The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  j

  JENNET’S ISLAND, THANK HEAVEN, was no mirage. Shortly after Ben gave their raft a name—the Prodigy, in tribute to poor Barnaby Cavendish—a rank of forested hills appeared in the distance, its silhouette suggesting a many-humped camel fording a river. The wind augmented the Philadelphians’ good luck, as did the current, both forces pressing the Prodigy steadily toward the landfall, and by late afternoon the raft had run aground in a cove ringed by mangrove trees and dotted with clusters of brilliant white coral.

  After praising Providence for their deliverance—Jennet extolling her “most glorious Creator,” Ben lauding the Deist Clockmaker—they disembarked and staggered through the surf, dazed, shocked, sapped, and above all enchanted by the fact that they were not dead.

  They gained the beach, advancing barefoot across silken sand punctuated by vacant crab-shells, and forthwith entered the forest, soon discovering that their respective deities were watching over them yet, for the storm had deposited pools of sweet rain in dozens of rock crevices and tree clefts. No Pierian Spring could have pleased them more completely, no Well of the Saints, no Fountain of Youth.

  “How goes’t with thee, Mr. Franklin?” she asked, sucking down the delicious liquid bounty.

  “I am entirely miserable, Mrs. Crompton. And thou?”

  “Completely wretched. I mourn our drowned curator.”

  “’Tis in sooth a dark day.” He lapped up a puddle. “And yet methinks we have no choice but to embrace optimism, cultivate hope, and aspire to make the best of our circumstances.”

  “Cock an ear to the breeze, Ben. Listen. Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “’Tis the sound of Dame Fortune, laughing and chortling as she plays lanterloo with our lives.”

  Thirst slaked, throats soothed, they resolved to catch a measure of sleep ere exhaustion dropped them in their tracks. Returning to the beach, they dragged the Prodigy to the edge of the forest, then set the bulkhead fragment diagonally against a boulder and equipped the resulting enclosure with a mattress made of kelp and heliconia leaves. They yawned, stretched, and took up residence in this rude but serviceable lean-to.

  “A veritable palace,” he said.

  “And so to bed,” she said.

  Like serpents slipping free of their skins, they shed their spinning thoughts and muddled fears, then fell asleep to the harsh whisper of the retreating tide.

  j

  AN AVIAN CONCERTO heralded the dawn—parakeets, Jennet guessed, complemented by several trilling, warbling, and cooing kinds unknown to her. Shafts of amber sunlight pierced the lean-to. For an indeterminate interval she lay and listened to the surf, absorbing the rhythmic growl like a fœtus attuning itself to the rush and thump of its mother’s blood.

  “Ah, ’twas no mere nightmare then,” Ben said, rousing himself from his dreams. “We have truly joined the fellowship of the marooned.”

  “The castaway’s normal stratagem, I’ve heard, is to write his coordinates on a scrap of paper, then place the message in a bottle and toss it into the sea,” Jennet said. “But, alas, we have no bottle.”

  “Mayhap some other castaway’s bottle will reach these shores. We’ll uncork the vessel and, ere relaunching it, add our message to its cargo—explaining, of course, that we’re but second in the queue to be rescued.”

  They passed the morning foraging for breakfast amongst the reefs and tide pools. So intense was their hunger, they easily convinced themselves that eating uncooked shellfish would do a human no harm, then set about harvesting the dozens of pale little Cartesian machines—the sand-crabs, brine-berries, conch snails, and mussels—that inhabited the glossy rocks.

  “Tell me, Ben, do you perchance share my shame o’er yesterday’s panegyric to Providence?” Jennet prised a snail from its shell, setting the animal on her tongue. “In the cold light of morning, I judge my devotions an insult to Barnaby, Mr. Eliot, Captain Fergus, and every other wretch who went down with the Berkshire.” She chewed the rubbery flesh, which was subtly flavored, like a mushroom. “I’d rather believe in no God at all than one who is so capricious in His mercy.”

  “My dear Mrs. Crompton, you’ve surely picked the wrong time and place to start experimenting with atheism,” Ben said. “Whether God be fickle or fair, ’tis only by His intervention we shall e’er see Philadelphia again.”

  “No doubt you’re right. But in the future I shall forbear to praise the Creator in question.”

  Ben scooped a mussel from its shell and popped it into his mouth. “Are you not acquainted with Monsieur Pascal’s brilliant deduction? ’Tis far more sensible to be a believer than an atheist, for the latter hath his immortal soul to lose, the former only his illusions.”

  “Aunt Isobel once told me of Pascal’s celebrated wager.” In a frenzy of voracious violence she picked up a sand-crab and smashed it open on a rock. “She concluded that any Supreme Being worthy of the name would scorn the believer for his complacency, even as He rewarded the atheist for his bravado.”

  Ben intertwined his fingers and raised the fleshy configuration skyward. “Forgive my friend her impieties, Lord, whether thou existeth or not. Along with these shellfish she hath ingested a great quantity of salt, and ’tis making her brain go dry.”

  j

  FROM HER YEARS amongst the Nimacook Jennet knew that, for all the island’s apparent fecundity, their survival was to Nature a matter of complete indifference. They must not take their next full meal, warm night, or tranquil moment for granted. Ever the cheer-monger, Ben at first laughed at her fatalism, but then came three successive days in which they failed to extract a single morsel from their habitat, and thereafter he counted himself an eager student of Algonquin arts.

  For their initial task she had them erect on the lee shore a wigwam framed by candelabra-tree branches and covered with bullhorn acacia bark. A split-log dwelling would have been preferable, of course, but without an iron ax or a long Damascus knife such a project was unimaginable. Under her tutelage Ben learned how to turn animal skins into moccasins, fashion clothing from grass and reeds, start a fire with a bow-drill, trap grouper in a reed weir, tolerate the taste of roasted katydids, appreciate the flavor of boiled tree frogs, and snare the harelike agouti that proliferated throughout the inland forest.

  At first Ben was distressed to be violating his vegetarian principles so blatantly, but then he noticed that, whenever they cleaned a grouper for roasting, they found a smaller fish within its stomach. “If a big fish may eat a small fish,” he argued, “I don’t see why I mayn’t eat a big fish.”

  “A sturdy piece of logic,” Jennet said.

  “’Tis so convenient being a reasonable creature,” he said, “for’t enables a man to find a reason for everything he hath a mind to do.”

  Even as their prospects brightened, Jennet’s grief compounded. The image she would always retain of her dead friend was one she’d never actually witnessed—the grinning mountebank delivering the Lyme Bay Fish-Boy to Billy Slipfinger, blithely promising that it would bring him luck. Such a disciplined dissembler was Barnaby Cavendish, confining his fakery to one arena only, his prodigies, whilst remaining upright in all other matters.

  With a nod to Francis Bacon’s political allegory, they named their isle New-Atlantis, and over the next several months they explored its inner reaches, catalogued its abundance, and ascertained its form—an irregular oval along whose primary axis ran an L-shaped ridge perhaps fifteen miles long, jagged craggy backbone of the landmass. Each expedition proved more productive of wonders than the last, from purple butterflies swarming like fleets of færy kites to sea turtles with shells suggesting Byzantine mosaics; from ants building great formic cities in the forest’s heart to spiders spinning webs as intricate as doilies; from twin waterfalls echoing through the jungle in crystalline duet to troops of nimble monkeys, their tails looped around the uppermost branches, swinging back and forth like antic church bells. A plenary Paradise indeed—though like Adam’s primor
dial estate it harbored a despoiler.

  The serpent’s name was boredom. There was nothing on New-Atlantis by which a Baconian experimenter might sharpen his wits, no psychic whetstone, no mental flint. Unlike their literary counterpart, Robinson Crusoe, the Philadelphians took no satisfaction in their castaway condition. Whenever Mr. Crusoe had engaged in yet another act of ingenuity—growing barley, making furniture, taming goats—he’d experienced an unequivocal delight. But Ben and Jennet were of a different disposition. They craved salons and seminars, troubadors and telescopes, allegories and air-pumps. To condemn such sensibilities to a West-Indies isle was like banishing a herd-dog to a nation without sheep, or exiling an eagle to a planet of such ponderous gravity that not even a milkweed pod could take flight.

  For a brief interval they brought to their tedious Eden the salutary artifices of theatre. Ben conceived a cycle of one-act comedies, so thin of plot and broad of theme there was no need to write them down. He had but to toss out the premise, and the New-Atlantis Players would improvise their way to the end. For Jennet, the jewel of their repertoire was “A Sense of Proportion,” all about a lord and lady who resolved their petty domestic disputes—what color to paint the drawing-room, which cat to allow in the parlor—by hiring two commoners to fight lethal pistol duels, one man representing the obverse of the controversy, the other the reverse. She was also fond of “Crowned Heads,” concerning a king and queen who, eager to spend their every waking hour at gaming and falconry, had the Royal Alchemist fashion a pair of doppelgängers gifted in handling the quotidian demands of despotism. Offended by the arrogance that had given them birth, the doppelgängers set about issuing repressive edicts, and ere long the true king and queen found themselves kneeling before the chopping block.

  The satisfactions of emoting for an audience of uncomprehending monkeys were few, and the Philadelphians eventually sought other, less cerebral ways to relieve their ennui, so that Ben’s Moderation grid—he’d managed to reincarnate the perfection-matrix by marking scraps of acacia bark with a burnt twig—was soon a mass of black dots. Whilst the bounty of New-Atlantis did not extend to Belgian adder-bags, Jennet assumed that their sport would involve no procreative consequences, for she was beyond the age when a woman might expect to conceive, and during the past twenty months she’d bled not at all. She experienced an extreme dismay, therefore, to realize that she was once again with child, for how else to account for her swelling contours and terrestrial mal de mer?

  “I’ll come right out and say it,” she told Ben one balmy afternoon. They were repairing their hut with patches of mud and clay, its roof having leaked profusely during the morning’s thunder-gust. “The third and final offspring of Jennet Stearne Crompton is but six months from daylight.”

  “Dearest angel, do you seek to amuse me?” he said, massaging his scraggly beard.

  “My announcement’s no more a joke than this wigwam’s a cathedral.”

  “Pregnant? Really? A woman of your years?”

  “’Steeth, Ben, do you think me some dry and withered Sarai? Do you imagine I could ne’er quicken my lover’s seed without Jehovah Himself injects me with a heavenly egg?”

  He scowled and twisted a viscid brown bung into place. “This all seems most uncanny to me.”

  “Uncanny? Uncanny? There be no cause to posit a virgin conception here, sir. I needn’t remind you of that.”

  Breathing suddenly became for her swain an activity requiring his complete attention. “Oh, my dear Mrs. Crompton, methinks I am too young for fatherhood.”

  “As I am too old for motherhood.”

  “Truth to tell, I feel cozened by this news. ’Tis as if Nature and Dame Fortune and you yourself have all conspired against me.”

  “Cozened?” she snarled. “Cozened? How durst you accuse me of such?”

  “If not cozenage, then a malign sort of carelessness. A conscientious woman knows her fertile days and constrains her lover accordingly.”

  “Faugh, Ben, no witch-court e’er reached a judgment so unjust! Nummusquantum!”

  “What?”

  “I am angry!”

  Pivoting abruptly, she stalked away from the wigwam, her patience stretched to the snapping-point. She would rather hear Gunny Slocum brag about catching counterfeiters, or even Cotton Mather opining about America’s Satanic tawnies, than endure another instant of this twaddle.

  As the sun arced toward its tryst with the sea, she walked south along the rumbling surf. She vowed to spend the night alone, resting atop a pile of heliconia leaves and, if Morpheus declined to bestow his gift, meditating upon any topic save the insufferable Mr. Franklin. Alas, no sooner had she made this promise than the sky grew dark as dried blood, releasing forthwith a cold, fierce, unsalutary rain. Shivering in the squalls, her grass mantle growing soggier by the minute, she decided that pleurisy was too high a price to pay for dignity. She slogged back up the beach and silently entered Ben’s vicinity. For a full minute the castaways stared at each other, shedding rainwater, saying not a word.

  “The more I think on’t,” he muttered at last, “the more happily I anticipate teaching our splendid young son the printer’s trade.”

  She took his wet hand, separating the thick fingers as a coquette might spread the blades of a fan. “This son of ours could very well be a girl.”

  “Then she shall follow her mother into the wilds of modern geometry. Marry, I see this junior Jennet teaching the fluxions at the Philadelphia Friends School. Long before she’s born, I shall advantage her by reciting the multiplication tables well within her hearing, over and over and over.”

  They flashed one another weary smiles, exchanged mistrustful frowns, and, crossing the threshold of their rehabilitated wigwam, took shelter from the storm.

  j

  PRINTER, PHILOSOPHER, PLAYWRIGHT, and—now—paterfamilias, Benjamin Franklin spent the first week of his son’s life setting agouti snares in the heart of New-Atlantis, noting their locations on a map he’d made by embedding pebbles in a mud pie. On the morning of the eighth day he took up his woven-seaweed sack and began an inspection tour, feeling a bit like a country squire making the rounds of his estate. Snare number one was unsprung, likewise number two, but the third trap indeed held an agouti, the confused animal dangling like the lead plumb on a carpenter’s twine.

  Until the moment of his son’s birth, Ben had regarded himself as well experienced in matters of ecstasy. Catching Saturn’s rings with his telescope, making electricity with his sulphur-ball, joining with his true love in carnal embrace—surely such activities defined the bounds of rapture. How wrong he’d been, for all these wonders paled beside William Franklin’s arrival in the world.

  Jennet had delivered in the upright position favored by her Nimacook kin, her arms locked around two adjacent mangrove trees. The spasms still caused her much pain, however, and Ben found himself wishing for a supply of Barnaby Cavendish’s imagined insensibility drug. Disoriented though he was by Jennet’s distress, he ultimately became what she called “a not incompetent midwife,” soothing her during the pangs, guiding the infant free of the womb, pronouncing authoritatively on its gender, and cutting the cord with a stone knife. On Jennet’s orders he gathered up the gelatinous afterbirth—it was both fascinating and repellent, like one of Cavendish’s monsters—and buried it in the sand. When finally satisfied that the mother had survived her ordeal, he bore their son to a tide pool and gave him his first bath, gently sponging the bloody, wrinkled flesh with a crumpled heliconia leaf.

  Whilst “William” was clearly the correct name for this astonishing soul, they could not agree on the reason. For Jennet the name evoked the dramatists she most admired, Shakespeare and Congreve. Ben preferred the political connotations, for many a friend of liberty had called himself William, including William Penn, champion of religious toleration, William Wallace, heroic Scottish rebel, and William of Orange, the first British monarch to rule wholly at Parliament’s behest.

  Cautiously Ben crep
t toward his prey. Even as it struggled to right itself, the agouti looked him in the eye. He paused, took a step, whereupon the gravity of New-Atlantis forsook its traditional Newtonian allegiance and acquired a disconcerting independence of mind.

  “’Sheart!”

  Ben’s captive ankles flew upward, his torso plummeted, his head descended. At last he came to rest, his arms hanging downward, his fingers brushing the dirt. His first thought (quite ridiculous, he realized) was that a troop of vengeful but clever agouti had fashioned a trap of their own. His second thought (much more rational) was that he’d tripped an agouti-snare laid by some other castaway. His third thought (utterly terrifying) was that the snare had been set specifically for him by a cannibal like those who figured so memorably in Mr. Crusoe’s adventures.

  For nearly an hour he endured his inverted condition, the puzzled blood filling his cranium and clogging his ears. His field of vision was confined to the similarly ensnared agouti, a berry bush, and a mangrove root as gnarled as Newton’s shillelagh. When at last two brown leather boots entered the scene, his heart surged with hope, for such footwear was surely beyond a cannibal’s budget.

  “Look!” a male voice cried. “We have catched ourselves a most peculiar beast.”

  A second pair of dark boots, oiled like a Belgian adder-bag, materialized within inches of Ben’s nose. Their owner, likewise male, spoke next. “God was in a whimsical mood when he fashioned this creature. The toes are where the head should be.”

  “The knees are where the heart should be.”

  “The cods are in the stomach’s proper place.”

  “Ben Franklin, you are one befuddled animal.” The owner of the un-oiled boots leaned over and showed his face to Ben. He was a muscular Negro, dressed in tanned leather breeches and a blue linen shirt, his features fixed in a scowl. “Have no worries”—he pulled a knife from his belt—“for I shall free you anon!”