The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  In recent years John Tux had elected to reforge his bond with the Kokokehom, regularly exchanging letters with his grandmother, Quannamoo, sister to the late Miacoomes and now the clan’s chief sagamore. According to Quannamoo, hard times had befallen the tribe. Pushed ever westward by the dreams and deceptions of the European settlers, the Nimacook had most recently established their plantations in the Hoosic River Valley. Of the original six clans, only three remained, the Kokokehom, the Moaskug, and the Wautuckque. Evidently there was nothing in Quannamoo’s letters about the medicine-woman, Hassane, about Jennet’s adoptive cousin, Pussough, or about Kapaog, the one to whom she’d given her milk after the small-pox took his birth-mother. And yet, felicitously enough, Quannamoo occasionally mentioned the Indian of whose fortunes Jennet was most anxious to learn, her first husband, Okommaka. By Quannamoo’s report, Okommaka’s rage against the white race had lately increased to the point of mania. So far he had failed to rally a war party to his side, but the squaw-sagamore feared that ere long Okommaka would lead a raid on an English town, an action certain to spark disastrous retaliation.

  “In your next letter to your grandmother,” Jennet told John Tux, “I should like you to convey a sentiment from a footloose plantation maid.”

  “Cowaunckamish.” I am at your service.

  “The message is this. ‘Tell Okommaka that his Waequashim remembers him with great fondness, and she hopes that he will not be so foolish as to make war on the English settlers.’”

  “In all candor, I doubt that your words will succeed in cooling Okommaka’s ire,” John Tux replied. “And yet I shall happily relay them. ’Tis the least I owe to one who seeks to foil the pricking persecutors of my kind.”

  By the end of the year it had become woefully clear to Jennet that The Sufficiency of the World was now her responsibility alone. When she chastised Ben for his unannounced decampment, he replied that the final draft would “boast a greater aesthetic integrity if written solely in your unique and piquant style.”

  “Then methinks ’twould also boast a greater aesthetic integrity if your name appeared nowhere on the cover-page,” she said.

  “As you wish,” he said. “The thesis sprang full-blown from your brow, the words flowed largely from your quill. I can make no claim upon this tome.”

  Although Jennet deeply resented Ben’s withdrawal from the argumentum grande, she could not quarrel with his offer to publish it for free. He could well afford such philanthropy. Under his guidance, Franklin and Meredith’s Printing-House was flourishing, the Gazette having transmuted into a daily newspaper boasting hundreds of subscribers in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New-Jersey, plus several score in Mother England. As with her earlier A Treatise of How the Four Aristotelian Elements May Serve to Convince There Are No Elementals, she decided that she would need three hundred copies, though she still could not imagine by what breed of cunning or species of deceit she might induce a Parliamentarian to read one.

  On the fifteenth of April, 1730, the first proof of the first signature emerged from Ben’s new Blaeu press. Jennet scanned the cover-page, her spirit reveling in its stately appearance even as her eye searched for typographical errors.

  “Have I o’erreached myself, using Newton’s name this way?” she asked Ben. “Does my action smack of desperation?”

  “Aye,” he said with a soft groan. “But better desperation in the service of Reason,” he quickly added, “than Reason in the service of desperation.”

  He proceeded to expound upon this newly minted maxim, but she failed to hear him, for her brain was now ablaze with an idea, the sort of momentous stratagem she normally conceived only whilst swimming in the Schuylkill or walking the shores of Amakye-Isle.

  “’Steeth, I see it!” she shouted, pulse racing. “I see how we’ll get both Lords and Commons to heed my book!”

  “How, friend? Tell me.”

  “This be a devilish clever plot.”

  “Out with it!”

  “We shall arrange for a witch-trial, with my damnable brother at its core. Not one of those travesties he enacts along the frontier, but a full and public test of the demon hypothesis, conducted right here in Philadelphia.” Her heart had not ascended to such an altitude since her invention of the Albertus Magnus Goldfinder. “Now, Ben, listen to the nexus of my scheme. Every day of the trial, you will report on’t in the Gazette, narrating each twist and turn in a manner calculated to enthrall your London subscribers. After the jurymen issue their verdict, each Parliamentarian will want to know how I convinced ’em I was innocent, and he will forthwith consult his Sufficiency of the World.”

  “I must have a plug of beeswax in my ear, Mrs. Crompton, for I heard you say ’twould be you in the dock.”

  “Of course ’twill be me, playing the part of an enchantress.”

  “You upbraid me for crossing swords with Hezekiah Creech, and now you wish to cut cards with the Devil himself?”

  “Quite so, sir, but aside from the dangers involved, have I not wrought a most wondrous plan?”

  Lifting the signature from her grasp, he strode into the drying-room. She followed directly behind, inhaling the pungent and authoritative fragrance of printer’s ink.

  “Wondrous?” he wailed. “Wondrous? ’Sheart, ’tis wondrous insane and naught else. Nay, Jenny, I shan’t let you imperil yourself as you propose.”

  “I must do this, sir.”

  “Will you not understand that I cherish your life even more than mine own?”

  “And will you not understand that nary a month goes by without Dunstan and his demented bride kill some blameless New-England savage? ’Tis my duty to thwart ’em. My soul demands it.”

  For five silent minutes Ben occupied himself in removing a dozen dry signatures from the line—the opening pages of a grammar-school primer—thus making room for The Sufficiency of the World.

  “Your soul,” he echoed.

  “My soul.”

  Sighing and snorting, he clipped the first signature of Jennet’s treatise to a string. “Very well, darling. Put on your darkest dress, mount your swiftest besom, and summon a thousand serpents to your door. But take care lest your ruse carry you straight to the gallows. I’ll not have you gaining your soul and losing the world—there be no bargain in that.”

  j

  AS JENNET DREW HER PLANS against the Massachusetts cleansers, she inevitably thought of the innumerable animal traps she and Ben had laid during their marooning. More than once she imagined treating Abigail Stearne like a snared agouti, peeling away her hide, boiling the flesh from her bones. Each time the reverie surged up in Jennet’s mind, she recoiled from its violence, even as she reveled in its crude justice. “Keep your object always in view, dear philosopher,” she told herself. “’Tis not to extinguish Abigail’s person but rather to eradicate her profession.”

  Although the New-England prickers were craftier than any agouti, Jennet’s plot was more cunning than any snare. The opening gambit had her shipping thirty copies of The Sufficiency of the World to King George’s councilors and the remaining two hundred and seventy to prominent Parliamentarians. (The idea of handing out books gratis so unnerved Ben that he immediately printed another three hundred, arranging for both Mr. Efram and Mr. Gerencer to sell them at eight shillings per copy.) Her next move was to turn herself into another person. Her new name, Rebecca Webster, took but a moment to contrive: “Rebecca” to honor the unfortunate Rebecca Nurse of Salem-Village, “Webster” to salute John Webster and his bravely skeptical though philosophically impoverished Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft. For a base of operations she selected Manayunk to the northwest, a farming community situated on the fertile wedge betwixt the Schuylkill River and the Wissahickon Creek.

  Specialists in raising flax, a crop whose proper cultivation they’d learned from the inhabitants of nearby German-Town, the yeoman planters of Manayunk were an unsophisticated bunch, peasants by another name, which made them ideal for Jennet’s purposes. As she gauged the charac
ter of the village, if a newly arrived widow exhibited coarse manners, asked rude favors, grew strange flowers, and appeared to worship heathen gods, it would not be long ere her neighbors cried her out.

  After a full week’s search she found an ideal venue in which to enact the great ruse, a decrepit and deserted poultry farm at the intersection of Hermit Road and Sumac Lane. The barn had already become a haven for stray cats, easily cast in the rôle of animal familiar. Even more felicitous was the dark loamy soil adjacent to the house, a tract well suited to the growing of monk’s-hood, thorn-apple, mandrake, henbane, and other plants certain of arousing local suspicion.

  “You have found a tenant,” she informed the farm’s owner, a retired Welsh sea captain rumored to have made and lost several fortunes importing rum from Barbados.

  Obviously William must now go live with Ben, lest he awaken one morning to witness his mother being carted off to gaol. At first Jennet had no idea how she might prepare William for her imminent disappearance, but then John Tux reminded her of pittuckish, the duty of every wayward Nimacook to visit his clan at regular four-year intervals, an obligation that he himself would be fulfilling ere long. Because the boy had always regarded Jennet’s Indian past with fascination and delight, she decided to tell him that the time was nigh for her to practice pittuckish: betwixt now and early spring she would be away in Massachusetts, living with the Nimacooks, harvesting maize and weaving sleeping mats. So plausible did this narrative sound when she presented it to William, she did not hesitate to circulate the same falsehood amongst the families of her nine pupils. Such a rare privilege it hath been to teach your progeny, she told each mother, even those who’d whelped porridgeheads, but now my blood beckons and my heritage calls.

  Naturally the idea of their child inhabiting Ben’s unhealthy garret troubled Jennet, and so she experienced a great relief upon learning that the resident landlord, Thomas Godfrey, had resolved to move his family to New-Jersey and rent the entire dwelling to Ben. Rather less soothing to Jennet was the news that a certain Miss Deborah Read, whose widowed mother ran a boarding-house in Spruce Street, would be living at the Market Street mansion as well. Whilst Jennet was prepared in spirit for this event—why had she surrendered Ben if not to let him find the woman who would share his dotage?—the fact of it made her miserable. No doubt Miss Read was a worthy soul, but she’d probably never determined a parabolic orbit or launched a war against irrationality.

  Jennet signed the lease on a Friday afternoon, moved in the following Monday, and set about presenting herself to the people of Manayunk as the village’s most sinister eccentric. She had barely embarked on this masquerade ere realizing that Rebecca Webster’s paganism must occupy a middle ground: the widow could enact uncanny rites, but she ought never to engage in manifest Devil-worship, lest the jury feel bound to convict her whether they subscribed to the demon hypothesis or not. And so it was that, walking home each evening from their fields and shops, Mrs. Webster’s neighbors witnessed her performing wild Dionysian dances around a high cairn. They observed her flying kites in thunder-gusts, rehearsing incantations before her barn cats, and tending a garden of consummate grotesquery. But they never saw her sacrifice a goat to the Dark One or pour libations on a Satanic altar.

  Even before the first stories of the Widow Webster’s peculiarities surfaced in Manayunk, Ben had drafted The Pennsylvania Gazette into the charade. For the immediate future, he furtively informed his employees, the paper would pursue a policy of amity toward the Royal Governor, periodically lauding his courage in attacking the pirate shallop. Beyond its praise of Patrick Gordon, the Gazette would publish each week a letter from the nonexistent Ebenezer Trenchard. Jennet judged this hoaxa true Franklin masterpiece, his most impressive deception since Silence Dogood. She read Mr. Trenchard’s inaugural epistle straight through without once relaxing her smile.

  19 September 1730

  To the Authors of the Gazette:

  I write to acquaint you that I, an aging Philosopher who learn’d more of Nature’s Ways from sailing the World’s Oceans than from his Years of Study at Harvard College, have lately reach’d certain Conclusions pertaining to so-called Witchcraft. Owning no Inclination to write a full Tome on the Subject, I shall instead purvey my Opinions through your excellent Newspaper.

  Before the courteous Reader replies that Philadelphians traffic not in Old-World Superstition, let me report that in Manayunk-Village today there be Whisperings of how a certain Widow living in Sumac Lane hath covenant’d with the Devil. To wit, our Province may soon see its first Witch-Trial, sanction’d by the very Parliamentary Act that saw Nineteen supposed Satanists hang’d at Salem in 1692, an Event whose tragickal Nature did not deter the Pennsylvania Assembly from ratifying, to its everlasting infamy, the Statute in Question a Dozen Years ago.

  My own Views concerning the “Demon Hypothesis” have lately alight’d atop the highest Pinnacle to which a reason’d Skepticism might aspire, a Circumstance I credit largely to J. S. Crompton’s estimable Book, The Sufficiency of the World. If my Recommendation prompts even one Gazette Subscriber to acquire this remarkable Work (on sale at 8 s. the Copy at Gerencer’s, Ephram’s as well, and obtainable by Mail from those same Vendors), this brief Missive will have been well worth the Composition thereof.

  Your most humble Servant,

  Ebenezer Trenchard, Esq.

  Seaman Scholar of Front Street

  After five full weeks of portraying Rebecca Webster, Jennet at last received indications that her neighbors were growing fearful: a mysterious fire in her barn, a dead opossum gibbeted from her largest chestnut tree, an aggressive scrap of Scripture nailed to her front door. (And the Soul that turneth after such as have familiar Spirits, and after Wizards, to go a-whoring after them, I will cut him off from amongst his People.) And yet, alas, not one villager undertook to lodge a formal complaint. Whilst nobody felt any affection toward the Witch of Manayunk, evidently nobody wished to see her in gaol either.

  The instant she apprised Ben of the village’s complacency, he sought out the Junto’s second cleverest member, the poet and surveyor Nicholas Scull, whose aptitude for trickery fully equaled Ben’s. On the first Monday in November Mr. Scull rented a room from a Manayunk tallow-chandler named Lawrence Eddings, and by evening he’d convinced the credulous dunderhead to regard his gout as an instance of maleficium. Two days later Mr. Scull visited Mr. Edding’s first cousin, Elizabeth Jarrett, soon persuading the dressmaker that her baby’s colic traced to wicked spirits. On Friday Mr. Eddings and Mrs. Jarrett betook themselves to the local justice of the peace, Herbert Bledsoe, and offered up their reasons for suspecting Mrs. Webster of demonic compact, and that very afternoon Jennet’s farm-house shook with the insistent clamor of the newly appointed magistrate pounding on her door.

  “Do ye know what brings me here?” he asked as she gestured him into the parlor. Mr. Bledsoe was a sallow and phlegmatic young man, not more than twenty-five, with a thin mustache sitting atop his upper lip like a dormant caterpillar.

  “Nay, I cannot imagine,” she said.

  “Your neighbors call ye a sorceress”—his tone was almost apologetic—“and so I am bound to arrest ye.”

  “I know naught of such arts,” she protested.

  “Your accusers say otherwise.”

  Mr. Bledsoe permitted her to bank her cooking-fire, extinguish her hearth, latch her casements, close her shutters, and lock her door. He clamped iron manacles around her outstretched wrists and, like a Nimacook taking a white woman captive, led her down the garden path past a thorn-apple bush, its fruit still unharvested, and a stand of monk’s-hood in a similar state of neglect. So far the drama was playing out exactly as she’d written it, and yet she experienced a dim disquieting presentiment that her control over this pièce bien faite had reached its zenith. She had awakened a sleeping dragon, the antique fear of maleficium, and God alone knew what consequences would soon be upon her.

  Located on the eastern shore of the Schuylk
ill, Manayunk Gaol-House was a rude stone structure consisting of Mr. Bledsoe’s offices on the ground floor and, delved deep into the riverbank like a mass grave, the dungeon itself. The magistrate handed Jennet over to the turnkey, the ursine Matthew Knox, his face aflush with gin, his breath laden with the same substance. Upon removing her manacles, Mr. Knox presented her with a burlap smock, then gestured toward a folded muslin screen and instructed her to avail herself of whatever privacy it afforded.

  Once attired in prison garb, Jennet followed Mr. Knox in a clockwise path down a spiral staircase, their journey terminating in a torchlit grotto containing three iron-gated cells separated by brick partitions. Such heat as the space enjoyed came from an enclosed brazier and its concomitant brick chimney, the contraption dominating the corridor like a great Cartesian heart throbbing within an immense clay golem. In the left-hand cell stood a runty man of middle age, his rheumy eyes and ruddy nose dribbling with the Danish chill. The right-hand cell held an elderly woman of the dilapidated sort frequently apprehended for Satanism—though surely, Jennet reasoned, there could not be a second witch-trial in the offing. Mr. Knox placed her in the central compartment, half the size of Billy Slipfinger’s hovel in the Fleet, devoid of all furnishings save a pitcher of water, a chamber-pot, and a pine pallet supporting a straw mattress. Acrid moss clung to the bricks like daubs of green mortar. A huge spiderweb spanned the ceiling, two trapped woodworms twitching near the hub.

  Shortly after the turnkey locked her in, Jennet learned that, for better or worse, voices traveled easily from cell to cell. Her fellow prisoners introduced themselves as Edith Sharkey and Cyril Turpin.