sentence bespeaks an opulent intellect.”

  Something was wrong. The affirmation in his words could not conceal the catch in his voice, the hesitancy in his demeanor. She decided against further pursuing the matter but instead suggested that they experiment with his sulphur-ball.

  “You have shown how a human body, ungrounded, may exert the electric attraction on small particles,” she said, sipping the last of her tea. “Ah, but can that same body transfer its charge to another?”

  “A splendid question! We must seek its resolution!”

  They adjourned to the laboratory. Jennet lit a tallow candle and settled onto the stool. Ben assumed an upended cider cask, then carefully assembled three small mounds of crushed tea-leaves. He set one pile before the Von Guericke sphere, the other two at opposite ends of the table. Cranking the ball with her right hand, she placed her left palm along the rolling equator.

  The central tea-mound disintegrated, its particles flying to the sphere’s mottled surface. She kept her palm on the ball, lifted her feet, and stretched her right hand toward the corresponding pile. The tea bits ascended, coating her fingers.

  “I’m all electric, Ben! Now let me touch you, and we shall learn more of this strange principle!”

  Feet still hovering, she spun the ball, then charged the sulphur with her right palm and immediately wrapped her left hand around his right wrist. He unfloored his feet and brought his free hand toward the remaining mound.

  A dozen stray particles leapt to his fingertips.

  “I’Christ, we’ve done it!” he cried.

  “An impressive result”—she released his wrist and withdrew her palm from the ball—“but I shan’t count our experiment complete till we’ve turned the entire heap into a whirling tornado of tea.”

  “But…how?” He shook the particles from his person.

  “Ere I re-electrify myself, we must enlarge the area of overlap ’twixt our respective persons,” she said. “’Tis one thing for my hand to clasp your wrist, and quite another for, say, the skin of our forearms to meld.”

  “Then let us bare our limbs anon.” He unbuttoned his right cuff, rolling the ruffle toward his elbow.

  “Anon,” she echoed, furling the left sleeve of her dress.

  They brought their forearms together to create a warm fleshy tangent.

  “By your leave, we can further increase our contiguity if we place one cheek against the other,” he said.

  “Ah!”

  Keeping their forearms connected, they fused the sides of their faces, a gesture that inevitably caused their knees to bump together and her left breast to mesh with his sternum. They gulped and laughed in perfect synchronicity.

  She kissed him on the lips. He did not flinch but instead committed his own mouth to the philosophic cause.

  “Ne’er have two experimenters done a better job of enlarging an overlap,” he noted, retreating just far enough to move his lips. “Prithee, spin the ball and charge yourself, that we might continue the investigation.”

  “Let me propose that we first expand our common boundary by at least a hundred square inches.” She broke the seal betwixt their forearms, stood up, and brushed the front of her dress, transferring the tea and sulphur from her fingers to her lace bodice. “Or, even better, two hundred.”

  “Might I make the case for three hundred square inches?” he said, likewise rising.

  “Thou mayest.”

  They kissed again. Their hands became autonomous beings—ardent mariners hoisting anchors, loosening halyards, and raising canvas prior to mounting the tide and plying the seas beyond.

  “Or even four hundred square inches?” he asked.

  Buttons rotated. Thongs unthreaded. Clasps opened. Stays parted company.

  “Four hundred!” she agreed.

  A dozen articles of clothing tumbled to the floor at uniform Galilean velocities.

  “Five hundred?” he asked.

  “Five hundred!” Her heart pounded like a pagan drum setting the tempo of a bacchanal. Her lungs chuffed and wheezed like a bellows operated by a lunatic smith. “Six hundred!” Never had she observed so enthralling a phenomenon as Ben’s nakedness. His skin glowed like the translucent crater atop the candle. His virile member was a belaying pin fit to cleat the mainsail of Æneas’s flagship.

  “Ah, Mrs. Crompton, I do love thee so!”

  “My dearest, sweetest swain!”

  “Is this immoral?” he asked.

  “Merely immoderate,” she replied. “Like all women, I fear the gravid state.”

  “’Sblood, Mrs. Crompton, I shan’t so burden thee. As a faithful patron of the Grinning Sphinx, I am well instructed in the thwarting of spermatozooans.”

  “Thou hast a Belgian adder-bag?”

  “Three at last count, mayhap four,” he said, blowing out the candle.

  Naked, they scurried to the bed-chamber and collaborated in the construction of a fire. With the fevered intensity of a poet choosing a new quill in a stationer’s shop, his original having cracked in mid-composition, Ben selected an adder-bag from his cache,
which he kept beside the mattress in an earthenware jar. Her cunny was as wet as a peach. Sheathing his manhood, they set about exhibiting their deathless devotion to the cult of electricity.

  “Ne’er have I felt such sparks,” he said as his ardor gained admittance to its object.

  “Mr. Franklin, you make me crackle,” she said, rotating on the axis of his manhood. “I declare our experiment a triumph.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Quod eros demonstrandum,” she said.

  j

  AS TWILIGHT CAME TO PHILADELPHIA, the philosophers lavished themselves on one another, abandoning the bed-clothes only to stoke the fire or appease their bladders. Whenever Ben was occupied with hearth or chamber-pot, Jennet took to indulging in salacious speculation, and ere long she’d accumulated musings enough that, if so inclined, she could write a book addressing the mystic qualities of carnal embrace. Swiving, she decided, was no less spiritual an exercise than the singing of a hymn or the recitation of a prayer—a truth that might very well explain the clerical zeal for witch-cleansing. For how could the immense and sprawling Christian Church, with its instinctive suspicion of human bodies, its profound Pauline hope that these soggy conglomerations of leaking cocks and dribbling quims might simply disappear one day—how could it abide the possibility of widows and wenches and all manner of seductresses turning their devotional energies to sybaritic congress, those notorious orgiastic Sabbats? A woman needn’t worship Lucifer to spark a demonologist’s ire. She need only be made of flesh.

  A silken gloom suffused the bed-chamber. Ben lit a fat candle. The air thickened with a wondrous fragrance: salt, tallow, seed, and sulphur in miraculous amalgamation. But then, shortly after Jennet decided that she’d never been happier, a cryptic misery overcame her swain, his breaths growing short, his eyes welling up.

  “Why do you weep, bonny Ben? I swear to thee, there be no sin in this.”

  “Sweet lady, your noble treatise doth harbor a grievous error.”

  Despite the fire, a chill washed through her. “What manner of grievous error?”

  “Have you not read the late Robert Boyle?”

  “The man was a witch believer. He hath naught to offer my cause.”

  “Alas, some several years ago Mr. Boyle brought ruin upon the premises round which your brave book orbits. In The Sceptical Chymist he proved that Aristotle was wrong to number fire amongst the elements, for fire is itself a mingling of immutables.”

  She grew colder yet. “Mr. Boyle kept company with demonologists!”

  “Even so, many an experimenter hath drawn fruitful inspiration from his work, so that today the Greek chemistry is all but routed. As an example, for all you may combine gold with other metals, you can recover the stuff in its original form, a fact that implies—”

  “Unchangeable corpuscles of gold?” she moaned.

  “Aye,” he said. “What’s more, the consensus is that we must give the name of element to arsenic, iron, zinc, and white phosphorus.”

  “White phosphorus can be admixed and then recovered?”

  “Mrs. Crompton, I fear I’ve stolen your vocation.”

  “Iron’s an element as well?”

  “Aye.”

  “And zinc?”

  “That too.”

  “Damn all zinc.”

  “I agree, Mrs. Crompton. Damn zinc to Hell. Damn iron. Damn phosphorus and arsenic.”

  “Oh, Ben, my mind’s a-whirl. Have I squandered my life on an obsolete science? Whilst expiring at the stake, my aunt bid me construct the demon disproof from Aristotle’s immutables, and yet today I learn such chemistry’s good for naught but making a modern philosopher titter and wince.”

  “’Sheart, I cannot resolve the contradiction. But hear my promise. Should you elect to fashion a new argumentum grande, you shall have this diligent printer for your assistant.”

  “At the moment I ask only that you embrace me. Anchor me to your bed, bonny Ben, lest I succumb to a devilish unreason, for I’ve half a mind to flee your quarters and pitch myself into the Schuylkill like Ophelia into the Limfjord.”

  The glorious boy did as she commanded, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, pulling her chest tight against his.

  “How does a person say ‘I love you’ in the Algonquin language?” he asked.

  “Cowammaunsh,” she said.

  “Cowammaunsh,” he said.

  Her tears dried. Her muscles relaxed. The candle burned low. As she floated through the sleepy dusk, she decided that she, too, was an element, no less so than gold or zinc, readily melted, easily mingled, but somehow always recoverable to herself.

  j

  IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED her collision with the new chemistry, she devoted her energies to augmenting The Devil and All His Works with fresh news-clippings, as if the gutting of her argumentum grande could be remedied by rousing to incandescence her wrath against the Massachusetts cleansers. Most of the reports came from The Bible Commonwealth, but occasionally she found her brother’s activities documented in The American Weekly Mercury and sometimes even The London Journal.

  What course made sense? Should she publish her treatise as it stood and pray that no Parliamentarian had ever heard of Robert Boyle? Purge the thing of all Aristotelian speculation and hope the results were judged neither atheist nor incoherent? Sequester herself once more within her skull and construct still another demon disproof?

  “Just remember, if you attempt a new treatise, this time you’ll have me standing by your side,” Ben told her. “Franklin and Crompton, united against the Conjuring Statute!”

  “’Tis a marvelous slogan,” she said, “but as of yet we’ve no thesis to give it teeth, and meanwhile here’s the Book of Exodus, telling the world, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”

  Owing largely to the constancy of Ben’s optimism, the intensity of his affections, and the tenderness of his care, she at last regained the energy that Robert Boyle had sapped away. As far as she could tell, her swain loved her no less than she loved him; their passions matched precisely, inch for inch, ounce for ounce. Why, exactly, did this canny and beguiling youth adulate her? Because she’d once persuaded Isaac Newton to do her bidding? Because her campaign to bring down Dunstan was as audacious as his mission to master all knowledge? His reasons were opaque to her, a delicious riddle.

  Not since her tutelage under Aunt Isobel had she known a person who took so broad a view of so many matters. By Ben’s reckoning, the life that lay before him was not a terra incognita but a Promised Land whose peaks and valleys he himself could shape through the sheer power of Reason. A fortnight after their felicitous sulphur-ball experiment, he devised a scheme that he intended to follow all his days, a five-page, crosshatched “perfection-matrix” on which he would mark down his every lapse in Thrift (“I shall endeavor to be extremely frugal for some Time till I have paid what I owe,” ran his caption for the first grid), Honesty (“I shall strive for Sincerity in every Word and Action”), Industry (“I shall not neglect my Business for any foolish Project of quickly growing rich”), Forbearance (“I resolve to speak ill of no Man, not even in a Matter of Truth”), and Moderation (“I shall not eat to Dullness, drink to Elevation, nor use Venery for any Purpose save Health and Offspring”).

  The reach of his planning extended even to the grave. Rummaging through his desk one afternoon in search of a scissors with which to snip out her brother’s latest crime, the hanging of a supposed sea-witch in Gloucester, she came upon an epitaph Ben had composed for himself shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Not only did this young man expect to live ethically, he meant to die eloquently.

  The Body of

  B. FRANKLIN,

  Printer,

  Like the Cover of an old Book,

  Its Contents torn out,

  And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

  Lies here, Food for Worms.

  But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

  For it will, as he believ’d, appear once m
ore,

  In a new and more perfect Edition,

  Revised and corrected

  By the Author.

  “Your strategy of self-perfection’s admirable,” she told him one night as, standing beside the Schuylkill at the cold dark hour of three o’clock ante meridian, she trained Ben’s reflecting telescope on banded Jupiter. “But can you actually cleave to’t from here to Heaven?”

  “Believe me, dearest, I have oft-times told myself to eschew this project, for’t could easily make me not so much a faultless man as a moral fop, fore’er flaunting his merits. Then, too, does not a truly virtuous person exhibit a few failings, so as to keep his friends in countenance?”

  “Now I hear Reason talking,” she said, bringing the regal planet into focus.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Crompton, but ’tis not Reason you hear but rather its deceitful twin, Expedience.” Ben rubbed his hands together as if lathering a bar of soap. “I am reminded of a story told me by a blacksmith I knew in Boston. It seems there appeared in his shop one day a farmer who desired to have the whole of his ax as shiny as the cutting-edge. The blacksmith consented to buff the blade bright if the farmer would but turn the grindstone crank.”

  She fixed her eye on Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. She blinked. Yes, there it was, the Great Red Spot, radically shifted from its position of a mere four hours earlier. “I’ve caught the crimson storm, Ben, though now its fury lies to the east. ’Twould seem that, for all it’s a weighty sphere, Jupiter takes but twelve Earth hours to make a rotation, surely no more than fourteen.”

  “Then I thank Providence I’m no citizen of the place, for my days are short enough already.” Ben clucked his tongue and resumed his tale. “With great zeal the farmer worked the crank whilst the blacksmith pressed the ax hard against the stone, which made the turning of’t very fatiguing. At length the farmer declared that he would take his tool as it was. ‘No,’ the smith said, ‘turn on, turn on. We shall make it glitter by and by. As yet ’tis only speckled.’ ‘Aye,’ the farmer said, ‘but I think a speckled ax is best.’”