The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Dr. Cavendish?”

  “The same.”

  “Dr. Cavendish, ’tis I—Jennet Stearne.”

  “Who?”

  “Your Miss Stearne.”

  The curator stopped polishing. “Miss Stearne? Jennet Stearne?”

  “Verily.”

  “I do not believe it.”

  “Then will you believe that I am the favorite ward of Lord Adramelech, Grand Chancellor of the Infernal Empire?”

  Upon absorbing her remark in all its implications, Barnaby released a yelp of delight and clasped her to his chest. “Oh, my dearest Miss Stearne, are you in sooth this full-grown woman?”

  “I can make an excellent case for’t.”

  “In my reveries you’re always still a girl of twelve!”

  “I was certain you were lost to me,” she said, gradually reconciling this wrinkled male crone with the Barnaby Cavendish of her youth. “’Tis as if you’ve come back from the dead.”

  “On my rheumatism days, that’s exactly how I feel.” Relaxing his embrace, he slipped on his spectacles and scrutinized her with the intensity of a linen-draper assessing a bolt of cloth. “Tell me, Miss Stearne—Jennet—did you e’er devise your argumentum grande?”

  “Alas, the project’s not yet complete, though I believe the vital calculation’s close at hand.” With the respectful affection of Bellerophon bridling his beloved Pegasus, she looped her arm around Barnaby’s shoulders, then guided him toward the obelisk of sunlight formed by the tent flaps. “Mayhap you remember that, ere we parted company in Colchester, I promised I would bring you a prodigy when our paths crossed again.” Pointing toward the occluded Fish-Boy, she snatched the scarf away. “Voilà!”

  “’Sheart, ’tis my own best aquatic oddity! ’Tis my dearest ichthyic astonishment!” The gleeful curator kissed her cheek. “Had my fortunetelling colleague predicted that on this day I would enjoy not one but two reunions, the first with a friend, the second with a fœtus, I would have thought him deranged.”

  “I acquired our Fish-Boy directly from the Widow Totten of Whitefriars Street.”

  “Do I infer that old Slipfinger hath finally found the decency to bereave his wife?”

  “’Tis a long story. Let us dine together this evening, and we shall share our life’s adventures.”

  After declaring her plan “nigh as perfect as my freaks are flawed,” he offered to show her his new acquisitions. As the tour progressed, Jennet learned that a distracted Nature had of late brought forth in England a Turtle of Tewkesbury (its tiny head peering from beneath hunched shoulders) as well as a Hastings Clock-Girl (her elongated chin tapering toward a chest marked with Roman numerals) and a Newgate Pig-Child (a sphere of flesh with two eyes at its north pole and a fringe of toes along the bottom). But the jewel of the collection was the Knightsbridge Hermaphrodite, both varieties of genitalia on full display. With a heavy heart Barnaby revealed that the Cyclops of Bourne, the Maw of Folkestone, Perdition’s Pride, and the Sussex Rat-Baby had long since left the family, sold during the same impecunious period that had obliged him to do business with Slipfinger, but he hastened to point out that, thanks to the Fish-Boy’s homecoming, the roll call of the misbegotten once again stood at its traditional total of ten.

  The curator now insisted that they go visit his magician colleague, a manumitted West-Indies slave who in his youth had enjoyed the patronage of the French aristocracy, taking his show from one château to the next. Barnaby and Jennet proceeded to the red tent, surmounted by a sign reading FEIZUNDA THE ILLUSIONIST: FEATS OF JUGGLING AND CONJURING, EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR. Although it was exactly four o’clock, all the seats were empty. A snowy-haired man in a blue silk turban, his skin as dark as gun powder, sat before an oaken table, rehearsing a trick that had him filling three crystalline bowls with clear water then tapping each with a glass scepter. Under the influence of the conjurer’s wand, the first measure became a ball of ice, the second boiled as if set upon a stove, and the third acquired a school of tiny crimson fish.

  “Allow me to present my old associate in rascality,” Barnaby said to Feizunda. “Jennet Stearne, formerly the most intelligent girl in East Anglia, currently the most brilliant woman in the American provinces.”

  “Je suis enchanté,” Feizunda said, bowing graciously.

  “Et moi aussi,” Jennet said.

  The magician came forward and with a sudden chirping laugh reached behind her ear and drew forth a goose egg. “Voilà!”

  “Merveilleux!” she said.

  He smacked his hands together, causing the egg to pop into oblivion like a burst bubble.

  Barnaby next brought Jennet to the red pavilion, arena of GIBELLUS THE SEER: DESTINIES DIVINED IN CRYSTALS, CARDS, BONES, AND PALMS, and introduced her to a squint-eyed wight whose mottled skin and toothless jaw put her in mind of the Turtle of Tewkesbury. Sprawled across a Turkish carpet that he shared with Ptolemy’s Quadripartite, Guido Bonatus’s Astronomica Tractaus, John Maplet’s The Dial of Destiny, and a dozen other astrology texts, Gibellus did not bother to rise, but instead offered Jennet a cryptic wink and gummy smile.

  “Permit me to cast your fortune,” he said, placing a splayed hand on his chest. He wore a black robe spattered with five-pointed stars. “I would expect no fee.”

  “Alas, I have of late grown unfriendly to all hermetic pursuits,” she said. “I would be a dissatisfied customer whether I paid you or not.”

  “You must not slight my colleague’s gift,” Barnaby gently admonished her. “Through his astrological calculations, Gibellus predicted both the Great Plague of 1665 and the abdication of James the Second.”

  “Aye, but did he predict ’em before they occurred, or after?”

  “I assure you, Madam, I am skilled in the diviner’s arts,” Gibellus said. “I can prophesy using ceromancy—that is, by the forms of melted wax in water—as well as lithomancy, by the reflections of candlelight in gems, also halomancy, by the casting of salt into fire, not to mention crominiomancy, by the growing of enchanted onions. In your case, however, a simple palm-reading will suffice. Make a fist and bring it hither.”

  Jennet could not forbear a skeptical smirk, but she did as the seer requested. Gibellus unfurled her fingers one by one and studied the hatched plane beneath.

  “Five great lines,” he said. “Every person hath ’em, rays of heart, head, life, fate, and matrimony. Their geometry reveals all—the angles and gaps, the arcs and intersections. Let us see what Dame Fortune holds in store for you.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Gibellus,” she said, “but if these lines reveal my future, then logic says they also speak of my past, as I am forty-seven years old, with much of my destiny behind me. I bid you tell Barnaby about my more memorable experiences with love and husbands and the rest, for ’twould make an interesting test of your system.”

  “Don’t be sly, Jenny,” Barnaby cautioned.

  “By St. Agatha’s warts, I shall rise to the challenge!” Gibellus cried. He fixed on Jennet’s palm. “I can see you were once…married to a man of…nautical bent. A sea captain, mayhap?”

  “Aye, ’tis true!” Jennet said. “My sweet Daniel—Captain Throgmorton to his men, master o’er the man-o’-war Obadiah.”

  “Ah,” Barnaby said.

  “But, alas, he no longer lives,” Gibellus said.

  “Dear Throggy went down with his ship in the War of the Spanish Succession,” Jennet said.

  “Leaving you with a child…a son,” Gibellus said.

  “My boy, Horatio!”

  “Oh, Jenny, I had no idea you’d suffered such a terrible misfortune,” Barnaby said.

  “Whilst your son came of age, you pursued your aptitude for…horticulture,” Gibellus said. “Even today your cottage is surrounded by flowers of every description.”

  “Hyacinths and jonquils!” She placed a guinea in the seer’s hand. “I was wrong to doubt your talents, sir. Prithee, accept this consideration for entertaining me so thoroughly.”

  With th
e blessing of his associates, Barnaby posted a GONE TO SUPPER sign outside the Cavendish Museum, then guided Jennet across the street to the Pettifog. For two hours they enthralled one another with their respective autobiographies, though Barnaby’s account of Le Cirque’s ragged rise and imminent collapse paled beside her narratives of the Salem witch-trials, the burning of Haverhill, her Nimacook adoption, Pashpishia’s death, Rachel’s wanderings, and the glorious arrival of Ben Franklin in her bed—and then, of course, there was the previous evening’s maddening encounter with Sir Isaac Newton. It took her three separate tellings to convince Barnaby that the man they’d brought to Colchester Assizes was in fact the late Robert Hooke, and just as many to convince him that the real Newton had proven as useless as the impostor.

  “I am relieved to learn there be not a tittle of truth in Gibellus’s version of your life,” he said. “I’Christ, I’d always thought him as deft a deceiver as myself—thank goodness I needn’t revise my opinion downward.”

  “And now I fear we must endure another parting, for my only hope of toppling my brother is to dishonor him on his own soil.”

  “Let me put a proposition to thee.” Barnaby puffed on his clay pipe. “One needn’t be Gibellus to see that Le Cirque will fold its tents betimes, which sets me to wondering whether my monsters might find an audience in the American Colonies.”

  She drank the rest of her coffee and pondered the curator’s scheme. Barnaby in Pennsylvania? An excellent idea. If this splendid charlatan joined her company, which already boasted Ben and would soon, God willing, include Rachel too, she would have at her command a kind of Antipurification Commission.

  “Truth to tell, I’ve ne’er heard of a prodigy museum in America,” she said.

  “So the field belongs to Barnaby Cavendish?”

  “Entirely.”

  “Reserve me a berth on your ship, dear Jenny, that I might gain renown as the man who brought the Knightsbridge Hermaphrodite to the New World!”

  j

  AS DUSK DROPPED ITS SOFT GRAY SURTOUT upon the city, she left the Pettifog and set off for Drury Lane, her brain seething with visions of Barnaby, Rachel, Ben, and herself assembled in some secret Philadelphia cellar, candles flickering all about them as they whispered their conspiracies against the New-England cleansers. She reached the King’s Theatre at half-past seven. Ben awaited her in the foyer, dressed lavishly in a chestnut periwig and a gold-trimmed suit of purple silk.

  “’Steeth, you’re more gaudily attired than an Istanbul whore-master,” she said. “My daughter will be impressed.”

  “God’s truth, Jenny: I wear this finery to please you, not young Rachel.”

  Whilst he queued up to purchase their tickets, Jennet descended to the supporting players’ dressing-chamber. For a full minute she studied the hurly-burly. Five actresses in various states of déshabillé rushed about the room, putting on their costumes and painting their faces, but Rachel was not amongst them.

  A buxom woman with luxurious lips and a beauty spot on her cheek approached Jennet and flashed an equivocal smile.

  “Mrs. Crompton, perchance?”

  “Aye.” With a pang of despair she realized that the woman wore the same dress in which Rachel had portrayed the waiting-maid.

  “This is for you.” From the vale betwixt her breasts the actress produced a sealed envelope.

  Jennet snatched the packet away and with trembling fingers extracted Rachel’s letter.

  23 July 1725

  Dear Mrs. Crompton:

  Unhappy Circumstances prevent me from offering my Farewell in Person. Last night, upon enduring yet another salacious Entreaty from Mr. Quince, I quit the Drury Lane Company forever. Gaston says that my Competence in French is most excellent (the one Boon bestow’d upon me by my repugnant Stepmother), and so I have resolv’d to seek my Fortune in the Comédie Française. By the time you read this, I shall be well across the Channel. Please understand that no Argument you might devise could ever induce me to come with you to the American Colonies.

  Regards,

  Rachel Crompton

  She read the letter a second time, but the words refused to rearrange themselves into a different meaning. She read it a third time. The cruel message remained. On her fourth perusal, the characters grew blurry with her tears.

  “If you decide to stay tonight,” the actress said, “you’ll see me play both Betty and Mrs. Marwood.”

  Jennet dried her eyes, then climbed the stairs to the foyer, where Ben was examining a broadsheet advertising a forthcoming “Newgate Pastoral” by John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera. Upon reading Rachel’s letter he said, “Oh, darling, for all you may have slighted her, you do not deserve such thorns as these.”

  “Shakespeare knew whereof he spoke,” she said. “A child’s ingratitude is sharper than a serpent’s tooth.”

  “I shall return our tickets anon.”

  She grabbed his decorous sleeve, massaging the lacy filigree. “Nay, Ben, for I feel The Way of the World may be the very physic I require.”

  “Then lead the way, my love.”

  They stepped into the parquet along with a gaggle of latecomers, finding their seats just in time to behold the shameless and predatory Mr. Quince recite the Prologue. As the comedy progressed and the players enacted their rôles, Jennet realized that her decision to attend the performance was felicitous indeed. For there, right there, up on the King’s Theatre stage—there stood Aunt Isobel. The actress was Alice Shuter; the character, Mrs. Millamant, the most magnetic, intelligent, and sophisticated of all the fine ladies in London.

  Mrs. Millamant could match the men around her epigram for epigram. “One no more owes one’s beauty to a lover than one’s wit to an echo. They can but reflect what we look and say.” Like Isobel Mowbray, she allowed no person to take her for granted. “Though I am upon the very verge of matrimony,” she told her future husband, “I expect you to solicit me as much as if I were wavering at the gate of a monastery, with one foot over the threshold.” Unless she enjoyed certain freedoms within their marriage, she informed this same groom, she simply wouldn’t have him. “As liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; to write and receive letters without interrogation or wry faces on your part; to have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like because they are your acquaintance, or to be intimate with fools because they may be your relations.”

  Beyond her comeliness and her cleverness, Mrs. Millamant possessed another arresting quality. This was a woman with a will. In her view compromise was defeat, and those who moved counter to the way of the world must be numbered amongst its benefactors.

  Jennet squeezed Ben’s hand and said, “There was probably ne’er a Newtonian disproof in the first place.”

  “Agreed,” he whispered.

  “Be quiet, both of you,” said a wan woman to Jennet’s left.

  “So we’ve made a kind of progress,” Jennet said. “At least we’re now at the starting-line and not behind it.”

  The man seated in front of her, a Redcoat captain in a white peruke, turned around and glowered. “Shut up, you driveling cow.”

  Jennet stopped talking. The patrons were right. She was being rude. Once back in America, however, she would raise her voice again, and if her enemies turned Jacobean, cutting out her tongue, she would pick up a pen instead, and if they sliced off her hands, she would hold the pen betwixt her teeth, and if they removed her teeth, she would search out some wise and audacious physician, a Newton amongst surgeons, and bid him reassemble her, tongue and hands and teeth, and a strong new heart as well, the heart of a mare or lioness, and it would not stop beating until Reason reigned in the souls of men or a thousand years went by, whichever happened first.

  P A R T I I I

  abababababababab

  Reason’s

  Teeth

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Ninth

  abababababababab

  An Interlude of High Adventure, Inclu
ding a Shipwreck, a Marooning, a Preternatural Magnet, and a Perilous Encounter with a Pirate Band

  j

  On the eve of their scheduled departure, Jennet returned to Le Cirque de la Lune and helped Barnaby pack up his museum. They filled two sea-chests with rags and straw, then laid each bottled prodigy to rest, five per cushioned compartment. For Jennet the task felt like midwifery in reverse. They were restoring the fœtuses to the womb, it seemed, so that Nature might fashion them anew, fixing their asymmetries, excising their scales and feathers.

  So familiar was she with the monsters’ reputation as good luck talismans, it never occurred to her that anyone might cast them in a sinister light. She was therefore greatly astonished when the first mate of the Berkshire, the squat and obstinate Archibald Eliot, after inspecting Barnaby’s sea-chests for rats and opium and finding instead the stillborns, declared that Captain Fergus would “rather ship out with Jonah himself than this load o’ frightful cacodemons.” The mate’s prediction proved correct. Arriving on the quarter-deck later that morning in the company of Ben, Captain Fergus glanced at the prodigies, turned to Barnaby, and said, “Sir, methinks thou art a necromancer, for I see no other reason a man would accumulate such hell-spawn. I shan’t have ’em on my ship.”

  “My dear Captain,” Barnaby said, “I’m surprised that so well-traveled a person as yourself knows not the therapeutic value of fœtal marvels. In Persia or Cathay no self-respecting physician will visit a sickbed without first he places a prodigy in his satchel.”

  “My friend speaks the truth,” Jennet said, reprising their ancient chicanery. “No sooner did I rub the bottle of the Knightsbridge Hermaphrodite than my backache flew clear to Heaven.”

  It took Ben but a moment to grasp the game. “This Tuesday past, simply by giving the Smethwick Philosopher a fraternal sort of hug, I caused my fever to vanish with the morning dew.”