The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  A fortnight went by, and then a month, with no word from Pemberton. For Jennet the days passed with an excruciating languor, as if the Earth lay fixed to an ancient orrery, its gears and wheels frozen by rust. To make matters worse, she could barely venture a yard beyond Mayfair without being reminded that demonology was still in flower and its votaries much afoot. Her first visit to Hyde Park climaxed with a noisy Puritan divine named Christopher Waller giving her the printed text of his newest anti-Satanist sermon. Later that week a Bow Street ragamuffin sold her a broadsheet narrating a witch-trial in Aberdeen. At Lemuel’s Bookshop she obtained a pamphlet celebrating the Kirkcaldy Cleansing League as if it was a glamorous band of highwaymen. In a booth at the Hare and Hounds she came upon a discarded London Journal whose penultimate page related the Massachusetts Bay Purification Commission’s campaign against a Braintree warlock. Each such encounter drained her energy as thoroughly as it sapped her spirit, and she would subsequently limp back to Adam’s Row at the lethargic pace of a machemoqussu.

  Exacerbating her discontent was the fact that Ben’s employment at Palmer’s Printing-House occupied him fourteen hours a day. Were they short on funds, she would not have begrudged him his absence from their rooms, but she’d brought along her savings. True, both the summer and autumn stipends from Tobias were overdue (a phenomenon that Mr. Horsfals, a prickly old Tory with a lisp, could not explain). The sum involved, however, was only sixty pounds, and meanwhile she and Ben had nearly eight hundred.

  At length she gave voice to her frustration—“Our couplings come with less frequency than doth Dr. Halley’s comet”—and Ben’s answer caught her by surprise. Mr. Palmer, he explained, had set him an all-consuming challenge, designing and building a machine that by the stroke of a key would lift a leaden letter from the rack and plant it in a type-form.

  “As you might imagine,” he said, “such an ambitious project devours my time voraciously.”

  The argument was sensible, and so for many weeks she kept her annoyance in check, until one afternoon, hunting through Ben’s wardrobe for a mirror (her own having shattered), she happened upon a stack of pamphlets headed “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion by Benjamin Franklin, Printer and Natural Philosopher.” Instinctively she formulated several denunciations in her mind, including “Am I not more valuable to you than this theologic folderol?” as well as “Hours for the Almighty but barely a minute for me!” But then she began reading Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, forthwith finding herself in the presence of him whom she adored.

  “Since I cannot possibly conceive of that which is Infinite,” he’d written, “I must conclude that the Infinite Father expects from us neither Worship nor Praise, but rather that He is infinitely above such Displays.” Who was this audacious thinker who presumed to know the mind of God whilst simultaneously sounding like the soul of modesty? Any woman who could claim the affections of so dauntless a youth was a fortunate person indeed. Jennet returned the treatise to its hiding place and resolved to practice the fourth virtue on Ben’s perfection-matrix, Forbearance.

  Gradually the shroud lifted from her psyche, and she came to see that her immediate circumstances were hardly lamentable. Her health was robust, after all, her mind clear, her senses keen, her purse bulging, and at her doorstep lay the city of her dreams, the London for which she’d once pined as passionately as had Dido for Æneas.

  Whenever and wherever she alighted—theatre, ordinary, market, coffeehouse, concert hall, gillyflower garden—she inquired after Barnaby Cavendish, now seventy years old by her reckoning. A few Londoners recalled that bottled prodigies had been amongst the attractions at the Frost Fair of 1709 (the Thames having frozen solid for the first time since 1684, creating a natural promenade along which puppeteers, jugglers, magicians, troubadours, and crystal-gazers had installed their booths), but none could say whether the Cavendish Museum was still in business. Unless Dame Fortune had developed a sudden sympathy for runaway Nimacooks of philosophic persuasion, Jennet decided, her chances of finding the mountebank would hover betwixt the minute and the minuscule.

  True to her expectations, London excited her senses and aroused her intellect, but the place continually eluded her tongue. No metaphor was equal to the task. Was London a beehive, a buzzing nexus of freneticism and hubbub? Yes. Was it an immense Von Guericke sphere, forever spinning as it pulled bits and pieces of the outside world to its electric embrace? Indeed. Was it a roadside carcass, beset by vultures, encircled by flies, crawling with maggots, roiling with stenches? That too.

  London was parks and monuments, bridges and churches, day-vendors and night-criers, bear baiting and coach racing—but for Jennet one fact eclipsed all others: this was the city of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. She alternated her attendance betwixt two venues, the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Playhouse in Chancery Street and the King’s Theatre in Drury Lane. She disliked the newer works by Colley Cibber and Richard Steele, which were crudely absorbing at best, sentimental and moralistic at worst, but fortunately the great comedies of the Restoration enjoyed frequent revivals. During her first two months of theatre-going, she caught marvelous productions of Wycherley’s ebullient The Country Wife, Congreve’s deliriously epigrammatic Love for Love, Farquhar’s wry and canny The Beaux’ Stratagem, and, the most curious of the lot, Gay’s Three Hours After Marriage, featuring a pompous philosopher, Dr. Fossile, evidently modeled on Newton.

  On the night that Jennet beheld Rupert Quince play Mark Antony in Dryden’s All for Love, she returned to Adam’s Row to find Ben in an intricate mood, a mixture of apprehension, chagrin, and joy.

  “I’ve been concealing a pertinent fact from you,” he confessed. “Five weeks ago Dr. Pemberton came by Palmer’s to say that Mr. Newton hath refused to meet with us.”

  An ingot of molten anger formed within Jennet’s breast. “Why did you not tell me of this calamity?”

  “I feared to break your heart.”

  “Then why do you break it now?”

  “Events have taken a felicitous turn. It seems that, shortly after receiving the bad news, Pemberton presented Newton with a theologic treatise I’d composed to amuse myself during my luncheon intervals. Apparently Newton found my arguments astute, and the upshot is that he will have us to dinner come Friday.”

  “Oh, Ben, this is splendid news indeed. I should very like to see your treatise”—she felt the sarcasm rising within her, building toward eruption—“as I’ve been meaning to write such an essay myself.”

  “Really?”

  “I would make the point that God, being infinite, expects from us neither worship nor praise.”

  “’Sblood, Mrs. Crompton, you speculate precisely as I do!” He grew suddenly pensive. “Or did you perchance come upon the pamphlets I keep in my wardrobe?”

  “I shan’t tell you,” she replied dryly.

  “You must.”

  “When Newton first spurned us, you should’ve come to me.”

  “Quite so, Mrs. Crompton.”

  “Protect me from all the imps of Hell, bonny Ben. Protect me from George’s dragon and Apollo’s python. But you must ne’er again protect me from the truth.”

  Having spoken her mind, she felt her spleen diminish, and she stamped his cheek with a kiss. “Let me not strain on the gnat of your presumption whilst Parliament swallows the camel of Dunstan’s preachment,” she said. “If our luck holds firm, ere the month is out England’s legislators will have lent their most sympathetic ears to Newton’s demon disproof.”

  “Whereupon we shall appear before the Massachusetts Governor and cheerfully inform him that his licensed cleansers enjoy the same legal status as forgers, freebooters, and fastfannies.”

  “Am I to surmise you’re prepared to sail home?” she asked.

  He nodded and said, “Mr. Palmer and I agree that my device for setting type hath no commercial value. ’Tis an impressive beast to be sure, a-whirl with cogs and sprockets, but an unacceptable hiatus occurs ’twixt the stroking of a
key and the slotting of a letter.”

  “A human could do’t quicker?” she asked.

  “Let me put it this wise. Were The London Journal to employ the Franklin Typesetter in announcing the pregnancy of King Louis’s bride, the babe would be born, weaned, and riding to hounds ere the form was ready for inking.”

  j

  ON THE FIRST MORNING in April Jennet took the day-coach north to Colchester and got out at the Fox and Fife, the Hill Street tavern before which, thirty-six years earlier, she’d said farewell to Barnaby Cavendish. She proceeded directly to Frere Street and thence to St. James’s Church. Upon reaching the crumbling Roman wall, she vaulted onto the unhallowed ground and dropped reverently to her knees before the slate outcropping.

  The epitaph had survived the intervening winters without deterioration, but a mesh of yellow vines now obscured the words. Even more troubling were the stick figures that a libertine draughtsman, as incompetent as Dunstan was skillful, had chalked below the inscription, five men and as many women engaged in several varieties of swiving.

  “Dearest teacher, ’twould seem that Dame Fortune hath at long last joined our side,” Jennet murmured. “Fool though I am, I have nevertheless sorted the false Newton from the true. Aye, my brave aunt, two days hence I break bread with him whose calculation will end the cleansing madness.”

  She scrambled back over the Roman wall, entered the church, and, unwinding her scarf, submerged it in the stagnant and slimy baptismal waters. Her tears dripped into the font like raindrops filling a cistern. Returning to the grave, she pressed the wet wool against the stone and rubbed the licentious drawings into oblivion. Now she tugged on the arrogant vines, but the earth would not surrender them, and so she trampled down the stalks with her boots till the epitaph became visible.

  I measured the skies, now I measure the shadows. Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests.

  And what of the soul? she wondered as she headed back to the Fox and Fife. Was a tomb in sooth a portal to immortality, as so many clerics and theologians averred? She had no information on the subject, but it amused her to imagine that Aunt Isobel might yet exist on some ethereal plane. Perhaps she now kept company with Johannes Kepler, the two of them running an academy for recently deceased dunderheads who in their ignorance still credited the Ptolemaic universe. In her mind Jennet could see the whole scene, Dr. Kepler and Lady Mowbray presiding over a celestial classroom populated by cardinals and popes. This afternoon the instructors were requiring their pupils to set quill to parchment and write Eppur si muove one thousand times—for such was Galileo’s legendary aside as, standing before the Inquisition, he’d returned astronomy to its biblical foundations, renouncing forever his allegiance to a revolving, rotating Earth.

  Eppur si muove, Galileo had muttered. Still, it moves.

  j

  SHE REACHED LONDON near dusk, the collective chimney smoke combining with the incipient twilight to turn the fruit stalls and flower-carts of St. Giles Circle a uniform dun. Decoaching, she recalled that at eight o’clock the curtain would rise on the premier presentation of the Drury Lane Company’s most recent revival, Mr. Congreve’s The Way of the World. If she moved quickly, she wouldn’t even miss the Prologue. She sprinted down Holborn High Street to Drury Lane, made a mad dash south, and arrived breathless on the steps of the King’s Theatre, where she paused to rest her lungs and read a printed billboard affixed to a marble pilaster.

  According to the advertisement, the part of Betty, the waiting-maid in The Way of the World, belonged to a certain Rachel Crompton.

  Rachel Crompton?

  Could it be? Was it possible? Rachel Crompton? The living child of her own blood, now fifteen, had left the East Indies and landed on the London stage?

  She bought a ticket and received her broadsheet, which likewise announced that Rachel Crompton would play the waiting-maid, then rushed into the parquet. As always the great hall dazzled her, the two thousand tallow flames twinkling in their gilded chandeliers, the four tiers of balconies rising on all sides like cliffs facing a river gorge. She stumbled past the denizens of Row 23, their disapproval of her tardiness manifesting in frowns and snarls. Even before she could assume her seat, the chandeliers ascended into the shadows and Rupert Quince, painted and preening, appeared before the green velvet curtain to deliver the Prologue. The patrons’ chatter receded from loud burbling to emphatic whispers to silence.

  “Of those few fools who with ill stars are cursed,” Mr. Quince began, “sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst. For they’re the sort of fools which Fortune makes, and after she has made ’em fools, forsakes.”

  The spectators offered snickers of appreciation. A tipsy oaf standing in the pit hurled a half-eaten apple onto the stage, but his associate oafs were quick to reprimand him, and the rest of the Prologue—more disingenuous self-deprecation from the playwright—unfolded without mishap.

  Mr. Quince strode away. The curtain rose. Two young men, Mr. Mirabell and Mr. Fainall, sat at a small table in a chocolate-house, engaged in a hand of whist. An exchange of dialogue established that Mirabell, being distracted, had played badly, but he was willing to continue the game for his friend’s amusement.

  Fainall declined the proposition: “The coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner. I’d no more play with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I’d make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.”

  The spectators tittered approvingly, none more than the primitives in the pit.

  Finding his chocolate-dish empty, Fainall slammed it on the table. In response to the angry clack a waiting-maid entered, whereupon Jennet’s attention deserted Congreve’s universe to focus entirely on the young woman portraying Betty.

  God in Heaven, it was she! Her roundish face had lengthened over the years, assuming the oval of the Madonna in the Reverend Foster’s illustrated Bible. Her complexion was still fair, but her hair had turned dark, and her frame displayed nubile proportions.

  Throughout the whole of the first scene, Rachel had but one line. Mirabell asked, “Betty, what says your clock?” and Rachel replied, “Turned of the last canonical hour, sir.” In Scene Two, Rachel’s speeches were limited to “Yes, what’s your business?” followed by “He’s in the next room” after which came “Sir, the coach stays” and finally “They’re gone, sir, in great anger.”

  As Act One drew to a close, Jennet studied her broadsheet. For Act Two, the scene would shift to St. James’s Park. Acts Three, Four, and Five were confined entirely to Lady Wishfort’s residence. To wit, Betty of the chocolate-house had evidently departed the story.

  Braving her neighbors’ sneers, she jostled her way down Row 23, then charged up the aisle and into the lobby. She lurched past a sign reading NO PATRONS BEYOND THIS POINT, descended a dark stair, and followed the corridor to a dressing-chamber apparently reserved for actresses assaying waiting-maids, scullery-wenches, fishwives, and similarly minor rôles. The room was a hall of mirrors, each framed in brass and flanked by hierarchies of burning candles. Rachel sat on a bench before the nearest such glass, rubbing the vermilion from her cheeks with a damp cloth, whilst in the shadows beyond three female players chattered amongst themselves and adjusted their coiffeurs.

  “Good evening, Miss Crompton,” Jennet said, pausing in the doorway.

  Rachel started and glanced toward her visitor. “Do I know you, ma’am?”

  “I’Christ, daughter, I’m the woman who gave you life.”

  “That’s a poor topic for a joke.”

  “Some twenty years ago, I married your father, Tobias the Postmaster, changing my name from Stearne to Crompton.”

  Rachel winced but said nothing. She turned back to her mirror and continued to unpaint her cheeks, washing away the white grease as Jennet had earlier purged Isobel’s monument of the vulgar sketches. “If you’re the woman who gave me life, then you’re also the woman who gave me grief, deserting me when I was but a child.”
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br />   “We were separated by an abduction,” Jennet said, taking two steps forward.

  Rachel’s mirror displayed a frown of bottomless suspicion. “Faugh, I’ll warrant you’re but an impostor, looking to snare the fortune you imagine I possess.”

  “If my oath’s not enough to satisfy you, ask me a question only your natural mother could answer.”

  Having cleaned her cheeks, Rachel commenced to swab her brow. “A test, aye? Very well. In Philadelphia my father employed a maid-servant…”

  “Her name was Nellie Adams.”

  The mirrored frown transmuted into gape-mouthed surprise. “My mother passed much of her youth in uncommon circumstances…”

  “No doubt you allude to my years amongst the savage tawnies of Massachusetts Bay. Many were the times I entertained you with Indian lore. The Fable of the Wily Raven, the Parable of the Greedy Porcupine, the Adventure of the Tortoise—”

  “The Tortoise Who Had No Shell,” Rachel interrupted in a voice at once pained and amazed. Her reflected face declined from surprise to bemusement, and then came anger, followed by contempt. “An abduction, you call it. Mayhap that’s the right word, but ’twould appear you took no particular trouble to find me once the deed was done. By my father’s account, you were always too vainglorious to abide mere motherhood.”

  “Forsaking you in favor of philosophy was the worst thing I e’er did. Not a day passes but I feel the shame of’t.”

  “And not a day passes but I feel the sting of’t.”

  Jennet shuddered and said, “Rachel, will you not look me in the eye?”

  “If I wish to behold treachery’s gaze, I need merely seek out Mr. Quince”—Rachel leaned into the mirror, filling it with her scowl—“who hath promised me the part of Mrs. Millamant the instant I yield my virtue to him.”