by James Morrow
“So ye’re the one stands accused o’ necromancy,” Mrs. Sharkey said.
“Quite so,” Jennet said, itching in her burlap smock.
“Then please know that a witch hath ne’er had a more amiable prison-mate than myself. I’ll give ye no cause to make my hair fall out or my skin turn to boils.”
“The charges against me are without grounds,” Jennet said.
“Marry, what a coincidence!” Mrs. Sharkey exclaimed. “They’ve got no evidence in my case either, save a rumor I came home from marketing one day to find my husband and our serving-maid stark naked in the barn, churning up some love butter. Supposedly, I grabbed the plow and furrowed both their skulls with the moldboard. Now I ask ye, Mrs. Webster, how could an old wife like me lift all that iron by herself?”
“’Tis a mystery, in sooth,” Jennet said.
“Odsfish, ye ladies have me outclassed!” Mr. Turpin shouted. “One of ye’s indicted for bashing out her husband’s brains, the other’s accused o’ Satanism, and I’m naught but a common thief.” He paused, sneezed twice, and continued. “Well, not too common, for I’ve risen far above my station. I started out in the chicken-coop, but soon I’d worked my way up to the goat-pen, and from there to the sheep meadow, and I had my eye on some horses when this outrageous suspicion concernin’ Mr. Pertuis’s cattle fell upon me.”
“I cannot speak very highly of Philadelphia justice,” Jennet said. “Here we are in gaol, and yet each of us is spotless as St. Genevieve.”
She eased herself onto the mattress and stretched her frightened bones along its length, the bits of straw jabbing her back and thighs like the nails in a Hindoo fakir’s bed. At that moment she wanted nothing more than actually to be a witch—a certain kind, of course: not a misbegotten hag with gobber tooth and warty nose, but a full-blooded magus boasting Perdition’s every imp as her retainer, each eager to pluck its mistress from her gaol-cell, bear her to little William’s side, and fly them both to the warmest and most fecund of Jupiter’s undiscovered moons.
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AS HER INCARCERATION PROGRESSED, Jennet was pleased to find the rawness of her accommodations counterbalanced by a certain civility in her keepers. Although tradition required Mr. Bledsoe to make his prisoners’ diet severe, he saw to it that their water was clean, their pease-bread fresh, and their cheese free of mold. He kept the brazier burning around the clock. Best of all, he imposed no limits on visitors, with the result that Jennet and Ben enjoyed one another’s company every day.
Mr. Knox, meanwhile, provided her with each new issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, as well as daily bulletins on the status of her case. By the turnkey’s narrative, Mr. Bledsoe had recently enlisted the services of Magistrate Abraham Pollock, his counterpart in Mount-Holly, New-Jersey. Late in October Mr. Pollock had tested an accused Satanist named Gabriel Toffey by standing him on a granary scale and counterweighting him with the town Bible—for it was commonly supposed that wizards and witches contained less physical substance than ordinary mortals, hence their ability to transvect themselves via brooms and pitchforks. Much to Mr. Pollock’s disappointment, Mr. Toffey’s meat and bones elevated the Prophets a full five feet, and so the magistrate was obliged to release him. For reasons not entirely apparent, this episode conferred on Pollock a local reputation as a competent demonologist.
Given what Mr. Knox had told her about the Mount-Holly affair, Jennet was hardly surprised when Mr. Bledsoe appeared in the dungeon early one morning and declared that his colleague would test her that day. At noon Mr. Knox rowed Jennet across the Delaware in his brother’s fishing dory, then transported her by hired carriage to Pollock’s cramped office, its every horizontal surface obscured by deeds, wills, and contracts. The magistrate sat behind his desk, signing arrest warrants with such broad gesticulations as to suggest an orchestra maestro conducting a tumultuous finale. A choleric man with blotchy yellow skin and a livid scar on his forehead, he seemed to Jennet less an avatar of Themis than a renegade from Hezekiah Creech’s pirate band, now posing as a judge.
Throughout the questioning phase Jennet remained unflustered, deliberately arousing Pollock’s suspicions whilst simultaneously confounding his expectations. When he asked her why she encouraged so many cats to inhabit her barn, she offered an answer—“’Tis the mice who lure them thither, not I”—that seemed to partake of neither innocence nor insolence but of something betwixt the two. When he demanded that she recite the Lord’s Prayer, she purposefully switched “Thy kingdom come” and “Thy will be done,” then calmly explained that she’d learned her Pater Noster from an elderly parson who’d routinely scrambled his scriptural clauses. When he inquired whether she indeed grew monk’s-hood and mandrake in her garden (a rumor to that effect having reached his ears) and whether she intended to mash these plants into flying ointments and libidinous unguents (their most notorious application), she cryptically replied, “Monk’s-hood and mandrake boast utilities ne’er dreamt of by a mere provincial magistrate.”
Next Pollock delivered her into the hostile embrace of his three husky sisters so that they might scan her skin, whereupon the impetus of the interview went against Jennet as abruptly as Gabriel Toffey had shot the town Bible skyward. Whilst Knox stared uncomfortably at his boots and Pollock watched in lascivious delight, the sisters stripped off Jennet’s burlap smock, shaved her body—head, armpits, legs, privates—and went to work, their fingers inching across her skin like blind and mindless larva. Just when it seemed she could endure this humiliation no longer, the eldest sister reported a warty protuberance on the suspect’s neck. Pollock proceeded to probe the excrescence with a steel sewing needle, betimes declaring it bloodless, which was doubtless true, for Jennet could barely feel the needle’s point.
At dusk Pollock and his sisters reclothed her in the burlap smock, bowed her into the posture of a fœtus, and lashed her wrists and ankles together with leather thongs. When Knox averred they had no cause to treat Jennet with such cruelty, Pollock plied him with his favorite food, unwatered gin, and the turnkey forthwith found himself on the floor, sprawled across a mattress of documents and singing “Lillabullero.”
The Mount-Holly witchfinders deposited their trussed prisoner in a horse-drawn cart, conveyed her to the Delaware, and spilled her onto a granite pier as a fisherman might unload a netful of cod. As Jennet lay shivering in the winter air, face down, the damp stone gnawing her bare arms and exposed calves, the sisters hitched a plow-rope around her waist. Without warning, Pollock bent low and swung at her with his balled fist, ramming his knuckles into her stomach and forcing her to exhale. Before she could take more than half a breath, he blithely rolled her over the edge of the pier.
She crashed into the frigid river, the surface shattering around her as if she’d fallen through a cathedral window. Engulfed, she sank, straining and jerking against the unyielding thongs. Water shot up her nose, burning the fleshy cavity beyond. So this was what they’d endured, Isobel Mowbray and Susan Diggens and all the others—this maleficent acid, this liquid fire. She opened her eyes, beheld the Delaware’s green swirling murk. Her windpipe spasmed. Her chest grew tight as a brick. And still she sank, deeper, deeper. A noise like muffled cannon fire boomed in her skull, a phenomenon she soon recognized as the pounding of her own heart.
Suddenly the rope went taut, and now she was rising, ever higher, until at last she felt a breeze upon her brow. She devoured the evening air, sucking it down as forcefully as Ben’s vacuum-pump drawing the atmosphere from a bottle.
“The Delaware hath spurned thee,” Pollock declared, pulling her shoreward, “a fact I am bound to share with the grand jury!”
“I nearly drowned!” she cried, teeth chattering. “’Twas the rope caused my ascent!”
The witchfinders dragged her onto the pier. “Nay, Mrs. Webster,” Pollock insisted. “Thy buoyancy be of Beelzebub!”
“’Twas the rope!”
Four days later Pollock offered his findings to the ad hoc grand jury. The hearing unf
olded with an inevitability that bid fair to make the transit of Venus seem optional by comparison and the inverse-square law a mere matter of opinion, and Jennet would have counted the whole show a farce but for its occasioning Ebenezer Trenchard’s best essay to date.
10 March 1731
To the Authors of the Gazette:
This Tuesday past I again visit’d Manayunk, where I witness’d a Grand Jury return a Billa Vera against Rebecca Webster following Testimony by her Neighbors and a Presentation by the Mount-Holly Magistrate. Throughout the entire Hearing Mrs. Webster sat respectfully beside the Bench, Head bow’d, as if in Prayer.
In this Week’s Epistle I am mov’d to present a Fact not universally known. For nearly forty Years now His Majesty’s Privy Council hath charter’d within Massachusetts Bay an Organization styling itself the “Purification Commission,” consisting of a “Witchfinder-Royal” named Dunstan Stearne and his three fellow Prickers. Far from performing the Godly work the word “Purification” implies, these Scoundrels have to date executed over two Hundred innocent Souls, most drawn from the local Indian Population.
How might the good People of Pennsylvania protest this violent Mangling of Justice by Mr. Stearne’s unholy Company? I answer as follows. We must call upon Governor Gordon to petition his Massachusetts Counterpart for the Loan of these dubious Demonologists, that they might come to Philadelphia and prosecute Rebecca Webster, in the Doing of which their fallacious Methods will, I am sure, stand expos’d as sheer Chicanery. Should Mr. Stearne and the Others refuse to take the Case, then methinks all reasonable Men will be forc’d to a Conclusion that this “Purification Commission” hath Much to conceal and More to fear.
Your most humble Servant,
Ebenezer Trenchard, Esq.
Seaman Scholar of Front Street
On the second Sunday following the issuance of the billa vera, Ben gleefully recounted for Jennet his recent conversation with Major Patrick Gordon. A practical man who took a dim view of metaphysical matters, the Governor had been vaguely antagonistic to the Conjuring Statue even before the Gazette cast him as the hero of the Creech affair, and now he wished to reward Ben’s blandishments by becoming a devout crusader on Rebecca Webster’s behalf. Assenting to the logic of Ebenezer Trenchard’s most recent letter, Gordon had already asked Governor Belcher of Massachusetts to send his Purification Commissioners south and make the Crown’s case against the Witch of Manayunk. The nascent Court of Oyer and Terminer, specially appointed by Gordon to try the defendant, would be administered by the famously evenhanded Judge Malcolm Cresswell. In contrast to the Salem protocols, the jury would hear not only the evidence against the accused but also an argument for her innocence. Moreover, Cresswell would allow Mrs. Webster to speak on her own behalf, provided her statements were elicited by a skilled and circumspect barrister.
Jennet could not help noticing that despite these victories an uncharacteristic gloom clung to Ben, palpable as a frock coat.
“What ails thee, sir?”
“Jenny, dearest, ’tis not too late to end this perilous game.” He pressed his chest against the bars of her cell, printing their grime on his white Holland shirt in four vertical columns. “Let us tell Magistrate Bledsoe you’ve merely been playing the enchantress—you did it to set Trenchard’s pen scribbling against the New-England prickers—but now the hoax hath run its course, and you wish to rejoin human society.”
“What possible good could that accomplish?”
“The greatest good imaginable. ’Twould keep you off the gallows.”
She pulled a handful of stuffing from her pallet, closing her fingers as if to mash the straw to flour. “Hear me, bonny Ben. My whole life I’ve chased after the abominable Conjuring Statute, and I shan’t know peace till it be torn in bits.”
Ben released a dissenting sound, something betwixt a bleat of anger and a groan of woe. “I did not sleep well last night, Mrs. Crompton, nor the night before either.”
“I cannot accept a speckled ax.”
“I wonder if I shall e’er sleep well again.”
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ON THE LAST AFTERNOON in April, as Ben sat in the press-room making ready to draft the newest Ebenezer Trenchard essay, it occurred to him that he’d developed a peculiar habit of living his life in reverse. The normal procedure followed by a person starting a business was first to obtain the funding and then to acquire the tools, but Ben had gone about it backwards, sailing off to buy printing equipment with no capital beyond the ethereal endorsement of a known scoundrel. Another such sequence had a man taking first a wife and only later a mistress, yet here too Ben had inverted the usual chronology, enjoying amorous relations with Jennet long before pledging his troth to Deborah Read. As for the marriage itself, once again he had defied tradition. Convention dictated that, upon winning a woman’s love, a man should let her annul any existing marriage contract ere wedding her himself. Having absconded to the West Indies, however, Deborah’s ne’er-do-well husband, the potter John Rogers, wasn’t available for signing a divorcement decree, and so she and Ben had simply set up house together.
Although he felt an abiding fondness toward his common-law bride, he would admit that his sentiments fell short of adoration. The Helen of his heart’s own Ilium would always be Jennet Stearne Crompton. But Jennet was a madwoman, a pagan Fury, her eyes locked on some self-consuming star that she alone could see, whereas he merely wanted to become an accomplished printer and a competent philosopher, ambitions that Deborah stood ready to support in full.
He inked his quill and touched nib to paper, but no words flowed forth. The momentous news of the day was Governor Belcher’s announcement that he would instruct his Purification Commissioners to hie themselves to Pennsylvania and expose Rebecca Webster as a Satanist, a development that the imaginary Ebenezer Trenchard would logically disclose in terms of unqualified triumph. Trenchard’s fleshly creator, however, was utterly distraught by the bulletin from Massachusetts. Dunstan Stearne’s entry into the case, the very circumstance that Jennet so deeply desired and Ben so greatly feared, now seemed inevitable. He set down his pen and brooded.
The brass bell tinkled, the door flew open, and a young man strode into the press-room, liveried in purple silk and swirling a fur-lined cape, his head crowned by a powdered peruke. Marching up to Ben, he announced that his master wished to speak with the proprietor of the shop—or such was the interpretation that accrued to Ben’s limited command of the French tongue.
“Je m’appelle Delvaux. Êtes-vous bien Monsieur Franklin?”
“Oui, c’est moi,” Ben said.
“Mon maître, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, souhaite s’entretenir avec vous. Il attend votre réponse dans sa carrosse.”
It was generally a good idea to receive barons, Ben believed. Yes, hereditary aristocracy ranked high amongst his least favorite institutions, but potential patrons were always welcome at Franklin and Meredith’s Printing-House. “Informez votre maître que je serais heureux de le voir, mais j’espère qu’il parle anglais.”
“My master indeed speaks English,” Delvaux said with an oblique sneer. “Also Italian, German, Hungarian, and Turkish.”
As Delvaux headed for the door, Ben realized that his caller must be the same Baron de Montesquieu who’d written the scandalous novel Lettres Persanes, published anonymously a decade earlier but finally appearing under the author’s name during Ben’s sojourn in London, for surely there could not be two different Frenchmen laboring under the appellation Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu. On the surface a chronicle of Oriental customs, notably that endlessly fascinating institution known as the harem, Lettres Persanes was in fact an indictment of the follies infesting French society, framed as a series of letters to and from the courtier Usbek and his young friend Rica, fictive Persians traveling through Europe. Such a delicious conceit! What in Heaven’s name had prompted this accomplished author to seek out the obscure editor of The Pennsylva
nia Gazette?
The instant he clapped eyes on his visitor, an elegant man in his early forties with a breaching stare and a hawk’s beak of a nose, Ben nodded respectfully and said, “Let me declare at the outset, my Lord Montesquieu, that Lettres Persanes is quite the most caustic satire I’ve read since the Decameron of Signore Boccaccio.”
A crescent-moon grin spread across Montesquieu’s face. “Monsieur Franklin, je vous remercie,” he replied, sauntering toward the new Blaeu press. “But I must confess, I do not think of you Americans as enthusiasts for les belles-lettres.” Compared to his valet, the Baron dressed less ostentatiously, spoke less haughtily, and comported himself more humbly. “I regard you rather as the unpretentious inhabitants of a New Eden.”
“For better or worse, we shed our jungle manners and bearskin leggings several generations back,” Ben said. “Of course, I still keep an Iroquois hatchet in my desk, should a wild boar or an unruly Tory come charging down Market Street.”
Montesquieu untied his perfumed neckcloth, employing it to sop the sweat from his brow. “You truly found amusement in my trifling novel?”
“My mouth grew sore from smiling.”
The Baron proceeded to explain that, though he did not disavow Lettres Persanes, he hoped his future works would address subjects of greater import than his countrymen’s foibles. Toward this end, he had undertaken a grand tour of Europe and the New World, recording such observations and collecting such artifacts—codices, trial transcripts, letters from repentant criminals, even a few torture instruments—as might one day enable him to write a great book on law and government. Already he’d visited Austria, Hungary, Italy, and England, and now here he was in America.
“Whilst living in London,” Montesquieu said, “I became enamored of two American writers—the natural philosopher J. S. Crompton and also Ebenezer Trenchard, champion of the accused sorceress Rebecca Webster. As you are the publisher of both men, I hope you might point me in their direction.”