The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  According to their original plan, which she regarded as both elegant and practical, when the Judas Tree reached port Ben would arrange for the pirates to deliver her and William to the Chestnut Street townhouse. Once confident that his family was safe, Ben would lead Creech and Baldwin to his Market Street garret, chip a splinter from his “philosopher’s stone” (his most potent specimen of magnetite), run the fragment through a cork, and bid Baldwin bear the new doubloon-detector back to the Judas Tree for testing. Whilst the mate was confirming the device’s authenticity, Ben would present Creech to Sir William Keith and, after graciously forgiving Keith his failure to provide the letters of credit, gleefully reveal that a band of spendthrift pirates stood ready to disperse their brightest coins amongst the local merchants, at which juncture Keith was certain to promise Creech that his buccaneers would find Philadelphia to be a pirate-friendly city.

  By the time the Judas Tree dropped anchor, however, Ben had become enamored of a more elaborate scheme, intended not only to rescue his loved ones but to bring Creech and his band to justice, though Jennet did not learn of this egregious emendation until it was a fait accompli. The new plot hinged on Ben’s entirely accurate assumption that the pirate captain would not imagine his prisoners to be swimmers. (Thévenot’s art was largely unknown amongst seafarers, who held that a shipwreck ought always to entail a simple death by drowning, never the more agonizing alternatives of terminal thirst, lethal exposure, or carnivorous fish.) Shortly after midnight, Ben slipped furtively from his berth. He laced his sturdy torso into his agouti-skin suit, climbed down the anchor chain, swam a mile to Market Street Wharf, and dashed a dozen blocks west, shivering and dripping, to the largest mansion in Broad Street. Upon entering the foyer, he was informed by the servants that William Keith no longer occupied the Governor’s post, but Ben did not allow this development to diminish his resolve. After rousing Keith’s successor, a swaggering British major named Patrick Gordon, Ben convinced the new Governor to ignore his visitor’s wild beard and strange wet garment, focusing instead on the propitious fact that a pirate shallop lay in the harbor. If Major Gordon acted quickly, he could capture the most abominable buccaneer ever to terrorize the Spanish Main.

  Within the hour a raiding party of Redcoat soldiers was bearing down on the Judas Tree, one boatload commanded by Ben, another by Major Gordon, the third by Captain Wilcox of the Philadelphia garrison. They circled the shallop and came at her from the east, thereby acquiring the advantage of surprise. And so it was that, slightly after dawn, Jennet awoke to a cacophony compounded of clanging swords, discharging pistols, cracking bones, falling bodies, screams, shrieks, cries, oaths, and the scything sound of musket-balls burrowing into wood and flesh. She took William in her arms, pressing his face to her bosom that he might be spared the sight of the skirmish. As the boy wept tears of fright and confusion, she peered through her cabin window and beheld a tumult nigh as terrible as the Indian attack on Haverhill. This time, however, the chaos culminated not in a loss of freedom for Jennet but in its very opposite—her safe delivery, together with Ben and William, onto Market Street Wharf in a longboat rowed by two lobsterback corporals.

  “You addlebrained cavalier!” she seethed as Ben clambered onto the pier. “You ninny-pated knave! ’Tis a miracle we weren’t killed!”

  “You flatter me, Mrs. Crompton, for I know naught of working miracles,” Ben said, clutching Hezekiah Creech’s map to his breast. At the height of the hurly-burly he’d managed to appropriate the document, in accordance with his commission from Ebinose-Mbemba. “Howbeit, I did calculate, quite correctly, that our fifty soldiers would easily o’erpower the sixteen buccaneers.”

  “Mark me, sir—you will ne’er again put our child in the vicinity of a pirate battle!”

  He folded the map neatly and slipped it into his coat. “All’s well that ends well.”

  “But it didn’t end well, for today you have proved yourself a reckless rogue!” she cried. “You should take your Moderation grid and blacken every box! Nummusquantum!”

  In the days immediately following the skirmish, The American Weekly Mercury devoted many acres of ink to the subject of freebooting in Philadelphia, with a particular emphasis on Governor Gordon’s foray against the Judas Tree and his subsequent delivery of Hezekiah Creech’s gold to the Crown. The most gripping such story related the fate of Creech himself. By the Mercury’s account, as the soldiers were leading the buccaneer and his fellow blackguards to Walnut Street Prison, Captain Wilcox indulged in an especially abusive variety of literary criticism, smearing Creech’s autobiography with cow dung. Somehow the outraged author broke free of his captors and wrenched the manuscript from Wilcox’s grasp. A startled corporal, misreading the situation, shot Creech betwixt the eyes.

  They buried the pirate captain in an unmarked grave, on unhallowed ground, along with his orthographically impaired memoir.

  Was there a moral to be gleaned from Creech’s demise? Jennet wasn’t sure. She knew only that, against conventional expectations, the pirate now belonged to that tiny minority of human beings who had died in defense of a book.

  Whilst thinking fondly of Creech came naturally to her these days, thinking well of Ben did not. “To err is human, to forgive divine,” Alexander Pope had declared in his Essay on Criticism—two interconnected principles toward which Jennet felt considerable sympathy. If only Ben weren’t so emphatically human, and she so far from divine. After much conscientious effort, she managed to stop berating him whenever the subject of the Judas Tree skirmish arose, though other points of disputation emerged betimes to fill the void. They quarreled about the efficacy of the new small-pox inoculations (Jennet favoring the procedure, Ben urging caution), about the value of lightning-rods (she judging them unproven, he arguing for their immediate and ubiquitous deployment), about the nature of God (she regarding the Almighty as an Aristotelian Prime Mover without knowable attributes, he cleaving to the infinitely clever Deist Clockmaker), and about the need for greater political unification amongst the Colonies (she opposing the notion, largely because he supported it). They even bickered about whose dwelling to make their permanent abode. Whereas he wanted them to occupy his Market Street lodgings, she thought they should live in her townhouse, which was cleaner, roomier, and more private. A month after their return to Philadelphia they were still essentially living in both places at the same time, a circumstance that to Jennet felt like living in neither place at any time.

  “You must try to understand that I feel comfortable in my garret,” Ben said. “I’m a wight who must be hemmed by his philosophic instruments.”

  “Then we need but pack up those instruments and carry ’em two blocks south,” she said.

  “They might break.”

  “Then we shall cushion ’em in straw, as we did Barnaby’s monsters,” she said.

  “A procedure fraught with risks,” he said.

  “I’Christ, Ben, why is it we cannot breach a topic—which roof to call our own, whether it should have a lightning-rod—without we end up squabbling?”

  After pondering the mystery for a fortnight, she fell upon a simple but sobering solution. In their minds’ most subterranean tiers, they wished to be free of one another. Whether he knew it or not, Ben was suffocating. No doubt his overt desire to be “hemmed by his philosophic instruments” was real, but it paled beside his unspoken desire not to be hemmed by an infant he’d never meant to father and a woman more than twice his age—a woman who might ere long become incapable of negotiating a soup spoon or chamber-pot without his assistance. But Jennet, too, was feeling oppressed, laboring under an onus she could not abide, the burden of being a prospective burden.

  When she first told Ben that they’d each become a millstone about the other’s neck, he declared that his love for her was ripe and real as a field of Nimacook maize, and he would never assent to a rupture such as she proposed. The second time she offered her diagnosis, he sobbed like a child, so profoundly did the thought of losing h
er distress him. The third time she spoke to him of millstones, he found merit in the metaphor and consequently broke her heart.

  “Alas, I must assent to your argument,” he said, heaving a sigh. “For years our lives were of necessity intertwined, braided like the threads of a Persian carpet, but now the strands must come unraveled.”

  “Ne’er to be rewoven into their former splendor,” she said, her throat swelling like a sprained ankle.

  They were browsing through the bins in Gerencer’s, searching without success for Newton’s promised treatise on invisible particles. Either the tome didn’t exist, or it hadn’t yet crossed the Atlantic. A few yards away William played with the proprietor’s cat, swinging a bit of kite-string through the air, thereby prompting the animal to walk on its hind legs.

  “Oh, Jenny, why must we be so reasonable in this matter?” Ben said. “Prithee, talk some nonsense into my head.”

  “Nay, dear Ben, I shan’t,” she said, drying her eyes with her sleeve.

  “I implore thee.”

  “The time hath clearly come for us to relinquish one another. ’Twould be a generous gesture on both our parts.”

  “Not generous—merely practical,” he rasped. “We must sever our connection whilst we own the strength to do so.”

  From the nearest bin she retrieved a dusty quarto of Romeo and Juliet. “Come, my gallant, let us take hold of Shakespeare’s great love-tragedy and pledge ourselves to an eternal separation.” She pressed Ben’s right palm against the book, then set her own right hand on top. “I do solemnly swear to give the world its due measure and deserved dose of Benjamin Franklin…say it, sir.”

  “I do solemnly swear to give the world its due measure and deserved dose of Benjamin Franklin…”

  “…who hath before him gardens to plant, experiments to perform, sages to impress, monarchs to harry, and dragons to slay…”

  “…who hath before him gardens to plant, experiments to perform, sages to impress, monarchs to harry, and dragons to slay…”

  “…in the name of all I hold sacred and dear.”

  Haltingly he echoed her words, then moaned quietly, turned away, and slunk off to sport with William and the bipedal cat.

  j

  THE NEW ARRANGEMENT went into effect the next day: two individual lives, two separate domiciles, with little William inhabiting his mother’s townhouse all through the week but visiting his father’s garret on Saturdays and Sundays. Occasionally she and Ben joined in connubial embrace, but these episodes became less frequent with each passing month. Gradually her sobs grew softer, her tears fewer, her dreams longer. She realized that, for the first time since her journey to Trinity College in quest of Newton, she’d done something unequivocally noble, and the novelty of it saw her through many a miserable night.

  The sweltering summer of 1728 found both philosophers struggling to avoid bankruptcy, the remainder of Jennet’s fortune having gone down with the Berkshire. By autumn their prospects had brightened. Bitter over Ben’s secret alliance with the former Pennsylvania Governor, Samuel Keimer had at first rebuffed him, but then a formidable commission came Keimer’s way—printing paper currency for New-Jersey—and he realized that he would meet the deadline only by availing himself of Ben’s quick mind, unflagging industry, and London training. Jennet, meanwhile, designated her front parlor a classroom and advertised herself as a tutor, and ere long several of the city’s wealthiest families were entrusting her with their children’s minds. She taught them what she’d learned from Aunt Isobel—penmanship, astronomy, geometry, optics, Latin—though rarely with the forbearance that the mistress of Mirringate Hall had so consistently displayed. Of her nine pupils only one evinced uncommon intelligence, Lucy Rooke, a Quaker girl who could draw the micrographic world, especially gnats, mites, and pond-water animalcules, as enthrallingly as Dunstan had rendered the horse-head promontory.

  Her teaching efforts consumed half her day, William the other half, and yet she found time to collaborate with Ben on the great work, which she’d decided to call The Sufficiency of the World: A Treatise Concerning How Witchcraft Is an Impossible Crime. Although she still believed devoutly in her demon disproof, she took little pleasure in its composition, and Ben was likewise uninspired. Despite the book’s provocative thesis and pithy prose, they could not imagine the average Parliamentarian sitting down and poring over every page. Most likely the Lords and their counterparts in the Commons would pawn the treatise off on the Royal Society, where it would devolve not to the estimable Dr. Halley—he was seventy-four, after all, and doubtless defensive of his time—but to some bright young demonologist all eager to find its faults and savage its lapses. And yet Jennet and Ben persisted in their labors, straight through Christmas and well into the new year, goaded by Bible Commonwealth reports that Dunstan and his band were “campaigning against the Wampanoag and Narragansett Pagans that infest our Massachusetts Coast.”

  Late in June there arrived at Keimer’s shop a bundle containing over a hundred back issues of The London Journal, some as old as two years. Prominent amongst the headlines for the third of April, 1727, was the news that Sir Isaac Newton—Knight of the Realm, Master of the Mint, President of the Royal Society—had died thirteen days earlier in Kensington, subsequently receiving an elaborate entombment ceremony at Westminster-Abbey. A dozen eulogies filled the pages, including epitaphs by Dr. Halley, Dr. Pemberton, and the celebrated French philosophe, Jean François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire. Mr. Pope honored the late geometer with one of those impeccable couplets Jennet found so annoying: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and All was Light.”

  Newton’s passing instilled mixed emotions in Jennet. As a disciple of Reason and the inventor of the sufficiency hypothesis, she mourned the loss of Creation’s keenest intellect, but she was happy to be forever rid of any obligation to return to England, solicit the madman once again, and beg that he go before Parliament with his endorsement of her demon disproof.

  Her final flurry of effort on the manuscript had less the effect of elaborating her argument than of multiplying her grievances against Ben. Contrary to the pledge he’d once made—“Franklin and Crompton, united against the Conjuring Statute!”—his principal goal these days was not to defeat the witchfinders but to transform himself into America’s most celebrated printer. Already he had much to show for his ambition: a rapid, conspicuous, and well-deserved rise that was the mirror opposite of Samuel Keimer’s rapid, conspicuous, and well-deserved slide into ruin. Although the New-Jersey currency project had netted Keimer a handsome profit, he’d managed to squander it in a matter of weeks. For a time he revived his fortunes by publishing a weekly newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, but ultimately this venture failed too, and when Ben proposed to purchase both the paper and its parent shop for three hundred pounds sterling, the broke and broken Keimer readily assented. Ben borrowed the specified sum from the father of his high-born friend Hugh Meredith, whereupon Keimer absconded to Barbados, the better to avoid his legions of creditors.

  Beyond his obsession with the Gazette, Ben had also grown preoccupied with the Junto, a self-improvement and mutual aid society he’d formed with a dozen like-minded young men. Although Jennet scorned the Junto for its deleterious effect on The Sufficiency of the World, she decided that its advent was not entirely catastrophic, as the membership happened to include John Tux, née Naanantux, a chestnut-brown Indian whose pensive countenance reminded her of Okommaka in his prime. Astonishingly, John Tux was a Nimacook. More amazing yet, he hailed from her own adoptive clan, the Kokokehom.

  On first meeting John Tux, Jennet was hard pressed to persuade him that, her abduction notwithstanding, she did not abjure her savage past. Indeed, but for her devotion to the argumentum grande she might yet be living in the woods, wearing feathers and skins. Convinced at last that she bore him no malice, John Tux proceeded to tell his story, delighted to be once again conversing in the Algonquin tongue.

  Not surprisi
ngly, the narrative whereby Naanantux had come to Philadelphia was only slightly less brocaded and bizarre than the adventures that had landed Jennet in the same metropolis. When he was but nine, a skishauonck epidemic had claimed both his parents. The orphan forthwith fell under the patronage and persuasion of the latest missionary to have insinuated himself into the village, Pierre Dumond, S.J. Observing in the bereft Naanantux a mind of singular intelligence, Father Dumond convinced him to abandon his tribe, abbreviate his name, embrace Roman Catholicism, and join the priest in bringing the One True Religion to receptive Indians everywhere. For the better part of five years, Father Dumond and John Tux roamed the Algonquin lands south of the Merrimack and west of the Shawsheen, baptizing not only Nimacooks but also Pocassets, Sakonetts, Nipmucks, Abenakis, and Wampanoags, a period during which the Jesuit instructed his young charge so ably in the languages of antiquity that ere long he could negotiate St. Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin.

  John Tux’s career as a latter-day St. Paul ended abruptly when an Abenaki sagamore took violent exception to Father Dumond’s project, subsequently dashing out the priest’s brains with a hatchet and threatening to treat John Tux in the same fashion if he failed to mend his Papist ways. Having acquired from his late sponsor a morbid fear of the fiery damnation that awaited all who forsook Holy Mother Church, John Tux lost no time fleeing the Abenakis and heading for Boston. Although he reached the city without mishap, he soon found himself destitute, for whilst his erudition made him competent to tutor the children of Puritan affluence, the parents of those same children could abide neither his Nimacook blood nor his Catholic faith. Fortunately, rumors of the Philadelphia ethos eventually reached his ears, compelling tales of quaking Christians who placed a premium on toleration, and so he made his way south to the City of Brotherly Love. Falling in with Ben and the Junto, he quickly ascended to the position of assistant foreman at Franklin and Meredith’s Printing-House, even as he shed his Catholicism under the influence of his associates’ rational and capacious Deism.